Josh Fabian has a hole on his shoulder. About thirty years ago, and counting.
A 32-year-old Black man, Fabian was adopted and raised from a young age by a white couple who fostered a series of troubled children, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. Everywhere he went, he felt alienated because of his skin color – and there was always something to prove.
“I remember just feeling invisible, just feeling like I didn’t fit in anywhere,” Fabian told CNBC Make It. “[I] wanted to be important … To be known as a great person somewhere, in some way.”
Downsizing can be a powerful motivator, says Fabian. Today, he’s the founder and CEO of Pittsburgh-based Metafy, a 2-year-old online platform where amateur video gamers pay for training alongside some of the world’s greatest games. the world.
Since its launch at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Metafy has attracted more than 50,000 users and thousands of coaches, including top players in popular sports such as the “League of Legends” and “Super Smash Bros.” The company received nearly $34 million from investors, and was valued at $105 million in February.
Metafy’s journey so far may seem like a typical startup story. But Fabian’s journey, which includes living off food stamps as a teenager and becoming a nationally known “Yu-Gi-Oh!” players, definitely not.
A ‘life-changing’ amount of money
At the age of 16, Fabian freed himself from his adoptive parents. He dropped out of high school and became a father for the first time in his 20s. Read also : “Oregon health officials postponed a meeting because ‘urgency is a white supremacist value'”. For a time, he and his girlfriend at the time lived on food stamps, sometimes trying to steal diapers and other supplies for their baby, he said.
Fabian is a self-taught coder. His main source of income at the time was designing small websites for around $100 a job. Deciding that he needed to commit to a career to provide for his family, Fabian improved his skills on a three-month coding course in Chicago, which led to a coding job on a joint website. food and social media marketing started Obaz in 2012.
In addition to a six-figure salary, Fabian said he also received equity within the company. When Groupon acquired Obaz two years later — for about $250,000, according to a 2015 SEC filing — he was more financially sound than he had been before.
“That was life-changing,” Fabian said.
After almost three years at Groupon, Fabian stepped away from the tech world to focus on another passion: gaming. As a teenager, Fabian achieved a national ranking in the top national “Yu-Gi-Oh!” players. By 2016, he spent eight hours a day playing online games like “Clash Royale” and “Hearthstone,” while watching his name climb the ranks.
Fabian often broadcasts his games on Twitch and uploads videos to YouTube. Later, people asked for individual lessons. “I did it for $100 an hour,” Fabian said.
In six months of teaching, Fabian said he earned $40,000. It’s a good haul, but not enough to convince him to give up his humble job as a website owner.
That is, until the tap on his shoulder started telling him that he had something to prove again – and business seemed like the best way to do it. .
Realizing he ‘wasn’t alone’
In 2016, Fabian tried to launch Kitsu, an advertising website for fans of anime and manga comics to connect with each other and find new titles. On the same subject : Are you traveling to Germany? Here’s what Americans need to know.. Struggling, no money, and Fabian returned to the idea of teaching video games.
Until then, his own children – now four of them – are playing bravely in the game “Pokémon” trading cards on the Internet. Fabian reached out to a few top players to see if they would be willing to coach his children. Someone offered her services for only $20 an hour, which Fabian said was less than babysitters pay.
Eventually, Fabian realized that the teacher’s main source of income was a low-paying warehouse job.
“I just realized how amazing it is,” he said. “[I realized] I’m not alone, and there must be hundreds of thousands of people who are experiencing this feeling of true excellence – very few people have achieved true excellence in anything – and not being able to make a living doing it.”
Gamers have already advertised themselves as tutors on forums like GamerSensei and Fiverr, but Fabian says none of them have been introduced to professionals. higher or allow teachers to keep 100% of their fixed fees. He and Tom McNiven, a software engineer he had hired to help build Kitsu, began defining specifications for a new platform and writing code in their spare time.
When the virus hit, the two took the idea to Product Club, a startup startup in San Francisco run by former Tinder vice president Jeff Morris Jr. which offered $100,000 in seed funding. Metafy entered. The money helped, but Fabian says the real value was gaining access to a network of willing business owners.
It’s important: Less than 1% of venture capital goes to Black people each year, and Fabian says even successful VC awards can be disruptive. “For business people to say these things about their concern about diversity, when I never asked about it … It’s very frustrating,” he said.
Lofty goals ahead
Today, Metafy is well-financed with a reliable income: The company earns money from the 5% fee paid to each student. This may interest you : The travel season reaches its peak, how people get to their destination.
Fabian says he wants to introduce his platform “MasterClass-style content for gaming” with things where teachers and students can meet – or compete – in real life. He loftily promised that Metafy could become a billion-dollar startup “within the next few years,” and permanently change the e-sports landscape, like when Twitch launched on the internet.
Metafy investors say they believe he can pull it off — though, of course, they’re biased. Forerunner Ventures managing partner Brian O’Malley, who considers Fabian “probably my best coach,” said he invested because Fabian “understands the player, not only what they want, but what would they like if they were free.”
It’s a “one in a million” trait found in a foundation, O’Malley said.
Perhaps this is why Fabian compares his vision to disruptive technologies such as YouTube and Uber, although he is running a small company that he admits is “not close” to revenue.
“I look at all those CEOs and I look at them as hypocrites. It’s crazy,” he said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I do it.”
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