We started Metafy with the belief that a future with gaming careers is more exciting than one without them. Today, Metafy is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with a long-term goal of enabling a million gamers to make a living doing what they love.
The future of work is remote, flexible, global, and digital-first. We believe that in this future a new breed of entrepreneurs will sell knowledge over products. There’s value in expertise, empires have been built on it. Metafy intends to do for gamers what the tech industry did for developers.
Scratching my own itch.
I hate losing. Sure, everyone does — but I hate losing. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. Surely it can’t be normal to want to win so badly in everything I do. When I’m beaten, I obsess over how it happened and how I can prevent it next time. For this reason, games have always resonated with me. I’ve competed at the world level in multiple games, before settling into a career in tech.
I have 4 kids — which is something akin to a circus. My two older boys, Isaiah (10) and Elijah (9), share my passion for competition. These days, I spend much of my time helping them improve rather than playing games of my own.
Pokemon TCG was their game of choice, and I wanted to do everything in my power to help them pursue their passion — great incentive for finishing that homework. I could teach them the fundamentals of card games, but I needed an expert to teach them meta-specific strategies they needed to be aware of to win.
So I found someone. Not just any someone, but one of the best players in the world. Sounds expensive, right? It cost us about $20/hr. In their first year playing competitively, prior to COVID-19, both boys ended up ranking in the top 100 in the world.
In working with the kid’s coaches, I realized how much better the experience could have been for my kids, myself as a parent, and their coaches. When we needed Metafy, it wasn’t there. So we built it. We’re working closely with top players across all games to rethink competitive learning from the ground up. Metafy is answering years of frustrations about how hard it is for average players to become great, and for great players to profit on the knowledge they’ve acquired over hundreds of hours of hard work.
What it takes to win.
Psychologist Benjamin Bloom conducted a series of studies at the University of Chicago in the early 1980s that hoped to answer the following question:
What does one find in the childhood of people who become experts that explains why they, among all people, develop such extraordinary abilities?
He studied 120 experts across six fields — concert pianists, Olympic swimmers, tennis champions, research mathematicians, research neurologists, and sculptors — and looked for common factors in their development. Bloom identified three crucial stages of development that were common to expert performers in every area. He later confirmed that these three stages are common to the development of expertise in all fields.
- In the first stage, children are playfully introduced to what will eventually become their field of interest. Tiger Woods was given a little golf club to hold when he was just nine months old. For Susan Polgar it was finding the chess pieces and liking their shapes.
- If they begin to show promise in an area, the typical next step is in taking lessons from a coach or teacher. This stage is a critical turning point in their development, where the most noticeable progress is seen. Their practice up to this point has been mainly playful activities, but it now becomes work. Their instructors at this stage may not be experts but are good at working with children. They know how to motivate their students and keep them moving forward as they adapt to the work of improving through deliberate practice.
- The third stage is commitment. Generally, when future experts are in their early or mid-teens, they make a significant commitment to becoming the best they can be. They’ll often seek out the best teachers or school for their training, even if it requires moving across the country. These teachers have frequently reached the highest levels in their fields.
The cost of success.
In traditional sports working through steps two and three can be prohibitively expensive. Money magazine, in 2014, estimated the cost to train a child who was an elite tennis player.
- Private lessons cost $4500 to $5000 plus an additional $7000 to $8000 for group lessons.
- Court time goes for another $50 to $100 an hour.
- The entrance fee for a national tournament is about $150 plus transportation, with the best players competing twenty or so times a year. Bring your coach along for advice during and between games, and you’re looking at ~$300 a day plus transportation, lodging, and meals.
- Many serious students go to tennis academies where they train year-round, dramatically increasing costs. IMG Academy in Florida costs $71,400 a year for tuition, room, and board.
Very few families can afford to have their child pursue this level of performance. And all that, only to face the reality that the majority of pro tennis players, even those ranked between twenty-fifth and hundredth in the world, barely make enough to cover expenses and a decent living.
In esports it’s possible to work through steps two and three without mortgaging your home. There’s no cost for court time or equipment. The phone in your pocket is often enough to begin competing. There’s no limit to the tournaments one can enter. Popular games host online tournaments with prize money on a weekly basis. Most importantly, coaching is affordable and available to anyone with an internet connection. Gaming is the great equalizer, it’s not about how much money you have, your gender, or the physical attributes you were born with.
Wildly successful careers in esports already exist, but a clear path to getting there doesn’t exist yet, not in the way it does for traditional sports. The average salary for a player in the League of Legends Championship Series is a whopping $410,000. Many of the teams paying these salaries also pay for player housing, food, personal trainers, utilities, equipment, etc. That $410k is clear of cost-of-living expenses.
Metafy is obsessively focusing on how to best help a great player become a great teacher. Both the coach and the student win.
It’s more than the hours.
There’s a fundamental truth when it comes to practice: if you never push yourself outside of your comfort zone, you will never improve. A fantastic example of this can be found in Ericsson and Pool’s great book “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise”.
Benjamin Franklin played chess for more than fifty years, and was one of the first chess players in America. When he was in Europe, he often played with François-André Danican Philidor, the greatest chess player of the time. He’d sometimes play from 6 pm until the following morning — not unlike some gamers I know.
With his incredibly high IQ and thousands of hours spent playing chess, sometimes against the best players of the time, he must have been incredible, right? Wrong. He was above average, but he never grew enough to compare with Europe’s better players, much less the best. His inability to improve served as a source of endless frustration for him; he didn’t know why he couldn’t get any better.
Today, we understand why.
Franklin never went beyond his comfort zone. He put in the hours, but not in the correct way. His strategy led to stagnation, not improvement. Deliberate practice must take place outside of one’s comfort zone, demanding that students try things beyond their current abilities. Deliberate practice develops skills that others have already figured out and for which effective training techniques have been established.
Feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback — that’s essential for improvement. Early in the training process, most of that feedback will come from a coach, who will keep a tab on progress and shine a light on problems and how to address them.
Ten thousand hours is a platitude thrown about often, but it’s not just about the hours. It’s about how those hours have been utilized. For significant progress, one needs a coach who assigns practice techniques designed to help improve specific skills.
There’s a better way. We’re building it.
The business of game coaching is already a $1B market, and it’s just getting started. 62% of young people say gaming is their favorite hobby. While 68% would choose a career in gaming over becoming a lawyer, and 58% over being a doctor or nurse. 56% would rather work in the games industry than be a professional athlete. Source
We’re thrilled to have been accepted into Product Club, an early stage product mentorship program with a maniacal focus on product & design. Every week, we’ll have a private 1:1 session with top product leaders from Uber, Twitter, Slack, Adobe, Robinhood, and Tinder. I have a deep respect for the people making Product Club happen, they’re another competitive edge in a game I have every intention of winning.
I’m excited about Metafy, more excited than I’ve felt about anything in a long time. We’re creating something that helps people make a living doing what motivates and inspires them. More importantly, we’re building something my kids want to use, few things in life are more rewarding than being a source of pride for your children.
We’re not trying to make another marketplace; we’re trying to enable the future of work as we see it.
