That was also the moment when Burnie realized that he might have to make a choice between his full-time job and this project he had started at home. It might be easy to assume this was an obvious path, but it was accompanied by natural fear. “This really took off, but entertainment can be very fickle. When you have a hit, you have to realize how rare it is and try to service it as best as you can. But there’s still always this feeling that it can go away instantly, in a moment’s notice.”

In the media industry, things can die off as soon as quickly as they explode, and getting discovered is even more daunting. “YouTube publishes a statistic regularly that shows how many hours of footage are uploaded to the platform every minute, and as of now, it’s about 400 hours a minute. That means, if you wanted to watch every video on YouTube, you would fall three weeks behind, every minute. It’s totally impossible to watch everything on YouTube. In that environment where there is a huge noise floor, how do you find a way through to people? For new creators, it’s a tough question, but we’ve been doing it now for 15 years and still have to reinvent ways to find people who are trying to discover content.”

So when he was questioning if he should leave his job at a telecom company and make the leap, the owner of the company put him on a sabbatical. “He was so gracious,” says Burnie. “I’d learned so much, and there aren’t many business owners who would do that.”

And that wasn’t the only piece of fortune that Burnie found falling into place. Halo is a first-person shooter video game franchise that is a subsidiary of Microsoft Studios. It is military science fiction genre series of games that been met with record-breaking success and popularity. “I somehow convinced Microsoft to loan us their multi-billion-dollar franchise to make funny internet videos,” says Burnie. “We used the video game Halo to make the show, and it was popular and great, but once we started to monetize it and sell DVDs and T-shirts, the phone rang. Microsoft wanted to meet with us.” So Microsoft, Rooster Teeth, and the game developers, sat down for a meeting. “They told us they were a company that values innovation. They said ‘We don’t understand it, but people seem to like it, so let’s see where this goes.’ And it’s grown into a 15-year partnership. Anyone could write how that story should have ended. They might have said ‘this is cute, cut it out,’ and six weeks later, it would be a thing nobody remembers.”

So Burnie Burns took the profits from each show and tried to make it a bit bigger, and then took the profits from that success and invest it to even a bit bigger, and so on, hit after hit. They attended a bunch of conventions, like Comic-Con and PAX, and finally decided to try their own event. “We thought we’d just throw a big party for about 200 people. Well, the ticket sales went live, and the fans broke the cart on the website. Instead of selling 200 tickets, we sold 650.” Finally, Burnie realized that the audience wasn’t going to just evaporate overnight. Of course, they weren’t prepared to accommodate so many people, but it gave them the confidence to scale the event very quickly each year. Now RTX is held in three cities (Austin, Sydney, and London) and over 63,000 people attended the Austin RTX Convention in Summer of 2017.