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2017 — The year eSports really goes mainstream

In stadiums meant for physical sports are thousands of fans gathered to see their idols play more virtual kinds of games. Foto: Bago Games

In 2016 reports showed that over one billion people are aware of eSports the industry brought in around one billion dollars the same year. Both analysts and experts see 2017 as a year this growth continues, and that in a fast pace, as this will be the year eSports goes mainstream.

Pol Ruiz is the co-founder and CEO of Playfulbet, one of the biggest social betting platforms in Europe with over seven million users. They were one of the first startups that saw the eSports wave coming:

I have to say that eSports have evolved a lot since we started Playfulbet four years ago. At the time we were the only ones offering betting on eSports (though not with real money). Today all the betting sites lets you bet on eSports and it’s growing rapidly month over month.

Pol Ruiz, CEO and co-founder of Playfulbet.

Talking about sports, the only thing growing faster than eSports itself, is betting on eSports. According to the market analyst SuperData the eSports market will be worth 1.8 billion by the end of 2018. The sum is small compared to the betting market says Pol:

What many analysts doesn’t take account for is the betting industry around eSports which is also growing exponentially, and is anticipated to generate around $20 billion in turnover by 2020.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Gamers are more loyal than football supporters

Stadiums used for traditional sports, are filling up with energetic audiences hungry for eSports live tournaments. It’s important to note that there are several key differences between the normal sports fan and the eSports enthusiasts.

The things that are special with eSports fans is that they support, interact and are much active than normal sports fans. They identify themselves with the game in a bigger degree than with other sports fans, and this makes the eSports sector both so interesting and valuable.

Pol and his team at Playfulbet are monitoring both sports sectors, and see trends emerging.

The industry is exploding, and especially after many traditional football and basketball teams got associated with the online sports games, and even formed professional eSports teams.

Mainstream means money

Until now eSports has been associated with one particular kind of demography, but that is changing rapidly, according to Pol:

As traditional TV and mass media companies are entering, this is becoming a mainstream thing. In Spain there’s TV channels dedicated to eSports and Mediapro is covering the LVP (the national eSports league in Spain).

He continues:

As most experts predict, the eSports sector will continue to grow fast the next couple of years, particularly with the entry of mainstream brands and additional famous profiles from the traditional sports world.

Also read:

https://blog.itnig.net/how-playfulbet-grew-to-400k-followers-on-facebook-and-300k-on-twitter-c207cb286559

Focused on eSports because no one else did

To strengthen their focus on eSports, Pol and Playfulbet is adding more gaming streams to the platform:

we’re integrating streaming of eSport matches so you can follow the games you’ve been betting on without leaving the platform, and you can also chat with your community watching the same games. But there’s still much more to be done for the eSports community using the platform.

Playfulbet moved over the offering bets on eSports fairly early because of one main reason:

We added eSports mostly because no one else did it, so for us it was a competitive advantage. We’re still not more focused on eSports with respect to other sports, but we’re working on offering even more content and functionality in this niche.

This post was written by media manager itnig Sindre Hopland.

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How I Got Hired & Ditched By UBER

This is not a picture of me.

There is a lack of engineers everywhere, but finding talent is especially hard in the Bay Area.

I’m from Spain but 5 years ago I went three months to SF, to attend a couple of conferences and visited some friends.
At that time I was trying to start something, but I changed my mind and I started looking for jobs in the US instead.

Getting in contact

Every single company I visited was recruiting.

Tech companies provided pizza, beers and tons of famous, smart people to talk about smart things. All to attract talent.

I sent out many resumes, but 90% of the times I didn’t receive any response, and I couldn’t figure out what was missing.

I have a CS degree, five years of experience and lots of open source contributions in cutting edge technologies. My best guess was that US companies were not willing to sponsor me a `H-1B` visa.

I was close to giving up and going back to Spain when I received two calls from a couple of companies. One of them was Klout, the social media analytics company that sold for $200 million. The second call was from a company that was just starting up at the time, they wanted to disrupt the transportation industry.

The interviews

The first interviews are always done by telephone. They ask you about your background, some theoretical questions and some *puzzles*.

When they have decided that you’re smart enough to meet face to face, the real interview starts, and it’s not a normal meet and greet, it can last up to three hours.

You talk with people from different departments, answer more questions and solve more *puzzles* on whiteboards.

– Implement a function that calculates square roots
 — Sort and concat arrays in a optimal way
 — Guess the two missing numbers in a array with `n — 2` length containing `1..n` unsorted numbers
 — Calculate the number of digits for a given number
 — Implement a function to detect palindromes
 — …

Most of them were doable, but I think they were missing some amazing developers that may not know how to solve those problems,
but they are capable of solving real-life problems (fix this bug, port this library, refactor this code…).

Some of the theoretical questions I had (mostly javascript related):

– What is a closure and which disadvantages does it have:
 — What is hoisting.
 — How does `this` work.
 — How `float` works and which issues does it have.
 — How does the event loop work on the browser and how to delay a function to the next tick.
 — How to optimize CSS, and how does specificity work.

The offers

Both companies I interviewed for offered to sponsor me a H-1B visa and a good salary.


I ended up accepting one of the offers because they where more transparent with the stock options (which I later discovered not to be so great after all), and because they told me that I could work remotely until getting the visa.

I signed the contract, opened a bank account, left my job and came back to Spain.

The silence

Back in Spain I started to prepare myself for the new job — I was looking forward joining a new team. I learnt Python because I saw some people using it at that company’s offices.

I was super motivated and willing to start! I even sent some emails to the CTO to get some instructions on how to setup my development environment.

At my starting date I received the first email from the CTO saying that they were not able to get my visa and that they were thinking about the aspect of working remotely.

I answered them that it wasn’t a problem for me. I had been working remotely for a while and it had never been an issue.

What happened next? Nothing. Silence. I was completely ignored.

The problem

Getting a working visa in the US is not easy. If it was, most developers would be working there. It has gotten a lot better the last years, but companies should start to be more open minded about hiring remote workers.

There is a huge deficit of talent in the US, and a lot of wasted (and way cheaper) talent in other countries around the world. An average engineer in the Bay Area can cost around $100k+. In Spain, the same engineer costs significantly less.

Even though I’m happy I didn’t end up in the states, it would have been cool to be one of the first developers at Uber.

The solution

Ironically, while I was on holiday in San Francisco I was working for [Teambox](now Redbooth), a company with their development team based in Spain.

It was an amazing experience, the development was happening 24 hours a day. The git repository was constantly receiving commits, never sleeping.

It was a great time, that I now look back on as me and Jordi Romero are working on our new project Factorial.

Luckily there’s more and more great companies being built in Europe, and there’s no need to go to the US to land a fantastic job as a developer. Both Madrid (14th) and Barcelona (9th)are climbing on EDCI’s digital city index list every year, and more and more startups are getting funded.

A recent report by Atomico predicts even greater times for European tech in the years to come, so no need to apply for the green card lottery this year, just hold on to your European passport.

This memoir was written by the CTO of Factorial.

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How important is networking for your startup? (Isn’t hard work enough?)

Some of our hard-working people at itnig.

If you’re running a startup, or working in one, you probably know how much work it takes to build a brand new product from scratch. It’s not unlikely that you’re reading this post by your desk at 10pm, just because you needed a break from your sweaty keyboard.

But no matter how much and how hard you work, it’s not enough. At least that’s what some experts claim.

Most humans are social creatures, and even though the tech world is built by developers (not famous for being super keen on networking), the startup industry arranges more networking events than most other industries.

In Barcelona you can go to several events every night if you have time.

Is hard work enough?

As I’ve worked as a journalist, meeting founders and entrepreneurs every week the last year, I’ve been asking several of them why I haven’t seen them at tech events before?

The answer is usually:

“We’re busy working, I don’t have time to attend events and drink beers several times every week.”

It’s a valid point. Nine out of ten startups fail, so working day and night makes perfect sense.

I went to cover a startup competition for a major European tech blog earlier this year. After tough competition between some of Spain’s best performing startups, one of them were crowned the winner. Me and my college were surprised that we hadn’t heard of the company before, and asked them how they went beneath our radar. The founders told us:

“We usually never go to events. We actually signed up for this competition almost by accident.”

This made me wonder how many other great startups go under the radar, missing out on important exposure because they’re too busy working (too hard?).

Another example is the founder of Tradesy’s, Tracy DiNunzio, who says she thinks too many founders are wasting time going to tech events:

When I was bootstrapping through Tradesy’s first two years, I never attended events. Instead, I stayed focused (obsessed, really) on improving our product and technology. I was glued to the computer for 17 hours a day.

Building a network

It’s clear that networking is important, but it’s probably also true that many entrepreneurs would benefit more from working, than from sipping beer at tech events every other night.

To some people networking is the most natural thing to do, the ones that have the gift of speaking to anyone, anywhere about anything (or nothing). To them it’s like breathing.

For others it’s more about building a network, doing a job, rather than talking to a massive amount of people. And to some people, a small group, it’s torture.

But no matter what group you belong to, as long as your startup is being built, you’re the product. Before you have users, customers, a physical product, or any metrics at all, you and your team are the only thing representing your startup.

Connections are key, and good advice are extremely valuable, especially from people with experience from your own industry. But tech connections are not necessarily found through going to events.

It’s about being present, and especially talking to the right people. It does not have to be at tech events, but any place you can meet people caring about the product your startup is building.

Connecting to people via mail (or social media etc.) can be just as good as going to an event. Mark Suster made a good Snapstorm on how to send email intros, because there are mistakes to be made.

To sum it up:

Growing a solid network of people in your startup ecosystem can never go wrong, not to think about the vital support you can provide to other entrepreneurs building their respective upstarts.

But hard work is still as crucial as it always has been. Just because there is an event every night with great headliners and interesting topics, does not mean you have to attend.

Tech events are often a blast, and networking is good, but not for the sake of networking itself. Going to events will rarely create more value than a well-functioning team can accomplish in the same amount of time.

However building a network and providing value for your ecosystem is guaranteed to benefit both you and your startup. Just don’t do it on the expense of your startup.

…….

This post is written by Sindre Hopland, Media Manager at itnig.