Have you ever wondered how a love for puppet shows and theatre could evolve into pioneering innovation for Kiwis in Virtual and Augmented Reality.
As this podcast goes to air the team at Beyond are readying to release their game Runaways for the new Apple Vision Pro.
Join us as Jessica Manins, co-CEO and co-founder of Beyond, takes us through her story from childhood passions to leading innovation in virtual worlds.
In the last couple of years Beyond have created stand out successes like Combonauts and Fluf World alongside the Futureverse team.
Venturing into the startup world can feel labyrinthine, yet, Jess and her cofounder chartered the world of imaginary digital worlds and in this episode she shares the peaks and valleys of their journey, from hustling like a pro to shaking off the inevitable imposter syndrome and building their dreams into reality.
You can connect with Jess here and check out the amazing work from Beyond.
Have you ever wondered how a love for puppet shows and theatre could evolve into pioneering innovation for Kiwis in Virtual and Augmented Reality.
As this podcast goes to air the team at Beyond are readying to release their game Runaways for the new Apple Vision Pro.
Join us as Jessica Manins, co-CEO and co-founder of Beyond, takes us through her story from childhood passions to leading innovation in virtual worlds.
In the last couple of years Beyond have created stand out successes like Combonauts and Fluf World alongside the Futureverse team.
Venturing into the startup world can feel labyrinthine, yet, Jess and her cofounder chartered the world of imaginary digital worlds and in this episode she shares the peaks and valleys of their journey, from hustling like a pro to shaking off the inevitable imposter syndrome and building their dreams into reality.
You can connect with Jess here and check out the amazing work from Beyond.
Kindness for me in business, you know, is really important, because I didn't realise how many people aren't kind. And you know you get told this oh, you have to be ruthless, that's who wins. And I just thought that surely that's not true. Surely we can be good people.
Speaker 2:Jess Mannins. She is the co-CEO and co-founder of Beyond, and Beyond are all about the creators of virtual worlds.
Speaker 1:You've got to be brave and bold, you've got to try things and not be afraid of that failure and experimenting. If you want to do something, just do it, you know, because otherwise you're going to have regrets in life. And it's not to say you're going to make a unicorn or whatever, but if there's something you're interested in and you're passionate about it, just be brave and just do it and make it happen.
Speaker 2:I know you will be a source of inspiration for a lot of other people that are thinking about getting involved in digital creativity. Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. Welcome to my podcast, where you will hear from a range of guests, including those from the startup world and those that have had incredibly interesting lives and some stories to tell. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the follow button and share this amongst your friends, but, as you know, time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest. I want to tell you a little bit about desk work.
Speaker 2:Desk work is your offshoring option. If you want to save around 50% of your total headcount cost for equivalent talent across accounting, marketing, sales, your operations or your admin, then check out desk work. Honestly, if I was looking to start an accounting firm again, it would be a no-brainer for me to use Deskwork. I've used offshoring teams before in the past. I got past my skepticism on being able to do it and it was so phenomenally successful. Go have a look at desk-workco backslash, greg, and book yourself a free discovery call to learn more about it. Better still, mention my name and get yourself some discounts. Check it out. Now back to the show. My guest today is Jess Mannins. Jess, a super, super impressive individual. She is the co-CEO and co-founder of Beyond, and Beyond are all about the creators of virtual worlds. Jess, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Kia ora. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:It is so cool to have you. This is one of these sort of conversations where I feel like I'm so naturally intrigued to learn more about the world of virtual creation and this world of VR and AR, et cetera. I'm naturally curious, but I feel like I really know very little about it, so it'll be just from my own personal point of view. It'll be really interesting to kind of learn about that. But I always love to start these podcasts with a bit of an origin story about you. Now, I know you spent a bit of time in theatre, but just take us through your childhood and how you got to be where you are now. Were you always a kid who was destined to be in this world of creative design?
Speaker 1:Definitely in creative industries. Yes, from a very small age I was that kid that was forcing her parents to sit on the couch while I was behind it doing puppet shows. So entertaining is in my blood and is something that I've always loved doing. And, yeah, theatre was my passion Theatre and then film naturally progressed into that. I actually studied television production and ended up doing kind of a range of things in front of and behind the scenes, worked over at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, kind of did that run as an actor, and then ended up getting into technology and just and finding a passion for technology. And I think that's naturally where the world of what I do now VR and AR collided with my world of entertainment and passion for, you know, bringing joy and fun into people's world, which is what I always did, yeah. So, yeah, as a kid, definitely all of that, and then improvising you know, all of that I did it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Puppet shows. I think that's actually quite funny because essentially, you're just building digital puppet shows and digital creation. I think that's super cool. And before we sort of get into the origin story around Beyond and by the way, I love the domain name you guys have got the beyondfun. I just think that's so cool.
Speaker 1:It's such a good domain name. We get through so many domains. You know, when you're trying to choose one, of course com is domain. You know, when you're trying to choose one, of course dot com is gone. Yeah. And then we're like, what about?
Speaker 2:dot fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's really the only thing is, everyone then thinks our company name is beyond dot fun, which it's not.
Speaker 2:It's beyond yeah, but it's still given that fun is a massive part of what you do. I think it's really really cool. It is so what I'd love you to do. Before we sort of talk a bit about the origin of beyond, how you and Anton got started, I'm keen just to have you paint a little bit of a picture of. You know, there'll be a bunch of people who are listening to this who don't know what AR or VR or XR or MR and they don't really know what those things are. They may be broadly aware that there's some what people wandering around with some weird things on their eyes. They know they've heard about gaming. I'd love you to just sort of paint a little bit of a picture of what augmented reality, virtual reality, et cetera, is all about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so virtual reality is one which takes you into a completely new virtual world, you know. And so, if you think about it, when you put the headset on when there's so many different types of VR headsets it completely immerses you in another environment, whether that is a 3D created world, animated you could be on the moon, whatever you could be at a game, but in its 360. So, you know, if you're looking around, you can see that full world or augmented reality is where you can still see your real world. But then there is digital objects or games overlaid within that real environment, and so I could be here and I'm in my lounge, and then I can also, with my headset on or through my phone, see fun little animated things happening, you know, through that. And then there's so many other words right now, like spatial computing, spatial gaming, mr, xr. They often just encompass all of that, but those are the kind of the two key ones.
Speaker 2:And so it's a really nice sort of way of kind of leading into the origin story around Beyond. So, from my understanding, you got started what seven years ago, but in 2017, how did that all play out?
Speaker 1:I was actually working at the Biz Dojo when I had my first kind of VR experience, which was with a Wellington company, 8i, and we were putting on a showcase and I put on a headset then for the first time and saw their content and naturally was just blown away Because it really the first time you ever try VR. It is hard to explain, but it is amazing. It's nothing like you've ever, you know, could imagine. And so I learned about it and I was like this is so cool, look at the possibilities. You know it's been around for a long time but it was just starting. That quality of the content was starting to grow. You know the quality of the headsets and what they were capable of doing.
Speaker 1:And then also Pokemon Go came out and, as cliche as it is, you know, I had to go and I was like this is so cool, wow, I'm looking at my phone and all of these little fun characters and I'm playing a game and I could really see the potential.
Speaker 1:And so I ended up opening a research and development centre in Taranaki Street called Projector, and the aim of that was kind of to bring people together from both university, you know, for professionals, corporate, and give people opportunity to try new gear. So, you know, for professionals, corporate and give people an opportunity to try new gear. So, you know, have all the headsets there, collaborate on projects and just try and grow the industry as a whole and create a bit of an ecosystem. And so that's how I got started and how I met Anton, who was also, in those early stages, excited about AR and he was making a multiplayer AR game on the Google Tango back then. You know hardware that no longer even exists. And then, of course, I ended up being like oh, you know what my passion is, to actually make the content is to try and dive into this and see if I can come back to my creative roots and do it. So yeah, that's the origin story.
Speaker 2:Was it confronting doing that in a world that was fully digital and I would imagine you needed to have some element of development skill, or was that not really? It just didn't really get in your way.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that is a challenge when you're not a technical person, you know, and you can't develop yourself. And yeah, now my team. Of course, I work with very highly skilled engineers and 3D artists, you know, so both sides of it highly technical and very skilled in something that I can't do. But I had been working prior to doing co-working. I'd been working at a company called Star Now, which is another very awesome New Zealand success story online auditions website for the entertainment industry, and so I'd got pretty good with understanding technology and what goes into it and working with developers and working with designers. So I knew that a successful company is about having a successful and great team around you, and so it didn't really matter that I can't do it myself I have many other skills but I can find that it's fantastic people to work with me, so that didn't stop me.
Speaker 2:And so you and Anton, you're in Taranaki Street, and Taranaki Street, for those listening outside of New Zealand, is in Wellington, new Zealand, aotearoa. And so you get started. But was that sort of an easy journey getting started? Let's incorporate a company, throw in some cash, boom, we get a success, we're away. Or was it finding funding? How did that all kind of play?
Speaker 1:out. Are you kidding? When did that ever?
Speaker 2:happen Exactly. It might have been a rhetorical question, but yeah, how did that?
Speaker 1:go, I think. So Come on. No, you know, yes, we got some jobs, but it was small and scrappy and you know you're just trying as best you can to A convince people about the technology but then also make sure they're using it in the right way and not just a gimmick. But yes, we did a bunch of different kind of experiences brought William Wairoa to augmented reality for the election. You know he touhu VR, so we did photogrammetry of all of those amazing documents in our history and brought them into a VR experience. So a range of different things.
Speaker 1:And I guess doing that kind of services work enabled us to learn a lot along the way, and it was then that, you know, of course, for us we really wanted to do our own thing and have our own IP and we started to explore what the opportunities were in terms of games.
Speaker 1:And we went to an augmented world expo over in the States and we had an experience where it was a multiplayer game in VR, but you wore these backpack PCs and they had OptiTrack systems up there.
Speaker 1:You know, like all up probably $100,000 worth of hardware and we played this amazing game and it was so simple. It was just a co-op game trying to help each other get across a shark infested pond, you know, to dodge lasers and not get hit, or you had to go back to the start. And we thought, oh man, this is amazing, just doing something together in VR and seeing each other's avatar, that's just so fun. And we thought, well, there must be a way to do this without that $100,000 overhead. You know of that hardware. And it was the early days of Oculus Quest Meta now coming out, and we thought maybe we can do something using their headsets so we can eliminate having to have all of that tracking system. And it was off the back of that way back of that that we raised some capital for our first game oddball and was that so up until that time you were doing services work?
Speaker 2:had you sort of gone all in on this, or were you doing other day jobs as well?
Speaker 1:pretty much all in, except I did have this funny contract to helping to set up a tech hub in Mauritius out of Africa. Yeah, just you know as you do, because I'd had that expertise and that kind of co-working and accelerators and they were looking at doing kind of a blockchain-based kind of space over there. The government was really trying to get new skills and people into Mauritius and through a friend of a friend, I ended up helping them with their business plan. So I had a little bit of cash coming in from that while I was trying to hustle on the other side for the VR and AR stuff. But pretty much all in.
Speaker 2:And so then you raised capital. How did you do that? Did you go to Angels or did you go straight to VCs?
Speaker 1:I guess you could call it a friends and family. A friend, a very wealthy friend, who at a lunch one day said you know this VR stuff you've been talking to me about for years. I'm actually kind of keen to see it. Now, take me to your office and show me. We had a little experience and we'd actually kind of done this kind of mixed reality experience where we'd mapped the real couch with a virtual couch, you know, so they're in the same space and so you could put the headset on and you could actually sit down on the real couch and see the virtual one. And that's a very buzzy experience, you know, when you mix those two together and you can physically feel it. And he was like I'm in, I'm in, let's make something. And so not a traditional way of raising capital, but later on, yes, I did raise capital through traditional methods, like Angel HQ and a few of our local investors.
Speaker 2:And did it take some convincing of some of the local angel investors of what even is this? So your mate gets it, that's awesome, but I'm picking it as a bunch of people sitting in an angel group on their chairs going what the heck is that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, some of my investors are classic. I love them, they're so brave to have taken a chance on us. But they literally said you're an experiment, jessica, we don't know half the time what you're talking about, but we're kind of curious so we're gonna give it a go. But yes, there was a lot of education, like everything in those early days of convincing people that this is going to be in a sector, that VR gaming will be big and like anything. People like yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, and I think at the time early on at projector, we had some of the the early guys who were right into AI and you know it was a similar kind of thing eight, nine years ago where people were kind of like, oh yeah, you weird techie people off in the corner. Now everyone's like, ah, ai, ah VR.
Speaker 2:Did you ever have moments of self-doubt through that process? You're a confident person, you're an actress, you've had a background in theatre, you've done puppet shows right, so you're confident in presenting something. But there must have been times where you were like, oh man, this is hard.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. So many times. I mean, imposter syndrome is a real thing. And when you're learning a new skill and a new technology and you have to kind of be the expert, when you're not an expert and you're still learning and I never claim to be an expert there's times where you think, oh, I'm a fraud, should I even be doing this? Have I got the right skills to do this? And especially when I moved into gaming because I didn't have the gaming credentials.
Speaker 1:You know, I might have come from a creative background. I'm very good at producing, I have a creative eye, I understand entertainment, I'm passionate about customers and players and what they get out of it. I always focus on that first. But I felt a little bit of a fraud when I got into gaming, cause, you know, here are these people who, it's like I'm a hardcore gamer, and what game do you play, you know? And I'm like I used to like Monkey Island, you know. So, yes, absolutely. But over the years that confidence has grown massively. And when you have some successes, along with many failures which I definitely have had, of course then your confidence grows more because you realise I can do this. And when you surround yourself with talented people, together you can do it, so yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm pleased you raised the topic of imposter syndrome because I know I personally have that constantly. I think every human gets it at various points in their life, even the most successful people. I used to say to my kids, actually, that even somebody like Barack Obama, who I'm a big fan of, I'm sure he had moments where he felt like he was an imposter and yet he's a world leader. So everybody gets it and it's just a reminder that we're all human. So you get started, you raise a bit of capital and then you start hiring a team. Was that super easy to find the right people? You look on your website. You look like you've got a really talented group of people. Was that quite straightforward getting the right team together?
Speaker 1:Yes and no. We yes and no. We knew a lot of people already because of our experience, so it was a little bit easier to find the right people then and we weren't trying to be a big team. You know, it was only ever like it was six people in the early days and we've grown during the years. It's fluctuated to, you know, maybe up to 12. And then I think we're about six again now. It wasn't too tricky, except we switched from Unity to Unreal Engine and there's definitely less Unreal Engine developers and engineers in New Zealand than there is Unity. So that caused us a bit of trouble when we were trying to scale and find more engineers. But yeah, there's just so many talented people in Wellington, so not too hard.
Speaker 2:Is the world flat in regards to what you do? Is it easy enough to compete with others in wherever they are in San Francisco, anywhere around the world? Do you face any kind of barriers for being at the bottom of the South Pacific, or is it actually it's just not an issue?
Speaker 1:You face relationship building issues and therefore access to funds is often harder. So you know where some of the things we did in the early days, like making a virtual reality at a therapy application which ended up going through clinical trials and was proven to actually help reduce anxiety. So this amazing VR is that ripple?
Speaker 2:is that?
Speaker 1:yes, that's ripple, yeah, yeah you know, I feel like if I had been overseas when that had happened, A, there would have been funding to carry it on, which there wasn't here. I think it would have been picked up by some other platforms or easier to be picked up by platforms, because I'm seeing it done now, you know, and I think, wow, we were doing that many years ago. So I think that part you have to travel a lot. You know, relationships are key in building those relationships. So it's really only in the last few years me getting out and about a lot more that I've been able to kind of build those relationships, whether it's with Meta or Apple or Pico or whoever. So I think that's the only limiting thing personally. Otherwise, you know, you can build from anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what is cool is that for that Ripple product and helping therapists work with. You know anxiety. You were a finalist at the Wellington End of the Year in the science and tech category, which is pretty cool, you know. It's a real testament, even though, as you say, if you'd been sitting in San Francisco, there may have been even bigger accolades for what that was.
Speaker 1:Thanks, yeah, yeah, and I think more than anything it would have got more funding to carry on, you know, and for Breast Cancer Foundation, you know, they, good on them, managed to get some funding to pull that together, but then to do it any further was tricky for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's the biggest challenge in building a business like this? In the world that you are in, all startups are a bit different and your industry is very different to many others. What's been the biggest challenge in building a business like this is very different to many others. What's been the biggest challenge in building a business like this?
Speaker 1:It's an interesting question because capital is a tricky thing. When you're innovating early on and you live in a smaller market, like we do, and you need capital to get started, and when you're experimenting and innovating and trying new stuff, you know there needs to be a budget for research and development. That's really important. So probably that, yeah.
Speaker 2:And what would you say is your superpower? Is it something that? Is it the creative production ability? Is it your belief? What is that?
Speaker 1:Is it a little bit of blind stupidity and determination to make things happen? Maybe? Yeah, I think pulling people together, you know, bringing something from nothing, having an idea and then seeing that idea come to life, and making it come to life, whether it's through finding the right people, producing it, having that creativity to put it out there and that kind of guts, I guess yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you were sort of giving advice to other founders out there, would you consider or suggest to people that they double down on their strengths and just purely focus on their strengths, or do they address their weaknesses and try and tackle those? What's the better approach if you had to make that choice their weaknesses and try and tackle those.
Speaker 1:What's the better approach if you had to make that choice? It depends what your weakness is. Look, I mean I can anything you know. If you're in a leadership position, if you're running a company, if you're a founder, it's really important to understand and be aware of those areas that are your strengths and weaknesses. I don't necessarily think doubling down on it is, you know, maybe the best idea, but you might want to double down on what you're really good at so you can make stuff happen, but being aware and conscious and trying to learn and grow as a leader. I'm actually doing the abroad program for the second time, I don't know if you know. It's a leadership program run here. We have weekly sessions together with other founders or leaders and and you address all the things around imposter syndrome, around anxiety and fear and lots of leadership stuff, and I think it's really important to work on all of that. But if you've got a skill, double down on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and is it quite collegial where you are and the industry and in Wellington around building these things, or does it feel really competitive at times?
Speaker 1:It was competitive at the start when we were all pitching in for these five $10,000 small jobs that were going. That was tricky, you know, because there were a bunch of us trying hard and we were all friends and we know each other at such a small country. But now, absolutely just friendships and sharing of contacts and helping each other out, reviewing each other's pitches that happens on a daily basis. For me, I feel very fortunate about the industry here, whether it's amazing people like Mario from Pickpock, who has just been just so kind and generous and what an amazing success story, or Sam Ramloo up in Auckland, you know, with her VR game Wanderer, you know there's so much talent here and we all share and work together and so I'm very grateful that I'm no longer in that competitive kind of industry with my peers, because I don't actually like that. It's not much fun. It's fine with overseas people, but I don't want to do it here yeah, I think interesting about Wellington is it just?
Speaker 2:it just reeks creativity and innovation. It's just the most incredible city for developers and for artists and digital creators. It's got that vibe about it, just everything about it. It's like a little mini San Francisco and even some of the architecture is very similar to some of the traditional old housing in and around San Francisco. If those of you listening are from San Francisco, check out Wellington. It's actually a super, super cool place. Now you've got the release of a new game coming up next week. We'll talk about that soon, but I'd love you to take us through a couple of the other you know creative projects you've worked on. You was it Fluff World Combinauts? Tell us a little bit about these. What were they, how did they come about, who were the customers, etc.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, yeah, we've had a few different things we've done over the years. So Oddball was our first, as I kind of mentioned, our first game, and that's a multiplayer free roam game. So you're wearing a wireless headset and you can move around the room together and that's a little bit like playing laser tag. But you know, the world we'd created was like a Dr Seuss world where you turn each other into giant pineapples and, you know, silly, it was silly, you know a silly fun and it's competitive, and that was all our own IP. And that was very much learning about the hardware and creating our own system so that we can control the tracking of people, because when you're in a physical space with eight people and they've all got headsets on, the tracking needs to be really perfect because if it's not, they'll crash into each other and that's a health and safety hazard. So we had to do quite a lot of stuff outside of just the game itself. Yeah, so that was really cool.
Speaker 1:And Bluff World was, you know, an old friend of mine, aaron, you know, created these rabbits and gave me a call one day and said I've made these rabbits and everybody loves them and I'm like what Rabbits? And he said, yeah, and they need a home. Do you want to make them a home and them a home and you do virtual reality still, right, I was like, hold up, let me just get on the computer and understand what you're talking about here. And yes, we made these 3D worlds, these homes, the burrows for these characters to bring them to life and give them a place where they could be, and that was really fun. We had good success with that and managed to do some really awesome things, like with that money, like a million dollars between us to Auckland City Mission and all you know, and that was amazing.
Speaker 1:And then we moved into Combinauts. Combinauts is actually still unreleased and that was originally a collab with Weta Workshop. Richard Taylor had kind of been an early fan, I guess, of the work we'd done. He was just getting into kind of the location-based space in terms of gaming, looking at gaming and VR, and he came and played Oddball and he said, oh, it's the most fun I've ever had in VR, and I used that quote wherever I could. Absolutely yeah. So Combinauts, a family-friendly multiplayer game, again for the Oculus Quest. And then moved on to, you know, a few little other little projects, but those were kind of the main ones over the years.
Speaker 2:And for those listening who don't know who Richard Taylor is, richard Taylor was the founder, creator, ceo of Wesa Workshops, which did all of the creative work behind Lord of the Rings and many other success stories in New Zealand. And now you've got a game that releases next week. I don't know even how you managed to make the time to be here today. I'm presuming it's tracking well, so tell us about that and what you can tell us about that, yeah, yeah, it's called Runaways and it's for the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:It's an infinite runner. So for fans of Subway Surfers or Outer Odyssey or any of those kind of games, but it's an augmented reality or it's a spatial game. They use the term spatial computing and so, again, you can see your real environment. And then our game is in that environment and your first chapter, the first campaign. Everyone has a comic book, so that's how you learn about the story and the background of the characters. And you are playing Hank in the first one. He is a lovely, rebellious dude who has escaped the evil overlord who's been making him mind you know bloop for many, many years and he's found a portal into our world and is on the run, and so these tentacles are trying to get you. This weird overlord's trying to get you and you're running away from him and it's all hand control on Apple Vision Pro. So you're jumping. You know a little pinch to jump and you can disarm the traps, otherwise he ends up dying and you get blooped all over your room.
Speaker 2:What sort of time does it take to create a game like Runaways?
Speaker 1:Well, this game was, to be honest, pretty short timeframe because we really wanted to be early on the headset, and so this game is probably about, I guess, six months maybe. Yeah, five, six months. So, from the early prototyping at the end of last year, we didn't have an Apple Vision Pro, so we were prototyping on a meter, coming up with ideas. What we do when we're doing that is finding the fun. That's what we call it. Like, is it fun? And so you're just testing out these little theories of something that might be fun. And, yeah, so we were doing that at the end of last year. And then when we thought, yes, we found a fun bit, then you go into production and and you make it, and then you do heaps of testing and it takes way longer at that end than you think it will, because you're like, oh, there's a bug, oh, that that doesn't work oh, ui looks funny on that and it's a whole new user experience.
Speaker 1:As you know, the ui the hardware itself, is different. We didn't even have the headset until february, so you know we were building in a simulator rather than actually being able to push your builds onto the headset and see what that's like. So yeah, all sorts, all sorts of interesting challenges, but fun as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can imagine the user testing for a product in the gaming world must be really challenging, because there are so many different places that your player or whatever could go into a room and it might be in one part of the room where you get an issue but not in another part of the room, and that must be challenging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, and just yeah. The environment can throw up issues and you don't. Yeah, you can't go to every environment. There's a bug that seems to happen. That did happen in my house. That would never happen in the office and I'll be you know and so you're trying to recreate it and replicate it and you're like, no, this is what happened. And you're like why?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Is it my house, my floor? Hey, just let me pause you there for a second and tell you about some help that's available for startup founders. One of the biggest reasons startups fail is that the founders give up. They just burn out through struggling with aligning all of their people to what it is they're trying to do. It doesn't have to be like that, though. Jess Dahlberg is an expert in startup performance, and she works to align your team to the performance you need so that you, as founders, can get on and scale with confidence. Simply head to jessdahlbergcom backslash, scale up. That's jessdahlberg D-A-H-L-B-E-R-Gcom backslash, scale up. Use promo code scale up 2024 and start removing those headaches. Let's get back to the show, and so, with the product going out there with Runaways now like, who is your customer here? Are you building this for Apple or do you build this in your own right? And then you every gamer, essentially is buying this product. How does that work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, we are building it to publish it on the Apple Vision Pro and we're you know, we're an indie studio and we're self-publishing, but we do, you know, we have investors and they've helped support us to have the funds to be able to make a game on a new platform like this, because we're not being paid to do it. Some companies might have got funding to do it if they're on Apple Arcade. And the audience are those quite limited people at the moment who can afford an Apple Vision Pro. It's three and a half thousand US dollars, although there's talk of another one that will be a little bit less expensive and there's about between about 500,000 to 900,000, I think they estimate out there in the market at the moment. And those people, you know they're a little bit different from, say, the meta audience and, again, the people who use a meta. Again, there's lots of segmentations of who those audience are, whether they're participant parents who like to play games with their kids or the hardcore gamer.
Speaker 1:And Apple Vision Pro has never been sold or marketed as a gaming headset. It's a spatial computing headset headset and it's all about spatial computing and there's lots of productivity applications on it. But, yeah, those people we're trying to make a game that we feel everyone who owns it would like it, because it's fun, it's accessible, it's not too complicated, it's sticky, it makes you want to go back again to get a better high score. You know it's got that competitiveness and it's taking a lot of those traditional game mechanics from old runners. So we're not reinventing the wheel in that way, but what we're doing is bringing these really beautiful graphics to life in a really fun way in augmented reality.
Speaker 2:How important is it for you to be able to sort of second guess who's going to dominate the headset market and where that's going to go between, say, an Apple and a Meta or other players? Or can you sort of sit behind that wave a little bit and just see what's playing out and then build accordingly? Do you have to be able to look into the future on this?
Speaker 1:You do have to look into the future because if you want to be early on a headset like the Apple Vision Pro, then you've got to start building before it comes out. And we've done that the whole way. We were building for Meta and our free roam game. Before we had a Meta Quest in our hands, we were using other hardware. So, yes, if you want to be an early innovator and an early person company on those platforms, you've got to take a huge risk and build like that. If you're not and you just want to wait, great, you can let other people make some silly mistakes and play their stuff and learn from them.
Speaker 1:But you know, watching those companies and seeing well, a who's making the investments in it, like who's in this for the long run, and you know, as much as people might hate Facebook, meta Zuckerberg he really did create the VR industry by putting so much funding in and making a headset that was accessible to many, many people. You no longer needed a strong PC. It's not plugged in. I think the current Meta 2, you can get for about two or three hundred US dollars, you know. So he did that and that really enabled the industry to grow and they have about, I think, 30 million headsets out there now, so it's a pretty big market. You know still niche, but it's growing massively.
Speaker 2:So yeah, he's taken a huge amount of flack as well from Wall Street, from investors, from tech writers around the bets he's placing on some of this stuff. Where do you see this going over time? Not so much just meta, but the metaverse, digital reality, whether it's in productivity apps, etc. What's your view of the future around how we're going to use augmented reality, virtual reality?
Speaker 1:I think virtual reality will always be one that people will want to spend some time in, but not all the time in, and I don't think it's healthy to spend all the time in a virtual world. Augmented reality is a really interesting one because you can go back to the Google Glass right, glasses right. We start thinking about that and we know that Meta are working on augmented reality glasses and as soon as something becomes small enough that we're all happy with wearing it and it's not too expensive but now we can see, we can have that same technology in our eyes, just looking around and I can see whatever I might want to see, whether it's the pipes under the ground or the name of that building and the history of that building. You know, it's all there at my fingertips, my voice, but also visually. That's where it's going and that will be a real game changer and a really interesting transition for humans, I think, when that happens.
Speaker 1:But yeah, the metaverse thing, that's a tricky one. I mean, I have never been that big on the word of it and some of the thoughts of us blending everything together and it's all integrated and you just seamlessly go from AR to VR, to one person's application to another. Back to reality. I mean, that's kind of the vision for some people, but I'm not 100% sure about it.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting to see how this is all going with our physical lives, our real lives, if you like, where we live, where we physically live, our interactions with other humans in a cafe or whatever, versus our digital lives and our digital identities and the security around our digital identities, and just seeing how these two converge over time and how that will play out. Yes, it's super, super interesting.
Speaker 1:I think that's where Web3 and blockchain technology comes in and hopefully will continue to play an important factor in that, so we're not just relying on these big giants to own everything and to have all our data and to know where I'm looking in my room and to see what my room looks like.
Speaker 2:You know, there's all sorts of interesting privacy issues, yeah, and hence why Web3 is, in a way, is quite critical around creating our security in that new digital world, even though it's still, in some places, still considered a little bit early and a little bit fringe I think who knows how long, but it'll be way more mainstream.
Speaker 1:It'll be the same as AI and VR.
Speaker 2:now you know, yeah yeah, and then at a very human level and away from sort of the digital. I noticed that the values that you had, the Beyond Values up on the website and that's super cool and I just I'd love to know a little bit about how you came up with those. Like for one, the first one, which really I thought was so, so awesome, is spreading kindness. So how did you go about building the values for the company?
Speaker 1:You know we'd always had values. I did a lot of that work back in my days in Star Now around. You know we'd always had values. I did a lot of that work back in my days in Star Now around you know what's our vision, what's our mission, and then what do we stand for and how do we make sure that we live those not just words and corporate words and therefore how we make decisions. And so that's kind of a similar thing that we did when we started Beyond, and then we did a bit of a kind of like four years in a bit of a refresh and look at them and just kind of sat down and went well, what's important to us and what we want to be known for and how do we want to make decisions?
Speaker 1:And yeah, kindness for me in business, you know, is really important, because I didn't realize how many people aren't kind and you know you get told this oh, you have to be ruthless, that's who wins. And I just thought that surely that's not true. Surely we can be good people, we can have good ethics, we can be kind to each other, we can still be challenging, we can still, you know, do hard things, but with kindness at the forefront of it. So that was just really important to me, that we were seen and we did things that stood for those values, like we did the good games last year and just thinking about when I do it next for this year, which is, you know, two game studios compete against each other and play a game and then we, you know, we donate to a charity. So, yeah, things like that to make sure we live those values.
Speaker 2:And you seem like somebody that genuinely and really authentically lives your why so? Whether that's around, you know, spreading fun, I mean even if you look back to your childhood and you were entertaining because you, you know, I don't know what the motivation was as a child to doing puppet shows, but you wanted to entertain, you wanted to have fun and that just exudes through your pores, right? Does that make it easier when you're living that? Why Does it make it easier to deal with the hard days that inevitably come as a startup? It?
Speaker 1:does it really does. I think it's a really important thing to figure out what your why is, to do, the five whys, and also it can change. But essentially, yes, for me, entertaining people, making them laugh, making them smile, that's the most satisfaction I can get in the world, and so that gives me so much pleasure, and so it was really easy for that to be my personal mission and therefore to work in a games company where, you know, we make people laugh and smile, and we used to say, oh, what, what success when people were playing oddball and it's like if they smile then we win. You know, if they came out, we saw a big grin on their face. That is success.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, and what fills your bucket? Like you're, obviously as a creative, you're giving a lot and you're expending a lot of energy. What does fill your bucket?
Speaker 1:nature getting out, getting out, because I, you know, I am on a, on a screen a lot. I'm around a screen, I'm looking looking at headsets, whatever it is. There's a lot of technology and there's a lot of time working on things on a computer, but very, very blessed to be here on the water where I live and to go snorkeling. I love that, go spearfishing, I go fishing in general, just all of that. The sea is probably what fills my bucket the most.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that the sea is probably what fills my bucket the most. Yeah, I think that the importance of nature is just so critical. I was talking to the founders of unyoked recently, and unyoked is an off the grid cabin experience around the world where you cook on an open fire, you hand grind your coffee, you can't see anybody, it's quiet and you just connect with nature, because we are all built to connect with nature. So, particularly for those of us who are spending a lot of time in front of a computer, it is just so, so, so critical.
Speaker 1:It's what recharges us definitely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of the things I suppose is and I'm kind of jumping around a lot here, but you work with creatives and some people find working with creative people kind of challenging. With creatives, and some people find working with creative people kind of challenging. How do you personally find you get the best out of creatives? I mean, you are one. How do you find working with a creative and, I guess, bringing productivity to the creative experience?
Speaker 1:yeah, it. It's an interesting one because you know there's nothing worse than telling somebody I need you to be really creative and come up with this thing and build it, but also it needs to be done in two days. Well, you know. And then they're like you know, that's not how our creative brains work. So there's an element of freedom that you have to give, of trust. You know you've got to be a little bit more fluid on timelines. You know you really actually do than other industries, because creativity can take time if you're creating a character and you know it's different from other technology. But of course, you do have to have timelines because we all have budgets. So there just has to be a good understanding relationship about what that budget is and how long we have. And so you know, if people know that from the start, they know how much time they have and can manage it more mostly. But yeah, definitely there has to be a bit more freedom, I think, and you know fluidity than other ones, and we talked about restoring yourself through nature.
Speaker 2:But how do you sort of fill your head with ideas, whether it's reading books or, you know, listening to things or attending seminars, etc. How do you personally find you go about kind of learning in your industry?
Speaker 1:yeah, I actually learn from the real world. That's where I learn and it might be a bit focused, like going to an arcade, because arcades in particular translate really well in terms of the gaming experience into virtual reality. If you think about going to time zone or whatever and playing something where you know you're whatever, whack-a-mole or whatever. If you go and do that and then you think about, oh, if I took that mechanic of whacking something which I know is fun, what if I did that in virtual reality but it wasn't that I was whacking something which I know is fun? What if I did that in virtual reality but it wasn't that I was whacking? You know little gremlins that are coming up and if I don't whack them, they jump on my face. So, taking that and then thinking, wow, now I can allow my imagination to go anywhere because it's virtual reality. So, yeah, I take a lot of inspiration from physical games and then just sitting around having silly ideas and laughs with Anton, you know, imagine if this, oh, that could be cool.
Speaker 2:Do you dive into other disciplines? You know, because often creativity is like a confluence of different things. You know reading history or listening to music or whatever. Do those other things play into this, or is it purely from the creative experience of building games?
Speaker 1:At the moment it is. I mean, anton is a musician. He was a DJ for many years and I play music and obviously I made theatre shows and I think probably a lot of my theatre history and my love of Shakespeare and all of those experiences have filtered into what I do now. I mean, what I think about, yeah, but I would say mostly it's very focused on how do we make a fun sticky game and is it fun and what is that cool little thing that people are going to love and make them want to do it again? I make casual games, so you know I'm not doing these massive, complex things, which is quite good for me in my brain, but just like, let's, let's try something. Is it fun? Is it fun to whack that? Is it fun to control a little guy who's racing across your room? You know?
Speaker 2:What are you most excited about in the industry and life right now?
Speaker 1:I'm really excited about Apple. I honestly am Like we talked about Apple Vision Pro or Apple headset coming out since we started. It was like, if just you wait, you know, when you're all those people doubting you yeah, it's a fad, you know. And you're like, don't worry, it won't be when Apple releases one, I promise you know. And then they took so long I started to be like, oh no, what if they don't release one? And so having them now in this industry their expertise is amazing. Headset, like, the capability that it has is just incredible. So now they're in the game and they don't go, they don't do anything by halves, whether you might, you know, if you just think about it, the first Apple watch, you know, you might've been like, eh, we're only just beginning. We're first gen. I'm excited for second gen, I'm excited for when people get in it and try it, and I do believe that this is a game changer.
Speaker 2:Well, as you said, you know it's Apple. So Apple have changed our lives in so many different ways. We all love our Macs and our iPhones, et cetera, and our watches, and then they were doing some work on an autonomous vehicle, and then they've obviously just recently announced that they're not pursuing that. It feels like the headset is the future. If we go back to what we were saying before, you've got your real world and then your digital world. To have something that is beautifully crafted, hardware that just works and it works innately, will make a massive difference to our lives.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, at the moment we're putting phones in front of our faces half the time. You know we're looking down and we've got this device. It really isolates us from other people as well. It's a very isolating thing. Our phone and as soon as we remove that, we all still want screens and we're very addicted to them. But once it's on your face, then the social elements change. All sorts of things change.
Speaker 2:In what way do you think? Obviously, with people with a giant sort of mask on their face, it's going to be very clear they're in that world. Does that therefore make it easier? So they're not kind of in both worlds, in that world right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I mean, of course, because it's spatial and you can see who else is in the room, you can converse with them, you can walk around in it. You know you're not as isolated as the traditional VR headsets, which didn't have that capability to be able to kind of see the real world. But yes, they're big right now, but they'll get smaller, without a doubt, and so then they won't be that thing that people go oh, what have you got on your face? Oh, you're gonna headset on. You know, leave them to it.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that's when it will really change and finally, have you got a tip for founders? You've been on this startup journey now for a while. You've lived in and around the creative industries. You're in a really fast-changing world of technology around VR and AR. Any sort of thoughts you would want to leave for founders listening to this about their own journeys?
Speaker 1:You've got to be brave and bold, you've got to try things and not be afraid of that failure and experimenting. If you want to do something, just do it, you know, because otherwise you're going to have regrets in life. And it's not to say you're going to make a unicorn or whatever, but if there's something you're interested in and you're passionate about it, just be brave and just do it and make it happen. That would probably be my only one. And then, of course, know that it's going to be a crazy ride and it's not going to be easy, never easy.
Speaker 2:Jess, that is just. Those are real words of wisdom. Thank you so much for the time you've given today. Janine Granger this is another Janine Granger introduction. Janine just so highly rated you and you know, talked about you being the OG in this world. So, for those who don't know, janine was on an episode recently and is the founder of Easy Crypto. So, jess, thank you so much Thank you.
Speaker 1:She's amazing.
Speaker 2:She is amazing, and so are you, and so are you. And thank you for the way that you're trailing a real trailblazer here on this path, so I know you will be a source of inspiration for a lot of other people that are thinking about getting involved. You know digital creativity, so, yeah, really appreciate your time today. Hey, don't forget to check out Deskwork, the team behind you being able to build high-performing offshore teams for your startups and SMEs. It's deskworkco. Backslash Greg and go and save yourself some hard-earned money.