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Growing up in Toronto, Edmonton Oilers forward Zach Hyman and his four younger brothers bonded over games—basketball, soccer, and ball hockey outside, ice hockey at local arenas, and whatever Mario or Super Smash Bros. game was on the console hooked up to the family TV.
In 2011, when he was 19, Hyman left home to play hockey at the University of Michigan. Now if he wanted to bond with his brothers, it was via phone, text, and email. His youngest brother was 8, which made that sort of communication a challenge. Then Hyman discovered long-distance gaming.
“Instead of talking on the phone for five minutes, we’d sit there with headsets on and play three hours of video games and just talk about whatever—everything,” Hyman recalls.
It was a revelation, what he describes as an “aha” moment. Gaming could be more than sitting in a basement with your brothers; it could connect you even when you were hundreds of miles away.
Today, gaming is more than just a fun way to pass the time for Hyman—it’s a business. As co-owner of the Toronto-based Eleven Holdings Corp., he helps set the direction for a company that owns and operates a portfolio of esports and gaming businesses, including SoaR Gaming LLC and Eleven Gaming Corp.
The main company, SoaR Gaming, fields a competitive Valorant team, maintains a roster of 20 to 30 content creators, and has amassed a following of more than 21 million fans worldwide, generating more than 400 million impressions across social media platforms on a monthly basis. It supports multiple charities and boasts a growing number of brand affiliates, including Asus, Royal Bank of Canada, and Freetrade.
Hyman isn’t the only athlete with a financial stake in the esports and gaming space—Michael Jordan, Stephen Curry, and Odell Beckham Jr. are among the pros who have invested in companies similar to Eleven Holdings. A handful of NBA stars are part-owners of FaZeClan, which Hyman’s business partner, Oliver Silverstein, considers Eleven Holdings’ most notable competitor.
But it’s safe to say Hyman’s path to the business side of gaming is unique. Simply investing wasn’t enough for him. The son of a businessman, he wanted to learn about the esports and gaming industry from the inside, while playing hockey.
“It’s important, I think, for any athlete to have other interests so that they can kind of decompress and not think about hockey 24/7,” he says.
Here it’s important to point out that Hyman does indeed have other interests. He has a wife, a toddler son, and a baby on the way. He’s been writing best-selling, award-winning children’s books since he was a student at the University of Michigan. Since joining the Oilers as a free agent in the off-season last summer, he’s having the best year of his career, with record numbers of goals and points. So it’s not as if hockey is an afterthought. It’s more that he has a lot of energy in need of an outlet.
“When you’re a hockey player and an athlete, you have a certain amount of time you allocate to the rink and you focus on hockey, and then when you come home from the rink, you take care of your body,” he says. “But really, there’s a lot of downtime.”
Hyman was two years into his career with his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs in 2018 when he decided he wanted to spend that downtime in the esports and gaming space. That’s when he reached out to Silverstein. Growing up in Toronto’s Jewish community, the two, who were born three days apart in June 1992, had a lot of friends in common. While Hyman was breaking into the NHL, Silverstein, who earned a business degree at the University of Western Ontario, was breaking into the esports and gaming industry.
In 2014, Hyman’s last season at Michigan, Silverstein, then 22, landed his first job, in customer service at WorldGaming, formerly Virgin Gaming. Around the time Hyman was collecting a slew of awards at Michigan, including Senior Athlete of the Year (which Tom Brady had picked up 15 years earlier), Silverstein was capitalizing on what he saw as an untapped opportunity: attracting users to the WorldGaming platform through influencer marketing. He began building relationships with influencers in the gaming space, getting them to use their platforms to direct more traffic to the company.
Eventually, he left to start his own influencer marketing agency, 3six5Influence, leveraging the connections he had with gaming creators to solve marketing problems for different brands. In 2019, the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation, the organization that raises funds for Canada’s largest cancer research center, asked him for advice about getting involved in the gaming space. Silverstein worked with the foundation to create Quest to Conquer Cancer, bringing together content creators to raise nearly $40,000. The program has raised close to a million dollars over the past two years and is expected to raise much more going forward, according to Steve Merker, the foundation’s vice president of corporate and community partnerships.
By the time Hyman approached him, Silverstein had been consulting for four months for Luminosity. While he was there, one of Luminosity’s creators, Ninja, made gaming history when he and Toronto superstar Drake played Fortnite before a live audience on Ninja’s Twitch stream.
Suddenly it was cool to be a gamer. And it’s even cooler and more lucrative now.
Brands like Gucci are collaborating with companies like 100 Thieves. Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton have introduced their own video games, and have brought their designs and fashion to even more. Other brands getting into gaming in an effort to reach younger consumers include Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Prada, and Valentino.
“There’s a ton of crossover with traditional brands, major, non-endemic players coming into the space and wanting to build something special with gaming creators, and we’re in the middle of the intersection there,” Silverstein says. “Every day it gets bigger and bigger, and the creators become more powerful celebrities within the space. It’s exciting.”
The esports space today reminds Silverstein of the traditional sports world he grew up with. “I would be all nervous and excited to meet the players if I had the opportunity to do so,” he recalls. “And I see that same look in the young kids when they meet the players and gaming creators on my roster. They’re shaking. They’re nervous. They’re smiling. It’s the same excitement that I had when meeting professional athletes, and I think that’s just going to be the new normal now.”
The opportunity to grow with a nascent industry that has so much potential is a big part of what led Hyman to reach out to Silverstein. His initial plan was to invest in an already existing company in the gaming space, but the more the two talked, the more they realized what they wanted was to start something new, together. They named their company after the number Hyman wore on his Maple Leafs jersey.
“It’s exciting, trying to build something that’s sustainable and has a long-term effect on the industry and the space,” Hyman says. “I’m really excited about the potential and the future of it. I love that I’m in a space that I truly enjoy and have an interest in, and I love meeting gamers and helping them on their journey, and working with a bunch of amazing people.”
Among those people are Michael “Mak” Maknojia and Mustafa “Crudes” Aijaz, president and vice president of SoaR Gaming, which Eleven Holdings acquired in 2019. SoaR got its start in 2011 when Aijaz, Maknojia, and a handful of adolescent gamers from all over the world started a YouTube channel to share the cool trick shots they made while playing Call of Duty.
The goal was to be “the Kobes of video games,” Aijaz says.
Note the reference to basketball, not hockey. Hockey wasn’t on Aijaz’s radar, understandable given that he was born in Pakistan and lived in Dubai until he was 11, when his family moved to Toronto.
Hockey is Canada’s game, but Call of Duty was Aijaz’s. And playing with the SoaR kids, who were scattered all over the globe, helped him to feel more at home in his new country.
“Gaming was that one platform where everyone was kind of equal,” Aijaz recalls. “There was no race involved—you were just trying to get the best clips, and that’s how we all got brought up.”
That he is now earning a living on the business end of the adolescent pastime that gave him a sense of belonging—and doing so as part of a creative team that includes a professional in a sport that he wasn’t familiar with as a kid and doesn’t care much about as an adult—is an irony that’s not lost on him.
“It’s crazy how all the stars aligned,” he says, pointing out that his lack of interest in hockey hasn’t hurt his relationship with Hyman. “He’s an awesome guy.”
Along with a built-in fan base and social media presence, one of the things Hyman and Silverstein appreciated about SoaR was its commitment to charitable causes, which started 10 years ago when the company overproduced about $1,000 worth of apparel and Aijaz came up with the idea of donating it to a homeless shelter rather than let it go to waste. Since coming under the Eleven Holdings umbrella, SoaR has raised more than $50,000 US for causes including Australian wildfires, Gamers Outreach, and the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation.
The charity arm of Eleven Holdings is a priority for Hyman, who started a foundation in his family’s name a few years ago and has raised money for causes ranging from the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto to the United Jewish Appeal.
“I think that at our company, we all want to give back, and it’s always extremely important to us,” he says. “And even more, being an athlete, and the position I’m in just enhanced that. We’re just really lucky and privileged to be where we are, and people look up to you as an athlete. To give back is something that most athletes would want to do.”
Hyman is a team player who understands and appreciates the expertise, experience, and contributions that others bring both to the ice (in his day job) and the table (in his business life).
On the ice, those others include Oilers teammates Conor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, two of the world’s best hockey players. Hyman is paired with them regularly, sometimes as a line mate and often on power plays or penalty kills, where he has a well-deserved reputation for being steady, hardworking, and dependable.
Hyman treats the business the way he treats hockey. Although he can’t maintain a physical presence at Eleven Holdings, he checks in daily and is always available to his colleagues.
“He’s always working,” Silverstein says. “He never takes anything for granted. Every day he goes out and proves himself. There are a lot of people in the business world who like to talk and may not be able to go out and execute, but I think what we have seen in the past three years is we can go out and build something big. We share a very similar approach to managing individuals, we push each other every day to be better, and that transpires and comes through to our entire team.”
When Hyman talks about gaming and Eleven Holdings, he inevitably talks about his passion for gaming. But the truth is, between hockey, business, and family life, he hasn’t gamed in months. His wife, a lawyer he started dating in high school, has no interest in video games. His son, who turned 1 in December, isn’t quite ready to operate a joystick. And while he employs a roster full of Valorant players, whom he could presumably hit up for a game or two, he quickly shoots down that idea. He may be a professional athlete, but he knows his limits.
“There’s just no way,” he says, laughing. “It’s like a beer league player playing with an NHL player. It’s not going to work.”
