39 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
Sabina Hemmi is co-founder and CEO of Elo Entertainment, the company behind gaming data sites Dotabuff, Overbuff, Fortbuff, Artibuff and Trackdota. She talks to FEED about being a tech WHEN I SEE DATA I JUST SEE OPPORTUNITY
entrepreneur, the beauty of data and negotiating sexism in the games industry
FEED: How did you start your company, Elo Entertainment? SABINA HEMMI: I’ve always played video games and been involved in esports, as a participant and player; ever since 2000, when I attended my first esports event and caught the online gaming bug. For five years I led a top World of Warcraft (WoW) guild, Blood Legion. I studies computer science at the University of Texas, Dallas, but I dropped out and I was working in tech and finance for a while. Then I had a weird life situation and I quit my job and moved. I was young enough that I didn’t have an established career to worry about. I needed a job and I had all of this expertise in esports, so eight years ago I ended up starting a company with two other people, Jason Coene and Trevor Schmidt. The idea behind Elo Entertainment was really simple. We noticed League of Legends was just coming out at that time and we knew it was going to be a huge game. It was going to be an esport. FEED: What was it that tipped you off to how big LoL was going to be? SABINA HEMMI: In alpha and beta, people played and liked it. Riot at that time was an unknown publisher and was
running it like a tech company, which was hot for that time. We noticed that when players started playing it, they seemed to really enjoy it. The growth wasn’t as instantaneous as, say, Fortnite, but League was intentionally trying to appeal to core gamers, which I think is, to some extent, necessary for creating an authentic esport. We knew the data existed and nobody was doing anything with that data. We said, “Let’s just do something on the web this week in beta.” We also knew from our World of Warcraft guild that really good players have data tools. In World of Warcraft, we would write our own simulations, we would write our own odds, and for that time period that was not very common. Really motivated, competitive gamers do that. We thought, could we take some of the tools that we would make for ourselves and apply it to League of Legends, and then take that data and democratise it? You’re looking to ideally make players feel empowered. You want to show that certain gaming strategies are more successful or less successful than others. Also at that time, you couldn’t get that kind of good game data anywhere. So there was a little bit of – I don’t know how to describe it – almost a journalism aspect about it. We were exposing this new data. Really good players would have instincts:
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