Page 55 - Forbes - Asia (September 2018)

Trophy life: TSM founder Andy
Dinh with the 2017 League
of Legends North American
championship hardware. He used
to give $20-an-hour gaming
lessons to Steve Arhancet, now
co-CEO of rival Team Liquid.
growing audience helped bring about a new sponsorship from Chi-
potle, which sees TSM as a means to intersect with pop culture.
hough it’s undeniably a blockbuster game, there are still
questions about Fortnite’s potential as an esport. And while the
game’s creator, Epic Games, is ofering $100 million for prize
pools across a year of tournaments, it’s unclear how these com-
petitions will be structured or even broadcast. But TSM and
Dinh are used to leaps of faith.
From a working-class family of nine in Campbell, California
(his parents immigrants from Vietnam), Dinh was a perennial
C student in high school but found his calling ater discovering
League of Legends in 2008, when he was 16. Playing under the
name Reginald, he soon became the top-ranked player in the world
and started his own team in 2009. He and his brother Dan decided
to create community websites and author guides for the game.
Long before ESPN and Amazon thought to broadcast League of
Legends competitions, Dinh was hosting and streaming them.
Soon ater, Dinh dropped out of college and borrowed $5,000
from his mother to invest in his vision. His gaming-guide site,
solomid.net—named ater his position in League of Legends—
attracted millions of visitors, which meant Dinh was pocketing
ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES around $60,000 a month. In 2013 Dinh, then 21, retired as a player
to focus on his business, which still includes gaming sites.
Five years later, he remains hungry, taking aggressive new steps
in the industry he helped pioneer. In July he received $37 million
in Series A funding from a group of investors that included the
A-list venture capital irm Bessemer Ventures Partners, the Hall
of Fame NFL quarterback Steve Young and the three-time NBA
champion Steph Curry. “It only made sense to go with the best
of the best,” says Curry, who plans to use his cachet to help TSM
reach even more young men.
With the new capital, Dinh plans to double staf to 100 and use
up to $15 million to build a 25,000-square-foot training facility and
operational headquarters in Los Angeles next year. he new head-
quarters will generate revenue through sponsorships and fan events
and serve as a base where players can train, in uencers can create
content and TSM can develop as a household name for a new gen-
eration—and much of this is well under way.
At TSM’s Fortnite game house, Myth Kabbani recalls watching
TSM play when he was in middle school and realizing esports was
a realistic career goal. When the organization reached out to talk
about a partnership, he says, his heart started to beat out of his chest:
“Joining TSM is less like joining an organization and more like ight-
ing crime with your favorite superhero.” F
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