The Metaverse

A definition.

I was recently on Kent Byte’s Voices of VR podcast discussing pieces of this post.

In 2015 I was fundraising for Boost VC’s first institutional fund. We were going around to endowments and foundations and family offices saying:

“You should invest in Crypto and Virtual Reality.”

At this time, no one cared about Crypto or Virtual Reality, so it was an uphill battle. I remember some conversations lasting less than 15 minutes in an hour long meeting. Hindsight is 20/20 and I know some things we could have done to translate the message better, but genuinely - The world didn’t see it yet.

Fast forward 6 years. The world has been jerked into the future. The Metaverse is front and center for a lot of investors, and is the prompt for many startup founders. But what is it?

I’ve been on two podcasts recently in the VR space, discussing the metaverse. It’s super interesting to me, because the term “Metaverse” originally was presented to me through conversations in Virtual Reality, but the popularity of “The Metaverse” is vocally from the Web3(crypto) realm right now.

Here is my definition of “The Metaverse”: The metaverse is a visual representation of the digital world (internet) with true immersion. A true Metaverse requires three things. It requires Communications, Ownership, and Immersion.

Crypto founders are building a Metaverse led by sovereign ownership.

Virtual Reality founders are building a Metaverse led by immersion.

It’s pretty crazy that I got to write this post and people will regard it as reality. Like… we live in a world where we can hang in VR and gain sovereign ownership over our digital things. What a world!

I felt it was important to focus on definitions in this post, because when a VR founder and Crypto founder get together to discuss “The Metaverse” they technically mean different things.