In this episode, with special guest Eric Lay (Founder & CEO of Elventus), we discuss how Eric became a professional League of Legends player, Eric's transition from a pro gamer to an esports coach, video game coaching at the highest level, the role mental health plays in gaming, and so much more!

Welcome to the business of esports podcast, the official podcast of esports. We

explore the intersection of business and esports, one of the fastest growing industries in the world

and the future. Have fun. Please welcome your host Paul esports. Prophet Dawalibi. The business of

esports podcast begins now.

From the keyboard to the boardroom. This is the business of esports podcast. I am Paul

Dawalibi. I'm joined today by my friend and co host, Jimmy the judge burrata. For those of you

who are new here, welcome to the official podcast of esports. What we do is we cover the most

pressing, gaming and esports topics news of the week, but we look at all of it through a business

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review it helps others to find the podcast. Jimmy How you doing this week?

Having a great week Paul, how's it going listeners welcome back to another another

great episode happy to happy to be here.

You know, my tan is fading Jimmy, I'm starting to become somewhat self conscious of

this. This is this is a bad this is bad news. And you having golf clubs in the background is not

exactly helping. This is not. But if you

take a closer look at the clubs, half of those are actually lightsaber hilts or whatever,

that's

very serious golfing happening.

But we can always we can always spend a day on the course I think maybe even do a

recording from the clubhouse that would be as fun as recording at PAX or DreamHack or, or any of the

other amazing venues that we're planning on hitting up.

You know, a friend of mine used to do this thing called geeks on a plane and where

he'd get a bunch of startup founders. And they'd all get on a plane and go to some city that was

mostly fun, but also like to visit the startup ecosystem in that city. And I feel like we need to

do something similar and gaming, like gamers on the golf course. Or like I like the alliteration,

you know. I don't know there's something

like it's kind of like Jerry Seinfeld's comedians, coffee, right. So he's on a

plane Snakes on a Plane, I get that. But yeah, the alliteration is is really, I don't know, a lot of

G activities, I'd probably have to put,

yeah, we'd have to find by me why.

It's a winner. So you heard it here first, you know, get get ready.

heard it here first. And then it's gonna I need to get the 10 back, I need to get

back to Florida thing.

And speaking of new content, by the way, you know, because I have so many meetings, so

many calls with great people. And they always are asking what's going on with William the professor.

You know, we love him. We want to hear more of him. I don't let me take that that went out of

your sails. Paul, if you want to announce that no, go ahead, please. So office hours with the

professor is one of our new programs, it stars William the professor Collis it's the same insight

and analysis that you've heard from him on our business of esports programming, but in a more

snackable form, and in a more in depth coverage of specific events. So instead of a little bit of

William here and there across a whole myriad of issues, it's it's truly as informative, it's

great. If you get a chance watch it, because Big shout out to our editor, Chris, on that one who I

think just made it look amazing. But but the audio is, well, we'll be on our business of esports

feed. And so for William fans, you'll be happy to hear that we were doing some cool things around

that brand.

Yeah, even more reason to subscribe to the business of esports. Like if you're already

getting business of esports content, you're gonna get the office hours episodes for free, right?

It's more more content every week. And the beauty of those episodes, I think you hit the nail on the

head with it. Jimmy as you know, William gets to do a deep dive on on on an issue. And and you

know, there's no one smarter in the sports space than William is. And so, like when he does a deep

dive on something, I think it's really, really quite interesting, quite captivating. And there's

a lot to learn, which is why we call it office hours with the professor right? It's like going

like you weren't back in college, you're going to your professors office hours because you want to

get that one on one and that in depth kind of insight that only you get in office hours and not

in sort of the general classroom. So I hope everyone enjoys it. You know, Williams done a

great job. There's two episodes out already that you guys can check out. And it should be fun that

you expect Office Hours episodes every single week. Jimmy The other thing I just want to mention

And before I introduce our guest this week, because we do have an amazing guest this week.

Last week, guys, there's there was we had two podcast episodes that came out, that won't

necessarily be a regular occurrence. But sometimes we just, you know, we're in fact, we have, you

know, six months of guests booked in advance. And so every so often that happens where you might get

a couple of extra episodes or an extra episode on a given week. We hope you guys appreciate and

enjoy that. But make sure to still come to our Wednesday night live streams. It's Wednesday

8:30pm. Eastern time. It's a bigger cast. It's me and Jimmy and Jeff, the juice and Lindsey, the

boss. And we tackle all the news of the week that we don't cover on the podcast, necessarily. And we

do it live. So you get to show up and ask questions and get in our faces. It's Wednesday,

Wednesdays 8:30pm. Eastern time. It's so much fun, highly, highly recommend you guys checking it out.

Jimmy, I don't want to waste any more time. We have an absolutely amazing guest this week. On the

podcast this week, we have Eric lay, who's the CEO of L Ventus. And he's going to tell us about this.

Eric, welcome to the business of esports podcast.

Yeah, glad to be here.

Eric, for our viewers who maybe don't know much about you or about elementis we'd

love a bit of your background like how you got into gaming, why you did what you guys are focused

on at all Ventus like what what do you spend your time working on there? What are you guys doing

would love a bit of the story?

Yeah, I guess we can start off with like my early days of gaming. So I've been a gamer for

basically my whole life grew up playing video games. It started off as a way for me to connect

with friends, they got me into it, um, and then eventually got really hooked into it. I had a lot

of like, issues I was dealing with that home anxiety, some like mental health issues and

started spiraling into some like unhealthy places and video games ended up being that safe space.

For me, it was a place where I could feel like I have friends here. The work I put in the video

game, I can see the progress were in life, I felt like I was trying hard to make him make meaning of

my own life. And I couldn't see any progress. So I just dove deeper and deeper into the video game

ecosystem. And you know, that might sound good at first, you know, you're using video games to find

some meaning in life. But I started using it as sort of like as an unhealthy escape mechanism. I

started you know, avoiding a lot of in real life issues I had got to a point where I ran away from

home. And you know, I would stay overnight at internet cafes and I was like playing non stop. At

that time was really addicted to League of Legends. I was hard stuck gold player. And I had

this dream where it's like, you know, I hate school. I hate my parents hate life. Like, I'm

gonna be this competitive video game player. Back in the early days of season two, three league of

legends, I saw these big Twitch streamers starting to pop out like Doublelift and stuff. The odd one

and stuff like that was like, you know, maybe I could be like that. Now at the time, I wasn't very

good at video games. But now I finally found some of those passionate about so I started playing

more and more video games. Not my parents obviously were not very happy with that they owe

me to go do well in school. But I just fell in love with the game. And as I dove deeper and

deeper, I realized like, I'm like, I'm not even that good. I'm like spending like, you know, eight

hours a day playing video games, skipping classes and not doing any homework. And I'm still hard

stuck good. Like, why is this the case? That's where I started. You know, diving deep into the

world of sports psychology and mental performance. I started studying the most successful athletes

entrepreneurs, trying to reverse engineer their mindset, like why are they the best at what they

do? What am I doing wrong? I'm spending so much time playing video games, yet I can't find a way

to turn it into something meaningful. And that's where you know, I started reading all these books

and I started you know, looking for mentors and advice. And I started practicing everything I was

learning into my video game career, if you can call it that. So as I started playing a lot of

these mental performance principles as I started learning about growth mindset started learning how

to practice like mental resilience, strengthen my work ethic and get my sleep schedule figured I

started like meditating daily, I started like reading my journal started like bought reviewing

my games rather than just playing to play and just going in that infinite loss streak or infinite 50%

win rate that everyone dread. So as I dove deeper into there, I started seeing some success. I got

to a point where eventually I was like top 50 ranked and top 50 ranked in North America for

League of Legends in a challenger player for over five years. Now. I never ended up going

professional I like scrim with some pro teams and stuff like that. So now even though I had this big

dream of trying to go pro, I still was able to you know find success in other ways and I started to

realize that I had this knack for coaching people. I started taking on some different side gigs I had

like background with traditional sports as well because I was a competitive athlete in high school

so it was natural that as I would you know I did some coaching with like running and like soccer. I

started playing this principle. So the way I started Coaching League and applying all the

sports psychology principles I was learning into coaching League and then I started having a lot of

success as a freelance coach. Fast forward a few years, I got to a point where I was arguably like

probably like the number one ranked coach in North America and Europe in terms of like how many

bookings and how much money I was making got to a point where I was making well over, you know, five

figures a month USD, which might not seem like crazy amount in like the world of business or even

the world esports right now, but at that time, I knew like the market, most people were making,

like struggling to even make a few $1,000 A month coaching, because the supply and demand just

wasn't there. And the way I was able to get there was I started learning law about like business I

started learning about, I had to, like scale out my coaching business. And from that, I started

turning that success as like a freelance eastwards coach to building fantasy now, that sort of like,

bring things full circle in the I had a few years. So I tried a few other like business projects.

Some of them worked better, worked out better than others. But I found myself coming back to all

Ventus because I knew I really wanted to build a business that can really help other people and do

something that I was really passionate about. And that's how I started like Atlantis. Yeah.

Eric, I love the story. And, you know, I have I have some obvious questions that

aren't let me get the non business questions out of the way that I'm just talking about pure

curiosity. First of all, why l Ventus? Like, why the name?

Yeah, so. So the way I got it was, as I was, like, thinking about this for a few months,

like I was trying to figure out a name for the company. And I found a sum upon the Roman god of

success, I think it's like bond eventus. So, and then I sort of took el el my initials, and I just

combined, el Ventus. And it sort of just flowed nicely as like, it sounds nice. It sounds

professional, because in like the gaming space, there's like law of like, black market businesses

and the coaching and it gets title boosting. And I want to make sure that the branding sounded very

professional, more like a consulting agency more like thumbtack, and like professional players like

academies, colleges, parents would be interested in supporting, I didn't want to go down a

stereotypical, like, Dragon coaching, like this, that you see with like, old school gaming audience

that the the stereotypical gaming audience I, you know, parents or institutions might not be as

supportive of.

And then the second fun question I have before I do business questions, why why did

you decide to not go pro? Like, why gets so close to that goal? And then not, you know, not push

that last? That last mile?

I get this question all the time. I think I think I got more mature. What that means is

like, people don't understand how insanely hard it is to become a professional gamer. I was playing

16 hours a day before. And now when I was operating on my performance, I was probably

practicing around eight, because I learned more about like balancing it like sleep and all that,

but it's insanely hard. And there are people who get to challenger, without even needing to do any

training that I did. Like the amount I trained, like, I can tell you, I worked harder than anyone

like out there at that time. Like no one was writing, you know, our spending like three, four

or five hours a day, watching VODs and writing essays of notes and reviewing it again, again,

like I was grinding my ass off, just to get to like challenger, where I see other people, they're

like 15 years old, and they're like, top 50 ranked, and all they do is play solo Q. And that

was just crazy to me. And I think that was like a big wake up call. I'm like, Yeah, Eric, you want

to go pro? Like, yes, you've accomplished a lot. But you have to work like 10 times as hard, why

not do something where you can put that same effort and have way more success. And I mean, I

was studying a lot of entrepreneurs. And I was like, what if I put that same effort into

business, like maybe I could, you know, build something much bigger and have something that's

way more impactful, or even coaching before I got more exposed into business I was like, and I

didn't have to put the same amount of effort I was putting into my professional career into coaching.

And all of a sudden, I'm like, one of the best in the world at this. And I'm like this is probably

the better career paths. So I tried like, you know, five different side hustles like businesses

and stuff. And I was doing everything at the same time while balancing a part time job because my

parents weren't very supportive of my video game career. So I was trying everything trying to find

a way to make it work. And the video game coaching, end up being the one thing that was

actually like, really successful. So for me, it's like I diversified my portfolio skills. And it was

very clear which one was working the most. And that's where I just invested more into it.

It's a tremendous amount of self awareness, which I congratulate you for I think, I

think there's like I know, we have lots of listeners who could learn just from that little

tidbit there. You know, I know a lot of gamers who put in 16 hours a day and don't understand that if

they just Put them into a business or something, the amount of success or the amount they could

change their lives is pretty dramatic. Let's pivot to the business here a little bit in terms of

events, you know, we've had, we've talked to other college coaching platforms, you know, we hear a

lot about them. There are, you know, I don't know the exact number, there's probably a few dozen

sort of, at least good options out there or decent businesses out there around coaching. I, you know,

when I look on events website, I noticed you guys position yourselves quite differently, right,

like, coaching sort of come second, there's a lot of the word like consulting, which you mentioned,

how do you guys sort of position yourself in the coaching space relative to the others? And like,

what sets Ventus apart in your mind?

Yeah, so I think the biggest thing for me, it comes down to quality, I want to think

about how you build a scalable coaching business. In the end, I see there's a lot of like, tech

founders building like coach, coaching companies, I see a lot of people with different backgrounds,

maybe some like competitive background. But in the end, I think the the greatest companies are always

gonna be the companies that have the best product, who can solve this the biggest problems for the

customers who can deliver the best solution towards the the gamers needs and what I find for

us, like, I, I've been doing this coaching stuff professionally, for over seven years, I've

dedicated 1000s of hours into like, learning about what it takes to be successful coach. And it

really shows in the way we build out our coaching platform, and our product and our service. And I'd

say the real difference is like, we focus on quality. Yes, we can try and build a marketplace

and have like 1000s of coaches, but really like, that's really hard to scale. In my opinion, the

way I want to focus on is like, how do we build a service that is so good at targeting that. So I

want to build a service that's really focused on like, how can we solve the big problems of the

gamers and then scale it out through technology? Rather than focusing on let's build like a

scalable technology and figure out some like coaching element and attach coaching into it? I

want to start off with what are the biggest pain points of our customers? Build a coaching solution

for that? And then use technology to scale that out?

And who is your target customer in your mind? Like? What does that person look like?

Is it? Is it the parents of a young kid and they, you know, they want to they hope that their kids

gonna get a scholarship to an esports program? Is it? Is it the kid who, you know, has ambition to

be pro? And you guys want to produce champions? Like, what is the, the profile of your target or

ideal customer?

Yeah, so it's funny to ask this question now, because we've we've done a few different like

iterations, I think when I started off, I really focus on the premium customers, I had clients who

are paying over $500 a month, some paying 1000s of dollars a month for coaching, and they would be

with us for six months, a full year plus, right. And, and we start off with like the premium

people, people are trying to go pro collegiate programs, stuff like that. And because we have

like a team of professionals who've worked in the LCS, we have like actual registered sports

psychologist, mentors, coaches, who have years of coaching experience and have spent years building

out a training exercise and routines like, we were able to grab a hold of the more premium audience.

But then as I start building it more, I realized that like there's a cap in terms of like how much

opportunity there is in the premium side. But I'm more excited right now. It's like how we build a

service that can reach billions of gamers across the world. And with that, that's been our main

focus now. And the way we're planning to do that is really through our new lake training partner

matching system. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to take all the foundations of what

made our premium coaching service really amazing, and find a way to teach our students how to teach

themselves. And by being a part of our platform, and our subscription service, they're going to be

dripped training exercises, and drills every single week. And then they're gonna have a

training partner, where we're gonna match them with different people each week. And they're going

to use the training exercises, and the curriculum, the IP that we've built over the past few years,

to be able to work with them each week, and we have like different seminars, we've got, like,

over 50, like recorded lessons. So our version of scalability is more so focused on like, how do we

build something that can, you know, help, you know, hundreds or 1000s of people at once, rather

than we're going to have hundreds of 1000s of coaches try and deliver because we realize, like,

trying to manage that supply chain, it's very hard to manage? Yeah.

I want to follow that thread just a little bit. Eric, and it's so impressive. And, you

know, I'm sure you have this or or, well, let me just get into it, you know, with these students

and that you're teaching in the pain points, like you said, you know, what, what do they want to

learn? What what are they coming back for? What are you learning in with regards to specifically

addressing those pain points, as you're applying it now to this new business model and your shift

towards growth and optimization? And in that same regard, what's the initial feedback you're getting

from the students on how you've Been able to adapt your business to your understanding of what that

pain point was? You know, have you been initially successful in in this shift and then re addressing

that issue?

Yeah, yeah. So do you mind just going back to the first question, and then I'll get to

the second one.

Yeah. Yeah. So so the initial question was, you know, what were those initial

pain points, I suppose, of your students of the people coming through your program, and then we'll

go to the second half. Yeah,

so what I noticed was, um, so when I was like a freelance coach, I started off by just

doing vaad reviews, I started just like, watching their gameplay, help them improve their, as I

started getting more experienced coaching, I realized that the reason why players aren't

improving the game, oftentimes, it's not because of the lack of game knowledge. In fact, these

days, you can go on YouTube, you can search guides, there's infinite free resources online,

you don't need to hire a coach to tell you what you're doing wrong. If you weren't so lazy

yourself, maybe you could just research and just compare your gameplay to a professional player.

And just, you know, and you'll be able to, like, see some of the differences in your gameplay to

theirs, because that's what I did. But the reason why people aren't successful, it's not because of

the lack of knowledge or inability to execute what they know they need to do, you know that you're

getting caught out in the same position. And you tell yourself, I'm not going to get caught up in

this position anymore. But for some reason, the gamer still makes that same mistake tomorrow and

the day after, even though they know they're making that mistake, and they beat themselves up,

or it's like, why am I doing this? And the answer is really simple. You've seen this in education,

you've seen this in professional sports, it really comes down to discipline and repetition. If you

want to achieve mastery, if you want to be the best at anything, there's only two shortcuts to

success. One, you learn how to one, you get great genetics, and you're born with a great, great

skill set. And you know, you learn very quickly, you're going to get to the top, you're going to

get to challenger, like you've quickly because you're just born very talented. Or the other

answer, which is the answer I learned for myself was you have to learn how to work smarter and work

harder than everyone else. And the only answer is through discipline, repetition, you do the same

micro actions, again, and again, again, again, and again. And again, to the point where you can't

forget it. And then we forget, focus on the next thing. But when I see like most coaches, what they

do is they just focus on like, what are you doing, they'll watch like what you're doing, right? And

those give you some tips of like, oh, you should do this differently. And you know, when I watch

someone who's playing League, or any other video game, like I could probably point out like,

hundreds of different mistakes are making in just the first five minutes. But what are you going to

do with that information, you can't actually coach yourself to improve on 100 things at once your

brain can't handle that. The what we try and do with all Ventus is we simplify that and we're

like, this week, we're going to give you a training exercise. And you're going to work on

this for one week, straight hundreds of times in a row to the point where you can forget it. And

that's why like I really started this company, because when I went on that journey myself, when I

started learning the power of repetition of like focus discipline, I it really changed my life.

That's how I got out of like my anxiety, my depression. So I think about the people we're

trying to solve, try and build a service for it's really two. There's there's multiple people like

it's for the gamer who wants to get really good at video games. There's also for the parents, it's

those are the institutions because parents are spending like hundreds of dollars on

extracurricular programs for their kids. But not a single dollar of that is being spent towards video

games, because there's still this negative stigma around video games being like, ah, video games,

it's bad, it's unhealthy, it's toxic. And that's why I really started this company, because I was

like, I want to show my parents and the next generation of gamers that you know, video games

can develop real life skills. Because I've seen the dark side of gaming, I've seen myself spiral

deeper and deeper into depression, because you games was that unhealthy escape mechanism. But

when I finally found a big lack of work towards when I had that dream of trying to go pro, I was

able to start working on those skills. And that's what we're really teaching them with their

training exercises with their mental performance coaches. And even just the accountability systems,

with like matching with a training partner, just having a friend who's in that community, who's

also learning the power of mentors that into who understands the power of growth mindset and how

that applies your learning, being in that community is really going to help accelerate the

growth of our players. And our goal with events is really to take that to scale.

Eric, I want to dig on the product side a bit, as you mentioned, you know, products

super important to you guys having the best products important. And you know, when you're

dealing with a premium product like yours is how are you? How are you delivering this to customers

in the sense that like, is is it all very custom tailored right someone comes in and a program is

built for them is some of it like curriculum that you've built already that gets delivered, you

know, multiple times to different clients and you reuse and then I'm also curious about like the mix

because I think some one of the things a couple of things you mentioned are quite unique to you guys.

Like the mix of training call it on PC versus like, outside of or off the PC right like what

that mix looks like. So the average customer

Oh, so So I guess like started off with like, how we deliver to our premium services. Like

I mentioned before, we've made a slight pivot from that we're still working with our premium

customers so, but in terms of that, we've we've got an insane amount of curriculum like we've like

over the years, I've got pages and pages and pages of docs, and templates of how we do coaching. We

even launched like a coaching training program to train our coaches, we had a coach go through six

months of training, just to allow them to work with advances, because we put six months of like,

homework every day, like in our training before we were able to hire him full time, because that's

how insanely like how much like how much like how serious we are about like the quality of our

product, but in terms of like how we actually deliver it, like we've got love curriculum, and

then basically we work with a client, it's we do a discovery call, we understand what their biggest

pain points are. And then we figure out, okay, this seems to be the biggest issue. We'll work on

that until you get really good at that. And we'll structure out, you know, a full month of training

based off of that, and then we'll see how that evolves. Also, we get all of our premium clients

to synchronize their Google Calendar with our coaching staff, we give them access to a team of

coaches, a mental performance coach, head coach, and then like an assistant coach. And basically,

we will help you manage your sleep schedule. So we've had players like we're trying to push Pro,

but we've also had people who are like busy entrepreneurs, and they work like insane hours.

And we're like, okay, we want to make video games very efficient. So we're going to match your work

schedule with you, we're going to try and find pockets and time, and we're going to give you very

intentional training, you have two hours here, how do we make the most of that, and then also

balancing burnout to under sound like, we also don't want to push you too hard over the edge? How

do we structure that calendar? And that's, that's just been a lot of trial and error. And, um, and

everything really comes down to the power of the training exercises? And how do we incentivize them

to do the training exercises. So you know, the way our coaches are trained? Like, there's a lot of

psychology that goes into it, like how do we like, communicate information in a way that will get

them excited, you know, some people do very well, or they need extra push from a, some people are

very, like, competitive, and they want a guy who's gonna yell at them, you're like, you got this man,

you know, you just got to push hard, like, like, Don't be lazy and other people, they just need

more confidence boost, right? So because our coaches go through so much training to understand

that, you know, we're able to deliver really high quality services for our premium clients.

Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of philosophy, I suppose, underlying, you know,

the program that you're building, right, in terms of understanding what's going to work

fundamentally, I'm curious how much of this is transferable to different game titles, because

there's a heavy focus for you right on League. But a lot of these, like you said, confidence building

and just being a better coach, obviously, that, that it's gonna work in any sense in life in

general, not just in gaming. So, you know, as you build up this curriculum, and as you build out

your your protocols, I suppose for in training, you know, internally for your product, you know,

where are you focusing on taking this across? What titles what games are, you know, in what capacity?

Yeah, so I've been talking to like a few, like potential partners to see like, what's the

next vertical to expand to, and I would say, because we're really big on trying to target like

the parents, and we're trying to target the institutions, because we see that's where the real

money is, is really coming from so the research I've seen, it's like rocket leagues very big. For

parents and institutions, we see Smash, smash committees pretty big as well, or knights pretty

big. And valorant is also really big, specifically, not not necessarily with the

parents, but it's really big, because we have the connections with riot and League of Legends. So

that's like a very, it's very popular game. So those are like the top titles we're looking at and

cod just because of the size, but man, if I had to pick two titles, I would say probably Valerie just

because it's very close to her ecosystem, and then probably Rocket League, um, just because of, like,

how simple it is for like parents to grasp and understand

it. Oh, it's gonna just quick follow up on that, you know, and again,

understanding that your product now it's going to be applied to a different game. How does that also

affect I suppose, your marketing and your community, right? If you have a discord or your

socials, because you know, a lot of these fandoms are super loyal to that one game. So I'm curious

how that affects the community that you're growing as well as you start to expand and incorporate new

users new clients, but that have very conflicting interest or at least separate separate interests.

Yeah, so right now like we're all in on League of Legends, because that's where my network

and my experiences by philosophy for business. I mean, if I'm going to take the philosophies for

coaching, it really comes down to focus. It's my individual success came from knowing what I'm good

at, and I'm going to dominate that one industry. So my goal is like how do we become number one

number two in League of Legends It's like, get to a point where, you know, everyone knows like, oh

Ventus as the top like coaching platform for League of Legends, and from there, we can pivot

very quickly to games like valorant Rocket League, and you know, with like venture capital money,

like, we'll be able to scale very quickly and implement those systems similar to how TSM they

expand to fortnight very quickly, they already built a brand in League of Legends. And because

they, they built a track record of success, when they translated that success to other titles, it

was very natural for them, or easy for them to recruit a team in fortnight because they, like the

committee already knew, like these guys know what they're doing from a business standpoint. So no, I

because we're still in the earlier stages of the startup, like, I don't want to take on more than I

can chew, I want to make sure we prove this business model, get that fleshed out, and then

we're going to expand to the other titles. Because I think there's there's a lot of similarities,

like, like you mentioned before, these coaching principles, it's really focused on a lot of mental

performance, like growth, mindset, mental resilience, like work ethic, it doesn't matter

what you're trying to get good at, these principles apply to everything. And that's why we

started this company, because the goal is to help the player who wants to go pro. And what they

don't realize is 99% of players won't ever be pro, or won't ever make it to go pro 99% players won't

ever become a big influencer, everyone wants to become that big influencer, that big player. How

do we equip these students, these players with the skills to be successful, no matter what they set

their mind to in life, and that foundation, in our training in our in our learning curriculum, it

will apply to no matter what esports title, the transition into,

does a challenge then become? Eric, the hiring of good coaches that meet sort of your

standards? Is that sort of become the the biggest challenge to scale this business to, you know, a

very large size that, you know, are there enough great coaches out there that meet the kind of very

high standards, you guys have said? Or are you resigned to the fact that basically, you may have

to train every coach that comes through your door,

we've got a great business model. So I'm not afraid about expand to other other titles, I

think we can, we can probably hire like the best coaches when we're ready. Just because the margins

of our products are really good, because we have, like our premium services, like we make money off

of that. And then our and then our scalable, like services or subscription services that start at

like $30 a month, and we run like different promos for that, like, the margins are infinite. Like, if

we got 1000 clients, like we're 99 90% margin right on that, because we're doing like one coach

to 1000 people, right. So when you have margins like that, compared to you know, coaching

marketplaces would take 10% cut, you know, it gives you room to bring in the best talent. And

not only that, like, our, the way our business is structured from a coaching training coaches

standpoint, our beta when we train our other coach, he paid for the training and the coaching

because of the credibility that I have in this space. And our team has in this space. He paid

$9,000 are this this certification, but you know what it was worth it for him much better

investment than most college degrees, because he got a full time job after that. So I mean, with

with that training, like it's, it's a great model, because we're actually profiting from recruiting,

like when we recruit a coach, we're profiting and then there, we know that they're the best person

for the job, because we're training them we're teaching them in a way that's gonna, that's going

to be successful our business because I've, I've tried hiring, like some big name coaches, and I

paid some decent money for like, very reputable coaches. And I realized, like, the guy we trained

in house, his client retention rate was much higher because of the quality of our training

itself. Because the big name coach was so used to his ways of coaching like in LCS, like, we

couldn't mold him into the coach we want to be, and the guy that we had go through our training

program, where we trained him for six months, like his client retention rate was like insanely high,

and I'm so impressed, and like, really grateful that you know, he joined our beta program, and

that's really proving that business model. So you know, we're excited to take that to other games

eventually, and do the next phase of the pitching training program.

It's a great story and you love hearing they think, your ability to create

opportunities and jobs for the coaches, as well as I think a useful skill set for your clientele. The

third piece of that wheel, you know, in there, at least for me that I'm always thinking about

business development, because so much of what I do, how valuable is it to you? How important is it

to you? And how great has it been for the start of your business? Not only to be in Liga legends, but

to have such a great line of communication with arguably, I think the best the best in the

business right now in riot, you know, how important is that connection, that relationship?

And how do you see yourself facilitating future relationships like that with some of the other

developers and publishers?

Yeah, I think that stuff is really important to be honest. Like I don't have those

connections at right yet. So we've been able to just bootstrap our way through this, just from

like my, my tighter knit circle and my network there. I mean, if we were to get like a

partnership with riot, I think that the growth of the company would just skyrocket like crazy. Just

having the backup, the backing the validity, but also the pipeline of customers. So I mean, that's

going to be one of our big targets. I think right now, we've been the past year or so we've been so

invested into like, building out the perfect product, like delivering the most quality service

to our users, like, we haven't been so big on the bizdev side, we haven't been getting these big

partnerships, none of that PR, like, haven't done any marketing, everything's just very organic. So

I'm excited to get move to that phase where you know, we can start growing and securing these big

partnerships, because I think we get that big megaphone, or that big, like signal where it's

like, Hey, this is RIAA approved. Like, I think that would be insane. And we and the way we

structured the business, like we can handle an influx of 10s of 1000s of clients and still be

able to deliver the same quality service. In fact, something I didn't fully mentioned, but like the

quality of our service actually goes up based off of the number of clients in the program, because

we'll be able to match them with better training partners, because we're going to be able to match

our students with someone who's the exact same rank wants to learn the exact same thing that

week, and wants to you know, is in the same server as the same availabilities right now are matching

system is very manual, through we're getting like, you know, bad master players with gold players,

but I mean, they're, they're, they're happy doing it, because like, we've got a really great

community, and they're still learning that you can get, but imagine we can get this product to a

point where you can have someone who's like your perfect match. I think that's gonna be really

exciting for the scaling and the growth of the product.

And so Eric, what is like, Paint me a Picture of the future. And you can pick the

timeline, five years, 10 years, three years, whatever timeline you you're looking ahead at? Is

there a world? And I've asked this question before, is there a world where this kind of

coaching is as ubiquitous as common as people putting their kids with a math tutor? Right? Like,

will we reach this level of acceptance? Because, you know, and correct me if I'm wrong, but or if

you if you disagree, so much of this, to me, is driven by the parents, right? Like the kinds of

this is decisions made by the parents to pay to get their kids coaching, there may be the odd one,

you know, those the minority that will do it themselves or pay for it themselves? But I feel

like the huge opportunity is, how do you get every parent thinking, you know, this is more important

than getting my kid my son or daughter, a math tutor? Right? And, like, how far away are we from

that in your mind? Like, what does that future look like? Do we get there? Is it? Is it tomorrow?

Is it three years? Is it 10 years?

Yeah, it's hard to say. But I mean, if you're talking about getting to a point where

sending your kid to video game camps or lessons is as popular sending your kids to piano lessons, or

swimming lessons, stuff like that, I'd probably get anywhere in the in the five to 10 year mark, I

think there's still a ways away. I think it's gonna take startups like us, and you know, I know

there's a lot of other startups trying to, you know, tap into that apple into that space, but

it's gonna be, you're gonna need some big partnerships and stuff, you're gonna need to get

the credibility, have the right partners that parents trust. So I know, on my end, like, I can

get the credibility from the gamers, we already have the buy in, parents love. I mean, kids,

gamers love this, right? So they're gonna tell their parents, but how do we get parents to be

like, this is something really cool. I think it starts with having a really strong mission, making

sure your core values, making sure the product is actually delivering really strong value for your

clients. And then once you have that, then you can bring in institutional partners, big corporations,

fortune 500 companies that put the seal of approval and be like, this is a company that

really pushes mental health mental performance, like, you know, we've we've actually done a recent

survey are right now 80% of our clients, they've said that through the program, they've seen a

development in the growth mindset, you've seen 86% of our clients saying like, they've improved their

mental resilience and 92% of their, of our clients say they've developed stronger work ethic through

our program. And when we present these statistics to the larger corporations and partners,

eventually, I think that will hopefully, you know, snowball and bloon the goal of getting every

single parent to send their kids to video game programs, because every kid is playing video games

right now, the question is like, when will parents want to support their their children's, you know,

passion for gaming?

And maybe you already answered it there but like, what are those accelerants? Right,

like, what are the things the levers that that you have the capability to pull on? And others in the

industry that that may take that five to 10 years down to, you know, two to three years? Like what

are those accelerants? Is it bigger prize pools, more University esports programs? Is it like, what

are the accelerants in your mind?

I think what you guys are doing is a great decelerator I think media, I think, when you

think about how esports companies are successful, it's building a brand starts off by having, like,

I think you can create a movement where if you can speak to a mass amounts of parents, and

corporations, and if you get them to believe and buy into the story, right? Now, it's going to

start to spread, because they're like, Wow, my kid said, join this program, and then they're gonna

tell their friend or this corporation while we partnered with all Ventus. And they're doing some

really amazing work for employees in terms of like, improving their mental performance. And it's

really fun. So I think as like, it really comes down to like, I'd say content, I think that's

going to be one of our big goals in the next year is like, how do we really get that content out

there not just to the gamers because I think those those those channels are already proven. I mean,

obviously, you could do like influencer marketing. You could you could do YouTube content. You do

those like click clickbait, you know, educational videos, right? That that's like that strategy has

been played out. Many times people know how to target that. The big question mark is how do you

deliver content that the older demographic, right, the parents institutions are going to be, you

know, really excited about I think that's going to come down to love, like news, use of the letters,

blog posts, podcast content, conferences, panels, right. So I think that's going to be a part of the

strategy in the next year.

Very cool. I love that answer. Obviously, I love that answer. Um, Jimmy, this

brings us to, you know, everyone's favorite new segment. Jimmy, I'd love if, you know, you could

take ERIC through judge Jimmy's cross examination here. And for those of you who are new to the

podcast, if you don't know if this is your very first time, Judge Jimmy's gonna ask Eric a few

rapid fire questions here. Looking to dive a bit deeper into who Eric is as a gamer, as a person as

a business person. All those good things. Honorable Judge Jimmy, take it away.

Great. Yeah. A couple quick questions for Eric. First one, let's see. What is

your favorite food or drink when gaming?

Oh, God, like when I game I lose track. I forget to eat and drink water. I know that's a

very boring answer. Like I drink a lot of water. I like that. Yeah,

I love your first answer that you forget because you're so into it. It's the performance coach

answer.

And that's

that's the Rinaldo answer to if you guys remember when he done the Coca Cola bottle

and said you know, our great, I typically ask favorite video games, but we know that one let's

actually take it old school. What was your favorite video game growing up before you ever

came across sweet, so your pre weekdays.

I've got to I think I really liked all the NBA titles I played on my playstation and

stuff. It got me I was in love with the manager tools. I loved like trading. And so I think that

was a good early, early exposure to business and the other game would be Maplestory. I think I love

economics. I love the marketplace. I was a guy who wasn't doing as many of the quests but I would be

buying and selling items. So I think that was a sneak peek towards my love for that guy.

That's so funny. That's my ears. That by the way, that's an interesting like, the

founder of maple syrup. For those who don't know actually just passed away some actually quite sad.

But that is a great game.

Yeah. Nice smooth transition. Sorry.

I hope game. Sorry. Yeah.

Definitely a sad Saturday here. Let's pick it back up. Eric. This is a fun one.

What is your favorite ninja turtle?

Oh, gosh. Um, oh, man. I didn't follow Ninja Turtles. I can't give a good answer here.

I'm sorry. Yeah.

Fair enough. There's a first time for everything, I suppose.

My alternate question there, Jimmy, like, like, I guess our ranger or I don't know.

Like, if you didn't grow up on Ninja Turtles, he grew up on one of these things, right?

I mean, let's expand the question. They were kind of diverging here. But Eric, what

was like your favorite TV series growing up? And then the character within that? Um, are you one of

those outdoors kids?

Sports. Like, my parents didn't even have cable. Like they didn't let me watch TV. They went

astray. They didn't let me play video games. So that's why I was so addicted to video games,

because they didn't let me. Yeah. Or watch TV. Yeah.

And now this is a successful business in a massive industry and you did a

complete one. Door. It's great. Alright, last question here. Where do you hope? Well, actually,

we asked that one already. Let me switch that up. What keeps you up at night? What's your biggest

problem for your company today that that you're kind of always thinking about how do I solve this?

Are I'm going to have to come across this eventually, and I need to plan for it.

I want to make all the people who believe in me proud, I think that I feel the weight of

that on my shoulders every day, leading a company. Now I've had plenty of people who come in early,

we're still you know, we're still like Bootstrap. I've invested my personal money into this. And I'm

not able to pay like competitive salaries. I wish I could write. But people are taking a chance on

this business because they believe in the mission and they believe in the vision. And I think that

motivates me every day to just work a bit harder to be like, okay, are these people believe in me,

they put their trust in me and I want to deliver for them. So that's what keeps me up.

lovelies answers. I mean, Eric, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show.

It's such a pleasure getting to know you over the past few months and meeting you late last year.

And and back to you, Paul. Eric, thanks so much for for joining us today.

I think that's the best answer yet to that question. Honestly. Eric, again, thank you

for being on the show. For if you want to be followed or found, or, you know, where can people

go find out more about you or what you're doing or event is like, Where can people follow or find

you?

Yeah, just connect with me on LinkedIn. I think that's probably the best place for business.

So Eric lay all Ventoux. So, yeah, search me up on LinkedIn, I set pretty much everyone. So I'm

present me with some unique opportunities. I love you know, chatting, esports business. And

obviously, I mentioned a bit about partnerships. I think that's gonna be a big goal for us in this

new year. So I'm happy to explore what opportunities are out there.

I love that I love what you guys are doing. And just having met you now and you

know, have these conversations I, I have no doubt this is going to be a massive success. So

congratulations on all the success so far and excited to see where all Ventus goes. For our

listeners, guys, just a couple of reminders, couple of housekeeping things. Make sure to follow

business of esports everywhere. Everywhere you get our content, whether it's YouTube or Twitter, or

Instagram, or tick tock, even Reddit, you name it everywhere you can find business of esports just

search for it. Either business of esports or busy sports. And also don't forget our live stream

Wednesdays at 8:30pm. Eastern time. It's a lot of fun. Make sure you show up for that. Again, you

can find that everywhere you find our content. And let me know let the professor know let William

Collis myself Jimmy know how you're liking the new show office hours with the professor. We're really

proud of it. And we hope you guys are enjoying it. Jimmy Thank you, Eric, thank you so much for being

on the show. Thank you guys all for listening. And as always, we will see you next week.

Thanks for listening to the business of esports podcast. Check us out at the business of