C5 Network
CEO & Co-Founder · 2013–2015
A global esports content and consulting network built from a bedroom during uni -- 50M visits, 40+ person team, and an exclusive interview with Faker.
What I Learned
- A grind is only unsustainable if you don't love what you're doing. 18-20 hour days felt like nothing because the work was genuinely energising.
- Know your zone. I was most alive creating, forming partnerships, and delighting the community. The back office ops drained me -- which is exactly why finding a co-founder who was energised by that side was the right call.
- Managing teams of teams is a different skill to managing individuals. Extracting high performance from both volunteers and paid staff require different approaches.
- Audience is not the same as business model. 50 million visits with no clear monetisation path is a media company with an identity crisis.
- Being early to a category is not always an advantage. Sometimes the market isn't there, and being first just means you build the road for someone else.
- Don't let emotional attachment to your first company stop you from selling it. The attachment is real; it's also not a business reason.
- Building C5 while finishing a software engineering degree made it obvious: I wanted to be in business, not engineering. That clarity was worth the whole experience.
Leaving Reign of Gaming gave me more motivation than I'd had for anything. I wanted to build something of my own -- bigger, better, fully mine. The timing felt almost designed for it: eSports was growing year on year, CBS and NBC were covering it at a loss just to get a foothold, and I was competing out of my bedroom as a university side hustle.
I worked 18-20 hour days and loved it. The hours were partly structural -- the team was globally distributed, so someone always needed something regardless of the time, and the only way out of being permanently on was to delegate well and build teams that could function without me in every conversation. I brought in a contact as co-founder to own finance and back office operations, the parts I never found energising. Having someone genuinely excited about that side meant neither of us was grinding through something we hated.
The launch was sharp. The first weeks of Cloth5 put out better League of Legends content than any other network that year -- guest features from known community names, rigorous analysis, the kind of output that signals something real is being built. (Some of that early work is still in my archive -- very nerdy, very niche, very me.) From there we added a YouTube channel for weekly content, and an esports consulting practice doing scouting reports for NA LCS teams. The peak was working with KeSPA on exclusive interviews in Korea, which led to a sit-down with Faker -- who was, and still is, the GOAT of esports. One of the highlights of my career, full stop.
At its largest the team was 40+ people across four divisions: art, written content, video content, and esports consulting -- a mix of volunteers and paid staff. Managing that was its own education.
The business model was the hard part. Advertising was structurally broken for our audience -- hardcore gamers were among the earliest adopters of ad blockers, so display revenue was almost nothing. What kept us afloat were business sponsorships and creative content deals, which required constant selling to maintain. Consulting was interesting but not repeatable at scale. No content outlet in the space was profitable unless you were an individual streamer or a pro team -- I didn't have cash to burn and had no interest in fundraising. We broke even most months and occasionally eked out small profits, which I'm proud of given how labour-heavy production was.
The honest mistake was not selling. I had an emotional attachment to C5 that I shouldn't have let drive the decision -- at the time it felt like mine in a way that made selling feel wrong. On reflection I should have found a buyer. I'd had my run, I wanted to get into the real world and see how big business worked, and I wasn't going to fundraise to keep the lights on. Doing all of this alongside my BEng Software Engineering had made one thing clear: I wanted to be in business, not engineering. That's what pointed me toward Deloitte.
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