During a recent online merchandise drop, gaming fans eagerly refreshed a page waiting for access to a small range of limited edition sweatshirts, T-shirts, and hoodies. The prices were high, but the apparel didn’t last long: more than $500,000 worth of gear sold out in just five minutes. It’s the kind of thing that calls to mind established streetwear brands like Supreme. But in this case, the clothing was branded with a very different logo: 100 Thieves, one of the hottest names in competitive gaming.

E-sports is a burgeoning business, but it’s also an uncertain one. While it’s been around for decades and spawned ambitious projects like the global Overwatch League, it’s still largely unclear whether competitive gaming is, or ever will be, as big as many have predicted. Amid this constantly shifting climate, several e-sports organizations are attempting to hedge their bets by depending less on only winning tournaments. 100 Thieves is among the most successful to date.

The company was founded in 2017 by Matt “Nadeshot” Haag who started his career as a teenage Call of Duty star before eventually retiring and becoming a YouTube celebrity. With 100 Thieves, he’s attempting to bring the worlds of e-sports, YouTube, and streaming together, while adding in a successful apparel business to create a uniquely modern entertainment company.

“The best way to describe it is we’re a little bit like the Lakers, and we’re a little bit like Barstool Sports, and we’re a little bit like Supreme,” says 100 Thieves president and COO John Robinson.

Robinson previously worked at major game publishers EA and Nexon and also ran his own mobile game studio for a time. He says that this multiprong approach to building 100 Thieves is what attracted him to the company in the first place. “Everyone else was trying to apply the Utah Jazz business model to e-sports,” Robinson explains. “‘Oh, we’re going to be a professional sports team, and we’re going to sign a lot of players, and hopefully, if we win, we’ll get some sponsorships.’ And Matt was like, ‘No, we’re going to reinvent this thing. We’re going to build a huge fan base on top of not just winning, but also people coming to our content and social channels.’ It seemed like such an obvious answer, but Matt had the credibility to actually pull it off.”

“Matt had the credibility to actually pull it off.”

The company made its first splash in late 2017. It was one of 10 teams to join the newly franchised League of Legends Championship Series where it sat alongside entrenched e-sports organizations like Cloud9 and Team Liquid and others backed by NBA squads like the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors. Since then, it has continued to expand into other games — including titles like Fortnite and Call of Duty — while also structuring its business around those three core pillars of competitive gaming, content, and apparel. In June, the company hired former Dota 2 pro Jacob Toft-Andersen as its VP of e-sports, and it followed that up in July by luring Doug Barber away from streetwear brand Reigning Champ to become VP of brand and apparel. Meanwhile, Jackson Dahl, one of the very first hires at 100 Thieves, has assumed the lead of the company’s entertainment division, which covers everything from YouTube and Twitch to podcasts and emerging platforms. Oh, and last October, Drake jumped on board as 100 Thieves’ most famous co-owner.

The ambitions at 100 Thieves weren’t necessarily apparent from the beginning. When the company entered League of Legends, it seemed mostly in-line with other e-sports organizations, albeit with slightly better jerseys. The same was true of its video content; it was tense, documentary-style filmmaking but nothing that felt especially new. “At first, it was just getting up to the baseline of the best teams in e-sports, and they’re really making high-quality narrative content,” says Dahl. “From there, and what we really started to think about after those first couple of months, was what type of content does the gaming audience care about, and how e-sports-focused do we need to be?”

Think of it like the MCU, but for streamers

Today, 100 Thieves operates a fairly full slate of programming that it says will grow in 2020. That includes ongoing series documenting its pro teams, of course, but also podcasts like The CouRage and Nadeshot Show, which is essentially a talk show featuring famous streamers, and Selfmade, where Haag interviews people he admires from the business world, ranging from Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey to entertainment executive Scooter Braun. (Braun is also part owner of 100 Thieves.) And that’s not including regular streams of Fortnite and Minecraft. On top of this, the company has gone on a hiring spree, snatching up notable personalities like Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, Rachell “ Valkyrae” Hofstetter, and up-and-coming creators group The Mob. In fact, Haag, Hofstetter, and Dunlop all live in a mansion in LA appropriately dubbed the 100 Thieves Content House.

Since 100 Thieves started with a big personality in Haag, Dahl says it only made sense to continue to expand in that direction. “If personality-driven content is king, how do we build a cast of characters or a universe around Nadeshot? We have our Howard Stern or our Tony Stark or our Bill Simmons, and I want to fill in other characters,” he explains. Think of it like the MCU, but for streamers.

One thing all of those creators and even the company’s president have in common is what they’re wearing. Since its debut, 100 Thieves has been notable in large part because of its sense of style. Streamers, professional players, and executives all wear 100 Thieves-branded hoodies and T-shirts, and when that apparel finally goes on sale, it usually sells out in a matter of minutes. It’s like a Supreme drop, only a bit nerdier, and you can regularly find 100 Thieves gear being sold for high prices on aftermarket sites. The company says that its most recent drop, with $500,000 in sales, was its biggest to date.

Given that early success, Barber was brought on board to solidify the apparel business, though he says his role encompasses much more than just designing clothes. “I’m overseeing the entire 100 Thieves brand,” he says. “That can mean many different things. But basically, the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we appear visually.” Barber previously worked at streetwear brand Reigning Champ where he helped design apparel, managed the company’s brand, and oversaw a number of retail locations. His goal is to turn the 100 Thieves apparel phenomenon into something both bigger and more sustainable. “Apparel is one of our top initiatives,” he says. “Really building out a true lifestyle brand is one of our primary goals for the brand for the foreseeable future. We’re not just trying to create merch to support our e-sports business. We really want to build a true apparel brand. I think that’s what differentiates 100 Thieves.”

“People desperately want to reach this audience.”

Outside of apparel, the main revenue-driver for 100 Thieves is sponsorships. Brands are everywhere. There’s the Rocket Mortgage Team House that’s home to the League of Legends team, and team jerseys that are covered in corporate logos from Cash App and Red Bull. Watch a 100 Thieves podcast, and you’ll see carefully placed cans of Red Bull, while a tour of the Fortnite team house might include a freezer full of Totino’s pizza rolls. “It’s our biggest revenue stream,” says Dahl. “People desperately want to reach this audience.”

Those additional revenue streams are particularly important given the often volatile nature of e-sports, an industry where some have predicted an impending bubble burst. The challenges inherent in competitive gaming are things 100 Thieves has experienced first-hand. Despite jumping into multiple games, the company currently only operates teams in League of Legends and Fortnite. Other teams ceased operations for a variety of reasons. 100 Thieves joined the first season of the Clash Royale League but left soon after that season wrapped up. Robinson admits that the mobile card game was “off-brand for us.” And while 100 Thieves was one of many organizations to jump in early with Apex Legends, the company ultimately pulled out after a viable competitive scene failed to emerge.

The most shocking has been 100 Thieves’ recent move away from Call of Duty. Haag made his name initially as a world champion Call of Duty player, and during 100 Thieves’ sole season operating a professional team, they saw a lot of success, winning two major titles, and ultimately finishing as runner-up in the Call of Duty World League Championship. But as publisher Activision started preparing for a new Call of Duty league, one with teams based in specific cities like more traditional sports leagues, the cost became too high for 100 Thieves to stay involved. “The fact of the matter is, the [Call of Duty League] is incredibly expensive,” Haag explained in a video. “It’s so expensive. And not only are there a lot of upfront costs, there are a ton of operational costs that we’ll be spending money on for years. And we are just not equipped, and not prepared to make that jump.”

That doesn’t mean 100 Thieves is moving away from competitive gaming. In fact, Toft-Andersen says that the company is looking to expand into more titles in the future. But given its short history, it’ll be more thoughtful about which games to explore. “We’re not in a rush,” Toft-Andersen says. “We don’t necessarily approach e-sports in the same way that a lot of other teams do, which is they sign up to just about any competitive title that comes around.” Robinson says that “for us, it’s definitely about fewer, bigger, better.”

“We have to be really, really agile and smart about the bets we make.”

What these struggles do show, though, is the solid footing 100 Thieves has built up over a relatively short time. Despite millions of dollars being funneled into the space, there are few e-sports teams that are especially lucrative right now. There are likely even fewer that could handle losing three out of their five competitive teams. But because 100 Thieves had other businesses to rely on, dropping out of Call of Duty wasn’t as huge of a blow as it could have been.

“We have to be really, really agile and smart about the bets we make,” Dahl says of the company’s future. “You have situations like Apex Legends, which there was a ton of hype around, and we certainly bought into the hype. A lot of it was for good reason. But we have to be really smart around when there’s a new game out, or a new opportunity to pick up an e-sports team, it’s a matter of prioritization of our resources and doing it in a way that’s authentic to our brand.”

One of the big initiatives over the coming months for 100 Thieves is the construction of a new headquarters in Los Angeles. Currently, the company is scattered around, with teams and streamers in their own houses and the main company in an office space. By the end of the year, the plan is to move everyone under the same roof, while also adding new elements to the company. The HQ will feature practice rooms for players, editing bays, stations for streamers, a soundstage, a design studio for the apparel team, and, eventually, a retail space for selling that gear. The goal is to have the various elements of the business talk more and become more tightly integrated. “Once we get under one roof, we’ll be a lot more connected,” says Barber.

It’s hard to say what the future holds for 100 Thieves since the industries it operates in move so quickly. When the company first jumped into League of Legends, it was the biggest thing on Twitch. Now, Fortnite has taken that title, while something new will inevitably come after that. Streamers will rise and fall in popularity, and the YouTube algorithm will change, dramatically altering that landscape. Amid this turmoil, 100 Thieves could very well thrive because it’s not dependent on any one of those elements, giving it both more flexibility and stability to roll with unexpected changes. “We like that we have a couple of different bets,” says Robinson.

In the meantime, the various pillars of the company will continue to interact, sometimes in unexpected ways. Robinson may be the one responsible for the day-to-day operations of 100 Thieves, but he’s also on his way to becoming another part of the expanding cast of characters in the 100 Thieves cinematic universe. He recently appeared in a video alongside Haag taking a tour of the in-development headquarters, and in another, the pair discussed a recent round of funding. You can’t be a part of 100 Thieves without getting some camera time.

“Now, I’m just known in the YouTube community as the bald guy who works with Matt,” Robinson says.