Next
What I'm looking for
I'm looking for a role in strategy or operations in gaming or sports, somewhere I can have impact and build and mentor a team or a function, and above all somewhere that will challenge me and help me grow.
I'm based in New York and open to roles there or in Los Angeles.
Four seats
Where I've sat
Riot Games
League health, analytics and market intelligence for the LCS's ten franchised teams.
Evil Geniuses
Built the League of Legends franchise from inception, then ran esports across four titles.
Counter Logic Gaming
Ran the P&L and the competitive and commercial rebuild.
MSG & Oak View Group
Partnership strategy and valuation for the Knicks, the Rangers, the Sphere and the rest of the portfolio.
The path
How one move led to the next
-
2011–2016
Consulting at Exeter Group
I started out running technology programs for public and nonprofit clients, the largest of them a ten-person team advising the State of Hawaii's CTO on stabilizing the state's health insurance marketplace, and another the American Red Cross's modernization of its Biomedical Services platform.
Consulting gave me the skills and my introduction to professional life, and I learned a ton, but I wasn't excited about what I was doing and didn't want to end up working in healthcare or education.
-
2016–2018
MIT Sloan
I went to Sloan knowing I wanted to be part of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and it was through the conference that I settled on a career in sports. I ran the esports track in 2017 and co-led the whole conference in 2018, with 3,500+ attendees, more than $1M in sponsorship and a volunteer team of 60. Our 2018 speakers included Barack Obama, Alex Rodriguez, Adam Silver, Rob Manfred, Steve Ballmer and Sue Bird. While at Sloan, I also co-captained the basketball team.
-
2018
The league side, at Riot
My first job in esports was as the LCS's first-ever dedicated insights lead. I built the viewership, audience and sentiment tracking, owned the League Health Report and LCS fan research surveys, and presented at ownership meetings for all ten teams.
It was a great opportunity to learn about the esports ecosystem from the game publisher's side, working alongside Riot's commercial, broadcast and league operations teams and with the ownership groups of every team in the league.
-
2019
The team side, at Evil Geniuses
The move to EG was a rare chance to join one of the ten teams in the LCS and oversee the build of a competitive League of Legends operation from scratch. I also thought what I knew from working at the league could help the team be commercially successful and, most importantly, be a good partner to Riot as we all worked to make the LCS successful.
We had about a month to stand up the franchise, which meant the roster, the LA facility, the contracts and every vendor behind a $33M LCS slot, and the team made the playoffs in its first season. I also set up a scouting and development program that found several of North America's top League players, including Joseph "Jojopyun" Pyun, who has since become a world-class mid laner.
I was promoted to Director of Esports the next year, over 40+ staff and players across four games including League and Counter-Strike. I also founded EG's VALORANT team and operations, signing the roster and hiring the coaching staff, including Christine "potter" Chi, who went on to become a VCT-winning coach. Throughout, I represented EG in league meetings with Riot, BLAST and ESL.
-
2021
Running Counter Logic Gaming for MSG Sports
After EG, I had the opportunity to take on a broader scope when MSG Sports hired me to run Counter Logic Gaming. Coming into the role, I inherited a competitive rebuild, with rosters that had finished last in both the LCS and LCS Academy. As a company, we were also coming out of COVID, and after mixed success over the previous few years we were looking for a brand vision and a fresh direction.
We rebuilt the League of Legends team and overhauled our infrastructure and operations, which led to the 2023 LCS championship under successor ownership (NRG). We also grew as an organization, continuing to support CLG Red, our women's esports team, and launching a fighting game division with its own online tournaments, content and social channels. On the business side, we renewed and upsold Spectrum, Samsung and Logitech, among others.
CLG is where my approach to running a team came together, and it's unfortunate I wasn't able to see it through after the sale.
-
2023
Commercial strategy, at MSG and then Oak View Group
When MSG sold CLG, I stayed with Madison Square Garden and returned home to New York to work on commercial strategy for the Knicks, the Rangers, the Sphere and MSG Entertainment. I owned partnership pipeline and pitch strategy across jersey patches, founding partnerships and new categories, helped upsell existing partners and supported accounts including Pepsi, Lexus and Verizon, and reviewed the valuation and partner reporting on the Rangers' digitally enhanced dasherboards to set how we'd package them going forward.
Six months later MSG moved its partnership sales and strategy into Crown Properties Collection, a joint venture with Oak View Group, and the accounts I was running moved over with me. At Crown Properties I was promoted to VP, Strategy within ten months, served as a right hand to our division president across partnership strategy, CRM and pipeline analytics, research, forecasting and reporting, and led a nine-person team across strategy, partner solutions and design.
We built the division's insights, CRM and OKR systems from scratch, along with the asset valuation and performance analytics we used to price sponsorship inventory across our clients, including MSG Sports, the Sphere, and others. My work helped land several notable deals, including the Knicks jersey patch, MUFG's naming rights at Japan National Stadium, and sales of spots on the Exosphere during the Sphere's first commercial year.
Over three years, the division went through three operating model changes and was still profitable every year.
Perspective
A few things I've learned
Building from zero
I've been a builder throughout my career, coming into organizations and either building businesses from the ground up or re-establishing foundations for ones going through change. Each time, the biggest part of the job was bringing structure and frameworks to something ambiguous.
At the LCS, that meant giving a league a dedicated analysis function. EG was more literal: we had about a month to find the people with the right expertise and build everything a competitive team needs, from an office with the right internet to food and physical therapy. CLG was a rebuild after a very public low point, and Crown Properties was effectively a new agency that needed strategic infrastructure for leadership and our sellers alike.
In every case we studied the market and the people who'd done it before, and then asked how we thought it should run, setting the bar beyond what our peers were doing. We kept asking how to get better every day and how to design for the long term.
What the league side doesn't see
At Riot I could see every team at once. My viewership data went to all ten teams to support their own brand work and sponsorship sales. I knew what made each team distinct, how each added value to the league and why some drew more viewers than others. What I didn't appreciate until I was on the team side was how differently each team experienced the league, competing against the other nine for fans and in the marketplace for partners at the same time.
When it came time to lead an organization at CLG, this meant crafting our own vision and trying to build the things leagues couldn't hand us. We kept investing in CLG Red. We also started a fighting game division with Run It Thursdays, a free weekly tournament across the US and Canada that Spectrum and Logitech sponsored.
Leading through change
The hardest thing I've done was winding down CLG after the sale, which meant letting go of our staff and every competitive team outside the League of Legends operation. It taught me a lot about management: transitioning people out with empathy, working with each of them on their next step, and understanding the weight of having people trust you as their leader, and what that means when times get tough.
Crown Properties went through three big changes in three years: the spin-out from MSG, which came with layoffs and a new management team; an internal reorganization of who did what; and then MSG ending its relationship with Oak View Group, which meant rescoping the team, letting people go and changing our strategy.
I was there through all of it, coaching my team through each change, taking on more responsibility, hiring new people as the scope shifted and keeping my reports' careers progressing while it happened.
Rules
My three rules
I picked these up from mentors and other people over the years, and by the end of my tenure, they were the rules I handed to every person who joined CLG.
- No sniveling. This was my high school basketball coach's rule, whether it was about running extra laps or a call from the referee, and I told it to pretty much every pro and coach we brought in at CLG. Constructive criticism is always welcome. Whining for the sake of whining isn't productive.
- Don't skip steps. In League of Legends, if you try to fight at Baron or Dragon without your wards down, your vision cleared and wave priority, you're not going to win the fight. At CLG the same was true of everything, from marketing project plans to budgeting and goal setting. I learned the team-building version at EG: you can't sign an expensive roster and expect to win games. You have to build a culture and invest in your people.
- No coping. In gaming, coping means explaining away a loss instead of owning it. For a pro, that means being realistic about your own performance and what was in your control versus your teammates'. At work it's the same, whether you're working with other departments or planning around the resources you have. Making excuses doesn't help the team.