[Creator Summit] The Road to the Metaverse with the founders of Gather, OpenSea & Rec Room

Index Audio

Guests: *Phillip Wang*, Co-Founder & CEO of Gather,*Devin Finzer* Co-Founder & CEO of OpenSea, *Nick Fajt* Co-Founder & CEO of Rec Room and Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures. We're spending more time than ever interacting and transacting online. And in the future, we'll spend much of our lives—for work and for play—in immersive virtual environments and robust digital economies. This is the future of work and the future of entertainment, combining key gaming, crypto, and media. Sarah Cannon, partner at Index Ventures, raises the question of what the metaverse should look like from a first-principles perspective. Phillip Wang, co-founder and CEO of Gather, which allows communities to come together online, observes the prospects for a metaverse that doesn’t merely mimic ‘real life’ experiences, but in some cases can go beyond them, with new kinds of social encounters and forms of belonging. Nick Fajt, the co-founder and CEO of RecRoom, where players can build and play games together, talks about his company’s desire to cater to people’s creative need to ‘affect’ the world around them – something that’s been lacking in many virtual environments up to now. Devin Finzer, the co-founder and CEO of NFT marketplace OpenSea, notes that the frontier technologies driving the metaverse – AI, VR and crypto – all have early adopter traction but are only just on the cusp of an exponential growth curve. The group turns to the question of what will ‘mainstream’ the metaverse in order to move it from novelty to necessity; what new jobs it will create; how it could hypercharge digital network effects; and what we can do to ensure the ‘dystopian’ representations of the metaverse in literature aren’t born out in reality.