Why Gaming Group FaZe Clan Went Public Today

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

The FaZE Clan.
Courtesy of the FaZe Clan

To most people over 35, even those that consider themselves gaming gurus—the name FaZe Clan might be associated with mystery or even confusion. Is it an esports team owner? An influencer hype house? Or is FaZe Clan a merchandising company? Maybe it’s just a group of teenagers filming audacious “Fortnite” trickshots.


FaZe Clan CEO Lee Trink would probably tell you the Hollywood-based outfit is all of that, and then some. During a bombastic showing at NASDAQ headquarters where FaZe Clan rang the opening bell to mark its first day of trading as a public company, Trink proclaimed “now is the time for Gen Z to lead” the culture – while holding hands with FaZe content creators, of course.

Despite worming its way into the public consciousness relatively recently, FaZe Clan has been around for over a decade. Here’s a brief recap of the company’s origins, and their ambitions going forward as a publicly-traded gaming firm.

“The Voice of Youth Culture”

FaZe Clan’s start was simple enough – in 2010 three talented “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” players linked up after meeting on Xbox Live to start a YouTube channel documenting their trickshots and antics in-game. Their first series was called “Illcams” and caught the attention of many teenage boys who wanted to both beat—and be—the players. Within two years the channel had a million subscribers and FaZe was competing in esports tournaments, laying the groundwork for what would become over 35 esports championship wins to date.

In 2014, FaZe bought a mini-mansion in New York and became one of the earlier entrants into the YouTube influencer house scene – though it has since upgraded to swankier digs in Los Angeles. Since then, the brand has grown its following to 500 million followers across social media, with 80% of that audience aged 13-34.

CEO Trink (a former Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney-turned-music executive who managed artists including Kid Rock) started leading the company in 2018. He oversees about 35 content creators and 15 pro esports players, plus the other 40-plus people on FaZe’s business side.

Lately, FaZe has expanded more into merchandising in an attempt to turn a profit. It recently sold $1 million worth of mouse pads designed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami in one day and in recent months opened several pop-up shops.

“FaZe Clan will fund investments and we will create the product and we’ll own a bigger piece of the upside. That’s the future of the creator economy,” Trink told CNBC.

FaZe Clan CEO Lee TrinkCourtesy of Lee Trink

The Money Problem

Trink and the Clan clearly seem confident in FaZe’s potential. Wall Street doesn’t seem convinced just yet.

FaZe first announced plans to go public last year and said the deal could be worth $1 billion. But it's actually a $725 million SPAC merger, and the new entity FaZe Holdings Inc. was created by merging with a blank-check company set up by wealth management firm B. Riley.

It’s been a tough year for SPAC deals so far and most companies that sought a SPAC merger deal lost nearly half their value or more in the first six months of 2022 as investors wouldn’t stop selling. FaZe could rise above this trend, or become the latest to see its stock sink to new lows.

In its first day of trading, FaZe’s stock dipped 30%, trading at about $9 per share.

There’s clearly valuable brand potential in FaZe; Forbes estimated the outfit’s worth at $400 million. But it isn’t profitable just yet. In a 2021 report FaZe noted more than half its revenue came from sponsorships. and it made roughly $53 million last year – compared to $28.7 million in overall losses.

It remains to be seen whether FaZe Clan’s stock will sink or swim. After all, it’s unlikely most of the core Gen Z audience is trading its stock.

The cash from the IPO deal could allow FaZe to invest more into content and direct-to-consumer merch, adding value and boosting its bottom line. FaZe will also look to buy out smaller firms in the future; Lee Trink told dot.LA last October that he is targeting acquisitions of content companies that could help FaZe break into streaming services like Netflix and HBO.
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'Open Letter' Proposing 6-Month AI Moratorium Continues to Muddy the Waters Around the Technology

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
'Open Letter' Proposing 6-Month AI Moratorium Continues to Muddy the Waters Around the Technology
Evan Xie

AI continues to dominate the news – not just within the world of technology, but mainstream news sources at this point – and the stories have entered a by-now familiar cycle. A wave of exciting new developments, releases and viral apps is followed by a flood of alarm bells and concerned op-eds, wondering out loud whether or not things are moving too fast for humanity’s own good.

With OpenAI and Microsoft’s GPT-4 arriving a few weeks ago to massive enthusiasm, we were overdue for our next hit of jaded cynicism, warning about the potentially dire impact of intuitive chatbots and text-to-image generators.

Sure enough, this week, more than 1,000 signatories released an open letter calling for all AI labs to pause training any new systems more powerful than GPT-4 for six months.

What does the letter say?

The letter calls out a number of familiar concerns for anyone who has been reading up on AI development this past year. On the most immediate and practical level, it cautions that chatbots and automated text generators could potentially eliminate vast swathes of jobs previously filled by humans, while “flood[ing] our information channels with propaganda and untruth.” The letter then continues into full apocalypse mode, warning that “nonhuman minds” could eventually render us obsolete and dominate us, risking “loss of control of our civilization.”

The six-month break, the signatories argue, could be used to jointly develop shared safety protocols around AI design to ensure that they remain “safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” They also suggest that AI developers work in collaboration with policymakers and politicians to develop new laws and regulations around AI and AI research.

The letter was signed by several AI developers and experts, along with tech industry royalty like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. TechCrunch does point out that no one from inside OpenAI seems to have signed it, nor Anthropic, a group of former OpenAI developers who left to design their own “safer” chatbots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did speak to the Wall Street Journal this week in reference to the letter, noting that the company has not yet started work on GPT-5 and that time for safety tests has always been built into their development process. He referred to the letter’s overall message as “preaching to the choir.”

Critics of the letter

The call for an AI ban was not without critics, though. Journalist and investor Ben Parr noted that the vague language makes it functionally meaningless, without any kind of metrics to gauge how “powerful” an AI system has become or suggestions for how to enforce a global AI ban. He also notes that some signatories, including Musk, are OpenAI and ChatGPT competitors, potentially giving them a personal stake in this fight beyond just concern for the future of civilization. Others, like NBC News reporter Ben Collins, suggested that the dire AI warnings could be a form of dystopian marketing.

On Twitter, entrepreneur Chris Pirillo noted that “the genie is already out of the bottle” in terms of AI development, while physicist and author David Deutsch called out the letter for confusing today’s AI apps with the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems still only seen in sci-fi films and TV shows.

Legitimate red flags

Obviously, the letter speaks to relatively universal concerns. It’s easy to imagine why writers would be concerned by, say, BuzzFeed now using AI to write entire articles and not just quizzes. (The website isn’t even using professional writers to collaborate with and copy-edit the software anymore. The new humans helping out “Buzzy the Robot” to compose its articles are non-editorial employees from the client partnership, account management, and product management teams. Hey, it’s just an “experiment,” freelancers!)

But it does once more raise some red flags about the potentially misleading ways that some in the industry and the media are discussing AI, which continues to make these kinds of high-level discussions around the technology more cumbersome and challenging.

A recent viral Twitter thread credited ChatGPT-4 with saving a dog’s life, leading to a lot of breathlessly excited coverage about how computers were already smarter than your neighborhood veterinarian. The owner entered the dog’s symptoms into the chatbot, along with copies of its blood work, and ChatGPT responded with the most common potential ailments. As it turns out, a live human doctor tested the animal for one of the bot’s suggested illnesses and accurately guessed the diagnosis. So the computer is, in a very real sense, a hero.

Still, considering what might be wrong with dogs based on their symptoms isn’t what ChatGPT does best. It’s not a medical or veterinary diagnostic tool, and it doesn’t have a database of dog ailments and treatments at the ready. It’s designed for conversations, and it’s just guessing as to what might be wrong with the animal based on the texts on which it was trained, sentences and phrases that it has seen connected in human writing in the past. In this case, the app guessed correctly, and that’s certainly good news for one special pupper. But there’s no guarantee it would get the right answer every time, or even most of the time. We’ve seen a lot of evidence that ChatGPT is perfectly willing to lie, and can’t actually tell the difference between truth and a lie.

There’s also already a perfectly solid technology that this person could have used to enter a dog’s symptoms and research potential diagnoses and treatments: Google search. A search results page also isn’t guaranteed to come up with the correct answer, but it’s as if not more reliable in this particular use case than ChatGPT-4, at least for now. A quality post on a reliable veterinary website would hopefully contain similar information to the version ChatGPT pulled together, except it would have been vetted and verified by an actual human expert.

Have we seen too many sci-fi movies?

A response published in Time by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky – long considered a thought leader in the development of artificial general intelligence – argues that the open letter doesn’t go far enough. Yudkowsky suggests that we’re currently on a path toward “building a superhumanly smart AI,” which will very likely result in the death of every human being on the planet.

No, really, that’s what he says! The editorial takes some very dramatic turns that feel pulled directly from the realms of science-fiction and fantasy. At one point, he warns: “A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.” This is the actual plot of the 1995 B-movie “Virtuosity,” in which an AI serial killer app (played by Russell Crowe!) designed to help train police officers grows his own biomechanical body and wreaks havoc on the physical world. Thank goodness Denzel Washington is around to stop him.

And, hey, just because AI-fueled nightmares have made their way into classic films, that doesn’t mean they can’t also happen in the real world. But it nonetheless feels like a bit of a leap to go from text-to-image generators and chatbots – no matter how impressive – to computer programs that can grow their own bodies in a lab, then use those bodies to take control of our military and government apparatus. Perhaps there’s a direct line between the experiments being done today and truly conscious, self-aware, thinking machines down the road. But, as Deutsch cautioned in his tweet, it’s important to remember that AI and AGI are not necessarily the exact same thing.

Will EVGo’s Stock Surges Be Enough To Keep the Company Stable?

David Shultz

David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.

Will EVGo’s Stock Surges Be Enough To Keep the Company Stable?
Image from EVGo

Shares of EVgo are up over 20% today after the company released Q4 earnings that outpaced predictions from Wall Street. Analysts had predicted the company would announce a loss per share in the neighborhood of $0.16-$0.18, but the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle charging company reported a much more meager loss, to the tune of just $0.06 per share.

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How AgTech Startup Leaf Wants To Modernize the Farming Industry

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

green leaf drawing and rolling farm lands
Evan Xie

At least 50,000 acres in the state of California are estimated to be underwater after a record-breaking year of rainfall. So far this year, California has received nearly 29 inches of rain, with the bulk being dumped on its central and southern coasts. Farmers are already warning that the price of dairy, tomatoes and other vegetables will rise as the weather prevents them from re-seeding their fields.

While no current technology can prevent weather disasters, Leaf Agriculture, a Los Angeles-based startup that launched in 2018, wants to help farmers better manage their properties by leveraging data.

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