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In this episode of ‪What Worked, Mike interviews Jason Ton, CFO & Chief Business Officer of 100 Thieves. Jason tells his story about going from engineering to investment banking and finally to the esports c-suite.

Jason shares his insights about:

• Breaking into the video game industry
• The evolution (and specialization) of finance teams
• How to properly onboard a new hire

We'd love for you to connect with us:

• Mike Wu
• Tyler Rachal
• Jason Ton

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Transcript edited for clarity:

Mike Wu

Welcome back to another episode of What Worked. In this episode, I sit down with Jason Ton, the CFO and Chief Business Officer of 100 Thieves, a company that has been growing rapidly in the e-sports industry. We talk about AI for finance organizations, what finance teams look like from pre-seed to post-series C, and Jason's journey over the past seven years at 100 Thieves. Definitely a great conversation. Please check it out. Thank you.

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Today with us is Jason Tan, the CFO and Chief Business Officer of 100 Thieves. Jason, thanks for being here.

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Jason Ton

Thanks for having me.

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Mike Wu

Can I ask you to just give a brief introduction of who you are and share a little bit about 100 Thieves?

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Jason Ton

Yeah. So let's take a way back. I started my career as a software engineer at Northrop Grumman, which is an aerospace and defense company. I spent a good three years there and it was pretty slow paced. And I was wondering, looking around, am I going to be here in 30 years? And I was like, yeah, I don't think so. So I was like, man, I gotta go somewhere else that's a little more fast paced. I joined PWC in their advisory group to do consulting. That's where I was exposed to tech and finances working on carve outs for transaction services. And that's where I got a little bug and went to finance and I want to understand, what it was to take a company public or what it was to do an M&A transaction. 

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So I went to business school with a sole focus on getting into investment banking. I wanted to stay on the West Coast, I am a West Coast guy, so landed at the Merrill Lynch office in Los Angeles, which is now B of A of course, and spent three years there as an associate. I learned a lot and knew I wasn't going to be a lifelong banker. So, I did the next sort of logical thing. I went to CorpDev, which is basically in-house investment banking at Sony Pictures Television. And there I was working on OTT services, they had a thing called called Crackle that could expand internationally, working on acquiring film libraries, and also at the time I covered their mobile gaming studios, so working on mobile game acquisitions. 

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From there, one of my old friends in banking went to this company called Riot Games, and he was like, hey, they're building up the finance team. And I was like, okay, I've always been a all-time lifelong gamer, never thought I would be able to work at a video company. So I jumped the opportunity to lead finance for one of the divisions. I was sort of a divisional CFO for their North America publishing, global e-sports, and apparel division. And that's where I really learned what it was to manage finance at a company and in-house and really growing my financial skill set there. Spent four years there, Riot experienced phenomenal growth during the time I was there. Midway through, they 100% acquired by Tencent. And after four years, I was like, hey, I want to become a CFO. I want to take that leap. And I left to go join 100 Thieves. 

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The best analogy I can give there is going from Riot Games to 100 Thieves is the same as going from the NBA league office to Lakers. And the reason I say that is because 100 Thieves was an e-sports company at the time, and they just acquired a franchise in League of Legends in Riot's North America League of Legends Championship Series. So that's where the analogy come from. 

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Mike Wu

That's a cool analogy.

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Jason Ton

And 100 Thieves is today an entertainment lifestyle company rooted in gaming culture. And the things that 100 Thieves offers is that we have e-sports. So basically teams that compete in professional video games, such as League of Legends, Valorant, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, some of the biggest titles out in the world. And then we have content creators in the gaming and lifestyle vertical. We have a media network of YouTube channels. Some of the YouTube channels are the largest in the world, such as Jesser and Valkyrae. And we also sell consumer products with our apparel business and also our gaming peripherals business, which is called Highground. And they sell keyboards, mice and mousepads. How we make money through all that is effectively brand sponsorships. So we sell branded content or jersey patches on our jerseys. We sell advertising through our media network, when you think about pre-rolls and mid-rolls. We have league revenue, which is basically revenue and prize money from the leagues in which they go and sell media rights deals and sponsorships on their own for the entire week and they share a portion of the teams. And we have direct consumer transactions for consumer products business, which is our apparel and gaming peripherals. And lastly, a new revenue stream we have is subscription revenue. So we started a fan loyalty, rewards program. And as part of that, people can sign up for a year to get unique benefits.

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Mike Wu

Wow, that's a great overview of 100 Thieves. It's more than I truly understood. Of course, since you've been there, I've been following 100 Thieves. And the big splash for me, was when you guys got Drake and Scooter Braun as investors. I think that was a great media moment and got them on your cap table, good backing. But it seems like you guys have grown a ton since. Can you talk a little bit about what it felt like, the company, when you joined almost seven years ago and what it's like today? I imagine it's a little bit different at least.

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Jason Ton

Yeah, so I joined when they were seed stage, maybe a couple of months after they were formed. Pre-revenue, so we had zero revenue by the time I joined. And now we scaled to post-series C and also to where we are today with multiple business lines and through acquisitions and organic growth as well. And yeah, it's been a wild ride. I would say the first couple of years was marked by how do we do things? Laying the infrastructure. For example, I set up our apparel e-commerce workflow with our 3PL, customer support, the ticketing system, and everything. I've never done that before. And I set that up with the whole workflow and vendors and hooking it all up. We have a team right now who are much more skilled than I ever was. But those are the kind of things from the beginning that we just need to figure out how to do things. And that's on the apparel side. And this goes across the entire company. On the finance side, specifically, it's just like, how do we make payments? How do we get corporate cards? How do we start banking relationships? So all the nuts and bolts you wouldn't think of if you started with a company that's already super mature. 

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And then over time, we laid the infrastructure, the next phase was just about scaling. And it's just like, OK, now we've got runnings, how do we grow the business? Should we make acquisitions? How do we integrate them with the company? What new business lines should we think about? And I would say that was sort of a scaling phase. And I think probably the last two years was all about sustainability. It's like how do we think about profitability? What are the economics that we should really be diving in on? What business lines don't work or should we think about certain divestitures? So it's been a wild ride over the last seven years for sure.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, I think we'd be remiss to not mention that amongst all this growth, it's going from pre-revenue to where you guys are today, you're doing it in an industry that is brand new. Esports is a new industry, introduced over this past decade, and you guys are very much ushering in and leading the charge and growing the industry and becoming one of the models for businesses that could exist here. So thank you for that. 

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I'd like to double click into the finance org, Jason, if you're okay with that. At Hireframe, the finance org is one that we work a lot with, whether it's CPAs, accountants, AR/AP specialists. And we work with companies all the way from early stage startups to large enterprises on the New York Stock Exchange. So I'd love to kind of take a glimpse into your history. What did the finance org, look like when you joined and how has it evolved? Has it evolved in chapters? Has it been a gradual linear growth? For me from the outside in, I don't know what a finance org looks like at a startup and what it looks like Series B, Series C as it evolves. What's it look like at 100 Thieves? 

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Jason Ton

Yeah. So from the beginning, when I joined seed stage, I was sort of the only person in finance and all of G &A ops, right? So I handled finance, HR, legal, IT facilities. Obviously now I do not. There's plenty of very, very skilled people who do the jobs way, way better than I ever did. But that's what you sign up for when you join a seed stage company, you're doing it all. That was the point of joining a startup, getting experience in all these areas. So I was basically a generalist, right? And at that point, you just get to figure out, Hey, how do we accomplish whatever we need to set up to do? Jumping into the financing specifically, as you start to scale and that's, different timelines for different companies, I couldn't do everything myself, so needed to hire a finance generalist. 

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So that's what I did, I hired one person. She was with me the second year in, and she helped with everything at that point, tax accounting, FP&A, and that's kind of what you need, right? Especially the beginning phases, you need people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and do everything and anything. Because that's the only way to work with a small team to cover all different areas. Then as you go into the next phase, you start to segment the roles into something specific. So at that point in time, we started to need a dedicated FP&A person. Okay, Then now we need a dedicated accounting person. Then we need a dedicated treasury person. So that's where you start to build up a team and you get leaders in of each of those areas. And then that's at the time when we started to bring Hireframers. But now we have an FP&A team, an accounting team, and then a tax and treasury team.

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Mike Wu

Got it, so three finance and accounting teams. More specialization as you guys have grown. And that means bringing on specialists. 

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Jason Ton

Yeah, one person works on the accounting team and she specifically focuses on revenue recognition as well as ASC 606. So she helps with accounting of all of our revenue, how it translates to our books, and how it should be recognized over time, including writing memos for all the different revenue streams that come in for us. And the other person, he works on the treasury team, so he helps with all of our AR, AP, treasury management, corporate cards, anything to do with the transfer of cash as it goes in and out. Another thing there is that when I talked about being a generalist earlier within the broader finance accounting team, at this point, we still need people who are generalists within the treasury team. At super mature large organizations, there's people who just do AR, who just do AP, who just do procurement. But with a company of our size, we need someone who's still generalist within that sub function. So that's like a pretty important distinction.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, thanks for breaking that down for me. One thing that I was curious about actually is I know today your team is a hybrid team, right? And obviously you joined 100 Thieves pre-COVID and now we're years past, but that's impacted a lot of organizations in terms of their remote, hybrid, in-office work policies. Where are you guys at today? Obviously our Hireframers are remote team members, but I'm curious to know for your finance work, what does that aspect of their role look like?

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Jason Ton

Yeah. So I think for us, obviously we started off with the team fully in person, like every other company pre-COVID. And then once COVID happened, we transitioned to a fully remote team. And now we are a hybrid and remote team, hybrid for the people who are local to Los Angeles, we come in at least two days a week, sometimes more and the people who are not LA are fully remote. One of things that we're able to navigate this transition to where we are today is because we really have a culture of setting clear expectations and measuring success based upon outcomes and deliverables. 

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I think that's pretty important because my take is that you don't necessarily need to be in the office all the time. I think this goes back to my banking days whenwe're up late at night and we're here. And we  wait a couple hours just to make a couple of comments. And it's like, man, why do I need to be in the office to do this thing when I can just do that at home. And it's the same thing, you know? So I remember back then, man, this is like one of the crappiest parts of job. Well, it has benefit too, because you create camaraderie with people that you're in the pits with. But I was like, I always felt like when I get to a leadership position where I have some influence, I'm not going to care if you were going to be in the office. All that matters is like an outcome is done correctly and accurately. And the work product is important. So that's what you're measured against, it doesn't necessarily matter if you're there all the time. People on my team message me like, Hey, I'm going to be gone this afternoon from one to three. I'm like, man, you don't need to tell me, you should be able to manage yourself, just manage your own time. I already know what you need to do. So just focus on that. And as long as you're able to fulfill those deliverables by the deadline, it doesn't really matter how you manage your time within the day. So I think that's another pretty important distinction that has changed over time.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. Your leadership philosophy is really aligned with a hybrid or remote work framework. My familiarity with finance very broadly is the investment banking days where you had to be in the office. I think it's still like that from what I understand. I think what we're learning is some organizations are better off in person versus others. When you speak to your peers, other CFOs, is the finance org, is that one that you think is well suited for a room at work or are a lot of people still doing today the in office thing?

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Jason Ton

Yeah, I do think that it's beneficial for people to be together sometimes. It doesn't necessarily need to be all the time, five days a week, nor would it necessarily be beneficial if we were remote five days a week, especially as you onboard new team members or developculture. But we're only in the office two days a week. And I think it works great for our team. We don't really need to be in more than that. But it's good that we're in sometimes. It's a healthy balance. I think the extremes from before of being in everyday doesn't really make sense for us at this time. But I think generally, everyone on the team is pretty on board and happy with the current schedule. And we're able to get a lot done.

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Mike Wu

And you mentioned onboarding, so I want to actually ask you. I know from our side of things at Hireframe that the Hireframers at 100 Thieves have had a really positive onboarding experience, and specifically on your teams, on the finance teams, but I think across the board too. Could you speak to how you and your team, your leaders onboard new team members, specifically on the finance orgs?

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Jason Ton

Yeah. So the first thing that I always ask, and always ask the team or anyone else is, what is the onboarding process? Do you have an onboarding process? So the important part to detail out before any person comes on is this is how we're going to onboard them into our tools, this is the information we're going to give them, here's our 30, 60, 90. So all that needs to be outlined.

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And then second, we treat the Hireframers as if they're part of the team, so it’s same as if we were hiring someone locally. You need to onboard them in same manner and treat them as one of the teams. They need to be given the proper context so they can succeed at their job. So we invest the time to onboard them properly and timely as opposed to just throwing them in. So it's just all about process at that point and just making sure that you even have a process for onboarding in the first place.

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Mike Wu

Do you have an onboarding snafu, like a mistake that you look back on? It could be anywhere, this is just an onboard, general onboarding question. It could be any company you've worked at. What's an example or an onboarding mistake that you've seen before?

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Jason Ton

Lack of communication expectations.We've on board people before where, you don't really set clearly the expectations are for the next 30, 16, 90 days of what they're supposed to do for the year. They come in and they have a totally different expectation of what they're supposed to be doing. And that like goes totally awry. Right. So that's why it's always important to clearly outline what are the expectations in the short term, medium term and long term. But all parties are like, okay, I get it, and here's what I'm working towards too. And then on top of that, if there's not a feedback loop on that onboarding process, then how are you going to know how you're performing? So it's not even just outlining, here's expectations, short, medium term. But then once that short term period is over and you come back and look, hey, here's what you accomplished. Here's what we did, this is great. Here's what we didn't finish, here's why. And just have a look back and say, can we improve that going forward? Usually, there's regular check-ins for the onboarding process throughout, whether it's two weeks, a month, two months, whatever it is. But checking back in is also important that I've seen gone bad in the past.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, you can create a great 30, 60, 90 day plan, but it's not valuable if you're not checking on and seeing where you're at on things. 

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Jason Ton

Yeah, that's just half the battle.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, I have experienced that actually myself too. I'm guilty of doing that. Cool, thanks for sharing your onboarding. I want to ask you about your thoughts around building finance and accounting teams. I remember our process when we were just talking about perhaps Hireframe and 100 Thieves partnering up here to help staff on your team. I don't know if you're open to it, but would you be willing to share kind of like the different alternatives that you were evaluating and how you ultimately landed on working with Hireframe?

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Jason Ton

Yeah. So I think there's five main options I thought about when I'm going through this process. The first option is like what people typically default to is just like to hire local employee. So that's the simplest process, that's what people know the most. The second option is hiring a remote contractor, whether locally or remote. And then once you start thinking about remote contractors or contractors in general, then think about, do I need a person in the US? Or third, should I outsource it to a company that has like a roster of people that can help service your needs? So that's a very popular option too, where people go to an outsource accounting firm, they help close your books, but the roster of people rotates every single month, depending on their availability. So sometimes you have different people working on your projects. So you don't have any continuity, but they help you with the projects. 

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The fourth option here is where it's just like a lot of people don't necessarily know about is that you have an international remote contractor. And that goes into two ways, into the fourth and fifth option. One is through a search agency and one is through Hireframe. I think the key difference there is that through a search agency, they help find you a remote contractor internationally, whether it's like the Philippines, Mexico, or whatever country that suits your business needs. But it's a one time transaction. They walk away after it's done and they have no investment in the continued success. Whereas Hireframe is like a very, very different business model where their outcome and success is based upon continued success. So they want to ensure that person is doing well at your company. They want to make sure that you're happy with the Hireframer. So they're there throughout the entire process or for as long as the Hireframer is there. So they have a whole team set up in the back end to ensure their success with the customers.

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Mike Wu

Thanks for that shout out. Thanks. But a Hireframe business model, you explained that really well. As you were evaluating these different options, you kind of alluded to but what was it about our model that made you want to work with us versus some of the alternatives?

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Jason Ton

Yeah. Mainly because of three things. First thing is that you're able to find someone with skill sets. These are highly skilled folks. For example, the person we have is our revenue rep person. She works on AC 606. She has experience already in that. So we don't have to teach her that and she already comes in with that skill set. So it's more about teaching her just our industry. 

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Second is speed to find folks. And really, we're looking for someone as quickly as possible. And if our pool is just within our local city, and we have now another country, that's like our roster of folks is much bigger. So the likelihood of finding someone quicker is also greatly increased. And then third is just cost effectiveness. Depending on what your salary is, it could be a third of the cost. And you think of it like that, that really allows you to scale up your team even further and make your dollars go a lot longer. It's like, hey, instead of hiring one full-time person, I can hire two or three. And on top of that, that benefit for our current employees that we have here locally is that it allows them to step into different roles and add more responsibilities, continue to let them grow. As opposed to them working on the same thing. So our Hireframers relieved our current full-time employees and managers of tasks that they were previously doing and allowed them to focus on new things and help them grow in their career as well.

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Mike Wu

That's great to hear actually, that your existing team sounds like it's been elevated to take on new responsibilities, work on more strategic type initiatives. That's great, no thank you for sharing. I have to ask you, maybe you get asked this all the time, but I have to ask you about AI. That's just like all the talk right now. And I'm also just personally curious about AI and specifically around finance teams. What are you guys doing with AI today, if anything? And where are we today with AI Specifically for accounting and finance teams?

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Jason Ton

I think there's like a couple different ways to look at AI. I personally use AI, take your LLM of choice in my personal day to day, right? Help me write emails, synthesize documents, summarize next steps, and review whatever contracts. And it's really good at that, like your personal assistant. I think that's really important, and I've been encouraging everyone on our team to provide examples of how to use AI to boost productivity, personal productivity. And that's actually one of our team goals. 

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I think that's really impactful there, but what I mentioned, that's just on the personal productivity side. And when you go on to the enterprise side, I think that's a totally different story. I think we're still very early on. And to give you an example, we onboarded to this FP&A tool that uses AI that could replace our current FP&A tool. And I would say that it hasn't worked to what we thought it was going to be working at and it's still taking a lot of configuration. The data isn't correct. But I can see the potential. But it's just not there yet. On the enterprise level, I think we're still sort of very early on. And I know it's eventually going to happen, but depends on when it happens in a year or two. That's on the finance specific AI tool enterprise side. 

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And then on the third side is that now we're seeing AI being integrated to whatever SaaS tools that you currently use. So your expense management, your accounts payable software. So every company is integrating AI into that. So I think that's just a benefit that everyone's going to see and use because every company has to keep up. But in terms of new products that are AI specific, we're still very early on. Yeah, we're testing it out.

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Mike Wu

Cool, we're early. We're early and it's good to be experimenting right now, I think is what you're saying.

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Jason Ton

Yeah, it's good to be experimenting. If you're not using the eye for your personal stuff, that means you're just not being as effective. So you definitely should be using your personal day to day to look at anything, research or whatever it may be. I even create research reports, that has been pretty awesome. But in terms of enterprise level and replacing tools that you currently have, I think we're still sort of early on.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, this is a challenge to everyone who's building tools for the finance or the office of the CFO, AI platforms and software, a challenge to meet Jason's expectations. So we're not there yet, but keep building.

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Jason Ton

I mean, this goes not even just finance, goes for everything. I've heard people talk about, they'll just have AI build software to replace your CRM, like Salesforce. But I don't know, I mean, I haven't seen anything yet. I know Klarna has talked about them replacing, but they have tons of engineers. They probably built it in-house, but that's only if you have a huge engineering organization, which we don't. So we can't necessarily do bespoke software to do something like that. That's kind of where we are at.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, that makes sense. Cool, thank you Jason. I’m really grateful for your time. I wanna start wrapping up here a little bit, but one thing I did wanna touch on was, I think it was last year, you announced, you went from being the CFO to CFO and Chief Business Officer. I saw the LinkedIn announcement notification. Tell me more about that. What does this new role entail? I imagine broader scope, tell us more.

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Jason Ton

Yeah, it's just a broader scope. Being CFO, it's not just purely about the numbers. But really a Chief Business Officer now is like, how do I, how do I help the company scale sustainably? I think in the past, especially during the zero industry policy area, it was all about chasing growth at all costs. So how do we grow top line with no regard for short-term profitability.

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And I think in this environment, it's a little different. But now it's like, OK, how does profitability factor into that? Obviously, we still need to grow our top line revenue. But how do we factor in profitability and revenue and think about sustainability as we scale moving forward? And really I think about our revenue streams, potential new revenue streams, thinking about what makes sense for the company, and how does it all fit together? So it's one step removed from just strictly the numbers. It's more just about what is our business model, per se.

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Mike Wu

And as we wrap up here, I wanna ask you, what's one thing you're excited about at 100 Thieves or one thing that you recently worked on that's exciting that you'd like to share with the audience here?

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Jason Ton

Our most recent marketing activation was pretty big at 100 Thieves. What we did was that Blackpink is one of the largest music groups in the world. They're a famous K-pop group and one of their members, Lisa, was launching her solo album globally. And we were able to co-market her album launch, specifically with her fan and meet and greet and store sales here in Los Angeles at our office. So we actually turned our office into like a seven day pop-up store for Lisa and her fans for them to come buy apparel and merchandise. And we actually also sold it on our website as well. And on top of that, she also had a real life meet and greet at our office with a select number of fans, including some of our content creators who did an interview with her. But yeah, that was a really great co-marketing opportunity because we brought the fans of 100 Thieves into Lisa's world, into the K-pop world and vice versa, right? So it's a collaboration people didn’t see coming, but that really just shows the brand and brand power of 100 Thieves and bringing gaming culture into the limelight.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, that's awesome. And I saw the work that you guys were doing and I was intrigued because I know how big Blackpink is. And then I checked out Lisa's Instagram, I think she's got many millions of followers obviously, but what was interesting was she's bigger than Drake, Justin Bieber. She's huge. I didn't realize how big she is as one of the members of Blackpink.

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Jason Ton

A hundred million plus followers and I think K-pop fans are pretty rabid. Their fandom is second to none, I would say.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. That's awesome. Well Jason, thank you so much. For anyone who's listened and maybe if they want to reach out to you, is there a place they can do that? Or do you have any kind of call to action for anyone who's checked this conversation out?

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Jason Ton

Yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to chat anytime about Hiframe, this, or 100 Thieves. But yeah, reach out to me, LinkedIn. My DMs are open.

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Mike Wu

Thanks Jason, great convo.

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Jason Ton

Thanks for having me.

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