It was a long and arduous journey for our Gaming + Entertainment agent, Alex Melendez. But one that was meant to be! Read on to learn more about our resident legend AKA Hollywood Clutch and how he became a gaming agent.

My dad came to the United States from Mexico in his early twenties with my mom. They did not have anything to their name when they got here, but he always loved the food industry. Because he was homeless when he was younger, food was his passion. He eventually started his own restaurant in the greater Philadelphia area called, Coyote Crossing. He always had me working there when I was younger, working from the bottom of the totem pole: busboy, to dishwasher, to finally a server my senior year of high school. I quickly realized, while food was his passion, it was not mine at all, and I needed to create my own path. 

I was a huge sports fan growing up and always wanted to be a professional athlete. Because it seemed unlikely, I felt the next best thing was to be a sports agent. So I set a path to go to the University of Tampa for business and then try and get into Villanova Law because of their highly touted sports law program led by Professor Brandt. Fast forward four years and I was graduating at the top of my class at the University of Tampa and received a scholarship from Villanova Law.

However, I quickly realized in my first year of law school that I didn't want to go the sports agent route. During my first year, I was struggling with anxiety and felt overworked. I spent my entire mornings and nights in the library and it felt like my days started to blend together. The only thing keeping me sane was playing video games with my best friends from back home. I made it a point to carve out time to play with them since I didn’t have much time during the day to talk. I left my house around 5 A.M. to workout and get ready for classes and reading. By the time I got home it was 9-ish and I played video games until around 12 A.M. My dad joked around with me that he only saw me playing video games and never studying, mostly because I never studied at home. 

Despite spending three hours a day on video games and sleeping an average of four hours a night, I was able to finish near the top of my class. However, I quickly realized this meant nothing because I never wanted to go into corporate law or any big law firms. I wanted to do something more than just make money because money has always been a means to an end for me. Life is short and I wanted to live a legacy that would be remembered and change people's lives who needed it most. I realized that once my life was lived, no one was going to remember me if I was just a corporate attorney doing M&A every single day at a place I didn’t want to be. I needed to make a bigger impact than that. My dad always taught me if you’re not making someone else's life better, than you’re not living properly. 

During my second year of law school, I wanted to expand my love of gaming to see how I could help people in the gaming community. I did research and realized there weren’t any big agents in the space and I wanted to be someone that changed people’s lives. Too many people in the space were being taken advantage of and didn’t have proper representation. Because of this, I started learning more about gaming and content creation. I tirelessly spent hours watching Twitch and learning about what makes content creators tick, while meticulously watching what they said about agencies. I started to take more contract law classes so I could hone in my skills for contracts and really add to my skill set. 

After graduating from Villanova, I passed the bar with scores high enough to practice in all 36 jurisdictions that accepted the UBE. Eventually after working with Halite as my first talent, I was able to bring on more talents. 

I started off on my own, negotiating brand deals for my talents. I was always good at this but the problem was that brands would not answer my emails or Twitter messages because I did not have an established presence yet. I knew, for my talent's best interest, I needed to find an agency with serious firepower behind it to bring them the deals they deserved.

So with those talents that took a shot on me, Gojj, Halite, Bush, Doug, and Rara, I was able to join Dulcedo.

Since joining Dulcedo I have been able to take my talents to new heights and bring them deals we used to dream about, and they are just getting started. Dulcedo Gaming and Entertainment is barely two years in, and is already making one of the biggest impacts in the gaming and content creation industry and will continue to grow and impact everyone in the content creation space positively.