John Robinson is the current COO and President of the world-famous gaming organization 100 Thieves. Robinson was highlighted as a featured guest during a recent podcast hosted by Joe Pompilano. During this conversation, the high-ranking executive explained that 100 Thieves’ top priority is not turning a profit.
“We were at a point where we could have remained a mid-sized esports and gaming organization and really been thoughtful about watching costs and investment for the future and become profitable,” Robinson said. “Our ambitions got much bigger, we wanted to make better content, have World Championship-quality esports teams, make great apparel, and expand into things like Higround. If you’re going to do that you’re going to have to make some investments for the future and that’s going to be pretty expensive. We’re all big enough believers that there’s so much growth that’s going to happen in this industry, making bets now for the future that we think we could pay off was the right way to go. Rather than take the more conservative approach, we’ve gone down the more optimistic and opportunistic path forward. In a lot of ways, 2021 is the closing of the first chapter of 100 Thieves. We feel like we really delivered against all the promises we made. Now we’ve raised more money, we’re excited to expand and go after some even bigger opportunities.”
During this conversation, Robinson was also able to provide some insight into the organization’s financial results. Robinson claimed that the company has almost doubled its revenues every year since its inception. Furthermore, he said that 100 Thieves had the company’s fast-growing year of all time in terms of gross dollars from 2020 to 2021. 100 Thieves reportedly experienced a growth of 110% year-over-year.
The Profit‘s Take:
The Dexerto article did not reveal anything of real substance. Here’s the summary: “we’re growing fast. We raised a bunch of money to drive growth. We don’t care about profitability. If we cared about being profitable, we would grow much slower and wouldn’t be able to do all the things we are doing.” This is kind of a non-story because this is the same thing that every growth company on the planet says. “It’s okay we’re losing money because we’re growing.” As a start-up guy, I fundamentally agree with that. But, then, I begin to question why this story exists at all. My tinfoil hat theory leads me to believe there is a stigma with esports orgs (that they’re all burning cash), and maybe this is a paid story to paint 100 Thieves in a better light. Maybe worst of all, the article reveals nothing of their strategy. It’s all completely vague, because the strategy is probably just more of the same without much innovation.
(All information was provided by Dexerto)
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