INSIGHT
INTERVIEW: ALI MOIZ,
CEO, VULCUN
Headed by former League of Legends team owner Ali Moiz, San Francisco start-up Vulcun is on a
mission to apply the DFS model so successfully used by DraftKings and FanDuel to the eSports space.
Moiz explains the concept and business plan that attracted more than $13m of VC backing to iGB
Affiliate, why he believes eSports is now a real sport, and how you go about acquiring players beyond
traditional digital channels.
What was your background prior
to starting up Vulcun, and how did
the business come about?
I’ve been an entrepreneur for 16 years now,
starting in high school. I built and sold a
couple of VC-funded companies before
this. My last company was Peanut Labs,
that was also based out of San Francisco
in the video gaming business, so we
worked with a lot of game publishers and
platforms, everyone from Electronic Arts
to Ubisoft to Facebook, to Zynga, and
most of the social gaming industry. That
company was acquired, I stayed on for a
while, they are still doing really well. I’ve
been a gamer all my life, starting with the
Commodore 64 back in the days where you
had to take an audio tape and put it into
a computer to load up a programme. I got
hooked on the eSports, six, seven, eight
years ago, and when Twitch and Starcraft II
started to get big a few years ago, the two
came together and created the first large
audience for eSports in the west. Around
the same time, I put together a League of
Legends eSports team, also called Vulcun,
so that’s where the name comes from. I was
the owner, we had five players, a coach, a
manager, we were the No 2 team in North
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America in 2013, so a really good team
which had a great season.
At the end of the season, I sold the
team to one of our sponsors. I was
always looking for interesting ways to get
involved in eSports, because I’m really
passionate about it and very bullish on
eSports long term, because I think this is
a real sport, and every year there are more
and more things happening that turn
this into a more of a sport. Viewership
has been doubling every year, there’s
teams, professional leagues, pro players,
sponsorships, central contracts, collective
bargaining rights, and the broadcasting
is becoming more mature and improving
every year, except the broadcasting is not
on TV, it’s just all online. So right now, it
resembles a sport.
While FanDuel and DraftKings
are attracting huge levels of
investment, combining eSports
with fantasy is a new concept.
What makes you believe this will
succeed as a business model?
The question is not really whether the
DraftKings and FanDuel model works,
because it does, those companies have
clearly been doing well. The questions
people have are, is this a real sport, is this
market big enough to be interesting, is it
reliable, is it consistent, does it look and
behave like a real sport? To most people
“Viewership has been doubling every year,
there’s teams, pro leagues, pro players,
sponsorships, central contracts, collective
bargaining rights, and the broadcasting is
becoming more mature, except it’s online,
instead of on TV. So right now, it resembles
a sport.”