Jake Brooks, Triumph | Founder Interview

In this From the Founders interview, we hear from Jake Brooks, CEO & Co-Founder of Triumph, a gaming monetization platform provider. Hear about Jake's story of going from dropping out of college in the midst of the pandemic, to staying in airbnbs throughout the US with other aspiring entrepreneurs, to starting Triumph (which just raised its series A).

E: To start, can you give us a brief introduction of yourself and your company, Triumph?

J: I’m Jake. I’m an avid game player. Grew up in Los Angeles, went to Stanford, then dropped out my junior year when Covid started to start Triumph.

The idea was to essentially bring seamless skill-based wagering within games. We love to play games here. I love to play my friends for real money. And it seemed like it was something that was actually legal. So the question became, “why isn’t this widespread yet?“. We’re definitely not the first people to think of this, but the reality is there is a lot of interweaving of legal matters, technology, and good user experience that go into making a product like this. So we’re trying to be at the forefront of that and actually create it, so we can live in a future where every game has a button where people can play with real money if they want to, and developers can make more.

E: How long ago was the company founded, and how big is it now?

J: We were founded in 2020, when my co-founder and I were bootstrapping and tinkering with the concept that became Triumph’s real stakes gaming platform. Since then, we’ve raised Series A funding and have been building out our team of 10 people.

E: Sounds like it’s been a pretty busy 2.5 years. What have been some of the most pivotal moments for you during that time?

J: I think there are pivotal moments that generally apply to a lot of companies, regardless of what you’re doing, and then ones that are specific to us and what we’re working on. One more general one was setting up the proper legal structures that are required for the industry we’re in. Typically at startups we are told to move fast, break things, etc. But that’s something we knew from the start we were not going to do when it came to Triumph, because having the proper legal and financial infrastructure to begin with is crucial to our existence. There was a lot of consulting with lawyers, getting legal opinions, building up relationships with payment networks and processors in order to actually be fully online on certain credit card networks and banks to process it. Getting those systems in place took time, investment, and when we had everything working perfectly was a huge turning point.

Then, we went to build our own in-house games to test out Triumph and continue iterating it. These were games that we got to make in just a few days — we’d spend 2-3 days making a game, and then spend many, many months building infrastructure around those games to enable tournaments. We’d take what we built and make it easily digestible to developers, to make it actually a self-service SDK. Now we’re in the process of onboarding our first games onto the platform.

E: That must be so fun for you and your team as gamers. How much are you playing your own games you’ve made?

J: A sickening amount. But you know, got to make sure it’s just right!

E: Ok, so you drop out of college, start this company. That’s something a lot of people dream of doing. What caused you to ultimately commit to doing it?

J: For me, it was a bit of a soft launch. There wasn’t a particular moment in the beginning where I thought, “ok, we’re going to do this”. What ended up happening was I was in my second quarter of junior year when Covid started. We had two weeks of online classes, then the final quarter fully online. To me, the value of school is twofold — it’s what you learn in classes and what you learn from being around your peers. The latter of that is such a valuable component to me and I thought to myself, “no one really knows what this is or how long it’s going to last”.

I got a house together with a bunch of friends. We went on Airbnb and messaged different people and found an amazing place in Malibu for pennies on the dollar. None of us did classes. We ended up all working on different ideas for companies, making all the mistakes you could make early on. Over the course of Covid, we continued doing that throughout the US before returning back to San Francisco. Through the process of working and building knowledge in that space for 6 months, it just kind of took a turn to the point where I felt all the momentum in that direction, and decided to continue to pursue it. We started building out a team, raising capital. By that point, I looked back and thought to myself, “I guess I've dropped out now. I haven’t been to class, and I want to do this.”

E: It sounds like you were surrounded by a lot of friends who had this curiosity of working on new ideas and companies. For you, did you always know you wanted to start your own thing one day, or was it more the idea that came first?

J: I think I was personally really attracted to building something that made sense. That was actually wanted and necessary. I think there are lots of companies that are fantastic and give people fulfilling experiences that aren’t necessarily glitzy, glamorous things. I was really inspired by one friend of mine who was a year above me in school and he’s building these large, 15-feet tall obelisk towers to help optimize freight and logistics. At no point in knowing him did I ever hear him say, “when I grow up, I want to customize freight,” but here he is, building a great business with a great team. His company is filling a definitive need, and there’s a lot of personal fulfillment that comes from that. In my opinion, that’s a sustainable thing to do long-term, to pursue something that brings you that sense of purpose and to solve a need.

On one hand, we’re a gaming company, and it’s super exciting. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of nitty-gritty work here. There’s a lot of making sure we’re compliant with each state, and that our legal opinions are in check with the way money flows into systems. Ensuring the way you plug into the game is safe, simple, and secure. We’re in the gaming space, but are not spending most of the time playing games. We’re spending most of the time doing a lot of this complicated grunt work in the trenches, so that game developers can have a really easy experience. We want game developers to have the idea of wanting to put tournaments in their game, and then be able to do so that same day. That is what Triumph does, and that took years of work to build.

E: Makes total sense. A lot of the most successful ideas aren’t always the wild ideas that everyone is so excited about using, and vice versa, working on sometimes. I’m sure there’s a lot of work, especially as a founder, that you have to handle that isn’t seen much.

J: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of fun stuff you can do once you’ve achieved certain elements of scale – funding, a team, and customers. When those pieces are in place, that’s when you should start to really ideate on what you can do. At the inception before you have a team, funding, or a customer, it’s important to establish the tactical problems to solve. Having an amazing team of people around you and the stability of a product solving a problem is the foundation, and when the resources are there, you can expand to pursue moonshot ideas.

E: It sounds like that was your philosophy in starting this — not wanting to sacrifice anything legally, making sure there was a stable infrastructure without any shortcuts in that area, before moving on to the more “moonshot” components. What inspired this philosophy for you? How did you know you wanted to approach it in this way?

J: To me it was always somewhat obvious. I think it was a little bit of intuition in the sense that this was an emerging space and skill-based gaming isn’t really currently being done. There are a lot of complex laws around it, and I think the company that will ultimately succeed is the one who is legally powerful, cautious, and respects boundaries while still technologically innovating.

E: I’d love to hear more about the future of Triumph. This is obviously an area you yourself resonate with as a gamer. When you think about Triumph 10 years from now, where do you want it to be?

J: Triumph is a seamless, plug-and-play payments and compliance engine that makes esports competitions a viable way for developers to monetize their games. Even right now, we have two sets of customers: game developers and game players. We’re not asking game developers to buy something from us, we’re asking them to build with us, then use us as an additional stream of monetization. So right now, the monetization landscape in gaming kind of exists as in-app purchases or ads. I view this as a whole third category of monetization that’s yet to be unlocked. We touch a lot of customers and there’s a lot of different components to it. Triumph is democratizing access to a robust compliance and payments stack that handles KYC, payments processing, legal analysis, anti-fraud, accounting, player skill matchmaking and privacy, while shielding developers from exposure to the complexities surrounding real money offerings.

So yeah, ten years from now — hopefully it’s a widespread product covering those things. We’re working with major mobile game studios, and also being used by individual indie game developers. The goal is to be used in a bunch of games where we have a whole suite of payment processing tools, enabling new ways to play and new ways for developers to monetize at scale.

E: Is it fair to say you see Triumph as becoming this end to end platform for game developers, while also being a marketplace for them to reach other users and sell their games?

J: Yeah, that’s spot on. Every game has different needs. Some games will want to keep it all contained and create an experience exclusive to them through our API. But then some developers just want to make something really cool with our SDK and be able to distribute it and show it to people. So as a developer with Triumph, you can choose whether you want to opt-in to join the larger network of Triumph players who are competitive people who love to play games and love playing tournaments, or you can contain it within the user base of your game.

E: Let’s talk about the team working on building out this vision. You mentioned you have 10-15 employees currently. I can imagine these were pretty critical hires. Can you tell me about how you knew what kind of roles you wanted and how you determined who would be a good fit for your company?

J: Team is everything. We used Wellfound for almost every hire we made. I think of Wellfound as where people go when they’re sort of curious and want to dip into something new. We got a lot of inbound from people that we were just shocked at. It was cool to see.

I don’t try to oversell Triumph. I share what we’re building, but we want people who will connect with the vision organically and can see it in their own way. Team building is a core skill that matters, and we were specifically looking for people who have participated in successful early startups before. One of our first hires was employee number one at a hospital CRM that became 80, 90 people. Our General Counsel worked at two publicly traded marijuana companies which is legally, one of the most complex industries ever. Our Head of iOS used to be Head of iOS at Tango, which has 500+ employees. What we’re really looking for right now is an extremely talented team of people who really know how to execute and have seen teams scale before, and can resonate with our product.

E: How has that been working out for you so far?

J: We have the capital to be around double our size, but we’ve intentionally kept a very low head count because headcount does not equate to output. We’re results driven, and what we’ve been able to do with such a small number of people is truly astonishing. A lot of people who come in see the actual complexity of what we built, meaning everything on our website. Not just a cool render of something we want to do one day. It exists in a whole way and there are full dashboards, a full user SDK, etc. The documentation is all live, and we were able to do that with 10 or so people. So we want to keep that same level of output and increase it over time with really smart, really technical people. We optimize for intelligence more than hustle –we don’t really believe in having a team that pulls all-nighters. We’ve always been slow and steady as a team. From the last 2.5 years, I’ve learned that being really thoughtful about the direction we’re going is so important. Many of our wins didn’t come from simply working really late hours (even though we sometimes also did that) – it was mainly driven by taking a fundamentally intentional, informed, intelligent approach.

E: It sounds very intentional, which I’m sure is appreciated across your team too. We’ve been talking a lot about your philosophy to running your company. Do you have any advice you’d share to future founders, such as folks who are in the same position you were in 3 years ago?

J: If you’re looking for advice, it may not be right for you. I think it’s one of those things where you need to be okay with falling flat on your face. It’s hard to do the wrong thing because you kind of know you’re doing the wrong thing, but you need to still be willing to do that with the faith that the right thing will emerge. In the beginning, you’re not even doing things to have any sort of results. You end up doing things because it will give you even 1% more insight.

I also think that eliminating all the wishful thinking that oftentimes comes with young founders is important. In college, you have maybe 3 problems: note-taking, dating, and then maybe splitting expenses with friends. So people often try to build a company in one of those verticals. You get a lot of apps in those areas for college students. But the world is much bigger than this. I think the faster someone learns and internalizes that is important. Don’t put this massive pressure on yourself to create the future, just try to see trends, where things are going, and align yourself with that.