Startup Battlefield Competition: Session 1 – Teeoh

Are you Thank you for coming appreciate it Why are you Here People come to events for two reasons To learn from great content And to socialize with people But TechCrunch has 10 million readers And there's only 5 000 people here where Are the other 900 000 people Well they could live stream In which case people can learn from Great content But they can't socialize They can host a webinar People can learn from great content but They can't socialize or maybe even a Reddit AMA people can learn from great Content But they can't socialize The world is missing a product That gives the two benefits of why we Are all here at this event Online Enter to a platform for virtual events You appear inside of a venue This is my avatar that I customized as You can see I have blue hair You appear inside of that venue with Hundreds of other people just like us Here today All of these people are actually Controlled by someone in real life You can move around and actually talk to

People Just like you're going to plan on doing Today And now I'm going to show you what it Feels like to be on the virtual Tech Crunch disrupt stage Pretty nerve-wracking And right here you'll see we'll get some Audience love Perfect We've been working with some great Communities companies like startup Grinds they have 2 million entrepreneurs Across 600 cities And no way to bring them together into The same room With Teo now they can We've been working with esteemed people Like Tim Draper To host his virtual alumni reunions for Draper University Those alumni span across 50 countries And he has no way to bring them into the Same room With Teo now they can We've hosted so many cool events we've Had live podcasts hosted in our event Platforms we've had events about mental Health in the workplace where people Appear and talk about the issues that They're dealing with This is a really important thing for us To do What's really really unique is that

People are staying inside of our app Sometimes for three four hours It's very similar to a real event As you can see here the event starts at 7 pm And just like a real event people start To filter in around six o'clock The panel begins at seven It lasts until 8 pm And then for the next few hours people Actually socialize Moving around and talking to real people That might not even be in the same Country where you live Creating connections that you could Never create otherwise What's great about virtual events is That there's already a massive Market Offline 62 billion dollars are spent on Event sponsorship alone and that doesn't Include tickets The way that we make money as a company Is by charging organizations a monthly Fee to have access to our venues And then we also take a percentage of Ticket sales And virtual sponsorship If you're interested to host an event With us if you are currently hosting Webinars if you're currently hosting Real events Go to this address apply to be on our Next batch of communities that we work With and we would love to help connect

Your community Ah your distributed community Thank you very much for your time Looking forward to questions Judges [Applause] So how's this different from you know Second life and some of the previous uh Incarnations of VR Um and you know if it's if it's the fact That it's for conferences specifically What is your moat what is unique about The fact that you're doing it yeah so Second Life in 2007 had its Heyday Um there was actually a big Trend back In 2007 around virtual events The unique difference is a few things One the mobile phone so second life was Not able to scale to the mobile phone we Have a good percentage of our attendees That obviously join from their mobile Device There's also a lot of things that have Changed from a technical perspective Things like Unity so you you before Couldn't spin up a company like this for A fairly Capital efficient manner There's things like improbable uh you Know they help enable Virtual Worlds and So there's a lot happening on that Ecosystem what differentiates us from Other platforms out there is that we do All of our spatialization in the cloud And my CTO and co-founder John can talk

About essentially how we're doing that By sending one up and multiple down yeah Essentially rather than sending up one Stream and hundreds down we would do all The spatialization in the cloud so we Know which way the faces are looking we Know whereabouts they are in the in the Virtual space and that way we're able to Scale Beyond typical limits so sort of 250 upwards uh our objective really is Unlimited scale uh to do 125 000 Arenas Because of that technology because You're not limited by the physical Horsepower of the client machines it's All done remotely yeah so because we Spatialize in the cloud we can scale to Numbers like 250 000 people in a virtual Event what we're doing as a company is Setting that as our one of our Milestones because it's a tech mode it's Not necessarily a community motor the Fact that people are signed up to the Platform it's it's the fact that nobody Else can can do it uh at scale like you Can yeah it's one of the reasons I think You know every great company has Little moats as well so I come from a Background of event hosting Um and community building so I Definitely relate to the people that I'm You know pitching with Um and obviously John comes from a Background of VR avatars he spent you Know 20 years in gaming so the two of us

Together virtual and Community are a Nice fit Awesome I think this is a great thing For the planet right and I think virtual Conferences are coming there's no doubt About it and it's also thank you from What I understand an extremely lucrative Business model for you guys But I still have a question around the Scalability of I think I've tried to Figure out how many users you had per Stream and it's not that many so how can You scale the user the user base is that Your responsibility or a company like Startup grind because you need to get This out at Mass scale right so we we Think of our partners Um as the external brand Not so much Us in the sense that startup Grinds trusted by 2 million Entrepreneurs right and so when they Send out a newsletter with a link to Join one of their virtual teos then People already trust their brand we've Been doing controlled tests with the Community so far so startup grind Um they have an accelerate program Internally out of the two million people That's about 40 of their top Entrepreneurs that's who we've been Working with they actually have their Next event tonight and that's another Great thing about what we've done we've Seen people repeatedly come back and

Host more events so one of the Organizations has now hosted over the Last six weeks probably an event a week Start of grind has their next event Tonight and we're seeing that pattern Across all of the communities we're Working with What's your Insight in terms of Facilitating a virtual event with Avatars versus video a video based event It's a key question So social anxiety is real People hate to stand on stage and talk People are very anxious when they go Into a room full of people they don't Know and it's even weirder when you're Video chatting with somebody that you Don't know and that's randomized there Are platforms that exist that are out There right now I've tried them I'm a Fairly social person and I get awkwarded Out when a random person appears in Front of me and all of a sudden I'm Looking into their kitchen so avatars Lower the social anxiety and it also Allows because there's less social Anxiety for events like mental health in The workplace where people are coming And telling us about real things that Are really hard to talk about in person So avatars versus video we lower social Anxiety Do people need some specialized Hardware To use it is that an impediment any

Device anywhere so it works on mobile Phone computer uh web and also VR Headsets but focusing on the mobile Device for now okay awesome Um I'll come back to my favorite ask Question what's your biggest struggle What do you need the most right now say That again please what do you need the Most what's your ask uh We want access to really large event Organizations that are interested to be Forward Thinking and push the envelope Here that is the most important thing to Us I know a lot of companies are raising We have great investors from San Francisco like General Catalyst and Other people along those lines Um so what we're really hoping for are Access to the top event companies in the World All right give it up for Tio thank you So much thank you [Applause]