455: How to Use the Metaverse for Your Business with Kirin Sinha of Illumix

0:00Hey Founder fam, before we dive into another incredible conversation, I want to share something really special with you. Whether you're just joining us or you've been following us since the beginning, you've been a critical part of our community working to change entrepreneurial education. I started Founder almost a decade ago with the mission to provide entrepreneurs access to the world's greatest business leaders. Our goal was to break down barriers to entrepreneurial education, and that's taken us on a journey from Founder Magazine to this podcast and beyond. And today marks the next step in that journey, Founder Plus.

0:35I'm proud to introduce you to Founder Plus, which is an all-access pass to each of our online courses and programs and their proven frameworks for success. It puts every strategy we've compiled from world-class instructors at your fingertips while connecting you to a global network of like-minded entrepreneurs. Founder Plus will take your business to the next level for today and tomorrow. So whether you've just joined our family or you've watched us grow from humble beginnings, We're really thrilled to have you join us in this exciting new phase of making the founder brand and this company the world's best entrepreneurial community to launch and grow your business.

1:16So finally, before we get into today's episode, I'm inviting you to come back, check out Founder Plus and go to founder.com forward slash membership. I'm really excited, guys. This is an incredible new evolution of entrepreneurial education and our mission is really to get as many of these founders that we interviewed to teach and also give back on the founder plus platform and really go more in depth with the knowledge and the experiences and the lessons learned that they're sharing all in founder plus so guys please go check it out if you're enjoying these interviews that's it from me i hope you enjoy this episode now let's jump in What you need is thirst.

1:59You need to be a thirsty human who is intent on learning. It's a really fascinating exploration of human potential. Now. The Founder Podcast. Even the greatest entrepreneurs had help. If you want to learn from the most successful founders on the planet, you are in the right place. Branson, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Ariana Huffington, Steve Case, Gary Vee, Sophia Amoroso, Barbara Corcoran, Damon John. Learn from the greatest minds in business today with interviews hosted by Nathan Chan. This is not your average entrepreneur podcast, The Founder Podcast.

2:42Hey, Founder fam. Welcome back to another episode of The Founder Podcast. Today we're speaking with Kieran Sinha, the founder and CEO of Illumix, which is a leading augmented reality technology and media company. We're going to go really deep today and down a rabbit hole on all things augmented reality from the new opportunities of the AR landscape, her experiences of building an AR-driven company, and why you really need to be paying attention to the metaverse. Please welcome to the Founder Podcast, Kieran Sinha. So Kieran, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. The first question that I ask everyone that comes on is, how did you get your job, aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?

3:33Well, you know, because I founded the company, I suppose no one officially gave me my job, but I definitely fought for it. You know, my path originally was going to be very academia centric. So it was a space where there was always a clear sense of what the next step was, the research you had to do to get there. It's just a very well-defined path in many ways. And I think when I left that to start my own company, and for me, that was really driven by the work of, I became basically obsessed with the idea of doing something in augmented reality and that this was really going to be the next platform.

4:04I believed in it so foundationally that I wanted to work in that space. And I just didn't see anyone else doing really, really committing to that in the same way that I felt needed to be. And so I decided to do it myself. And so a lot of the early days for me were actually defining out, really proving to myself I wanted to do a company. I spent three months committing myself completely to it before diving in officially, I would say. And that was just to see if there was anything behind it, but really gave myself some dedicated time where we were working. I think it was like 8 a.m. to past midnight.

4:39We had all kinds of wacky traditions in that time frame with the kind of first three of us that formed the company. And, you know, going out to early investors and saying, hey, we think we have something here. We have an idea. We have the beginnings of a product and getting projected far more than not. But eventually someone saying, hey, I think this is something really interesting. But yeah, we got a lot of pushback at the beginning. And I think it actually only served to more clearly clarify to myself, this is what I wanted to do. Hmm. So you started Illumix in 2017. So that was five years ago.

5:15That was before people talked about, you know, the metaverse and all these kinds of things. I'm curious why AR? I think fundamentally the trend that we have seen in our society is there's been a trend towards things that are more immersive and more interactive, right? If you think about, early Twitter and Facebook is all just text. And then we get to Instagram and images and TikTok, and now Instagram and Meta are really more video centric. The world is becoming more immersive, more interactive. And the fastest growing segment inside of entertainment has been gaming, which is really about 3D interactivity in these immersive worlds.

5:55So it was very clear to me that this was a trend that was going to continue. And we were only going going to become more immersive and interactive in how we engage in every activity that exists today. I think very philosophically, I fundamentally do not believe that we as humans evolved to tap screens all day. That's just not the most natural way to interact with information or to engage with entertainment. It is, I think, much more about things being in your space. That's how we evolved, right? That's really kind of at the core of it. And so I really believe that digital physical physical interaction and that's to me AR more than VR and so we really focus around AR is going to be how all information is eventually presented.

6:37Yeah I see so when it comes to I guess AR like was there much technology around in 2017 and and talk to us about the problem and the product and what you're looking to solve because you describe Illumix as I guess the the metaverse insurance. Yes, a little. I think that's how, you know, when the metaverse hype was really at its peak, we kind of joke, that's what brands thought of us as, because it's something with value today, but sort of guarantees that you have at least a foot in what the future might be. And I think that that's kind of how we've thought about this. But from the very beginning, I think this was always at some level a tech and infrastructure play, right?

7:18It came from a belief of this is where the future is going. We believe it will be in this kind of timeframe. And when you work backwards and say, what is missing? What is the bridge that gets us from where we are today to where we can be tomorrow? What does that company look like? That's really how we thought about this. So I think a lot of companies are born off this idea and it's very valid. Huge, important companies are built off this idea of taking something today and saying, how can we make this better? What's the next evolved version of this? And I think the way we built Illumix was a little bit in reverse of we kind of took a long view on what does the future look like 50 years out, 10 years out, five years out, and how can we bridge and create the company that ultimately fuels that really big picture of where we're going?

8:02And so that's how we approached it. I always think about early founders, and I think in general, when you're pitching a really good litmus test is sort of the, in 20 years, the world will look like X. Every company should have some answer to that, right? Because that's ultimately the vision and almost like the mission of what you were doing. And so when we started the company, there wasn't a ton of AR tech around at that time. There had started to be pushes in that direction. We were at a time in technology where machine learning and computer vision was really at a point where we could start to leverage it on mobile devices.

8:35And that was, to me, the really large unlock, right? We have a supercomputer and a camera probably within two feet of our body at every given moment. And how can we leverage that to present information and experiences in a way that I think is ultimately more resonant and more valuable. Yeah, I see. So can you talk us through like what the first version of the product looked like? And, you know, what did the MVP look like? How did you bring it together? As you said, there wasn't that much AR tech out there at the time. So yeah. Absolutely. So when we first started to build, it was really building things that we wanted to exist.

9:12It was really heavily inspired for us off sci-fi. So I think the first AR applications we ever built were all highly Star Wars centric. If I remember correctly, it was us building that, you know, Princess Leia saying, help me Obi-Wan Kenobi just to say, oh my God, we can create something using a mobile device that appears in the digital physical world. And that's just, that was such an iconic moment. We thought, oh, that's really exciting. And then we sort of evolved it to how do we make this interactive, right? We just created an immersive experience. How do we make it more interactive? And what we built was, it was the training droid.

9:44It was a idea was you kind of activate your lightsaber and it looks like you have a lightsaber in AR. And as you turn around, there's a little droid that's shooting, that's shooting at you that you have to reflect out. And that was a really interesting kind of learning moment for us as well to see what it felt like to be the protagonist inside of a story, right, where you were the actor functionally. And that was just really compelling. Even though it was a small little app, we learned a ton from that. So the first year or two was honestly building out different demos and pieces of technology just to learn.

10:20And I think that was probably one of the most valuable things we did early on is just have a mindset really towards learning as much as possible, getting your hands dirty. We tested it with a ton of people, you know, in the Palo Alto and Stanford area. You know, I was basically going around functionally soliciting random people to say, hey, do you want to try this you know take my phone and try this try this crazy app and see how you react and you know we were just really in a headspace of learning a lot and then by the time we got funded there was a more we had learned a lot we had a lot of clarity on the product and that first true product that we released was a game and that was uh five nights at freddy's ar which is a survival horror augmented reality game.

11:03So cool. So how'd you start working with Disney? So we were lucky enough to be accepted into their accelerator in the 2021 group. It was very exciting for us. As I mentioned, you know, early days, we were obviously very inspired by Disney's combination of storytelling and new technology, which I think is really at the foundation of what that company does phenomenally well. And so it was a great opportunity to, you know, take some investment from them to learn from that experience and ultimately see how augmented reality could be applied in this more general way to storytelling in the future. Yeah.

11:41Wow. So I'm curious, like, when it comes to, I guess, funding, how much have you raised up until this point? At this point, it's about 30 million. Yep. Okay. And is it really like most of your resources goes into development, right? It's not really into marketing. It's all product, right? It's all product. It's all headcount really, right? It's into the team that ultimately builds the product and that's the majority of our operating expenses. When it comes to, I guess, building a company like what you're building and now with the metaverse being a hot topic, still a hot topic. I know you said it's peaked.

12:25It peaked and now it's died down a bit. Where do you see the metaverse and this industry going? So the hype cycle around the metaverse has been highly interesting. I think it's been really valuable in that it got a lot of people who might not have otherwise been thinking about what's next, what's past this way that we interact today, which is kind of chained behind screens. Where are we going? I think that it really opened up that conversation and started to make every company and individual and really everyone think about where are we going as a society? How will this evolve what we're doing today?

13:01And that's where I think a lot of brands start to think more deeply about what is their future strategy and how can they start making moves towards that today? And that was really valuable. I think where the metaverse as a term can become confusing is that often people don't know what they're talking about with it, right? This idea of web three and the metaverse, how are they related? They became highly intertwined with this idea of crypto or all VR often. So this idea of a fully virtual immersive world. And I think it's much broader than that. At a very broad level, I would define the metaverse as, you know, this it's certainly a digital world, but I think it can appear in our physical world.

13:42I think this idea of a real world metaverse, something where information rather than being locked into your phone is something that's more naturally presented in front of you. So for example, maybe shopping in a website no longer looks like scrolling through 2D images, ordering something and sending it back if it doesn't fit, but actually looks like scrolling through a website where you can actually see these items on you as it goes through, know if something's going to look good on you, know if something's going to fit. That's a just much more natural experience, I think, and ultimately you know is better for the consumer better for the brands better for the environment that's I think how I think about the future is what is that evolution around 3d interaction hey founder fam I want to talk to you about something super exciting we're officially partnered with OmniSend the email marketing and sms platform built specifically for e-commerce founders we've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works.

14:37Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling the seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code founder50. Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Yeah, look, there's no doubt that that's where things are going. I'm curious because you're kind of, you know, you talked about the vision and of your company in 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now where you see that your company going and the vision.

15:24How long do you think it would take for us to get to a place where like if you're shopping on, you know, a fashion website like Fashion Nova, and you can actually see the clothes on you? Oh, I think we're within 10 years. I don't think that's a 50 years out kind of thing. When I think when we talk about 50, 30 years, that's when we're talking about, for me, significant innovations at a hardware level or manufacturing level, or really talking about maybe there's contact lens or glasses, and that is harder to predict when that will really be at a point at which it's on everyone's face or accessible to everyone's eyes at some point.

16:02But if we talk about our existing hardware platforms, what can be done with the desktops we have today, the phones, which are increasingly powerful year after year, have better cameras, depth sensing cameras, numerous cameras. What can be done with that? I would guess within five years, we're actually going to be at a point at which everything that we see right now that's a 2D image will actually be 3D interactive and something you can try on. So I think we're closer than people realize to that vision. Yeah, crazy. So how should businesses be looking at what the future is going to be? And in terms of the metaverse, how should they be, I guess, investing right now?

16:43What should they be thinking about? It's of course, you know, it of course varies business to business, but I would say the biggest piece that I feel very confident will be a part of the future that still is a gap for some businesses today is thinking about investing in 3D assets over 2D assets. So a lot of how, you know, whether it's in shopping or even sometimes in entertainment, a lot of things are done in 2D because it's easier, kind of cheaper, and it's been historically how things have been done. I think what we're starting to see more and more is a move towards 3D. And you can see this in some websites already are at 3D, if not fully immersive AR, where you can configure something or look at different colors of it.

17:25And we're kind of making motions slowly, slowly towards that. But I think today, if I were thinking about someone's design process or manufacturing process or, you know, marketing and even just consumer level exposure, I would lean in much more heavily to 3D. There's no doubt to me, the metaverse and this next version of the internet is much more 3D than it is 2D. Talk to us about like what a digital twin is and how it can help e-commerce businesses? Sure. So a digital twin is really just the digital version of something that exists. So at a very, at a huge level, there could be a digital twin of the building or of the city or, you know, the world, but at a product level, it might be that if you have a pair of shoes or a ring that you're selling in a store, there's a digital 3D version of it that exists online.

18:11And there are numerous ways this can be leveraged, right? Like you can use this to share inside of these specific metaverse type of game platforms. If it's inside of Roblox, this can be something you use on your website to allow people to engage and interact almost as though they're there in real life, the way you would maybe pick up a shoe and try it on or look at it from different angles that should be available kind of through the digital experience. And, you know, of course, there's the further kind of Web3 crypto component of it, which I won't get too much into yet, but there's that kind of possibility as well of ownership of a 3D asset.

18:49But at minimum, it's a utility that consumers can use today. But that's really what a digital twin is. Something that exists in the real world has a version that exists in this virtual plane. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Excuse my naivety. I just know that you know so much about this space and so many people don't. So it's just kind of, I know that might be a basic question for you. No, it's always good to establish, I think, what words mean. Even you'd be shocked, like even amongst people who really think about this often, because it's such a new space, there's all kinds of vocabulary that's being developed and evolved over time.

19:25So in general, I think it's great to establish what we're talking about right up front. Well, good. So I want to switch gears. I want to talk about your experiences building Illumix. um you know you you're you're in sand you were in san fran you said you're in miami now but uh what why why choose to build an ar startup versus joining a big tech company for me the motivation was never necessarily i want to run a startup right running a startup is uh very difficult and i i think i in general recommend that people really think about whether that's the right path because it's hard. There's a lot of sacrifice.

20:05It's incredible hours and stress, and it never lets up. And that's a real thing. We're five years in now, and in some ways, I feel like it gets more difficult, or maybe just the flavor of difficult evolves over time, but it doesn't get easier is really the reality here. For me, I did speak with some of the big tech companies, and I felt very passionately about augmented reality. And for me, it was very specifically around outer camera work, meaning a lot of what, for example, Snap does with augmented reality is very much face centric, right? It's like the selfie social application, which makes perfect sense for what they do.

20:41But when we were looking to start this company, again, with that headspace towards where does the future go? We felt that 30, 50 year out mark or even 20 year out mark was going to have some kind of glasses or kind of evolution of the way we can interact with the camera and the computer in such a way where actually the most important thing wasn't the selfie, but actually the external facing camera. And five years ago, no one was doing that, right? There was really nobody outside of maybe Pokemon Go, which was truly more of a location-based game than augmented reality. There really wasn't anything out there that was heavily investing in augmented reality.

21:18If there was, I think I would have joined a team, but we really didn't find anything, or at least I really couldn't find anything early on where I felt like, yes, this company is committed to this. This is a real vision of the future that I can participate in. And eventually, I think if you believe enough in something, you feel like you have to do it no matter what. And so I decided I would just do it and set out on my own for it. So you scratch your own itch. Scratch, scratch. Yeah, exactly. You scratch your own itch, which is, I think you do as a founder really need to believe in what you're doing because there's so many moments where you're tested to say, is this the right path for you?

21:55Is this really what you want to do? And it's this blend between needing to be very confident in your vision, but also sort of humble and at least questioning enough, like approaching your own scientific method on yourself to say, am I building the right thing? Am I doing this correctly? Has the data changed where maybe I need to adjust what that vision is? So I think that's always a challenging balance. But early on in particular, I think for founders, the first two years, you just have to go for it completely, like completely build out the vision, learn as much as you can. And I think you typically have some indication of whether you have something that's resonating or not, I think within the first year or so.

22:32What was that moment for you in that first year that you knew you were onto something? For me, it was when we did the first play tests for the Five Nights at Freddy's game. It was really early on. I mean, it was barely built out as a game. I think there was one model inside of it. It was, you know, it didn't even end up being the end game mechanics necessarily that we use, but the goal of the game was to basically it's to frighten someone to make them believe that there's this ghost or this creature in the room with them, even if you can't see it. And there was a lot of question at some level of, does that work with augmented reality?

23:07Because you can just look outside your screen and realize there's nothing there. So how can you really be scared if you're in the middle of the day in a brightly lit room and, you know, you know, nothing is there. And so we wanted to test that really early on with a variety of inputs. And what we saw from that first play test was when I felt in my heart, absolutely, there is something here where people were holding up their phone and I'll never forget, like backing themselves into the corner of the room where they're literally back up against the corner with their phone up, believing that there is something there that is coming for them.

23:38It was this incredibly visceral behavior of wanting to almost run or escape that we had created with this kind of new technology. And that is a real emotional connection, right? That is when you know you have tapped in on something that is really core to, I think, who we are as humans and that belief. And it was incredibly powerful. I think that emotional connection we saw with people made it clear to me that this was going to be a wave. It's the difference between how do you feel when you see a dog in a video, right? It's very cute and you might feel a connection to it compared to how, but then think about how you feel if you see a puppy in real life.

24:13It's a completely different level of interaction and connection when it's there with you, when you feel connected with it, when you feel like you can feel its energy. And I think that to me was the distinction of what we were creating with augmented reality versus traditional entertainment to that point of, it's not that the video of the dog isn't cute. It's that when you're with it in real life, it's a completely different layer of experience. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it.

24:48However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success. you should come and check out our new podcast from zero to founder hosted by our community manager molly flynn these are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs people just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business these are the founders of tomorrow you can find the from zero to founder podcast on all platforms.

25:34And remember it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. Just made me think, was Pokemon Go around back then? Was that before or after? It was before, very briefly before is what I would say. It was like the summer or so beforehand. Cause I remember very vividly when I first moved to San Francisco in 2016, and I was talking to people about this idea of augmented reality and I was laughed out of every room. Everyone thought I was absolutely insane. And then Pokemon Go came out and everyone was very interested in the space all of a sudden. And then, you know, then the space cooled down again.