When Your Startup Folds And Your Work Folds With It
Two years down the drain
It’s been one year since I found out I was losing my job via Twitter. I woke up, couldn’t access Slack, checked Twitter, and there it was. The news that G4 was closing its doors and presumably hitting my arse on the way out.
It was a dubious honour but not one that was unique in the world of business, particularly when that business is the gaming media business. The whole experience made me take some time off to evaluate what I was doing with my life, which is how I ended up here, applying for jobs with a big black hole that swallowed any of the work I touched in my last two years of employment.
Two years and five months, to be exact. Two years and five months of shifting goalposts and making content based on the whims of a few as opposed to the strategy of many, blindly stumbling around the darkness of the internet in the hope that something might ‘go viral’ and save us from a production hell.
It’s worth mentioning that G4 wasn’t exactly a startup. It was a legacy brand that Comcast tried [and failed] to revive, an exercise in hubris that cost so much money they could have pulled an entire Pacific Island out of poverty instead of throwing it into the abyss. It did have a startup mindset, however, something we were constantly reminded about. A startup mindset with a Comcast budget and a friends and family discount approach to hiring.
But this isn’t a story about why G4 failed.
If you want to read that story, you can read about it here at the Washington Post. This is a story about what happens when you invest two years and five months of your professional life in something that doesn’t just fail to launch but explodes spectacularly in the sky, crashing back down to earth in the flaming debris of your broken dreams.
Like so many failures before it, this one started with the best intentions.
I left my [awesome] job at Riot Games to go to G4 on the promise that we would ‘make cool shit’ and attempted to do that at the height of the pandemic, which came with its own challenges. And yet, despite these challenges, I like to think we rose to meet them, creating content that didn’t involve celebrities singing Imagine and therefore probably wasn’t the worst thing you saw during that period.
Our humble Twitch show lasted nine episodes before it was cancelled for not getting enough views, at which point the ‘cool’ in ‘make cool shit’ was forgotten. All we were left with was ‘make’ and ‘shit’ and so that’s what we did, we made piles of shit, throwing it against the wall and hoping it would stick, knowing that we only had so long before our creative direction would change again. This was all in the pursuit of eyeballs, a term I heard so much it made me want to claw mine out.
The thing I hated the most about the work we were doing was that it wasn’t even ours. At least, it didn’t feel like ours, as we had no agency when it came to our content strategy. It reminded me of the time I was stuck in the back of a taxi in Belgrade with a drunk driver and a meter that kept going up; there was nothing I could do or say to stop him from driving on the wrong side of the road.
Whenever my manager would raise concerns about these pieces of content, their goals, how they aligned with the goals of our team, and how they would help us grow as an endemic voice in the industry, the leadership team would listen carefully to our concerns and tell us to do it anyway.
This way of working produced a whole lot of the aforementioned ‘shit’ that I still struggle to stand behind, hold my hand to heart, and say that I’m proud of what I made.
And that’s if I can even find it.
Nearly everything I wrote over this period is gone, purged from the annals of internet history because it no longer aligned with our brand strategy. Even if I wanted to show someone the work that I’m not proud of doing, I don’t have the option, which leaves a rather awkward question looming over my head.
If you work in content creation and you don’t have any content to show for it, did you ever even work in content creation?
This whole experience at G4 made me take a year off which, honestly, has been amazing. I’ve been working for seven-ish years in the esports and gaming industry and I was burned out. I took time off to write a book, wrote two, and then decided to get back on the job hunt.
Which is how I ended up here.
Applying for jobs, facing the usual amount of rejections [I’m a writer, my skin is made of diamonds by now], until one job application asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks.
What was the last thing you made that sparked joy?
Shit.
What was the last thing I made that sparked joy?
I panicked and went back to try and look through everything that I had written at G4 to try and find something that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to share and found that it had all vanished. What hadn’t vanished was nothing but a ghoulish memory of everything I never wanted to do in the first place, which is when I realised that those two years and five months were gone.
Just like that.
I think this is a cautionary tale of working on something you no longer believe in. Yeah, money, that’s important, more important than ever with this rising cost of living, but at the end of the day we all need something that we can stand behind and say this is mine, I made this, and it is something that I believe in.
Which, in a roundabout way, is why I started writing on Medium. No one will force me to say words that aren’t ones I already have in my mouth. This is me, and these are mine, and I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and find out from Twitter that someone has taken them away from me.
