Before there was a company, there were two piles of stones. In a mathematical game called Wythoff’s Game, two players take turns removing them. A player can take stones from one pile, or the same number from both. Whoever removes the final stone wins. The equipment is modest. The argument about what to do next can become rather elaborate.
Jared Geller co-authored a paper about variations of this game while he was still in high school. Years later, he would co-found Triumph with Jake Brooks, building software for competitions with cash prizes. Between the stones and the smartphone sits the subject that makes his career interesting: what has to be settled before two people can play?
It is tempting to tell a founder’s story through the moment the money arrives. Geller’s story rewards an earlier starting point. Long before venture funding, he was working on patterns, permissible moves and the conditions that distinguish a winning position from a losing one. The stakes were mathematical. The rules already mattered.
A seventeen-year-old, an infinite series
At Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Geller entered the 2016 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a project on continued fractions and infinite series. He received a Fourth Award in mathematics, carrying a $500 prize. The project’s title, “Patterns in the Continued Fraction Expansion of Various Infinite Series,” offered no concessions to the casual browser.
A continued fraction puts a fraction inside another fraction, then another. Infinite series add terms according to a pattern. Both belong to a corner of mathematics where a compact expression can conceal a great deal of structure. Even the language demands that a reader slow down. A science fair table can hold work that takes much longer to explain than to announce.
In 2017, Geller was named a Regeneron Science Talent Search scholar. His submitted research concerned new patterns in continued fraction expansions, examined through semi-folding symmetry. These were specific research achievements before college, with a named problem and a named result. They give his early biography a texture that the usual phrase “interested in technology” cannot supply.
The pleasing detail is the choice of subject. A pattern can sit in plain sight until someone finds a useful way to describe it. Then the description becomes something other people can inspect. That small exchange, from private observation to shared method, is one of the satisfactions of research.
Intel ISEF Fourth Award in mathematics.
A research milestone, years before venture funding.
Two piles, four authors
The Wythoff paper brought Geller together with Shubham Aggarwal, Shuvom Sadhuka and Max Yu. Submitted in December 2016 and revised in February 2017, it developed an algorithm for a family of variations in which equal removals from the two piles follow powers-of-two constraints. The paper identifies itself with PROMYS 2016, the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists.
The useful distinction is between a position from which the player can force a win and one from which optimal play leads to defeat. The authors studied how those positions form patterns as the rules change. A simple game gives a precise question; changing a permitted move changes the question again.
There is no need to turn this paper into a prediction of Triumph. A research project is allowed to be a research project. Still, it is an unusually fitting item in the biography of someone whose later business would organize skill competitions. Geller had already worked on games as formal systems, with assumptions stated before the calculations began.
For the ordinary player, the next move is the absorbing part. For the researcher, an entire family of possible moves becomes the object of study. Reading Geller’s early work alongside his later company puts both views on the same page: the pleasure of playing, and the machinery that makes the contest intelligible.
He finished the degree
Geller attended Stanford from 2017 to 2021. His degree was a Bachelor of Science in Mathematical and Computational Science. At graduation, he received distinction and was listed among the program’s Phi Beta Kappa recipients. His full name, Jared Matthew Geller, appears in the degree-conferral list.
It is a small but useful correction to the familiar Silicon Valley college story. Here is a founder whose academic work reached a formal finish. The diploma belongs in the account alongside the company. It records a completed course of study rather than asking the reader to treat attendance alone as an achievement.
His early work experience also crossed mathematics and finance. Before Triumph, his professional history included Art of Problem Solving, ArrowHead Economics, Citadel and Bridgewater Associates. The roles included grading, an economics internship, quantitative research and an investment associate placement. Those are distinct kinds of work, gathered before the long commitment to a single company.
A résumé makes these transitions look tidier than any working life feels. Dates line up; organizations acquire equal-sized rows. The meaningful point here is the range of environments. A mathematical answer, a research result and an investment decision each have their own standards of evidence. Geller’s early career put him in contact with several of them.
The company inside the competition
Triumph began in 2020, when Brooks and Geller were still Stanford students. Brooks describes the early period as bootstrapping and experimenting with the concept that became the company’s real-stakes gaming platform. The founding partnership joined a shared university setting to a product that would sit between games and money.
Brooks’s ambition was to make competitions with real prizes easy for developers to add. The demanding work included legal structures, relationships with payment networks and processors, and the technology behind integration. He described years spent building the systems that could make a developer’s eventual experience feel simple.
That ambition changes the scale of the problem. Two people who agree to a contest have a shared understanding of what they mean. Software must make the agreement repeatable. It has to accept a result, account for the money and handle the circumstances in which someone disputes what happened. Every apparently simple button has a backstage.
For Geller, the public role was co-founder and co-CEO. The company has also identified him as a technical founder. Those titles place him at the junction of the commercial undertaking and the system being built. Triumph’s subject is play, but its founders took on the less photogenic work that allows play to become a product.
A sentence with four difficult nouns
When Triumph announced its launch in May 2023, Geller described the challenge in terms of a “patchwork regulatory landscape.” He named gaming law, payment processing, identity checks and anti-fraud work as parts of the infrastructure. His language stayed close to the tasks. There was a great deal to fit behind a tournament entry screen.
Identity verification asks who is entering. Payment processing asks how money gets in and out. Anti-fraud work asks whether the contest can be trusted. Rules determine where and how a particular experience can operate. A game developer may arrive with a finished game and discover that each of these questions has become a separate project.
Triumph’s proposed answer was a software development kit, or SDK, that developers could integrate into their games. The attraction of such a kit is the work it packages. The developer can concentrate on the experience while using common infrastructure for the surrounding operations. The promise depends on how thoroughly the surrounding operations have been handled.
This is the portion of Geller’s story that resists the usual startup glamour. A payment that arrives correctly is rarely a spectacle. Neither is an identity check that completes. Yet a cash contest makes both consequential. The prize can be small; the obligation to get the transaction right remains quite specific.
“patchwork regulatory landscape”Jared Geller / Triumph launch, May 2023
Funding meets a working system
The launch announcement disclosed $14.1 million in total funding, including a $10.2 million Series A led by General Catalyst. It also named appointments in legal, engineering and product leadership. The business was assembling the different disciplines required by its own description of the problem.
An investment round is a milestone in a founder’s career, but it leaves the central question open: what can the organization now deliver? The dollar figure measures financing. It does not measure whether an individual player likes a game, whether a developer finds integration convenient, or whether the next tournament runs as intended.
General Catalyst later placed Brooks and Geller among the student founders it had backed in gaming. The two names appear together, as they do across Triumph’s founding story. That partnership is one of the durable facts of Geller’s career: the research years involved collaborators, and the company years began with a co-founder.
The press photograph of the pair supplies a welcome bit of visual mischief. Geller sits on the left, Brooks on the right, surrounded by outsized chess pieces. For a business handling tournaments, the set dressing is almost excessively cooperative. The image offers a board, two founders and enough pieces to make a modest living room feel under-equipped.
The game keeps changing
Today, Triumph Labs presents two consumer products on its website: Arcade and Rips. Arcade brings together games including pool, golf, puzzles and arcade titles. Rips centers on collecting cards. The public face of the company now gives visitors things to play and collect, as well as the founding association with tournament infrastructure.
The breadth matters to a personal profile because it shows the undertaking Geller co-founded continuing beyond its original launch description. A company acquires new surfaces as it develops. The founder’s first idea remains part of the history, while the products people encounter can become a different-looking collection of experiences.
Geller’s earlier record offers a concrete way to understand that history without inventing a private philosophy for him. There are research problems, named collaborators, a completed Stanford degree and a company built with Brooks. Each stage leaves something inspectable: an award entry, a paper, a graduation record, a product.
The two piles of stones make a good place to finish. Their charm lies in how little is needed to start playing and how much can be discovered by examining the rules. Geller’s career has moved from studying a game’s possible outcomes to helping build the systems surrounding competitions. The player sees the next move. Someone has to make the rest work.