YouSaid · the spoken record

Blake Robbins

lines on the record: 52
first: 2020-06-30
most recent: 2020-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He has always just been a mentor for me. And he's basically the first person I ever reached out to in the startup and venture community. And he took a total bet on me when I was a freshman in college and helped sort of guide me through what this world even meant. So like for him, I'll be eternally grateful. And he's the best. And then the other is just my two partners I love though, where they took a huge bet on me as basically a 21-year-old out of college and basically were like Yeah, like we'd love to have you join. I think those two within my partners and Eric within the context of my professional life have been so invaluable and we're willing to bet on me before anyone else. And I think that is rare. I think it's very easy to be skeptical and not want to bet on a young kid. And so definitely feel very thankful for both of them.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, oh wow. I think the kindest thing that someone's ever done for me, I guess there's two. I don't know if you know Eric Jorgensen.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are still selling a $60 copy of a game every year and their incentives as a public company are obviously to sell as many copies as possible. Those are conflicting incentives with esports teams where you're actually cannibalizing the game every year. So if your Call of Duty, you're releasing a new Call of Duty every year. I guess to sum it up, it's like, how do you actually make sure that the game developers and the sports teams and the players are all aligned moving forward? And I think we're still in the first inning of figuring that out because each game itself is taking different strategies. Some are much more aligned and some are like completely hands off. And that will be really, really interesting to see how it plays out.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tough question. I think the thing that is going to be interesting to play out is just whether the open versus closed ecosystem for esports, like how that evolves. And do the esports teams themselves need to figure out a way to fix that? Or will the publishers, I guess, taking a step back on that? For the past decade, publishers themselves and the game developers, so let's say Tencent and Activision, whoever else all viewed esports or the competitive side of this as just pure marketing. And we started to obviously see some hints in the past couple of years that they do realize there's more here. And it's not just a marketing and retention tool. I think the open question is how does that just continue to evolve and how do we make sure that, especially the publishers or game developers like in Activision where”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what parts are compatible with each other? And I guess for me, I'm just a total nerd in the sense I love hanging out on the fringes of the internet. And I love finding these random subcultures and sub-communities that people would overlook. And I think those often hint towards where things are heading. And so in short, it's just, I'm really curious and genuinely curious about the way that the world looks and how it's going to evolve. And I think the niche communities are a good hint towards that.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think about this a lot because I just try and understand how I actually differentiate myself. I guess I think the biggest thing is that I'm sort of endlessly curious and it's why I love Venture so much. Like I love figuring out about new spaces or new areas that and maybe they're niche businesses or niche areas. But I think the truth is the definition of like niche has evolved over time and they've become really big businesses and they can become really big businesses. So like a perfect example of that is the PC building community, right? Like I don't know how many people were building PCs over the past decade, but over the past couple of years, that's really emerged as a popular spot. And there's a company within it that's like a bootstrap business that I just think is one of the most interesting businesses that I've ever seen. And it's called PC Part Baker. And all they are is like they walk you through.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both involved, and their peril is very popular, their media is really popular. I don't think I'd believe myself. And I think that's been a really fun one to watch. And obviously, it's still in the early days, but it's been a really fun one to watch so far.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the one that is just most public is 100 thieves. And so for me, it's been a really incredible journey just because it's also one of the ones where I've been most involved. And I think 100 thieves as a brand has really evolved into being like almost a streetwear or a luxury brand within the gaming space, which is something we didn't even really touch on. But the apparel itself, for example, sells out within 10 to 15 minutes almost every drop to treat it like they are a supreme in the sense that everyone is really hyped about when they create new clothes. They've created this. Like if you told me 10 years ago, and this is maybe why I'm just proud of it, like if you told me 10 years ago when I was 16 that I would be involved with one of the biggest gaming teams in the world, like I just wouldn't believe you. And then on top of that, the fact that it has become a pretty big part of pop culture and like Drake and Scooter Bronner.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think touching on the build an audience side, I think building an audience is invaluable. And if you are trying to compete in anything, like whether you're building a business or you're trying to create your own bakery or whatever it might be, having an audience is invaluable. And then if not, then I think building the infrastructure and being the platform itself to enable new things to emerge. Those are the two best spots to be. And ideally you're both. Like if you're a Twilio or a Stripe where you're the household name associated with those things, people will literally probably look at you weird if you're building your own SMS product internally right now where they're like, why aren't you just paying Twilio? And if you're Twilio, you have so many great tailwinds where you now have, in theory, all of the best engineers in that space working at your company rather than going to X, Y, and Z company as well.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The marketing layer. And I think that's where a lot of this is heading as consumer facing businesses go, where you're the marketing layer. You're trying to focus on what is your core difference. Maybe that's customer support. Maybe that's actually a differentiated product. It really depends on what you're building. But that is like there's going to be a bunch of these plugins or a bunch of these APIs that are helping you build those.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Builds their, let's say, some casting or body of their thing, they're going to trust someone who it is their core competency of. And they're going to say, okay, well, we'll pay you basically on a per volume basis. And that just is starting to get converted onto the internet now. And we're now seeing like, what is this new form of internet supplier for these software businesses? And I think that's, if you take any software business, you can strip away what is actually the core competency and what isn't. And whatever is not a core competency or their secret sauce. And then some of these, it literally might just be marketing. For example, there's a company that's, I think, really interesting called TruePill, which basically powers the back end of, I believe it's hymns or Roman, one of those telemedicine companies. They do a couple other telemedicine companies, but they're just the fulfillment pharmacy. And they also do the telemedicine angle of it. And so if your hymns are Roman, you're literally just like.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way I would view it is there's going to be a lot more of like this plaid layer where you're going and filling out paperwork or when you're trying to transfer places like you have to go and like manually get all of your information and transfer it. What behaviors can you unlock outside of just fintech where you're logging with your bank? And I know there's some that have like in health insurance, for example, or whatever it might be, they're starting to emerge. I think that's a really interesting layer. But I think where you start to discover this is if you just strip back a business, I don't know, you could take even just like a general motors or whatever and you're like, what is actually the core competency? And if you look at general motors, it's actually not that different than the way that these new software companies are emerging where they're paying a tax or paying these suppliers, right? And this is sort of this new form of supplier where GM isn't going to”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going and spending to acquire all these users. And for each user that they spend to acquire, they're actually paying PLAD. And so PLAD basically gets to grow at the expense of this personal finance, continuing to invest and grow. Obviously personal finance, App X has to figure out their own economics, but it's interesting to think about how they just are getting like Plaid is getting a tax for that. And in some ways, like Unreal and Unity, which we touched on earlier, are also this enablement layer where people before, if they were building games likely had to have a much bigger team, or maybe they didn't even know how to build certain aspects of it in the game. So I view it as like the startups that enable other startups or like the startups of startups. And eventually that graduates as the companies grow using that like a recent one that's starting to get a lot of conversation is one called Daily.co there the enablement layer for video and like web rtc so”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before this, they literally wouldn't have even been able to pitch their company. They would have needed to have like a team of 10s to get to the beta or MVP. And I think that's where that specific side of all this gets really interesting because, again, it's not the core competency of your business. And at what point do you maybe switch off, right? Like that's the ultimate question. I think WhatsApp, I think it came out that they paid like $100 million last year for Twilio and the less earnings report for Twilio. And so at what point does Facebook just switch off and build their own? But I think it's more of just a tax. They built the platform itself. It's not a core competency. Are you going to just build all that in-house? Are you going to continue to worry about updating it or are you not? And as a result, if you are this enablement layer, you get to grow with the companies themselves. And so if you view a company that's built on top of plaid, let's say a personal finance app, the personal finance app.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we're still in the very early days of that. I think FinTech alone, and we're seeing obviously tons of companies emerge within FinTech, whether that's Phoenix or other ones that are just emerging to focus on one key part. The way I view these, I guess taking a step back is they're focusing on something that is not the core competency of your business. And they are saying like basically pay us the tax to do that really well for you. And for Stripe, that's payments for Twilio. That's SMS and whatever that might be as your company. And I think the real key there is that they are enabling new startups to be built because instead of hiring the X number of engineers to build that all out, they're now just paying essentially the tax on a per user basis or whatever the actual pricing model might be to just get up and running. And so, for example, I talked to a ton of companies that use Twilio or Plaid or whatever it might be.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, like, what does that look like of the local bacon side of all this? And I know Etsy has in some crazy world started to transform into like selling baked goods and that side. So yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of new platforms that emerge here to disable these new type of creator, a new type of small business.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do this for my living, and that's what he pursued. And today he has 40 million subscribers or something close to that. And he's always just like studied it. And I think that goes back to just me as a person. I feel like I'm a student of the internet. And I think most kids today are students of the internet. And so if they can figure out how to monetize their time, whether that's making memes, right? There's people that run pages on Instagram where they're just making memes and making lots of money, where they're just selling ads based on there. And I think the way platforms that emerge to help enable that are really going to win over the next decade because I think there's going to be a very big switch, especially in like today's times where you have people who maybe are out of work. This is sort of that time where they can maybe focus on what they really love to do and what their hobbies are because they're like, okay, well, maybe I love baking. Maybe I should start my own baker.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think my general thesis is that they are the new small business and sort of look like they're just these odd jobs or random things that people are making as like side hustles right now. I like to view it as like the modern day lemonade stand of if you're a kid right now you likely want to be a youtuber or a twitch streamer and they are all trying to get followers or viewers. And I think there's some really interesting lessons of like why don't your videos get views or why are you only getting two viewers on Twitch and how do you actually grow that? And we're starting to see like the first wave of that right now where people my age, let's say, grew up on the internet watching YouTube and Twitch and they're finally being like, oh wow, I could actually do that as a job. And like one example is there's a big creator. His name's Mr. Beast. He'll tell you that he's just only watching YouTube like his entire life. And when he was like 10 or 12, he realized I need to.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The creator economy, I think, Andreessen and Lee Jin over there call it like the passion economy. I think that's where a lot of this is heading, where people, I don't think it's a secret that most people probably don't really enjoy their jobs. And a lot of them want to do what they love. And I think the beauty of the internet and the real power of the internet is that if you're good at something, then you will likely be able to get rewarded for that. And so these platforms just emerge, whether that's Etsy or Substack or Twitch or YouTube, whatever they might be to help enable those people to make money doing what they love. I think is where like we're only going to see more of those platforms emerge. For example, like we'll probably see something really start to grow in the education space where the best teachers are able to just bundle their classes online and sell them and they can make a lot more doing that versus just going and teaching at their local public school or local private school.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of did this strategy of let's invest and lever up before launch because they realized that's sort of the last real chance for them to get money in. These games, you find out really quickly if they're going to hit. And so the chances of you investing at a, I would say, reasonable valuation post launch are pretty low because they just become cash flow businesses, especially in these free-to-play worlds where there is actually no cost.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mitchell asked you to his credit has just been very good at this. Like he was one of the first investors in riot games and Riot Games sold, I would say very early relative to where they are now. I mean, they're doing billions of dollars in revenue. And I believe when they actually exited to Tencent, it was probably $400 or $500 million. But I would say benchmark and Dreesen has really started to move into the space. They recently hired someone from Tencent. His name is John. been very active in trying to deploy capital here. I think the key is if you are going to invest in these studios or hope that you have the next fortnight or one of these types of games, you have to invest really early and you have to basically take on a substantial amount of risk of before the game launches. And index was very active here. They're continuing to be pretty active, but they used to be a little bit more active. And they all”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting because I would say there's a couple different sides of it. There's been several investors or funds that have emerged here to really focus only on game investing. And I think that's actually really smart. I think if you're doing early stage investing, let's say like our fund and you're doing seed and pre-seed bets, if you're going to raise $40 or $50 million of capital, which some of these funds do, and they try and cherry pick one or two games, the chances of those actually working is statistically very low. And so there's one fund called Play Ventures out of Europe that's merged and they actually only invest in the preceder seed of game studios. And I think it's just fascinating because you basically an index of, let's say, the 50 best up-and-coming studios. They are very, very sharp. They fly very under the radar benchmark has been incredibly here.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the real truth is that these games become more of the third place. I think if you talk with any kid who plays Fortnite, they likely say they spend several hours on there and that's where they're hanging out with their friends. They're not hanging out on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere with their friends. They're going home and after school and talking with their friends for hours and Fortnite just happens to be the place where they're hanging out. And that's the thing that I think has largely been misunderstood by a lot of investors.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actual live action. Yeah, yeah, like actual live action movies. I remember sitting there a couple weeks ago watching it and I was like, oh my gosh, this looks better than actual Tomb Raider. And the actual opportunities that you're able to unlock when you have this now are just limitless. And I think that's what gets me so excited is when the canvas, which these engines help power and create continues to just have the boundaries removed, I think we're in for a really exciting future. I think gaming is still in the first inning overall as an actual ecosystem and world. I think gaming forever has been mistaken as this hit driven movie type business. And we really are starting to see them emerge as platforms. And obviously Unity and Unreal are in amazing spots to be powering the back end of a lot of these.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both of those and EPIC is an unreal spot and no pun intended what's unreal. They actually, I don't know if you've seen the latest demo, but it's starting to look even better than like movies. And I think if you just continue to”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, invest in the preceder seed stage of company, so really at the earliest stages, I would say for gaming specifically, that's obviously incredibly difficult because that means you're investing before they.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting a glimpse into where all of that's heading. So either there's going to be platforms that emerge that allow these people to what I call like the white label of everything where you partner with these maybe smaller manufacturers or mom and pop type brands that have really quality products and you're like, we'll just reskin it or white label it as this is Blake's coffee company. I think that that's a really interesting feature that I think we'll head towards because right now what's happening is almost all of these big content creators are just actually saying, hey, buy my merch and they're just throwing their name on it and it would be the same thing as invest like best, like creating just a shirt that says that on it and you selling that and just continuing to push that out. Whereas obviously there's a lot of different ways you can go and build around that rather than just continuing to push merch. And I think that's the big thing that's starting to get unlocked.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scramble and find those opportunities. I think the key is understanding where to build and what is endemic to their audience. So another example is there's a very famous YouTuber named Emma Chamberlain who built a coffee brander around herself because she drinks a lot of coffee in her videos. Obviously in the beauty world, we see this a lot where they're sort of, I think of the beauty side of YouTube and Instagram as like a leading indicator of where all this is heading. And for the past couple of years, Kylie, cosmetics, is the biggest one that you would know. But there's tons of these smaller brands or micro influencers or even medium-sized influencers that create their own makeup and beauty products. And they sell incredibly well, obviously, because they have a really engaged fan base and those people learn to trust and buy into whatever they're selling. And I think that's a really big.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hinting towards something which is just the broader trend that I think is going to emerge, where the biggest creators and content creators realize that they have distribution and they have an audience. And instead of having all that value extract to their brand partners, let's say they're just doing a sponsored video and they're getting paid a couple hundred thousand dollars for that. That's amazing. But there's also a world where they could be building something bigger for themselves. If a brand partner is willing to pay you a couple hundred thousand, that probably means that there is several hundred thousand dollars worth of value to be unlocked for you. And I think in the case of NayChot and Hundred Thiefs, Naychot, to his credit, very early on realized a Nadhot name and logo on a t-shirt. I wanted to create something bigger and a brand that can stand without me. And I think as creators start to get more savvy and realize that they can build real businesses around themselves, they're going to start to.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's a lot still to be unpacked, but overall the engagement within the world has been absolutely fascinating to watch. And there's real communities and camaraderie around 100 thieves as a team, but even just League of Legends, esports or Counter Strike esports. If you go into any of those ecosystems, you can see how fanatic these fans actually are and how invested they are in actually following these players and these teams. They follow the offseason just like we follow the NBA offseason and there's crazy threads and Twitter threads around offseason. So it feels to me like real sports. I think that was always the confusing thing for me is like I grew up watching Halo and that always felt like it was a real sport and people followed that just as closely as I would have followed like college basketball. And today that's really.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We basically then were like, okay, we got in. We went through the whole process and we decided we were going to invest, obviously. And then it was like, okay, what do we do now? And so we put together and interviewed a bunch of different coaches. We went through the whole process of it. They did incredibly well in the first season. They finished second. And then we've been playing for two seasons now. We're on our third season in League of Legends. It's been a really amazing partnership so far where the teams are all lined for the first time. And that's sort of the big thing for esports where before this, all the teams were acting as basically independent companies all looking out for themselves. And the publishers were never really involved. And now with North American franchising, they're all working together. There's league-wide sponsors which contribute to a league revenue pool. There's eventually hopefully going to be media rights, which is the big sort of driver for revenue in traditional.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That brand was still sitting there. It had like 100,000 followers on Twitter, but he was doing nothing with it. And I had known him very barely, I would say the highest level of knowing someone. Like we followed each other on Twitter. We'll say that as a frame of reference of how well we knew each other. And we had never talked officially. But I floated that idea to our team internally and Dan's team. And I was like, what?”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to build their own. Turns out we decided to go the route of like a hybrid where there was essentially a dormant brand called 100 Thiefs, which is tied to a really big influencer in the YouTube space. His name is Nade Shot. He used to be a former Call of Duty professional and was world champion call of Duty. He had left one of the biggest teams in the world called Optic Gaming and was just going independent as a YouTuber. He had launched in 2015 or 2016 essentially 100 thieves as an esports team, tried to do it in Call of Duty to compete with the other teams at the time that quickly fizzled out because he had no management team. He was just running that out on his own. And so that ended up really falling apart for him. And he just went back to creating content because it made sense. He didn't have a business team around him. So in 2017 or 2018, when we were evaluating opportunities.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the GATS officially started in 2017 or 2018, and that really happened when we, and I'll say we as Ludlow and a couple other investors, Dan Gilbert and his entire team started to evaluate esports as an investment opportunity. started to talk to a bunch of different teams because this is around the time that Riot announced for League of Legends that there would be franchising. We wanted to get ahead of it and we wanted to figure out how could we get into it. There was a lot of uncertainty around would existing teams be favored over new teams? All of those questions were up in the air. And so we started talking with a lot of different esports teams. We kept coming back to the question of why are we buying into a team when there's uncertainty of whether we'd even get into the League of Legends for North America? Or should we be building our own and what would that look like?”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time as that, Activision Blizzard was coming out with a new game in 2017 or 2018 called Overwatch. They decided that instead of having any grassroots tournament for their ecosystem, they were going to try and brute force a game to be an esport. And they were going to start with this franchise league right from the start. That's called Overwatch League, where they charge really hefty premiums. I think the rumors are between like 20 and $30 million for a spot. You bought like you were referring to a specific spot that you had forever and it hopefully became sort of the rare coin or the rare asset. Around that time, and that was a long-winded answer to tell you the start of 100 thieves and how we got involved with 100 Thiefs. But 100 Thiefs is an esports team that plays in Conestrike, playing Fortnite. They play in League of Legends. And they also have a big media side of it. And they also have a really big apparel side.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do franchising, which made it look a lot closer to an MDA, where up until that point, it was acting closer to an English Premier League where there was a promotion and relegation system. There's 10 teams in North America. There was a challenger seen beneath it. One of those teams got promoted. One of them got relegated. For a lot of reasons that made investors really nervous about actually buying a team what's in North American LCS is what it's called. That changed in 2018 when they introduced franchising. And franchising was when Riot came out and said, let's actually pick 10 teams that are going to become stable partners. We're going to do a league revenue share. We're going to put real team around this to help grow it and create it as a sustainable esport. That's when things started to shift in this world and when a lot of the investors that we now see in the space have started to pay attention and start to invest.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 years, so it's not shocking that that hasn't really changed. And then on the flip side, we see these two other new games, League of Legends. It's been around for about a decade now. They spearheaded it where for the past, let's say, eight years, they broke up these leagues into specific regions. So you have like North America, Europe, Korea, China, every type of region you can think of. Those regions play their own independent seasons, and then they actually funnel into like a world championship. The world championship is what always gets quoted in the massive viewership numbers, where it's like they got more viewers in the Super Bowl or whatever those numbers are. Those are the ones that are always quoted because it's one of the biggest events in all esports. That changed a little bit as far as the structure go, whereas the individual regions will say North America, for example, in 2018.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set number of teams that are in a professional league, it's always rotating. And for a lot of reasons, that's really compelling for fans and viewers because you have new teams emerging all the time and starting from scratch and then becoming the best teams in the world. They do have several tournaments every year, which are basically majors in the same way like you would have in golf, like the masters. They essentially have one major where the independent tournament performance is allow you to gain entry into it. That ecosystem at its core, there's no revenue share of these tournaments with the actual teams or anything like that. It's much more, you figure out how to get sponsors for your players. That's sort of the wild west esports, which is what's been going on for the past 10 to 20 years with StarCraft. We could say starts with that StarCraft and Doda, where it's been much more grassroots, completely open. And Counterstrike has been played competitively now for close to.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot to touch on here, and I think they're all great questions. I think esports as a whole, and this is where it actually gets confusing for some people, if they're just hearing about esports for the first time, they typically associate it with just one game. Esports is basically the same as saying sports, where there's a ton of different games within it. I would say in the context of this conversation, I'll highlight sort of the tier one games, which are counter-strike and which is owned by Valve, League of Legends, which is owned by Riot, Overwatch, which is owned by Activision Blizzard. I'd say I'll touch on those three as the core ones to focus on. For Valve and counter strike, they've actually taken a complete hands-off approach and they actually treat it probably more like golf than any other traditional sport if we want to use that as an analog where it's a lot of independent tournament organizers, a lot of amateur teams and amateur players working their way up. There isn't any set like this is.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case to be made, and it was something that I think shocked a lot of people because it was really overlooked by the mainstream.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gambling with him. When the gambling sites got removed, I would say almost all of the items halved over the next year or two in terms of value. And they still continue to decline because there wasn't any other real value other than the pure in-game sense. Before when the gambling got introduced, people were realizing they can actually make money by starting with their in-game items and then converting and gambling and turning it into real money. So that's when things really started to explode. There's a lot of people within the community to actually view these loot boxes like Counter Strike or even Overwatch where you have to pay to open something and it's random as a form of gambling. And I think there is some nuance around it where it does feel like gambling. You're paying $2 to basically open something up. It looks like a slot machine. It like rotates through and shows you all of the available items that you could have gotten. And then it stops on one and it's like, okay, wow, I should open that again. So there is definitely a.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And streamers were all showing them basically gambling for bigger skins, like they basically just would start with a K-47 red line and they'd end up with a $5,000 sniper rifle. And people just loved it. And those videos are still all over the internet. But in 2016, that sort of really started to crumble where there were several lawsuits that emerged in Washington and one other state where they actually said that this is promoting gambling for kids. Valve, who traditionally is very hands off and basically just says we're going to have an open API, we're going to let people do whatever they want with these items, had to like officially step in and they sent out season desist to every single gambling site. And that actually essentially crashed the economy of these skins where before they were like guaranteed the 5,000 or 10,000 because that was what was driving the value where they were actually just going and”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the game, the market value so they show how many of them transactions have happened and they show like, okay, it's been stable at $25 for the past, I don't know, however long. And that then shows to everyone else like, okay, this AK-47 red line, which is like one of the most popular scans, is known as like this equals $20. And so people were just buying a bunch of these and then putting them onto gambling sites. And what I mean by that is like people essentially created poker sites where you would deposit this AK-47 whatever red line and that would be the equivalent of $20. So now you convert it into this $20 gambling amount that you can use on this site. It started to really blow up. And it actually really helped a game a lot if you look at player-based numbers over that time once gambling started to become a big thing. It really blew up and it makes sense like the YouTubers and”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have a skin, and you just rock the really basic free skin in the game, it's really associated with you just being a total newbie to the game. And so people actually tease you or look down upon you for not having that. And so, and then there's on the flip side, there's skins that people wear that represent they're really good or like they maybe the biggest streamer uses that. And so they want to be a part of their fan group. And so there's a lot of nuances within those actual economies and within the skins itself. I would say in going more broadly and talking about like encounters, it's probably one of the more extremes. Dota also has some real nuances, but I'm not as well versed in it. I would say counter-strike is the one that I'm super tapped into where when these items start to get a lot of value, it actually emerged from gambling, where people realized that these items had fixed values. They show you.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each of these games has their own sort of economies around them. And Fortnite, you're just buying V-Bucks as the actual currency that they use in the game. You're just putting those in, buying these specific items. And those actually just, you just hold them. There's no real secondary market outside of really it's the gray market of selling your accounts. And Epic has been pretty strict about catching people who sell accounts. So they've basically just been like just buy our skins and continue to support us. And I guess the one thing I would touch on with Fortnite specifically is, and maybe just gaming more broadly, is that these people are actually using these skins as an expression, like you said, like it's their way of self-expression in these games. So there's certain characters or skins or whatever it might be that you're using that essentially symbolize the type of player you are. For example, in Fortnite, they associate if you”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People open these actual loot boxes and you pay, I don't know, $2 to open a box and you get a random skin, they call it, which is essentially a different type of color or pattern on top of your weapon in Counter-Strike. These skins are actually, they can be worth anywhere between, let's say, a penny all the way up to.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Free to play games as that just means that the game itself is pay to win. Like you have to pay to unlock certain elements of it or you need to buy expansion packs to really play the full game. That's not really true of the major games that are popular today. Like Fortnite and League of Legends and Counter-Strike are some of the biggest games in the world, but they're actually completely free to play. Counter-strike recently, I think in the past year, switched to completely free-to-play. And that's because they make a lot of money off of their in-game items and in-game cosmetic items. When I say items, I mean, like these items don't actually impact the game at all in terms of making you better or worse. It's much more you essentially showing your friends that you have, you spent money on a character. And I've done a lot of research in this space because I'm always fascinated by it. I think Counter-Strike is one that actually has a more open economy around it where”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were sort of the first ones to realize if they build really great games and they make the player, like that's the launchable player for those games, they can also distribute third-party games through there and take a fee or whatever that might be. Say a bit more about the monetization methods of these games, especially ones that have become more open. And what I'll call like the half-life of a game. So it used to be you'd buy a video game and maybe it's like a movie that you play, you play through it and it comes to an end and maybe you played a few times, but there's some fixed set of hours and then you buy another game. It seems like the trend now has been that people play just Fortnite and they've been doing that for some number of years. So why is that possible? Why does it remain interesting? And since it's free, how do companies like EPIC make money? I think this is one of the most fascinating parts about how games have evolved where there was sort of a period in time where most people have”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real and also Fortnite. And they also bought the majority in full stake of League of Legends or Riot Games, which now has Valorance and these other games. The other sort of big players in this space are obviously Activision Blizzard, which is a public company, and they have a lot of different games underneath it. There's Electronic Arts, there's another big player in the East called Climited that has mobile games that are really starting to become very popular. And then I would say on top of that, there's another big player that a lot of people overlook in this space. And it's a private company called Valve. They're the creators of Counter-Strike and Dota, Half-Life. A lot of those games are from them, but they also actually have their own App Store. They own an App Store called Steam, which is sort of the first actual App Store for games. It's built on top of just like Windows and Mac.”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great computer. I mean, Fortnite, you can actually play on your phone, you can play on, I think you can even play on like a Chromebook. You can play on almost anything. And that's really what's led to this massive growth and especially growth as a conversation around it where people are realizing that gaming is much more than just a pure hit-driven business. You've mentioned some of the names already. The absolute biggest and most important business players across this ecosystem and how relatively entrenched do you think they are, meaning like if you want to play this, you just buy existing big companies or do you think there's a lot of upstart potential? Yeah, I would say the real giant in this space as far as they just get it is 10 cent has been incredibly proactive at acquiring studios and buying large stakes in studios, for example. I believe they own close to 40% in Epic, which is the creators of”
2020-06-30 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Robbins – Investing in Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.180] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source