42 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
esports, it’s got so much better. To me, I always feel like I have no choice but to be an optimist about these things because if I wasn’t an optimist, I’d be thinking: “What am I doing with my life?” But it has certainly been challenging. The interesting thing is that esports does have more women now, and at every event I see more women. But as I get more successful and I get into more important meetings, I am always, always the only woman. It’s a short list of female founders in esports. It’s a short list of female founders in tech, and it’s a really short list of the intersection between tech and esports that has female founders. I think my company is also unique in that we’ve been around for so long. We’ve been profitable. It’s not a common situation, so it can feel pretty lonely. When we launched this company, I was somewhat well-known in World of Warcraft because of my WoW Guild. I never hid the fact that I was a woman, but for the first few years, I wasn’t out there. I wasn’t out in the community, I wasn’t talking to people. I wasn’t doing interviews about being a woman. In the years of growing my company, I was head down, working hard. I wanted my product to speak for itself, and I was worried that if people knew a woman was behind, say, DotaBuff, which is a really popular website, then the conversation would be all about what a woman is doing in the industry, rather than the product itself. I’ve spoken to some female founders in esports now, and it feels like they get to be a lot geekier than I could because the times have changed. I’m grateful that they have that ability. But everything you hear
WE SAID, ‘LET’S JUST DO SOMETHING ON THE WEB THISWEEK IN BETA’
certain behaviours were more normal than I would have if I’d had a more ordinary childhood. I really think that the fact that I was abused primed me for dealing with more bullshit in this industry, because I probably would have got out of this business a lot earlier if I’d had more self- respect! Maybe that’s a dark interpretation, but I truly believe that. FEED: How can other people in the industry help to promote diversity in tech? SABINA HEMMI: One thing we did for our Overwatch site Overbuff was have a trans woman doing our social media, and she did things like retweet on Trans Visibility Day. That allowed her to create her own voice, let her be really out there, and present and visible. We saw after we hired her that our Overbuff Twitter, which served the Overwatch community, grew from 9% female to 15% female. I thought that was a really interesting case study. Just having visible women can increase the participation of women in a community like that, and I’m hopeful. For me, I am an entrepreneur, so I’m running a business. I’m really busy, but I do try to look for opportunities to mentor women. I do look for opportunities where I can try to be a role model for other women out there because I don’t want to be the only woman at every board meeting. I want to see the industry change.
is true. It takes thick skin, it takes a lot of tolerance and patience to be a woman in esports because there are challenges that are trickier or different to those that most male founders have to deal with, because in this industry male is the default. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry means that you’re always going to be seen as different first. I feel like this industry is not always friendly. On a personal level, I had a rough childhood where I was abused. I think that meant that I left childhood thinking that
DATA OF THE ANCIENTS Hemmi believes data is more than just facts. To her, data is history and a way to connect to the past
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