Ann Hand had no idea what she was getting into when she took her first job out of college in 1990 with oil company Mobil. “Because it was early ’90s, there was no way I could Google what a marketing rep did,” she said in an interview with The Esports Observer. “I was an econ major, and I just figured it had something to do with sales and advertising. But a marketing rep for energy companies means that you are running gas station convenience stores.”
After three months of training, Hand was put in charge of eight Philadelphia Mobil convenience stores, some with service bays. Hand admitted that she was “horrified” when the job ended up being very much different than expected, and that it wasn’t the most fascinating-sounding thing to brag about as a post-college career. On the other hand, she was quickly in charge of a $30M profit & loss (P&L) business with more than 50 employees, “learning a lot of the basics about running something and making it profitable,” she said. And it makes for good stories.
“It would be a reality show today,” she added. “Taking a preppy, naïve, Midwestern girl and plucking her in the city of Philly for 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week gas stations. There’s a lot of interesting stories, what goes down at those locations. I could entertain you for hours with that.”
“It was kind of a time when an MBA felt critical. It was a bit of an insurance policy on your CV.”
Needless to say, she’s not overseeing gas stations these days as chairman and CEO of amateur tournament platform Super League Gaming 
, which she joined in 2015 while the company was still in its infancy. But while she left Mobil in 1995 after gradually taking on more and more locations, she would spend most of her pre-Super League Gaming career in and around the energy industry, including a decade spent living abroad as new challenges helped mold her into the leader she is today.
From Philly to Hong Kong
Hand’s next stop was with McDonald’s in Chicago, but she was recruited specifically for her gas station convenience store experience: the fast-food giant was expanding into new restaurant themes, including within larger gas station buildings. She worked there from 1995 to 1997, and it was also the time during which she began pursuing an MBA by taking night classes at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“It was kind of a time when an MBA felt critical. It was a bit of an insurance policy on your CV,” she said—and while juggling work and school was difficult, it was a “no-brainer” because McDonald’s covered the lion’s share of her tuition. She had already spent several years working for a large-scale business and had encountered some of those textbook concepts in the real world. However, when she and her classmates introduced themselves in an early class, she realized that she had come in with different aims than many of her peers.
Credit: Super League Gaming
“I felt like 75% of the people were all saying they were going to be an entrepreneur at the end of it,” she said. “I grew up with a very entrepreneurial father who owned several different types of retail businesses, and it kind of made me laugh a little bit inside—because it was almost this notion that here we all are in our 20s, kind of naïvely thinking that you can just get an MBA and naturally be an entrepreneur at the end. When they came over to me, I said, ‘My name is Ann. I work at McDonald’s, and when I’m done, I think I’ll just keep working there.”
That didn’t end up being the case, however. She left the chain to join oil company Amoco partway through her MBA program, as she felt like her opportunities to rise through the McDonald’s ranks were limited since she didn’t start out in one of the restaurants. According to Hand, Amoco and Mobil both trained employees to be generalists, sending them to different areas of the business to become better-rounded and gain more perspective—to potentially help with running a larger part of the business someday. Amoco did that by sending her to Hong Kong to work a finance job in its chemicals division.
“When I got there, it was unusual to be a woman in that role, and it was also a lot of sharp elbows because everyone was trying to show off.”
“It was probably the worst performance I ever had on any job in my career, to be candid,” she said, adding that strictly focusing on numbers didn’t end up being her strong suit. “What I realized was that when I was out running those gas stations, I’m an extrovert. It was all about relationship-building and all of those things, and I wasn’t getting a chance to tap into all of that stuff.”
It was still just an amazing experience, to go live in Hong Kong,” she added. “It’s an amazing, amazing place. And it really changed me. It was the beginning of a really significant international career, which I just never could have imagined when I was running gas stations in Philadelphia or going to those night classes in Chicago.”
Silencing Critics
After about a year in Hong Kong, rival oil giant BP announced plans to acquire Amoco. Hand was summoned back to the States to wait and see how the merger would shake out. Ultimately, she ended up with a significant promotion, running a real estate and construction team that oversaw land deals and built convenience stores. A year and a half later, BP identified Hand as a potential future executive candidate and placed her into a fast-tracking program.
Hand’s role was to be the chief of staff for executive Vivienne Cox, BP’s highest-ranking woman at the time and someone Hand describes as “kind of a legend” at the company (Cox was later the CEO of BP Gas, Power, and Renewables). The job had no real agenda of its own: Hand would effectively shadow Cox, providing another set of eyes and ears for her at the company while being evaluated for a potential executive role. Hand moved to London for the position.
Credit: Super League Gaming
“When I got there, it was unusual to be a woman in that role, and it was also a lot of sharp elbows because everyone was trying to show off,” she said. “You knew that there was probably a 20-30% chance if you did that job well, that your next assignment would be an executive role. That’s when you not only move into very different compensation, but it’s also ‘making it.’ That was one of the most important times of reflection for me as a leader, because I really wasn’t comfortable in some ways.”
Hand felt like her peers were all undercutting each other to try and vie for that potential next job, and she took some pointed criticism of her own along the way. In one instance, a male colleague told her that she laughed too much, and that it looked bad if she arrived at work after her boss—even though she and Cox were purposefully on shifted schedules following the birth of Cox’s child. Luckily for Hand, her boss overheard the colleague’s comments.
“She pulled me in her office and said, ‘You know, Ann, I want you to work on bringing your whole self to work. I want you to laugh as loud as you can every day. I want you to dress the same way I know you dress on the weekend—you usually wear a lot of color, but you wear grey all week,’” said Hand, laughing. “And like a big sister, she said, ‘Your personal brand is being yourself. So don’t fall into this image of what you think a British male looks like, or just a male in general. You’re going to stand out if you bring your whole self to work.’ With a ton of encouragement, I really blossomed in that job.”
“Whenever I would talk about starting out in the stations, that was kind of like starting in the mailroom. ”
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Hand ultimately got that executive position as a global business leader for liquefied gas, running a $3B business with 3,000 employees across 20 countries. She felt like she was expected to prove herself to the people around her who didn’t know where “this American gal in her 30s” came from, she said. Ultimately, she credits those years running the gas station convenience stores with giving her the business fundamentals—and even credibility—to handle the role.
“Whenever I would talk about starting out in the stations, that was kind of like starting in the mailroom. It gave me credibility. I had gotten my hands dirty,” she said. “A lot of people are hired into these large companies, and they come straight out of grad school and go into strategy and finance jobs, but maybe never have really had to run an operation. Any naysayers, that would usually shut ’em up.”
A New Toolkit
Hand shifted roles in 2015 and became BP’s senior vice president of brand and marketing, where she found a different kind of challenge—one that tapped into a new side of her. “I had an absolute ball working with all of our agencies around the world,” she said, “and I feel like it unlocked a whole different kind of creativity in me that I had never been able to fully express at work.”
Credit: Super League Gaming
In 2008, however, Hand was at a crossroads in her career. BP’s CEO was retiring, and after nine years in London, she felt like it might be time to explore another path in a new location—otherwise she could be committing to spending many more years there. She began meeting with venture capitalists, who were on the hunt for experienced executives to be CEOs for the clean tech startups they were funneling money into. Hand had always wanted to live in Los Angeles and had bought a fixer-upper home in the area, so she used the opportunity to relocate and keep discussing possible options with VCs.
From 2009 to 2014, she served as CEO for Project Frog, a company that makes what are effectively IKEA-style, flat-packed kits for assembling the core and shell of an entire building. It was Hand’s first experience with running an early-stage company, and it was a dramatic change of pace.
“I was quite naïve. I learned the Sand Hill Road way, how to raise money, and how to scale a business. That tested me,” she said. “I couldn’t get over: Why is this so much harder when I only have 20 people in the organization? It’s a really humbling experience, because in big companies, you have so much infrastructure and support around you. You aren’t staying up at night wondering if the company’s gonna make payroll. Those five years were really challenging years where I had to develop a whole different level of resilience and new tools for the toolkit.”
“It’s not about you being the consumer of your brand, it’s about you knowing who that consumer is.”
According to Hand, market fundamentals worked against Project Frog at the time, and affordable energy meant that demand for clean energy solutions was weak. “It was this hard lesson that timing is everything with a startup,” she said. Although she considered returning to the more comfortable world of big business, she’d spent those five years building up that early-stage toolkit and didn’t want to toss it aside.
Finding Her Voice
When initially pursued by Super League Gaming about six months after its formation, Hand wasn’t sure it was the best fit for her. She’d played games as a kid, but decades had passed and the industry didn’t look anything like what she’d known from her youth. Still, something about the opportunity was intriguing, and she kept attending SLG’s test events during that time.
“I kept looking out at the audience at who the players were, and I saw people of all ages. I saw girls and boys, young adult women and men, and the wide psychographic mix of what is really a mainstream consumer offering,” she said. “I talked to parents, and I talked to the players themselves. I saw how much fun they were having when you brought gaming out of the home and put people together—no different than when I would ride my bike to the local arcade as a kid. And this time it’s even better, because in the arcade, we were all friends socially but we were all playing independently. And now, everybody was playing together.”
Credit: Super League Gaming
As Hand viewed Super League Gaming through the lens of a consumer brand, she saw areas in which her expertise could be valuable, and thought she could build out a team to support her aims. And at that point in 2015, the opportunity available in esports looked more and more appealing. “Unlike Project Frog, maybe the timing for this one was spot-on,” she said.
Hand said she had to accept the fact that she was not going to be the kind of esports CEO who knows each game and individual subculture inside and out, and that her strengths come from her business experience and ability to nurture partnerships and strategic relationships. That was her biggest struggle at first with Super League Gaming—trying to “find my voice in that room,” she said, when meeting with prospective partners and game makers.
“I was quite naïve. I learned the Sand Hill Road way, how to raise money, and how to scale a business.”
“Probably for the first year, I spent a lot of time almost over-apologizing for not being the player of a certain title, or letting that at least mentally get in my way,” she said. “Really that’s the whole point of Super League—is that these days, there’s thousands of games, everybody’s a gamer, they’re not growing out of it, and there’s a place for everybody in the competitive gaming lifestyle. For me, it just took me a while to just accept that it’s really Marketing 101. It’s not about you being the consumer of your brand, it’s about you knowing who that consumer is.”
Super League Gaming has been especially active in 2019, going public on the NASDAQ and inking partnerships with the likes of Samsung, Capcom, and Topgolf. It’s been a long and winding road for Hand to get to this point, but she’s embraced every major career challenge and turned it into an opportunity—from the gas stations in Philly to the world of amateur esports. She’s heard a few jokes about her odd-looking resume in recent years, especially with the shift to esports, but she’s not sweating it anymore.
“I just settled on: Well, I guess it means I’m versatile,” she said. “I just decided to look at it the most positive way, and not spend any more time questioning it.”
Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted by Trent Murray.
