The following excerpt is transcribed from The Future Of Now event  that took place on 14 October 2021.

Speaker

Daniel Liebeskind and Topia

Daniel Liebeskind is the founder and CEO of Topia, a fully customisable spatial-based virtual gathering platform that launched in May 2020. Topia found quick success, hosting over 25,000 people as a co-sponsor of Burning Man, providing virtual event spaces for Fortune 100 companies, IPO celebrations, and music festivals, as well as hosting birthday parties, reunions, and workspaces.

In 2021, Topia successfully completed a seed round of $5 million led by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. Topia hosted virtual Burning Man again in 2021. Daniel has been featured in The Washington Post, Forbes, Wired, Digiday, and more.

 

Key Points

What is Topia? 

Our mission and our goal is to evolve how people socialise online […] so Topia in many ways is a social experience platform. It’s about being social and it’s about having experiences and those we think are the foundation of real friendship and the ability to build communities and come together as communities is really a core tenant for us. 

We have three things that we care about, one is human connection, and experiences, this idea of social experience platform, second is accessibility. One of the really interesting things here is we’re not trying to replace real life, people should still get together in real life. […] Making it so that people around the world can access a community, be part of these communities, (and) we’re breaking down the walls of what it means to be a community, so you don’t have to be within a geographic locale. And the third is consent and safety. And we think this is another really important thing, when we’re thinking about the future of the internet and of the metaverse is how do we not just replicate the safety and consent of in person, but actually, because we’re a digital platforms, we have the opportunity to have even more consent and even more safety than you can have in real life.

 

On the Metaverse

What that’s really all about is this evolution of how people can socialise, how they can come together, how they can actually form communities online, and tearing down a lot of the barriers between the physical relationships around community.

When it comes to things like the Metaverse, it’s really important that we don’t just try to build attention economies, which is how a lot of the social media platforms that exist right now, you know, they really were, they came about as ad models, right. And that’s been their revenue, the revenue system, the revenue model, what they’re optimising for. And in order to serve more ads, you need to have more people’s attention […] 

The idea of the Metaverse is not that there’s not gonna be one any one company that’s telling you that they’re building the Metaverse. It doesn’t even really make that much sense – it’s sort of like somebody’s claiming that they’re building the internet. It’s something that’s open to everybody that you can build upon.
 

On The Confluencer

We’re gonna see a big shift from the “influencer” of social media […]. What we’re going to see when we get to synchronous, experiential internet (the Metaverse), is what we refer to as Confluence. So these are going to be people similar to influencers, but they’re going to be the people that are actually creating space. 

And so we think that that’s where a lot of the internet is going is away from influencers that are just crafting personas and broadcasting information about themselves and towards influencers that are creating spaces, bringing people together, building communities, and helping really enable people to create their own community have their own serendipity, facilitate their own experience and connect with others. […] And Topia is set up to be a Confluencer platform.

What have you guys changed your minds about in the last year, especially in this kind of environment?

DL:  One of the interesting things is that originally we thought of this as just play – for human connection […] for festivals, for parties, and one of the things that we’ve seen that we just didn’t anticipate is that a lot of organisations are coming to us. For example, we have companies coming to us and trying to use Topia to bring their employees together as a community and to strengthen the bonds between individuals within their company.

How are you measuring the impact of this world and what you guys are doing?

DL: There’s a couple of things that are really important critical metrics that we’re tracking. One is human connection, and many people are actually having connection experiences and conversations with each other. That’s pretty much our core metric. […] We’re measuring how many many unique people are coming in and having at least one conversation. And so when we think about the success of different use cases, it really comes down to, which of these use cases are bringing in the most people to actually have conversations and have experiences together and forge new relationships and build new connections. 

[…]Number two for us really is how much are we paying out to our Creator ecosystem and you. […] We have talked about it as a creator economy, which is the 30% of our revenue that we’re paying out in the marketplace, […] but we have a really vibrant ecosystem of people that there’s a financial aspect, but there’s also a social capital aspect.

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About The Future Of Now series

Our goal at More Space For Light with The Future of Now (FON) series is to build a community of like-minded passionate professionals. We intend to bring together like-minded professionals to share, inspire, and explore new opportunities for growth. So you can discover new ways of working to bring back into your organisation.
     

   

More about the organisations connected to this event

• morespaceforlight.com.au – A strategy and innovation consultancy specialising in both in-person and/or remote workshops, design programs and Design Sprints.
• MURAL.CO – a remote collaboration whiteboard. With this platform you will supercharge your remote and in-person meetings and workshops.
• hacker.exchange – a global education company that is supercharging the next generation of startups & leaders.