GEORGE GIANNUKOS

Country of Residence: US

Networth: $2.6 million

George Giannukos, 16, is a founder and Co-President in GameWager. Local entrepreneur from Texas A&M who started a new gaming venture called GameWager . GameWager is an online, matchmaking platform that enables members of all skill sets to win cash/fun prizes & recognition competing in the most popular PC games online.

They host pay-to-play (poker style), cash prize tournaments where the entry fees are distributed to the winners in structured payouts and free, token-based (arcade style) tournaments where gamers collect more tokens as they win; all of which can be turned in to their “Reward Zone” which will be full of prizes.

Sarah Lakhani, of the Texas Entrepreneur Association, turned me on to a startup called GameWager.  She described GameWager as an online platform that matches gamers wanting to play each other for money, prizes, and recognition in existing PC and Console games.

GameWager so far claims over 60,000 registered gamers and 25 million earned tokens since launching in July 2008. The company recently secured $3 million in a Series A round of funding.

Below is a transcript of the Austin Entrepreneur network’s interview with George Giannukos:

What does GameWager do?

Simply put, we’re creating the “Dave & Buster’s” for online PC Games. Gamers earn tokens for kills and other in-game achievements (capturing the flag, rescuing hostages, etc.). These tokens can be turned in for the opportunity to win really cool prizes. In addition, we are adding a number of social community features and have many other innovative ideas in the pipeline.

What kind of prizes?

Seriously really cool ones! We’ll have daily, weekly, monthly and yearly drawings. Based on the drawing, we’ll award gamers anything from t-shirts and hats to video cards or a new laptop. We will be offering one lucky gamer a 2008 Ferrari!

How does GameWager work?

It’s ridiculously simple. Our sign-up process takes 10 seconds for a gamer to register on our site. Once they’re registered, they simply click on our “Play” tab and find game servers we’ve GameWager-enabled. We have approximately 20 game servers that are enabled which allows us to collect each gamers’ performance/statistics. Gamers can view their accuracy rate, favorite weapon, and other relevant in-game statistics. 

What games are you working with so far?

It’s only PC-based games right now. We’re currently supporting Counter-Strike Source and Counter-Strike 1.6. They are First Person Shooter (FPS) games.

Is the system up and running?

Yes it is. We probably launched a little early, but we’re working very hard to add more features and flesh out the site. We wanted to get it out there and begin receiving feedback from the gaming community. Our philosophy is to release early and release often. 

I see you are from Houston. How did you come to Austin?

We believe the first five or so people you hire in the company are the most important. We looked at Dallas, Houston, and Austin, and felt like the technical talent here made this the best spot.