Esports pro lands Shopify internship after impressing CEO with StarCraft

Kyung Ryoo, known as SeleCT, has been out of the professional gaming scene for some time, now attempting the University of Washington after competing in Warcraft III, Dawn of War, and StarCraft II tournaments for many years. Those years of training weren’t in vein, though. About a week ago, Ryoo tweeted that he was looking for a software engineering internship in summer 2020. The next day, Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lütke, was quick to respond:

Hey select. Happy to hire you into the Shopify intern program. Your Starcraft accomplishments are enough of a CV. Place is yours if you want it.

— Tobi Lütke (@tobi) October 14, 2019

It’s important to note that Ryoo never sought Lütke out. It seems the esteemed Shopify CEO was familiar enough with Ryoo’s StarCraft accomplishments to seek him out instead. It’s not clear what’s coming on the internship, though. The interaction started trending on the StarCraft subreddit with over 4,000 upvotes. Lütke recognized the Reddit success on Twitter but has yet to say if Ryoo has landed the internship or not.

SeleCT’s esports history & StarCraft II

SeleCT is an ex-professional RTS player, starting his StarCraft II career in 2010 after finding success with Warcraft 3 and Dawn of War. In his four or so years of competitive play, SeleCT sat as a Terran player, earning nearly $40,000 professionally. Although the majority of his wins came from minor and monthly tournaments, SeleCT placed highly in a few premier tournaments, earning second place in the 2010 MLG Pro Circuit Washington D.C. and third place in the 2011 MLG Pro Circuit Dallas.

He briefly retired from StarCraft II to play Dota 2 between 2012 and 2013 with team Mineski.kor and team QPAD Red Pandas. After playing in a few team tournaments, he returned to StarCraft II to play in the 2013 and 2014 World Championship series with his former team, Dignitas. In the 2014 competition, he was placed in the Season 1 American Premier League.

Now 30 years old, Kevin Ryoo is studying computer science at the University of Washington. You can find his history and accomplishments on his GitHub page.