An Introduction to Myself and My Blog

Welcome to my blog! My name is Reed Kolbe. I’m many things — glassblower, consultant, skier, scuba diver, drummer, and soccer goalkeeper to name a few — but above all else, I’m a massive gaming and esports enthusiast. I’ll delve into the origins of my passion for competitive gaming further below, but at a high level, it became a cornerstone of my identity thirteen years ago and has remained so until this day. This blog will be a medium (pun fully intended) primarily dedicated to the sharing of data and research that I am conducting under the broad umbrella of esports and gaming; secondarily, it will serve as a venue for me to share my thoughts on current events within these industries. This initial post serves two purposes: to introduce the type of data and research that I’ll be sharing in subsequent posts, and for those interested, to share my story of why esports means so much to me personally.

Part 1: my data and research

Last month, I quit my job as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman after four and a half years in order to take some personal time before starting business school at The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business this Fall. At Oliver Wyman, I spent my first year and a half as a generalist consultant, followed by three years in the Private Equity practice group. During my tenure with this group, I evaluated over 30 portfolio companies that client PE firms were interested in acquiring or selling. A major component of nearly every project was gathering insight from customers/users of the target company’s main product or service; quantitative data was captured through detailed surveys, and qualitative feedback to layer color over the data was captured through customer interviews. Spending 3 years designing surveys and interview guides helped me become quite adept at asking the right questions to identify customer desires, value propositions of select products and services, and more, agnostic of industry.

Over the next several months, I will be applying these skills I’ve cultivated to the esports, gaming, and live streaming industries. I know what I personally look for when I buy apparel from an esports team, when I’m choosing which games and leagues to follow competitively, and when I select which live streamers to watch, but I am merely one data point. Due to both intellectual curiosity and my desire to transition to the esports/gaming industry post-MBA, I want to learn how the entire consumer base approaches these decisions.

The data will have broad coverage across these industries by design. My dream job post-MBA is working in business development / strategy for an esports team — the chance to define an organization’s direction as it looks to grow using a variety of levers is thrilling to me. I’ve watched esports grow from nerdy, niche hobby to global billion-dollar media and entertainment mainstay, but the industry is still nascent, and I truly believe future growth potential is boundless. That being said, I realize these roles are extremely limited, and I would also jump at the opportunity to work for a company like Twitch as it navigates the ever-changing live streaming landscape or a company like Riot Games as it evaluates how best to design and grow the competitive scene for VALORANT. As such, I want to analyze the gaming industry through the lenses of all these different stakeholders in order to hypothesize how each may approach their respective growth strategies.

A week ago, 100 Thieves released their latest apparel drop: Foundations. As someone who’s fascination with esports originates from competitive Call of Duty, I’ve been a fan of the organization ever since Nadeshot founded it in 2017. What fascinates me most about 100 Thieves is how it has seemingly dominated the esports apparel market over the last several years despite how new the organization is compared to counterparts like FaZe Clan that have roots dating back to over a decade ago. This prompted me to design my first survey around the esports apparel market specifically. I launched this survey a couple days ago; its scope includes what specific products are viewed most favorably, brand loyalty when it comes to apparel, the most important criteria when evaluating products to purchase, perceptions on different logos/color schemes, and other themes. After I’ve collected sufficient data and have meaningful findings, I will share them in my next blog post sometime over the coming weeks.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that the data I gather as one person conducting ostensibly academic research will not be nearly as in depth as what these companies are gathering and analyzing with dedicated full-time employees. My purpose here, though, is not to gather top secret data that I can sell to these companies (otherwise I wouldn’t be publicly sharing my findings) or to uncover never-before seen, paradigm-shifting insights (though I’ll admit, it would be cool if I do). All I’m trying to do is begin putting myself in the mindset of the type of roll that I’m looking to eventually occupy, and even if my findings end up being rather surface-level insights that these stakeholders already know, if I can use this blog to make more connections in the industry or help my thought process as I begin approaching interviews, then that’s a win in my book.

Before I begin sharing the results of my research, though, I want to give a proper introduction to myself and tell my personal story in more detail than the “About” section allows for on Medium. If you’re only interested in my research and empirical findings on the industry, feel free to skip the remainder of this article and await my subsequent posts. If you wish to get to know me better and understand my personal motivations behind the research I’m conducting, though, then here’s the waxing poetic story of my affinity towards gaming and esports:

Part 2: my story

I grew up in the Northern Suburbs of Chicago, Wilmette to be specific. As a child, my greatest passions were soccer and baseball. I religiously poured all my free time into honing my skills in both, and quickly developed into a very competitive child athlete. Simply put, soccer and baseball were my life. In seventh grade, however, I was diagnosed with a medical condition, Crohn’s disease, that rendered me unable to continue playing sports. As a newly minted teenager who knew nothing else and had no other social outlets, I felt completely adrift, passionless and purposeless.

After a year of trying and failing to find a new hobby to fill the void, a video game came out that, unbeknownst to me, would serve as the inception of my greatest passion to this day. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released when I was in eighth grade, and it was all anyone talked about — at the lunch table, in the hallways, and on the bus, none of the boys could get their minds off this new, groundbreaking first person shooter. Having never owned a video game console, but desperate for anything that might grant me a new social outlet and hobby, I convinced my parents to buy me a PlayStation 3 and a copy of the game.

This purchase immediately led to the renascence of my happiness and competitiveness. Every day, I couldn’t wait to get home from school and hop in a lobby with my friends to wage war on virtual battlefields. Despite how much joy the social aspect brought me, though, there was one source of anger that came with — having never gamed before, I was undeniably a “noob”, far worse than all of my friends and most of my adversaries. After excelling in baseball and soccer, I couldn’t stand being at the bottom of the scoreboard each game. With ample free time and an innate competitive spirit, though, I pushed myself to improve just as hard as I did in sports as a child.

Over the next two years, I went from “noob” to “pub-stomper” — a term reserved for those who frequently dominate public lobbies. At this point, I was in tenth grade, and the current iteration of the game was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the Call of Duty franchise puts out a new title each year). While I somewhat enjoyed pub stomping and dropping nukes with my friends, the experience was no longer rewarding. I derived great enjoyment from the grind to improve over the previous two years, but once I hit the top, playing public matches became relatively uncompetitive and stale. Almost by sheer coincidence, it was right then, when I was beginning to lose interest in the game, that my local GameStop announced a 2v2 Call of Duty tournament that they were planning on hosting.

Eager to match our skills up against others who considered themselves fierce competitors, a friend and I signed up for the tournament. After nearly 9 hours cramped in that sweltering storefront alongside dozens of other gaming nerds, we found ourselves in the finals of the tournament. While I wish I could say we put up a good fight, we got destroyed by the team that effortlessly ran through everyone else. While the defeat was bitter, the tournament nonetheless changed my life, and it wasn’t because of the $50 GameStop gift card awarded to us as runners-up. This was my introduction to the world of competitive Call of Duty, and more broadly, esports.

Enamored by the prospect of playing in video game tournaments for money, I switched away from public matches and began spending all of my time playing in private matches and tournaments online — gauntlets that the champions of the GameStop tournament ran through and recommended to us for further improvement and enjoyment. I sought out these tournaments initially for the prize money (which was negligible, even for a teenager working minimum wage summer jobs), but very quickly the main value I derived from these tournaments became simply enjoyment; I finally found a true competitive outlet akin to the sports I loved as a child.

Fast-forward a couple years and I’m a freshman at Northwestern University. While I was focused mainly on academics and cultivating a social life, I still made time for Call of Duty, lofting my bed so I could fit my gaming setup underneath in my shoebox-esque dormitory room. With this setup, my room quickly became a hub for all things gaming — from split screen CoD 1v1s to late night sessions on classic games like Super Smash Bros. I developed many friendships through these experiences, but one in particular was most meaningful to me. Jake was the only one who ever came close to dethroning me as the champion of Nuketown. Similar to me in high school, he was packed with raw skill, but oblivious to the world of competitive Call of Duty tournaments. I introduced him to the scene, and for the rest of freshman year, we spent much of our free time climbing the ranked ladder in Black Ops 2 and watching tournaments as the professional scene started to blossom.

As sophomores, we decided to elevate our involvement in competitive CoD to the next level. We wanted to form a full team of 4 that could compete in the same online and LAN tournaments as the pro teams like OpTic Gaming that we idolized. When the new iteration of CoD (Ghosts) came out in the Fall, we posted fliers in the Northwestern student center soliciting tryouts for a competitive CoD team that could represent Northwestern. Interest was admittedly limited, but we received a handful of texts from curious students, and after a series of tryouts, we identified the two others who we wanted to join us as brothers in virtual arms, and thus the Northwestern Call of Duty team was born.

While we petitioned the athletic department to allow us to formally affiliate our team with the university, the appetite for a competitive Call of Duty team was not there. Esports was very new at the time, with the collegiate scene being nonexistent, and the prospect of fielding a team in a game where you shoot your opponents was not enticing given the stigma surrounding violent video games. Despite their denial of formal affiliation, they said that if we wanted to put “NU” in our clan tags and don Northwestern purple at local tournaments, there would be no repercussions.

Over the rest of my college tenure, the four of us competed in countless tournaments. While our team was undeniably better than many others out there, it was also abundantly clear that we unfortunately didn’t have futures as professional gamers. The times we butted heads with pros online and the two times we tried to battle through the open bracket at tournaments that pro teams also attended showed us that, understandably, the 12 hours we put in weekly did not allow us to compete on the same tier as those who put in 12 hours daily.

As a realist who acknowledged he’d have to settle for a more traditional career, I set my sights on becoming a management consultant after graduating Northwestern in 2016. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do professionally, but I saw consulting as a great way to quickly develop my “professional toolkit” (client management and relationship building, research, developing and delivering presentations, etc.) and gain exposure to a variety of industries and working environments.

After four and a half years of consulting at Oliver Wyman, I’m grateful for everything that I experienced and learned, and I believe that it enabled my growth as a young professional better than any other job could have. One of the most important lessons that I learned, however, was that a long-term career in consulting or private equity was not in the cards for me as I thought it might have been just a year or two ago. My work was intellectually stimulating, and the earnings potential in both fields is certainly enticing, but I wasn’t truly passionate about either industry. It was at times difficult to motivate myself to stay up past 2 AM grinding in advance of client deadlines when I wasn’t personally invested or interested in the industries I was analyzing. The work was certainly rewarding from a professional growth standpoint, but not from a fulfillment one.

In hindsight, I’m shocked that it took me this long to realize that a career on the strategy side of gaming and esports was my calling. My risk-averse side telling me to chase a steadier paycheck in a more traditional industry, coupled with the tremendous growth and managerial opportunities I had, kept me in consulting for over four years. But the lack of fulfillment I felt, compounded by a year of remote work where I enjoyed all the negatives (long, stressful hours) and none of the positives (traveling, fancy team events and meals, etc.) of consulting, has led to who I am today: an ex-consultant who looks back fondly on his time at Oliver Wyman, but who also looks with renewed vigor and optimism towards two fun years at business school and a career in an industry he is passionate about.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! Every set of eyes on this blog means a lot to me, and I appreciate you bearing with me as I shared my story. Going forward, if you have any questions about any of the data I publish, or if you want to just connect and chat esports more broadly, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at james.reed.kolbe@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/reedkolbe. Thank you again, sincerely, and I hope you revisit in the coming weeks and months as I publish my research!