welcome to the bot lane
By Louis W. Gresham
Hello world!
Founders, CE/XO’s, LPs, GPs, strategic partners, colleagues, mentors, friends, family- welcome to the “Botlane” email blog. Fellow Riot Games alumni, and anyone else who is/was part of the hundred million monthly active user-strong League of Legends [LoL] community, will recognize the term, but many of you will wonder why you’re seeing it here from yours truly.
Many of you won’t, though, after hearing me apply so many LoL metaphors over the years to elements of the venture/entrepreneurial/gaming/strategic ecosystems. It’s simply because the infinitely complex nature of winning a Lol match as a team has irresistible parallels to how team success happens in the various worlds in which I’ve met all of you (I also can’t help it given the requisite thousand+ hours in-game).
The thoughts that live here [feedback, feelings, forwards all welcome!] are inspired by those of you who have (very patiently) been asking me for years when I’m going to share my musings about these worlds we all “play” in, and for everyone else who I hope will enjoy them as well.
What is this “Bot Lane” you speak of?
The LoL map has three lanes — Top, Mid, and Bot — and a jungle. Of the five players on each team, one goes Top, another Mid, another roams the jungle, and the final two play the “Bot”, or bottom, lane. Over the past decade+ of play, the metagame has shifted an infinite number of times but the basic roles across these positions have remained consistent.
The Botlane duo composition (“comp”) is a fascinating blend of two: the high damage output, but fragile role formerly known as the ADC (Attack Damage Carry, simplified to “Marksman” these days but I’m nostalgic for the old term), and the low damage but high “utility” role of Support. At the most basic level, the ADC is responsible for dealing the most damage to objectives, opponents, and earning the most “gold” in the match to purchase upgrades and become stronger, deal even more damage, in order to “carry” the team to victory. The Support’s job boils down to using every possible means (e.g. utility abilities/tools to heal, shield, crowd control, buff, etc.) to protect/enable/empower the ADC. I’m grossly oversimplifying here, of course, given the many layers of moment-to-moment (micro) and overall strategy (macro) beyond this in the game, but that’s the nucleus of the lane dynamic for our purposes here.
And this is a metaphor for . . . ?
Within the teams I’ve had the privilege to work on/with across my experiences as a bootstrapped cofounder, consultant, think tank fellow, game producer, venture-backed cofounder, exec, and investor, I’ve seen/experienced incredible duo comps of all kinds power companies to wins, and believe that elite “ADC/Support” pairs of all kinds are an unbelievably powerful business driver within teams.
Of all the variants, I’ve spent the most time in the founder-CE/X/O & VC investor comp at this point in my career (a bit more than half of the years since 2004) on one side or the other of the pairing, with the past four on the VC side.
Our Botlane discussions will naturally lean towards that particular “comp”, but we’ll integrate plenty of the others via our own experiences and those of our community. We’ll use this lens as a means to explore a wide range of topics at the strategic, industry, mature/young companies, and executive levels, among others, with the lofty goals of achieving breadth and depth of insight along with an entertaining read.
So Founder/CEO + early stage VC = ADC/Support?
We’ll break this down further in plenty of fun ways, but in short, yes — we believe that in early stage venture it is the VC’s job to use every tool in their “kit” to position, protect, and empower the founder/CEO to deliver the highest possible output and “carry” the team to a successful business lifecycle. And yes, earn the most “gold” to purchase the best “upgrades” to push each “objective”, and so on. Many fun analogues.
We’ll dwell a fair amount on that one for several reasons aside from all the great parallels:
1) in our practice we believe that the founder/VC duo comp dynamic is one the most critical of all discussion points pre-deal in the evolving founder/VC relationship;
2) executing these roles in concert is so critical to the lifecycle of the business;
3) the venture-backed business model is a uniquely intense Petri dish that tests this pairing to the extreme, and has insights for all kinds of partnerships inside and outside of venture, such as within:
Within startup (CEO founder and key cofounder e.g. CTO; CEO to other team members, etc)
Gaming (Exec producer + lead designer)
Go to market (many, such as CRO + CEO)
Corpdev (ie lead acquirer such as CSO + target CEO)
Building a VC firm (early and/or anchor LP + emerging manager)
Operating a VC firm (how respective partner comps balance fundraising, investing, portfolio ops, fund ops etc.)
And so many more. But for now our bias will be toward CEO/VC, with specific focus on the lens of founder/CEO + early stage investor / Board member.
What’s next?
These posts will live here and we’ll share them via email for the most part, as well as the occasional Linkedin ping. As mentioned, feedback/feelings/forwards all very much welcome and appreciated! Especially feedback, whether content, whether topics, viewpoints, specific companies, experiences, people that you would be interested us touching on, or format. And of course sharing this out, as the more perspectives we draw upon to inform the content the better— if you’re receiving this from any of our channels, whether one of our email blasts, Linkedin, a forward, etc. then you’re the kind of person we want to hear from!
See you in the Botlane ;)
Louis