With Team 10 in utter turmoil, Jake Paul—the leader of the YouTube group—joked in a vlog this weekend that his team should actually be called Team 3. With some of his best friends defecting Team 10 in recent weeks, leading to rampant rumors online about why the squad has fallen apart, Paul tried to turn the unfolding drama into a positive.
He also expressed a measure of calm among the chaos and explained that new additions to his business group—and an apparently challenging vision for his future—led some in Team 10 to leave.
“As Team 10 grows, as individuals grow, and as I grow, sometimes all those stars don’t align for some people,” Paul said in his vlog. “That’s life. That not only happens in business, it happens in relationships. If you can believe in something, you can achieve it. For me, these next couple of months, this next chapter of my life, is leveling up, taking what I have to a more fun and more exciting level for you guys and the people around me. That vision scared a lot of the people in Team 10. Hell, it scares me. It’s a lot of pressure and a lot of work.”
Paul didn’t specify his future plans—though he is developing a YouTube Red talk show—and he didn’t address any former Team 10 member specifically, but he said that people should expect some pitfalls as he takes his journey.
“Change is a good thing. If you’re not changing, you’re just staying the same,” Paul said. “It’s simple. People change, things change, emotions change. The biggest thing that happened over the past week or the past few months is people changing, people maturing, and people growing. I look at it as a good thing.”
Earlier this month, Nick Crompton, the former Team 10 COO, resigned his position and said he was leaving because of “internal changes being made … that I don’t agree with.” Wrote Crompton: “I still love my Team 10 family but the vision for the business, people involved, and direction it’s now going in, no longer makes sense to me.”
The Team 10 Twitter account responded to Crompton’s departure by writing that, “Team 10 will never allow one individual to negatively influence or undermine the team’s collective vision, but if it begins to happen in any capacity, the situation will immediately be corrected to protect the community we’ve all worked so hard to build and protect.”
A few days later, Chance Sutton, another team member and one of Paul’s best boyhood friends, announced he was departing along with one of the Team 10 engineers. Rumors began spreading that Greg Paul, the father of Jake Paul and Logan Paul, had verbally abused Team 10 members and that he was trying to orchestrate a merger between his two sons’ companies.
https://twitter.com/gregpaul63/status/994686771639279616
In a subsequent tweet, Crompton responded by writing, “People had issue with being verbally abused, watching their coworkers be fired around them and not being kept in the loop. Business 101, communication. Everytime you publicly post to try make myself or the team look bad, I will respond.”
It also appears that Kade Speiser and his younger brother Nathan, who was Jake Paul’s cameraman for most of his vlogs, have left Team 10, though neither has publicly commented on it.
https://twitter.com/gustavonever/status/995031518560051200
Paul said that, as he’s surrounded himself with more experienced advisers, he was recommended to find somebody who he trusted who could help protect his business. That person was his father, who Jake Paul said would “simply look over the shoulders of the other people who are in my business.”
“I knew,” Jake Paul said, “my dad would have my best interests at heart.”
That apparently caused friction and led to some drama. That also seemingly affects the Team 10 tour, which is about to embark on a 21-city tour this month. But the tour is still on, and Paul sounds optimistic in his video.
“Everyone who has left Team 10 has been a family member to me,” Paul said. “Yes, there’s drama. Yes, there’s always going to be this stigma of drama around people leaving Team 10. But I want everyone to succeed. I can grow my tower as big as I want without knocking down anybody else’s tower.”