How one South African e-sports entrepreneur made R1 million and invested it in a neuroscience degree

South African e-sports entrepreneur Thea Booysen made R1 million from her game-streaming passion and used the money to study at a highly-respected university in the UK.

Many people might be familiar with Booysen because she is dating world-famous YouTube star — Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson.

MyBroadband asked Booysen more about her major milestones, current activities, and ambitions for the future.

Aside from earning a degree in law and honours in psychology, she is a successful online game streamer and e-sports investor.

She has also written and published her own book — a young adult novel called The Marked Children — which she started working on while still in high school.

The book was self-published seven years later and has received excellent reviews — with an average rating of 4.3/5 on Goodreads and 4.7/5 on Amazon.com.

Booysen had initial financial success while streaming video games on her YouTube and Twitch channels, where she has amassed over 35,000 and about 30,000 followers, respectively.

She has taken a particular liking to competitive card-based video games, including The Witcher’s Gwent spinoff, which helped her become an e-sports caster for publisher CD Project Red (CDPR).

But gaming is just one of her many passions. Among others, Booysen deeply loves research and learning and wishes to make knowledge more attractive to online users.

She was also chosen as the official brand champion for the recently launched Volvo EX30 electric car in South Africa.

Below is what she told MyBroadband about her passion for e-sports, the law, psychology, and advice for prospective streamers who want to make a living out of gaming.

---

In what ways do you believe your law and psychology qualifications have helped you achieve success in your e-sports and charity work?

Ironically, I started streaming games and making an income early on in my first degree which was a law degree. I quickly started out earning my friends and then even some of my friends parents’ money doing this.

It shocked me that the e-sports scene was incredibly lucrative. I don’t think a lot of people realise just how much there is to be made in the scene.

I could easily have stopped studying after my law degree and pursued e-sports full-time.

Instead, and this is going to sound odd to the older generation, e-sports has somehow become my full-time job and studying has become my hobby. Very much like gaming is other peoples’ hobby.

My e-sports career paid for my studies after my first two degrees.

I studied psychology because I love working with people and I like to understand the way we as humans function.

I studied law because I wanted to help people and I wanted to understand how our country works and how I can protect citizens.

After that, I decided I wanted to do a master’s degree in neuroscience, and that’s very hard to do in South Africa, given that we don’t have a lot of resources available. Many local universities don’t even often offer neuroscience as a degree.

I decided I was going to take all my savings from e-sports and pursue my passion and hobby, which is the human brain.

I took about R1 million, all my savings from e-sports over the last four years and applied to study neuroscience at a prestigious university, the University of Edinburgh, which accepted my application.

Will this degree get me a job? Not necessarily. Is it going to give me income in the future? Not necessarily. In fact, some might even call it a bad business move.

But I see it as part of my passion for helping people. For me, the next step was learning how the brain works on a biological level, and that is what I did.

My e-sports career has funded my education and after my degree in neuroscience, which is almost done, I will be going into experimental neuroscience in my free time.

I will be self-funding my own experiments so I don’t have to rely on an institution to give me grants or to hire me.

---

What would your advice be to South Africans looking to grow their audiences on Twitch and other game streaming services?

You definitely want to reach an international audience. As South Africans, we’ll always support each other, but we are a small minority in the world.

In order to maximise your influence you want to try and break out of the South African bubble.

I’m not saying leave South Africans behind, I’m saying you want to make friends with people all over the world. Represent South Africa on an international scale.

This is easier said than done.

Try not to stream in a language that only a small minority understands. If you are Afrikaans like me, start speaking English on your streams so you can communicate with more people.

If you’re streaming a game that only South Africans are watching, start streaming a greater variety of games that draw more international viewers, on an international scale.

Start reaching out to international brands and e-sports organisations because we are looking to help gamers. You don’t have to be the best of the best. We don’t want your money.

We just want you in our team and we want to provide you with the resources to reach out to big brands.

---

What drove you to take up an interest in gaming organisation Nixuh?

Nixuh is the best e-sports organisation in South Africa. It started about two years ago and was created by Dale and Jason, the first two co-owners.

They invited me to Johannesburg for a podcast, and when I met them, I quickly learnt that they were very passionate when it came to helping South Africans, and that’s where my passion lies as well.

I’ve always been very passionate about helping South African gamers connect with international brands because if I can do it, other people can do it too.

There’s just a very steep learning curve and there are not a lot of resources when it comes to helping gamers. It’s still a very new industry and the younger generation is very quickly getting into it.

A lot of e-sports organisations can be very predatory, and essentially, they take advantage of young people who just want to make a living doing what they love.

I know a lot of successful streamers who stay far away from them and yeah, it took one day of talking to Nixuh that allowed me to reach the conclusion that this was the next big thing in South Africa for e-sports.

I wanted to be a part of it and obtained a third of the Nixuh business within a day.

---

What first piqued your interest in card games?

I started streaming on Twitch in 2016, and I was playing The Witcher 3, one of the most popular adventure games ever

In that game you can also play this card game called Gwent so you would collect cards in the game and then you would play against characters in the game.

I would find myself just doing that all day long. I would run around in the game I would collect cards and I would play this card game called Gwent instead of playing the actual game the Witcher.

So in 2016 CDPR, a Polish company they brought a standalone game called Gwent and published it away from the Witcher and I immediately started playing that game, I loved it. I would study law at the University of Stellenbosch, I was a first-year student and I brought my PlayStation 4 with me, and I would just play Gwent all day long.

But I reached a point where I couldn’t justify playing games all day long, I had to study.

So I found out about Twitch which is a streaming platform where you can stream your games to an audience with a camera on a mic and you can make an income and friends while you’re doing it and I needed both of those.

I started playing Gwent, and it went really well. I got really good at the game and started casting community tournaments, and before I knew it, CDPR hired me to become an e-sports caster for Gwent.

I’ve been playing card games ever since.

I’ve been at the forefront of the competitive scene in a lot of card games, and Parallel is one of those card games who reached out to me recently.

They made me an ambassador for their game, and I am now casting their game.

You’ll find that a lot of people who play card games are older than 20 years because it’s more technical and analytical — like chess.

You can make long-lasting friendships with people who are the same age as you and who are also competitive in nature.

---

What are your big plans for the coming year?

I’m now finishing my master’s degree in neuroscience. I guess you can call me a neuroscientist, technically. That does feel weird.

I’ve been studying since high school. Knowledge is truly my passion.

I am going to leverage my position and my network, which is a very privileged one, since I am surrounded by brilliant people who are very smart and are very inspirational, for creating content to essentailly share that knowledge with the world.

I’ve learned that you could make incredible discoveries in academia but if nobody ever hears about it, your influence is minimal.

My goal is to help the world of academia take the knowledge and spread it on social platforms in a digestible, watchable manner.

I have already created my second YouTube channel, which is still in its infancy, called “More than Human”. It’s going to be a scientific channel.

The videos are already doing far better than my gaming videos, even with minimal effort.

I’m going to be making educational, scientific content, discussing the nature of the universe and new discoveries in science.

I’m also going to be having people come on and talk about how they became successful and get influential people to help inspire the youth of today.

In short: I want to make it cool to be educated and to get involved in the world of academia.

Besides that, I will be growing the e-sports scene in South Africa and working on my second business focused on launching massive tournaments in the card game world. It’s called The Pack.

Everybody in my community is part of the pack, but it’s also a play on words because you normally open a pack of cards.

I’m hosting a Disney Lorcana tournament every two weeks, where we get record-breaking signups online.

We had an Easter tournament this weekend. We had 300 people sign up which was a world record because the game just came out.

I had a $2,000 prize pool which is something I wish South Africans would take part in. That’s almost R40,000. It’s a lot of money.

I would give anything for South Africans to see these opportunities and take them.

South Africans are very smart and very hardworking. They can easily compete on an international scale.

It is totally free to participate if you just contact me and you take the opportunities that we give you.

I hope to have an in-person event at the end of the year in the US and we’re likely going to have a prize pool of $10,000 (R180,000).

If we ever had a South African card game scene, I would host events in South Africa. That’s my goal — to make it accessible to South Africans.

---

Do you plan to stay in South Africa in the near future or move abroad to explore other opportunities?

I’m currently finishing my last laboratory experiments in Scotland for my thesis to get my master’s degree.

After that I’ll likely just be flying from the US to South Africa. That’s going to be my life for the next little bit, I think.

I just moved in with my boyfriend of two years. His name’s Jimmy, but you might know him as Mr. Beast.

We bought a house and we are furnishing the house. So I live here half of the year, in the US.

My tourist visa allows me to be here for six months of the year. So I’m essentially living with him and we just adopted a dog.

However, I’m still South African. I come home at least once every three months. Whether it’s for work or just to visit my family and friends.

Now that I co-own a business in South Africa, I actually have to come home a lot more.

When I’m in South Africa, I live with my mom who I love very much.

I’m coming back in April for the big Comic Con event. We’re going to be presenting our team.

If I’m not in the US, I’m in Europe. It’s a lot of flying, and I’m constantly jet-lagged.

But I’m never really situated in one place for very long. I’m always travelling and working.

---

How did you become the official EX30 Brand Champion?

When Volvo reached out to me, I thought it was too good to be true. I thought it was a scam because the email essentially asked me if I wanted a car. I was going to ignore it.

Then my sister said, “Hey, hey, hey, you need a car, you just sold your car so you can study in Scotland”.

I replied and then I got a call. It turns out it was very real. Volvo wanted me to be the Champion for their new model — the EX30 — which is a state-of-the-art electric car.

The reason this car is so cool for me and my personality is because the creators of Fortnite — Epic Games — helped with some aspects of its design. This is why Volvo thought I would be a good ambassador for the car.

I’m absolutely in love with it, it looks super futuristic. It has a literal iPad-type screen in the car where you can see vehicles coming from your sides.

It’s super safe because it can detect obstacles around you. It’s freaking amazing. I love it.

I’m having a lot of fun driving it when I am in South Africa. It also saves me a lot of costs when it comes to petrol which is very expensive,as you might know.

Being able to charge my car at an electrical power station is kind of crazy to me. I didn’t know South Africa had the infrastructure for that yet but it seems we do.

There are ample electrical charging stations, and they work fine.

It’s super silent. It excels really fast because it’s an electric car. So, the time it takes from being stationary to going full speed is astronomical.

I don’t do it often because I like to drive safely, but it is a pretty safe vehicle. I’m a huge fan. It also has a nice sunroof, which is very fancy. I’m not used to these things.

When Nixuh goes to Comic Con on 28 April, I’m gonna pick everybody up in my new car.