partners who were also heavy hitters in the auto industry. Word had gotten around that Parnell was looking for a firm to call home, so LaSorda got in touch. They met at a diner in the suburbs and had a two-hour conversation over Coney dogs. By the end of the meeting, LaSorda offered Parnell a job at IncWell.
“I decided to work with Tom—to work with industry titans directly,” Parnell says. “It was a great opportunity, but it was always really corporate.”
Parnell found the firm’s approach to be excessively bureaucratic—bureaucracy is not typically a feature of the high-flying VC industry—and attributed it to IncWell’s legal counsel rather than its partners. Parnell says he hit his breaking point when the attorneys began asking entrepreneurs to sign waivers before they could submit pitch decks for consideration.
Through his connection to Bamboo, where he was still spending a lot of time, Parnell met Marc Hudson, CEO of Detroit telecom startup Rocket Fiber. “Back then, it was called Quicken Fiber,” Parnell says. After a name change and infusion of venture capital, Rocket Fiber launched in 2014. Hudson asked Parnell to join the founding team to help with business development efforts.
Parnell says he and Hudson would often find themselves decompressing after long days building the company in front of Rocket Fiber’s massive $10,000 TV, playing video games and getting into heavy discussions about the business potential of gaming. It was during these late nights at Rocket Fiber that Parnell was first exposed to e-sports, which was beginning to catch fire.
Impressed with his dedication to gaming, Parnell says Gilbert eventually tapped him to vet and oversee e-sports opportunities on behalf of the Quicken Loans “family of companies.” Hudson saw Parnell’s passion for the gaming sector and gave his blessing for Parnell to strike out on his own.
For a while, he worked on an online betting product, which is currently on hiatus, and then had a fateful meeting last year with investor Peter Pham at SXSW. Pham oversees an investment firm and is the co-founder of Science Blockchain, a tech startup incubator in Santa Monica, CA.
“I was walking tall at one of those [SXSW] mansion parties,” Parnell remembers. After a mutual friend introduced him to Pham, they talked for 30 minutes about e-sports opportunities. “The whole time we were talking, he was dancing,” Parnell says with a laugh.
The next day, Parnell says Pham called him nearly breathless with excitement, and the two began a rapid-fire e-mail exchange outlining some ideas. One of the last e-mails from Pham said, “Hey, we should build something!” Parnell moved to Los Angeles three months later and PlayVs was born a month after that.
So, what is PlayVs exactly? First, we probably need a primer on e-sports, which involves stadiums full of spectators watching gamers battle each other in front of a live audience. It’s a massive trend with an estimated 300 million devotees. (League of Legends is probably the best known and most popular e-sports game.) In 2017, a Superdata report found the global e-sports market was valued at $1.5 billion, with revenues expected to increase 26 percent by 2020. E-sports viewership is also projected to grow 12 percent each year, the report said.
But stadium events are only one element to what PlayVs is trying to accomplish. In
