#5
My hire number. The roster and staff were already there.
CASE STUDY · ENVY GAMING · CMO, EMPLOYEE #5
I was employee number five at a North Carolina esports team with no investors. I built the marketing engine that carried it.
In February 2016 I became CMO and employee number five at Envy Gaming. The org ran out of the Charlotte area, had no outside institutional money, and had one intern doing marketing. It also had one of the best rosters in the world. I built the marketing engine while that team was named Esports Team of the Year, won world titles, moved to Dallas, and launched an Overwatch League franchise. Years after I left, a publicly traded broadcaster invested in the company at a valuation near $400M.
Growth is easy to claim. I was there before Envy had a dollar of outside money.
By the time most people found Envy, it was a Dallas franchise with tens of millions behind it. I found it earlier. When I joined in February 2016 it was a North Carolina company, incorporated in the state in 2012 and based in the Charlotte area, with no outside institutional money yet. What it did have was a roster good enough to win worldwide, a full house of players and staff, and a marketing function that was one intern. I was employee number five.
So I was there for the part before the capital. My job was to build a marketing engine that could keep pace with where a roster that good was obviously headed, and to do it while the company still had to count every dollar.
Every marker here happened inside my tenure, February 2016 to August 2018. The titles are org and team wins I supported as CMO, not competitions I played. The capital events are associated with the company while I was there, not things one hire caused. What I owned was the marketing engine running underneath all of it.
Marketing was one person when I arrived. An intern. I built the roadmap, the brand, and the audience strategy, then hired against it. By 2018 marketing was a 20-plus person org and I ran a 10-person team inside it. Same roster underneath. Now a structure that could actually scale the brand around it.
1,000,000+
Team Envy read like a gamer tag. I built a brand a corporate sponsor and a broadcast partner could sit next to without flinching, one that still meant something to the fans who were there first.
I set the audience strategy across the org's core channels and grew it by more than a million fans. Not rented impressions. A following the company owned and could bring to any deal.
I turned one intern into a 20-plus person function and ran a 10-person team inside it. As the company doubled in ambition, the marketing bench doubled with it.
When Envy bought a Dallas Fuel slot in the Overwatch League, the org had to read as a franchise, not a fan club. I helped carry the launch marketing, working with The Richards Group, the largest independent ad agency in the US, on the creative.
$400M
Valuation Gray Television invested at in 2021
I built the growth engine in the no-money years, before a single institutional dollar came in. That foundation is what the company scaled on. In 2021, three years after I left, Gray Television, a publicly traded broadcaster, led a roughly $40M investment into Envy Gaming for about a tenth of the company, a valuation near $400M.
I am not going to claim I caused a number that landed years after I walked out the door. What I will claim is the part that was mine. When Envy had no investors and one intern, I built the marketing engine and the brand a roster that good deserved. Everything the company raised and became later was built on top of that base.
The job was never gaming. It was building a marketing engine fast enough to keep up with a roster that was outgrowing its own state. No investors, one intern, a North Carolina team. Years later, a franchise a public broadcaster valued near $400M. I have run that same move since, for AI, for fintech, for hard tech. Find the real thing, build the engine, keep pace with the climb.
No outside money to a franchise valued near $400M. I built the engine before the market caught up.