"There aren't a lot of owners that get as hands-on as I do. I really enjoy building the relationships with the players. I feel like it gives me an advantage to understanding their needs."

C9's Jack Etienne at WEC

Hi, I'm with Jack, he's the Cloud 9 owner. I see you around a lot of Dota events these days. I saw you at The International and now I see you here. What's the biggest difference managing an elite LCS team and a Dota team?

There's a lot of parts that are similar outside of getting to practices on time and strategy, I make sure that they're well fed, making sure that they're getting to sleep on time and keeping folks that might be a distraction to them out of their way and those sort of things that are similar. Where it's different is a little more difficult to figure out because there's a really a lot of similarities because both teams have an amazing ability to lose stuff, spill things over their white jerseys, love to sleep massive hours and hate waking up. So finding similarities and differences are a lot tougher. Some of the guys on the league team are a bit older and I feel they're a bit more independent.

Are most owners as hands-on as you?

I think I'm pretty unique in that? There aren't a lot of owners that get as hands-on as I do. I really enjoy building the relationships with the players. I feel like it gives me an advantage to understanding their needs. So yeah I think I'm very unique in the way I do things.

What do you think about the Dota scene and the growth of this team, finishing 6th at The International. Did you expect that?

Absolutely not. Like, the overall growth of Dota 2 is unbelievable. I got into for a reason, I saw that it was growing but I didn't expect the massive growth spike we did get though while we did get a team and the fact that we were invited to The International was really humbling and we were really excited to see that happening and the guys doing so well was mind-blowing and that was an added perk. But definitely unexpected.

Now that you've been there, what's the new goal?

My major role is to support the team and their goal is to win. So all our focus is to make sure that they have everything they need to perform and return and win TI.

You guys made a roster change recently, do you have a hand in that or is it mainly the team that decides?

I was there to help sort out their decision making process, help them clarify what they wanted. Once it was clear that Sing wasn't going to work out with the team and they had decided that hey we want this player, I did everything I could to get that player on board, make sure he had a contract he was happy with and once that happens give them all the tools they need to succeed from there.

You guys have a pretty crazy travel schedule in the next few months, going to China, to New York, back and forth. Is fatigue a concern at all?

Yeah absolutely. We have 4 LANs, we had a 5th on the table that was very attractive but there's only so much you can do at any given time so the most important is going from the WCA to the ESL One New York event. Looks like there's only a 3 day time delay between those events and that's a severe time delay between those events so yes lag is definitely something we're concerned about, but since last year I think these guys are very battle hardened and have done a lot of travelling. We know how to travel now and how to get set up efficiently so I think we can pull it off.

Tell me about what do you know about these guys that the public doesn't know about them. Give me some Cloud 9 stories or secrets.

It's kind of funny because generally every time we travel there's generally two dudes that if they don't get 12 hours of sleep they get super grumpy and that's Pieliedie & Aui_2000. They're the sleeper room, they want to eek out every second of sleep as possible, say we're leaving at 11 they want to be woken up at 10:45. It's pretty amazing how much sleep those two guys put away.

What about EternalEnvy and bone7?

Bone7 has a lot of issues with the food he eats. I swear he lives off a watermelon because he doesn't want to upset his stomach so if it's outside white rice, chicken or watermelon he'll straight up refuse to eat. There's times he wont eat for days and I don't know what he's surviving on. I have no clue what he's doing. I'm trying to work out something we can pack so that no matter where we are we can always have food.

What about Envy? There's pretty much a cult around him, how do you deal with that?

Envy? he pretty much deals with his own business. People might think hes difficult to work with but he's actually really self sufficient, takes care of business and tells me what he needs. He's very direct, so it makes my job easy. Envy is very interesting dude. My biggest concern is making sure he doesn't say things like "Fuck James", and to thank sponsors for setting up bootcamps.

Well you have multiple teams, tell us a little about C9 organisation, that the average fan won't know just following the C9 Dota team?

Really C9 is always looking for the next popular game. We spend a lot of time watching streams on Twitch looking for a specific game gaining traction, we start to poke around working out what players and what teams are the best out there and most likely to succeed at winning tournaments. I'm not looking for players to be celebrities. I'm looking for people who are a cut above the rest competitively. So if you're a person in either games or an upcoming game that can win events then we should be talking.

You have a coach now, you had Clairvoyance at TI, you have some support staff. Do you think that is a big deal in Dota 2?

Yeah definitely. But in any game not just Dota 2, it's hard to find quality support and I feel Clairvoyance really helped the players find new strategies and also do a lot of research on the teams we potentially will be playing against. The players definitely that had a big impact on their quality of play. For all the folks out there who are amazing analysts who could provide us with quality information, that's definitely something that is a major growth area for Cloud 9. I'm constantly looking for new talent.

The best way to do that is download some C9 replays, analyse it and send it over. That's actually how Winter got hired, he downloaded a few Alliance replays, analysed it, sent it over and got hired!

Yeah, in fact pretty much any coach or analyst I've brought up, they took the step to put together some analysis for us, let us review it and if it's good then we're going to be in contact with you.

Tell us about yourself, what do you do other than manage these teams. Are you married? Do you have kids? That kind of stuff.

I live in San Francisco. I work on C9 full time now. I was working at CrunchyRoll for 4.5 years where I was their VP of Sales, but it got to a point where the side hobby working on C9 was taking so much of my time that I had to make a decision, stick with CrunchyRoll or take C9 on full time. And it's one of the rare situations where I was loving what I was doing at Cloud 9 and I stepped away from a rapidly growing company where I was employee 9 at, to take this risk with C9. It was about 3-4 months ago and I've never looked back yet. So most of my job at C9 besides the managing of teams, is going out to get the best sponsors to support the team. Once the sponsors are on board, I provide reporting to them, showing them what this investment is doing to them. Basically keeping the money flowing and keeping the players happy.

Do you have kids?

Yeah I have one daughter, she's 18 months old. But I feel like I have 27 kids across all the teams and my own child. I feel like managing TSM for 3-4 years before C9 helped prepare me for having my own child.

You'd be the most experienced dad now. Some of the most fickle crazy kids ever!

Yeah some of them are finicky eaters, some that fail to sleep, yep I've got that nailed down. Emotional issues, yep a lot of experience with that. I feel like I saw a lot of wear before I had my own kid.

Are you a Dota fan now? Can you watch Dota games other than C9's?

I'm absolutely a fan. I'm a learning fan, and I've been coming in on 9 - 10 months now. I feel like , I have a clue what's going on, what objective should be taking now. But it's an extremely complex game and I feel like I won't be able to understand what's truly going on until another 6 months.

When are you going to pub with them?

I wouldn't do that to them haha. Maybe I'll play League with them and Dota with my League team so I don't feel like an idiot.

Alright do you have anything you want to say? Shout-outs or call-outs?

Absolutely. Shout-outs to sponsors who've actually made C9 possible, in particular Logitech who've taken a real hands on help to the bootcamping. They helped find a place to stay, place to practice, food, transportation etc. Without them we couldn't be able to do what we do. Of course Hyper X has also been a huge financial support and Alienware.



Call-out to Artour, who's been talking shit this entire week and I hope to see you tomorrow in the finals!

HotBid had the chance to sit down with the owner of Cloud 9, Jack, and talk about the management of his team. Also the players on Cloud 9 Dota 2 team and their respective uniquenesses.