Q&A with OG.JMR

7 August 2021

JMR Luna, CEO of OG, took his time on the evening of August 6th, 2021 to host a Q&A session with the members of OG Discord server to answer their questions about NFTs, sponsors, and the general direction OG is taking. This is a transcript of the recorded session, partially redacted by JMR.

Manon: Welcome veryone, thank you for joining us.

JMR: Hello everybody, how are you guys doing?

Manon: Hello everyone, so today we're here for a Q&A with the CEO of OG, Mister JMR Luna, who kindly accepted to join us today. Jay, if you maybe want to introduce yourself briefly, if those people maybe don't know who you are, and explain why you're doing this?

JMR: Hello everybody, so I'm Jay, I'm originally from Spain, been living in the US for 13 years, became the CEO of OG in May 1st, 2020. And yeah, I want to do this because obviously I've seen some of the social media reaction and some of the comments and to, you know, help provide a little bit more of clarity; and if you guys have questions that I have probably not really thought about answering them before and, you know, take a little bit of the initiative into resolving those things; because I feel that a lot of criticism that you guys have showed on social media it is fair and we have listened to it, I would like to see if you guys feel the same way after hopefully some of these things are resolved or at least addressed.

Manon: OK, thank you. So I have a question for you, real quick well. How would you prefer to proceed, because I believe I have a bunch of written questions to ask you from people who cannot be there, but still had questions to ask you.

JMR: Will they listen in or how would they find out the answers?..

Manon: I mean, maybe they just want their questions to be answered and so...

JMR: OK, alright.

Manon: So, if anyone wants to ask a question right now, on mic, please, you know, make a request, I will let you in the chat, no problem. If not, then I think we will start with the written questions.

JMR: I would say I'm here to answer all questions, even though the ones I might feel spicy. Whatever you guys want to ask I will do my best to answer them.

Manon: OK. It doesn't seem like anyone is willing to take the mic right now, let's start with the written questions.

JMR: OK, let's do it.

Ludejano: Would it be helpful if we have some way of maybe recording this so that if people want to go back and listen to it later...

JMR: It was not part of my idea, what I had in mind was... I wanted to have a conversation with our close friends and part of the family, and if I feel that what is being said is important to share with the rest of the world I could be open to host another session...

Ludejano: That's fine. It's just worth it. We can just edit it, if any of it is that we don't want to share.

JMR: Sure, you can record it, and then we can judge it later. It's just like I didn't feel that I had to justify what we do or how we do things to the rest of the world. But I do think that we have to at least talk with our close friends, you know.

Ludejano: That's fair enough, I'll move back to audience. I just wanted to ask that question.

Manon: No problem. Thank you. OK, so there are a few spicy questions, just so you know. OK, so first question: why invest in crypto despite most probably knowing and hearing the ever increasing complaints and worries of how crypto is having an awful effect on the environment?

JMR: I would say that we are quite hypocrites to say that crypto is the one ruining environment when there is thousands of studies that shows cars and meat industry and a billion other things ruined the environment. Now somehow we are all focusing on one, but that doesn't mean that just because the other ones are bad this is not bad. Specifically let's talk about why crypto is bad for the environment? Why does the studies show that? It is because the energy exchange needed to either farm or to create the exchange has an impact on environment, but if we really think about sending messages on a phone or one of the 1,000,000 things that we're doing right now, all of those take energy to do so.

I believe, we personally believe, that the reason why this is the one that people are focusing on is because this is the one that has gone under the radar for a lot of governments and a lot of things that have already set their clause around some of the other things. At the end of the day it's a level of taxation. People want to make money out of taxes. Government wants to control things through taxes and they make money through those taxes that they put on things, that's why alcohol is a drug that is permitted when other drugs are not permitted, that's why there's specific things that we can bid on trade owned housing market, stock market and all that, well the other things that you are not allowed to trade on.

I think that there is a lot of studies being made about the ecosystem as well, and the impact that they had environmental, and Elon Musk in a way is the one that is pushing narrative depends on what works for him in the second and in the moment. And I think that he was able to shine a light and one thing, then he retracted the opinion in the next day, but social media and the media does not pick up when people retract. They just pick up when people light fire and we all go to see the fire.

So, in my opinion, and what I know, and I'm happy to be corrected or learn throughout the time, I don't think that this is any worse than many other things that we do. And I do not think that the environmental impact of cryptocurrency is worse than paper, automobile, meat industry and such. So I think that there is a little more good things that we get out of this market, like decentralisation, like improving technology, improving guarantees on payment and authentification, so I think there's still room to see where history lands, you know? And look, for all I know I may be wrong, you know? And you guys might be right with this question, and, you know, in 2 years or 3 years or whenever this is resolved, you guys were right, but so far through the research that I've done I have concluded that this was worth exploring and investing.

Alteclere: If I might ask a question too, I'm sorry... I think the issue people have concerning environmental thing with NFTs is that we don't see the value in it in comparison with what we put in it. So like, I agree that there is not only the NFTs that influence environment badly, like cars as well, but with card we can drive around, we can, I don't know, go shopping, go on holiday. So we associate a certain value with cars that we can connect to the bad impact on the environment. While we can't do the same for cryptocurrencies and because, from what I know, at least, most crypto currencies basically gain value through mining, like data mining, which basically is just computers solving calculations, and that doesn't really get us anywhere, it only costs power, so from my point of view it just doesn't have the same value, so the impact it has on the environment, and I think that's the issue most people might have with environmental issues.

Ludejano: Follow on that as well, someone just posted it in chat. The crypto uses somewhere approximately around 120 terawatts per year, whereas Ukraine, as in a country, uses 128. So basically, there are countries where their entire energy economy for that year is being beaten out by cryptocurrency. That's where a lot of it is also coming from, that's following up on what Alteclere said here, that it's using that much power consumption for...

JMR: So I would say I think that you're really mixing things.

First and foremost OG is not the one to blame for all cryptocurrencies activities in the world, cryptocurrencies are going to exist whether we [inaudible] to be on them or not. Second, I think that she made a very good point when she described that she doesn't see the value on this. I agree with you, you might not have seen the value. Now, I do see it. The way that I see it is that fundamentally we have not seen investing in the same way. When you say... it's just, there's so many to unbox, so I will try to do it slowly, OK?

What is the value or a cryptocurrency? The value of a cryptocurrency is a value like anything else, it's a mixture between demand and offer. The reason why an iPhone is worth that much money, the reason why a car is worth that much money, the reason why a stock or a normal currency worth something, it's in the end the willingness of the market to be able to buy it.

The reason why a Monet or Van Gogh is worth that much is because there is only one, and there is a lot of people that are willing to pay a lot of money for that. This economic principle serves in everything, and at one point people were trading in Forex exchange where I trade this dollar and I buy euro, and that in a way is a similar market.

And we have seen that this trading of assets has created an immense amount of value through generations, isn't always the same reason why people buy a property to invest, you know.

So to answer you. Like now imagine that I make $30,000 a year. What chances do I have to invest my money on anything? I don't have enough money to buy an apartment, and I cannot really buy 1/10th of an apartment. I cannot buy 3/10 of an apartment next month, and in stock options, there's also a lot of limitations within these stocks to invest. So people that have little money or no money, or they have like little liquidity that they can make month to month, they didn't really have a chance to invest on anything. I mean, you could try to buy stamps, you know you could try to buy those things to increase your wealthness, but there was no really a solution for people to be able to do those things.

I think cryptocurrency was able to do those things, and I can tell you because I did it myself. You know I was not making a lot of money and I just I really started putting, I'm going to put $300 here, I'm going to pull $200 this month, I have another extra $300 that I was able to save, and slowly I buy, you know, 0.11 of ETH, or 0.01 of Bitcoin, and as lonely those bitcoins that I was buying on fragments were able to increase the value, and my $400 became $500, my $2000 became $2100, so I was able to participate on an investment and in growing my wealth that I was never able to do before for many different reasons.

So I have seen and I have witnessed how people have [inaudible] started increasing their wealth, which I like, but second become more attentive about this, realizing that, hey, there is a lot of people with a lot of money that are investing and increasing their wealth, and now we get to participate on this, we get to participate on these conversations, and hey, maybe I don't have to be poor my whole life, you know? Or maybe I get to do other things with my money that I couldn't do before. Maybe this is a path for me to be able to pay to college. Maybe this is a path for me to be able to guarantee that my kid can go to the university one day. I have specific examples within my family about a family member that got very sick and couldn't go to work, and because he makes money by going to work if he didn't have a job he couldn't go to work, and in America we don't really have a lot of, like, protections socially, so this person was able to to put some of his money there and start investing with the little capital that he had in order to be able to move money this way; because, you know, the day trading of stocks and all that are extremely regulated and we need a lot of cash to enter.

So the big picture is cryptocurrency itself is too big to just unifying against one theory, but one of the things that we're able to do is the coins, that are the Bitcoin, the ethereum, yada yada yada, that has allowed people to come in and do that.

And then NFTs right now, NFTs are technology more than anything, it's the technology to authentify something, it's actually much more accurate than a fingerprint, and with this technology there's many applications that are already happening and that are going to continue happening. One of them is the authentication of art, which is what we've done before, and another one is authentification of a passage, you know, like if you want to buy a ticket, instead of by a normal ticket, you can buy an NFT, that is the way that you get a ticket and the way that you get into the conference. So any of this is going to continue to develop.

If by all means you do not see the value in this activity, I encourage you to not participate, just like if you don't see the value on, I don't know, owning cool cars, because I don't know why people spend money on cars, I don't like them, so when somebody spends over $60,000 on a car, I'm like - that's crazy, you know, but I can see it and I respect it. Other people buy apartments and I don't know, I've never owned an apartment, I've rented any apartment that I've ever been, but if they do that, hey, that's great, you know. Why do people spend $100 on dyeing their hair? I don't know, but if it's important for them, can we at least say "OK, I don't want to participate, I choose not to participate", but why are we being so... I don't know, so, so closed about this whole thing?

That's one of the things that, in a way, is more fascinating. Because if we are this closed this means that people like me are failing to educate or communicate at least the thesis of the premise of this.

I know I went on a ramble, sorry, but I don't know if there is anybody else following.

Manon: Yeah, we are where.

Ludejano: Yeah, it's a It's a difficult. The problem with this kind of thing, it's difficult to explain even, like, as much layman as possible, because X amount of the problem sort of born by it is one of capitalism in general, but that's the growing commy in me being.

JMR: So for example, this person breaks a very good point. He said, could you put your money in an investment fund? Same result, just handled by professional investors for tiny fee. Well, first, some of the investment funds have minimum to join, and if you're going to ingest really going and refutable, a person that you know that is not going to steal your money and run away, you're looking at big money to start, otherwise they will just not be profitable for them. And if you do it for smaller ones, you end up putting your money in people that you might not know if they have a year on year track to do this.

2nd, at one point in the 90s and 80s and before that we used to have the stock options will reflect the revenue and the profit that companies will have, but now they don't anymore. They're actually branding exercise in a real way, because right now Tesla is the highest, the biggest automobile company in the world, and that's what the stock says. But they are not the biggest automobile company by far. So how is their stock larger and higher than the other automobile companies? So as you see, the volatility of the market has make it very hard to invest in for savvy investors, and if they were [savvy then it] were that easy and everybody will be doing it, you know. So think about it. I don't have a lot of money. I don't have a way to enter those things. The stock options right now is volatile as hell. Might as well just do it myself, you know.

Alteclere: This still doesn't really address for me the issue with how this discrepancy between the value and environment comes to pass, because I've seen at least one company on Twitter doing crypto that moved into a crypto zone where they don't have as much impact, I can look up the name, I don't have it in my head right now, something with T and 5 letters, Taxes or something, and so there seems to be companies out there who try to focus doing crypto for like little people for the investment, which I think it's a very good point, this little people investment, but yeah, there's seem to be companies out there who do focus on trying to make it environmental friendly. But most companies don't seem to care about it, and that's another thing where... I like your point about Tesla, right, its stocks is really big, but I don't think it's only because of the marketing thing. I think it's also because it's a future technology. Like, Tesla is is giving kind of the hopes that there will be electric cars instead of petrol run cars in the future, and so people invest in this future technology, and I think that might be the reason or one of the reasons why it's successful in stocks. Not because it makes good marketing. Maybe partially because of good marketing, but also because the technology is something people like to support, especially when you look at what's happening around the world right now with wildfires and floods and everything and the weather going crazy, so that's something where people want to invest in because they think that in the future in the long run, it will protect the environment in some way.

JMR: Seeing that we're again mixing a few concepts and at the end of the day we don't have to agree, you know, I'm only here to try to explain how I see the world and I hear you, how you see the world.

The the reason why our environment is going to shift, is being proved that there is 3 industries that are polluting environment more than anybody else. And one of them is the [inaudible] industry and so far nobody seems to be addressing that one.

So the idea of Tesla being inspirational and Tesla providing a vision of the future that we all want to participate on is a lot of the reason why people buy Tesla. Because they want to be inspired and they want to do better and they want an environment that is more prosperous and they are doing great work. So I agree with that. Fundamentally, I agree with that.

In order for cryptocurrency and all these electronic transactions, which by the way, I really don't think that they are any different from all the other transactions that we do outside of the mining, and I know the mining is a big thing and we can talk about mining, but... So when we have these transactions and for the little people for little money, the truth is that little people or little money cannot make money as long as the only money in that ecosystem is the little people money, because we don't have anything to trade against. So we need the big people with big money to participate on the same activity that we are in order for us to be able to make money out of it. The loss of energy and how this specifically is cryptocurrency platform or thing is granting the deterioration of environment, I think, is a very good point and I could not contest you in that, you know. I would say that for me, I believe it's still to be developed and I hope that with time we get better at it, but for me the trade off is granted. We can make cars right now that can run on 40 gallons per... uhh...

Alteclere: I think it's like 40 gallons on 100 miles or something? Yeah.

JMR: It's very efficient, right? But in order to get to the efficient ones, we had to go through 50 years of shitty cars, that you had to put petrol in maybe every 30 miles. So yes, I'm with you, we have to do better and we should support the companies that are making the technological advances. But I think that this is so new, that right now I feel that we're moving into a world that I'm excited about, where governments do not control necessarily everything that is happening, where the people are now the ones ruling some of these decentralized markets, whereas more people now can access wealth that before we couldn't, where artists can make money in a different way, authenticating things online that before they couldn't, you know, because... I don't know if you guys thought about it, but there is this barrier of entry for many things that we do in life, that is money, you know? You cannot build/buy [?inaudible] a sculpture if you don't have the money to sculpture on. You cannot be a filmmaker if you don't have the money to hire the crew and get the cameras. You cannot really get a masters if you don't have the money to pay for the masters. So it's like... our whole life we're caught up in these... I'll rephrase, if you don't have the money, you don't have the ability to even participate on the environment or on the ecosystem that you want or the game that you want, so I hope that cryptos and these are going to lower some of those obstacles, but again, I might be wrong. I just have not decided that I am wrong yet.

Alteclere: OK, then I have a question concerning this and OG, because you talk about supporting small artists that, like wouldn't otherwise be able to get into the scene, because they can't sculpture, they have money and the materials for it. So why - 'cause I think that was one of the questions - so why didn't OG choose to collaborate with community artists to promote crypto work? Like the the NFTs, why were the big name artists chosen that don't have any connection to the teams instead of artists that have painted pictures of them as a fan tribute for years?

JMR: It's a great question. And the thing here is, I'm going to get hit whatever I say. I am going to get shit on for whatever I said right now. When Gorgc accused us of the specific things to try to make money at our fan base and just trying to make money out of Dota, I proved to him that there was no money that I made out of Dota, that I did not try to tap into Dota ecosystem at all. That I made spaceships and aliens that had nothing to do with Dota 'cause I was trying to sell and participate with another people, so I feel that whatever I do I was going to get shit on.

My choice was the market that we were going to sell this asset to were not Dota or OG fanbase ecosystem, therefore I needed to give something that they were expecting, that they could consume, and they wanted to buy. So I partnered with Filip Hodas, the first time, to do these first rings. And you can believe me, you don't have to believe me, I'm pretty sure that if you ask fans in their community and the next jobs that we did, we were not selling to Dota fans. We were selling to their market, to their users that were participating there. I have to dress to what they want to buy, because if you look at what other teams did, 100Thieves or some other ones, they only were making 20,000, but they were literally just making money out of their fan base, and I was trying not to do that specifically. That's why we can create a completely different IP, intellectual property, so I wouldn't cater to the community that I know that they might not have that money.

What we did with this artist is that we have a rev share with them. They make a lot of the money that we make and we split the money together. The first one, Filip Hodas, was a big creator, and I wanted that to be as good as possible, even though I left a lot a lot of money with him instead of with us because I needed that ring to be as incredible as possible. The second one was this gentleman called... Oh my God, I forgot his name. Great artist from Malaysia. I forgot his name, I'm so sorry. And it was more like a whimsical world that I wanted to do, like a vision of the Dota map and those things, but that guy didn't have that many followers, and the last one that we used for vinyls... These guys had no followers, these guys have 3000 followers, so they're not famous at all. These people have never been able to make money before like this.

And again, this is not a fee, it's like a revenue share, so they get a lot of the money. It's a partnership between us.

If I ever feel that we have something that we want to do within the community and there is a specific value and utility that we're going to give to those NFTs, and we're going to really lean on the OG experience, on OG Dota for Dota fans, I would absolutely find people within the community to work with.

Alteclere: Makes a lot of sense to me, so thank you for the explanation.

JMR: Yeah, of course.

Alteclere: Then, my follow-up question, this is because if you don't aim to sell it to the Dota community, it seems to get a lot of promotion on the Twitter which may be useful, sponsoring I don't know, but I think that's really harmed the brand in the last year, it got a lot of attention in the Dota scene without being aimed at the Dota scene; and it was never clear to me that that you didn't try to sell it into the Dota scene, but like try to aim it outwards. So yeah, that that is something that's definitely also hurt my view on OG, that I thought OG was trying to make money out of the Dota scene with those pictures, or like with those NFTs, instead of selling them outwards and feeding the money back into the scene.

JMR: I think that's a great question. OK, it's a great point, so let me just explain a few things first.

The reason why it caught fire is because Gorgc started saying those things online even though there are all of them [?]. But most of them not true, and even though they have NBA that has made over $400 million on NFTs, even though there is every team, and the Weekend, and hundreds of millions of art- yeah, okay, but like thousands of artists are doing things with NFTs, Gorgc [redacted].

[redacted]

[redacted, redacted]

I think that I... as OG, we have account that we express a lot of things in that account, and we have a lot of partners and a lot of themes that we have said. We have even talked about, I don't know, s1mple destroying everybody, and if you really look at the numbers of tweets that we have issued, the ones that we have done supporting this activity, I don't think that there is a direct correlation of "hey, if you like Dota, buy this".

But we are part of this, so I have not tried to do it as a promotion. It's more than something that we're actually part of [proud of?].

So OK, here it says, "I don't think that is because [redacted]". Is that, uh, is this because Gorgc? In the chat?

Because I think [redacted]. And I think [redacted].

[redacted]

[redacted]

I am extremely proud of what we were doing with NFTs, extremely proud. The fact that we were the first e-sports team ever to be in Nifty Gateway, the fact that we were the first e-sports team to be able to do it on Binance, is something that I'm very proud of.

Because it's very, very hard, you know, to do those things, I'm doing this successfully and finding the right artists and doing the right strategy... I'm very proud of, and if you believe that by me sharing my happiness or sharing this with the audience I have hurt the OG brand - I'll take the input and I will think about it, you know, because maybe the OG brand that you guys have in mind and the OG brand that I have in mind might not be exactly the same, you know.

I know Manon, for example, wanted to talk a little bit about the Dota economics. I don't know if this would be a good segue?

Manon: Well, what I think for sure is that it might be a good thing to also, you know, maybe explain the reality of what the finances of a Dota team look like in order to explain also why some organizations try to find different type of partnerships and try to find different ways to generate [revenue?inaduble]?

I think maybe explaining just the basics is probably something interesting. That's just my opinion.

JMR: But I think there's a misconception, thinking that all e-sports people are rich and that we are just floundering and swimming in money, and I think that this would be a little bit more complicated to explain, but let's just go with me for a second. OK, I'm going to close the chat, otherwise it's hard for me to explain it.

I run OG Esports, OK, so OG Esports has specific costs, meaning things that we spend money on. So I spend money on salaries for players, I spend money on all the things that the players might need from bootcamps to food to travels to peripherals to jerseys to medical assistance to emotional coaches to managers that will help them do that. OK, you know, like that is X amount of money; and then I need money to run operations and run the social media, Manon salary, Dorian, Allen, my salaries and everybody in the company that we have jobs to do, OK. And then we have... just imagine that it was just a Dota team, OK, without really getting into numbers, let's say that the Dota running of the operations of competitive is X, and let's say that the salaries of the employees and the staff and their health insurance and pensions and health and all that are Y. So very simple, I have to be able to make at the end of the year X + Y for these to be able to be sustainable. If I just make X + Y, I have enough money to run the company, correct? OK, so how do we make money?

We make money, the one that everybody talks about - prize pool. Price pool is great, OG has made a lot of money, but prize pool is not for the org. Prize pool is for the players. There is a very small, very very small percentage or part that the orgs keep. And by the way, this is why e-sports orgs do not want to sign Dota roster. Because the truth is that the biggest [money comes from the?inaudible] prize pool and the players, rightfully so, do not want to share with orgs in big parts.

Another way that I can make money is through sponsorship deals. But let's be realistic guys, because I think everybody is just living in an unrealistic world, in order for a brand to give us money, to be associated with us, they need us to be able to provide a specific exposure for them and a specific value for them. These are not just donations, these are business decisions that those brands make. I want to get this in return. If I put this money in this company, I will get the exposure to these fans on these audiences and this way.

But a lot of the e-sports orgs do not have the following in Dota to be able to provide that value to those sponsors. When they make a post, they get no followers, they get no viewers, they get no KPIs, they get no nothing. Furthermore, one of the main things that people want is they want airtime with the players, meaning content.

I am sure that if you guys read through Reddit you will see that no Dota player wants to do content.

And actually, a lot of it is organizations that have approached Dota roster end up not signing them because they do not want to make content and they will not therefore create the value for them and their business partners and their sponsors. So now we have an ecosystem where the money that we get from them is very little, prize pool, even if you win - I mean we win a lot, - what happened with the people that don't win? There is no money coming back and they have a very hard time commercializing data from sponsors, and when they do, they still don't want to do content.

I am extremely lucky that I have the guys that I have, that they will do content with me, they will do things with me, but I can tell you that not every other team wants to do it.

OK, so now I have X cost plus Y cost, now I have to figure out how to pay for it. I have a little bit of the share prize pool. Then I have a little bit from the sponsors. And I can tell you guys, doesn't cover everything. So I can see why most of esports organizations within Dota are struggling to stay. And instead of just constantly saying, oh, you guys were doing anything wrong, just figure out the economics, y'know, in the end of the day, all these companies are here to try to make a profit or to try to create something of value, and right now the economics do not hold it.

I was going to say "off the record", obviously cannot be off the record, there is 60 people in this room, but even being the most famous e-sports Dota org in the world - yeah, we struggle making enough money to survive at the end it. So imagine how much the rest of them struggle.

So now we have to figure out what else to do. OK, so let's sell merch. Merch is the one that everybody says. Well, when you sell merch, OK, let's just break merch ecosystem.

In order for me to sell a jersey for €50, it's costing me 40 to make. So I only make, imagine, 10 on profits, and that doesn't even start paying for the salary of the person inside the company that I do. So if I want to sell this year 40,000 jerseys, I still be losing money, you know? So I make revenue, but I do not make profits, because the cost of making them will be higher. So the reason why we make merch is not to make money of our funds, it's a brand exercise, it's for us to consolidate the brand, it's for us to continue to tell the story of the brand, it's to create brand affinity with our fans and a conversation with them, not to make money. Honestly, we lose money every single time we do merch. So, but we still do it because we think it's a very important thing to do.

OK, so merch is not really a way of making money. Prize pool is not a way of making money. Sponsorships don't see value on these.

So what do we do?

And this is what everybody else in this sport is doing, OK, they get funding. They get money from another company so they can offset their costs versus their revenue. But what happens when you get money from someone is that you have to become someone else. So, the person that was here before, I'm sorry if I... Alterete?

Alteclere: Alteclere, yeah.

JMR: Sorry, sorry, yeah. OK, so I had to make a binary decision of "do I fundraise and become someone else" or "do I try my very hard to make money in a different ways being as careful as I can so I don't hurt the brand"

So so far I've chosen... we have chosen, as a collective, to do it internally, and when we get a partner, we try really, really hard to make it the right partner, you know, with the betting company, we try our best to do it with the best one of them, with the crypto thing we try to do the best out of them.

But you know, it's like, oh God. It's so difficult, you know. So I am going to make mistakes and I'll be here, you know, to apologise for them, even though I'm not sure this one is one of them, you know. But I have seen the [inaudible] which is why I'm here, you know?

Manon: Are we have someone willing to ask a question, I believe?

JMR: Yeah, absolutely.

Manon: I invited you to join the chat in your request, I believe your username is SinO?.. Whenever you feel like accepting the request or whenever you see it, feel free to join the chat.

SinO: Oh, OK. Sorry it's just first time I'm using that, so... Thank you! So sorry, it's not my mother tongue so...

All: No problem, hi, welcome.

SinO: I think Manon is French, so maybe you can help me with some words.

Manon: Of course!

SinO: It is very interesting, first of all, this is very cool to do, and it's always something that... yeah. And and my question will be about this. It's sort of something so you know, blurry, for us, when you're just here to support a team or any enterprise or any other brand or, you know, when you want to cheer for them because you love the team, you love the the product or anything; it's always so blurry for us to understand and I think numbers are quite important in the way of, I don't know if it's the exact word, but my question will be why is it so hard? And maybe there is a very good reason, I don't want to say that, you know, you are all trying to cheat or anything, but why organization or brand or anything - I think you are a brand now? OG, is it a brand, or...? How can we call OG?..

Manon: You could call it a brand, yeah.

JMR: Whatever you want.

SinO: OK. So why, as a brand, you can't say, "OK, on our website, for example, you will have every number, that's all that we need, the salaries are costing us this much, the Jersey are costing this much, if you buy something from us we will receive this amount of money", and having like some transparency, être transparent?

Manon: Yeah, so your question is pretty much why don't we have like a full transparency of all expenses for organization?

SinO: Exactly yeah, and this is a kind of a general question. But I think you are more close to me and this kinda of, you know, question I have because you are in it. And I really wonder why numbers are such a secret. For some, you know, very huge - I I can get it, but for some smaller organization I think it's a plus if they are coming very clean and very - not clean in the way, you know, just transparent and OK, the organization is costing us this, and in the end we make some profit, but yeah, how much and maybe with the the sponsors like NFTs that some people don't like, some people are OK with it, I think this would clear a bit some of the...

JMR: Yeah, let me address it. Yeah, so first thank you for the question. Second, let's break this down in a few ways.

First, this creates a competitive problem. I can't make public the ways that I pay the players, because if you knew it then you'll be like OK, I can pay this guy $1000 more and then I can get him from my team, that's very dangerous.

Second, we have something called antitrust laws. Antitrust laws means that owners cannot call each other to decide how much we cannot pay everybody. If we were to make those numbers public, we could inadvertently do so because, let's say for example- or even example, I believe that NiP players are getting paid X, so I'm going to go to my players and I'm going to be like, hey, you're not getting more than X, look at them, they're getting this money. It creates the possibility to create trust issues and and monopolies and conglomerate issues.

Also, I don't think it's fair that you should know how much, for example, what Bonker makes. I don't think you should know how much money he gets paid. I think that you want to know, but I don't think that you need to know.

I want to know how much Cristiano Ronaldo gets paid, I want to know how much his wife gets paid, I want to know how much they spend on their houses and I want to know how much they, I don't know, their food bills are.

But I don't need to know. But we have come to a place where we mix a little bit the idea of transparency with just pure curiosity.

I believe that most publics [inaudible] they have a public offering, meaning that they sell their shares and their stock to the public, and they become public. But while we are private, we don't really have to state where do we spend the money. Can we do a better job informing of things that I just said, like how these economics work? Yes, but, I would like to ask a question from you. What do you want out of OG? Do you want OG to be big and famous around the world? Do you want OG to be a small company where there is 50 people here in the Discord, or 60 people? Because I have to be able to project a version out to the market. It's called B2B, business to business. That OG is a strong and well run company and that's why you should do business with us. And if I go around telling them "hey guys, we're nearly making money now, to do design when we do merch we do this", well, nobody want to do business with us, you know?

So at the end of the day, all the other companies that are bullshitting their way through the market would be more exciting for us.

So you know, it's very, very very thin line between being honest and being transparent, and you're literally just blowing your foot off by trying to do business that way because you are trying be good to your consumers and to your fans and to your evangelists and your champions. But you also need to realize that if you don't appeal to the mainstream, you're never going to get the funding. You're never going to get those deals. You're never going to get that, you know.

I feel that as long as there trust in there between the community and us, I can live with that, but clearly I needed to do this more often. You know, where I come here and talk to you guys.

Ludejano: A supporting point of what's said to one of the things you were saying earlier on about the whole salary thing, of the idea that it shouldn't necessarily be expected for us to be privy to what people salaries are, if you've ever worked in a big company, and there's a lot of companies where it's impolite even if someone is doing the exact same job as you, it's impolite to ask them what they're getting paid because sometimes someone with more experience might end up getting paid slightly more, so as as much as anything else, knowing how much people like Manon and JMR takes and how much anyone takes it's just impolite, I think.

JMR: That's very tricky, so it's really tricky because... I'll give you an example, okay? I know it's very tricky and it's very unfair, but we live in a world where your job salary does not depend on how good you do your job. It depends on what it feels that your job should be paid. So you could be an amazing artist and you will not get paid as much as a mediocre doctor, you know, because the world has decided that as the doctor, you could pay that. So in OG, I can tell you, we're not laundering money. We're actually a very conservative, financially conservative company. I think that we have good salaries and we have a very young workforce and very talented, and we are very aware that we are right now in the climb. I have never discussed the salary of anybody in front of anybody else within the company, and if you were, for example, to say, wait a second, imagine like CS GO player makes more money than a Dota player, how is that fair? Because the CS GO ecosystem thinks that you should get paid more and there is more money there. Why should a basketball player make 1000 times more than a handball player? No no. You know, but that's just what the market is. Because the market says that I am willing to pay more money towards basketball than in handball. So yes, it's very tricky.

Also, the numbers have changed too fast, you know.

I feel like I will have to give you weekly reports. You know. I get weekly reports myself.

SinO: This is very, very cool. I just love the idea. And just keep going, keep doing those things, because I think it's important. But just to be clear, I don't care about your salary or Manon's or players'. I think you can, for example, because you stayed focused on the salary, but you can say just add them all. I understand your point of view, you want to be competitive and the market is what it is, but I personally don't care if someone makes this or this salary. It's just, you know, you could put - and this is a general thing, not just for OG, - I think this could be nice for society in general. You put every settles in one number, so we can't know how much is paid this person or this person, but you have the global global idea of how much money OG need to run, just to help people understand that yeah, you have a lot of costs and it's not to point out how these guys is doing more money than me or anything, it's just a global thing. So yeah, you put every salary together, so we can't know how much people make, but we understand...

JMR: Great, but why do you want to see that? Why do you want to see that?

SinO: It's because of you have to justify or-

JMR: I don't have to justify that, that's the thing, that's the part where we disagree.

SinO: No no no no no. Just let me finish my sentence. You need to justify when you get a sponsorship that people don't like. But as you said, you love the idea, you love - OK, but I think people don't get it. Like you said, OG won two TIs, they are multimillionaire brand - no, as you said, the money goes to the player, so no, the brand does not own a multimillion dollars or like some people have phantasies about it. So don't think that I want to know your salary, this was just a general idea, maybe not exactly this one, but some little things, sometimes you can just put some numbers so people know. Because X&Y just won't never talk to anyone but those who are already in a business. So for the spectators like us, this won't mean nothing. But this is just an idea. I don't say this is the best idea of something that you have to do. But I think sometimes put numbers so people can see clearly what's going on - could be helpful to say OK, so you see, we need the amount of money so we will need some sponsorships and something like that.

JMR: Yeah, thanks, impact I understand and I want to think about it, how to provide insight without losing competitive edge. But thank you for the insight, yeah.

SinO: Yes, exactly. Thank you for your time and thank you for the Q&A. This is very good.

Manon: Thank you, thank you for coming. If you're OK with it, Jay, I would like to read you some of the other questions that were written 'cause I think some of them are interesting. So this one is a little off topic. It's not about NFTs or cryptocurrencies, but it's just something that has been mentioned a couple of times, so someone asked, how is the process of opening an SEA store going? Because I think a lot of people were wondering that.

JMR: Yes, yes. So, look, I am so passionate about merch and it's been really, really hard to find the person to lead merch at the same time that I'm doing also a few other things. So at the end of the day we have a manpower problem, you know.

The way that I'm very passionate about creating an OG SEA and it's honestly been in every one of my business plans since I joined the company and before the company, where OG has a headquarters in SEA, we open an SEA store and we find a way to directly interact with our SEA fanbase and creates touch points and stories and activations with them, and this is part of a big thing that we want to do in SEA.

The problem with the SEA store - again, full transparency, - is that our manufacturers right now are in in Serbia, are in Europe. We started looking for manufacturing in Thailand, in Indonesia, and in Vietnam, but during COVID it's been very very hard to get samples and to get them to help us, and we've not been able to travel there.

I cannot manufacture something in Serbia and sell it in Southeast Asia because by the time you guys buy it there, it will be worth $60 for a jersey and nobody will buy it.

So what we have to do in order to be able to open an SEA store is that we have to be able to build it in SEA, manufacture it in SEA, create quality control that is up to SEA standards, so the item is not sold at 60, but is sold at 30 or 20.

Also, you know SEA is a region, but there's a lot of different countries there that are played in very different ways. So if you go import, taxes, and import manufacturing or export in Indonesia, it's very different than Thailand. It's very different than Singapore, very different than Malaysia. So there is a chance or a way that the SEA store is actually a collection of mini stores. We just have not been able to do it because I have been trying to go to SEA for a year and I cannot get in, so I promise you guys, that is actually one of the things that I'm most passionate about, I'm super passionate about merch, and I'm super passionate about SEA, it's just not being able to make it happen yet.

After TI, I hope that different borders open up a little bit more and I can go there and hopefully set it up before we come back. Because yeah, so far every sample that we have got has not being up to the standards that we wanted, and I don't want to just to give you a bad product just because I want to hurry. And I mean, I can tell you millions of stories, like the Pantone colors wouldn't match our jersey's, and I send them the jersey and say, "hey, can you make me a jersey that looks like this one?", and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, by the time they send it is a different color.

So yeah, it's a little bit tricky, so little tricky.

A lot of companies solve this by just making these deals with other middle groups, but we did it in the past and we felt that OG customization of our jersey, for example, could not be delivered by them. You know, our jersey has a very interesting shape, the shoulder pads look like an armor and the center plate of the panel... And the only way we could do the jerseys there is with a normal cut. The leaves are one cut, the front panel is one cut, the back panels one cut and that's it. We don't want to make a standard jersey. We wanted to make our jersey, you know.

Manon: OK, so I'm going to keep reading the questions, if you feel like you've already answered a part of it in the previous questions, please feel free to just tell me or skip through, but I want to try to go through as many questions as possible.

So one that was asked, why does OG keep focusing on things that OG fans have obvious aversion to? So I think this again.

JMR: Haha, okay, let's go for it.

OG, I want to just make a little bit more clear one thing, OG right now is based on Dota, but we have more than Dota, we have two other games. I understand that our OG Dota fans having big aversion [?inaudible] on that, but we have seen that this is where the market and the money is moving, and what the opportunity that opened up in front of us was, and we have chosen to aapitalize or initiate activities in this industry by doing it the best way we could with the best partners possible.

I see, and trust me, it is hard, you know, I have my own feelings, I'm part of Dota community, and I've been here for a long time. When somebody just goes online, somebody that we cherish, something we consider a friend and says, hey, you guys are doing this wrong - obviously it impacts me. I don't want to create sadness for anybody, but we felt that there was a opportunity here, and we decided to take a try on it.

I would also maybe segue these to another conversation from our friend before that I wanted more clarity.

I get a lot the feedback of "why don't you sign good brands"?

Well, no shit, I'm trying, you know, I'm really, really trying, but it's not that easy because when you're trying to get like, for example, BMW, it took us a year - a year! - talking to them every week to make this happen. It was so hard to make it happen and we're so proud to do that, you know. But OG cannot survive just out of BMW's. We can't. We can't. The truth is that the best brands that they know, that you get something out of them, they are adding value to you, but that value sometimes is not really monetary, you know.

You have to figure out what are the different things that you get. You know, like BMW has this and this summation, I can do this. Red Bull is amazing, and I can do this with them, but I still need other things to do to be able to offset this, so I decided, this came and we decided that this was one of those things that we wanted to do.

And again, I think the jury is still out. You know, I don't think that I did this wrong. But I am willing to consider it that so far on the point of time that we are right now, it's still have not been explained or educated well enough.

But I believe, I honestly believe in this project. I believe in this product. And I hope that you know, I do a better chance and a better job trying to explain it to them and create an authentic value for everybody and we'll see, I hope I can succeed on this one.

Manon: OK. We have someone requesting to speak again. I have sent you an invite. Hello, can you hear us, hi?

RIP: Hello hello, thank you for having me. Second, thank you for this Q&A, it's really helpful. I have a simple question, I think in the start, you said something like "it's a way for poor people to invest like $100 into it, it's not like big investments, where you have to invest a lot of money", but don't you think that after a while, after it becomes famous, it will be the same, like you should have a lot of money to invest or will it stay like this for a while?

JMR: Great point. There's two different questions. One of them is how do you enter, and the other one is how you can make real money.

So let's say, you have 100 bucks and I have $100 and we want to invest the money that we have. I cannot buy 1/10 of a car, I cannot buy 1/10 of a house, regardless of how much the house is worth, it doesn't matter if the house is worth a million or the house is worth 100 millions. I cannot buy .001 of the house or .00001 of the house. I can only buy a full house, but what crypto allows is to do investments of any money that you want and they are the ones that say OK, if this Bitcoin is worth 40,000 and you're only investing $100, you own .001 of the coin. If the coin goes up 20%, your investment goes up 20%.

So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what is the ultimate cost of the coin, it just matters what this market fluctuation is. If it goes up, your money goes up. If you put $1000 and it goes 20%, you make 20% of $1000. If I didn't have $1000 and I only had 100, I will only go up 20% of 100. That would be the simple mathematics.

Now, how do we become millionaires? Yes, you are right, because it's not possible to become a millionaire right now, buying bitcoins at 40,000. You don't have millions. When bitcoins were, I don't know, three dollars, people like you and me could go and buy them and we can make money like that and become millionaires. So right now this is not a millionaire scheme. This is "can you invest a little bit of money? Can you make a little bit of money at the end?", but at the end of the day it's an investment, some of them will pay out, some of them will not work for you and you will lose money.

But the difference is I can get in with whatever money I have and the fluctuation of the market will determine how much money I make or how much money I lose. But yes, it might be already too late, which is why constantly people are looking at other coins and the new thing and the new thing and these crypto punks, I don't know if you've seen those, or these boring apes, and the crypto piles were, like literally small NFTs, like pixels, there were very few very very small, and they were selling for, imagine, 300 bucks and then 1000 bucks.

Now they're selling for 800,000.

The same pixels.

Because at the end of the day is the demand, people want to buy them, people want to buy them. So now it's all about investing and money and all of that, but it just became public because before all these things used to happen behind closed doors for only rich people to participate, but now all of us are participating in this and we get to see all these crazy moves that people make, you know. Do I believe [inaudible] that low-tier NFT should be worth that much? If the answer is no, then don't participate.

But it's undeniable that there is something happening right now in the world, you know, because we can see it. And there are people that are believing that it is going to be worth something and it is worth something because they are actually trading them.

Sorry, I don't know if I answered your question or I went on a rant.

...Are you there, RIP?

Manon: If you can hear us, thank you for your question. Hopefully you got an answer there, so let me proceed.

JMR: Oh, I was going to, sorry, I was going to explain actually something different, even though I don't want to bring back the whole world of what mining is. But remember that I said that I was going to explain mining.

OK.

So I'm going to go very fast and I'm gonna explain it.

So.

When you make a deal with the stock options and you're going to buy in Wall Street, you have to call an agent to say, hey agent, I want to buy $10,000 worth of Tesla, and the agent will go to the floor and I will find you a seller.

But you are in a way paying middleman's, you're paying the stockbrokers, you are paying the whole Wall Street industry, and they are making money. Those are in a way, the banks or the casinos. They always win, those are the ones that win. We all the rest or just trading and trying to figure out how to make money.

But in cryptos, the transactions are managed automatically, and those transactions and those mathematical things that are happening for the transaction and the authentications, it's what mining does. So mining, in a way, those are going from those things that you're solving, in big part is the upkeep of the whole ecosystem, trading and creating those transactions. So instead of you asking for money in return, like you will pay a broker, what you get out of this is the money that you will be paying those brokers in the form of the token itself.

Does that make sense?

So the miners are actually the ones holding the ecosystem, and the transactions, and the mathematics behind it. It is just instead of paying the money as brokers on Wall Street, we're actually doing this.

I don't, I don't know, Manon... How weird, that was, how I explained it.

Manon: No, you can go ahead and feel free to elaborate on whatever topic it is you feel like you need details about, that's no problem. Is it OK if I keep on reading some of the questions?

JMR: [read a question quickly and in hushed voice, talking to himself] Can you explain this question a bit more? WW, what you meant?

I'm going to have to leave in a few minutes, Séb is waiting for me, I had a meeting with him.

I could come back, in 30 minutes or so, if you guys want to stay around, I don't know if anybody would like to stay.

Ludejano: Would it be OK if I ask one very quick question?

JMR: Yeah, of course.

Ludejano: Theoretically, if OG and other sort of tier one teams that are currently all in contact, all in contests for TI, if it was positive to all the tier one teams that they could willingly choose for the prize pool to be slightly reduced in order for some of the some of the money from the prize pool to be redistributed towards the Tier 2 and Tier 3 scene to promote the sustainability of the scene as a whole, do you think it would be something that they would consider?

JMR: No, we have asked already.

Ludejano: Fair enough.

JMR: We've been asking for years.

Ludejano: Yeah, the problem there isn't on the org, I don't blame the org for that, I blame Valve.

JMR: I would say that I'm not on the business of bashing Valde, and I want to maybe leave with this thought, I think Valde is an incredible company that are doing a lot of things that are amazing. Unfortunately, I can tell you from experience, you can't get all of them right. You can't. So I understand what they're trying to do, I support them with what they're trying to do, even though I disagree with what they're trying to do and some of the things that they try to do but it would be very bad for me to say that I know better than them because they're very smart.

So I know what they're trying to do, I follow the thought process. The truth is that when you have TI being this incredibly large number, it drags a lot of attention and is the best marketing tool they have for the whole year, you know.

And therefore they don't have to spend any money on marketing. So they don't have to spend money on marketing because they have the biggest event every year and it's the biggest number. And when a team like ours wins it, you know, the guys become the highest grossing owners, which in a way becomes a whole marketing activity for them, and then those guys open their own companies, which ends up becoming their own marketing tool, so they're geniuses. If you think about it, you know, think about it, Johan and Séb, the guys spend their own money to open this company and they spend their own money to get us here and pay our salaries, and now we have OG brand in other games, like in CS GO because they spend their own money, and they could not have to spend their own money if they were not making that money so I see what they're doing, even though now that I have a company and I don't need that money anymore, because we're trying to be profitable in other ways, my objective would be like hey guys, can you please take some of this prizepool, put it on the majors, put it on the minors, put it on the tier two scene, so we all make money, so now I have a way to compete against great teams all year and everybody can make money. And if everybody can make money and be happy, I'm happy.

Yes, but I don't want to do that because what I already explained, you know, their marketing is a different one.

Ludejano: Yeah, right, so that makes sense.

JMR: Hey Manon, do you want me to leave and then come back in 30 minutes? What do you guys feel?

Manon: Uhm, I feel like it would be maybe more appropriate to try and schedule a new one. Maybe we can do another time to have people from different time zones also join these, something would be interesting.

JMR: Is uhh.... is Sam here?

Manon: Is Sam here? Uhh, let me see...

JMR: You guys, I would like to finish the thought, to say that... we read everything that you say. We see the comments. We see the messages, I read all of them, you know. I don't like feeling like the bad guy. I'm OK if I have to be the bad guy, but obviously we're not trying to do anything weird or scammy, I'm not trying. And you should know that at the end of the day, you know who my bosses are. My bosses are Johan and Séb. If you felt, or if they felt that I was doing something bad, you know, they will crush me and fire me and all that. So I do feel that I have to do a better job spending time with you guys and talking through some of these things because maybe I have delayed too much. But you know, have a little bit of faith that we're not trying to do something bad, even if sometimes it looks like it.

Manon: Sorry to interrupt you, Sam is here, so I've invited them to to speak.

Sam: Hi, I just heard that- hey! I just heard that somebody has been asking for me. Sorry-

JMR: Hey! I really, truly did this for you. Yes, we did this for you, and we did this whole Q&A because of you, so I was trying to hope that I could resolve some of the questions or the things that we talked about.

Sam: Well, that's awesome. Like if you have been doing this whole thing for me then I would appreciate next time being, errr, told about this a bit earlier, so I could-

JMR: Yes, sorry... Have you been recorded?

Manon: Yes, so no, that's fine, that's fine.

Sam: So I will definitely listen back to it. But did you address my questions that I left in the chat?

Manon: Yes, not all of them, but some of them were asked by other people. So overall, yes, I think they got all got an answer.

Sam: Well, that's good enough for me, then.

JMR: If not, Sam, I'll talk to you, and I will resolve them or just address them again. All right? I promise.

Sam: OK, well I will give it a listen and then we'll see whether you really did.

JMR: Awesome. Thank you so much for the comments of support and I would like to make clear about one thing. It is healthy that you guys question this thing. It is healthy that you put a mirror in front of us, you know, in case our bullshit goes too far. And it is healthy that when I saw what Sam wrote, my immediate reaction was not "oh no, she's talking back to me" - it's like "OK, why there is a feeling in community like this, because it needs to be addressed". So please continue to, you know, bring these things up, and that we can create our way for us to have these conversations. And if you guys believe that this is healthy, we can do it once a month. I can come here and we can just chat about e-sports and Dota and these things.

I think that in a way reputation and honor is something that we have to earn, you know. And when you guys feel that we're doing things that are not good, just call us [inaudible], and we'll be here.

Awesome. Well, great pleasure, for everybody, and I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye bye.

Manon: Yeah, thanks to everyone who came and have a good one guys. Thank you.