Good questions. Let me address, as I’ve personally vetted Robb’s background and spent considerable time talking to his references (which includes CEOs at the major firms he’s worked with, a great sign). We’ve also talked publicly about our goal of hitting China-language Asia expansion in Q4 of this year, and I believe we’re very lucky to have someone like Robb identified at this point to drive these ambitious efforts.
The experience of some Rally founders has been building out a 300 person Beijing and 50 person South Korea operation at Kabam, plus founding Gen.G Esports in Seoul and Shanghai Tigers for NBA2K. So I hope we have the credibility to earn the trust of the community to evaluate the right talent to lead up our efforts in Asia.
In terms of accountability, let’s start with getting aligned on overall framework. When a business has well defined motions, teams, and historical data, it’s relatively easy to define KPIs and accountability. Hiring the next Asia leader for AEG is an understood job and the leader can be held accountable for growing revenues by X% or growing market share by Y% or whatever. For Rally, we’re undertaking a 0 to 1 initiative in Asia. Where would we even start on accountability, as we don’t have a plan yet?
At this stage, it’s all about finding the right leadership, and asking the leadership to put together the plan for the community and then reporting against the proposed plan.
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Let’s take a look at some previous proposals and historical context of standing up a brand new initiatives for the Rally community:
PR - When we first proposed PR at $20K/month, our Discord exploded with criticism about costs and accountability. And justifiably so, since we had never done PR before. Later, we’ve formally updated the community with KPIs, and continue to provide updates in community calls and in the #PR channel in Discord
Bremner - we proposed a similar senior level hire just over 2 months ago. After being on the job for roughly a month, he put together a broad proposal to unleash a world class marketing program encompassing everything from branding, major creator initiatives, events, and education. We’re only a month in, but already have creators such as Jauz and !llmind joining Rally, and household names that I know his team is working on that we should be able to talk about soon as we get these deals across the finish line.
Similarly, I’m comfortable saying that Robb is the level of talent that will enable us to make a substantive push into Asia. I’ll be working with him to put together a more comprehensive plan we can present to the community to create the accountability we all want. But at this stage, it’s about bringing on the leadership talent to create the plan that the community can react to and create accountability.
And finally, until we have had someone focused on reporting against previously stated goals, it’s hard to create a real accountability motion. We haven’t done the best job introducing her, but @mobina joined recently as a serious talent in her own right. We’ll be working to create the type of accountability motion that we all clearly want.
Kevin