Back in the saddle. Siliqs Blog beginning
What’s up folks, my name is Farukh. You might know me from previous startups in the gaming industry I worked for (Bugart Games, Impala Dev).
I was around gaming, and the startup industry for the last seven years worked pretty deep in mobile game dev in the CIS region Kazakhstan and Russia.
Two years ago, I moved to Los Angeles and started my new chapter of life from scratch.
I’ve always known that computers are fun, Fun in a sense that it always challenged me in some way [like running first Doom on MS-DOS, you know]. But as time passed and I grew up, and I realized it could genuinely be my life, my work, my (almost) everything.
That was just the beginning of my 15-year journey in gaming and esports. If it was a love story, my very first crush was StarCraft. I was a severe sixth-grader gamer. I played this game for 8–10 hours straight using a dial-up phone to phone modem without connecting to the internet. While classmates were chatting on the phone with girls at night, I was battling with nerdy friends because my family used the phone during the day.
I remember the custom maps in Warcraft long before the first Dota came out. Then I saw the Dota 1 and everything changed. I was playing around 10 hours in a row, skipping school, and turning on a complete “no life” mode. I still watch competitive Dota nowadays and sometimes play it too, as this seems to be almost like the only place where I can hook up with my old friends and teammates.
Overall I have been playing competitively for more than 15 years now: Starcraft, Warcraft, Quake, Dota, Counter-strike, etc. I love these games from the player’s perspective. During this time, I changed a lot of hats in esports field as a team manager, coach, CEO, event manager, production manager, even an investor and chef in the kitchen. With the experience of a person who developed games and did e-sports in different ways, I can confidently say that I have my own extraordinary picture of the industry and its evolution.
The dark side of gaming
I should say — I do love my parents. They did not get angry at me if I spent too much time playing my video games. However, as I see it now, I was serious about the game. Like maybe a little bit too serious, you know. I spent hours and hours sitting in one position, entirely concentrated and staring at the screen all the time. I didn’t think at all nor about posture, or empty stomach was craving food by the end of the day. Later, of course, I got to learn about this condition called “state of the flow” I was in that made me lose the sense of space and time.
I was an active kid at school first in judo and played on the football team. I love sports because of this magnificent feeling of competitiveness. I like to develop new skills and feel challenged. After playing sports, I usually went back home, sometimes local PC Bang, and played with my friends. I was so passionate about it at that time that I didn’t think about any side effects it could have in the future.
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One day during the seventh grade, I found myself in a hospital with a gastric ulcer diagnosis. Yes, these games got me overwhelmed so much that I completely forgot that I still needed to eat food. But even when I did, you know, it was cheap junk food. My stomach wasn’t feeling good at all. But who knew that this was only the beginning.
Later in college, I started having some severe back pain. I was still playing PC a lot and did lots of judo. I even started lifting weights in the gym. My idea was simple: the more sports I do, the more time I can spend playing my favorite video games.
But I was young, and I didn’t pay any attention to this pain at all. Just right before the annual national tournament, I came home after the workout with a very unusual pain back pain. I decided to put a warm compress on my back that night. The next morning, I found myself in a hospital with one leg paralyzed. I got three spine hernias. It was a terrible situation to be in because in the early twenties, having diagnosed with something like this meant that your life was over. And I had massive hopes about my future and sports specifically…
My doctor said: “You can’t return to the tatami; for the next five years, you can forget about judo.” I was crying, and at that time, it felt like a complete disaster — the literal end of the world. Thanks to my family, they were very supportive during these extremely hard times.
A few months later, I finished a rehabilitation course, got some special treatment for my backbone, learned yoga, stretching, swimming, and other exercises that were supposed to help me with my back problem.
My coach always said: When you got some illness or weakness in your body, you put the right effort and continuously pay attention, strengthen these spots, and eventually you become stronger exactly where it was broken.
I started to educate myself and understood why it happened to me and how to prevent it in the future. I’m not pretending to be a doctor or chiropractor, but I can tell you for sure: now I know my body well enough to share some information with you. I spend thousands of dollars and a significant amount of time in rehabilitation courses at the clinic, to figure out how to solve the problem of my posture. Sometimes disease and illness help you to become more powerful.
Experience
Even though it was obvious that my sports career was over, it also meant something else — that the other door has just opened for me. And that is where my entrepreneurial journey just begins.
When I moved to California, my schedule shifted significantly. I was sitting in the office for 10–12 hours a day, developing video games. Now it is very different — I do yoga classes four times a week and boxing three times (at least!).
That is why I can reassure you I have the experience of being active during the day and also being stuck in the office for ten hours straight. And if you think about it, it’s almost the same for any online gamer who must sit for an hour or so, and he can’t stand up in a middle of 40 minutes intense CS:GO match or an hour-long hardcore LOL game.
In the next chapter, I’ll tell you how we develop the idea.
To be continued…
