 Gm, Seb. Gm, Timur. Hello, everyone. Hi. It's awesome to be here. We actually met six years ago at Slash. That's right. Time flies. But Slash is the best event for tech content in Europe and gaming. And it's fun that we met there. Yes, it is. We just figured it out before when we were talking about what to talk about. Yeah, and we've actually had kind of a common journey since that time. Some common touch points. So at that time, when I first met you, I think you were not working exactly on what Ready Player Me was today. Do you want to share a little bit that story with us, like your founder story? For sure. So Ready Player Me, we've been around for nine years. We started as a hardware company, building 3D scanners to scan people and create realistic avatars. We did that for a few years. And then we built a software product for big gaming companies. And we worked with Tencent, Huawei, HTC, Vodafone, Verizon, custom building avatars systems for those companies. And there was dozens of avatars systems from scratch. And that's where we really learned to build great avatars and then eventually built into a platform that now more than 4,000 companies are using in their games in virtual worlds. Well, 4,000. Well, what a growth. Exciting, right? Yeah. It went from 30 companies into probably to 4,000 in 18 months. So that was a wild ride. After a long time of building and learning and grinding, chewing glass and staring into the abyss. I'm sure we'll get back to that. Like six years of grinding before you figure out what would be the key business model for you. At what moment you found or you understood working on the avatar more specifically would become the future of the company? Yeah, I mean, we started the company. We made a bet on people spending more and more time in virtual worlds with every year that goes by in games and hanging out together. And VR is one component to that and so forth. And that's been the core going to bet. And avatars are needed in virtual worlds. You need to have an avatar to represent you well. And you need an avatar to travel across worlds. So that was always the thing we were trying to solve or build for. But it was from hardware to all the other stuff we did. And then eventually we built a platform when the technology was ready. And we were ready. And we figured out how to build an end to end product for developers. But it was more obvious every year that went by that avatars and virtual worlds and the metaverse is happening around us. And it's going to be important to build that. And what about sandbox? You've had a long journey as well. Oh, yes. So we started sandbox with the idea in 2011 that we wanted to empower anyone to become a creator. And back then I was already a serial entrepreneur. We had co-founded three companies with my business partner, Archon Madrid. We had two exits. And I always had a dream to how to make video games. And I saw mobile and smartphone as a new way for anyone to become a creator again, making video game development accessible. But we wanted to go one step more, removing the barrier of having to learn programming language. And so using touchscreen, we came to the idea, let's make a game where people can just buy a touch of their finger, a crate, and a chair. And it rapidly grew into a large success. We over eight years of existence of that mobile game, we had 40 million installs, 70 million creation. I actually remember in 2016, I was here at Slush pitching as a founder trying to raise funds for that secicle version of my previous game. And in 2018, my mobile game studio has been acquired by Animoca Brands and we started to play around blockchain technology. I was always exploring. I've been a geek of my life, an early adopter. I bought from the first day pretty much every tech product. So when I found about blockchain, I said, oh great, let's see how we can use that in a creative way or a way that supports what we want to do. And we found that blockchain and NFT would be a great way like for combining it with user generated content to enable people to make their own content, own it, transfer it from one game to another and even sell it outside of the place where they were originally created those content. That was one key challenge we had back then because on mobile, our creators were amazingly talented. We were giving them a lot of social recognition, social fame, but we have literally no way to reward them financially, sharing a part of the revenue that they contributed to our game back to the hand of the creator. And NFT solved that problem. And so we pivoted into building a new version of Sandbox in 2017, 3D multiplayer, multi-platform. We were one of the pioneer in blockchain gaming. I remember there were probably less than 10 companies in the space and maybe even less than 10 people in the audience when we were first pitching about the ID. And well, today, I think like Sandbox has been one of the most recognized builders in the space for contributing to the open metaverse. But it's not been like this overnight success story, like many people imagine. It's been like a 10 years overnight success story. And we still have a lot of challenge and a lot of things to keep building, to grow so that we can reach that level of recognition and those hundreds of millions of users that we want to reach. Nice. And then what made you make that bet so early when it was very unclear where three games weren't a thing? So what made you make that bet? And then the follow-up to that is what did it feel like when this space exploded into existence over the last few years? And you scaled from a relatively small team to a relatively big team now. So what was the whole journey like? And yeah, that would be great to understand. So what we drive us is how we empower the creator concretely. Every day I wake up, I have this passion to see what people are making. I'm just having all that joy that it brings to see people being empowered and giving life to their imagination with new tools and doing things that even yourself couldn't imagine. And it's true that adding that creative capability and now seeing as well that it had a positive impact in many people's life thanks to the ability to monetize. That's been amazing. But it's not been a short journey for sure. And at the beginning, we had, of course, a lot of challenges, people who didn't believe we were capable of building that product, building that platform. But ultimately, being super laser focused on creator first, being user-driven. And that's some of the core value in Web3. Like Web3 for me is user-centric, community-driven, versus profit-centric, or trying to centralize all that. And ultimately, that conviction, that passion for the space, and all the different factor of being a geek and early adopter, loving and connecting with other entrepreneur that's been driving us to where we are today. Awesome. And so in your case, how did you see that growth from working with some of the major virtual worlds today? How have you been pushing to the idea that they should open themselves to connect with avatars that come from outside world and use Ready Player Me as a solution? Have you seen Friction? How have you addressed it? Yeah, so for us, it was custom-building outer tech for big companies to start. And then when we built Ready Player Me, why we really built that, built Ready Player Me, was because we saw there's kind of two paths, potential paths for the future of the metaverse. And one of them is a good path, and one of them is not a very good path, if you ask us. So one path is a more centralized path, where the metaverse ends up being owned by one company or a few companies, and we spend most of our time in their worlds. And that is a scary future. They make all the rules, they have all the power over the world we live in, essentially. Not a good future. And the other path is a more open and decentralized metaverse, where we end up with something more like the internet, where it can navigate between different pages, and it can have a consistent experience across many virtual worlds. And it's built by millions of developers and creators, and not by one company, and it's not owned by anyone. So for the open metaverse to really have a chance, there need to be services and standards and protocols that make it easy for developers to link different virtual worlds together. And that's why we built Ready for Me, because we felt the world is getting ready for that. There's a way of decentralization. Like Web3 is a set of technologies, but as importantly, it's a mindset and a philosophy. It's not building a wall garden, it's connecting worlds and so forth. And we felt that the world is ready for that, and that is the macro trend combined with people spending more time in virtual worlds. And then I think we timed it right. And avatars just help break down some of the virtual worlds and make it easy for people to navigate between different virtual worlds. It's a naturally consistent part of your metaverse experience across now thousands of experiences. So yeah, and when we launched, we had also spent six years grinding our faces off and learning what it takes to build a good avatar system. And so we knew what we have to build. And there's certainly friction and resistance from more traditional studios that still have the old way of kind of building a closed economy that they control and it's a wall garden and that's fine. But there's a big amount of the industry that has the kind of like the Web3-minded approach to building things. And they prefer to have avatars in their game to travel across the metaverse instead of just, you know, stuck in their world. So I'm working with the early market, kind of the philosophical word, philosophically. I got it. Aligned with open metaverse, we can build a big enough of a network to prove the rest of the world that having avatars in your game that you can buy and use across the metaverse is actually a better business model for a game. It's a better user experience because you can bring in assets from other places. So our goal really is to show the general industry by working with the kind of like a current network that building an interoperable system is just a better business and a better way to do things. And that really tips over kind of the rest of the industry that is still very kind of traditionally-minded. So it has to be a no-brainer business decision, basically, and that's why we're working towards it. Well, I couldn't agree more. Like, for me, there's only one way for the metaverse. It has to be open. Like, I believe fundamentally that a digital asset, true digital asset ownership is a fundamental right. Just like we enjoy physical property, we should be able to enjoy the way we want all our digital asset. And metaverse is the best place for having all the use cases for enjoying the digital ownership. Avatar is like the best representation of a concrete use case for it. I think the most understandable, the most accessible, and we've been building the sandbox with that vision. Like, you want to be able to use avatars either from like various brands that we brought in to experience content made in sandbox but also outside of sandbox, but also like you can come and play with avatars, like ton of avatar collection from outside sandbox. It's a feature called interoperability, the technical world, but at the end of the day, what it means is like just if I own any cool NFT collection that I like, then I can play around with it in the metaverse and I can use it as my new identity as I cross around many other virtual world. So, I'm glad that we fully agree on that and I hope that more and more people will realize that we cannot build the real metaverse if we keep like a very centralized mindset and we only agree on like we need to build APIs that are like still controlled by companies and data that are not in the end of users behind. Yes, 100%. Yeah, and like the kind of like the warps we world is aligned with that vision and that pushes us to figure out those standards and build those services that link the virtual worlds together and then hopefully tip over the rest of the industry as well. Both, yep. Yeah, one thing I was thinking low is like even though like what we're saying is like there's this technological possibility behind, it's really important, we shouldn't forget as well, like users will appreciate that benefit first and foremost because they have great content, great experiences. So, the technical capabilities now today, the new challenge that we're facing is like how do we bring and build like exciting experiences, immersive experience, more social, a new format of entertainment that like is really compelling and makes users want to come and come again and again and again, so driving like retention so we can build like full business model on that and it can become sustainable over a long term. Yes, makes sense. And both of us work with a lot of brands. So how do you think kind of real world brands like traditional brands kind of play into the whole future of the metaverse and virtual worlds? So brands is typically one part of the strategy to achieve that, like to bring exciting experiences through like the content, the characters, the stories, the location that people are already familiar with and for them to interact in a more meaningful manner with their favorite characters, et cetera. And for the first time, because Sandbox is a very user generated content platform, they can take those contents, use them in the game maker, mix them, take many of their favorite brands to create a mashup game if they want or a mashup experience and monetize it the way they want as well. That's a strong first value proposition. The second thing is like brands are looking at new way to reconnect with consumer, like they kind of exhausted of that relationship that the Web2 platform has been imposing them and like not having access to their consumer data, not having able to communicate or target them and offering content where like attention span is in a range of like few seconds to a minute at best and like our interaction are limited to like, share, retweet and maybe comment. Users want more interaction and they find those interaction in virtual world, like they can chat, they can interact, they can socialize, they can express themselves with an avatar, they can carry real emotion and on average we're seeing users spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes in virtual world which is like incredible in term of time and attention if you compare to any other media or format. And we want to keep pushing those creative interaction through as well like the way like the avatar is going to move the animations, the emotes, the kind of action that we can do as a group in a land. And then once we've retained those users for the brands, those users will keep staying in the virtual world and explore all the content, content made by the creators themselves. And that's how we drive more audiences and more users so the creators can also benefit from them and fully maximize the potential of the creator economy where because they own the content and they receive the majority of the revenue from the value they bring, like in case of sandbox 95%, not 30%, not 70%, 95%, then like the creator economy will take off and all those virtual world should like become, I believe like the next wave of the internet. Yeah, I mean it definitely feels that ownership of assets is an essential part of the future of the metaverse, right? And that really like motivates a lot of creators and builders to take part and innovate and build their careers around building stuff for virtual worlds and that creativity and then that energy put into the space will create a lot of new types of experiences. So maybe to give some concrete numbers here, we're seeing like thousands of people whose job is like building content in sandbox. From the beginning of the year, we have roughly 10 builder studios around the world. We were like pioneers to create those experience for the brand or for themselves. Today there's more than 230 studios around the world, almost every continent, and they have like long pipeline of production to build those experience and use like, employ themselves people and so on. So indeed, and it's very exciting, like that ecosystem is taking off. And like you said, the success of an ecosystem is essentially the success of the builders into it. So that's what we want to push forward. And I know that you're also working on something quite exciting on your own roadmap to open this avatar economy around as well in ready play yummy. Yes totally. So like how we think about building our product is like it's a tool, it's tool like a tool set of, and it kind of enables other people to build stuff. So avatars are nothing on their own. They're only useful if they're using cool and awesome games and build, you know, by awesome developers. That's really our focus. And then now we're also opening up the avatar content part. So like anyone can come in and create outer accessories and assets. Work with a lot of brands because that really enables them to like sell virtual fashion before they had to go to each individual game and make a deal and create custom assets for them. When there's real interoperability of assets, they can just focus on what they do best, creating virtual fashion and selling it. And we make sure that it's used in thousands of virtual worlds. So, and that ability brings a lot more creators into the space and opens up opportunity to take part of the virtual economy and so forth. But let's change to founder topics. This is a founder stage, right? So, we've both had a pretty crazy few years scaling ourselves and the companies and so forth. You have a much bigger company, but what was the experience like going through that crazy time and how do you stay focused and how do you make sure you stay sane in the whole process? Well, for sure it's really overwhelming to see like how for the past four years Sandbox moved from being like, oh, they will never make it to kind of like, oh, they did something interesting and I'm interested to be part of that journey and build something in it. And the first thing that's really excited me the most is like, this is global. Like every country I go and I speak, we're able to see like a whole ecosystem of builders, of project, of brands that want to be part of the main areas who want to also, because it's a virtual world, it has a map, so they want their own virtual land on that map. They want to develop neighborhoods so that strong feeling of community, proximity, because we're in a spatial environment now, we're no longer just on a website or gallery of content that are disconnected from one other. And also like, even though we're building, we used to build product and tech product, today we are building a platform and we are focused on content. Like seeing all the creativity around the world and the content first, that's really exciting as well for me. And I want to keep inspiring people that this is a platform that we do. We do it for the, we build for the community. We provide you the tools to be more, to give life to your imagination. We want to take your feedback to keep improving it over time. But we want also you to fully own all the content you have and be the first to benefit from that creativity. We don't want to take away from you like the success. We want you to be successful as we grow together. And so that's, of course, very exciting. Also as an entrepreneur, the first time that we move, I think right now Sandbox is about 420 employees in 10 key office locations, like Paris, London, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal and Buenos Aires and Uruguay. And it's a challenge, of course, like you keep running every day as an entrepreneur. I haven't run a company large like this before, but we learn, we progress, and we all are very motivated. Like the number one thing that people see when they see Sandbox is like all our motivation and energy to make this the way we envision it. That's our dedication to the community and all the builder in the space. Awesome. How about yourself? Like you moved to close to 100 people already, no? Yeah, it's a challenge. I think you have to learn, as a founder, you have to learn to manage the downsides when things are not going well, which I learned well over the first six years of like two weeks of runway, many times and so forth. And that's actually kind of easier to manage a field than the times when things are going well because you have so much stuff coming at you at all times. You have to process an amazing amount of information and you have a high risk of drowning into this whole thing and just losing the main thing, right? And it's very hard to assess that and understand if you are still, you know, understand what's going on, basically, and you're still guiding the ship, you know, and not distracted by everything else. But that's what we sign up for, you know. We grabbed the Dragon by its tail and now we are going to ride it, you know, trying our best. That build-use trends, resistance. You know how to run a company and keep like a longer runway or being protected, specifically in the current market condition, I suppose. We're keeping a long runway. There's a lot of companies that trust us with the very key feature of the product as well. So it's very important for us to be trusted and stable for those companies. I think the last topic we can cover is kind of the terminal on the market. You know, there's FTX, Collapse, a lot of others with that. So how do you think about that as a founder, as a builder in the space and how do you think about that, yeah? So, well, the current market is like a bit dull in that moment. It's not specifically only cryptocurrencies or blockchain. It's like all tech companies' valuation that are being corrected. There's been a number of layoffs at larger companies, like Meta who fired 11,000 people, which is significant. And so that's definitely not a great general market context for fundraising, typically. And there might be a market risk, in general, how we evolve, that you learn how to make yourself more resilient to that market risk. It's not the first time that it happens, so we understand specifically as we evolve in web-free and crypto, to have secured enough cash for more than three years of development in the case of Sandbox, so we can keep developing safely. But on the other side, I'm seeing as well like a growth of adoption in Sandbox. We have more than 4.3 million users with a wallet. We have over 230 studios in the ecosystem, 33,000 landowners. And the last season that we opened, so like 40,000 active users, 260,000 monthly active users, while we are not yet fully open as a platform. We're still in beta, we're not yet on mobile. So seeing that the fundamentals, like the player adoption, the ecosystem adoption, the user adoption is there, makes me convinced that if we focus on like, let's keep building, let's keep making this place more fun and fun. Let's add more creative possibility and designing content, designing avatars. And then when market goes back, I think like will benefit as well from like the double effect from there. Yes. I mean, I think the great companies are built on very kind of long-term macro trends and the kind of small waves in the market don't really change that, right? Like people are going to spend more time in virtual worlds. The world is getting more decentralized over time. And we are also out of time. So let's wrap this up. This was a great chat. Thank you Seb and thank you everyone. Let's keep building. Thank you Timu. Let's keep building and see you in the metaverse. Yes.