Starting a Video Game Tournament League

Three years ago, a family member was working for the family business, a successful water and sewer pipeline construction business in southern California. Then the housing crisis hit, and it hit especially hard in the southern California area. The family business will weather the storm, but the outlook is not as strong as it once was.

As the crisis was unfolding, the family member was injured on the job and was laid up in bed for weeks. During this time, the pre-release of Starcraft 2 was out and he played a lot, eventually even winning a minor Starcraft 2 tournament.

He was in his mid-30s at the time, playing a bunch of teenagers online. As he played, he got to know the kids and found that several of them had started a video game consulting business, teaching other people how to get really good at video games. Their website had a lot of traffic, but the kids had no business sense.

The kids started looking to my brother-in-law for business advice, and it led to him buying out the website for a few thousand bucks. From there, he invested his own money and sweat equity to build up the consulting business.

Then leveraging the reputation his business held in the Starcraft community, he launched a video game tournament league in North America, emulating the successful model of the Korean leagues. Now he runs one of the biggest video game tournaments in the world and is having a blast. His business is responsible for driving a ton of the traffic that Justin.tv receives.

It’s fun to have watched him go from water and sewer pipeline construction to successful video game tournament startup in just a few years. With a bit of good timing, open eyes, luck, and a lot of hard work, he made the leap.

What interesting stories have you seen of entrepreneurs successfully jumping from one thing to something completely different?

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