Dylan Sena

Post-pitch story

Dylan Sena pitched DraftBuff as a smart companion app for esports fans and players, helping them make better picks and drafts in competitive games. It found an audience fast: launched in 2019, the app passed 150,000 users and earned strong app store ratings. But esports turned out to be a tough business. In a candid post-mortem published in September 2023, Sena described the problems: extreme seasonality, with interest rising and falling around tournaments, and a dependence on game publishers whose rules and data access he couldn't control. In November 2021, the team made a hard turn. DraftBuff became Theia Studios, a game studio building Icons of Theia, a turn-based tactical strategy game with a Web3 and modding angle. Investors went along for the ride. In November 2022, Theia Studios raised $2.4 million from backers including Hashed and Snackclub to build what it called a decentralized modding platform for strategy games. Sena is still in charge as CEO and co-founder of Theia. DraftBuff itself is gone, but the team behind it isn't, and the lessons from the esports app shaped the studio that replaced it. For fans of the show, it's a textbook pivot: same founder, same love of games, very different business.