Relentlessly pushing the boundaries of blockchain and VR technology in the metaverse, Hrish Lotlikar, Co-founder and CEO of Super World, is helping to create a more immersive and interactive future for the internet.
In 2021, the New York Times quoted Hrish in its ‘virtual land boom’ story amid the surge in virtual real estate investment. I recently sat down with him for an interview about virtual real estate and Super World.
Can you please tell us more about your background and about the founding of Super World?
My background has kind of taken me through a variety of different areas of specialty. I started off in management consulting, then moved into investment banking. I was at UBS Investment Bank and HSBC in New York and started off in real estate, investment banking in physical real estate.
I didn't know at the time, I would one day go into virtual real estate, but life's funny that way. The strong backgrounds got me into venture capital investing across tech and biotech. And then about fourteen years ago, I had this idea that wouldn't it be cool to go somewhere in the emerging markets and start a venture capital fund? I got on a plane, I didn't know anyone, and I went over to Eastern Europe.
I went to Ukraine, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Moldova. I ended up with two partners and started a venture capital fund based in Ukraine, backed by an investor named Victor Pinchuk, who's a very big investor in that part of the world.
We started an early-stage fund called Eastlabs where we invested in about 25 companies in the region. We were the first investor into preply.com, which is an online tutoring marketplace, which is one of the biggest and I think the biggest online tutoring marketplace in the world.
They just completed their Series C last week and then did the same thing in Belarus. So I'm on the board of Tech Minsk, which is backed by the US State Department and Google. The company that Facebook acquired that does all of the face filters for Instagram and Facebook is a company called MSQRD, Masquerade. They went through Tech Minsk and got acquired by Facebook.
I had early exposure to augmented reality through that. And then after that I was an early employee at Top Towel, which is a talent marketplace backed by Andreessen Horowitz. So I helped grow and scale Top Towel and I learned a lot.
Prior to Super World, I started Rogue Initiative Studios, which is a film, television, gaming, and virtual reality studio in Los Angeles and Hollywood. My co-founder had produced Call of Duty Modern Warfare series and Ghosts, and my production partner is Michael Bay, the action director.
And at Rogue Initiative, what we're focused on is building franchises from the ground up. What I learned there was that a Michael Bay movie and a Call of Duty game are really the same thing. They're built in an engine, Unreal Engine or Unity Engine.
I learnt that one can build anything in an engine. And what happened was about six years ago, Pokémon Go came out, became this huge hit, people running around looking at Pokémon around the world. Then I got together with my cofounder Max Woon. Max and I met because we had worked together previously at a company on the YouTube platform.
When we saw Pokémon Go, we thought if we can't build the next Pokémon Go, we could build a world where the next thousand Pokémon get built onto it. In other words, how could we enable anyone to have the tools to create, discover and monetize anything in real world locations?
What is your vision for Super World?
As I mentioned, we were really inspired by what we saw Pokémon Go do and as you know the company Niantic continues to do tremendously well and are really innovating the space. We thought the opportunity to enable users to create, discover and monetize content in real world locations is very interesting.
If we could give people the tools, you know, to create anything, anywhere, to discover anything from anywhere and to monetize in all different ways. And so that was the vision of Super World. Well, the way I describe it is I use three analogies, and I'll walk you through that.
https://youtu.be/31JfjxEiJ4w?embedable=true
So the first analogy is Pokémon Go. It's an analogy for adding digital information to the real world, right? I have a world. You have a world. Brands have worlds. So anyone can, you know again, create and discover and monetize any type of content anywhere: 3-D,2D, audio; you can put AR VR, MR, any type of content anywhere. I have a world,you have a world.
The second analogy is Foursquare. It's a data analogy. On the data side, our vision is that we want to build what I call live to earn, which is how we can bring tokenization into your real life. How can I incentivize you to do the things in your life that you love?
You know, can I get Nike to incentivize you to run a marathon or can I get Bacardi to incentivize you to go and activate something at their next event? In other words, how can I bring tokenization into your real life? This isn't play to earn. This is what I call live to earn. So the things that are related to things that you love to do in the real world, right?
And then have you ever seen that movie Social Dilemma on Netflix? It is a great documentary. I highly recommend you watch it. It's all about how we're living in these algorithmic bubbles. It's about how we're all staring at our phones more and more.
If you look at your phone fifty times a day, like four years ago, now you might look at it two hundred times a day. It is about how kids and adults alike are plugged into video games or obsessed with social media.
A really big part of our vision at Super World is how we can build a virtual world that actually enhances your real life, your physical life. We want to keep you in the physical world and we want to use these technologies to enhance your physical life.
As I always say, I have two kids, and the last thing I want to do is build a virtual world that sucks them into it. How do we build a virtual world that keeps you going outside? Although you can go as virtual as you want, the idea is how to get you out there doing things in the real world. The other part of it is to build a decentralized world together that actually enhances humanity. We partnered with the World Bank and the Caribbean.
As you know, we have tribes in the Amazon jungle that created digital art so that people could learn about deforestation that's happening in the Amazon jungle. The idea is can we build a virtual world with the goal of really solving these SDG problems and issues and be able to kind of work together to do something very positive. The third analogy explains the real estate part of what we do.
What we have done is we have divided the surface of the earth into 64 billion virtual plots of land 100 meters by 100-meter point, 01.01 longitude, latitude. You can buy any location in the world as a digital asset and when you buy those locations again you are a stakeholder.
There you can activate monetization from your actions. You can create, discover and activate ways to monetize in all those locations and also you can you know activate monetization from other activity that's also happening there in those locations.
Speaking of virtual reality, what is virtual real estate all about?
Virtual real estate, as I explained in the third analogy, is what we've done. We have divided the surface of the earth into 64 billion virtual plots of land, 100 meters by 100-meter point, 01.01 longitude latitude covering Earth. And so again each one of those is a digital asset. It's on Polygon currently priced at about 100 Matic.
When you buy those plots, as I mentioned, you can activate monetization from advertising, e-commerce, digital commerce, data analytics, gaming, and DeFi in those locations and you can become a stakeholder in SuperWorld and at those locations and so that's how we define it.
As you know, I think virtual real estate in general is a pretty nebulous term.
It can mean different things. For us It's about the places you care about places maybe you have a business, places you want to go on vacation, and places in the world you love.
How does virtual real estate and physical real estate connect in SuperWorld?
So virtual real estate in SuperWorld covers the earth. We have a virtual layer on top of the real world, right? And within that layer, you know, there's an infinite number of filters. So anyone you know can create a world. I have a world, you have a world, brands can create worlds.
And so this content, whether it's 3-D, 2D audio, any type of content can be placed in real world locations. And you know, one of the beauties of this is when we talked to many of our customers and we asked them why did you buy, you know, this city or New York City or London or Paris or whatever city in the world that they have bought.
One of the things that we understand is a reason a lot of people buy virtual real estate is they actually own physical real estate.
In those locations, they own a residence or they own a store or they own a mall or they own some kind of commercial real estate, some kind of physical property, and when we talk to them about what they want to do many of them tell us they want to build digital twin.
So they want to enable the visualization of their of their physical real estate, they want to build, you know, a way for customers to see and rent or buy the physical real estate they have.
Moreover, they want to create a way for their potential customers to see their store or to walk into their store and experience their store in a way that's virtual and that enables their customers regardless of where they are in the world to really experience their products or to maybe purchase buy from them.
If they own a gallery, they may want them to see the artwork that they have in there. What we have enabled in SuperWorld is for our customers, whether they own virtual real estate or not, if they have physical real estate in real world locations, they can come to SuperWorld and build digital twins and those digital twins enable those customers to click and see those properties and so it connects the physical and the virtual.
Judging by the virtual land boom of 2021, why is virtual real estate an exciting opportunity?
When I am talking about virtual real estate, you know, I am specifically talking about virtual real estate in SuperWorld, and you know I think the reason that it's a very exciting opportunity is because virtual real estate and super world covers real world locations and so it enables you to again become a stakeholder in places in the world that you love.
Ultimately, SuperWorld is a community of people that want to use these technologies: immersive tech, Web three, and AI to enhance their life, and maybe to market themselves and their business.
And so, virtual real estate enables them to own those locations that they care about and become a stakeholder in those locations. I think one way to think about it is we think about media assets. It's like owning a geospatial media asset covering the surface of the earth.
My cofounder and I both work together on the YouTube platform and you know a YouTube video is a media asset. When you think of virtual real estate, the best way I'd kind of put that opportunity is like owning a geospatial media asset that covers the earth that you can benefit from and essentially enables you to have this kind of connection to a real world location.
Whether it's for digital commerce, e-commerce, advertising, or decentralized finance, there's still a lot of different use cases that are evolving. As you know, spatial computing evolves as generative AI evolves, and as Web 3 evolves, I think there's going to be a tremendous opportunity from what we are building.
I would like you to explain the technology that Super World virtual real estate is built upon.
We have built a virtual real estate platform covering Earth. As I mentioned, we're built on Polygon, which is a layer 2 blockchain technology protocol. It's, you know, practically gasless. So it has very low gas fee and very fast transaction speed.
But the idea is we're building on technologies like Mapbox, Google Maps, Apple AR kit, and Google AR core. We can build on Oculus and the type of content that you can add into Super World are 3D, 2D, audio MP4 files, Jpegs, and GLB files, which are 3D files, and the point of that is you can create any type of experience because the technologies that we've built on are cross-platform.
You can literally build almost anything. The opportunities are limitless. I started the story by telling you that when you build in an engine anything is possible and that's to point you to the fact that what we're enabling on the virtual real estate is this cross-platform utilization of technologies that's very agnostic.
As we continue to build and as we continue to add integrations, we want to give users the possibilities to create and monetize and discover all kinds of content around the world.
I see a slew of technologies. How does virtual real estate intersect with other emerging technologies in SuperWorld? How do you combine them?
I think our vision has been very agnostic on the tech side. So we have kind of brought together a variety of different technologies. As you know, there's an infinite number of filters on the world that can be created.
We have launched a partnership with Sports Illustrated where we added 250,000 events onto the platform and that includes event ticketing, NFT marketing. So just to give you an example that I think will blow your mind.
If you come to Super World and you buy tickets to the Yankees game in New York, but you've bought the virtual real estate encompassing the area where Yankee Stadium is. Well, you're a stakeholder in that location and you're going to be able to monetize ticket sales from events that happen there or events that you are creating anywhere around the world, live or virtual.
Ticketing and events is a kind of a platform idea, but the other thing is, we will expand that with real world assets. So that goes into digital twins and being able to build visualizations of real world properties.
As I mentioned, the opportunity to connect the physical and the virtual is huge and as we continue to evolve, there's going to be more opportunities to bring in other technologies for communication, for monetization, for digital asset, etc.
What do your users do on Super World?
I think there's a lot of people that are very interested in these technologies, AR, VR, Blockchain, Web 3, NFT, etc. A lot of people are interested in these terms. They are interested in figuring out how they can use these technologies to improve their business or things in their personal life.
But when they come to Super World, they might not completely understand all of those concepts just yet, but they understand where they live, where they have a business, where they, you know, want to go on vacation and they come to super world and they buy those locations.
And now they become a stakeholder in the locations and the next thing they want to do is to create NFTS. They ask me how to create NFTs, how to get into AR, VR, and how to get into DeFi.
The first thing you can do as a user is you can add content anywhere in real world locations, 3D content, 2D content, photos, videos, GLB files, AR content BR content digital twins, and there is the opportunity to add any content anywhere and individualize that content from anywhere.
I could be in New York City and I could look at a digital twin that's located in Miami and zoom in on that in a 3D environment or pull it up in augmented reality on my phone.
The second thing that we're enabling is ticketing and live and virtual event creation and ticketing sales. So at a live event, you can place that live event wherever the event is in the real world and you can sell tickets for that event, NFT ticketing or traditional ticketing.
And then as your attendees go to that event, they could leave content at the live location which people can view from anywhere in the world: 360 photos, 360 videos, traditional photo or video GLB files and so you can bring events and content creation, user-generated content together.
I could sell an NFT at an event that you are throwing and if you know you own the virtual real estate there you monetize on the NFT that I sell as well. You'll have your own map of the world where you can add content, you can, you know, discover content from other worlds and bring those into your world. There's a lot of cross-functionality between worlds that's coming very soon.
What piece of advice do you have for other entrepreneurs out there who would like to follow in your footsteps?
I always say that it's really important to take that first step. Find your passion, find a problem that you want to solve and that you're excited about. It can be something that you have some really strong first-hand experience with and then take that first step, whether it's a first step of learning about how to approach it or the first step of moving towards that goal.
Entrepreneurship is a long journey. And it's a journey that you have to be really excited about every single day and so you know first and foremost is figure out what your why is figure out like what really gets you excited and motivated about something and then every day remember what is that why and keep going towards the goal. It's a a real journey and it's something that you should really enjoy every step of the way.