Source: Bruce Laurance / Getty
At 25, Delane Parnell has 15 employees and over $25 million raised for his eSports company PlayVS (pronounced Play Versus).
This fall, high schools across the country will officially offer competitive video game leagues and Parnell’s company will host competitions, compile stats and streams matches exclusively on the PlayVS platform.
That alone would be a huge accomplishment for any 25-year-old, but Parnell’s story is even more remarkable when you consider where it started.
The Detroit native got his first job at MetroPCS when he was 13 and worked over 40 hours a week to avoid the gangs and drugs in his neighborhood.
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“If I didn’t go to work and keep busy after school, the only alternative was to go back in my neighborhood and be in a gang,” he says. “I didn’t want that life.”
He eventually mastered the art of selling phones and saved enough to buy his own cell phone stores, owning and operating three Detroit locations at age 17.
“That whole time,” Parnell says, “I had one goal in mind: How can I get as rich as possible to get my whole family out of this situation?”
Hit the jump to see why Parnell eventually dropped out of school. Plus, learn how he went on to raise the largest initial investment ever secured by a Black-owned consumer Internet company.
Inc.com has the story of how Parnell went from dropping out of The University Of Michigan to securing the historic start-up investment for PlayVS:
Unable to find a balance between school and work, though, he dropped out after one semester. Around that time, he started reading about a startup with Detroit roots: Groupon, which was based in Chicago but co-founded by two Motor City natives.
“I was mad fascinated with their story, and how they were using software to help brick-and-mortar businesses with customer retention,” he says. “I fell in love with tech, head over heels.” When a friend gave him a ticket to the startup-centric Launch Festival in San Francisco, he was in heaven. “I talked to everybody,” he says. “Every person I could possibly find.”
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After visiting the Bay, Parnell returned to Detroit and started organizing his own events, inviting Kickstarter founder Charles Adler and Reddit co-founder (and Serena Williams’ hubby) Alexis Ohanian to speak.
Over the next few years, he bounced between jobs in the tech space, spending a few months at a venture capital firm and a year at a rapidly growing fiber optics startup.
His credibility grew, and so did his connections. He sought mentorship from a number of entrepreneurs, like Amanda Lewan and David Anderson, co-founders of Bamboo, one of Detroit’s largest co-working spaces..
In 2015, he quit his job and built a Call of Duty team, which he sold the following year to one of the leading organizations in eSports; he tried to launch a gaming league but couldn’t gain any traction.
On the dance floor at Austin’s South by Southwest festival in March 2017, Parnell bumped into a friend, venture capitalist Suzy Ryoo. A few feet away was another friend of hers–Pham, the investor from VC firm Science. Ryoo made an introduction.
The pair learned they shared a mutual interest in eSports, which was projected to be a $696 million industry in 2017. They exchanged contact info, and by the next day, Pham reached out: He wanted Parnell to start a company in Los Angeles, and he wanted to help fund it.
Read Parnell’s full come-up story on Inc. and follow PlayVS’s progress here.
