Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. I'm here today with the third episode of our new short form news show, 16 minutes, where we cover recent headlines, the A6 and Z way, offering expert takes on the trends involved and more. You can follow the show in its own feed in your favorite podcast player app. Our other episodes cover multiple news items and topics that this week we're doing

two separate short but deep dives connected to recent headlines, one on the opioid crisis,

which you can find in this feed or at A6NZ.com slash 16 minutes, and this episode, which is on

esports, gaming, and entertainment. So here's the news. The Fortnite World Cup just

happened this past weekend. It's the first time ever. It was the inaugural World Cup, and it actually

took place in the same exact stadium in New York that the U.S. Open for tennis takes place.

And the news was that besides the fact that this is a big new thing, was that a 16-year-old named

Kyle Giersdorf won $3 million, and that is actually

the largest prize ever for a single person in e-sports history. And by the way, his nickname or his

player name is Buga, and that's actually the name he got from his grandfather calling him Buga,

Buga, Buga, and he was a baby, which I think is really cute. Just to put this in even more

context before I introduce our experts, what's also really interesting about this is that this prize money is not that different from traditional physical sports.

Everyone's talking about how Buga earned more money than Tiger Woods did for winning the Masters.

And it's not even the biggest prize pool overall.

Dota 2's the international is the largest ever so far with over $30 million.

And that's what everyone's talking about.

To me, the real big news here is that 2 million people concurrently live streamed this

this past Sunday on Twitch and YouTube.

My friend Angela Watercutter at Wired pointed out that this is not as big as Game of Thrones,

but that's a hell of a lot, so it's slowly mainstreaming.

I'm going to introduce our A6NZ experts,

Andrew Chen, general partner, who covers our consumer vertical and Darcy Kuliken on the investing team for consumer. I want to hear from you guys, what's a broader category that this fits in,

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