Exit Interview: Donald Boyce

Welcome to the third edition of Exit Interview — a series in which I talk to people in the video game and esports industries who are experiencing some kind of major career change.

Last Saturday I spoke with Donald Boyce, an esports professional whose resumé is a list of some of the most recognizable brands in esports: TSM, Cloud9, G2, etc. And yet, in his telling, he’s “always kind of been trying to leave esports.”

In our conversation, we talked about just that — and also about some of his former bosses, venture capital body horror (it’ll make sense, in context) and human suffering. Forgive the long first exchange; it’s important for setting up the rest of the conversation, so I cut very little.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: Tell me a little bit about who you are and what you did in esports.

Donald Boyce: I got involved in esports through reaching out to Steve Arhancet on LinkedIn. This was probably, I don't know, almost 11 years ago now. I was in grad school for philosophy and I wanted to be an academic, and then my wife and I got married and I realized that would never pay off student loans.

I started off as a project manager. I got the job, I think, because of my responsiveness. I reached out to Steve, he messaged me back in like five minutes, and then I messaged him back in like two minutes, and so it was clear that I'd be responsive and I was going to work hard for him. After a couple of weeks, he was like: Take whatever title you want, I just need help. He treated me as a partner in basically running Team Curse at the time. If you search, “Curse energems,” all that stuff would be me. We also visited the Boys & Girls Club with Team Curse, which was really fun. I think that was one of the earliest projects to get teams involved in community service. I still think there's a huge need for that, for the emotional, spiritual, psychological health of the players.

Then, I went and worked at TBWA\Chiat\Day for a year, because I always wanted to go to work in an ad agency. I saw a documentary about [TBWA chairman] Lee Clow and TBWA\Chiat\Day in undergrad called Art & Copy. They were all about pirate culture. They had a basketball court in their offices. They had a boardroom that was a bunch of surfboards. And so I thought, oh, it's gonna be really cool. But I was doing paid media analysis, and I'll never forget getting the data from these big, big spends and realizing: Oh, man, this is not great. How do we make these numbers look good? That's something that happens, but people aren't really vocal about it. We spent this huge sum of money and we had two people come in to test drive vehicles, and it was like, okay, how do we make this look a little better? So I did that for a year. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

So I went back into esports. [TSM CEO and co-founder] Andy Dinh hired me to run his streamer network. But as soon as I got in, it became really apparent that they needed someone to manage the partnerships. So I did that for Andy.

After TSM, I was trying to swear off esports. Like: I'm going to go back to seminary, I'm going to go get my PhD. And Andy, ever intuitive, knew that I was running from something by leaving. My wife, with our first daughter, it was a really traumatic delivery. The doctor wasn't in the room and the nurse was barely able to deliver the baby. And I was like, you know, life's too short. I want to go and get my PhD. So we went to Belgium for me to try to finish my PhD in philosophy.

The Cloud9 hire happened like this: I had worked with [Cloud9 CEO] Jack Etienne’s dad, Bob, a bit during previous partnerships and we loved each other.² Jack had [Cloud9’s then-president] Dan Fiden talk to me to bring me on and bring me back from Belgium. Financially it was appealing enough to make me pause my PhD in Belgium and return to Los Angeles. I always was scared to ask for what it would take for me to stop pursuing academia, and when I did I was always really surprised they said yes.

I moved around quite a bit at Cloud9. I think where I was most effective was in fielding sales ambition and trying to make it happen. Basically: fulfilling the hopes and dreams of big promises. Eventually I was SVP of Sales, Marketing and Partnerships. At the tail end of my time at Cloud9, I got in the crypto weeds during the crypto gold rush. I did the Polygon deal. We had a Tezos deal that would have been a lot, a lot better. But we ended up going with Polygon. Then we did Blockchain.com, which — I'm not sure how much of this is public — ended roughly but positively, I think, for Cloud9.

And then G2. Not to put too much of a pessimistic spin on it, but at that time things were really drying up. I did the Stride partnership, which I thought was a good, purposeful partnership. Basically, Stride does online education for kids. They were the title partner of our Rocket League team. That was one I'm proud of. And then one that I wasn't as proud of is CSGORoll. I don't know how much I want to share about that, but let’s just say it was a necessary partnership. G2 was like: Don, we need this much money by this time. Go find it. So that was a partnership that we did basically to keep things rolling, and I had negotiated it well, so that if it did go south, it would go south in a really clear and beneficial way for G2. That was the Blockchain.com learning.³

There's one common thread that I feel I can tease out in some of these work experiences you talked about. When you were working at the agency, the data work seemed to have this overpromising and under-delivering thing going on.

Boyce: Yes.

And later, in esports, you talked about “sales ambition” and “big promises,” which I imagine was another case of having to match promises made to a client.

Boyce: Yes.

It feels very house-of-cards-like, where things could go very badly, very quickly. Can you tell me a bit more about that? I have very little insight into how partnerships work. On paper, there's an exchange of money between parties, but what's actually delivered is not super clear to me.

Boyce: What I kind of learned over time — and this is an unfortunate reality, I think, of partnerships — is that there's a good deal of partnerships that are just people building their personal resumé. They're collecting artifacts of things that they've done so that they can show it to their next employer and cash out on that next employer. I don’t want to say that that's all that it is, but I think a lot of the time that's what it boils down to.

The partnerships that never turn out well are the ones that expect ROI — like, immediate ROI. And sometimes you'll get someone who partners with you because they’re like: We care about brand positioning. We care about all these intangibles. And then halfway through the partnership or during the renewal, there's someone from finance that opens a spreadsheet and is like: Uh, why are we doing this?

The justification for spend, for ROI, is so tortured and bad wherever you spend money in advertising. It's not like there's greener grass someplace else when it comes to these things.

You mentioned a lot of recognizable names in your first answer. Listen, I’m a journalist. When people reach out to me to talk about esports orgs or their owners, they're not telling me nice things. I’m curious about Andy, who I've written about before.⁴  What was your experience working with him like?

Boyce: It's very weird to say this, but he is one of the most caring, loving people that I know. Albeit, there are maturity issues that he's had to work on in very public ways. And I think — I mean, I don't even just think at this point — after learning more about my own neurodivergency, I know him to be basically having to wrestle with that without much help.

Were you surprised when you started seeing reports about what other people who worked with him thought about his style and affect?

Boyce: No. I was in the room when he would get heated about stuff. I was there, in the thick of it. I actually told Parth [Naidu, former TSM League of Legends GM], when I left for Belgium, I was like: You should probably think about getting out of here. I don't think it was good. Andy would lose his temper. He would — as someone who is neurodivergent, probably undiagnosed — fixate on certain things.

I hate saying this, but most of the time he's right about things. He would get overly fixated on some things, and it was like: Okay, we need to back up and reverse a little bit. But like, he's right. I'm not trying to dismiss the intensity with which he was inappropriate in the workplace. But I do think, being on the ground in the heat of those conversations — and it was heat — that he just ultimately cared about the truth too much.

I feel very lucky: I think I got a lot of that heat out of my system in college. I worked for the college paper, and I just hated some of the other people I was on staff with. And we would get into fights and would call each other mean names. I got it out of my system in what was essentially a fake work environment.

Boyce: I don't know if there's a way to put this in a less direct way. There is no doubt in my mind that the help that he needs is not purely professional. It's not like something that would get out of his system if he had cut his teeth on a different job.

And it’s not excusable. It's not okay to yell at people because you're fixated on the truth. But my point is that the help that he needs, it's not just a career coach or a CEO coach.

Have you raised this with him?

Boyce: No, but I've had it on my mind and heart to do it for a long time. But it's like, how do you do that?

You mentioned earlier that you needed to pay off your student loans. Has esports helped you chip away at them?

Boyce: My wife, when we got married, I didn't know how much she had [in student loans]. I logged into her account, and there were student loans that were like eight and 9% [interest] Federal student loans. And by the time she would graduate — hers was a three year doctorate — it would be over $200,000.

You know, Andy, Jack, all of these founders that I have kind of interesting or mixed relationships with, they really did take care of me financially. I participated in — I don’t want to say [esports] “gold rush,” it wasn’t necessarily a gold rush — but I participated in the benefits.

So we paid off the student loans. We own the house that we’re in. We were trying to sell the house and had moved in with our in-laws [ed. note: Donald and I rescheduled our conversation in January after his in-laws’ house burnt down in the Palisades fire, which is what he’s referring to here] and so we lost everything, but we still own our house, which is like… To own a house is wild, right? And part of it came from a bonus that I got from Cloud9 for a very large Blockchain.com deal.

I don't know very much about Jack. When you say interesting and complicated, what does that mean in terms of Jack and Cloud9?

Boyce: Yeah, well… I got let go from Cloud9.

My boss was Dan Fiden, who is the angel investor in Cloud9. And so Dan's end — or telos, if you're into Aristotle — was just: how do we increase the top line revenue? Your job in venture is just more top line revenue. So I was doing that. I was doing everything I could to do that. And then Dan wanted to sell the company, because that's venture, that’s how you get an exit. And Jack didn't. And I, you know, even in something like picking Polygon over Tezos — because I had both deals done and ready to sign — I had sided with Dan. And so after Dan left, Jack and I couldn't really recover from the decisions I had made to fall in line with Dan and and basically build the company for top line revenue — for selling it, ultimately.

By the way, I hate venture capital with a passion, after this. I had a dream that I had an ingrown hair in my neck during this time, and it was so big. And I finally pulled it out and there was a bloody hole in my neck.

Was this a recurring dream?

Boyce: It just happened once, but I felt like I was going to vomit after seeing the hole in my neck. And what I realized, after thinking about the dream more, and in therapy, was that the ingrown hair was like the venture philosophy that I had that was inside me. And then when I ripped it out, I had no voice anymore. There was nothing left.

When you say venture philosophy, you mean pumping up the value of-

Boyce: Yeah, growth.

When people talk about exits from esports, they talk about it in very ambient terms. Was there a buyer lined up, interested in Cloud9?

Boyce: [Laughs] Yes. I can’t say more than that but yes. Lots.

Lots of buyers?

Boyce: If you remember, this was during the the space race, if you will. This was during the height of things. This is when crypto was booming. There were lots of people interested in owning it. I had heard one CEO say: You know, some people own yachts. Some people own sports teams. I think it would be cool to own an esports team. And Andy — who was always way ahead of his time — he was like: This is just a piece of art for someone.

When we were first scheduling this chat, you said that you had read my interview with Ryan Fairchild, and that you had some thoughts on the team side of the equation. [tl;dr: I asked Ryan about the ideal elements of contracts he might negotiate on behalf of esports athletes. He told me: “It's more what isn’t in there. It's more just getting rid of the kitchen sink approach wherein teams control your sponsors, teams control everything you can do and use, and all of the legal liability is going to be just totally lumped on you. And of course teams would come back and say: Well, we're taking all the monetary risk. And, you know, that's your choice, dude!”]

Boyce: There’s no way to enforce contracts to monetize the invested resources in players. There are people who would say, to this day: TSM helped get me where I am today. I think Myth is a good example of that from Fortnite. When we signed him — when [former TSM president] Leena Xu found him — he had like 2,000 Instagram followers. And TSM signed him and put him on the front page, basically, of everything.

The question is: How does the team make that back, when players want to get out of their contract, and also don't want to do the deliverables that are in their contract? We were always trying to solve for that. You could fine players, and some people would. But when you're — you know, just as an example — when you're at the top of your game, like G2 Counter-Strike when I was there, if they say no, they're like: okay, fine me.

Yeah, they’re star players. What are you going to do?

Boyce: There’s no team leverage in those situations.

Why are you leaving esports?

Boyce: It's really weird, but I've always kind of been trying to leave esports. For a long time. And it just kept growing, is what happened. So when people are like: Oh, you're going to get your PhD, you're going to be a teacher, you can teach philosophy — what changed your mind? It's like: No, I always wanted to do that. I went into esports for my wife, for her loan, and to take care of my family as well as I could. And now I feel like we have our feet underneath us, with three girls, and we're not struggling to feed them or struggling to have housing, so I feel like it’s okay for me to make this change now.

It's been about three months since the Palisades fire. How have you been since then?

Boyce: It was shock at first. I had two pairs of pants and three shirts we left with. I was worried about the smoke, and so I was like: I need to get out of here, I'm going to go get our girls, we need to evacuate. We didn't think that all of our stuff would be gone when we went back.

I had probably almost a thousand books that I had collected over the years. Like, the complete works of Augustine, which is like $4,000. I lost all my books. And when it first happened, I was like: Thank God, I don't have to carry those things around anymore. They were like my armor for my insecurity. They were like, how I felt smart, you know? But now that that's worn off, I'm sad. I used to read to my kids from Copleston’s History of Philosophy and I thought: I want to read to them from this book, and I just don't have it anymore. So I'm sad. It's interesting how long it takes for us to feel sad about things like that.

Looking back, is there one thing you would have saved if you had the opportunity?

Boyce: What's so hard is there's so many layers of things that someone else would tell me I should save. You know what I mean? The first thing that came to mind is my grandpa's suit coats. He was a really successful businessperson. They're super nice suit coats, but I needed to tailor them. I needed to spend a lot of money to fix them up to fit me. I never did it. But that's something that I feel like someone else would tell me to save. Oh man, I'm getting emotional now. I had a Cartier watch that my dad gave me that was meaningful. But that's, again, something that he would want me to save.

The thing that I would save is my shoes from my wedding. There’s something about shoes, and the fact that they kind of hold everywhere that you’ve been in them. They're shoes that, every time I put them on, I thought of getting to wear them in my wedding, which was the the best day of my life.

Before we spoke, you sent me some things you had written, including a chapter you wrote about the work of the philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Falque. What do you find interesting about him, and how did you get introduced to him?

Boyce: I was introduced to him as an undergrad. When I first read him, I had no idea what was going on. I still barely know what's going on in his work. But it was really healing for me. I grew up thinking that Jesus knew he was going to come back to life, right? He's God. He knows. But Falque says that Christ undergoes death, and not only does he undergo death, but the power of Christ is that he shows us how to die.

I was evangelical growing up. I grew up kind of fundamentalist. I took so much pride in saying: I'm not going to die, I'm going to live forever. To stop and take death seriously and suffering seriously is something that I had to learn, because I kind of neurotically denied it or theologized it away. What Falque says is: Yes, we all will die, and Christ shows us how to do it. There's other kinds of things that were impactful reading from him, but in general, it was his emphasis on suffering and the ways that we flee suffering.

Why did that feel so relevant to you?

Boyce: In college, I was really suffering. But I didn’t know that I was, if that makes sense. Like Augustine says — and this is so right — about God: I was outside myself, but you were within me. We're masters of going outside of ourselves. I think of my gaming, especially in college: I would just go and play World of Warcraft instead of sitting with my suffering. But what happened is that as soon as I stopped and was like, No, I'm suffering. What is going on? Why am I jealous? Why do I hate alcohol? and I started attending to it, I started remembering things that I had forgotten about my family and my past. My mom, when I was young — and I think my siblings know this by now, so if they don’t, sorry! — had an affair, and was an alcoholic. My dad was an alcoholic. And they would just fight, a lot.

And I remember I was reading the Bible and Jesus turns water into wine as his first miracle. I read it and was like: Are you kidding me? He's bringing out more wine? And it made me so angry I grabbed my pen and I slammed it into my Bible. That was me suffering. And as soon as I thought about: Why am I so mad? Why does that make me so angry? It was a clue, or a track, or a trace of some impression on my body that I had forgotten. [The philosopher Baruch] Spinoza calls it a mutilated memory or mutilated impression. And how you heal that is, you bring it to wholeness.

[The philosopher] Porphyry, who's a Platonist, writes a letter to his wife where he says: If you would only ascend into yourself and bring to unity the things that the body has fragmented and fractured. That is what happened to me. I had this pain, and I needed to attend to it in order to bring it to wholeness. And as soon as I brought it to wholeness — in speech — I wouldn’t say I was healed, but I could at least grapple with it.

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By the way: In my previous newsletter I promised an “eye-popping scoop” as my next story, but I got beaten to the punch by Nicole Carpenter at Polygon. I even had a headline picked out: “Amazon and Twitch sue Russian 29 year old to avoid paying fine of more money than exists on Earth.” Alas! I’m confident that I was the first to get my hands on the suit, but I was on vacation and had some rough luck getting Russian legal experts on the line for what I thought would be useful additional context. It happens! Hats off to Nicole; go read her story.

1. Editing an interview off of a transcript — a record of words said in a specific order — is always super weird, but for transparency’s sake, my edits are largely about cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of the answers (or entire exchanges) here and there that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me.

2. There wasn’t an obvious place to put this but, elsewhere in our conversation, Donald referred to Bob Etienne as “an awesome lawyer [and] an awesome man.” He said they would occasionally jump on calls to talk about philosophy. I thought that was sweet.

3. Donald also told me that he was proud of his work on Team Soda Mid, a playful TSM x Dr. Pepper ad, and Cloud9’s Kaiser Permanente Presence of Mind partnership. I made some cuts to this answer because 1) it was already so very long and 2) there’s a lot more conversation to get to. But, I don’t want to shortchange Donald, so I’ve moved some of his notable work here.

4. In 2022, I spent months interviewing employees at TSM, the esports team founded by and run by Andy Dinh, Don’s former boss and the subject of this part of our conversation. The result was this report into Dinh’s toxic workplace conduct. Here’s a representative snippet: “Some workers at TSM and Blitz told The [Washington] Post they made a policy of not speaking in meetings with Dinh for fear of angering him. On several occasions, the targets of Dinh’s outbursts — which often included high-ranking staff at the company — were fired or departed shortly thereafter, throwing projects and entire teams into flux, according to numerous former TSM and Blitz employees.”