by Hicham Chahine, Co-Founder, Co-chief Executive Officer and Director of NIP Group
When I first got involved with Ninjas in Pyjamas, I wasn’t trying to build a long-term company. I was simply trying to solve a short-term problem.
My background was in finance and I worked in environments built on structure, predictability, and clearly defined risk. Esports was the opposite. But NIP was one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and from the outside, it looked like it just needed stabilization. So, I gave myself six months to turn it around.
That was nearly a decade ago.
What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that the real opportunity wasn’t just fixing what was broken, but recognizing what the company could become once it actually had a foundation.
Fix the Foundation Before You Grow
In the early days, everything felt urgent. On paper, it looked like a long list of separate issues – financial instability, unclear ownership structures, and inconsistent operations, but in reality, it was one problem: there was no system holding the business together.
From the outside, NIP had scale, but internally, it lacked alignment, accountability, and a clear definition of success.
In finance, if the system is broken, you don’t expand, you rebuild and that became my approach. We slowed things down, put structure in place, and focused on creating a business that could support the brand it already had. It wasn’t particularly visible work, but it changed everything that came after.
Follow the Audience, Not the Industry
What became clear over time is that esports evolves in layers and more importantly, the audience evolves with it.
Esports fans aren’t passive spectators. They’re digitally native, highly engaged, and comfortable navigating virtual economies in a way most industries are still catching up to.
Coming from finance, I was used to thinking about infrastructure and how value moves and systems mature. When looking at esports through that lens, it became clear the opportunity wasn’t only in entertainment. It was in what this audience would adopt next and that’s what led us to think more seriously about bitcoin and digital infrastructure.
For a traditional sports organization, that might seem like a leap. But NiP was never a traditional sports organization. Our audience already understood digital ownership, online identity, and decentralized environments intuitively. So, to them, this wasn’t a shift, but more so a continuation.
Discipline Matters More Than Momentum
One of the biggest challenges in esports is how visible growth is. The new partnerships, new markets, and constant expansion create pressure to keep moving.
But, momentum can be misleading. There were moments where we could have leaned further into short-term wins, which meant we would have grown faster, expanded more aggressively, and followed the market more closely. But over time, those decisions break a business down rather than strengthen it.
That applies to entering spaces like crypto too. There’s a lot of noise, and a lot of short-term thinking and I had seen it all before when I worked in finance. So instead of asking, “How do we participate?” we focused on, “What can we build that actually lasts?” That meant being selective, prioritizing structure over speed, and aligning decisions with long-term value and not immediate attention.
The Part No One Talks About
The most difficult periods weren’t strategic, they were personal. A few years into rebuilding NIP, we went through a period of intense public scrutiny tied to historical issues from an early acquisition. It brought a level of pressure that’s hard to anticipate until you’re in it. No matter what decision I made, the critics would be there.
For me, it reinforced something that had been consistent from the beginning: discipline matters more than narrative. You focus on fixing what’s real, not reacting to what’s loud and over time, that’s what restores trust.
Looking back, the biggest mistake I made was assuming this would be temporary.
What I didn’t account for is how responsibility evolves. Once you move beyond fixing immediate problems, you start thinking about what the business should become and once you see that clearly, it’s difficult to step away.
Because the work changes and it’s all about continuous adaptation and making sure the company evolves alongside the audience it was built for. If there’s one lesson that has held across everything, from finance to esports to digital infrastructure, it’s this:
You don’t build something enduring by following where the market is today. You build it by understanding where your audience is going and being willing to evolve before it’s obvious.
It’s the reason I’m still here – long after what was supposed to be a six-month fix.
Hicham Chahine is the Co-Founder, Co-chief Executive Officer and Director of NIP Group, currently serves as the CEO of the group’s Western business. Hicham acquired Ninjas in Pyjamas (NIP) in 2016, and has served as its Chief Executive Officer since then. Prior to joining Ninjas in Pyjamas and founding NIP Group, his experience ranges from the global financial industry to entrepreneurship.
