Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson (Part 1)

This interview is a fascinating look into the world of Gaming. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Matthew Benson: I’m born and raised in Ohio. I grew up an hour south of Columbus in a small town called Chillicothe. There wasn’t much going on down there.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your schooling?

Matthew Benson: I went to school at Ohio University and studied Entrepreneurship and Finance there. After graduation, I moved to Columbus and worked at a venture capital firm.

Sramana Mitra: Which venture capital firm was this?

Matthew Benson: Ohio Innovation Fund.

Sramana Mitra: After the venture capital firm, what happens?

Matthew Benson: Our startup is based in gaming and eSports. I played games all the time growing up. I was a casual player playing with my brothers on the weekends. I had a brother who lived far away. We used to talk on the headset at night. Gaming was something that I did casually and for fun. It was a huge part of my life.

When I went to Ohio University, I had a really cool opportunity to take an entire semester and do research on eSports and gaming. This was a class that was assigned to me. I fell in love and had my mind blown as it relates to the business of eSports. I developed a 180-page report and came up with the idea to create eFuse which is a platform to help aspiring gamers connect with different types of opportunities like tournaments, scholarships, and team openings.

I graduated and moved to Columbus. I worked at the Ohio Innovation Fund for about a year and a half and got to work directly with Bill. I got to see and meet a lot of portfolio companies. It was really cool because I got into Billy’s mindset and thinking and got to be hands-on with a lot of the entrepreneurs and understand their relationship with the VC. After about a year and a half of doing that, I got the confidence and took the leap of faith. I founded eFuse in August of 2018.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down and talk about how eFuse operates and how you got it off the ground.

Matthew Benson: When we first started, our mantra was to be the LinkedIn of eSports and gaming. We wanted to be the place that the gamers went to to connect with all kinds of opportunities. Those could be scholarships to play varsity sports at Ohio State. It could be a tournament on the weekend. It could be a job in the industry.

When we first started, we wanted to aggregate all of the opportunities that already existed into one place and provide a recruiting service for gamers to be discovered. We raised an initial round of funding to pursue this concept. We raised $1.4 million on a convertible note. Ohio Innovation Fund is one of the participants in that. We had a number of other traditional sports athletes as well. They were also gamers. They could see the similarities to what they had experienced on the traditional sports side.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson
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