| Hubert Thieblot | |
| Birth Date: | 1984 12, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Paris, France |
| Nationality: | French |
| Known For: | Chief Executive Officer for Curse, Inc. |
Hubert Thieblot (born 8 December 1984) is a French businessman who founded Curse, Inc. in 2005[1] and operated as the CEO until January 2018. During his tenure, he has overseen the expansion of the Curse network into wikis, news, video content, and desktop applications including Curse Client and Curse Voice. In 2013, his network of sites was estimated to have garnered in excess of 30 million unique visitors per month. In addition to his work with Curse, Thieblot also speaks at industry related events as a guest speaker, and has spoken at the 2011 Montgomery Technology Conference and the Login 2011 Conference. He now works at Twitch as Vice President of Emerging market/Mobile first product.
See main article: Curse LLC. As a teenager, Thieblot was a fan of World of Warcraft, a popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. His interest in the game led to him creating a website to organise and share World of Warcraft modifications, add-ons, and plugins to change player experience via the user interface.[2] As traffic rose, Thieblot decided to turn his hobby into a business, dropping out of his Swiss information technology program to incorporate in 2006 as Curse, Inc. The name "Curse" derives from the name of his World of Warcraft guild (a collection of players), which at the time was one of the largest guilds in Europe.[3]
As the company began to increase in traffic and revenue, Thieblot hired his brother as the first Curse employee, and after relocating to Germany, hired a third developer to aid in the site development. During this time, the site grew both in traffic and in number of hosted modifications. In 2007, Thieblot began development on the Curse Client,[4] a comprehensive solution to add-on management and distribution. As the client matured into beta status, its feature set became more comprehensive, supporting connections to various Curse modification databases. In 2008, with over 2/3rds of his traffic coming from the United States, Thieblot moved Curse to San Francisco[5] and began to expand Curse into community sites, news, forums, databases, and original content.
After seeking venture capital financing in 2007 and 2009,[6] Thieblot began to expand the services and scope of coverage provided by Curse. In 2010, Curse became a Microsoft Bizspark One company, and in 2011, Curse became an Inc. 500 company.[7] Thieblot was invited to speak at the 2011 Montgomery Technology Conference and the Login 2011 Conference, and has since sponsored international roundtable discussions between industry leaders and top executives concerning challenges, successes, and the future of the video game industry. Since launching in 2006, Thieblot has overseen the expansion of Curse content and traffic, with viewership and revenue doubling each year.[8] In April 2012, Ernst & Young named Thieblot as a semifinalist in their "Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year" program for Northern California,[9] recognizing his entrepreneurial efforts and successes with Curse.
Thieblot has overseen the expansion of Curse from wikis and community sites into the desktop application realm through several projects. Curse Client, a desktop application allowing for the unified browsing, installation, and management of plugins, was developed as a means to simplify the databases of game modifications first offered by Curse. The Client has expanded from World of Warcraft, Thieblot's initial inspiration for the Curse network, into several other titles, including Runes of Magic, World of Tanks, and Minecraft. In 2014, Thieblot announced the beta version of Curse Voice, a desktop Voice over IP (VOIP) application designed for games such as League of Legends, integrating voice chat and auto-match making with several titles.