Where this org came from
Quick note upfront: you won’t see my real name attached to this org, and that’s just a personal call about keeping me and my family private online, nothing deeper than that. I’m in my mid-30s, an engineer by day, and this is a passion project I’m running on the side. I’ll still be around on our Discord and on Twitter, just posting under the org account rather than my own name.
I grew up playing Counter-Strike and Call of Duty, and most of what I learned about esports came from staying up at 3am in high school watching CS finals, where somewhere along the way I noticed I was always more interested in building one of these orgs than in being on stage myself. Overwatch I actually came to pretty late, only downloaded it back in April of this year because a few friends in a separate Discord kept talking about it, but I climbed to Diamond on DPS faster than expected and somewhere in that climb I quietly realized this was the next thing for me.
The actual founding started by accident. I got into a long conversation with Kenobi in the r/overwatch Discord, and he told me pretty bluntly that operating in OWCS Pacific is much cheaper than running an org in any of the other regions, and that the smart move is to build something here first and only look at the bigger regions later, once you’ve actually got something worth moving. That’s what cracked the whole thing open for me, since I’d been assuming a tier-one org slot was either inherited or backed by money I didn’t have.
From there it turned into a few weeks of cold-messaging random players off the top 500 leaderboard and asking if their team actually had ownership behind it and whether anything was on the table, which mostly produced a long list of dead ends and a handful of polite “no thanks” replies, until eventually a representative from Rankers got back to me, we talked back and forth over a couple of weeks, and on May 5th I officially acquired the roster, which is how the same lineup that finished out Stage 1 ends up carrying forward into Stage 2 under a brand new org.
That’s basically the whole story, there are no investors, no PR firm, no parent company sitting behind any of this, just one person who grew up watching CS finals at strange hours of the night, downloaded Overwatch about six weeks ago, and somehow ended up deciding that owning a team was a reasonable thing to take on this year.
If we end up somewhere in the ballpark of what NaVi looked like at their CS:GO peak, that would obviously be incredible and probably take a decade, and if we end up looking more like NaVi at the very beginning, scrappy and small and figuring it out as we go, that’s honestly fine too, because everyone starts somewhere and I’d rather start small and earn the rest than skip any of the parts that actually matter.
GLHF.
The Najdorf Esports team