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What Emerging Tech People Do: Matt Daly
96 Plays6 months ago
Matt Daly is an award-winning XR and Virtual Worlds producer. Together we made real a few dozen projects in immersive tech, R&D innovations, spatial computing and partnerships all over the world.
In this first episode we delve into lessons learnt from building immersive projects, reflect about success of Wargaming Special Projects and how to turn early innovative initiatives into products. We discuss how tacos and margaritas help with ideation, what it takes to be a practitioner who makes innovation real, how AI helps to reduce effort required for idea validation. We also discuss trends in wearables, gaming, online collaboration, talk about crafting projects at an intersection of arts, music, XR and review best metaverse use cases that make business sense.
As we elaborate on secrets of storytelling, building communication with stakeholders and where to find space for innovations, there are a few ideas that resonate with me personally:
1. “If you accept that you are not nearly as important to everybody else as you think you are, it will be a very good asset for you”.
2. “When a technology becomes boring enough that you are not thinking about it, that’s a moment when it becomes a practical thing”.
3. “I tend to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission”.
4. Bonus: how hand-washing dishes helps to trick your brain and solve problems creatively
Please, enjoy our conversation, subscribe, rate the show and share your thoughts with us at monthsandmillions@gmail.com
Matt Daly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalymatt/
Alex Babko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderbabko/
This is a personal podcast. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.
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Transcript
00:00:13
Speaker
Hey,
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:14
Speaker
welcome to the Month in Millions, a practical and inspiring show about innovators and emerging tech practitioners. And I'm the host of the show, Alex Popko. My guest today is Matt Daly, an award-winning AR, VR, and metaverse producer. And I know Matt for almost a decade. And together we made real a few dozen projects with AR, VR, new media, spatial computing, events around the world, and partnerships.
00:00:43
Speaker
Matt Daly is one of the most prominent producers in the world of XR, metaverse and emergent tech that I ever met.
Topics Overview: Metaverse and Media
00:00:51
Speaker
And today we're going to talk a lot about spatial computing and XR authenticity at the age of Gen AI, the future of metaverse in the light of Apple Vision Pro and other new hardware. We will talk about trends and of course we will delve into the best practice and design and in producing of new media products. Hi Matt.
00:01:13
Speaker
Hey Alex. Matt, it's a great honor to be with you here today and with my first guest in in my new podcast Months and Millions show. I'm super honored to be here Alex. mann Thanks for having me. and i don't I hope I can live up to the to the expectation of being the first of what will become obviously a legendary podcast very soon. I feel like I'm going to have to put a gold record on my wall at some point. So thanks for thinking of me as the first as the first guest.
Guest Selection: Matt's Influence
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, thank you, Matt. When I was thinking who can be the first guest, of course there were like a lot of people, but my thinking was that your impacts on my professional life, on my understanding of the technology, of the design, if it's practical and the most hands-on experience, so I was thinking that you might be um the person that entails the idea that I want to bring with this podcast. so Here we are. Yes, sir. Here we are. Here we are.
Matt's Career Journey and Insights
00:02:18
Speaker
So, I made the introduction of you, so but are how would you describe like who is Matt Daly?
00:02:26
Speaker
um So I think there's like a long running joke among people that I know, friends, families, colleagues, relatives, where nobody can really properly describe what it is that I actually do for a living or whether I actually have ever had an actual job. I'm i'm here to clear the record. I have actually had ah real jobs. and In fact, I've had many real jobs. They just happen to be jobs that involve me, solving hard problems at the intersections of genres, media, and UX probably the ux challenges. So um I guess the easiest way to summarize it is I focus on anything that involves immersive technology. So that's pretty much my bread and butter is anything immersive.
00:03:15
Speaker
And so whether that refer to metaverse experiences or SaaS platforms for online collaboration, also immersive mixed reality installations slash virtual experiences, games, there's been obvious inevitable intersections of what I end up doing that touch on many
Matt's Background and Career Influences
00:03:40
Speaker
different disciplines only because the stage The stage of tech ah any technology maturation cycle that I tend to work at is not super, super early, but early enough to be a potentially practical business case, even a early stage business case. So what that ends up meaning is in order to get fuel to do those initiatives, I end up having to rationalize for stakeholders why we are doing a thing
00:04:12
Speaker
and the rationalization can't simply come from it's going to go gangbusters tomorrow and generate crap loads of revenue for everybody it ends up having to be very much like the mix of kpis and okrs that you and i produced and created and sort of I think invented when we were at Wargaming running special projects, which is there has to be a touch point to sort of almost every discipline and it has to be a rising tide that lifts the boats of all those disciplines. So the reason I'm even bringing that up at this in this intro section is because
00:04:48
Speaker
It ends up being that I have to be fluent in marketing, PR, communications, um R and&D, actual product and business, online communities, media production. So everything that we do ends up touching many of those departments and disciplines. So that probably come brings us back to why it's hard to define what I do for a living because it's kind of everything.
00:05:18
Speaker
At the end of the day, yeah, I wouldn't say it better. I think because I face the same dilemma ah when I try to explain what I'm doing and yeah, it's like tapping into like a combination of different.
00:05:33
Speaker
Skills experiences to create like next-gen products experiences that bring value right when when it's interesting like when My mom faces this challenge and there she's been asked like what your son is doing for living She says she found like a very good um Saying for that so she says like oh my son prototypes the future And everyone is just like, okay, fine. So that's probably the best way I could imagine ah describing what we do. Yeah, I mean, that when you talk about the future, it's interesting that there's almost an inverse correlation between how far into the future and the immediate business ah considerations to be made. The further into the future you're talking about, the less the actual business impact can even possibly be part of your initial value proposition,
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's I think that perfectly correlates with the concept of being most advanced yet acceptable, like M-A-Y-A, like an acronym, um that's that depicts like what slice we are actually talking about.
00:06:43
Speaker
but But before we delve deeper into the virtual worlds and the immersion tech, I'd like us like to make a bit of time travel exercise now and to shift left a bit and get back ah to the origin of like where it all started.
00:07:02
Speaker
as As far
Teaching Future Skills to Children
00:07:04
Speaker
as the things that are applicable to this conversation, I would say my the earliest exposures that I had to environmental factors that I would say make it very obvious as to why I am the way I am and why I'm interested in the things that I am are probably two things. One of them was being raised basically in a shopping mall.
00:07:27
Speaker
My father owned and continues to own and operate, although now in his own building, um a ah formal wear bridal and tuxedo store. So when I was a kid, I would spend maybe more time more waking hours at school and at my dad's shop than actually at home.
00:07:49
Speaker
I was exposed to a lot of humanity. right And all that humanity was was based around commerce. It's the reason why a shopping mall exists. So there's a there's an aspect to why I enjoy being with people and interacting with people um that probably comes from that time period. Obviously, I was also exposed to the inner imaginations of commerce as a concept. So focusing on sort of business application actually was kind of an aversion that I had at the beginning of my of like I would say my late education early career because I was so hyper saturated with commerce growing up I was just constantly in it and I kind of saw all the dark sides of it as well and I developed an early stage aversion
00:08:40
Speaker
The other part that i think is really important has nothing to do with where i was raised in fact is orthogonal to where i was raised is that i was i'm part of the last generation as you are of kids who.
00:08:53
Speaker
grew up without the internet, grew up without mobile devices, and then right at the, just at the sweet spot of like, I don't know when I got my first computer, but it was probably when I was like 12 or something at my dad's shop with the seamstresses, like playing Doom and like slaying demons and hearing them like, you know, wail in terror as, as the seamstresses that basically raised me were like, what is this, what is this kid doing?
00:09:19
Speaker
But I got access to the internet super early, at least relatively speaking. And that was like its own sort of version of a microcosm of the world. I was exposed to um communities and voices and opinions that were nowhere to be found in San Antonio, Texas in the late 80s, early 90s to mid 90s. And that obviously had a massive impact
Balancing Guidance and Independence in Parenting
00:09:42
Speaker
on me. My first Experience with the with a metaverse was you know online games like meridian 59 and ultima online So I think those are the the sort of formative two big factors in my life so um You mentioned that you have a son. um I also have kids a bit a bit older, but but still ah but what do you think? um What can be that level of
00:10:09
Speaker
Engagement into the understanding of the world for them and how they can learn the kind of like future proof skills. If there are any um interacting with the world, we are all living.
00:10:26
Speaker
And so I would hope that the end result of the environment that these kids are gonna be raised in, I hope that that just ends up being like, hey, what are you good at? What do you like? Let me as the tools, whether it's AI, LLMs, Metaverse, whatever,
00:10:43
Speaker
Let me just get a bunch of the crap that other kids and in the previous generations had to wade through and sift through. Let me just move those things out of the way for you. Let me be a good project manager of your life and just like remove obstacles.
00:10:57
Speaker
and help get you faster to the thing that you care about that makes you happy, that reduces your stress, that makes you more independent and successful. That's my that's my hope. Yeah, well, yeah, that's always like a very um a very strong balance that we need to find.
00:11:15
Speaker
um between being um like clearing the path for our kids and at the same time giving them the authority, the agency like to make sure that the all the did they do something for themselves and learn at early stages like what what what the world around them is all about. So I always also like trying to balance that. It's not always easy. And speaking about these skills that I think that it makes sense um to nurture in kids. Yeah, you mentioned the humanity, the the empathy is super important, I believe.
00:11:54
Speaker
and yeah the adaptivity to ever changing the environment, the storytelling, and they whatever cross the main knowledge that they can apply ah to to their life.
Learning and Education: Traditional vs. Immersive
00:12:05
Speaker
so The adaptivity and like the ability to adapt to like changing conditions and the the sort of the positive association with learning, like being a seeker of knowledge is something that that is more has always been any educator will tell you like you wanna you wanna create a circumstance where the kid likes learning like
00:12:31
Speaker
the kid just enjoys gaining new knowledge and operationalizing it. because it there's a fun There's a very satisfying game loop there just in existing in reality. It's like learning a new skill and implementing it. I'll give you a great example. When I was ah being raised in South Texas, you you ah take Spanish classes. It's almost like just super common. It's like a second language of this area, of this region.
00:12:53
Speaker
And so years and years and years of taking Spanish, but it was like a 19th century conveyor belt of Spanish. It was like... yo to l a yeah ahbe said that It was very rote, you know, it became like a chore and the environment was more of like kind of goofing off and like maybe not taking it. It took me until like...
00:13:11
Speaker
when I was in my 20s and I started spending a lot of time in Mexico where I actually I learned Spanish because I wanted to because I was able to app I was able to immediately operationalize my learning have rich interactions and dominate humor which is such a huge like milestone for like language adoption and like those two experiences couldn't be more orthogonal to each other but I think they're representative of the the the way that the worst case scenario can happen with traditional education, 19th century factory factory worker training conveyor belts basically, and what what is to come, which is like equipping kids, equipping teams. Yeah, I do this with my teams also. It's like to to whatever extent you can equip someone to say, hey, like you you're totally able to go find that information and learn that and then use it and then be applauded for using it. I think that that is,
00:14:07
Speaker
That's going to be that removing of obstacles that we're talking about. And I think that if I think about my accidental immersion into a virtual world called North Star Mall, i would I would want that for my kid in whatever virtual world and community that he is choosing to gravitate toward.
00:14:26
Speaker
And then immediately being able to absorb, and whatever you want to call it, gamifying education, or someone, ah an educator at South by Southwest just told me, and she said eduifying, eduifying gaming or something like that, right? Where it's sort of like, immediately being able to take those skills and and and apply them and feel pride in that I think is going to be, I think that's almost inevitable for a lot of kids coming up. And I think that's going to be a wonderful thing.
Entrepreneurial Beginnings at Trinity University
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah. Well, yeah, that sounds, sounds really, really incredible. So, um, it would be great to, to at least see that, um, more immersive, more adaptive education coming to our lives.
00:15:14
Speaker
So let's now make a bit of a leap to the university times. As I know, you graduated from the Trinity University San Antonio. um What do you think might be like the three takeaways from the university times? what What helped you there? What you learned there? What you still carry on with you?
00:15:38
Speaker
I ended up co-founding my first startup with two students and my mentor professor from Trinity and that was the beginning of very obvious through line to the current day for me as a as a professional.
00:15:54
Speaker
um
00:15:56
Speaker
I mean, my my takeaways like from a pedagogical standpoint were, like um again, enjoying the constant seeking of knowledge. That was a big one. There was like a really nice practical mix of like theory and application because I was a communications student. i wasn't like my My major was communication and my minor was new media.
00:16:21
Speaker
you know, really practical stuff like how to how to handle a camera, how to do video production, how to do video editing, stuff that, how to use Photoshop were like parts of media, gen media asset generation. And at the end of the day, I think what I had to hone in on was becoming a good storyteller or and becoming a better storyteller. And that is something that to this day is ah maybe one of my primary skills is live crafting stories in like a conversational format like this, and or producing storytelling primitives like PowerPoint decks to you know case study videos, to even GIFs, right like the sort of power of visual, experiential, oral storytelling, and when to use it, where to use it, um and what quality looks like,
00:17:18
Speaker
I think that's probably one of the things that is the most practical that came out of my education besides obviously founding my company when I graduated. Yeah.
Effective Communication in Media
00:17:32
Speaker
Yes, but speaking about practicality and gifts and assets, or I know that whenever I have a look into your ah slides or a deck or pitch, you always like pay that very, very special attention to creating those assets. So what might be your advice ah to those who seek developing in the storytelling, how how to use it? So how to how to start crafting that?
00:18:01
Speaker
pitching an idea, pitching a concept, your visual materials should be as brief as you think they should be, and then cut them in half even. We're a very egocentric like species, so we think very much in the sense of like my problems, my issues, my goals, my aspirations. But at the end of the day, even the people that are closest to you only have sort of this much, I'm sort of like making a tiny pinching thing, symbol for the people that are listening on audio.
00:18:26
Speaker
I don't think it's a bad thing either. I think it's just being pragmatic about how you talk to people, how you interact. And if you can accept that, that you're not you're not nearly as important to everybody else as you think that you are. I think that's actually will be ah ah be a really big asset to you. I think when you get inevitable rejection, which you're going to get more rejection,
00:18:48
Speaker
Then you get buy-in you that should that should probably actually be the way if it's the opposite then you probably are Surrounded you're probably a very wealthy person who's like surrounded by enablers So that's probably when you get when the when the tables flip and that's a different problem to have yeah Yeah, that that's very insightful and I so much relate to to what you said um Yeah so ah speaking about um
Pioneering Mixed Reality Shows
00:19:14
Speaker
pitching the ideas at the early stages. I'd like us to delve now into the year 2002, when you found yourself as a radio host at a radio station, and you had a music show there that was called like a mixed reality music show.
00:19:35
Speaker
So i I remember my year 2002 in Minsk, Belarus, and that was quite far from anything like a metaverse or mixed reality. How you even like came up with that idea? And from the other side, like how you pitched that idea to your management or investors in 2002. So what was that like? ah So it makes more sense when you think about a little bit about my background, one of them being the virtual worlds that I talked about stuff like Ultima Online and EverQuest.
00:20:12
Speaker
games that I'd played. So it was just clear to me that as a user, as a young, you know, as like a college student, and before how real those experiences could be and how, how much you could take away from that. So that's step one, that was just, I was a native in those spaces. Step two was my mentor, Erin Delwich, who is now transitioned. She is Althea Delwich. I was enrolled in her classes that in that were like virtual like a class on virtual worlds where we did a thesis project that was about virtual world so we were spending time inside of second life back in those days um using it for like a you know for like research we were doing like ethnographic research inside of
00:20:57
Speaker
virtual worlds like Second Life, like my part of my thesis was an ethnographic project on the habits of like virtual world denizens. So I was much more and actually continue to be this day, I asked more for forgiveness than permission. So if any, anybody I didn't really even ask, I didn't really ask the management of care to you, that radio station for permission to do that. I just started doing it. And if anybody asked, it was, you know, I, I had a,
00:21:24
Speaker
It wasn't like just randomness that I was trying to do. that was like ah There was a sort of a method to the madness. So what what it was, was I would bring local musicians and bands into the studio and we would live stream that out to Second Life.
00:21:39
Speaker
and trying to bring the real experience of live music in 2003 or whatever it was um and the virtual experience of a platform like Second Life as close to each other as we could. There was obviously limits and there still are to this day, 20 years later.
00:21:59
Speaker
But we did whatever we could to like pipe in video into Second Life, bring video out of Second Life, let people talk from Second Life to the band, make requests, make comments. So we started doing that in local clubs in San Antonio as well. And so we just did what now entire.
00:22:15
Speaker
Entire startups are are doing what that led to from a practical business standpoint is my my startup ended up working with Capital Music Group at the time, ah sorry, Universal Music Group, UMG, one of the biggest holders of IP in the entire world, particularly in music.
00:22:34
Speaker
And we brought bands like Korn and Interpol into the Metaverse via a platform called their.com at the time. So that was very much a one of my first projects that my first startup ever worked on was developing the strategy and implementation plan and producing the environments and the run of show and everything for bringing Korn, the band, into the Metaverse to interact with some of their biggest fans as avatars.
00:23:01
Speaker
So basically what you're saying is that ah the legendary event in Fortnite, so the origin of that was actually happening on the college radio. That's where it all kind of like originated and started and then eventually Universe picked up at this idea and like made that real.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, I would and I will ah be accepting royalty checks at the address that will be shared in the ah in the bio when this is posted. Yes. Thank you, Epic. I appreciate appreciate the ah the check in advance. I mean, the
Founding Metaversatility and Industry Challenges
00:23:37
Speaker
other part of this was that the Second Life community in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, whatever.
00:23:44
Speaker
they were already innovating on concepts like these well before they were commercialized and this is the whole thing about the inverse correlation between adoption and business case so it it's not like it came out of absolutely nowhere it was just a distillation and then you can track that through line to better technology more affordable.
00:24:05
Speaker
audiences that are more native to the experience is there for bigger address audiences and then you have something like travis scott in in fortnite is it is an inevitability but i think that's just the start i mean it's gonna get a lot crazier in the next fifteen ten fifteen years with entertainment in general Yeah, so do you think that that's basically what what we see is like a like a spin, like a spiral that just like repeats similar experiences just with the help of new technology, more advanced?
00:24:38
Speaker
hardware, more advanced connectivity, tapping into wider audiences, increasing adoption. And with every other new generation of the hardware and all the software or like the enabling technology, we are just getting pretty much so we already can see what can come looking into what what we already faced is just like multiplying that um by the degree of the technology development.
00:25:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it's I think it's pretty trackable too and you get to a certain age and you you live through a so a cycle see a cycle coming back again and you see just evidence of like my my father would always say when I was growing up that time is a wheel and it was just a way of him explaining to like a young kid that like you're having bad times and it won't always be this way. All right. All right. Wow.
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, so are we talked already today about the metaverse, but now I'd like us to delve into the next chapter of your career, or when um in the year of like 2006, 2011, you founded the startup Metaversatility. Can you guide me through the concept, please? like what was What was that like? What was the business model? What impact it did on you? like what What was that like?
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it it was pretty simple really. It was like like many of the things that have come up in my life. It happened over margaritas and chips and salsa. um I highly recommend that. Some people say you could take a walk. I suggest go get some margaritas and chips and salsa. They're very good accelerants for creativity.
00:26:22
Speaker
so um My mentor at the time, Aaron, who is now Althea, so Althea invited me to dinner with a couple other students at the university that I had actually never met before, Adrian and Peter. So Adrian and Peter had already been doing work in Second Life. I had been doing projects in Second Life, not like work necessarily, like the stuff we talked about, and Althea was like seeing and seeing the whole thing from like a bird's eye view because she was a professor at the time and still is actually a tenured now professor of Trinity. We just saw that there were there was this gold rush happening toward the Metaverse into ah platforms like Second Life. So let's just focus on Second Life only.
00:27:05
Speaker
so you're You referred to the Second Life. so what was What was that like, just like very briefly? Second Life is a virtual world platform. It still continues to be profitable to this day. and it was ah You have an avatar, you can interact with others, you can build you know ah buildings and experiences and assets, you can run a shop. It's a social virtual world in 3D.
00:27:29
Speaker
So second life at the time was being seen as like heralding this the the next the future of how audiences engage with each other, communities engage with each other. It's really the same the same thing that we're talking about with Web3 right now, which is just like the next version of the internet. so we Amongst the four of us, we already had knowledge as to how to build in Second Life. We we understood the dynamics of the communities, how they talk to each other. We were pretty much natives of those spaces. So we realized pretty early on that we could charge for that. like We could become a service organization like an agency. we already knew We knew what agencies were at the time. We weren't like, you know,
00:28:12
Speaker
pretty high quality education. Like we had already gotten a lot of practical hands on stuff. And so it was a very short jump from that to running our first projects for major brands. Um, and a lot of that just came from introductions where someone from, you know, a marketing group or like Toyota or something who ended up being a client of ours wanted to build something in second life, but they didn't know even how to start. And there were no, at the time there was no, like,
00:28:39
Speaker
Indeed development tools, Unity barely existed. There was just not a lot of knowledge as to like how to even build a thing inside of the virtual world platform. We helped Toyota launch the Scion brand inside of the Metaverse. um you know ah The Obama administration livestreamed. some of his like state of the union or something into ah a, do I think it was a DOD space that we built. It was kind of like fuzzy. Easiest startup you could imagine starting up. We were just off to the races immediately. That sounds
Metaverse Hype Cycles and Business Value
00:29:12
Speaker
like a piece of cake, but ah what actually were the biggest challenge to struggle? um Getting people to pay us on time.
00:29:25
Speaker
The biggest challenge was probably communicating effectively again, like the storytelling of what it is that we were proposing to build and how to convey that succinctly to clients. I still encounter that challenge to this day. Like I just wrapped a project that was identical in its challenge of visually, experientially conveying various immersive, heady, 3D concepts without actually building them. The difference, of course, is at the time, we would have to hire a concept artist who, you know I have some of his art on the wall, actually, um to help us you know do traditional concept art. And now we can do a little bit more with mid-journey, but not even that much, from know very limited.
00:30:12
Speaker
Right. But yeah you mentioned like the bubble. So speaking about the overall concept of Midiverse, do you think it was the bubble ah back in 2011-ish? Or in 2022?
00:30:27
Speaker
like are Is it the same bubble or different bubbles? And what you but do you think it's heading? like If it has any kind of... commercial viability and level of adoption now to make sure that the concept still has lags, it still can grow or it's like the bubble, the the next iteration of bubble is also over. So ah I think that the the reason the reason for these crashes is the lack of but like immediate
00:31:06
Speaker
like wideband business value like It kind of comes down to like, can you get large volumes of users into this thing for long enough but retention with a genuinely useful problem that you're solving for them?
00:31:25
Speaker
And if you can't, then you just have a product market mismatch or timing mismatch, which is the same thing. The sort of crypto blockchain version flavor of web three slash the metaverse and like the VR version of it also. Right. I think all of those suffered the same.
00:31:43
Speaker
lack of immediate scalable business value for them to be as for these companies and and initiatives to be have as much valuation and as much hype and capital injection as they did. and it's that That's an important distinction. is like to say It's not like they don't have that you can't build a business,
00:32:04
Speaker
It's not like you can't drive revenue, just at the scale of Facebook renaming itself to the thing. that's like and That's a mismatch of the actual market potential versus the hype cycle. And where it's going, I think, is we are going to enter another cycle. We are like already in the middle of another cycle. And if you if you want a good primer on this, is like you know Alvin Wayne Grayland runs HTC, ah China,
00:32:34
Speaker
as a friend of mine, like just wrote a book called Our Next Reality. ain't And he he delves in, he and his partner, Lewis, co-writer, co-author, dive into how this next generation may be, this next cycle may be different because of AI. And that is a compelling argument that is still swimming in my head because Both miniaturization and access are solved problems. Like this Quest 2, Facebook, Meta just dropped the price to like 200, like 199 MSRP. It's no longer an excuse that it's like lack of access to the hardware to be able to build an industry off of. I think it's much more the the first thing that I said, which was, what is the problem you're solving for someone? Literally, what is there to do when you go inside of a virtual immersive environment?
00:33:32
Speaker
I mean, a lot of the time, the answer to that, the majority of the time, to this day, is like nothing. There's nothing
Metaverse's Business Potential and Challenges
00:33:38
Speaker
really for me to do. I mean, if it's Fortnite, I'm playing a game. I'm engaging in game loops. Big problem there is that there's a lack of content and systems that incentivize interaction on a regular scalable basis.
00:33:52
Speaker
um You know i'm working on a project right now that could help solve that and i've known many others all are also leveraging ah AI as an accelerant toward that so i think that might be something that makes this cycle different Right but imagine that are you You have like a wide space that you can draw any kind of the metaverse design, metaverse use cases for any industry. And just like you're like metaverse God, right? So i what that experience would be?
00:34:27
Speaker
so that it is engaging, it is on everyone's top of mind, and people want to spend time there. So how do you envision that so that that actually is like, oh, yeah, now I want to go there? I have a recency bias toward collaboration tools, um only because I've interacted with a couple organizations very recently, namely Katmai and um and realm which is based in Germany just in the last few weeks. I've also I've had a sort of major product leadership roles in the last four years in on building platforms immersive platforms that a lot of the end the eventual use case where you can really build a business off of is ah with a b2b focus first of all not not a b2c focus like a
00:35:20
Speaker
business to business, talking to Fortune 500, Fortune 100 organizations, talking to music labels and promoters first, like first trying to solve their problems. You know, work that I've done with Ernst & Young on one of my previous in one of my previous product roles, where they built their whole metaverse presence,
00:35:40
Speaker
Internally for their for their own internal organization on the platform that that we were building but um if i'm going to like name a beachhead um vertical or category where the metaverse.
00:35:55
Speaker
could have the most immediate practical business value, I think it's an online collaboration. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, the online collaboration is indeed like new frontier because we we have distributed teams, we have people all over the world. And um yeah, there should be definitely something that can boost that collaboration and co presence. Like the other day, we've been um talking to you um to each other through the Spatial Personas on Apple Vision Pro. And I can confirm that that's that's very much already contributes to that next level of spatial understanding of the room, spatial co-presence in the same area, be it like virtual room or your office. yeah So yeah, there there is definitely a big
00:36:47
Speaker
um big big space or to innovate around.
Overcoming Adoption Barriers in Immersive Tech
00:36:52
Speaker
but i mean what do you think like what What is the thing that prevents adoption of an immersive platform? Number one, and I can say this, having been on the product side at high levels, is cost, is like impact to an organization's P and&L.
00:37:11
Speaker
so as long as you're Setting expectation and evangelizing and so and selling in these concepts in a way that differentiates them from the things that are already doing, the the products that are already solving these problems in a much more efficient way. You say instead this is about human connection, instead this is about serendipity, instead this is about trying to combat the sort of like scourge of virtual work and the the negative sides of virtual work or hybrid work which is just confusing everybody.
00:37:39
Speaker
um And it's much more about this um this idea of like maybe slowing things down, maybe having things, leaving more room in the air to like have a conversation that is unexpected.
00:37:54
Speaker
that's when That's when I think you start to see value that can be not only, you you're not only evangelizing properly to decision makers, but you're actually selling something in that can be achieved at scale. Because I can say with experience now, the products exist that are like, they have like SaaS characteristics, right? They have, you know, ah all of the things that are required for a SaaS platform to work, right? They have like the security considerations, all the login credentials, you know, ah the the different roles based access protocols and stuff. So all those things, they have these $200 headsets, if you're going to do the VR end of it, right? Like all these things are kind of like problems that are solved and ready to go. I think it's more of a perception problem and just a tepidness and obviously a cold financial market right now. But I think it's, it's going to get very interesting very soon. Yeah. So what might be your like,
00:38:54
Speaker
One practical advice to those who are building such experiences now in 2024?
Future Directions: Web-based Solutions
00:39:01
Speaker
Make it web-based. Don't require a native app download. that That's like number one. is like like Make it something that if it's 3D, use WebGL if you can.
00:39:17
Speaker
Um, don't, yeah, don't make adoption, don't add adoption to the, to the, to the problems that, you know, to the challenges that you will face in the path of acquisition retention. So WebGL is coming a long way. Babylon is, is making leaps and and and strides. Um, so I would say make, you know, make that a priority. And if you're, if you're.
00:39:45
Speaker
If you're building something that requires live communication, pay extra attention to your audio and video stuff. Because for all of the bells and whistles of like immersive interaction and communication,
00:40:04
Speaker
if your base you know if your base expectation from your stakeholders and licensees is that it works as well as Zencaster, which we're using right now, or Slack or whatever, it's gonna have to work as well as that. So you've just you've entered into a ground war with Slack, which is difficult, but not impossible, particularly if you're doing all the other stuff correctly. So I would say focus on accessibility,
00:40:28
Speaker
um big time.
00:40:33
Speaker
Then you can actually get people into it. You're not just telling the story about it. You're like, ah you want to try it? It's like on just put this, you know, scan this QR code, enter this yeah URL into your phone and you're off to the races. And then the you can let the person decide for themselves. Yeah.
Highlighting Metaverse Projects
00:40:50
Speaker
So our speaking about that, so what might be, um, what would you reference like as the like three best, uh, metaverse projects that you've seen thus far?
00:41:02
Speaker
the the The kinds of projects that are more like on the verge of becoming something very big are like something like Realm is very interesting. Something like Katmai is very interesting. the The stuff that Deep Well is doing, I think, is like very top of mind for me because it's not it's not a metaverse it's not like a metaverse play, but I think there's potential there for you know online immersive communities that are based around the therapeutic qualities of of gaming.
00:41:30
Speaker
um because so much of that is like community based. But the the the specific sort of like the unique problems that they're solving in their thesis is like super interesting is like unlocking the new revenue streams and new discoverability for developers and access to care for end users. I think that's super interesting project.
00:41:49
Speaker
um VRChat is still, to this day, VRChat is still killer. like it's And they're they're just good they're going through a big reorg and hiring a bunch of like product team and stuff, so they're starting to take that more seriously. But VRChat already does a lot of what the metaverse is supposed to do. It's just more about adoption at this stage.
00:42:10
Speaker
um Yeah, some of the 2D stuff is like very interesting. Some of the stuff like um like ah Spatial Chat, where it's like really low low requirements from the end user. Fly Machine, that' that's a very interesting one. I've had some like actual, genuinely meaningful experiences inside of ah ah Fly Machine, watching concerts with other people.
00:42:36
Speaker
had like you know The thing is it solves an interesting problem from the standpoint of like I'm at a concert and I certainly very rarely have like deep long conversations with people around me that I'm not with already. And I definitely had that watching Death Cab for QT do a live show on Fly Machine, definitely connected with some people who were also fans, never met them before. And there's literally a UX that allows you to like create pods with each other and you're literally connected like in these hexagonal sort of like grid structure. And that ended up being
00:43:12
Speaker
The emergent behavior that came out of that was super interesting so fly machine is super interesting speaking about the are hardware enabler for the metaverse.
00:43:24
Speaker
um So what do you think is the. is the true ah next gen device that everyone will get on their face. So is it is it the Apple Vision Pro or MatterQuest 3 or something else? So what is or what is the the main driver for hardware? I mean, I'm still i'm still bullish on on audio. I love the AirPods because they're they're kind of just boring and I think
00:43:59
Speaker
When a technology becomes boring enough that you're not thinking about it all, that you're not like obsessing over it and fetishizing it and like writing news articles about it, that's the moment where it actually becomes a practical thing. The long term obviously is is full sensory and optics. It's aural, it's visual, it's vestibular, it's all of your like, you know,
00:44:18
Speaker
your ah biometrics, it's like rob obviously worth trending in that direction. I mean, decade plus till we have something that maybe is like the iPhone and in that it costs $1,100 and is subsidized on plans and makes it affordable for the average punter. But in the in the near term, I'm very curious to see what we can do with with you know meeting users where they are, which is basically like everybody has like AirPods now.
00:44:45
Speaker
so I think like if the the goal of augmented reality is to deliver a content that is contextual to your current experience and also isn't disruptive to that experience, i.e. you don't have to walk around South by like we did with our $4,000 headsets, Apple Vision Pros, slowly leaking battery, like not slowly, but quickly leaking battery to the point where they just become cosmetic bricks that we're taking selfies with, um You're looking at miniaturized hyper affordable technology that everybody has and that a lot of that's going to end up being I think audio first.
Web-based Metaverse Experiences
00:45:23
Speaker
It's either we're going to have these heavily immersive environments and products.
00:45:30
Speaker
first focused on B2B, like I was saying, and they're going to be much more about collaboration in these controlled environments where you can generate revenue, or they're going to end up being something that sits in kind of media-friendly moments and then sort of subsides again and media-friendly moments and subsides again. It's another reason why I always advocate for web-based experiences.
00:45:53
Speaker
So platforms that are utilizing utilizing WebGL or or Cloud Pixel streaming, for instance, to allow for accessibility and solve for that. I
AI and Machine Vision in User Experience
00:46:04
Speaker
remember when we were actually designing some audio-based gaming and like spatial audio experiences, being inspired with that so early Bose prototype of the spatial sound with the um with the sunglasses.
00:46:22
Speaker
ah So what might be your advice to those who are who might be joining that race into designing the audio experiences for audio AR? Let's put it like that.
00:46:39
Speaker
The Meta Ray-Bans are obviously, that's that's the product that's ah attempting to solve this mostly audio-based interface. and so um And I own one of those, and i I've used it out in the wild, particularly on like you know big like business trips and stuff.
00:46:55
Speaker
so the what What I think Meta is doing well with that with that device is they are restricting the potential use cases down to fewer of them and more meaningful and more impactful, not just not trying to boil the ocean by solving all kinds of problems. What it does well is, from a hardware standpoint, really good quality audio that isolates well and doesn't require you to do anything with put but pair of glasses on.
00:47:27
Speaker
Where it starts to shine, I think, and is going to be is the the machine vision aspect of it. so It's equipped with an RGB camera, right so it it has the ability to see to some extent. and you know There's functionality now out as of the last like firmware update that is ah that will allow it to identify, do its best to identify what it is that you are seeing. So in the same way that like humane and the rabbit are trying to like solve the kind of wearable problem by leaning into, okay, this thing can see, can it also sense? And what can it what can it do to tell you more about your environment in a way that your phone is, in that's less frictional or better than your phone?
00:48:14
Speaker
So I think that that as the third-party development ecosystem for that evolves, and there are more scrappy, fast-moving, startup-sized, indie-sized developers or studios that are solving problems for their customers, for their personas, I think that's where you're going to start seeing maybe an explosion of what we can call low-friction, high-adoption, miniaturized and affordable, UX-friendly stuff. If it can work consistently and work really well and use some stack of LLMs to talk to other LLMs, to talk to various endpoints, and it can be fast, responsive, that's where I think augmented reality will become this day-to-day, almost dull, boring table stakes thing.
00:49:02
Speaker
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The question of the reliability and the consistency of Like many use cases and many technologies that we are having right now, especially relating to the gen AI or like LLMs, yeah, it's definitely something that but is far from being there, like in in terms of the consumer reliability, so that whenever you say like hey, rabbit or hey, humane, pin, just like go go and do this stuff for me,
00:49:39
Speaker
i I think it's like same as as with Alexa with Siri you're not sure if it got you right and when it's thinking and takes time to process information like you have no evidence like what happens to that is it's as if you are like.
00:49:58
Speaker
Copying files are on Windows 98 and it can just like, it can seem that it's almost over, but it takes eternity and then you get a blue screen of death and that's it. But so yeah, so I think that that actually prevents from bigger adoption. But yeah, as we were referencing today, we are like going in cycle, in spiral, so eventually we might get the it's ah it's ah It's a couple of problems, right? It's UX, right very like base level. How do you communicate to someone in a in an audio-based interface? That's its own set of challenges. that are
00:50:42
Speaker
you know, smart speakers have been dealing with for a long time. Another problem with it is cost. So, you know, um immensely computationally expensive to run these LLMs, you know, in the cloud. So edge, you know, the potential for specialized agents that are running on the edge and running locally, there's a huge potential there. um particularly with their focus. So I think a lot of it's going to end up being about focus is like if the if the first gigantic marketing push that happens with Meta Ray Bands or Humane or Rabbit or whatever it ends up being, that really is like the Super Bowl ad moment um for that for that interface, for that modality. As long as it's like focused on ah solving a specific problem, not like all of the problems, and it's fine-tuned to do that from a UX standpoint, from a technology, from an economy,
00:51:31
Speaker
from an economic stand standpoint, if it ends up being like, there is an app on this thing that will help you look at a shop front, or let's say look at a restaurant and like understand if it's appropriate for what you're trying to accomplish, the size of the group that you're with, the vibe, the time of day, your tastes, whatever. Just focus on solving the problem of, I don't know where to eat, and I'm somewhere and I don't know where i exactly where I am and it's lunchtime,
00:52:00
Speaker
um and that So I have a device that has that that has a single eyeball and it's connected to something either locally in the cloud or semi hybrid and I needed to solve this problem at a speed that I understand what's happening, that I can trust, and that is happening relatively quickly. um And it doesn't cost me a whole bunch of money. It's like, a whole as again, as Shin would say, it's like, how many miracles do you want to stack on? I don't think those are all miracles. I think they're just they're just problems to be solved for jobs to be done. And there are a lot of smart people working on that.
Wargaming's Special Projects Success
00:52:40
Speaker
What I want us to make another time travel leap now and getting to the point of time where we actually collaborated together. It was like Wargaming special projects times. ah So um I believe that that was like a very unique moment of time um with the right people, with the right level of passion, with the right level of freedom.
00:53:06
Speaker
and desire to experiment and innovate, so or what it was like for you, and why do you think that phenomenon was even possible?
00:53:20
Speaker
Well, I think it was possible because there was a lot of attention being paid and capital injection. We're at the sort of peak of a hype cycle of immersive, which was AR and VR at the time. That helps with anything. But it's it's it's not about how it's not about getting it. it's about hope It's about keeping it, right? So the approach that we took at Wargaming with Special Projects Group was, hey, we want to take this like, we want to hold ourselves even more accountable to like kpis than maybe even traditional more traditional established departments nothing against those departments but because this can look so much like smoke and mirrors because this can look so so much like. Just kinda like a like a bs like you know adventure time like.
00:54:03
Speaker
let's let's counteract that, right? Like at the time, you obviously you remember I had dreadlocks as like I would dress the rest of me in a way that helped counterbalance the perception of the dreadlocks. Like who's this guy with his dreadlocks and his massive beard? So I would maybe dress a little bit more formally. So like in the same way, I think that's indicative of the approach that we took, which was like, hey, let's take this seriously. Let's set let's set ourselves to a standard um and and let's be realistic about it. so you know the The standard could certainly could not be, this is going to be a huge profit generating you know in the same way that like the product management team for World of Tanks was hyper-focused on creating revenue and generating revenue and profit now, like this quarter, this month, this week, right?
00:54:52
Speaker
that That was like orthogonal to our ability to explore new mediums, technologies, modalities of engagement. And so we just had to, like I said briefly earlier in our conversation, we just had to be very practical about it. It's like what what will this actually bring to the organization?
00:55:09
Speaker
And that's why we started with, like i I don't know if you remember, but we just had a single spreadsheet to start with is like, let's just put everything that could possibly come positively from this. Let's try to put some kind of quantitative value on that, even if it's temperature or something. And then let's like use that to track, measure, evaluate, and then iterate. And i I think we did that pretty successfully. I think the fact that we were able to do it for as many years as we did without generating like direct immediate There were projects that definitely tied into marketing acquisition campaigns that did contribute to actual revenue generation, but that it wasn't going to be our like the the hill that we died on. I think that was like very important. I think the leadership team that we worked with you know at the time,
00:55:56
Speaker
understood that and supported it and saw it as cost of doing business when it comes to like not being a super profit generating center. We don't want to just tell these compelling stories that are going to generate hundreds of millions of impressions of like storytelling about it, which we are successful at. We don't want to just build up like the railroads of partnerships with Google and Microsoft to be like first to the table as we move toward compelling business model, we want to build things that like tens of hundreds of millions of people, you know, play and experience and use. So, you know, it was like, I think always part of our mission from the beginning to say, yes, this is where we need to be from a KPI standpoint now. But in the next three, four or five years, we see adoption and miniaturization and all this stuff.
00:56:44
Speaker
getting to the point where we can we can build compelling business cases, which is kind of where we we ended. You need to tie value back to the initiative, the investment. Even if it's you think it's a small investment, you need to show why you think that this is worth doing, not just this month, this six months, but like why it's going to be not just useful, but essential. Oh, yeah. Yeah. 100%.
00:57:08
Speaker
so our um So what do you think, I know that we've done a few dozens of projects ah during those years, but what do you think were the three, four maybe ah signature projects and what ah value you think they brought to to the organization.
World of Tanks AR Development
00:57:30
Speaker
Because I know like each of those brought immense value to us as practitioners because we had hands-on experience, we learned, we tested, we innovated.
00:57:44
Speaker
are But speaking about the organization that actually funds this kind of activity, so what do you think were the top three were those areas of interest collided. Yeah, I mean, I don't i don't know if it's going to be top three, but I would just speak to one tentpole initiative, which was the World of Tanks AR, like that family of products and experiences that started, I think, with the HoloLens. We started with the HoloLens, and then we moved on to basically every other platform that existed for the next
00:58:19
Speaker
you know, maybe two years after that, you know, we started even started to be the Google Cardboards. And then it was Google Tango, and then it was Microsoft HoloLens, and then, yeah, all the rest. I think the premise of that project was basically creating an experience, I think it started at Tankfest at Bovington Tank Museum in South England, where there's this annual event, a lot of people come together, it's a big marketing inflection point for World of Tanks and Wargaming products in general. There's a lot of big sponsorships.
00:58:56
Speaker
um ah Sponsorship investment into that and a lot of media a generation so the the trajectory of that project I think really balanced the Moving quickly moving meaningfully um having meaningful results, largely in the first in the realm of community engagement and owned and earned media exposure and media asset generation and storytelling from a from a branding and from ah an advertising and marketing standpoint.
00:59:32
Speaker
um the It was also done like very budget consciously, but highly with a high focus on quality. So we started with a Google google a partnership with Google doing cardboard, like branded cardboard at the event. and moved into something more immersive the following year, which was with Microsoft and HoloLens, which then moved into, we're now moving towards something that has more commercial viability, which is launching with ARCore on you know Google's big foray into um spatial computing with with Android devices, with mobile devices.
01:00:11
Speaker
um which was what came after Tango. So we so we moved from cardboard to Tango and HoloLens, still kind of like low adoption, but hugely successful from a standpoint of storytelling.
01:00:25
Speaker
And then moving into being one of the launch partners from Google, I think maybe even just the next year, where we took some of the same concepts and maybe even same assets, and again, sort of very like in a very lean way as an organization, inside of the organization, um turning that into a launch product that was experiential, was about social media sharing,
01:00:48
Speaker
um And that trajectory is what led us to the ideation and iteration moving into 6D, which is now Niantic Lightship with Matt Miesniks in that group, which was some of our first prototypes in what we believed and I still actually believe is a highly compelling um value proposition for ah for a gaming scenario that involves spatial computing using your mobile device but had we seen that go further past the stage where we left war gaming. I think that that would have been and may still be.
01:01:26
Speaker
the sort of completion of the goal of reaching toward commercial viability, like being a profit center. So I would say that that project, which is really a series of projects, is something that started as, we know that this is going to have to be low adoption, so let's get the best partner we can, which is Google at the time.
01:01:48
Speaker
And let's generate the dopest media that we can, which is like a lot of videos and you know ah Forbes and Venture Bill, all those like you know media outlets covering it. And then like let's reass let's deploy, measure, document our learnings, post-mort, reassess, and iterate. And we did that a few more cycles until Google was like, OK, now we have a billion-plus install base called ARCore on Android.
01:02:17
Speaker
wasn't didn't quite work out that way, but that was the premise. Okay, okay so now we we have an addressable market that we can deliver content to. We've built the partnerships and expertise. We've built the relationship with Google so that we are top of the app store on launch day, right?
01:02:32
Speaker
um we're still not committing mad, you know, um budgets to like building like a, trip we're not just diving into like AAA. And so I think that trajectory is actually a trajectory I'm very proud of because at the end of the day, we delivered, I think, huge value to the organization in multiple different areas for, you know, at very cost effectively, very quickly and agilely. And I think us holding ourselves accountable to an evolving set of KPIs that brought that demonstrate that and substantiate that value was part of that. And I think at the end of the day, I would say that was hugely successful. Just at at you know when it came down to it, shipping of the actual commercial product is still something that I'm looking toward to this day.
01:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, but that's so very thorough and very straight to the point description of what it was actually, how unique that moment and that set of expertise and a combination of skills, people, leadership opportunities. So yeah, converting something like that to a commercial viable product, I think is um is a dream or for of any R and&D group or any innovation team that can see that the investment that you've made, it actually results in something. And um I've seen ah on quite a few cases in my recent experience where we start with the proof concept with early mockups, with early ideation that proves this or that, like strategy direction, opportunity.
01:04:12
Speaker
And that moment when you see that evolving step by step. crawling towards the release to the public, release to the market. um Yeah, so that's that that feeling is is absolutely incredible. And the yeah, so it would be great to see more and more innovative projects like that taken um taken further to to the market so that people play with that. And that I think will evangelize significantly more um to general audience
01:04:47
Speaker
than than than many other media and tools. Basically, you're you're dealing with stakeholders and collaborators all the time. so like you know Something that comes from like product management is like the art of like influence. like You're not necessarily controlling and in an authoritative role and most of most of the time in like a product leadership role, but what you do end up having to do is evangelize and engage in like really effective storytelling.
01:05:12
Speaker
Because what you're doing at the end of the day is you're unlocking buy-in, whether it's financial investment, collaborative investment, time and energy, spiritual buy-in, whatever it is. um At the end of the day, it's like it feels like, and I think you can speak to this more effectively now than I do because you have such a wide purview in your current role at EPAM, is it feels like at the At the end of the day, it you need to come across as like thinking holistically, 360 and long-term. Super simple. It's like you need to be just hold yourself to the standard that you would imagine the most rigorous, non-toxic but rigorous stakeholder you could imagine. Hold yourself to that standard and maybe just a little bit more and think long-term, think multidisciplinary and
01:06:02
Speaker
be true to yourself, right? Like don't, don't blow smoke. Like if you don't think that something is going to have legs long-term, call that out and like do your job, right? Just say like, I'm actually at this next gate that we just did. I'm not really sure about the, this is the way, maybe there's a pivot we can make, or maybe we shelve this and we fail fast in that sort of classic axiom. So do you think that maybe that's just the simplest way to distill it is like, think long, think wide.
01:06:31
Speaker
be sane and hold yourself to a high standard?
01:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah i think I think it totally makes
Project Management: Holistic Perspectives
01:06:39
Speaker
sense. And I think it's very important to have ah people in your team that are either can tap in different roles, because in any project you need people ah who care, who look at the project holistically, like on a telescope level, right? But there must be those looking at the project details on the binocular level, and there must be people who think about the project on their microscope level. And the combination of that are roles, or those roles, or your leadership role if you oversee like it least at least two of those.
01:07:18
Speaker
i capabilities and features. I think that's that that's important for anything innovative because like no matter like whatever vision you may have or strategy that you that you envision, there still are things that can be done and should be done and and how to make them real. To to sum it up about the Wargaming Special Projects, do you think ah such ah innovation, R and&D, sub-organizations exist in other companies. Is it like a rare thing? Is it like frequently ah you see something like that? So what what might be the analogs that you can reference? I don't think it's super common just because at the end of the day, if you're prioritizing a roadmap,
01:08:13
Speaker
as a product team or as a business team or executive team. i mean it's going That's going to end up in your P and&L looking like the most like one of the more expungible things, even though it's it's ah it's shortsighted to it's it's a thing, but it's a human thing. I totally get that. so At the other end of the spectrum where you see a lot of this innovation happening is just in the indie to like SME, maybe um young kids really that are building like really interesting experience and products, maybe unrefined, but certainly the acceleration of creativity is happening. Organizations like maybe like like Resolution Games, the brc you know VR Games company run by Tommy Palm and Paul Brady, like, you know, right, that's like,
01:08:58
Speaker
They're definitely, it's not like they're like flush with cash. I mean, they've they've taken on investment and they've they're they're they're still around, right? I mean, to to say you're still around in the VR gaming space is a lot right now. and then But the point is that they make like really high quality products and they do focus some of their time on the innovation side. And they're already in kind of like an innovation space anyway. So you see maybe organizations like that that are doing both They have to be focused on profitability and revenue, but they also must focus on innovation. And I think those restrictions, those startup restrict you know sort of restrictions can be very useful in like sharpening your focus and saying,
01:09:46
Speaker
EPAM, obviously, right? Like the organization that you want you run project management at is like, that's a sweet spot of like, we have clients that we're working with, they have budgets, you know, they have resources, they have expertise. So yeah, I mean,
01:10:03
Speaker
The question is because maybe for you, do you see a lot of people in this space? Yeah, well, in in this case, yeah, so you referenced my current role and there it was like that that's a clear transition between Wargaming special projects where we did that ah firstly, like for R&D sake and for ah to support the product campaigns and product strategy and to innovate or around the products, whereas in my current role at E-PAM, where I'm in charge of the such sure thing as like E-PAM Garage, ah which basically follows similar principles where we
01:10:45
Speaker
innovate around different technologies, around different ah capabilities that are new enough and like most advanced yet acceptable, more most advanced yet affordable, and turning ah using the learning so we get through the R and&D.
01:11:07
Speaker
Are as a key in as an enabler for human centered design projects that we we are building because we still always trying to put the human needs first or like the business requirements first but then you know are.
01:11:22
Speaker
What enables that but without trying without innovating and having hands-on experience. it It can remain a pipe dream so we've seen so many cases when the designers and strategist create like very compelling decks and very cool stories but then when it comes to like how to make it real are.
01:11:46
Speaker
Clients are like left or without proper response and clients have to go and search for or a someone one to build it. And then that someone who builds that can have absolutely different vision and in the end you get something completely different from what you intended. Whereas like ah the thing that we are doing with our teams is that we have this.
01:12:08
Speaker
collision of those expertise areas where you both ah know how to strategize and how to innovate and how to make innovation meaningful and reasonable and are applicable to to people, to business. And you also have hands-on experience with advanced technologies.
Human-centered Design and AI Innovation
01:12:28
Speaker
And then you collide and make these like end-to-end. Of course, it's still like the um I wish like it could be like for all the companies, right? But are definitely each company has their own priority, has their own roadmap, the P&L and so on. But we see that the there is a big trend towards this kind of like end to end when you or come to the organization and you get like everything everything um under one roof. And that's ah that's super cool. And that's what enables this kind of
01:13:04
Speaker
and innovation?
01:13:08
Speaker
I think enablement is ah is a good is a good word. Enablement and acceleration. um
Startup Fundraising and Product Validation
01:13:15
Speaker
And I think that that that's becoming a flattened and democratized space because of AI. I think um the potential for AI as an accelerant is going to make it so that validating a thesis is going to become less and less expensive because you can try it out earlier and earlier with less and less capital. like I'll give you an example. like I'm working on a startup right now that is that we are we're in fundraising mode to to do our product definition, prototyping toward validation of the thesis or you know refinement of the thesis.
01:13:58
Speaker
the The amount that were that we need to do that, right now, today, I just got off of that like and a couple hours ago, the amount of capital that we need to do that effectively for this concept, I would say is, I haven't actually thought about this until right this second, is probably like a quarter or less of what what it would have required even when I was doing this three years ago. so
AI's Role in Prototyping and Iteration
01:14:24
Speaker
you know And that's because we are able to accomplish more with AI tools. And that's like, I can say it's almost specifically because we can iterate much more quickly for much much more cost effectively um to be able to get to that first stage, which is the cold start. It's like, just help me just validate what I think is true to be true. Let's do a little bit of prototyping. I just think you're going to see more people taking that kind of R and&D approach because
01:14:53
Speaker
particularly if the gate to that is capital, when you talk to a lot of, you know, people who hold capital, the first question they're going to be asked is like, like, they're going to raise their bars, like what you're supposed to come to somebody with seed, friends and family or angel investment stage, you're just going to be expected to come to them with more. Because if you haven't, then it's like you haven't used the tools that are come back to me when you've used chat GPT a little bit, more right? Run chat GPT through a few cycles, then come back to me. And then we can talk about getting you some seed. So you know I think that's going to have a huge impact, and it already is. Yeah. So so
Finding Inspiration in Daily Activities
01:15:29
Speaker
yeah, we see that it all speeds up for we have like the faster feedback loop can innovate faster and faster and faster and faster. So in this very fast-paced world,
01:15:43
Speaker
um where are you or have time or to actually um reflect, innovate, or get inspired. So what is the andt know time in the year or like area where you have actual time to be beyond on be be beyond the work, but actually i have this inspiration?
01:16:11
Speaker
i I hand wash dishes. we have a dish We have a dishwasher, but I hand wash my dishes just because I find it to be just a sort of like almost therapeutic experience to scrub and clean, complete. It's like kind of like a game for me. And some of my best realizations are not in like the shower, as some people say, or on long walks. But some of my like, sort of like, oh crap, that's the thing is while I'm washing dishes.
01:16:38
Speaker
And I have evidence of this, like actual behavioral quantitative data, because you talked to my wife, Melly, and Melly will tell you it drives her up the wall that I'm like in the middle of washing dishes and I'll stop everything, put everything down. I'll like dry my hands and I'll walk over to this office and I'll just start typing things out. Cause I'm like, that's what I need to do. And then I'll go back and finish and I'll do that three or four times in a dish washing session.
01:17:04
Speaker
So it's sort of like you need to trick your brain into being like, no, I'm just washing dishes. I'm just washing dishes. Everybody calm down. Nobody's expecting a KPI here. It's at that moment that your brain's like, you know what, that problem you were trying to solve earlier, there's a much better way to do that. And then that's when, so whatever your version of washing dishes is, is probably, you know, maybe it's the gym, maybe it's long walks actually, um be intentional and be ah maybe be an activist.
01:17:31
Speaker
Yeah, wow.
Predictions on AI's Impact and Growth
01:17:33
Speaker
So um but I think it takes us like to probably like the final question today. So are considering like what we've been talking about today, about the early days about the future about the trends. So Matt, what's next? What's next is a huge AI explosion. Um,
01:17:58
Speaker
in a way that we are going to be continuously shocked by and a lot of volatility in markets and people having to really internalize an entrepreneurial mindset that maybe is going to be a gift for some of us I say from a point of privilege probably but My hope is that the the best use cases for the internet, which is community and feeling not alone and feeling connected to others. My hope is that people help each other. My hope is that AI helps us, doesn't hurt us. And and that the that the the the thing that we look back on over these years, since pandemic really,
01:18:41
Speaker
is that we all learned how much we need each other and how smart and capable we actually all are and how much of a survivor we are as a species really not even just as modern like information workers or whatever we are and um that the end result is something positive and something that we can almost maybe say I'm we can maybe laugh at eventually and say, I'm almost glad that that happened because it made me a better person, it made me a stronger person, made me more entrepreneurial. I'm excited for all the startups that
Closing Thoughts and Gratitude
01:19:14
Speaker
are gonna be happening that are the new game studios, the new tech startups that I know are happening right now, I'm doing one of them, right?
01:19:20
Speaker
And to varying levels of success, I'm excited about the the way that as the as the the forest catches on fire and the trees all fall down, all that really means is like new saplings start growing in the fertile soil of the ashes and all of that um Phoenix, you know, rising from the ashes stuff. I'm hoping that that's what happens next.
01:19:46
Speaker
That was Matt Daly, leading producer in XR, games and Web3 space. Matt, thank you so much for coming and for a very insightful conversation. Thank you, Alex. Hey, thank you for listening to the show. You've been listening to The Month and Millions, a brand new practical and envisioning show about innovators and emerging tech practitioners. Please subscribe to make sure you don't miss a new episode. I'm Alex Bobko and you've been listening to The Month and Millions. Goodbye.
01:20:23
Speaker
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