ReadyUp CEO Roderick Alemania on His Return to Esports

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When ReadyUp CEO and co-founder Roderick Alemania graduated from UCLA in 1992 with an economics degree, he suddenly had a change of heart about his potential career path ahead. “I just realized I didn’t want to be an accountant,” he told The Esports Observer. So he applied for a job at Club Med and went to work in the Bahamas instead.

That short-lived adventure only lasted three months, but it signaled a career philosophy that has seen Alemania prioritize opportunities that were personally exciting to him. And beginning with his next job after Club Med, Alemania also started stringing together an impressive knack for being at the forefront of new technologies and innovations, from internet advertising to early esports and streaming video.

“We literally wrote and launched Microsoft’s first internet marketing campaign ever, in this job at this small agency.”

Early Internet Adventures

Finding an interest in advertising instead, Alemania joined the small firm Anderson & Lembke in 1994 as a media planner. It wasn’t the job that he’d studied for, but again, that no longer seemed like the kind of gig he wanted.

“At the time, it just felt like something really cool to do. I liked the whole concept of advertising. It just seemed like it would be a really fun thing to pursue as a career,” he said. “My philosophy going into it was, ‘If you can’t have fun in your job, then why are you doing it?’ I’m always about pursuing your passion and not focusing on the money. If you pursue a passion, you’ll do a good job and the money will follow.”

The firm’s media director, David Yoder, was famed for his work on Apple’s seminal “1984” ad. And shortly after Alemania joined, the company landed Microsoft’s B2B account. Advertising at that point was still focused on print, television, and outdoors, but Alemania was excited about the burgeoning wave of digital media. When Microsoft decided that it should have an online advertising presence for Windows 95, he was an ideal person to help make that happen.

“Microsoft was launching Windows 95, and eight weeks before launch, they decided, ‘We should probably do something on the internet,’” he said. “And the agency at the time, no one gave a shit about the internet, because it was this new thing—except for me, I was this young guy enamored with it. We literally wrote and launched Microsoft’s first internet marketing campaign ever, in this job at this small agency.”

Pictured: Alemania speaking at HIVE New York in 2018. Credit: The Esports Observer/Esports Business Solutions UG

Through that campaign, he came in contact with Infoseek, one of the pioneers of online keyword advertising. Alemania was the first person hired in the startup’s sales department as an account manager, and later shifted into the role of a business development manager. Infoseek was acquired by Disney during his days in the latter role, and he said that the experience of working on that biz dev team alongside several MBA-toting colleagues helped shape him as a professional.

“What I lacked in an MBA, I had in experience over all of these other MBAs,” he said. “I almost feel like that move was the equivalent of me getting an MBA, because working with these incredibly smart people—they’re all from Harvard or Stanford, these top-tier MBAs that were working on the business development team… and me. As part of my professional development, it was a huge, huge step for me.”

“We created this league called the Championship Gaming Series, which News Corp ended up funding with $45M USD.”

An Early Esports Pioneer

After spending a couple of years after that consulting, Alemania took a job with IGN in 2001 as a senior director of sales. He had been a fan of gaming as a kid, and saw a chance to marry his professional skills with something that he was personally interested in. “This was an opportunity for me to take what was something I enjoyed doing, which was playing games, and make a career out of it,” he said.

IGN was still recoiling from the dot-com bust and had shed a large part of its workforce when Alemania came onboard. At the time, game publishers were still spending much of their marketing budgets on print advertising, but Alemania worked with clients such as Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts and helped them understand the value of web. That helped yield multi-million dollar accounts along the way. “Essentially, we helped them create the playbook on digital marketing for video game companies,” he said.

Alemania shifted to VP of business development at IGN, and the call came from parent company News Corp that it wanted to push into competitive gaming. This was 2006, and it led to the creation of the Championship Gaming Series (CGS).

“News Corp reached out to us and said, ‘Hey, we want to start covering video games the same way we cover NFL games on Sunday, and create this league,’” he said. “Obviously, we knew the games space, we had an audience, and they knew television. And we created this league called the Championship Gaming Series, which News Corp ended up funding with $45M USD.”

Pictured: Counter-Strike Source. Credit: Valve Corporation

It was uncharted territory, putting on a TV-quality competitive experience for games like Counter-Strike: Source, Dead or Alive, and FIFA. The production came with some hitches, Alemania said, including Valve granting them a license about 24 hours before they were set to film—and for Counter-Strike: Source rather than the fan-favorite Counter-Strike 1.6. Ultimately, however, he said that it was too early for an esports effort like that to survive.

“We were trying to create a league using television economics,” he said. “Back then, YouTube wasn’t around and there was no Twitch . Ultimately, the audience wasn’t there yet to support an esports league. Esports wasn’t as big as it is today, in terms of people’s interest. It was still kind of a niche thing.”

“I was on the forefront of distributing content through the internet. “

And even though the Championship Gaming Series didn’t end up being a long-lasting venture, the experience of helping to pioneer professional esports made an impression on Alemania.

“One thing that really resonated with me was the passion of the gamers,” he said. “They were the true pioneers back then, making no money. They were so passionate and disciplined about playing video games as a real job, and I realized that there’s something here.”

Coming Back to Esports

In 2007, Alemania followed IGN’s CEO to a new gig as the VP of content acquisition for VUDU, which at the time offered a set-top box for streaming movies and TV shows (it does the same today without the bespoke box). He worked on digital distribution deals with all of the major movie studios, continuing the aforementioned career trend of being ahead of the curve on businesses that would eventually grow into robust industries.

“One of the recurring themes that you’ll see across my career is I’m all about being a pioneer,” he said. “I was on the forefront of distributing content through the internet. When I look back on my career, having a breadth of knowledge across multiple businesses and revenue streams allows you to think out of the box when I’m thinking about how we monetize what we’re doing on ReadyUp, and what business models work as it relates to ReadyUp.”

Pictured: ReadyUp co-founder Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel playing PUBG. Credit: ReadyUp

Laid off from VUDU as the recession took hold in late 2008, Alemania did some early influencer marketing at blogging platform Six Apart. From there, he went into mobile marketing at Tapjoy. Near the end of 2012, he was ready to take a break from a hustle and bustle of startups and spend more time with his kids while consulting. “Doing startups is really fucking hard,” he said. “I just needed some time off.”

By the time 2016 was coming to close, Alemania had the itch to build something new. He’d sent a holiday card to retired pro gamer Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, who Alemania worked with during the CGS days—and when Wendel texted back to say thanks, Alemania called him. That led to a conversation that got the two talking about Alemania’s possible next steps, as well as areas in esports in which critical needs weren’t being met.

“My observation back in 2017, from 2006 and creating the CGS, was that esports has grown as an industry but it hadn’t necessarily matured.”

“That text message was literally the birth of ReadyUp,” said Alemania. “When I took time off from my consulting days, I was coaching my son’s teams. Part of being a coach/manager is managing the teams. It’s a total pain in the ass. It’s like: Who’s on the team? When’s practice? All those sorts of things. And when Johnathan and I were talking, I started realizing, ‘Esports has the same problem that sports has, but nobody’s investing in esports.’

“My observation back in 2017, from 2006 and creating the CGS, was that esports has grown as an industry but it hadn’t necessarily matured,” he added. “It didn’t have a lot of the structure that it needs in place.”

The pair co-founded ReadyUp in early 2017 as a team management platform, and have been building it since with Alemania as CEO and Wendel as chief gaming officer. Many of the company’s other employees, investors, and advisors are also people that Alemania worked with at some point in his multifaceted career, and he’s now applying not only his knowledge but also his nurtured business relationships to sustaining a company in esports.