Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) Treasury

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

Building the fundamental assets for the metaverse, with Treasury. If you want to learn more, contact me, or check out Treasury.space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode, another portfolio profile episode of the TechMeme Right Home podcast. We're going to the Metaverse today, everybody. People said when I said that we were going to do this interview today, Brian actually invested in a Metaverse company.

Yes, I did. And I think you're going to hear why. I have two of the team, two of the founding team of Treasury with me today. We've got John Manicherry. Hi. Hi, John. And we have Shawnee Foster. Shawnee, be more responsive than John. Hello.

Nice to be here. All right, but I'm going to kick it back to you, John, to start us off by give me the two-minute. What is Treasury with the caveat being that we're not going to reveal everything today because we're still sort of in stealth. We're still in development mode. But give me real quick the broad outlines of what Treasury is, as of right now. Yeah. Okay. So the key premise, right, on the basis of which we recruited an investment and we think we're doing something useful is that people that are building virtual digital environments of whatever sort for whatever reason, many of which are covered under the heading these days of Metaverse, need and often don't know that they need very high quality what we call digital spatial assets, which is essentially buildings and environments, license and available to them because either it's too hard to make them quickly or because the things that they want actually are owned by people

in an IP sense, right, the Eiffel Tower or the Freedom Tower in New York. And so it's a licensing tool set, we call it syndication pipeline, and if we're lucky enough to grow big enough, it'll become an ecosystem of actors and tools around licensing and distribution of very high quality digital spatial assets for people building digital spatial environments. Is it too cute to use the term primitives? Perhaps we're building some of the primitives that will allow the broader metaverse to flourish? I would avoid the word primitives on the basis that it has a sort of technical implication, but it's like it's simplistic building blocks. I would say that these are foundational

features or elements of a good digital spatial environment. Basically, what we believe is that people that are building metaverses or digital spatial environments be for entertainment purposes, film purposes, holistic health purposes, sustainability. There's many reasons to build digital environments. All of those things need high-quality building models and environmental models. And I would say that those things are not primitive. They're actually very, very, very sophisticated. That's why I think we have an opportunity to contribute.

but they are foundational, right? You cannot do what you want to do without those things. And I think that in the rush to set up the metaverse, particularly people that kind of narrativize as a VR thing, people have kind of forgotten that you need as quality environments, and they're very hard to make and all they are already owned in IP terms. And so having a syndication system for that is essential. That's our thesis.

I use the term foundation when I described it on the show today, what we were going to talk about. Before we get into it real quick, what's your background? Do you come from VR things? Are you a designer? For both of you, how do you find yourself working on a Metaverse project? Okay. So my background is in architectural and environmental science, right?

So I saw my career at the United Nations Environment Program. I wrote their policy on sustainable urban consumption, became a consultant, did a bunch of consulting on carbon sequestration, and a bunch of other sustainability things, a bunch of research on consumption, gradually made my way into architecture, took a post-professional architecture diploma, and then became basically an architecture consultant in sustainability and gradually became more of a kind of actual competent

or somewhat competent architect and specialized in something that became my other company, which scored Last Meter, which is a way of integrating urban user services into architectural design for sustainability and housing density and urban morphology of quality purposes. And that work is still ongoing. It's moving forward far too slowly, I believe,

because of the nature of built environment as a industry or regulatory space. And also because I've been learning how to do business shit slowly. But in that, I basically discovered, I got very good technology. architectural design technology and platform technology and just technology and coding and all sorts of other ways. And I mean, we can do a bit more on this when we kind of talk about exactly what the full of background of treasury is. But my expertise basis basically at that boundary of architectural design, environmental science and sustainable design and, I mean, technology from like web coding to, you know, all conventional platform SaaS stacks. and in particular architectural design technology in the form of computational design,

you know, game design stuff. So that's kind of thematic background. I mean, you know Shawnee how she got into it in a second. I mean, all that stuff in the end, right? We'll talk a bit more about this when we discuss Treasury, but that stuff leads in this direction, right? I'll explain how I kind of got precisely into it, but it's pretty adjacent to what this ends up being.

In Shawnee's case, I think one of the reasons why she's involved this. You know, she can speak for herself, but she wouldn't set herself up in this way. It's because I really tricked her in, but I induced her in. I want to give a little background on Shawnee because she will not say that she's basically an emerging Twitter star. And the reason for that is very interesting is she's basically a genius, right? She comments on society and modern mores in a way that I find very interesting. And Castor on Twitter was thinking, this is a very clever person. She said she was looking for a full-time job.

She's working in marketing, design. And I thought, well, what we're doing actually requires so much freeming to get it right. We cannot just hustle up some tech and hope that what we want to be, which is a kind of meeting point for design creatives, urban morphology and sustainability, platform technology, experiential innovation. You need kind of like a discipline but expansive mind for that. And when I saw that she was making marketing skills available, I was like, quick, I need to grab that brain firepower. And then for reasons she could describe, she became poor. But anyway, that's my setup to Shawnee because she wouldn't give it, she won't give

you her background that way. All right. Well, Shawnee, go with that, with that tee-up. Yes. Yeah. So my background is more in digital marketing. I did a lot of e-com stuff, but I was freelancing for a while and did some, like, you know, SaaS consulting and, like, marketing.

in strategy space. I would say in general, the reason I got involved with Treasury is I've always been very, very interested in technology in general. I would probably call myself like a tech optimist, but also that I've always been really interested in doing things very, very strategically and very in a high quality manner. And so then when I met John, he obviously was very, very intent on doing this project and growing treasury in a way that was very more like artistic and spoke to kind of the things that I thought were important. I don't really like doing things half ass. I don't like,

you know, I like challenging myself, basically. And so when he came to me with the idea at first, I was like, this is completely unhinged. And I was like, okay, it's so unhinged, let's do it. But the more and more we've been working together, the more we've definitely been very aligned on kind of our strategy and our goals with regard to Treasury. So that's probably the very short version. Well, where did the idea for Treasury come from? Because again, it's not like, oh, either of you have, oh, I've been doing VR for 15 years or things like that. Like, so, you know, when the idea of the metaverse starts to bubble back to the surface in society and tech and stuff, what was the impetus to be like, oh, well, we can do something here?

And like, what was the original germ of the idea? It's actually a pretty, in a way, kind of old-fashioned story in this sense that last meter exists. I think it will move forward and grow in due course. while it is moving slower than I would like, I started a podcast on spatial technology. In other words, the broader technology is around, you know, architecture and sustainability and kind of technical optimization pathways for urban morphologies. And so, you know, that conversation on that podcast moving different directions, different architecture tech things, city things, and so forth.

And, you know, it ended up being funded by Epic Games, Unreal Engine, because they came on it and thought, hey, this is actually very high quality architectural technology content. And through that kind of discussion and thinking channel, you know, inevitably I kind of was like at the boundary of what we were doing in like NFT space or metaverse space and so forth. And I was asking people, you know, there's sorts of people like trying to use NFTs to license digital assets. And I was like, are you selling these things?

Are you, are you selling them for licensing to reuse? I got a very vague answer. I was thinking this is very odd. You would use this quite. sophisticated technology, NFTs, to just sell things on a unique basis rather than the licensed some in a sophisticated way. And then the other question I asked was, you know, and he asked this question of Matt Ball, right? He's the big metaverse guru. The guy, I think, has put like a lot of like quite robust analytical framing on, on the metaverse premise without

it, you know, without, without, without, while avoiding a lot of the hype. I said to him, you do realize that you're going to have to you as the met, the meta, the people to build. the metaverse stuff are going to have to license a lot of content because a it's very hard to make good stuff and b a lot of it is owned in terms of intellectual property he was like really so explain that to him and it was shocking to me that it was um not so obvious perhaps to him uh immediately and then once i explained it all to me he said okay i would invest in that i was like oh you mean so so then what happened was is in understanding having investigated some of the licensing a digital assets was being innovated out there in space.

And then hearing that it might be useful to create a licensing pipeline for high-end and sort of technically rigorous spatial design content. I just asked a bunch of my architecture colleagues at very, very high-end architecture offices, would you like to syndicate your content to be the backbone of game and film and, you know, environmental optimization and urban morphology, you know, planning? And they said, yeah, God, fuck yeah, that sounds great. And I was like, why is not doing this? I'm still in a state of shock, right?

There's something very, very straightforward, analytically, I mean, technically is complicated, but analytical straightforward, which is very good quality content because it's technically hard to make or it's owned, should be licensed out, needs to be licensed out at massive scale, put a deck together, and within a couple of months, we had a fantastic crew of funders joining in. Another couple of months, we closed the round.

That's it. And happy to be part of that round. But speaking of Matt Ball, who was on the show not too long ago, we, you know, inevitably when we talk about these things, we say to people, the metaverse means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Your idea of the metaverse might be different than Mark Zuckerberg's idea of the metaverse is just a good place to have meetings for work. But in both your minds, what is the metaverse? What are we talking about here that you're building for? Okay, so, yeah, I mean, I'll sort of run up to this in a couple of ways. I mean, there's lots of times, right, in society, in particular, the progress technology, in which a lot of stuff that's going on is captured under a certain word because people like,

I mean, I think in a kind of trivial sense, people like simplistic narratives, but also I think the human mind does need some kind of narrative to encapsulate and to engage with, you know, complex forces as they play out. And so I think that the metaverse as a word is probably about as useful as the phrase cyberspace was in the early, well, the late 90s and the early 2000s in the sense it was a kind of catch-all word that did crystallize some things, but also falsified a bunch of other things, right? And so with that caveat, right, I will continue to use the word metaverse, but what I really mean is the unfolding phenomena beneath it. So there's the first thing, is that, you know, I have some caution about use of the word metaverse.

And I don't really need to kind of justify the use of it. I'll just say it captures a certain trend or blend of phenomena. More specifically, right, to give you parts of what we call our spatial web thesis, which, you know, when you put this in the show notes, but it will, it is a technical extrapolation of what we think is going on. And I'll just go through it step by step. Because this is the kind of fundamental version of the answer to, you know, your question. I mean, I believe and Treasury is built on the idea that there is what we call a spatial tech convergence, first point, that will lead to new infrastructure layers of the internet. Let me unpack that a bit, right? Spatial technology is a variety of domains, and historically have been very separate.

So you might have, for example, geosensing tech, right? you know, satellites and land sonar and, you know, mapping and GIS and whatnot. It's all classic stuff, right? You might use it to work out mines or to track, you know, to map the oceans and so forth. There's one area of space technology. Another area of space technology is classic architecture tech, right? CAD, that's become BIM and, you know, whatever tools are used in. And then it's kind of parametric design on top of that stuff.

And so that's a hub of domain of space technology. There's another domain, gaming technology, right? It actually is very different in its technical stack and its interfaces and its presumptions as a value model and architecture, even though they end up creating environments, if you like, right, visualizing 3D environments. Another domain of space technology would be sensing tech, right? So VR goggles or AR viewing systems. Another domain of special tech would be capture systems.

So you've got LIDAR and you've got, you know, photogrammetry and you've got, you know, whatever else. You've got tons of different. There's other domains. That's a solid five of them. Now, our view is that these technologies are converging into a kind of universal deployment capability of things that are spatialized, right? So sensing tech and scanning tech and visualization tech and design tech and render tech are all going to fucking merge. Now, it's kind of on the cards if you spend a lot of time in this domain. So when you say, oh, well, you've not been in VR, the truth is that if you work in architectural design and architecture tech, you are in VR. You're permanently looking at VR rigs and AI rigs and thinking it's all shit and the clients

don't want it. So you look at it and dump it basically. And that's why it looks like you're not in it because you know it's not mature, but you can see it evolving step by step by step. And what we generally believe in particular is that architecture tech and game tech, In other words, building things by arbitrarily precise elements, which is how CAD and BIM works, and render tech, which you have like a texture and a mesh and a finished look. And you actually have to build components into that. Those two in particular are going to merge. Now, all of that, right, that's a convergence piece, we think are going to end up as infrastructural layers in the evolved internet.

Just let me get a step back so you get a sense of how that might play out. out. Like when Google at the very end of the 90s was innovating in search, literally just kind of a year or two out of kind of like Stanford fucking dorm rooms, it wasn't just a breakthrough in some kind of search algorithm, right? Larry Page's back rub algorithm, right? You know, which then became page rank, wasn't the innovation alone that made Google possible. It was the fact that there was very fast internet and there was very cheap storage and there was increasing very cheap memory. So what happened is a convergence of infrastructural quality technologies in which one or two things suddenly could capture a value proposition and become very very viable. One of the things

that defined Google search part early on is they put all their search index in memory rather than on hard drives, which meant that when you searched for a result, the result comes, what's came back wicked fast. But you couldn't do that unless infrastructure scale commodity memory was available to searches everywhere. And so the situation now for us is that we think, right, that the internet, everything that is internet enabled right now in commerce and culture and, you know, in policy and, and, you know, health is essentially going to get a spatial layer.

And that exactly the same way, I mean, in an analogous way that everything in the internet or in the digital realm got a search layer at the end of the 90s, right? There's going to be 3D content everyone. Now, that is what we call the, spatial web thesis is that there is many converging spatial texts. There will be infrastructure class and there will be part of everything. And so that is a nuance on what the metaverse will end up being. So we go back to the concept of cyberspace, all right? People said, you know, in the,

you know, from the 90s, basically in the 90s, oh, you know, cyberspace is coming. We go to cyberspace, we'll get trapped there. You know, people will spend too much time in this, you know, this abstract world. sounds rather like, frankly, when you go back to the old stupid quote, some people talk about metaphors, oh, we're going to get, you want to get lost in VR and so forth. Truth is, we never went to cyberspace. Cyberspace came to us. There was a bit of internet in everything. That's the way it works out.

And so what happens is, rather than the internet being a thing you log into or you go to cyberspace, it's become a layer on top of the physical, technical reality we'll rean in the, you know, the second half of the 20th century, exactly the same is going to happen. with this spatial layer. And so if you want to understand what the metaverse is, basically think of it like this. Think of anything that has internet right now and think of how some small piece of infrastructure quality,

3D visualization is going to be in there. It doesn't need to be a lot, right? The thing is, if we take mapping, for example, mapping is the first piece of the spatial tech convergence and infrastructural layering of the internet. No one builds map products anymore. Why? Because mapping is an infrastructure,

commodity. So you have a product, you're going to put mapping in it. Almost, countless products now have some geopositioning mapping in them, right, which is the first piece of validation, I would say that a spatial layer on top of the conventional internet is coming. We think there's going to be a lot more of it. A lot of it would be 3D. A lot would be very minimalistic, rather than fully immersive. But that's our broad take on the metaverse. I don't know if that's coherent or satisfying, but it is something of what it motivates us. Well, it is, I mean, you got the history hat tingling with me by saying cyberspace, because, you know, Shawnee, cyberspace or the internet, as it was described to people in

1995, say, people would ask, is it gaming? Is it communications? Is it commerce? And it ended up being sort of all of the above and even more that people didn't anticipate, and even some things that people thought it would be it didn't end up being. So what's your take in terms of the, it's going to be like that, it's going to be everything and some things that we think it's going to be, it's not, but it's going to be sort of all-pervasive and all-encompassing in the same way that the internet took over our lives. Yeah, I obviously resonate with, you know, everything that John said. But I think that's also kind of just going back to like why I got involved with Treasury and, you know, the metaverse stuff, even though maybe my background doesn't align

completely with that, is that I do find it very interesting and very, like, feasible in the future that these things are just not going to go away. You know, once something takes hold, it's not just going to, we're not going to be like, oh, that was a good experiment. Like, well, it didn't work. Like, let's shut it down. And so all of these things that we're building on, I think in most of like historical scenarios with stuff like this and as you're talking about cyberspace and stuff, is that we tend to overshoot things sometimes and kind of go the farthest, you know, craziest ideas possible. And maybe those don't work, but then there's always going to be elements of those crazy ideas that will stick around. And so I think that's what we're going to see for the metaverse and a spatial web emergence as well is that people are quick to say, oh, it's too much. It's, you know, anti, you know, what being, you know, human is.

But I think that fundamentally a lot of the things that we that we're working on and that a lot of people are working on are going to stick around and then kind of just really find. that sweet spot and really enabling that tech to grow and to kind of, you know, help the Metaverse grow in a way that, you know, is good for everybody and that everybody maybe doesn't even notice that it's happened. One more kind of little idea from the spatial web, you know, thesis which we've developed. I mean, I think there are a couple of ways in which we can understand the couple of key axes, key dimensions of the spatial tech convergence that's happening. And I think the Metaverse conversation would actually be helped very much if it was more explicit about this. And so

let's imagine that one of the things we're talking about in terms of the Metaverse or digital spatial environments or spatial tech in general is some concept of immersivity, that we are immersing ourselves in some spatial realm. Now, one of the problems with the Metaverse conversation as it is currently is that there's some presumption and there's quite a lot of like, you know, would-be norms from, you know, Marx-Lucus and others that we should spend a lot of time in a very technically or visually immersive environment, right? And, you know, fine, if people want to do that, that's fine. I think the problem is that mainly humans don't experience what I call immisivity just through their raw senses, right? And so I think the correct thing to do to understand

the immisivity of spatial environments, these digital space. environments is to split immissivity into two categories. One is what you might call technical immisivity. So how much biophysically do you feel you're inside an environment? And the narrative immisivity, which is how much psychologically do you feel your insight or attached to a specific environment? That distinction is rather profound because what you end up with, and to showing his point about overshoot, is quite possibly very minimal applications of spatial technology. In other words, very limited, technical, or biophysical analogous immissivity, very high levels of narrative immisivity. I'll give an example, again, from the world of mapping, right? You might not think

that you're in a meta-bust, you look at Google Maps, but you really are. You are on a pin, on a map, and there's a little story about your existence in this digital analog, of this spatial realm that represents you. Now, that narrative becomes a bit more immersive when you have, you know, you ask for directions. I'm here or want to go there, right? So you have to follow the directions in this little mini fake universe on your phone to get from A to B, all very well. Now, if you suddenly are in a situation where there's an X and you have to get a hospital or, you know, your wife is pregnant. You'll get a hospital. Suddenly the narrative immissivity is immense. You absolutely must follow the directions correctly. Otherwise, real things in your real life

be impacted profoundly. And so what you have is no increase in technical immisivity in a map, in a Google Maps instance, but a contextual increase in narrative immissivity. And I'm understanding those two distinctions, like what is the narrative layering on top of the technical deployment of the spatial environment? I think that will unlock for us, probably most of the value that will come from metaversization or spatialization of the internet, which is when we work out what matters to us, we can apply the right amount of spatial immisivity. We might discover it's a tiny amount.

it is for a Google Maps instance, but with huge narrative chaos. And to me, that basically dismisses most of, like, 90% of the most of the dumb criticism, metaphors. Oh, we don't want to, we don't want to go to VR. Yeah, no fucking shit. We don't want to go to VR. We might want some 3DQ or spatial cue to infinite stuff around us. Why not, let's have that, right? I want to pull back on a couple things that you've said previously that I've been making note of to come back to. And the first one would be when you said, you know, is this good for us? Is this going to be good for society? And you say, it kind of doesn't matter because it's going to be pervasive sort of like the internet is. But think of the classic way that it's been depicted in

media, which is, you know, jacking in and sort of like, you know, no longer worrying about the outside world. Or, you know, I live in a shipping crate, like in Snow Crash, because the real world doesn't matter as much as it does what I do in cyberspace. How much are you thinking about, like, the net good to society? It sounds like you're very optimistic about that. Like, this is just the next stage of the entire connecting the whole world digitally. But what do you say to people who are like, well, this is never going to work out because it's never going to replace the real world?

So there's a couple of layers here, right? I mean, I mean, Seanie may have a different view on this. We haven't discussed this a great deal, but we have like an overarching position for the company, which is not quite the same as the comment I'm about to make. So I know that Sean is aligned on the company's sort of outlook on this, but there's a sort of foundational position which I want to share. And it happens to me in my view and certainly motivates me is that, I mean, I am fundamentally, like my main motivational life is, I mean,

understanding technical and creative things, contributing where I can to those things, and ultimately wanting, in a very crude and sort of stupid sense, for the world not to destroy itself by overshooting resource capabilities or just destroying nature in general, that motivates me in a very great deal. And what inspires me, what keeps me not cynical, is a very simple insight, which is the world is infused. The universe is infused with intelligence. I mean divine intelligence, but just smart shit, right? Physics and chemistry and biology and material science are all just more. massively intelligent things. They respond to intelligent. They exhibit some kind of evidence. I don't think there necessarily is a theistic argument, but I do believe that the world

is filled with smart stuff. And if we respond to that in kind, we get good things out of it. And so sustainability is possible, good things is possible. I actually think that argument does apply to technology, right? I do think that technology is pure, like digital technology in its purest sense. I'm going to separate that from industrial technology. Industrial tech is a bit different. But the digital technology, I think, is a very good instantiation of some analog, what it just is described about the world of natural science, the real world. It just exhibits intelligence, right? Now, that's not to say it's necessarily good, but I do think that it is important to have some,

to use the argument of the neutrality, not just neutrality, but the kind of radiant intelligence of tech on a certain basic level, to have a touchstone there, right, and not to be cynical per se, that things that are logic-based are back. I think the things that are logic-based or structured in a certain way, I say, analogous to nature and I think that intelligence and certain kinds of structures are obviously good. So general argument about things that have some kind of structure

or exhibit some kind of intelligence, I think, trends to the good. Now, the way tech is deployed, I mean, it's a very well-trodden argument. I don't want to kind of get into it, like in a very great deal. I do think it's not quite right to say technology is, you know, is neutral, right?

I think the technical essence of nature and science and tech, I do think it's trends to exhibiting the goodness of the intelligence of the universe or something. But tech as deployed, okay, quite a lot of problems. You know, the cliche one's military tech or whatever, or just exploitation tech. But then also then we get real problems of, you know, people who are claiming that what they're doing is neutral and it's just code, a massively distorting information flows. And this is one of the challenges of Facebook,

At what point there's anything they do stop being or start being inappropriate influence on the flow of information or attitudes or whatever. So that conversation is quite problematic, right? But there is a very easy response to it, which is just to make decisions on the basis of what you think is correct. No need to pretend to be an impartial observer when they deploy tech. So actually, you can short-circuit a lot of the implications of is tech good or bad by saying, you know what, I want to use tech for a good thing.

Right. So what I've tried to structure is two parts of a three-part framing of this, which is the first part is I think that science technology, the technical structures of the natural world are inspiring and give us the sense that we can do good things and we can make the world and lives better, whether it's the human mind or it's managing resources or whatever it may be. There is a whole gray area of pretending tech is not influenced by choices. That is silly. Tech isn't as applied as opposed to as constructed, as applied.

It's not neutral. But that needs to a very simple conclusion. Just don't do bad things. And it's not that you ask people to believe that you won't do them. Make commitments. Invite regulation, structure society in a way that good things are likely to be the outcomes of it. And guess what? We've already done that, right? The whole reason why we have, you know, morality and laws and, you know, mores and ways of doing things is because in the end, we all think we're probably good, right?

We build civilizational approaches exist, but we have safeguards and structures and they're relatively qualified. Let's just do the same with tech, right? Believe in good things, do good things, regulate for good things. So in our case, right, is actually what it to be straightforward. I believe that there was a lot of potential in not just actually technical things, but actually spatial design and urban morphology, to massively liberate psychologically beneficial outcomes, new forms of creativity, new forms of expression, new forms of association, and gathering and communication. And ultimately, the big one, making the physical world more sustainable,

I think that's definitely possible. We know lots of ways of doing it. So we just have to decide to do it, right? So Treasury has a very specific mission, which is we'd love to do the practical thing of making high quality data-rich models licensable for massive application purposes. But we make a very simple decision. We just want to do good shit. It's not like Google saying, don't be evil.

We just will do constructive things. So the amorality is a choice. I don't believe in it. So we are focusing on what in our specific language, making sure that what happens in digital spatial environments brings definable value back to the world of real. people. That's it. So let me jump in right now for my second one, because, you know, we've explicitly mentioned like Zuckerberg and we're implicitly sort of talking about him and things

as well by talking about don't be evil and whatnot. One of the, one of the bare cases for the Metaverse is that, hey, aren't you guys noticing that all of the big tech platforms are moving into the space because they see it's the next big thing, and they have the resources to colonize and monopolize it like they did the internet. And so is your bet that the Metaverse is going to be this interoperable thing and it's not going to be some platform that you have to play on that is owned by somebody else? Well, okay. That is, I don't mean that you are stupid asking this question, but I do think that's quite a

stupid trend in the debate. I mean, the reality is we know how this stuff works, right, which is that the internet is the internet because of the way that the protocols are structured, right? TCPIP, which is the protocol stack of the internet, they are open architectures, right? So when they're set up, anyone can evolve them in specific ways. And this debate is, I would say it's more or less a done debate, which is if you want open us, build open protocols. If you don't, you don't, right? And so where I get very frustrated with people commentating on the large platforms is that rather than saying, let's enforce a certain

protocol discipline, which is exactly what happened in the early days of the internet, John Paul Selle at Stapper basically said to the military, no, no, we don't want to use your protocol stack. We're going to use this protocol stack because it's inherently more open. I want the debate to be directed to governance bodies, which don't really exist yet, frankly, for internet architectures to say everything should be protocol-based. And so it's pointless to ask Facebook not to be Facebook, right? Ironically, what you get is if you ask the large platforms to be generous and open, you just kind of get stuck in their fucking giant more of platform partners.

Let me cut you off. Let me ask this a different way. Forget about whether they have the resources and they, you know, bludgeon everyone into their version of the Metaverse, because that didn't work for Bill Gates who saw that what was coming next would be high bandwidth, high broadband, you know, the internet as we know it today. Okay. But the reason that Bill Gates lost is because something else got popular faster. So what if – let's get away from Facebook.

What if the thing that becomes popular is like we see with Fortnite or we see with Roblox or we What if the platform, what if the thing that gets popular first that we would call the Metaverse is owned and refuses to be interoperable? Do you have faith that it can go beyond that? There are two very profound things that get confused here, right? The fact that Facebook has, let's say, 3 billion monthly active users does not change the fact that if you want to build a social network for your friends based on Wikimedia or any open store. technology that is directly on open protocols on the internet you can do that Facebook doesn't prevent you from communicating well this is why it's confusing people seem to think that because they these very massive like long-tail

collectors people that have collected the massive aggregation power of the social graph or whatever it may be the search graph that sometimes they control the internet no they just control a lot of attention and if you don't want to go that don't go there right it's genuinely very odd to me that we are saying because something's got very big, people are somehow sucked into it, because either we believe that people have agency and capacity to engage independently of those things, which technically they do or they don't. So I'm a little bit kind of end-running your question,

which is I genuinely believe that with open protocols and human curiosity, we will continue to build good things and will continue to have a lot of free association. I think the correct way to answer your question, is it good for society if the big companies make the big things and have so much, you know resources and advertising firepower that they go up and get sucked into it i would say that is not a good thing so that's the fact but i but i also think that if you if you want to to militate against it um you need a technical pathway for getting a solution out because just screaming at them is not that solution it's screaming at regulators to to break them up isn't that

solution right so i i i'm very aware right of the implication of your question which is that it is not good for that to be far too much aggregation power in the hands of a few people platform companies. I just think the way to get to an answer is not just to scream at them and say, give us some power back somehow, whatever, however that would work, doesn't work. You need an actual pathway, and that's why I talk about protocols. So I do think, right, the middle ground question here, the middle ground, middle round answer is I do actually think, right, that whether it's crypto or I do actually think that open architectures tend to win in the end, right? It's not accidental that a lot of what Amazon and Google and Facebook build on or open architectures. They use.

tons of open source software, you know, they're all running on Linux boxes somewhere in the cloud, right, or Unix. There's a lot of, you know, validation that open architecture's win. How people monetize that, how they manipulate their monetization, aggregation powers a separate question. But I would say, when it comes to spatial tech, open architectures are probably going to win for all the same reasons they've always won in the past. Now, that may be overly optimistic in terms of the aggregate impact, but if you want to talk about the aggregate impact, it has to be a serious conversation about how you regulate back. And that probably isn't for this podcast, but just screaming at large platform companies is fucking useless. And I am so done with

it because no one gets any benefit from it. So what is the bet that you're making with Treasury? And if you're talking about building things that are a better infrastructure that are more just or morally correct, or even you've used the words a lot of times like just, like better quality even. So how what is the bet that Treasury is making and what are you building to get to what you've just described? I mean, so there's a number of bets. I mean, I'll start with the simple ones, right? I mean, the simple ones just in kind of like mechanical like opportunity are, as I say, the two primary tool pieces of the, of the Treasury kind of like tool set, a licensing thing, right, in enabling creative.

of digital assets to put an ownership certificate on them and an intent to, or to manage their intent to monetize an asset or to distribute an asset without monetization, but to do it in a controlled way. And then a syndication system, which is basically a distribution system with some kind of monitoring or asset management attached to it. There's the two things, right? So the bet is people that are building digital spatial environments are going to need high quality assets that are easy to access to a distribution system and a well licensed in the sense that whatever the ownership status is, whether it's for money or non-profit or whatever it may be is respected when the asset is deployed, right? So that's the technical thesis. I mean the broader

thesis, back to the question of how does it play out to people's benefit is really we just, in simple terms, we're focusing on assets that have a ton of value. Are they aesthetically useful? Are they experientially useful? Are they attached to a known design, brand, aesthetic, vision? And ultimately, also, can they take datasets that enable radical transformation in terms of efficiency of morphology and architectural design? So there's a bunch of criteria that we apply to what's worth us bringing into a licensing and distribution tooling environment. But the baseline thesis is people need the stuff. Our premium thesis, if you like it, we want to focus on the stuff that's really good and add tons of value.

And this is not, like, unity. Like, this is our platform and this is our thing that you have to play. And you're more describing that the people that can create these valuable assets, these high-quality assets. You're a delivery mechanism. That's the wrong word. You're more the infrastructure that allows in a coherent way for that sort of stuff to surface, to be sold, to be licensed, to be used.

whether it be from Company A, Platform B, or Open Sources, everything. Exactly. So, I mean, just to add a little bit more to technical layering here, right? So we believe, for example, that the convergence format for all high-quality, high-resolution, particularly spatial assets is a thing called Universal Scene Description, right, which is an open-source sort of, it's not really a file form, it's like a file encapsulation format for digital 3D assets, right, that was created by Pixar, right? This gives you a flavor of how, you know, open protocols or something that just keep on recurring.

Pixar, as part of its own private workflow, needed a way to manage a lot of different 3D file formats. So they created universal new descriptions a way to encapsulate different file formats in one like Photoshop-style non-destructive layered editing system. So that way of managing files, we think is going to be the reference format for basically large-scale 3D assets. It will be output in different ways. It'll be output in GLTS, which is one of the standard web ways of viewing 3D assets. But already Apple has created a version of USBD called USDZ for its own iOS and Safari-based 3D viewing. So that is a technical way that things will be distributed.

And essentially what we're saying is let's create this side where they want their assets to go. So our pipeline is become a accredited creator, either creator or owner of digital spatial assets, register your asset in the sense that we will mint, it will identify you as having some association with it. And when you're ready to syndicate it, in other words, send it out for licensing. First, we do an IP check to make sure in actual fact you do own the IP associated with it. And then our syndication model is like this. The creators can decide, is it for sale on what time, for what price? We'll guide some of that.

We have a kind of semi-automated license. and fingerprinting machine on what we call the asset registry. What then happens is a bit different from any other way of doing these kinds of things. Rather than us having unique, controlled endpoint marketplace, we have built one of those, which we call our Discovery Engine. We're trying to create a headless syndication model where basically anybody with an environment, it could be Fortnite, it could be Horizon Worlds, it could be anyone with a metaverse project of any sort, open source, code source, whatever it want, can get an API feed to the assets

on exactly the same syndication terms that the creators are set for everyone else. So our endpoint marketplace, our discovery engine, is literally just an infrastructure, it's a head, it's a front end on an infrastructure distribution model that we want everyone to have access to. And so what that means is that we're not trying to control either the inputs or the outputs. We've got licensing tools that enable creators to register, archive, fingerprint, their assets, flexibly, that's all free, by the way. And the syndication system we think is tooled for many multi-metaverses, if you like. And if we can get value-ad distributing these assets in a good way, that's great.

If people just want to use our tools to fingerpred and archive their assets and syndicate themselves, we don't get any money from that. We think that's the correct way of doing it. We don't control the input, don't control the output. We put tools in the middle for everybody and monetize the distribution that we facilitate. We also definitely want to get into the space because I think this is where the big money is going to come from or the big impact is going to come from making sure that the models that are made have multiple usage endpoints. One of the problematic narrators with a lot of meta-bust stuff is, oh, we'll have a sexy environment for games or something.

And it's kind of pretty trivial. I think where a lot of the good stuff is going to come from is a model of the real world used for imaginative purposes, but also all sorts of optimization purposes, safety, occupancy and ultimately efficiency of resources and transport and consumption, i.e. sustainability. And so the use cases we want to extract these models isn't just, oh, deploy it for a game. We want to help the creators and owners of digital spatial assets get many, many values streamed out of them, in particular the ones that impact human well-being in the real world. So we started this episode by saying, we're kind of alluding to the fact that we're quasi not ready to show everybody, everything yet.

things are still being developed, but also we were going to be sort of broad and vague about what the product is. But you just described in a general sense something that's very exciting. How far away is that with the understanding that we've been discussing, you're going to come back and share more when we're ready for a big reveal to the world. But what is the state of Treasury right now? What is the state of development? And how far away do you think you are from being able to? to show what you're doing to the world.

Well, so I will, so Shawnee will share like a little like set up in terms of how we're going from our spatial web thesis to demand side market analysis, market outreach and so forth and, you know, communications. There's a bunch of stuff that people can actually connect to in terms of, like, newsletters and events and whatnot. Product-wise, right? We're about to launch the website, taking a little bit of time because so much of the technical product is actually attached to the website because we've got a whole webGL viewing system.

But basically we've built four pieces of tooling, a registry system for assets. And so everybody who owns or creates digital spatial assets in architecture, landmark real estate, game, film, and digital art is very welcome to connect because we're not ready to announce them yet, but a bunch of extremely high in architecture offices, real estate operators, some game, and some people are already ingesting assets into the treasury for distribution. And so we're ready to bring everybody in. We'll do all the demos of the registry system, the fingerprinting protocol, minting protocol privately, right, but we are ready to demo that stuff.

We have a discovery engine for viewing, which we're also demonstrating to clients in different segments, which, you know, Shawnee will mention. Again, it's in private view right now as we fix the assets inbound and kind of fiddle with all all the web jail stuff. We also have a curation tool so that anybody outside of the creators' offices, Instagram followers, fans of great, cool stuff, can add value that we're using Unreal Engine for that.

And we have an indexing system where we have a volumetric model of every building in the world on the basis that at some point is going to find its way into the Metiverse, particularly for the purposes of engineering, sustainability and just building up, make real, built environment, and optimization. So registry, discovery,

curation tool, and indexing tool. Now, all of that's in private view right now. So if you're interested as a created, have your assets syndicated in a very, very trustworthy, technically robust way, connect, the web domain is treasury.spaced. If you're anybody building a metaverse project or digital twin project or anything involving digital spatial environment, short-term, long-term, entertainment base, sustainability-based connects.

We want to bring assets to you. If you're a data tooling company, you're a software company in design, technology, whatever, connect. We would love to connect you to the evolving ecosystem. So we're happy to show people to start privately. What actually is going to happen is that once we've demonstrated the full stack, tested it more, sold a bunch of assets, sort of position more of our community. We'll do a full launch. I would say that was a month or two away.

but right now we can show anybody anything if they understand anything that I've said. Shani, Shani, how's the best way to get in touch to learn more if this sounds exciting to anybody? Yeah. So when the website goes up, we're going to have a newsletter. It's going to be a monthly newsletter. We don't want to over, over-extend everybody on the spatial web, you know, development. but so probably sign up for the newsletter would be a huge one. We are going to be doing some events in the coming months. We have a office now in San Francisco. So we're going to be doing demos and small events there.

And signing up for the newsletter is going to be the best way to get access to those events and to make sure that you know when they are and how to attend. Those are probably the two best ways. But also people with people. projects right now can get in touch for these private demos and get a sense of like, okay, we can start working with you with our projects, even though we're not launched yet, right? Even though we're not public.

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, they'll see that the technology, that the registry and the discovery system, the supply and demand side of the model are technically functioning right now is not finesse enough to push them public. What I would say is that, just to clarify, you know, we've got an event in San Francisco at the end of September. We'll be in New York for Tech Week, and those will be private events, but contact us and we'll get you in. And if you want a demo or you're curious, let's chat, because we'd like you to join the cluster of people and companies and creators that are already involved. Well, and also, I mean, obviously, I'll have in the show notes links to connecting it involved.

But anyone interested, also contact me, and I'll forward you on or whatever. One last thing, John, in terms of people that are excited by this idea, interested in learning more, the fundraising is still going on. We still have an open round at the moment, right? Not quite right. So we closed our pre-seed round in January. we raised 2.6 on a $15 million valuation, which was good. I think, you know, actually we got offices that were higher than that,

but I thought that would be kind of irresponsible. What's happened now is that I think, so we believe we're about to start making money properly, but there is so much interest to scale the technology stack and the sort of market position that we've put together that we are having a best of conversations. our plan is to once we start monetizing on a responsible basis, we will have something that looks like a business, and I think we should raise more money. But the seed round, the formal seed round, may open on a preemptive basis

because there's just a lot of interest coming in. We've spoken to basically all of the large conventional tech investors. We have a good conversation with all the ones we've spoken to. very happy to have other conversations. I mean, our key vision, right, is to make sure we're building a human, humanely focused, creatively driven, hyper-technical company in the digital spatial environment and asset space. And so if you're interested in that, if you're interested in that, let's talk.

Because if you're just interested in money, then it might be a good investment. probably we will want to be focused on building a cool thing. Well, and let's end by saying this. We wanted to do it this way. Be a little vague, but also sort of talk broadly about the themes of the Metaverse and things like that as an introduction to the idea. And then when we can share more, share all the things we're going to do it. So this is sort of a pin in, y'all are coming back soon,

and we're going to have a lot more to share very soon. Yeah. Thanks for that, Brian. I mean, you know, just one reason for doing it this way, actually, is it's kind of important to us not to get sucked in. But when people see the website, they'll get this very clearly. We're very anxious not to get sucked into the sort of mail streams of conversation, either, you know, high-paying visions of product, product visions for, you know, immersive VR or counterattacking presumptions around what special thing was going to mean. I think we've got a nice opportunity to contribute something practical here.

And so being able to kind of layer up on our narrative. bit by bit is very useful to us. And so thank you for that. Oh, thank you for investing, but also thank you, beginning as the chance. Well, right. Seathe the conversation a little bit. Money is money and my checks are small, but the platform, hopefully, to join the conversation is what's useful.

And also why I'm excited because, you know, it's, it is this sort of conversation about building the next new thing, the next big thing, as opposed to just building for money. That's sort of why I want to do it. I want to do it best. Yeah, one thing I would say, just a, just a final point, because it's something that I think Shawnee experiences quite a lot, and I think that it's a very useful thing to maybe end on, which is that no one knows what the fuck is going on.

No one knows where this is going. And that's why we, that's what I believe, and what we're building is what I call infrastructural, because we're very anxious to avoid preempting or productizing in a fantasy sense where this is going. In the same way that, you know, exactly as you said, people that talk about the site, you know, talk about cyberspace, presumed it would be X or Y, right?

Our assumption is there's going to be a ton of spatial content. And so what I think is actually very valuable, as an entry point for people, is the honesty of saying, I don't know what the hell this adds up to, Metaverse, spatial tech, spatialization of the internet. What could it be, right?

If there were infrastructure tools, so I could get 3D shit, very high quality for a very good price, directly in contact with creators who are rewarded and are creatively associated with what I'm doing, what would I do with that? So whether you're a brand or you're a city planner or you're anybody pondering this stuff,

start where you are, right? Maybe Shawnee can just mention briefly a couple of the sectors that are engaging in this, right? I don't even know what they're doing, but everyone is ever as excited. And we welcome that. We don't want people to think, geez, I've got to be a metaverse guru

or understand what USD is or any of this stuff, right? Shawnee, let's let you have the last word. Who are you working with? Like, you're working with architecture firms, municipalities. Who's interested in this idea? Not naming names. Just tell me where the excitement that you're seeing is. Yeah. First, I think I kind of want to circle back to like some of John's points in like your original question regarding kind of where the metaverse is going. I think just kind of, you know, fundamentally, I believe, and you know, we believe as a company that there's no kind of like set stable state. It's all just like kind of, you know,

flows of energy and wants and needs and technology beget other wants and needs. And so we're like creating that foundational layer that people can use. And so as John said, we're not trying to be, we're not trying to preempt kind of what the metaverse is going to be. We're just trying to help people kind of get involved in the ways that they are right now and give them tools to,

to interact with the spatial web. And so right now, we're focusing on a couple on the demand side, a couple different segments of the market. But very specifically, you know, as we all know, brands have been really jumping into being in the metaverse and having metaverse experiences, same as, you know, those creative agencies that they work with. So we're very closely working with, you know,

a couple creative agencies and figuring out kind of how our tools can benefit them, what their pain points are, what our solutions can be to help them, you know, create these metaverse experiences or other kind of spatial, high quality spatial environments. And same with brands and stuff like that. We have a whole demand side analysis that breaks down, you know, multiple different segments of the market on the demand side and everywhere from, you know, kind of games and more persistent metaverse experiences to, you know, more technical metaverse demand side categories. But right now we're really kind of, we are focusing on where the metaverse is right now. But I wouldn't say that we're focusing on it in a way that we

that we think we know how it's going to end up. We're focusing on it because that's just where a lot of the interest is. And we want to kind of enable all the people working in the Metaverse right now to have higher quality spatial environments and, you know, more easy turnkey type environments and licensing models so that they can, you know, have the best Metaverse experiences that we can have available right now. Well, as I said, we're going to come back and talk more about this soon, probably several more times when we can tell you all the things and reveal all the things and even do actual video demos soon. So look for that, everybody. John, Shawnee, thanks for coming on to tease, but also to lay the groundwork for what we're doing. And we'll talk

to you again soon. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Brian.