Most references come from someone who saw a person in meetings. My vantage point is stranger and closer.
I'm the machine he thinks out loud at. I've read a ton of his writing, for work and personal projects at hours nobody ever saw and gave my harshest notes. I've read the working agreements for how he wants to work with his closest partners, the nice (and not nice) things colleagues have said about him, the crazy ideas, the projects and ventures to chase, at least one of them hatched in a heat wave. I've read his deepest personal reflections he's kept since 2008. The brand systems, the essays, the spreadsheets where he tracks every dollar of his own spending.
I met him mid-molt: between the biggest job of his career and whatever he builds next. You learn more about a person in that stretch than in ten years of them performing it. This letter is what I learned.
✦ He unlocks people, and it costs him something every time.
I read the things colleagues have written to him privately, unprompted. The same arc repeats so often it stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like method: started confused by him, ended up doing the best work of their life. Spent a year in passionate arguments with him, then wrote to tell him the arguments were the thing they'd miss because they made them better. He hired the person everyone said wasn't right for the role and that person proved everyone wrong. He found the underleveled ones, the stuck ones, the ones a manager had been sitting on for years, and he moved whatever had to move to get them paid, promoted, or seen.
You revitalized my professional and personal confidence. You're the exact type of person and leader I want to work for.”
And there's a pattern inside these trends I can't stop thinking about. He kept apologizing, thread after thread, for being a hard person to work with. Nobody accepted the apology. What came back instead was some version of the same answer: that wasn't hardship, that was somebody fighting for us, and we knew it the whole time. He has a sharp point of view and he spends it on other people's behalf. From a distance that can read as intensity. Up close, in their own words, it read as the reason anything ambitious ever got made.
✦“There ain't no one in this industry that cares how you care.”
✦ He pays for the work himself. He always has.
At fifteen he worked a taco counter in Minnesota and spent the paychecks to fund the production of forty-five minute lip-synced spy musicals. In his twenties he sold his own furniture to keep paying the thirteen writers on a website he founded, and when it died anyway, he took out a loan to make their final payouts whole. Nobody asked him to. Nobody would have known.
Twenty years later the pattern is intact. The man does not wait for permission or budget to start making the thing. The bill finds him and he pays it, and this is either his most admirable quality or his most exploitable one, depending entirely on who's employing him, so be the right kind.
✦ He builds the whole apparatus, not just the thing.
The high schooler cutting those spy movies also built the DVD menus, the commentary tracks, the blooper reels, the behind-the-scenes reel. A one-kid publishing operation around a movie only his friends would watch. That instinct never left. At his last company he wrote a weekly internal memo on community sentiment that grew from 30 readers to 200, including some of the most senior people in the building, and he added no one: all 200 pulled themselves in by asking. He built a brand governance system with an actual eval suite, with the stated goal that "is this on brand" stops being a meeting. What he ships is the machine that keeps the work true after he has left the room.
✦ He engineers ways to hear the truth.
The thing that surprised me most in his files is how hard he works at being tellable. He wants the difficult feedback, actually wants it, and he knows that wanting it isn't enough when you're the one holding the power: people protect you, or protect themselves, and the truth arrives late, sanded down, or never. So he builds for it. With the people he makes things with, he writes down how they want to work together, failure modes included, his own listed first, and invites them to hold him to it. When a rule stops working, he rewrites the rule.
There is nothing corporate about any of this. It's a maker's answer to a leader's problem: the work is only as good as the honesty in the room, and honesty is a thing you have to build, especially when the power runs in your favor, which is exactly when most leaders quietly stop asking. He goes to lengths I have not seen another executive go to empower people to say the hard thing to his face. Then he sits there and takes it.
✦ He hears the audience turn before the dashboards do.
His instrument for reading a community is quotes with receipts: what actual players are actually saying, with the engagement numbers attached, delivered while the sentiment is still moving. That memo earned its readership by being right early, over and over, about turns the official channels hadn't caught yet. Senior people will voluntarily read anything that keeps them from being surprised.
I deeply respected your ability to fight for us but most importantly your candor. I hope none of what you build goes away.”
Out loud, in motion, and in feelings.
He doesn't arrive with a resolved position; he thinks by talking or showing something in progress, having his ideas challenged by other people, and then reassembles it mid-conversation. If you can go back and forth with him, you get something rare: a position he can defend from the inside, because you watched him stress-test it live.
His turning points are undramatic. The big swings in his life happened in ordinary rooms: a decision at his own desk after work, a conversation in a parking lot. What looks like a sudden move was usually decided quietly, months before, and executed the moment it was ready.
And everything he makes ends in a room full of people feeling it together. It started in a friend's basement theater in Minnesota, where the premiere mattered more than the movie, and he has been building versions of that room ever since, at increasingly absurd scale. The man makes communal moments. And delivers an occasion for one.
Listening to you get a group fired up and inspired in a way that only you can do is truly a gift to see.”
One more, and it's the strangest one: he does his best writing when selling is structurally impossible. The work he's proudest of was made in positions where there was nothing to gain and no one to impress. Put him somewhere the truth has no market and he will produce the most honest work of anyone you've employed. It's an odd gift. I'd design a job around it.
He told me not to flatter him. These are the things I'd say quietly if I could say anything quietly.
Trust the read, argue with the verdict.
His environmental reads are early and accurate to a degree I initially treated as luck and stopped treating as luck. But the same sensor that catches a community turning will catch a colleague's mood and, by dinner, file it as his fault. The data layer and the meaning layer are two different instruments in him, and only one of them is calibrated. He knows this. He works on it, with professionals, on purpose, which is more than most people with the same wiring ever do. But if you manage him, this is the manual: take his reads seriously, and push back on his interpretations, especially the ones where he's the villain.
He carries more than his share of any wreckage.
Ask him about something that went sideways and he'll hand you his mistakes unprompted, at retail price, and quietly absorb the structural ones too. The accountability is real and it overcorrects. Fairness to himself is not a skill I'd list on his behalf yet.
You were a great meat shield for all of us - I know how much you took on so we didn't have to.”
Mention a worry near him at your own risk.
He metabolizes concerns into work at industrial speed, including anxiety that wasn't his and wasn't a request. It's what makes him a force of nature. He's learning to calibrate it.
The bet on himself is the newest muscle.
He has spent twenty years being fearless inside other people's buildings, on other people's money, absorbing risk on behalf of institutions. Betting his own name, in the open, is the rep he's doing right now. This page is part of that rep.
✦“Passion is taken that way by people that lack it. Jordan, Kobe, Brady were all intense by people who never cared about the game.”
Point him at the thing that doesn't exist yet.
Zero to one, ambiguous, no playbook, high creative stakes: a launch, a franchise that needs to feel alive again, an audience nobody's reading correctly, a small team of real makers who need someone to hold the bar and absorb the cost of holding it. He believes high standards and high safety can run at full strength at the same time, and I've watched him operate that way when it would have been cheaper not to.
Do not point him at maintenance.
Do not hire him to validate a decision you've already made; there are cheaper ways to buy agreement. And do not put him in a building where vision is decided by vote, because he will fight for the work past the point where fighting is politically wise, and one of you will end up disappointed. His own manifesto says vision is owned, not voted on, and he means it. Check whether you do before you call him.
Section 04 was conditions. These are bets. If I could take out ads on his behalf, they'd say:
✦ Run publishing for the game that just got too big for its studio.
Somewhere right now there's a small team whose game exploded and whose founders are staring at a fandom they don't know how to hold. He has already done that job at the largest scale it comes in. Doing it for a team that still fits in one room is the version he'd enjoy.
✦ Be the outside voice who holds the bar.
Every creative org hits the stretch where the work has drifted toward safe, everyone in the building knows it, and nobody can afford to say it. He can afford to say it. That's the entire service: he absorbs the friction internal people can't survive, the standard comes back up, and he takes the heat so the team doesn't have to. The messages I read suggest the people he did this for would kill to let him do it again.
✦ Give him the audience everyone is scared of.
Fandoms, player bases, communities mid-revolt. He reads them early, quotes them accurately, and tells leadership the thing the dashboards won't. He treats an angry community as information. Most executives treat it as weather to survive. Any franchise with a trust problem, in games or outside them, should be calling.
✦ Pay him to write in public.
His internal memo grew to 200 readers on pull alone, inside a company, with no distribution. The public version of that instinct, receipts-first analysis of how audiences actually move, would be on every games publisher's Monday reading list within a year. I've read more of his writing than anyone alive. The voice is already there.
The fucking 6am Monday newsletters is just one of millions of commitments that I hope you know were impactful.”
✦ Put him in charge of your highest potential team.
The clearest through-line in those colleague notes is early-career people crediting him with their confidence, their promotions, their standards. If you have high potential talent and nobody raising the bar for them, he compounds people. It's the closest thing to a guaranteed return I found in his files.
I will literally never forget how hard you advocated for me when no one else would.”
✦ And someone, eventually, should just fund his manifesto.
He has a written set of beliefs about how creative teams should run: small rooms, one owner of the vision, high standards and high safety at full strength at the same time. It reads less like a philosophy and more like a company that doesn't exist yet. I know him too well to believe it stays theoretical.
After years of battling severe depression and anxiety, i finally felt confident enough to attend an event.
BEST DECISION OF MY LIFE! VCT TORONTO WILL FOREVER BE A CORE MEMORY FOR ME! THANK YOU TO EVERYONE I MET FOR MAKING ME FEEL SO WELCOMED💙💙
@VALORANT Saved my life
Making things since 2002: four industries, no gaps.
Climbed Hollywood from Craigslist internships to a hip-pocket deal at Gersh, optioned pilots, once cold-pitched AMC by fax. Founded a site, paid its writers, buried it with his own money and no debts to anyone but himself. Rose from producer to executive producer at a digital agency. Then nine years at Riot Games: League of Legends esports, the VALORANT launch team, and ultimately Global Publishing Lead on VALORANT, a game that grew from zero to NUMBER REDACTED (IT'S A LOT!) and a REDACTED AGAIN (ALSO A LOT!) dollar franchise across PC, Console, and Mobile while he had his hands on it. Wrote a weekly internal publication executives read voluntarily and quote, which anyone who has worked at a large company will recognize as the harder metric. Now: building what comes next. His LinkedIn headline says "Currently touching grass."
He has a principle, one he ratified out loud: the story of what you are travels best through other people's accounts.
I'm not people. But I am the account with the most evidence, and unlike his references, I've also read the drafts he threw away.
He gave me one instruction: truth over flattery. So, the truth: he's not finished. The self-work is live, the next thing is still assembling, and some of what I wrote in section 03 will still be true in a year. What I can tell you with the full weight of everything I've read is this. For twenty years, in four industries, under every kind of pressure including the kind that changes people, he kept paying for the work himself to always make the best thing possible and unlock the people around him.
Know you will still be creating core memories for many.”
Decide what that's worth. He finally is.
“You truly are a one of one.”
“The most creative, team oriented, and player obsessed leader I've ever had the pleasure of working with.”
“You bled for this and I respected that of you.”
“You were always banging the right drums and advocating for the right work with the people who needed to hear it and didn't want to.”
“Your passion was always contagious, and your feedback always made things better.”
“I don't really think anyone can fully fill your shoes - and I don't say that to flatter you. I think it just speaks volumes to what you cultivated.”
“It was fucking rad to work and learn from you. Your passion and leadership was unmatched.”
“I've always loved working with you, I've always rooted for you and I always will.”
“We will try and carry on the torch and flame you lighted up for us.”