Every founder knows the decisions that keep you up at night. Fewer of us talk about the ones that are clearly right and still hurt.
For 2027, the LCP changes format and teams start each split in their home league. For GAM, home is Vietnam, so that is where we're building. It was the right call for the company. It also meant some amazing people would not be coming with us, and one of them was Adrian.
She filmed her own goodbye. Watch it first, in her words:
She almost didn't apply
Two years ago, Adrian nearly talked herself out of applying to GAM. She didn't speak a word of Vietnamese and had never worked for a Vietnamese company. She applied anyway, became our Operations Lead in Taipei, and in practice ran our League of Legends team: MSI 2025 in Vancouver, EWC 2026 in Paris, and all the ordinary days in between.
I think about that a lot when I hire. On paper, she was missing things. What she had was the courage to start before she felt ready, and that mattered more than anything on a résumé. She grew into the role in front of all of us.
A right decision still has a cost
Here's what I've learned, in esports and in every business I've built since moving to Vietnam in 2014. A decision can be right for the company and still cost the people who made the company work. Both are true at once. Leaders get into trouble when they pretend only the first one is.
The temptation is to hide the cost behind language. "Restructuring." "A new chapter." Those words protect the person saying them, not the person leaving. The cost has a name. Here, it's Adrian, and she deserved better than a line in a memo.
How I try to pay it
There is no perfect way to say goodbye. But there are three things I try to get right.
Say it in public, by name. We wrote Adrian a thank-you on gam.gg, in English and Vietnamese, and put her own goodbye video at the top. Fans should know who carried the team, not only who played.
Credit the work nobody saw. A team runs on flights, visas, meals, schedules and late nights. Adrian did that work, and she also shared it with the world in Mandarin and English. A goodbye is the last chance to make that work visible, so use it.
Recognize people while they're still with you. At our H2 Kickoff in June, Adrian won our Level Up Award. She couldn't be in the room, so I carried her around the office on an iPad and held her up next to the other winners. I'm glad we did that in June instead of saving it for a farewell.
Once GAM, always GAM
People who leave a company don't disappear. They become rivals, partners, tournament staff and fans in the crowd. Esports is small, and so is every industry if you stay in it long enough. How you treat people on the way out is what they remember, and what everyone watching remembers too.
In her video, Adrian says the VCS used to be just a region to her. Now it is "a region where my friends are fighting." For me, that's the real return on building a culture: the people who keep cheering for you after they've gone.
Thank you, Adrian. Wherever life takes you next, #GAMFAM will be cheering for you.
Read the full thank-you and watch Adrian's goodbye on gam.gg.
