In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Ultra’s new CEO Gus van Rijckevorsel about why the entrepreneur decided to invest in the company, also getting personally involved in the day-to-day running.
He explains his ambition for Ultra, including competing with Steam and turning the platform into a unicorn that will shake up the games industry.
BlockchainGamer.biz: What’s your history before Ultra?
Gus van Rijckevorsel: I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. Lots of failure, some success, as always. The last company I launched was a strategy consulting company in Paris. We went from zero to 50 consultants in less than three years and then sold it back to a major group in France. Before that plenty of things in services, products, all different things. Always a lot of fun. The past two years, I was more on the investment side because I sold my last company.
And you produced a TV show too.
There are plenty of different types of CEOs and different types of ways to deal with a company. My way of doing things is communication, definitely one of the major things that a company needs to do. When you believe that your product is good, the CEO needs to sell his shit. That’s what a CEO is here for, right? When it comes to Ultra, my background isn’t in gaming so I’m surrounding myself with the best for that. But what a CEO is there for is to sell his company. The notion of communication is essential.
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And that’s what happened with this TV show. I decided to launch a strategy firm in Paris, but it’s a very closed business if you’re not coming from a certain school etc. So I arrived in Paris not knowing anybody. The first thing I had to do is give myself credibility. When you see something on TV, you give it credibility. It’s stupid but that’s how humans are, so the first thing I did is to create a TV show where I invited major CEOs and when people saw those guys next to me then it gives me credibility. You get the first two bosses on and then the third one says, ‘I need to be next to the ‘beard guy’ as well’.
Of course, you cannot just sell shit. You have to make sure that you’ve got something behind but you have to play the game of human beings to sell something. With Ultra, I’ve got no doubt regarding the contents, so I’m here to play the game.
Given your lack of experience in gaming, why did you want to get involved in Ultra?
When you’re buying a company, there are two things you have to know – whether you are a super expert, or if you don’t know anything about it because that makes you super humble. It makes you super objective about things. You have to make sure that you surround yourself perfectly because you don’t know anything. And this is the angle I like to take.
As soon as you know things, first of all you produce what’s already going on. You’ve got your own blockers, ‘This guy already tried, this guy already tried, it didn’t work, so why would it work?’ So you put in your own roadblocker. You have difficulty reimaging things. So I don’t think the [lack of] knowledge of gaming in my position is what matters. What matters is to find the right people and set up crazy ambition.
Okay, that covers gaming. But why Ultra in particular?
Business is always about timing and opportunities. Over the past two years, I’ve received a lot of different opportunities to invest in. You check them out and you’re disappointed. But I met Nicolas [Gilot, Ultra’s co-founder] at my kid’s school. We started to discuss entrepreneurial things, and what could be done to scale the business and so on and at some point I fell in love with it. By not being a gamer, I haven’t checked Ultra as a gaming company. I’m just checking this as an industry and trying to understand what the signal of the industry is, what has been done in the industry, what can this industry be compared with, and how big the opportunity is in this industry. And what we have inside the company. What can be done?
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It’s just checking numbers. Just checking facts and figures. And that’s exactly what I did with Ultra. The way people have been accessing the content and interacting with the content [in games], nothing has been moved on. The film industry has drastically changed. The music industry has completely changed as well. I don’t know, even the luxury industry has completely changed. The gaming industry is just about creating a game and buying the game and that’s it. And when you see an industry like this, with a market cap like this, growth like this, more and more people getting interested, and nothing has been created, then it becomes sexy.
But then, what do do with it? You look at Ultra, and you see a company that has been investing millions of euros for the last seven years with crazy developers. Let’s be very clear. The business wasn’t there but tech, I mean they are the best, right? I’m not the one to judge. I asked several top people to check out the engine and they all say, ‘With tech like this, how come those guys aren’t further down the road?’ And this is why I am here. This is where a guy like me sees a major opportunity, a diamond that hasn’t been polished and where I can create the maximum value.
For some background, Ultra previously had two co-CEO Nicolas and David. They’re great guys but having co-CEOs seemed to be one of the issues as neither Nicolas or David’s personality was going out and promoting Ultra, but clearly that’s yours, right?
Having co-CEOs to make a business, impossible. It’s just not how it works. It never worked and it never will work. Well, if you want to be an R&D company, you could have five CEOs because basically you’ve got engineers and crazy developers working together to create a crazy monster. When you’re in the process of creation and you know exactly what you’re gonna do, one thing for sure is you’re gonna fail. The notion of creation is that you don’t know what you’re going to create. You have to try plenty of different things. So having different people at the top of the company, no problem.
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The moment you have to build your product and sell it, the moment you have to sell your product and make it a business, then you need one head. So that’s what Ultra did for the last seven years in a very smart way. Now, the product is fully ready, it’s time. Let’s go to the next phase. That’s why I’m coming into the game.
Ultra just announced a $12 million funding round. What’s the story?
The normal process for a company like Ultra is that it was a company creating something and now it’s a company making a business. There are plenty of things that need changing so we put together what we call in finance a bridge. It’s not fundraising. Fundraising for a company like Ultra, we’re there to build a unicorn, right? We’re not going to do that with a $12 million raise. This is a bridge in order to prep the bride and have the right VC, the right fund that can follow your ambition.
So that’s what we did. This bridge is composed of equity, debt and token. It’s a mix of all different financial aspects with different people around the table. There’s NOIA, which is this family office, myself, and then another very cool investor Jean-Christophe Conticello, who is an old friend of mine. We’ve invested together in businesses like this. You don’t change a winning team.
When you start the career of an entrepreneur, you have your own tools and you reuse them because you know it works. And the same with your investors, with your network, with the people that you can surround yourself with. You recycle them because you know that the last recipe was good so they’ve got a big chance to be good this time as well. So three guys around the table plus different other vehicles around us to make this bridge, prep the bride to go to the next level for Ultra.
We need to set the ambition. Ultra isn’t a web3 platform. Let’s be clear. We are a gaming distribution platform with the top tech ever, which is web3. But the web2 [audience] doesn’t care. They’re here to play the game and to interact in a complete ecosystem. Whether it’s web2 or web3, that doesn’t matter. Web3 is a technology and it doesn’t apply to the user. We’re just a gaming distribution with the best technology. We’re not there to be the underdog, trying to get the last three web3 games where we’re crossing fingers it works because the market is shit.
No, we’re here to eat a chunk of Steam. Those guys have been around making a monopoly on the markets and been treating the different protagonists very badly. When you look at the way they’re distributors, it’s awful. Developers are taking all the risk, putting the money on the table, developing the game for years and not knowing whether the game is gonna work. They’re completely cut off from the users.
When the hell is Steam gonna invest, take risk, put money on the table to please the end users? They haven’t done it for the last 20 years. I’m convinced that we’re gonna make money by pleasing those guys [developers]. Because a company like Steam doesn’t have any more challengers, they can treat everybody badly and still make money. This is the opportunity for us. Pleasing those guys [developers] and then being able to take a chunk of Steam.
Just to clarify, Ultra is a web3 platform but you’re not going to be using that as a marketing message to onboard gamers?
When I’m saying we’re not a web3 platform, of course we are. We’ve got a blockchain, we’ve got our own currency UOS. But we cannot be seen by the market as the little underdog who’s playing with web3 and everybody’s waiting for web3 to pop up at some point. No, we’re not here for that. We are a gaming distribution platform with the best technology the market has. And thanks to technology, we’re able to distribute any games on the market. And the best technology is web3.
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Thanks to this web3 technology, we are able to create our own currency that’s going to be used all across the gaming industry. We are able to make a secondary market. We are to have those marvelous web3 games where you’re buying assets, trading assets. So you’re just adding value but we cannot be seen as a web3 company. We are a gaming company, giving the best technology in the market.
Lots of companies including Epic have tried to compete with Steam but no-one’s managed to make a dent. How do you think you can break into such a monopoly?
Nokia said the same, right? We’re Nokia and we cannot die. Those guys disappeared in a year and a half, right? Kodak was the same. Epic did some very hard work, but just copycatted Steam. If you copycat, Steam is always going to be better.
If I’m just copycatting Steam, just in web3, saying, ‘Come to me, you can buy a game and play the game’, why the hell am I going to succeed? It’s impossible. Everybody tried. Epic tried. Apple tried. All those big guys tried. The difference with Ultra is we’re treating our users in a very, very different manner. When someone comes to the office, he’s not using one computer for Word, another for Excel, another for PowerPoint. It’s an ecosystem, an OS. It’s the same for Ultra.
A gamer is not just here to play the game. He wants to be recognized. He wants to play the game with his friends. He wants to know about the game. He wants to learn about the game, open Twitch and discuss it with the other guys. Then Discord.
There are three different types of gamers. There’s people who watch games, which is an enormous part of gaming, and needs to be treated equally to gamers. Because those guys are making the gaming industry. Those guys need to be integrated into the logic of the gaming industry. The other aspect is those people creating content.
There are people watching the games. There are people creating content around the games and there are people playing the games. These three are part of the gaming industry and they need to be treated equally inside the business model and the way you access the content of gaming. And this is what Ultra is about. Ultra is an OS to interact with those three types of gamers.
What needs to happen for Ultra to get the growth you want in 2025?
We’ve got three clients, right? Three clients which are the developers, the publishers, and the gamers. I’ve just explained what I mean by gamers – viewers, content producers, and gamers.
We also need to serve the publisher, as much as Spotify served Sony and Warners. By giving data to those guys, because they are the one who’s taking the risk on producing games, we need to make the link between them and the end users and give back the right they have because they’re taking the risk. It’s normal.
So we have to fill the gap between developers and gamers. Then we’ve got the developers. Developers are the guys who are trying to make games. Inside Ultra, we’ve got plenty of technological bricks to help them to develop games. Those guys need different things. They need to interact with the early adopters. They need to be able to fundraise their games. They need to have the technological bricks to access AI agents which are going to help them to develop their games. We’ve got all this. Ultra is a platform that’s been developed by gamers for gamers.
When you look at the people, look at Nicholas and David, those guys were born with games in their blood. They want to save the gaming industry. That’s the vision. That’s why we’re here, to serve the gaming industry, so giving developers the right tools, serving gamers and giving them the best ecosystem, the best way to interact with their content, the best OS, to make sure that when they’re there, they don’t want to leave. They’re opening Ultra in the morning. They need it to be open all day
Basically, you open your computer for a couple of different things. You want to watch a movie, you go to Netflix. You want to work, you’ve got Microsoft. You want leisure, it’s Ultra. That’s it. Ultra is three things. We’ve got a gaming ecosystem. We’ve got the gaming blockchain, and we’ve got the gaming currency.
Being the gaming blockchain is important. I don’t think it’s a technology that’s watched enough by investors. Ultra wasn’t built for AI. It wasn’t built for finance. We’re here to serve gaming and gaming needs very specific specs. We’re working on our blockchain to make it the best gaming blockchain ever. Of course we don’t have the traffic yet. One thing for sure is that we will have the traffic.
And the third product is the gaming currency. As much as dollars is linked to petrol, UOS has to be linked to gaming. We’re going to impose UOS on every layer of the gaming industry.When you know that your audience owns UOS, the gaming currency, you’ll want to make sure that your product can be bought with this gaming currency.
How does the strategy work in terms of the mix of web2 and web3 games on the platform?
We need to be all along the gaming value chain, just like Netflix signs actors, produces and distributes films. Ultra needs to work the same way. We need to be all along the value chain.
People are there for content, right? We need to have massive amounts of games on Ultra. We cannot be satisfied with a couple of hundred games. We need to be satisfied with thousands of games on Ultra, because when you go on Netflix, you’re happy to have the big shot films but what’s also satisfying is that you’ve got a tremendous choice. So we need to have a lot of content. Definitely one strategy that we are implementing now is to increase the catalog drastically.
So what should people interested in Ultra be doing now?
The magic of the gaming industry is you’ve got a lot of big fans. I’m sure the games industry is waiting for someone who’s going to change the game and eat a chunk of Steam. What we need from this ecosystem is support. We’ve got a bunch of guys who’ve been working for the last seven years on crazy tech. Now we’ve got a bunch of investors who are taking a massive risk to make this platform the next Netflix of gaming, the next Spotify of gaming. This is only possible with first believers.
When you look at how Spotify works, that’s exactly it. It was the listeners who said ‘This is the thing we need and we’re gonna fight for it’.
And Ultra, as a company that’s been created by gamers for gamers, we need the gamers to speak about us, be enthusiastic about us, and at the same time tell us where we can improve and get better. And judge us on what you’re gonna see.
Find out more at the Ultra website.
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