Building the PlayVS Business Model

Specifically with play versus, I never thought about it as a big business opportunity. You know, at the beginning I, you know, I sort of had this. And I hate when people say, oh, I had this problem I wanted to solve because it really wasn't a problem, but I had a niche that I wanted to scratch around, you know, building out infrastructure around esports just because I knew there was a lot of conversation around esports, but there wasn't, you know, there weren't a lot of businesses being built that I felt truly captured the essence of why people play video games and had the opportunity to unlock what I think some of the biggest areas of the space are from an enterprise value standpoint. So I wanted to do that. It wasn't that I wanted to build this massive business. I recognized that I needed to build a lot of value through revenue, through relationships, and it would become a big business. But I wasn't driven by that. I was, you know, mostly just, you know, you know, focused on, on solving the problem around. People are talking about esports, but there's no infrastructure online for people to play against each other. How do I do that? Where should I start? What's my scarcest resource? The scarcest resource for me end up being these publisher relationships. So how do you go and work with the publishers and give. Get them to commit to develop APIs to give you access to enable that online play? And then how do I capture value for them and give that back to them so they feel like it's a fair exchange? And that ended up being the reason why we committed our business to going to market at high school, because the publishers were investing tons of money, hundreds of millions of dollars in the top of funnel for them, which is their professional leagues, and they weren't really thinking about the rest of the pyramid. And so we went to them and said, hey, what have we created in an environment where we train your athletes or these players to become esports athletes for your game, commit to having them play in the exact same format that you want them to play with coaches, and with the recognition from the high school governance system where it's treated as a sport as any other traditional sport. And that was really appealing to publishers. And so they gave us a shot. And now we've obviously taken that and scaled that and also introduced the same sort of environment at the collegiate level.