Avatar Platform for Cross-App Metaverse with Timmu Tõke, CEO of Ready Player Me

hey and welcome everybody to the deconstructor fun podcast today uh my guest is timu tokei i i i mispronounced your name timo i'm really sorry but but the first name is right correct yeah yeah it's perfect it's very good it's international version yeah yeah thank you for having me yeah so tim you're uh you're a ceo at ready player me previously known as wolf 3d it's a cross game avatar platform for the metaverse that seems like the perfect sentence to raise money so can you can you tell a little bit about your company because this is not a company that you started last quarter it has actually been live for for a good while so you're not chasing the bags with that with the latest you know nft and metaverse and and all these integrations you've been actually doing this for uh for a hot minute so tell me a little bit about wolf 3d and ready player me sure happy to to do that um yeah so i mean we've been around for eight years actually um and it all started from building hardware-based 3d scanners um that we basically used to

scan tens of thousands of people and but the goal was always to basically make it easy for end users or normal users to create an amateur of themselves that kind of resembles themselves and they can use in in games and virtual worlds and i start from hardware and then we built a kind of deep learning solution from from this data we collected with hardware and that took a single selfie and converted it into like different styles of avatars and that was basically an sdk we sold to gaming companies so our customers were like tencent huawei htc vodafone verizon not just gaming companies all kinds of like people that needed outers i guess and um and what ended up happening is like we saw the sdk but developers always needed the whole avatar system around that as well so we ended up building the character system the clothing system all this stuff around it and and then we started automating that for ourselves over the like three or four years with that we built this like custom outer systems and then eventually

landed on you know a solution that is actually so easy that anyone can integrate on their own like developers can integrate on their own and that's very premie and that's where we kind of realize we can build a platform around it and we can make it into like a plug-and-play uh solution that anyone can integrate and you know drop the enterprise business and then build ready for me and android premier was launched uh one and a half years ago um and it's a it's a for developers it's an easy easy to use outer system so you won't have to invent your own um and for end users it's an avatar that you can use across many different worlds uh virtual worlds across the metaverse and launched one and a half years ago today we have 1400 companies that are integrating and using greater perme so that's the developer adoption has been has been quite um quite great so in january we added like 300 new companies that use our outer system um so yeah that's that's been been good but we started off a lot before

yeah needed you know so wait why did you like where does this because you've been hold on let me just reverse back sixteen hundred companies that's a lot uh but um let me just unpack this for myself uh the avatar system that you have in wolf 3d is it more can i describe it as um bit emoji on steroids um yeah a little bit i mean it's more like um you know we started off having a very simple outer system but it's like gaming oriented so you know if you are building a game and you don't want to invent an outer system and spend you know six or 12 months on doing that then we just give you a character system and it works in unity unreal you know and so forth so it's like a it's actually like a plug-and-play gaming outdoor system um but from an end user's perspective yeah it's kind of like with noisy but in 3d or in virtual worlds you know in that sense yeah okay so so i get i at least get a picture because you know there's the snap games and they use the emoji as

a system to make your own characters and play in them of course they use the only single type but but that's what i meant kind of like on steroids meaning like just better faster yeah uh more beautiful more healthy all the things that come in with steroids i don't know anyways um so so why did you start with this idea of of avatars like where where you know because you started that way long before even the word metaverse kind of you know was in the popular not popular culture but when it was normal like people didn't talk about metaverse like they do now yeah how did that idea come by yes i mean i i've been a gamer myself since uh since i was a kid i played runescape a lot when i grew up and like you know sold runescape gold to other kids in school and i was like you know i think i did for a while so like virtual economies and virtual worlds were interesting from from that point uh already and then that i started messing around with 3d and like 3d printing 3d scanning and it was just like you know

in school just doing some projects and and like but it had some context on there on the space and then when oculus was acquired by facebook we realized that okay like vr is probably going to be a thing like back then we thought that's the case and then um you know we are going to be social and in social vr and social interactions outdoors are kind of who you are and so afterwards are important and the state of avatars eight years ago was you know not not not great so we were like okay this probably needs to be solved um and there's no way to build like a software-based outdoor creator that will create an amateur that looks like you in the beginning so we built hardware actually at this like kind of egg-shaped scanning booths we had in airports and in a hierarchical museum in finland for example yeah yeah and and we use those to capture a lot of data uh of faces like human faces and then and then basically using that data you

know at the same time like deep learning came around and it was easier to build like um built that stuff basically and and then we had this like proprietary database of scans and then we actually managed to build like a software based solution but it all started from just believing that vr is going to be a thing and then avatars are going to be needed in vr because it's going to be a social platform um and then you know it just took many years to get there and like obviously we learned a lot over the old years ourselves and we were 20 when we started didn't really understand anything about anything that's a good start for any company but if you wanted to do something cool but didn't know anything about anything yeah well listen here's here's an interesting part that i that always kind of confuses me like coming from the perspective of now i would almost have to say a conservative game developer because i do free to play games and it seems like like i'm like an old timer now so the the whole idea of um how do you write on your web page across

app metaverse 3d avatar platform so meaning that you can create an avatar and use it across different apps in a in a wider space of metaverse or just an avatar that can be used across apps i've only seen that happening with snap like how are you imagining like how does this work because the way i'm approaching it is like if we do an avatar system or integrate an avatar system in our game like having a certain art style and you know the way it's built the skeletons the uh the rigging the animation like everything is very specific for a specific game and imagining something that isn't fortnite imagine the same thing in call calling a bad example call of duty or a candy crush it just doesn't fit and it's too weird like can you talk a little bit about that like how do you solve this issue and is it even an issue or you might why am i just like a dinosaurs yeah yeah i mean it's uh it's definitely an issue but it's less of an issue than we ourselves even thought um

so definitely you know there's different kind of styles of games and and worlds and and we you know right now we have one kind of style that you can slightly customize but we're creating more style templates to cover like different areas and then developers themselves can create assets for the avatar so that also like helps them style them and so forth uh what comes to the rigs and the specifics of the outer you know we support several different rigs we can even support a custom rig um but if every end user goes from your game that has your rig to another game has a different rig we do the magic in the background and just make it work basically um so so that's that part but of course it's like not something that game developers are used to you know like that kind of keeping that part away you're not doing that part and that's kind of like something that we are doing the education for i guess um and uh but ultimately it just gives you so much more time and energy to put into the core gameplay and core game or experience you're building and and you

know it just takes away this like important piece of of thing you have to build otherwise um and also like over time we're bringing in like branded content we're working with like new balance dior warden brothers like doing movie outfits and stuff like that into our game that you can sell yourself um you know and also like people that have created an altar in one of the apps and have bought something for their avatar they want to use this stuff in your game as well you know they might come in and explore there's like kind of reasons um benefits of being in the network um that we're now starting to introduce as we're getting to like a critical mass of of network basically um but yeah so there's like multiple parts there basically yeah but there's but these these certain parts that are like i'm trying to be the uh the conservative here please so so here's here's what my brain doesn't get and that is yeah i'm playing like this one game that has integrated ready player me i make a dope

dune costume actually i spent money on it i spent like 30 bucks on making my guy look like the um batista dude big bald and ready to kick ass all right i like this character now i like it so much that there's another game that i'm playing let's say it's a similar action game and i want to use the character there but the game is by a different publisher uh a rival publisher if you will yeah why would the rival publisher allow that like i understand there's a there's a point of taking you know having a player play both games and of course they engage it's a bigger audience but that's not how different publishers see it they don't want it they don't want something being spent on other platform to be used on their platform they want to they want the same thing to be i'm meaning they want you to spend money on their platform so yeah you build something on the other one no bueno if you come come with that into my game like you have to build your

your own doom dune thing here as well yeah what am i getting wrong with this with this type of like a limited thinking yeah i know i mean this is definitely the kind of the thinking right now in the industry um and um so uh what what do we do for example to like to help that um is that we distribute the revenue uh from the sale based on one first witness where the sale is is is made and then where the assets are used so if you buy it from a game a and you actually spend most of your time in game b playing with these assets then game b gets gets revenue from that as well um and that's kind of like but how does it it's based on like engagement and like time and like spent in in multiple games um so basically where you get the utility for owning this asset is where um the revenue is is is part of the revenue is made the one that makes the sale also you know gets apart and then the part that kind of offers utility for the

assets gets another part um so let me let me throw an example something costs 20. yeah 20 ethereum let's put it this way yeah let's go all the way in [Laughter] so meet priced nft yeah exactly so tenzo goes right away to the uh to the game that that is being used at and then the second tenzo is being divided by a certain like what is the time of of of utility like when is it fully paid out and then how do you how is that tracked like i'm now i'm curious yeah totally so i mean those are things that we are building out at the moment the first first kind of uh state of the tools was just to save developers time from having to build their own outdoor systems and now we're starting to work with monetization so we're building out all this models and tools and and that's like that's that's an evolution um so uh yeah so it depends on depends on like it's basically engagement which is time

and and frequency and and all things the many things combined that that we use to to distribute this but um but it's an evolving evolving um system the point is like developers want to sell stuff in their game that works in thousand other games like nobody's against that you know yeah of course but then you but at the same time you don't want to like kind of get random crap in your game without getting the benefit of like you have to get paid for your app basically so that's what we're trying to achieve with this model and it's not like um it's not perfect yet but um but that's that's it helps um us introduce like more open economies into games because what we believe in uh very much is that open economies are better so you can even take a you know look at you just think about about the country in every country you close down your borders you don't do business with anyone so so basically like um in the in in real world having an open

economy is almost always a good decision uh for the size of the economy and for everyone involved in this economy um so we believe that's true in the virtual world as well um and also like at the same time the trend that is happening is like a lot of like new virtual worlds and games and metaverses are more for a general kind of audience so there's like general social media audience which is like you know the aesthetics are more general and more like kind of like you know more generic i would say um and and so that kind of that also kind of makes it makes it easier to to like have this like one style or unlimited styles and it's not for the kind of the classic gamer that wants to go in and kind of escape into into a story or into a game and so you're talking about things like rec room for example yeah rec room yeah our room is a perfect example or even like roblox you know it's also like a very kind of socially driven experience though the avatars are not

totally appealing they're quite lucky yeah let's say they could use a round corner so so talk to me about because this is clearly not not something that um a mobile platform could adopt because they're you know apple google world gardens they don't want any of that even even making purchase outside the app stores they're already you know slapping tax on that one as well so what is like i would be very curious to hear like what are the some of the best implementations that you've seen right now from your clients uh that are heading towards that direction because i understand that you're describing uh a world of the future five ten years from now uh but in terms of today like what companies are doing this what are the platforms and and what are the sort of examples that that that set the way for the future yeah that's a great question and by the way mobile does still work so like you can also have like a traditional in-game economy

which is like non-cross-game assets you just create stuff for it on the avatars and sell them in the in-game in-game purchases like that's also there um so and that is actually that lives side by side with like this cross-game economy so only some assets so basically like using your tool is just not having to build it and it's a really simple sdk that allows you to have a pretty awesome um avatar system that isn't as sdk that is also updated with the current stuff so you say you're working with a bunch of brands the new balances the uh the diors you name it balenciaga hopefully uh yeah yeah like that type of stuff so once i implement it in my game like can my guy have balenciaga neon green giant shoes or like do i get it from from your side yeah totally so awesome we okay we make those deals we bring those assets and that's awesome yeah yeah and like we do also like we do

nfg drops ourselves so like yesterday we launched a drop for crypto punks owner so if you own a punk which is like you know 200 000 plus minimum you can generate a 3d version of the punk that is like a gaming altar basically um and then that lives in our ecosystem it goes to different games and the revenue we generate from this drop we actually share 50 of that to the games and apps based on where the assets are used to actually get paid for letting those nfts to come into your game wait a minute i you lost me like halfway through so i own yeah crypto punk that that way okay i still i'm not that dumb that i don't know what crypto punk is all right now i got it like i'm one of those um lucky or crazy people who have spent enormous amount of money on this picture that is not very pretty either but you know who am i to judge so i've sold it for a long time but then i like it down now yeah well you like the money behind it it's the same thing you know it's like you can look at a gold bar too it might

not be that pretty but it's it's really nice in terms of value um so so i have this and we create like okay i'm gonna use uh let it ready player me i'm gonna create uh an avatar out of it and i'm gonna play give me an example of a game actually can i play it in axi no vr chat let's see let's see vr chat alright i'm gonna go into a vr chat and to really you know what's the perfect word flex on everybody with my crypt so i'm gonna flex with my crypto punk like how like where what do you mean the revenue is being distributed so the revenue will go to vr chat app that i'm using my crypto punk but did i spend money in minting my crypto like how where where's the where's the money like i'm i'm looking for the money yeah yeah totally so like what we created is like a derivative of the crypto punk so i'll just share you a link so you just uh oh yeah yeah yeah for those listening

i will just describe it yes it's punk's not already paired up me and but just to give you an idea of what it is so so basically that's a derivative nft you can generate yourself from your punk each one is unique you know the punk's attributes like the hair and stuff like that there are badges you have the punk on a tv and it's like a 3d avatar body for your pump basically and then that's an nfc you buy for 0.33 each um and and then that's like a thousand dollars basically and then uh you can use it in in ready primary network pure game that allows that nft to come into our game then we share the revenue from the drop from the nfd sales with you so it's a completely new kind of a revenue stream for you perfect there's a link in the description of this podcast so just go in there yeah it's going to be there punks dot ready player me dot me no punks.readyplayer.me anyway link in the

description so i've added it there um okay well now okay i get it um kind of get it i hopefully i get it uh i wanna i i want a crypto punk to to really get yeah you should you should get mine i hope this podcast does a little bit better so i can invest into a crypt um so since we're talking about the crypto punks and everything so what is you know the current state the problems the future that you're seeing with this with this nft because i understand that that even though your business is has now success in terms of like you know companies can implement the sdk there's a tremendous boost that can be received from that because you are essentially doing all the partnerships so i can get into my game bunch of really cool looking uh skins and and elements without without really signing deals with the uh with the new balances and and the under armours of the world uh and the dunes and etc so that's uh

that's a tremendous value uh but but going in the future i presume that you know your focus is really on web three um so how do you see web three what is your even definition of web three um what are the problems what's the future so talk you know talk the crazy stuff to me yeah yeah totally yes i mean i guess like um important it's important for us to be like a mainstream platform so we can't to be too crypto too early and and we are experimenting with web3 we're doing some nfd drops and so forth but it's an option optional part of the platform for developers and for end users as well so we're not you know it certainly feels that ownership of digital assets is going to be good for virtual worlds and for the metaverse and nfds look like it's a good way to kind of create that or or i know and solve that problem so that's why we think it's it's it's good to experiment with that um and also obviously great to generate revenue with that and then

distribute that back to developers and and games um because that helps us you know uh help the games and then attract more app developers on the platform because to you know the the the goal is of course to be a universal author you know platform for for the metaverse um and one of the part one part of the question was kind of what what web3d is for us um i think like it's generally like crypto based uh experiences um i think web 3 can also be you know defy and like kind of decentralized finance like all this kind of crypto crypto stuff outside of nfps as well i think um it came to the popular um i don't know media and stuff stuff from nfc so i think nfts are like um important because they're easy to understand for for well they're not easy to understand i would argue that yeah it's not easy to understand the value you know behind them sometimes i guess but but it's like i own this piece of you

know a skin i own a skin and it's a nifty and i can i can resell it i think that's the biggest thing compared to um digital goods as it is is that you can actually resell the stuff yeah exactly and you know like what what we are trying to do with nfd is like when you attach an nfd to our router then it actually becomes like a metaverse nft you know it becomes usable and about you know more than a thousand platforms now or games uh which kind of like so the success of the nft doesn't depend on one single game that gave it out so it's just not like a secondary marketplace for one game and if the game goes down you know probably the nfts are not worth a lot as well it's an nft that is your for avatar that you can use in you know a game you play or a virtual concert to go to or you know and so forth and and hopefully you know you'll find more use cases over time as we add more and more games and so forth so yeah does the skin and fd have to be unique

um and if these don't have to be unique um but you can have so there's limits you know they can have 10 000 of the same same looking nfts but then in the contract there is like you know you'll always have only 10 000 of them and like people buying very premium nfcs early you know it's like well one part of just that people want to use it in the virtual world but i think the current market also looks it looks at it as an investment a little bit like okay i have very premiums like early nfds like if this platform is successful it's probably likely dividable yeah speculation yeah like and the market is very much thrown by circulation yeah um and like i've personally been into space in the nft space for i don't know a year a little bit less than a year year so like which is already a long time for it yeah like basically the whole time since the beginning yeah exactly and i've had hundreds of nfcs

and like you do you have hundreds of nfts i do yeah what is your most valuable nft um at the moment i think it's a clonex alatar at the moment i have a few art pieces also that like 20th or something like that like 20 ethereum right yeah uh and um what is the most uh expensive avatar done in radio player me like like the value how high has it gone yeah i mean like we actually just did our first um nft drop ourselves like um you know two few days ago so um and those are like they go for a thousand dollars now um we did the drop with dead mouse and then the last year um so and that was like a partner drop we just kind of integrated with our avatars they did drop in the marketing on their website and so forth and and yeah we saw the few million of them like you know you know in a few days um yeah so uh but yeah there was like one piece was

like the east price stages was like 500 bucks to 600 bucks yeah yeah and and um and do you follow like what their price is like do they are they being reselled in open c or yeah the floor price is like similar now some bigger ones have been sold for like six or nine thousand and something like that ones and um do you get the revenue from that if somebody sells it in opencl or is it just like they're the person who is reselling it so it's like an asset afterward or how does it work yeah we get to royalties uh from the after market so with like successful nft yeah so that's that's a good thing and like um with the uh with successful nft projects actually most most of the revenue over the long run comes from royalties not the not the primary sale sorry i'm just keep like throwing so many questions because this is like yeah that's interesting um who are your competitors yeah like is facebook and it's not like a facebook is meta your competitor

nowadays or like yeah like what what is the market looking like yes i mean meta definitely is a competitor and they're building an outer system you know with a similar kind of value proposition to ours but it's stuck in their own ecosystem and you know meta is not a very attractive brand for developers you're calling facebook not sexy oh wow [Laughter] so uh yeah but then they're building closed outer systems so like our goal is to be open connect different parts of the ecosystem uh snap is kind of similar you know you need to have a bitmoji already and then you can redeem it in apps with your login which stamp um yeah what does that say did meta come to you and be like tim well like what are we doing here like come on dude join the pretty much yeah join the death star like let's go dude yeah they're

no offense towards meta like or facebook like yeah i i really like we're just joking guys anyways um so this this concept that you actually said they are building their own metaverse and we're more for the open metaverse interesting how do you see this this evolving like is there gonna be the rebel alliance of not of metaver like like one metaverse that is not in any metaverse and then there's the the amazon metaverse the google metaverse the facebook the ten cent metaverse like like how does how is it gonna go yeah i mean i think the only way we can actually get like a fully open metaverse um is like if it goes beyond just being a philosophical thing and being a practical business decision you know and and like it's not sure exactly how that's going to like what are the business models that need to be created and how is it that going to work but ultimately if we want to the big

companies to not try to own the metaverse and to take part and like kind of open it up it needs to be a good business decision position for them and i think um you know over the next few years we'll see from the from the poc of the upper metaverse which is kind of the first crypto crypto worlds and and and like this kind of web 3 world which is naturally more open i hope the plc of that part of the metaverse shows to the rest of the world that this is at least something to experiment with or something to like too because it's just a better business it has to be a better user experience obviously and it has to be it just has to be a better system basically um say the plc of that metaverse a poc so like a proof of concept of oh god i got it i just just made sure that i understand everything got it yeah okay yeah okay um how about how about the recent crash in

not like crap i i don't look at crypto prices every day i do have some but you know that would be like they go so much in every direction that i don't want to even open up the app let's be honest so um yeah like i have no idea what what the numbers are today but um or yesterday or even last week but um but in terms of like uh my perception is that the values have been going down quite significantly with interest rates going up and and you know that that causes a lot of a lot of people who are putting in assets into crypto just because the uh the interest rates were so low and you were kind of looking for high risk investments so now they're pulling their money out putting it to berkshire hathaway or all the other other you know kind of like uh gold and you name it does that affect the prices and how does that affect your business on a short term yeah i mean um actually when each price goes down um nft activity goes up

um so yeah so like when heath goes up quickly then people don't want to like um trade nfts because that they're like afraid to lose their ease which becomes more valuable every day basically so worse is like when ether goes down then actually there's a lot of nfd activity so like a flat market is best for us so like a slightly i know that's like that that's that's probably like best for for nfts whenever the price fluctuates it definitely like affects the market activity but yeah it's kind of vice versa sorry and if it goes up nft activity goes down and and vice versa which is like kind of not intuitive maybe uh but um well it is in a sense intuitive because to my understanding the people who are buying most nfts are those who have a lot of cryptocurrencies so essentially when the uh when the value of cryptocurrency goes down in terms of fiat they consider that

now it's a cheaper price to invest it into nfts and and since they already have a lot of cryptocurrency that means that they are crypto believers you know they see the future so they that's that's the point where they make most of their investments because they consider that that it's a sale on nfd assets that will be more valuable in the uh in the future yeah that's right um that's true and so like you actually the activity has gone up a lot over the last like month um or like uh three weeks or whatever the you know the the the correction was but it's actually gone up quite quite a bit since the since the like uh crash um i think it was like 1900 at the bottom now it's like 3 000 three point two k dollars if uh but you know those things are not something that we uh put a lot of um energy into like you can't do anything about it no and like as an as an investor in cryptocurrency um i'm better off just like ignoring all that stuff and just like

just like the comment section of this podcast yeah i treated this yeah yeah okay so so uh tell me a little bit about about your company so you started off you were 20 got the 20 20 strong uh in estonia probably in thailand um yeah great city for for um for startups i think the taxation is a very very strong uh strong strong poll but um so you started there um how do you how's your company looking now and what is your kind of like a short term goal meaning like inside a year and what is your i i probably impossible to say long term but what is like a midterm like i'm talking about like a three year goal yeah totally yeah i mean like we yeah we've been around for a while now we don't close the series a in the end of last year so now we've raised like 16 and a half million dollars with north soul right north

no actually i think norse made the intro but they didn't they didn't report they didn't take part of the round oh wow so so yeah okay so just the background of this so uh i got an intro from a vc uh from north zone and they did not make i kind of i thought that you're a portfolio company since they made the intro but all right no but it was yeah it was i at the time when we were speaking yeah uh but yeah so stan thompsonville and tawa tindikus um let around so co-founders of wise and and teleport and many other people involved there um samsung next co-founder github uh and why is this why is this an estonian company right uh the background is transformative right what yeah yeah why is this great one i use that yeah yeah so they're you know to the 10 billion their ipo um i think a year ago or so and now yeah they're investing um in startups and they're great great people to work with and and operators and have been super helpful so they let around

but the question was you know kind of what's the what's the goal yeah what's that and like what's your current state like how many people there are how are you organized uh how have you been working through the uh the pandemic like it's probably been really great time for for uh for anything web3 uh you know especially with the rounds but but like like tell me a little bit about like how is your company running and what does your company look like like you're now in new york you're going to l.a uh yeah life is good [Laughter] intense is good and like like what is yeah how are things and like how does it look like sure yeah absolutely so like we have 35 people at the moment or 30 37 or so and and they're located mostly around europe uh italian is the biggest location we have berlin um uh helsinki actually had one person right now but hiring more so uh at barcelona i think we're where you are at the moment or you're saying

no i'm i'm no i'm not in barcelona i'm more like in the malaga region but yes yeah relatively there nice nice and and then i my my um i've moved to new york myself because we're building a team here um and like the kind of sales and marketing team will be here because most of the customers are in the u.s um and yeah we're scaling and we're like hiring like um you know we're getting to 70 people so like doubling the team from here um and uh and that's going to be uh it is a good challenge uh so but if sir if there's anyone listening that is interested in like kind of contributing into the uh into building the open metaverse then please let me know what kind of what kind of a talent what kind of a talent you're looking for because people probably there are plenty of people listening who are really into the web 3 and then blockchain gaming and so forth so what is what is the specific talent and also i wanted to ask new york is new york like the the crypto center or is it miami like which one

because i've heard both yeah um i would say both are strong like my choice to be in new york is it's easier to get here from europe less distractions yeah there's no distractions here a nice quiet place with nothing to do yeah yeah um yeah but then uh but it's it's easy to come here it's like seven hour time difference so wake up super early have a good overlap with european teams and um you know there's a lot of crypto activity here for sure um but like we're not a crypto company we don't like yeah kind of liberal but people are trading in crypto and that's kind of like the future so that's why i mean like web 3 is the future so i was just mainly asking like because i've heard about miami it sounds kind of crazy that they will be the center of this because no offense but i don't think miami is like not the first thing that

and if i think that the crypto is out of miami like that's for sure a scam again no offense yeah this is like the first city for yeah yeah yeah good single owner lambo yeah not even owned a rent a landlord yeah it's a little bit of a different but but i've heard a lot of you know things about uh new york that there's like a more of um of like an in-depth scene there and then and yeah but but yeah so um so yeah so you're currently 35 you're scaling for 70. what are the type of a people that you're looking for yeah i mean so like many different roles um in around europe it's mostly like some more product management and product leadership um both on kind of developer tools and and consumer than you know developers from unreal to unity developers to full stack developers um and like technical artists just character artists and then customer success

sales or like growth we're looking for a marketing kind of a leader as well and in the u.s like more enterprise sales more kind of licensing focus brand brand focused sales and business development so pretty much like everything you can imagine i guess one thing that you mentioned with these with these brands is that like because i've seen some reports that are saying that the brands are the sort of futures of nfts and then we've actually had the discussions on the podcast with some of the people who are very much into uh blockchain gaming like 100 you know crypto maniacs they don't think that brands is really the way to go it's it's like they they think about other things what is why why are you working with brands like is there like is it just they give a good pr for sure uh but are there other reasons yeah i mean like bro generally so far our our work with brands have been very inbound driven so

we we basically if there's a brand comes in has an idea that we can't say no to that it's like easy to execute then we do it because we don't have anyone that actually works on with brands at the moment yeah yeah so it's very much true but driven by that but i think long term like the the early crypto nfc community right now is like you know brand just doing a crash grab you know yuck yes it's like when we got by that yeah but i think yeah i think like long-term uh people are going to use the metaverse and people like brands you know like people buy brands they're like those real world brands have built their brands over you know hundreds of years in some cases and i think they realize that they have an opportunity to also like take part of the virtual world and have a um and you know play a role there and then like it makes sense that if you're a player of a game or a user of the metaverse you know you're going to buy metaverse native brands as well but you're going to also buy real web brands like it's

just i think it's it's hard to see how that's not going to happen okay i i get your point um i've asked a lot of questions yeah what have i haven't asked that i should be asking yeah i mean i guess like the the question might i didn't answer the fully the question about like kind of the plans for the future and then oh yeah yeah yeah yeah because i just keep firing so many questions when you go for like okay what do you mean by this what do you mean by that i'm just very interested in all of this but but yeah like you're you're um so you're scared let's say you scale up to double your company size from the current 35 to about 70 during 2022. uh what happens in the next couple of years like market's going to crash then it's going to bounce back uh how's ready player me looking in three years yeah it's always i mean our main goal is always to get better and higher quality developers on board using our outer system because that's kind of

what we live and die by basically so like that's always going to be the most important thing for us so we're always building better tools um better you know more better better better system basically for developers to adopt it so that's going to be the most important thing and and also to achieve that um you know we're now this year we're going from being this kind of time saver tool mostly for for for developers to becoming a monetization tool so integrate very for me comes away you actually make money uh with the game and that helps us to you know sign with with bigger companies and it helps us um make this you know make the proposition more attractive basically um and now we're you know scaling to from now 1400 developers to to a lot more but it's also the quality of the companies and games is you know as important or more important than the volume um but obviously if you have open platform that anyone can use

then then it's like it drives a lot of um activity but it also drives a lot of innovation new types of use cases you know we want to be in the next fortnight or in the next kind of a big game uh from the ground up and grow with them and and um and that's that's the plan you could but can you create your own metaverse in the sense but if you're in 1600 developers and in three years you're in into 5 000 developers and invested like you essentially have your own metaverse because everybody's using your avatar system yeah so we never want to like compete with any game or like you know we don't want developers to feel uh that we are trying to you know mine users from them and like put them into our own world and then somehow another way across the world to different different games yeah yeah so it needs to be like um yeah it needs to be turned by the user like cross game music and so forth but um and like yeah we don't we don't want to

compete we just want to be a neutral platform that just enables the outer layer and of course there's other things you can add to the avatar like um other metadata you can get from games that you can transfer along you know assets you own of course um you know a wallet you can pay with potentially there's a lot of things that you can add to the avatar we just believe the visual representation is of the auditor is like at the center of our metaverse experience and if we can somehow provide that then that's kind of like going to be strong and um another thing is like we're exploring with allowing outers to come out of games and go to other games so we take a fortnight out out of fortnite and we are the rails that make that outer travel to other games and apps as well or have a limited set of fortnite skins that you can wear and very premium outers that then become usable in other places as well so like that's also kind of part of the vision is to be like rails for routers and not just um you know an amateur system ourselves

so you're not you're planning to also create like a hub where all these avatars can come um you know mingle and then go to other apps from your hub you're not planning any like that yeah i mean the hub if it's natural to have something like that then yes but it just came to mind because there's another new york startup uh i think it's called bunch yeah it's called bunch yep um and dave and it was just recently uh the sort of a hub that they've been working on for a year so i was kind of thinking about okay well they've had the social system of again being integrated and allowing people to be together and play games together and they're more like a discovery platform so they put in now a more of a visual element for the discovery with avatars etc so yeah anything like that potentially in the future could be could be yeah uh we're open to all kinds of directions and we'll learn and we'll you know build those things what we were

like yeah what would be living is that it's incredibly hard to build this yeah cross game outers um and like we have you know more than a thousand developers our dev our competitors come by now about three so we like need to make sure that this continues to be in the same same ratio uh and then there's other things you can build on on top of that and the main thing is like everybody needs to benefit from from this existing right otherwise it won't exist long term super exciting uh i took one hour of your time uh i think a lot of people learned a lot of things about ready player me there's links in the description again for the uh the the uh crypto punks campaign that you have running uh your web page is there a career page that that or how do you want people to connect with you those who are interested in joining ready player me yeah uh it's on on the web page there's a career but we don't have all the roles listed yet so if you don't find anything from there just hit us up okay how do

they hit you up like what kind of a link that's a good question i'm all about like the funnel optimization yeah thank you thank you for that no drop off so yeah my own email is teemu that's okay the old name so we'll cut the email from here so that people don't email you too much yeah so that's a good point so that will be bleeped out bleeped out or cut off so uh no your email is not being shared that's good that's like i didn't i don't know how i didn't think about it yeah yeah there's gonna be more listeners than just a handful on this one so yeah let's not let's not give the email away yeah i haven't enough unanswered emails exactly that's what i thought um it was a it was a pleasure um and um and i'm sure everybody listening uh as as um has even more questions and they will be getting uh connected to you and your company and

um excited to hear back from you in about a year and and hear how how the scale up has gone and what uh what are the next steps yes thank you so much for having me it was really fun and um yeah uh let's catch up in a year let's catch up in real life earlier but but yeah yeah without avatars in miami yes okay thank you everybody for listening and we are out thanks