Jonathan Strause of Invincible GG joined episode 210 to talk about his new AI sports gaming company. First up, Owners Club that brings virtual horse racing to life.
Ryan Knuppel
Hey, what’s going on everybody? Ryan Knupple here. New Sports Show, episode 210. Thank you so much for tuning in and giving a little bit of your attention to this show. We’re having a blast doing it. We’re bringing on some amazing guests, talking to some awesome people in the gaming, sports, whatever industries around sports business. There’s some people doing some amazing things, and today we have another guest that’s going to blow your mind with what they’re up to. Very innovative things, and I’m excited to dive in to today’s guest and what they’re doing. Hopefully you’re well. Hopefully you’re enjoying football season. It’s here. We’re enjoying that as a sports content company. We just love sports, football season and everything about it. All right, without further ado, I’m going to go ahead and bring on my guest. Bring him with me today. I got Jonathan Straws of Invincible gg.
Ryan Knuppel
Jonathan, how are you my friend? I’m doing awesome. How are you, Ryan? I’m doing well, doing well. I’m trying to soak up a little bit of this sun here in Orlando, Florida. How are you doing up in the northeast?
Jonathan Strause
Doing great. My fantasy team’s in first place, everything’s good. Can’t complain. Hey, one weekend, Hey, even if you only got one week of first place, it’s more than I got. So good for you. That’s amazing. Awesome. So let’s, we’re going to dive into Invincible GG, but first I want to hear a little bit about yourself. I want to hear what your career has looked like leading into what you’re doing today. So why don’t you dive into you and we’ll learn about Jonathan? Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s been a long journey to get here. I was an undergrad, duke, born in Boston, diehard Bostonian sports fan, duke undergrad, Wharton Business School.
Jonathan Strause
Spent many years at McKinsey and Company doing strategy consulting all over the globe, mostly in emerging markets and technology and energy left there. Started my first company, geez, 20 years, 20 plus years ago now. This is my third company. And I’ve really just enjoyed, always enjoyed technology, always enjoyed gaming, always enjoyed sports. After I sold my first company, I really started to focus on things I was personally passionate about. Video games is one that I’ve been crazy about since I was a little kid, but more so always struggled with ’em. I’m not a great, when I played call dude with my boys, and so I have two older boys, they’re almost carrying me through the levels so bad. I’m just not good with my tactile skills. And so I love games that require your intellect, your IQ strategy. Games always have. And so what we’ve done with Invincible is really merge the sports genre with intellect, your sports, your gaming IQ versus your ability to be a faster button master than the guy across from you.
Jonathan Strause
And I’m also a big gaming guy, meaning casino gaming, sports betting. And so when we built Invincible, we were really focused on how do we legally within the regulatory frameworks create competitive sports where people, competitive games, where people compete head to head legally, and people can bet on those events in the casinos. I mean, eSports is great, but it’s really a viewership sport. You’re watching 16 people compete at a sports you could never play at the level they play at, and people want to be in the game. And so we’re trying to create platforms that facilitate people competing head to head and video games for real money and broadcasting that for legal wagering and jurisdictions, whereas legal. And so we started the back end of that. We actually got our platform, our platform is patented. It’s an AI uses AI entities, so the entities, the competitors.
Jonathan Strause
Our first game is a racing game, but our patent covers all sports, and it’s about those, whether it’s a horse, a fighter, a basketball player, an AI version of that, that is learning, developing, it learns based on its owner’s directives and also learns on its own decisions and its own experience and events. And how do you have those AI entities compete in an environment that’s being broadcast for betting? So those events are, if you and I are playing a race of three or four horses from our stable against each other, we’re playing for real money because it’s a skill event and we’re broadcasting that race to casinos for people to bet on. So we work backwards only. So our technology, we’re the only regulated and approved and licensed creator of virtual permut based virtual races where people can bet via permut systems. We’re the only AI technologies that have been approved in Nevada.
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Jonathan Strause
So where the outcome of event is based on the actual competitors competing real-time via AI technology versus an R N G, A random number generator. That took us almost a decade to get approved in Nevada. And we have a long operating history of delivering virtual sports, and now we’re delivering in a few weeks are the mobile side of this where people can own, manage, develop, train, race their horses. In the future, it’ll be basketball and fighting, but today it’s horses.
Ryan Knuppel
Well, I was going to ask that, but yeah, thank you for, I mean, you’re really making my job easy here. We went right in, talked about what you’re doing at Invincible gg, so thank you. Very innovative and future-based stuff that you’re doing here. You’re talking a lot of ai. I see the word NFTs, I see some of this stuff that’s very innovative. Before we really dive even deeper into what you’re doing here, is that just something that really interests you, like the future of tech and things of that nature, or how did you really get into that?
Jonathan Strause
I guess I just called the future of tech side of things. Yeah. Well, candidly, anytime you use the word AI today or you use the word N F T, it’s probably more of a curse than a blessing, but it’s both, I guess we don’t throw the things around lightly, but no, AI is something that it’s more about, and this is, I’ll give you a quick detour here.
Jonathan Strause
Something I’ve always been interested in is simulation and prediction models. So when I was at McKinsey and working in the oil and gas industry, doing things like trying to predict global supply and demand of oil or gas or regional supply of gas based on using very advanced genetic algorithms and solver technologies and the beginning of learning systems back, this is back two decades plus ago, and that was intriguing. And then I got really involved in sports betting and built a company in systems with a partner of mine from McKinsey who we predicted baseball games based on, back before Moneyball was even published and back before all the huge fantasy market, we were taking baseball stats and predicting totals and predicting money lines based on what we saw as overlays in the market that were available because people had basically misunderstood what was happening.
Jonathan Strause
And we then began developing, we took it from an Excel model to a SQL based model. We started beginning having the system learn on itself, creating our own learning algorithms. And this is again, early AI stuff. And so how I came to this, there was a company in the uk, it was owned by Teles and a game developer called Visit Entertainment called VISI tv. It was virtual racing over interactive television, and it was a struggling business, but they had this really cool underlying very early learning system, AI technology, AI simulation. And so we acquired the business for that technology and our mission since then, that was more than a decade ago. Our mission since then was how do we create live virtual events where the competitors are actually competing and they’re competing because they have intelligence? And it’s been a journey because it’s not, everyone’s focused on AI because of chat, G B T and all the things they can do, but the fact is it’s pretty, the concepts and the tools people have been using in development have been there for a long time.
Jonathan Strause
And how do you help? It is less about, in our case, supporting humans. It’s more about how do you create intelligent competitors, athletes, virtual athletes, and how do they learn, how do they get direction and develop because of that direction, how they develop on their own. And I think we’re still at the very beginning of the curve of what we can do with this technology, but it’s just, to me, it’s fascinating. And from a gaming standpoint, there’s a lot more people who want to compete based on their sports knowledge, their gaming knowledge then versus their thumbs. So we think it’s a good market too.
Ryan Knuppel
Absolutely. So let’s dive to the horse racing game that you guys have created. Really the first one that obviously you’re moving into other sports and things of that nature, but I want to dive into the horse racing game and really talk through how it works. Talk through from beginning to end. Let’s dumb it down for myself who’s just trying to wrap my head around it. All right, because some of us, we really want to see how this works. And so tell a little bit how the horse racing game works in your platform.
Jonathan Strause
And just a quick caveat that we chose horse racing A because it was the core engine that we acquired, but B, people don’t realize it’s a massive global sport. It’s the third most bet upon sport in the world, and it’s the second or third most viewed sport in the world. And what’s cool about it is everyone operates off the same platform. So there’s only a few totes in the world. They all communicate with a common system. So for us to actually broadcast events for wagering, it’s just much easier to do horse racing than say basketball.
The systems are in place. And then the fact that they have permut betting, which really is peer-to-peer betting and people are betting based on their knowledge, it just fits in well with what we’re doing as a company as well. So that’s why we did horse racing. But in terms of the game, so there really are two parts of what we do and was actually more than two parts. But the key two parts are we have a mobile game that’s coming out, and that mobile game allows people to acquire horses. We give horses away for free. You can buy horses on a premium that are fully trained and ready to race. So if you’re sitting in the casino and you want to own a horse that’s racing that day and you want to have it be competitive, you don’t have time to train it and care for it and so forth.
Jonathan Strause
You want to get a fully trained horse and get in a race, we allow you to do that. Then we also are, we got our toe in the N F T blockchain space, and you can buy, we have N F T horses that can be bought and owned. You have unique ownership in the blockchain, and they can be bought and sold on our platform and on third party platforms. And it’s true ownership. But when you get a horse, any of those horses, you got to take care of it. You got to care for it, feed it, you got to work it out. You got to develop core attributes through training. We have dozens and dozens of skills horses can develop, whether it’s how you start a race, how you close, how good you are drafting all these skills that can be learned, the more you race, you get skill points that you then apply.
Jonathan Strause
It’s a bit like an RRP T game in that sense. Sure, sure. Yeah. Whereas you develop your horse capabilities and there’s all the genetics. So our horses, we chose three well-known bloodlines from the real horse racing world. We basically have doing a bunch of regression analysis, figured out what traits these horses have. We created our virtual bloodlines based on these horses. And so breeding is a really important part. If you want to go from having, let’s just say in your stable, you’ve got a couple of good sprinters and maybe a good distance horse. If you want to get down to a really good kind of breeder’s cup quality miler on dirt, you got to get there by breeding and you got to make sure you’re matching your horse with the right other, and it’s only peer-to-peer breeding that happens in the blockchain. So you have to have NFTs to breed, but it’s really critical from one of our game of how you elevate your stable to being world class and then those rollings we’re doing from a horse development standpoint.
Jonathan Strause
What’s cool about our platform, and you’re showing pictures of the mobile game, and our beta will be in a few weeks, so we’re very close to rolling this thing out. Our full release will probably be first quarter of 2024. The game is trailing the hands of a lot of our partners and K O L partners that are testing and playing and enjoying it. But the big piece here is the racing. So most games in our space and the N F T games have what we call public races. You put your horse in the schedule, it plays on the internet, and it’s real money stakes. You pay an entry fee, the winner gets the pool. We do that too. Only difference is our races are not just broadcast on the internet. They’re broadcast into 16 major casinos in Nevada for broadcast into other states. The broadcast will be countrywide and Panama, certainly and will be in the UK and Australia this year as well.
Jonathan Strause
So the races are being broadcast for wagering, but more so we also have all the peer player versus player racing where you and I can race one-on-one against each other in a match race. We can put our stables against each other, we can form a racing club, we can join a racing league. And all these things are either, they’re for fun, people play with gold coins, they’re for US dollars or they’re for our crypto token. So we know that most of the world is not crypto enthusiast, and so our game is completely accessible to people that want to play for fun or play for US dollars or fiat currency. It’s also accessible for those that want to play exclusively in crypto. So we’re trying to bridge that, and we’re the first game to do that as well.
Ryan Knuppel
Yeah, yeah. Wow. There’s a lot to, this is amazing, and I can totally see how this type of thing can cross over to other sports. I mean, you can do the same thing when you’re building your roster of basketball players or your roster of a baseball team or whatever. Very, very cool. So you did lead me into the next question, which you already said, but where are you in the lifecycle of this development? I think you said beta’s coming out soon, correct? Yep. And then maybe first quarter of 2024, hoping to go live. Man, that sounds pretty awesome.
Jonathan Strause
Yeah, I mean, so the hard part, which is the AI based simulation of races being broadcast in the casinos and tracks and OTBs and so forth, that’s out there. It’s out there. It’s fully approved. It’s been working for a long time. We’re just expanding our distribution on that. The new thing is the mobile game that ties into that. So that’s coming out in beta and yeah, it’s a big, big game.
Another thing we do, which I think is completely unique I want to mention is that we’re the only game out there where you can get a free horse, develop it, and then mint it, and then sell it in the marketplace. You can actually get a horse if you’re into the game and you want to develop into a champion horse that will have real value in the metaverse for people who are interested in NFTs. And so there’s a first way to go from non NFT to NFT solely on your own next to no cost. I say next to no cost because we do charge a small transaction fee to make that happen, but it’s pretty minimis.
Ryan Knuppel
Sure, sure. So if somebody wanted to be a part of your beta A customer’s looking to get a part of the beta or even just be a part of the app once it comes out, where do they go? How do they get ahold of that?
Jonathan Strause
So the best place to go is to go to our owner’s club game website, which is owner’s club dot invincible gg.com, and they sign up, they’re now, it’s an early signup bonuses. They have an opportunity to be in the beta, and if they decide to take the next step, which is we’ll be selling our maiden set of NFTs, and the NFTs in our world are the rarest of the horses in our game are NFTs. And so we’re basically doing a lottery where you sign up, everyone pays the same fee, and you may get a super horse, you may get a good horse, but people that participate in the NFT sale will have an advantage in getting into the debate as well.
Ryan Knuppel
Very cool. That’s awesome. So then the future of this, I mean, obviously you want owners’ club and the horse racing side to succeed first, but then it’s a matter of new horses, right?
Ryan Knuppel
I mean, sorry, new sports coming out and launching new things. Talk about the future a little bit for Invincible GG, and what that might look like.
Jonathan Strause
Yeah, there’s two tags. So we are a company that’s completely bought into, I already mentioned we don’t do things in gray areas. We follow the rules, and one of those rules we have to follow is that we respect people’s ip, we respect the horse racing industry, and we want to partner with the horse racing industry. And we are, we’ll be announcing a bunch of partnerships in the months ahead where we actually have a version of our product we distribute at the track on race day. People get virtual horses in the stands, the races are running at the track, and our goal, obviously is to bring those people into our game. So we’re partnering with some of the biggest brands in racing.
Jonathan Strause
You’ll see this across the entire year of 2024, where we’re doing a set of events and we’re basically working with the racing industry and sharing revenues with the racing industry to help them bring in younger demographics. So that’s one major push we have going on in the future. The other is we definitely will be moving into other sports, and you already mentioned it, I’m a Duke guy, so basketball in my blood, we will be doing a three on three basketball game. Where if you think about that opportunity you have, first of all, you have incredibly, incredibly relevant historical athletes that there can be multiple AI versions of, there’s people creating their own AI athletes. But the whole process of developing a team, developing complimentary skills on a team, deciding what kind of D you’re going to play, what kind of offense you’re going to play.
Jonathan Strause
And we focus on the three on three, by the way, because we think it’s kind of a faster paced, more fun version, especially for the gaming environment. But there’s so much you can do in terms of having players, learning skills, working out with each other, learning new skills on their own as an owner, setting strategies and tactics and setting defenses and different types of play structures. And it’s endless. So from a gaming IQ standpoint, for us, it’s almost the holy grail. We’re also going to be doing a fighting game as well. We’re in negotiations with a few major brands in the fighting side of things. Oh, I get, yeah. But one thing we’re also, I almost want to say is that we’re not trying to recreate the wheel either. We think our core strength is the platform we’ve created, the ecosystem of the AI simulation, how we broadcast that legally for wagering, how we have connected to the blockchain and how we create these systems where people manage their entities with their intellect, not with their thumbs.
Jonathan Strause
And there’s a lot of great sports content and sports content companies that we’re looking to partner with and discussions with. So we do a basketball title. It’ll probably be a familiar piece of content that we would be using, but it would be different. It’d be a different purpose for what already exists as a great brand and a great game. Same on the fighting side. So we’re not trying to create our own the next Pokemon, we’re trying to leverage the games like that that are out there that already have mass followings.
Ryan Knuppel
So from a business side, more of a business strategic side. What current challenges or maybe current needs do you have? A lot of our listeners, to be quite frank, are other business owners or other startups or people just really interested in the startup space around gaming, things of that nature. What types of things, what asks do you have?
Jonathan Strause
I mean, you a potential partner out here that fits some need that you have. I’m curious what you have in terms of needs. Yeah, I mean there’s, the big one always is people. We always want great people. And actually we made a huge investment a few years ago into building a team in Kiev and Harv in the Ukraine, which has been really, really hard to sustain in the course of the war, I bet. But we’ve managed to sustain it, but we’ve also been expanding to a bunch of different other teams. But we’re always looking for, we need talent, especially development talent, and that’s always a need capital. This company has been basically funded by a few people for a long time, and so we’re always looking for capital partners, strategics, we’re not, pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered. We’re more in the skew of trying to share the upside with people that want to partner with us.
Jonathan Strause
So that’s wide open. And then the third thing honestly is we do need the help with the industry and all this stuff. So regulatory things are very hard. Getting every new state we add in the United States is a major endeavor. And having incumbents like the major horse racing companies, the major gaming companies that help us in those states, it just makes life much easier. And so also that’s true on the international basis as well. So we’re always looking for partners and we’re blessed by having a bunch of really, really great partners already, but we always need more. So those are kind of the three things that we’re always in need of.
Ryan Knuppel
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, Jonathan, it sounds like you’re doing some amazing things here. I know you’re a busy man running a company trying to get this off the ground and off and running. I want to open it. I always open it up at the end. Anything we missed? Anything you wanted to touch on? Any kind of last words or anything that you wanted to really make sure we showcase before we let you go here?
Jonathan Strause
No, I think we love, we are definitely a bit hunkered down and really focus on making a really great game and making sure technologically everything is working. We would love, we’ve been talking to racing syndicates lately and they’re very into what we’re doing. Obviously the track companies, casino companies work. We don’t spend a lot of time out doing B two B marketing, but we are wide open and looking for partnerships. It’s just we haven’t had time to really run ’em down as much as we should. So I guess that’s my one to say is, Hey, listen guys, A is a business, it works. It’s being distributed now and it’s only going to get better. So if what we’re doing interests people, please reach out to us.
Ryan Knuppel
And how do they get ahold of you? I know I’ll put up the site here and we’ll put it all in the show notes, but I know you said owners club dot invincible gg.com, but is there another way to get ahold of you or,
Jonathan Strause
Yeah, Email me directly. So jstrause@invinciblegg.com. Perfect. I’ll come right to my email box.
Ryan Knuppel
That’s amazing. That’s awesome. Well, Jonathan, I wish you best of luck. Hopefully I’ll see you around. Do you guys make it out to any of the industry conferences or anything of that nature, or is that talk to you while you’re in development?
Jonathan Strause
No, we do G two E every year. There you go. We do the Racing Symposium in Tucson in the fall or December. I guess we focus on those two things because again, like you said, we don’t have a lot of bandwidth. Exactly. We’ll be a G two E again this year, but I think we’re going to start expanding. Well, my marketing agencies are pushing me to expand the number of conferences we go to, and so I think we’ll pick up the pace a little bit.
Ryan Knuppel
Well, I’m looking forward to sitting down over coffee or a beer or something at G two E and saying hello in person. I’ll be out there as well. So looking forward to meeting you out.
Jonathan Strause
There’s definitely do that. That’d be awesome. And we usually do a suite. We have all of our technology and we kind of keep it stealthy, but we’d love to have you.
Ryan Knuppel
I’ll definitely check it out for sure. Well, cool. Jonathan, I appreciate everything you’re doing here.
Ryan Knuppel
Invincible GG. I urge everyone that’s out here to go check it out. Cool. Any last words, anything else or, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. It’s great meeting you and look forward to hanging out. Same thing. Alright, Jonathan, take care. Bye bye.
Alright, that was Jonathan Straw with Invincible gg. Awesome, awesome game. I cannot wait to get my hands on that and then try it. And I’m not even a horse racing guy myself, but just the fact that we’re mixing AI with NFTs and just a really cool looking platform, I’m excited to do that. And then of course when basketball or anything of that nature comes out, I’ll be all in on that. So I urge you guys to go check it out. Owners club dot invincible gg.com. I’ll put the link in the show notes as well. That was Jonathan Straws.
Ryan Knuppel
Really cool guy. Thank you for tuning in. I’m Ryan Knupple at K Nup out on all the channels. That was episode two 10. If you are going to G two E, please shoot me a message. I would love to just say hello to any listeners or any watchers, anybody that pays attention to this show. If you’re going to be there, please shoot me a message. I’ll say hello to you and just sit down and hear what you have going on in this crazy world. So, alright, until next time, Ryan Nup will check in out of episode two 10. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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