Today I sent my colleagues an email letting them know that I'm leaving Riot on April 1st to focus on building a founding team around a new joyful UGC startup (and no it's not web3). Here's what I shared with them about what I learned in my 8 years at the company, and why I'm leaving now.

Hello friends,

April 1st will be my last day at Riot. I started here in 2014 and have had a hell of a time since then, working with some truly incredible people and contributing to products that still fill me with immense pride (evolving our skins strategy, launching chromas 2.0, buying Hypixel, investing in Fortiche, to name a few!). Now I’m off to take a short break before building a founding team and launching my own startup.

Before I leave, I’d love to share a small part of my perspective on Riot. It’s long so for the tldr, skip to the “keep in touch” part at the end and know that I really love this place. For everyone else -

What Riot taught me

I would never attempt to write out everything that Riot taught me over eight years or all that I am thankful for in my time here, but when I think about what I will take with me as I start my own company, there are three values above all that I believe define Riot’s success. OKRs, bold bets, and mountain metaphors aside, a Riot that continues to do the following will continue to be a place where I’d be proud to work.

Be willing to bet ahead of the experts

Riot has a handful of aphorisms that we’ve used over the years to describe this phenomenon but it all boils down to the same thing. Whether we are “data informed, not data driven,” we are “challenging convention” or we “dare to dream” the sentiment is the same - before it is obvious, trust yourself to take big risks on behalf of players.

Nowadays Goldman Sachs writes glowing projections of the future of esports revenues. Had we waited for those reports before investing in a global competitive scene, we’d still be waiting. Our work on Arcane started years before the Witcher proved the value of video-games-as-TV and spawned a flood of new adaptations. The experts are great at applying growth assumptions to given businesses, but less great at seeing what doesn’t yet exist. We are fortunate to have a war chest to fund risks and a leadership crazy enough to greenlight them. And we are fortunate to have teammates who support us in our adventures, when it is unclear even internally that things will work out.

At the end of the day, there is no shortcut for making the right ambitious bets ahead of the numbers, but deep empathy for players and trust in each other is a great place to start. I believe the most powerful thing you can do for someone is to raise their expectations for what is possible. Riot has and should continue to play that role for our players and for the industry. Certainly Riot did that for me over and over again with the opportunities it gave me.

Money is the “how” not the “why”

In my eight years at Riot I’ve seen our company mature immensely in how it thinks about money, both in how to generate it in a player-focused way and how to spend it responsibly. I’m fortunate to have gotten a chance to play a part in that journey, and it might sound funny coming from a guy who got his start in Revenue Strategy (RIP the original e-commerce team) but over that time I came to appreciate that one of Riot’s greatest strengths is in how we choose not to make money.

When money is the “why” you make all sorts of stupid trade-offs. You cash in on player trust in order to lift ARPA’s because that is your job right? There is a reason exploitative F2P games and casinos share monetization designs, and it’s not because they are mustache-twisting villains. It’s because their job is to make money and those designs are simply the easiest and most efficient way to do it! It is Riot’s luxury and our responsibility to recognize that simply seeing $/hr going up is not proof that we are doing our jobs. Our job is to challenge ourselves to look past endless loot box optimizations to create amazing experiences for players that are worthy of their spending. Thankfully, we have years of proof that doing so can also be good for business and is the way to win in the long-term.

Our unique shareholder structure grants us not only the luxury to make money the hard way, but also to spend it creatively. When you are managing to margins you avoid costly bets that are unlikely to be profitable in the short-term, if ever. It could take another ten years for Riot esports to be lifetime profitable. And what if I told you that early investments in Entertainment would never pay themselves back directly, and that’s ok? Those bets proved to be great for players, making them inherently worth doing. The money is the how, not the why.

There is real risk in this type of thinking. Not all of our investments have been sound, and there is no glory in spending on projects that don’t move the needle for players. Efforts that take ten years when they should take five aren’t just bad for business, they’re bad for players, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think we have monopolies on understanding what players will love or a passion for delivering it. If we aren’t fast enough or efficient enough at reaching players in new genres or on new platforms, someone else will do it for us. Still, I truly believe that no company in the world cares more about their players than Riot does or believes as deeply as we do that we are here to spend money to earn player trust and not the other way around and that is one of our greatest strengths.

People are everything

The values above are great but they are nothing without the people who believe in them and perpetuate them, especially when it feels easier to do the opposite - Rioters who believe that there is always room to improve, for players and for each other. Nothing did more to raise my expectations of what I was personally capable of than the people I worked side by side with, on team after team, as they modeled an excellence that I strove to live up to and always demanded more from me.

Unquestionably the greatest thing about being at Riot is other Rioters and the breadth of ways in which they are incredible. You could build a university out of the world-class experts Riot has attracted and spend the rest of your life studying there without running out of things to learn. Without a doubt, this will be my greatest loss as I move on to my next adventure.

Why Riot will continue to be successful into the future

I would bet on any company that starts with the values above, and Riot has a whole lot more than that going for it. Once upon a time League was the whole business. I would make a monthly revenue slide for leadership that was just a big picture of the skins that had come out in the last 30 days (literally). Now we’ve proven that esports can be a business and not just a marketing expense and that the recipe of caring deeply about players in an underserved genre can be repeated to great success. And certainly no one doubts anymore that games can lead to valuable film and tv franchises.

In each of these areas, it’s Riot’s game to lose. We have a clear roadmap in all three categories and the resources (and ownership structure) to make bets further into the future than any other game company in the world. As our three pillars continue to reinforce each other, Riot should have no problem building an ecosystem greater than the sum of its parts, expanding our audience, attracting even more amazing talent, and funding larger and larger bets in obvious spaces (MMO, feature films). Even if (when!) projects fail, we now have the proof we need in our abilities to stay strong and continue making ambitious bets.

I fully expect Riot to live up to its ambition to be the Disney of the 21st century, and with its new equity structure anyone around to contribute to that vision will surely be rewarded for their impact. It’s never been a better time to be a Rioter.

So why in God’s name would I leave?

I was early enough at Riot to watch it grow immensely (geezer score 93%!) but I joined after the era in which our founding legends were born by overcoming impossible challenges together. It’s time for me to try to bet ahead of the experts myself and in a space where there isn’t a clear path to success. That’s why I’m leaving Riot to start a new studio. We’re building a genre-specific UGC platform to help players find joy in creating their own adventure experiences (think Mario Maker meets Breath of the Wild). We deeply believe that game creation should be, and can be, fun and there is a massive audience of creative players out there with their own stories to tell. I think it’ll be challenging, exciting, scary, and fun, and if the experience impacts me half as much as my time at Riot has, I’ll be a lucky man.

Riot is a really incredible place and I’m thankful for all of you who make it so. Special shoutout to some of the partners still at Riot who I believe most exemplify the values above. Magnus Lehmann, Jane Jeffers, Mort, Paul Bellezza, Joe Hixson, Sarah Ali, Jim McArdle, Betsy Anderson, Joe Lee, Ambrielle Army, Davin Pavas, Dan Nabel, and the original e-commerce crew of whom only Jack Calvi and Mark Sottosanti now remain (though I believe the impact of Jeff Denis and Areeb Pirani will long outlast their time at Riot). To Daniel Li for dealing with me as his manager. And to the leaders who bet on me consistently, often without evidence that they should - Myke Hoff, Anna, Dylan, nicolo, and over and over and over again, Mark Sottosanti. There are certainly many more Rioters from whom I have learned an indescribable amount, and I’ll miss you all immensely.

Stay in touch -

brendan.j.mulligan@gmail.com
Discord: .tuxedobear