by Hicham Chahine, Co-Founder, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Director of PIN Group
When I first got involved Ninjas in pajamasI wasn’t trying to build a long-term business. I was just trying to solve a short term problem.
My background is in finance and I have worked in environments built on structure, predictability and clearly defined risks. 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 to be stabilized. So I gave myself six months to turn the situation around.
It was almost ten years ago.
What I didn’t really understand at the time was that the real opportunity was not just in fixing what was broken, but in recognizing what the company could become once it had its foundations truly built.
Fix the foundation before you grow
At first, everything seemed urgent. On paper, it looked like a long list of separate problems – financial instability, unclear ownership structures and inconsistent operations, but in reality it was one problem: no system holding the company together.
From the outside, the NIP had stature, but internally it lacked alignment, accountability, and a clear definition of success.
In finance, if the system is broken, we don’t develop, we rebuild and that has become my approach. We slowed things down, put a structure in place, and focused on building a business that could sustain the brand it already had. It wasn’t particularly visible work, but it changed everything that followed.
Follow the audience, not the industry
What has become clear over time is that esports evolves in layers and, more importantly, the audience evolves with it.
Esports fans are not passive spectators. They are digital natives, highly engaged, and comfortable navigating virtual economies in a way that most industries are still catching up to.
Coming from finance, I used to think about infrastructure and how value evolves and systems mature. Looking at esports from this perspective, it became clear that the opportunity was about more than just entertainment. That’s what this audience would embrace next and that’s what got us thinking more seriously about bitcoin and digital infrastructure.
For a traditional sports organization, this may seem like a big step forward. But NiP has never been a traditional sports organization. Our audience already intuitively understood digital ownership, online identity, and decentralized environments. So for them it was not a change, but rather a continuation.
Discipline matters more than momentum
One of the biggest challenges in esports is visibility of growth. New partnerships, new markets and constant expansion create pressure to keep moving forward.
But momentum can be deceptive. There were times when we could have relied more on short-term gains, which meant we would have grown faster, expanded more aggressively, and followed the market more closely. But over time, these decisions destroy a business rather than strengthen it.
This also applies to entering spaces like cryptography. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of short-term thinking and I had seen all of that before when I worked in finance. So instead of asking, “How can we participate?” we focused on the question: “What can we build that actually lasts?” » This meant being selective, prioritizing structure over speed, and aligning decisions with long-term value, not immediate attention.
The part no one talks about
The most difficult times were not strategic, they were personal. A few years after NIP’s reconstruction, we went through a period of intense public scrutiny related to historical issues related to early acquisition. This brought a level of pressure that was difficult to anticipate until you were there. Whatever decision I made, the criticism would be there.
For me, this reinforced something that was consistent from the beginning: discipline matters more than storytelling. You focus on fixing what’s real, not reacting to what’s noisy, and over time, that’s what rebuilds trust.
Looking back, the biggest mistake I made was assuming this would be temporary.
What I haven’t considered is how accountability evolves. Once you get past solving the immediate problems, you start thinking about what the business should become and once you see that clearly, it’s hard to walk away from it.
Because work changes and it’s about continually adapting and ensuring the business evolves alongside the audience it was created for. If there’s one lesson that applies to everything from finance to esports to digital infrastructure, it’s this:
You don’t build something sustainable by following the current market situation. You build it by understanding where your audience is going and being willing to evolve before it becomes obvious.
That’s why I’m still here – well after what was supposed to be a six-month repair.
Hicham Chahine is the co-founder, co-chief executive officer and director of PIN Group, is currently CEO of the group’s Western operations. Hicham acquired Ninjas in Pajamas (NIP) in 2016 and has been its CEO since then. Before joining Ninjas in Pajamas and founding NIP Group, his experience spans from the global financial sector to entrepreneurship.
