‘We didn’t have the money for the train fare’: Kairos Group on gaming and growth
Kairos Group is a house of gaming media agencies headed up by co-founders Chris Parnell and Mike Craddock. The pair’s gaming credentials are stellar: both started out as content creators in YouTube’s first boom, and Craddock played professional Call of Duty. They recently inked an acquisition of esports org Horizon at the start of what they call an “M&A spree.” We sat down with the pair to talk burning out at 21, founding a business on £80 and big-ticket ambitions.
Kairos Group’s gamers-turned-founders on their origin story, growth and ambitions / Florian Olivo via Unsplash
Mike Craddock’s first YouTube video was a 25-second clip of a ‘collateral’ (a single shot from a sniper bullet eliminating two enemies) on the short-lived game Battlefield: Bad Company 2. When he uploaded it in 2010, he could have had no idea that it would take him first to a career as a professional gamer and then to a position as chief exec of the 140-strong Kairos Group, which has its sights, he tells us now, on becoming “the largest gaming media group in the world.”
That stint as a pro gamer, under the moniker FearCrads, saw Craddock competing in the Call of Duty franchise for a team he co-founded called TYT (Team YouTube), which later merged with esports organization Lightning Pandas. In 2015, he left professional gaming and his own career as a creator behind (after amassing over half a million subscribers on YouTube).
“We started Kairos when the influencer boom started,” Craddock says. “But I knew my time as a YouTuber was up ... I was burnt out.”
‘Burnt out at 21 from playing Call of Duty’ might be an idea that some readers find hard to parse, but we should all be able to sympathize by now with the grind of spending all day at home on a computer. By 2015, Craddock says he’d made close to 3,000 YouTube videos across several channels on his own; this was before the days of YouTube editing teams. That’s six hours a day gaming, two hours editing and the rest scrambling for fresh video ideas.
The right moment
That’s where childhood friend and Kairos co-founder Chris Parnell comes in. Parnell’s route to founding is the same but different: following Craddock on to YouTube, he became a content creator for the once wildly popular Machinima Respawn channel. While studying business at university, he took a sandwich year at IBM and “quickly realized I never wanted to work for anybody ever again. I just hated being told what to do.”
This was 2015, somewhere around the spark that led to the boom of influencer marketing – ‘kairos’ in ancient Greek means, appropriately enough, ‘the right moment’ (in modern Greek it has the rather more prosaic meaning ‘weather’). Kairos was formed based on a simple idea: early adopters had started using meme pages on Twitter and Facebook to promote brands. Craddock and Parnell’s friends in gaming and on YouTube were starting to amass real followings. “What if we got our friends to do the promotions of the brands? This wasn’t called influencer marketing back then; it was just our friends promoting brands.”
Thus the company was founded by a jaded young gamer and a business student. “We used £80 of my student tuition to launch the entire company,” says Parnell. “That’s our entire funding to date.”
‘We’re just two guys from Nottingham’
Kairos has come a long way from that £80. Parnell says: “We’ve made it work: we’ve turned £80 into an eight-figure-revenue company.” The turnaround story is a familiar one for early-influencers-turned-entrepreneurs. Craddock adds: “At the start, it was more of a lifestyle business. After two years, we really asked, ‘what do we want from this?’”
Both are sanguine – even laidback – about the upskilling process that followed. Having seen success with those early micro-businesses as content creators, it seems they felt prepared to learn quickly on the job. “We’re just two guys from Nottingham who don’t have loads of backing behind [us]. So we had to learn on the spot and try things, fail, adapt; try things, fail, adapt.”
Parnell goes on: “When I say we were bootstrapped, I mean we used to have to pretend that we were sick, because we couldn’t afford the train down to London to have in-person client meetings.”
Billion-pound ambitions
Today, the group sits over five brands: social creative house Kairos Media; content syndication business Kyma; talent agency Turopium; e-commerce arm Kairos Ventures; and, since an acquisition back in February, Manchester-based esports organization Horizon Union. The growth of this family of brands shows the pair’s business philosophy clearly. “We spot a trend, and we build a company to focus on and be an expert in that trend,” says Parnell. “It’s all built around the trends we’re seeing in the category, and then making sure we have experts ready to go to service that trend.”
So can we expect new brands spun out to serve, say, the cresting web3 wave? “I like shiny new stuff,” says Craddock. “I’m trying not do anything new and shiny, just to make sure our current business is operating at its biggest potential. We need to focus on making sure the house is in order before we start getting some more extensions on.”
And once the house is in order – what then? Craddock doesn’t need pressing to sum up his ambition: “To be much fucking bigger than we are.” Or in a little more detail: “To build it to a billion-pound company ... we’re only scratching the surface now in terms of what we can do.”
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Kairos Group
Led by experts with more than 100+ years of gaming and media industry knowledge, Kairos Group comprises multiple entities including Kairos Media, Kyma Media and...
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