Nir Efrat Podcast Transcript
Nir Efrat joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Nir Efrat. Nir Efrat is the CEO and director of Virtually Human Studio, the pioneering web three gaming company behind Zed Run, the first blockchain based digital horse racing game. With over 25 years of experience in the gaming industry, Nir is a seasoned product and business leader known for delivering and scaling innovative digital products across casual games, social casino platforms, and B2B, B2C innovations.
Nir has held key leadership roles at top gaming companies such as Take Two Interactive, Zynga, Dots, King, and 888, where he excelled in managing and scaling cross functional, cross cultural, and globally distributed teams. His expertise in product development, analytics, and technology delivery has set new standards in the industry.
Well, good afternoon here. Welcome to the show.
Nir Efrat: Hey, good to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time brother hailing out of New York and I’m in Kansas City. So we just got an hour time difference this evening. So I appreciate you making the time and near. I’m going to jump right into your first question with over 25 years in the gaming industry.
What drew you to join virtually human studio or known as VHS as the CEO of And how has your previous experience influenced your vision for the company?
Nir Efrat: Great question. I joined a year and a half ago, give or take. And as you mentioned, I was many, many years in more traditional Web 2, if you want, gaming, different gaming companies.
I worked at King, I worked in a company called Dots, I worked at Zynga, I worked at Take Two. And I always looked at Web 3 outside looking in as something which is very novel, very interesting, exciting, but not very accessible. It looked a bit weird. It looked small. It made lots of noise and lots of hype.
But when I tried to to engage, when I tried to try it out for myself, it felt really, really hard to do. It felt really hard to be onboarded. And it didn’t feel that most of those Web3, successful Web3 products and NFT products had actual utility. So in the big years of 2020, 2021, 2022, many companies offered.
Lots of cool NFTs to buy and lots of them were very popular, but there was not a ton of utility. There was a promise of utility. There was speculation around utility, but not a lot of game and not a lot of actual things to do. And I think that’s one of the main reasons why eventually we saw what happened to Web3 games and Web3 NFT.
It went a bit nowhere because there’s not a lot to do other than speculation. So when I joined and I looked when I was Pitched at VHS or Zed Run. I looked at what they had and it’s one of the very few projects that actually had a utility. The game for those who don’t know was virtual horse racing product.
You can buy horses. You can breed horses. You can race horses. You can win, you can lose. You can create more horses. You can engage with others. So it was a real game. It was not perfect for the time, but it got a lot of traction and a lot of success because it had real utility. And that’s what drew my attention because I thought that’s real.
That’s a real product. That’s a real game. There is something to work with here. To your question of what for my web to experience. So I’m bringing all those a bit foreign concepts of user experience, engagement, retention, all the things that we really care about in the real gaming world. And I’m trying to implement that in Web3.
In Web2 world, you spend months and months iterating and really crafting your onboarding experience, your first five minutes, your first hour, your first day in the game to create something really amazing, really engaging, sticky and retaining users. And that’s what we’re trying to do now with a new iteration of Zed Run, which we can talk about.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. It is interesting. Just, it was just a few years ago myself that I actually got into Web3 blockchain and this publication, we have a Web3 version of it as well. Pretty excited about it. But I was like you outside looking in, people talking about doing some crypto mining. That’s all I thought it was.
And, but I know there’s so much more utility behind the blockchain platform. So appreciate that. I really do. Your partnerships have played a significant role in VHS’s journey with collaborations involving. Brands like Budweiser, Netflix, and NASCAR. How do you envision such partnerships evolving with the launch of Zed Champions?
Nir Efrat: I definitely expect quite a lot of those, but the first thing that we need to make sure that we need to create a fun, engaging product that has a value and upside to get more and more users into it. And that is the one big challenge of many of the NFT games and the Web3 product that it’s just really hard to get on.
It’s not very accessible. You know, in the original Zedron product that I tried before I joined, you needed to jump through so many hoops. You need to get three different currencies to buy one horse in a different website. So our plan and what we’re doing with Zed Champions is making it a hundred percent accessible to anyone, anyone that has some knowledge and experience with NFTs and blockchain and people that do not.
And I believe that will create. More, uh, mass appeal to the product, which will in turn draw good collaborations and good partnerships with big brands. So in the new game, we’re going to have many races happening around the clock. We’re not going to get into the specifics, it’s, it’s, but it’s very exciting.
We’re going to have a racing pool and every 80 seconds, there’s going to be a race automatically. So horses will, will race all the time and will go up and down the value. And there’s going to be lots of opportunities for sponsored races, sponsored courses, specific side games, sponsored by specific brand.
So we expect a lot of cool brands that have strong affinity to the space, to sports, to horse racing, to be very interested in collaborating with us. But my priority right now is first. Build it and launch it. And we’re all launching the game next month in April. And once we launch, make it very, very strong and have an impactful launch.
And I’m pretty sure that those partnerships will follow.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I appreciate you sharing, you know, you mentioned some of the struggles early on with Zed champions, but I know your vision is to make this platform to be a hundred percent accessible to everyone, making it easier and seamless for users to join and participate.
Which I think is awesome. We need to do that and get some more adoption around web three. But what I heard is like gamifying your entire platform, adding all these different ways that people can be engaged. And of course, expanding this through your different brands and partners is only going to make that better.
So I appreciate that. Near web three gaming is continually evolving. How does VHS plan to balance the integration of blockchain technology with delivering engaging and accessible gameplay experiences in Zed Champions?
Nir Efrat: What we’re looking at is game first, that’s our approach, and we hope to leverage the benefits of blockchain, which is seamless transactions, which is transparency, which is clear idea of no ownership that can go across different platforms and products, and we’re going to just leverage that to make it a good experience.
So, so, as I mentioned, the first priority, the top priority for us is to create. If fun engaging game and this is what we’re going for. And there’s going to be, as you mentioned, lots of ways for users to engage either as owners, if they want to breed and own their horses, they can be investing or staking in other horses, or they can use our second product that picks to make picks on horses to view as a spectator, uh, view very cool streamed.
Races that we’re going to have every 80 seconds and place picks on, we can use for gems or for real money, and they can also partake and enjoy the same thing. So we’re going to use and leverage lots of different technologies to attract as many different profiles of users as possible. And blockchain is one of them.
Yeah, blockchain is really coming through in a lot of use cases through various industries, but gaming, Web3 gaming especially, is really where it’s, I think it’s going to start taking off with people like you. But I love that your approach with the game first philosophy, using blockchain, having those seamless transactions, and of course, engaging your users in various ways, including ownership in those assets or those horses, investing in assets, partake in winnings.
Brian Thomas: I think that’s amazing. So thank you again. Your last question of the day, Reflecting on your leadership roles at companies like Take Two Interactive, Zynga, and King, what unique challenges and opportunities do you see leading a Web3 gaming company like VHS?
Nir Efrat: It’s all about giving the users and building the games and finding the overlap between people that are excited by the technology.
And the opportunities with the technologies and actual players. And we’ve seen, as I mentioned before, right, when we’re looking at all the big projects of 2021 and 2022, we saw people coming, but they were not playing games. We want them to play games. We want them to enjoy the. Product. We want them to be excited about it.
And those notions were a little bit foreign and not very, not really highly prioritized and building because it was all about the speculation, which of course makes sense, but we want to build it more than just a speculative bubble or an investment opportunity. We want to have the upside. We want to have a nice cherry on the top of the cake of the plane, but we want to use.
The web two concepts that I got from King and from take two to build a real exciting product and leverage technology for it. And I think we’re definitely going there. The technology is sound technology is promising, just finding the right fit, finding the right way, right experiences. And then, as I mentioned, find the right in and onboarding to make it available and accessible for people that actually care about playing a game.
Brian Thomas: I just love the transition here, right? We talked about blockchain being Web 3 being something new to you and I kind of the outside looking in, but I love how you’re bringing a lot of your experience, leveraging your experience from your past Web 2 experience in game dev, leveraging those opportunities right with technology and building adoption through engagement and retention.
And like I said, I’m pretty excited about this. I’d say A good chunk of the guests on the show are involved in web three in some way or another. When I say some, quite a few, probably a couple hundred anyway that I’ve had out of the thousand podcasts I’ve done. So really appreciate that. And Nir, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Nir Efrat: Thank you so much, Brian. It was great to be with you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Nir Efrat Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
