The following interview is a conversation we had with Daniel Liebeskind, CEO of Topia, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $6 Million Raised to Help Organizations Build Their Own Metaverse
Daniel Liebeskind
Hey, Bret, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Daniel Liebeskind
So, yeah, I’ve been soft for Engineer for a long time now. Before that, I guess, growing up, I built games, I built websites. I then went into finance. I was an investment banker for Lehman Brothers during the fall of Lehman, went to Barclays. I was then a late stage VC growth capital investor at a firm called Summit Partners. Left that world in 2013 to start building things again and went to a coding boot camp called Hack Reactor. And since then, I’ve been really focused on the idea of the evolution of the Internet. I came across something called WebRTC, championed by Google Protocol for real time communication on the Internet. My first company was in 2014 that was focused on that technology, and it was a little bit ahead of its time. But the idea that the Internet is evolving from something that’s sort of static and alone or chronological into something that’s actually more similar to how MMORPGs or multiplayer games work, where it’s real time, it’s connective, it’s experiential, that’s kind of been my focal point.
Daniel Liebeskind
I had a dev shop for many years building lots of different applications. And about three years ago, I started building something called Everyspace, which was the WordPress of VR that was all about empowering companies to be able to create their own interactive social experiences. When the pandemic hit, I basically threw that out because VR adoption was just very low restarted with what is now Topia, which was a browser based, very accessible, 2.5 dimensional landscape where you could have spatial data connections to anybody. As your avatar moves around this space, you’re connecting. We’re sending audio and video, but you can also send anything else through our encrypted channels and happy to talk more about that.
Brett
So I got to ask about Lehman Brothers. I feel like that’s the scene of a number of movies I’ve seen. It looks like you joined the company in 2008, is that correct?
Daniel Liebeskind
So I was an intern in 2008, and I got the job offer. Historically, when you intern, you basically are guaranteed to have a job, but that summer. The writing was on the wall, people were kind of freaking out, and it actually was a pretty cutthroat in some ways. Environment just very intense. And I wound up getting the job offer and then went back to school. That’s when Lehman collapsed. So I wasn’t actually in the offices for the collapse, but I thought I lost my job. And then Barclays basically acquired many of the employees, including me. Got it.
Brett
Super interesting. And are you surprised today that you ended up being a Founder or early on in your career, in life? Did you know that this was going to happen at some point?
Daniel Liebeskind
I would say I’ve been a serial entrepreneur through my entire life. I had my first company called Megahertz when I was in high school, and that was reformatting computers for kids in low income environments. I’ve created like ten different companies that had any significance, and so it’s kind of been my mission. I’m not that surprised by it, frankly, working for somebody else has never really been my calling. And the environments, it’s ironic because I went to basically the most corporate of corporate environments investment banking, and I think those kinds of experiences can be good training grounds in professionalism, in writing, in structure. But I’ve always been called to building my own things. The idea of creation, being a sorcerer and being able to have an idea and then manifest it into the world and have people actually love it has always just been very attractive to me.
Brett
And a couple of other questions we like. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one, what Founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Daniel Liebeskind
Yeah, so I kind of have two, and they’re actually pretty related to each other. One is Dave Bazooki of Roblox. And Roblox is just a fascinating story because Dave really had this vision for a platform that was accessible to kids, that was democratizing the ability to create social experiences. And he was at it for many years before really had an uptick. And as we’ve seen over the last few years, roblox has just absolutely exploded. And the ability to actually create these social experiences actually helps a lot of kids to figure out that they want to be builders, right? Your world building, your experience building. And then the other that’s sort of related is David Helgeson of Unity. And Unity started as a game, and they realized their dev tools were the actual valuable thing. And again, the ability to democratize access to making games make it extremely easy for people to become developers and for existing developers to rapid prototype games with much smaller teams than was ever possible before.
Daniel Liebeskind
And Unity, for those that don’t know, is a game engine that has a library, has marketplace. And a lot of the inspiration from both of these founders were actually building a lot of these kinds of things in Topia.
Brett
What about books? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you? And I stole this from someone else, but they called it a Quake book that I really liked. And they defined a Quake book as a book that just rocks your worldview and really influences how you think about the world. Do any books like that come to mind?
Daniel Liebeskind
I’ve read so many nonfiction books and many fiction books that have been incredible inspirations. I would actually say that the most recent book that I read while being fiction is called Tomorrow and Tomorrow. In case you haven’t read it yet, anybody that’s listening, you absolutely should. It’s basically about a group of game designers that fall into entrepreneurship and wind up creating a game studio. It’s really a beautiful journey. It also has a lot of the interconnectedness, the challenges of creating something that people love, the joys, the highs and lows. It’s also just beautifully written. And it’s not just for entrepreneurs. It’s not just for people that are into games. It was actually introduced to me by a yoga instructor and it’s just brilliant. Such an emotional and gut wrenching book.
Brett
Nice. I’ve not heard of that, but I have it pulled up and adding to my Amazon cart now. So appreciate the recommendation.
Daniel Liebeskind
Of course. It’s incredible.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears here and let’s dive into the actual platform. So what is a metaverse platform?
Daniel Liebeskind
That’s a great question. That’s kind of the question, potentially of the decade, right? And metaverse has come to mean many different things. What we mean here is the real time, interactive and experiential internet. And so the Internet going again from something think of like a Facebook wall that is chronological, that is Asynchronous, right? So email, Facebook, walls, messaging, somebody sends a message and then sometime later you respond. The Internet will always have Asynchronicity, it’s useful. But the synchronous Internet, which we’ve seen in things like Google, Meet and Zoom, but also for decades now in multiplayer games, that unlocks the ability for people to have real time experiences, really forge memories together and create the world around them. And so when we think about the metaverse, we’re really talking about worlds, world creation, adding context around you, embedding and even integrating CRMs and enterprise technologies or learning management systems into the worlds themselves.
Daniel Liebeskind
And then, crucially, the ability to have real time experiences over, in our case, audio and video. So think of like, Zoom meets a minecraft. Or Zoom meets Roblox. That we think, is where the metaverse is going, but there’s probably going to take many different forms. Importantly, the metaverse in this context does not necessarily mean the decentralized Internet. It doesn’t mean Web three or crypto. That may be a component of it, but it’s really more of the evolution of the Internet from Asynchronous towards having more synchronous experiences.
Brett
And take me back to April 2020. What was it about this problem made you say, yes, that’s it, let’s do it? Sounds like you’ve had a lot of different ideas, and I’m sure there were different companies and businesses that you were considering building. So what was it about this particular problem that drew you in?
Daniel Liebeskind
Well, I was actually already building the VR version of this. And the reason that I was doing that again, I came across WebRTC early on, and that’s web real time communication, a protocol created by Google. I’ve just long felt that there are a lot of business cases for the kinds of interactions, real time interactions that video games give to gamers that on the business side of things and on the more consumer side of things, even non gamers should be able to have these kinds of experiences. And one of the examples of this is in a game called EverQuest, which was one of the early big MMORPGs, what people actually found is that there’s a whole game component, but then there was a social component where people could just hang out and chat with each other. And that actually became a sub game of EverQuest, right?
Daniel Liebeskind
And World of Warcraft, another great example, right? And people were just hanging out, talking to each other. And it was not even about the game. It was about the social connection. And so I’ve long held this belief that we solved real business problems by introducing business applications that had real time connection into the internet and make it available to companies. And so when the pandemic hit, so it actually kind of happened with Burning Man. If you’ve ever heard of Burning Man, which is a big festival, that happens. And when the pandemic hit, burning man was freaking out, trying to figure out what to do. Were they going to have it in person? What they ultimately decided to do was to do it online, but they had no idea how to do it. And so were already building this 2.5 D version. We started consulting Bernie Man on what they were going to do and even offering to help them build their own platform, which was what they were planning on doing at the time.
Daniel Liebeskind
Turns out it’s very hard to build these kinds of things. I was fortunate to have spent basically a decade in this technology already. And so ultimately, they decided that they weren’t going to build it themselves. And so we became an official host of virtual Burning Man for that first year in 2020. And that was basically four months after the first line of code. So the first four months of our company was really trying to build all of the capabilities for people to be able to build their own camps, build their own experiences, and then actually facilitate this real time connection for this festival. We had 20,000 people come to the event, and that was kind of how a lot of people heard about us. And then we had a lot of companies, people that were not representing their company, but coming to the festival, that realized that there was utility here for their company, allhand, for example, or for a launch event, or really for whatever.
Daniel Liebeskind
And so that’s how things kind of took off for us. Wow.
Brett
So Burning Man was the very first one.
Daniel Liebeskind
It actually was not the very first one. We had a series of events. We basically would have these micro events every weekend and then hack and fix things on the weekdays. We actually, in the early days, didn’t even necessarily tell people that were the creators of the platform. We would just go to the events and just solicit feedback from people, get an idea of what we could fix. And so for the first few months, it was about that. But it was really this build up to Burning Man that drove us.
Brett
And then just so we can visualize that, let’s pretend I’m a Burner. I’m going to the virtual Burning Man event there in 2020. What was that experience like for me as the burner?
Daniel Liebeskind
So you drop into the world, and it was for those that have been to Burning Man, you’ll know that Burning Man has the playa. It’s basically the entire Burning Man space is one gigantic space. But then there are lots of different events, let’s call them, that are happening, lots of different camps or hundreds of camps, and each camp is doing their own event. So in virtual Burning Man, we had one big space and then lots of different tents. And you could click on a tent and it would portal you to another world, which was the entire world that camp had created. And so you could think of it almost like the main world was a directory full of user generated content camps. And at those camps, we built an event system so people would have events like not awkward speed dating and magician shows and all sorts of stuff.
Daniel Liebeskind
And so you could wander around in Topia, you just click and you move around your avatar. You access it from a browser. There’s nothing to, you know, Bernie Man sent out the link to everybody. People came in, they’re clicking, they’re moving around, they’re going into the different camps, they’re experiencing different activities. And importantly, they’re facilitating their own experience so they can move between conversations, move between experiences really easily, kind of like you do with Burning Man. And that’s how it works. Wow.
Brett
That’s super cool.
Daniel Liebeskind
This show is brought to you by.
Brett
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Daniel Liebeskind
Yeah, so that’s how we started. That’s not really what we’re doing now. Just to be clear, that was the origin of the Topia application. And that’s, by and large, how the Topia application still works. We’ve added tons of bells and whistles and features, but spatially, being able to move around the world and connect to people is the topia application. We also now are working with a lot of enterprises, and rather than having them use topia IO, which is the Topia application, they can deploy their own metaverse ecosystem behind their existing firewall, their existing cloud infrastructure. So be it AWS or Google Cloud oracle or Azure or really whatever is running Kubernetes, they can deploy an entire application stack, including microservices, a Topia application, an API, and SDK. And that allows them then to deeply customize the ecosystem itself, the metaverse ecosystem, and importantly, control all of the data that is being produced within their ecosystem.
Daniel Liebeskind
And so another way to think about this is a lot of people are trying to approach the metaverse by saying, as an example, that Morgan building their client portal should build their client portal on top of a page, right, and give all of their data to Facebook. We think that would be kind of crazy. And instead, the way the Internet actually works right now is JPMorgan runs their own server architecture, they run their own application stack, they build their client portal behind their own firewall, and then they can customize that and have it be whatever they want it to be. And so we’re giving people, basically, platform as a service, the metaverse infrastructure, the real time experiential, networking at scale. We have a bunch of patents on the way that we’re actually doing this that allow us to do this in a relatively simple way from a DevOps perspective, and to do it at a very low cost that makes it feasible for companies that are experimenting with this to actually get started.
Daniel Liebeskind
And so that’s what we’ve evolved to. And when you deploy one of these ecosystems, you get your own topi application out of the box, very easy to customize either programmatically or with a Gui. And then you get an SDK and API that give you access to both the topi application and lower level networking. So you can build really whatever you can imagine as a metaverse experience on top of our infrastructure that’s deployed behind your own firewall.
Brett
And can you give us an idea of the adoption and growth that you’re seeing today?
Daniel Liebeskind
Yeah, so we have basically these two different products. We have a SaaS product that’s topia IO. We have hundreds of people that are subscribers there. They’re creating their worlds. They’re having events. And then we have the more enterprise solution, which is more recent. We have about half a dozen customers on that front and most of them are pretty secretive and private about it. Right now. It’s across a broad array of markets and use cases. One of the things that’s interesting is that we’ve found that the best use cases come inbound to us for that product, and having high conviction or having any conviction that this might solve a real business problem for you is the path to adoption. On the enterprise side, on the SaaS side, there’s a lot of experimenting. It’s really every market, every industry you can imagine with a little bit of an emphasis towards things like education.
Daniel Liebeskind
We have some finance, we have consumer goods and so it’s kind of all over the map.
Brett
Super interesting. What about market categories? How do you think about your market category? Is it a metaverse platform? Is this a different category? What’s the view there?
Daniel Liebeskind
Yeah, it’s a metaverse platform as a service is a way to think about it and it’s kind of a dev tool system as well. So it’s kind of a hybrid between even something like a Unity where it’s a game engine. This is like a metaverse engine in many ways and you can even build full games on socially connected games where you can have thousands of people in one space on top of this system using our SDK and our dev tools. In fact, you actually could use something like Unity and leverage Topia’s networking to have a 3D VR environment or front end with the social connectivity and the spatial data connections that Topia offers. And so there’s a lot of flexibility in what this becomes. And in terms of the category, it sort of depends where this industry goes. A lot of the use cases right now are around creating community and creating interpersonal connection between either customers or employees.
Daniel Liebeskind
So you could think of it as an engagement platform. Metaverse is again just kind of a nebulous thing. Like who needs a metaverse? You need a Metaverse if you’re trying to make it possible for your customers or your employees to feel more connected to each other and to have context around their conversations.
Brett
Super fascinating. And in terms of the metaverse, I feel like there’s a lot of noise and a lot of buzz around the metaverse. What are you doing to really rise above all of that noise and connect.
Daniel Liebeskind
With your know, our offering is pretty unique. First of all, we never really used the word metaverse until Facebook changed their name to Meta and sort of forced the issue and it just became the easy way to explain what it was. But originally were calling it real time environments or real time connection environments. And so there’s really nobody else out there right now, at least that allow companies to deploy the entire application stack behind their own firewalls and have this SDK and API where they can build anything they want on top. Instead, what most platforms are doing is trying to force everybody into a SaaS environment or into a shared universe. And one of the reasons that we’re able to do that is because of our peer to peer technology and the way that our networking works makes it feasible to actually do these deployments in a relatively simple and low cost way.
Daniel Liebeskind
So we don’t really have competition for this. And the benefit to a company, in addition to being able to have more control over their ecosystem and deeply customize everything and build whatever they want, is that the ability to actually bring people into their environment is extremely unique.
Brett
What was that like for you the day that Zuck announced they were going to change the name and go kind of all in on the Metaverse? Was that big validation for your vision?
Daniel Liebeskind
It really brought in a lot of hype. It was what mostly happened, right? So there was a lot of eyeballs, there was a lot of attention. Suddenly I was actually a little bit distraught when that happened because my original plan was to do this when I was building the VR platform, my plan was to build this over the thought. I had a lot of time. And then the pandemic hit. It kind of forced my hand. It forced us to actually reimagine what the platform itself was. And then when Facebook changed their name to Meta again, now there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of attention, there’s a lot of potential. You know, I didn’t pay that much attention to what everybody else was doing. We kind of kept our head down and tried to just focus on what is actually going to be valuable for customers.
Daniel Liebeskind
And I would even say this evolution into deploying ecosystems, that wasn’t really the original vision. We did that because we had AA Game Studio come to us and ask if we would do that and allow them to deeply customize everything. And we realized that the way that we had architected the platform for flexibility, for scalability, would lend itself to that evolution. And so we did that in response to customer requests. And that’s kind of how we built the whole product and platform, rather than even being just originally. There was kind of this vision. But a key, I think, for entrepreneurs and a key to our success certainly has been finding out what is actually going to be valuable to our prospects, to our customers, and then building that.
Brett
And if you reflect on the journey so far, what’s been the greatest go to market challenge that you faced and how’d you overcome that challenge?
Daniel Liebeskind
I think the biggest challenge, honestly, was the Pandemic bump that happened or the hype wave that happened around the Meta name change, the Pandemic itself, all of these kinds of platforms saw a huge adoption in 2020, 2021, and then the adoption of our SaaS product kind of just plateaued. Right. And that helped us to realize that the evolution towards something that’s more useful for businesses at this point. Look, this is a very nascent technology. It’s a very nascent market. If you look around and even you Google around and try to find out what are big metaverse use cases or big real time environment use cases right now, you probably won’t find much, right? They were big, they were exciting during the pandemic, but then it kind of fell off. And so we actually are doing a deal right now in the education space that we think is going to be the largest use case in the entire industry in terms of number of concurrent users and daily active users.
Daniel Liebeskind
But that go to market has been fraught. It’s been challenging to actually discover the use cases where this creates real business value and it’s not just something that’s interesting.
Brett
And based on a journey so far, let’s say you were starting the company again from scratch. What would be the number one piece of advice you’d have for yourself?
Daniel Liebeskind
Oh, that’s a good question. Number one piece of advice would probably be to focus more on the go to market while were building the product. I’m a software engineer, me and the CTO, we built a lot of the underlying technology. We’re very product and very platform focused. Some of our competitors went to market a bit faster and didn’t actually focus, and many of them didn’t actually build their own proprietary technology. I definitely am glad that we didn’t go that route, but we could have tried to actually find more business applications early on. It took us a while to really get into that motion and now we found it. But we could have gotten bigger, earlier, faster, even while were focused on building the platform, if we’d actually brought on anybody in marketing or sales or go to market or anything, were basically just a team of engineers building a technology and a platform, being responsive to people that found us.
Daniel Liebeskind
But we didn’t really have any outbound, we didn’t really have a go to market motion.
Brett
All right, final question here for you before we wrap, let’s zoom out into the future. So let’s say three to five years from today. What’s that vision for the company? What are you trying to build?
Daniel Liebeskind
I really believe that the democratization of social experiences and the ability for anybody to build their own and customize their own social experiences is going to be important to the future of the Internet. I don’t know exactly the form it’s going to take. So with our company, we are building to be front end agnostic use case, agnostic, really focusing on building something that allows for even hundreds of thousands of users in a single instance. That kind of technology as an engine to power 3D, VR, augmented reality, hybrid experiences, and importantly, make it really easy for anybody that has an imagination to build whatever they imagine is going to bring their community together. And again, whether that’s a customer community, an employee community, or just a group of friends or a burning know, really building the tool set for the unlocking of that imagination around social experiences is where we’re going.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Daniel, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build.
Daniel Liebeskind
Where should they go so you can experiment with Topia? If you go topia.io and that’s probably the best way to get, then, you know, feel free to reach out to us, especially if you’re a company or if you have a large community and you want to talk about working more closely together or partnering, we’d love to have that conversation.
Brett
Amazing. Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and talk about what you’re building and share some of those lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I really enjoyed our conversation and appreciate you making the time.
Daniel Liebeskind
Thanks, Bret. Great to be here. Appreciate it.
Brett
Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If at B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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