The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Once Upon Tomorrow: Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates by Shurick Agapitov, Tech Billionaire Founder of Xsolla

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Once Upon Tomorrow: Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates by Shurick Agapitov, Tech Billionaire Founder of Xsolla https://amzn.to/3Pe4ti6 Shurick Agapitov’s Once Upon Tomorrow unpacks the sometimes vague concept of the metaverse and shares the opportunities that are and will be available within this new world. Thirty years ago, the advent of the internet changed the world. For the first time in human history, the collected knowledge of all mankind was freely available to every man, woman, and child on the planet with the click of a few buttons. Fifteen years ago, the world changed again with the widespread availability and adoption of smartphones that put the full power of the internet in the palm of our hands whenever we want and wherever we are. As monumental as these advancements were, they were just the warmup for the change that’s coming next. In just a few years, we won’t think of “going on the internet” to look up information and find entertainment. Instead, we’ll already be in the internet, living, working, and playing in an endless virtual world that will turn everything we think we know about the internet on its head. Welcome to the Metaverse. In Once Upon Tomorrow, visionary tech CEO Shurick Agapitov dives deep into this new age of the internet by unpacking exactly what the Metaverse is and what it will become. It’s not about pixels and computer chips; it’s a total paradigm shift what will revolutionize how people interact, share stories, create and implement ideas, conduct business, and literally live their lives. The Metaverse will be the biggest change any of us have ever seen. Fortunately, Shurick Agapitov is here to take you by the hand and welcome you into this wild, wonderful new universe of opportunity. As the Founder of Xsolla, Shurick is not only a respected innovator but also a driving force in shaping the future of gaming and the Metaverse. His trailblazing company Xsolla allows video game producers to sell in-game items in exchange for a 5% portion of each sale. When anyone purchases something in-game, his company powers that transaction worldwide. Shurick's clients including Epic Games Store, Ubisoft, Twitch & hundreds more. With a global presence spanning Los Angeles, Berlin, and Seoul, Xsolla under Shurick's leadership, is fostering a more decentralized and inclusive industry.

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and all those crazy places we are on the Internet. Today we have an amazing young man we're going to be talking to. Shurik Agapitov is on the show with us today. He is the CEO and founder of Exala, and his new book is coming out. It's called Once Upon Tomorrow, Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates. It's out March 5th, 2024. We're going to be talking about his insights in the future of the Internet, the metaverse, etc., etc. As the founder of Ixala, he not only is a respected innovator, but also a driving force in shaping the future of gaming and the metaverse.

His trailblazing company allows video game producers to sell in-game items in exchange for a 5% portion of each sale. When anyone purchases something in-game, his company powers that transaction worldwide. His clients include Epic Games Store, Ubisoft, Twitch, and hundreds more. With a global presence spanning Los Angeles, Berlin, Seoul, Exxon under his leadership is fostering a more decentralized and inclusive industry. Welcome to the show, Shurik. How are you? Very well.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. We really appreciate it. So give us any dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better? I like the exotic domains. So I have an 80.lv, 80.lvV and I have an X dot LA as a consumer

destinations and gamers destinations which is my new addition and of course Xolo.com is my prime business which is a found X company almost 20 years ago now. There you go. I think I've helped fund it through all the video game purchases

I've made so I'm one of your customers, technically. What's that? Happy to have you as a customer. Thank you. So give us, we play a few video games around here. So give us a 30,000 overview of your new book, Once Upon Tomorrow.

It's a book about the future of the internet, which some people call the metaverse. And a lot of the people misuse the metaverse or overuse the metaverse and say like Roblox or Fortnite is a metaverse. In my definition, those are virtual worlds. And the metaverse is a new internet, which looks like a video game. And yeah, and the first chapter is about

how Zuckerberg got it wrong, and the second chapter explains my accent and where I'm coming from. There you go. And I was going to bring that up. That was one of my first questions for you. You kind of throw some shade at the old Zuckerberg there in the first chapter. So how do you define metaverse separately from what his vision was or is there a separation?

So the fact when somebody can name their company as a meta and declare themselves as a CEO as a metaverse. It's as silly as if I would name my LLC Internet and call myself the CEO of the Internet. Nobody can own the Internet, nobody can own the metaverse. And a similar joke from the previous generation of the internet gold rush is from Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It's a story when Steve Jobs is saying to Steve Wozniak, Did you hear about these new things called Internet? Maybe we should buy it. So here we are. Here we are again. There's new things called Metaverse and

Zakobrek wants to own it. Yeah, so he definitely saw the future of it. Now, there's a lot of people who talk about the future of the Internet is this thing called Web3. Is your version of what the Metaverse is different than this Web3? How does that all work together or not?

Yeah, so it's funny. A few years ago, people started using this Web3, and a lot of the experts would explain what's a Web1, Web2, and Web3, and what's the difference. I will not repeat. I think a lot of the people heard that explanations and slightly different variations. For me, the most exciting thing is not the Web3, but Web3D. Oh.

So I do believe the Internet is getting as a spatial place or 3D space, and video game technology is going to power all of them. There you go. And life seems to be coming like a video game. What's your thoughts on the new Apple Google Glass, basically? Well, VR and headsets like this is going to be a subset of the metaverse. It's not, again, the metaverse. It's one of the many screens where you can experience the metaverse.

I think the virtual reality of 3D glasses, headsets, it's going to be consumer choice. Somebody likes to invest in the full HD TV systems. Some of the people have the movie theaters at their home, but some of us prefer to experience the internet and the content on a small mobile screen. The important elements of the metaverse is similar like in the real world. There's an environment, right? There's rooms, realms. I call them meta sites.

There's, of course, users or people in in real world, business opportunities, and it could be web-free guys who see that as wallets or identity profiles. And there's stuff, like similar in real life. We have the stuff, and metaverse is going to be digital items. So when we have those 3D spaces, virtual spaces, and we carry the digital items, backpack of the digital items, similar like in video games,

and then we can walk through the one virtual world, let's say Roblox, to the Fortnite, through some sort of the portal, which is analogy would be in previous internet is a hyperlink, is gonna hyper portal. When you walk through that from one virtual world to another virtual world, that is the metaverse moment. That's meaning we have the metaverse.

And in the future, you're going to carry the digital items from every experience you have online. So right now you go to every website and you accept cookies. In the future, you're going to accept the digital items as a reward of your attention and as a reward for you being tracked by advertising. And you can redeem those items for the real goods.

Coupons. There you go. I know like Amazon has a deal with like the different game stuff, different games like Destiny and different things like Modern Warfare where you can, they give you like, for letting them track you through Amazon, I guess, they give you like free, you know, ships and different things.

Is it kind of like maybe that? Well, those digital items exist for decades with video games. And I think what Amazon is doing is like give away those items for the prime users. It's adding the value for the prime users. Right now, we cannot see who received those items just to be tracked. It's digital items very much valued by gamers and gamers love them. And there's a two point three billion gamers out there. Right. It's not like I just want to highlight that number for the audience.

So. So will will is in the future, will these be on the maybe the block chain so you can track them? So blockchain is one of the good candidate for the standard uh as a as a easy imagine nft but it's as an open api the idea is when you accept those items uh and you let's say you accept a virtual uh cup of coffee uh uh for for you watching the advertising, video advertising. So that's like people pay for your attention. You get this virtual cup of coffee,

and you can redeem that virtual cup of coffee in retail, or you maybe transfer it to somebody else who would appreciate it. So it could be on blockchain, but it's not necessary. Okay. So we'll come back to the book. Let's talk about you a little bit. Your second chapter of the book talks about your growing up, I believe, in Siberia. Tell us about your history, how you grew up, what influenced you, what motivated you and got you into the Silicon Valley and doing what you're doing now.

So I grew up uh very very poor in the in siberia and um my my um my dad was alcoholic and my mom uh was working class and uh and uh she always uh uh encouraged me to uh learn math and uh maybe one day to have a desk job. And so I studied a lot and math was kind of easy for me. And I saw it as a way out. Unfortunately, I didn't finish the math university. I dropped out on the first form and start my business. And I was 21 years old when I started Xolo.

Really? And so, yeah. What was the vision that you saw there? What was the proponent for you starting your own company there? This was the internet. I was fascinated by internet. And internet proposed and invited so many opportunities. And opportunities you can learn virtually anything on internet.

And I like that concept, learn and learn. But what my mom told me, you should learn to earn. But I learned, I chose to, I saw on the internet, there's so much more opportunity than whatever local job or whatever career could offer. So I learned many things on the internet and started my internet business. There you go. You're the first internet children, the millennials, right?

Yes. There you go. And it certainly beats going out in that Siberian winter in snow. So at what point do you come to America? So I come to San Francisco. I lived on a venture business or tech branch. If you have a tech startup, you should go to San Francisco and maybe raise the money, the Silicon Valley. And I moved to San Francisco in 2009.

And I failed to raise money. And I moved to Los Angeles. There you go. Yeah, that was 2009. Maybe something happened in 2008. Maybe it's my accent again. So I failed, and so now the best things would happen to me. There you go. So failure.

It happens to everybody. But you persevered through it and kept it going, and now you've built this amazing company, and the future is there. How is Xala positioned for the metaverse? I imagine one of the reasons you're writing about this book is you see that there's an incredible future and maybe a profit center for your company. So I believe the future of the Internet will be built with the video games technologies. It's worth noting a lot of the innovation happened because of the video games technologies. It's worth noting that a lot of the innovation happened because of the video games. If you think about like Nvidia and artificial intelligence, they exist because of

the video games, right? Cell driving cars exist because of the Nvidia and Nvidia exists because of the video games. If you think about whatever VR, I don't know, future could look like, before the surgeon is going to do the surgery, remote surgery in virtual reality, I'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot of the gamers who are going to play, maybe not surgery games, virtual reality because of the video games. And blockchain, most likely adoption is going to happen for the gaming. Similarly, would people buy the computers to play the video games and learn how to use the computer later? And I think a lot of innovation we're going to have because of the video games. There you go. You know, I have a 4090 behind me in the computer, an NVIDIA 4090.

And, yeah, being able to go fast not only works for video games, but it works fast for everything else. But, boy, I sure wish I bought NVIDIA stock last year because, man, that thing is taking the hell off. Yeah. Which is probably an indication of what you're writing about and talking about in your book. And you indicate that, I mean,

we're talking trillions of dollars here, people, as your chapter three. So you see an incredible future market for this. Yeah, I think that's the future of the internet and a lot of the things are going to be reset. User acquisitions and privacy regulations, they're working against the current establishment, Facebook and Google.

Those things have changed. And the way how we experience it visually is also changing. So I'm, as an internet entrepreneur, want to share that vision with the future internet entrepreneurs. And it's going to be slightly different than before. There you go. Now, you refer to the book in something called meta sites what are meta sites it's a websites which is but in the new internet meta side it's a every company who have a websites today in the future they want to have the the meta side It is basically like mini MMORPG and it could even replace, I think, the commercials

because developing the games is getting easier and easier. But those are mini games I think every brand would like to have. Every school would like to have meta sites and because we have the artificial intelligent uh generated content all this uh synthetic contents uh i think you have the ex immersive experience is gonna be absolutely necessary necessary for the users uh because there's so many information uh and and the attention span is getting narrower and narrower. People spend a lot of time on TikTok, but they spend more time on Roblox. Yeah, that thing is crazy.

Those kids love that. And that's how the internet may look like in the future. Hey, no. Between different experiences. Right now it's Rob a Roblox control sample of the corner of the metaverse, but it's not a metaverse. It's a virtual world.

When those virtual worlds connect with each other, this is the metaverse. That's going to be amazing. I was just sitting here thinking, how can I turn the chrisfoshow.com podcast into a video game so that people can interact with it like you're talking about? And then I realized, you know, it'd be really cool is if somebody could virtually come sit in to like an interview like this one here. And then they could jump in and maybe ask questions of the guests.

And then an AI system would go like suck some of their questions they've asked on multiple occasions from the internet. And it would almost seem like a seamless experience. How about that for a vision? Yeah. So that's, that's exactly how I, I think it's, it's,

it's going to be an individual in the video games with a lot of technology and an AI could build a very engaging NPC. And I think in the future brands would be represented by NPC as a character because the AI would enable us to not only just to have this robot customer support, but embedded personality and character. And you know how to feel about those different characters.

And people here in Hollywood who develop the characters professionally I think it's going to work with the brands and develop very interesting NPCs or characters

with a slight imperfection, which is represent the brand the way the brands want it. Wow. So my future is being an NPC podcast host on The Chris Voss Show? Well, if you want that. to the chris voss show podcast i am here to serve you uh so there you go uh you talk about ethereum and blockchain and bitcoin i think it is uh being a part of the internet what are your what are your thoughts on that if you want to tease a little bit about that? Well, as I mentioned before, those are good candidates for the standards. You know, the internet needs to have the standards, open standards, like email standard is working really well, right?

And we all use it, although it was attempts to make the email as a private technology and charge everybody a few cents here and there for the email sent and received. I think this could be some sort of the standards. And the NFT is a good candidate. The problem with the standards is, as an anecdote, every time when we see the problem of so many standards, like it's 10 different standards for the one specific things, like let's say, for the

how those virtual works will connect with each other, right? How the items can work. So people came and said it makes sense to have the one standard, and they're creating the one standard. And at the end, we have 11 standards. And that's a

and that's uh happen all the time there you go how should we address the ethical considerations and potential negative impacts of the metaverse is there going to be a dark metaverse like there's a dark web well i think the metaverse or any any internet it's a uh any internet, when it's a small city or small country size of the populations, it reflects our society. Whatever bad things we have in every town, there's a bad consequence of any sample of the population. There you go. So we're going to have some bad neighborhoods, maybe. What's some advice you give to entrepreneurs? I know at the end of the book you give advice on how to take advantage of this space in the future coming.

What's some advice you give to entrepreneurs who are interested in entering the metaverse space? Well, look, you need to find the role. So first of all, read the book and understand the vision and it's just one potential vision. Maybe it's not, it's, it's my opinion. Right. And it's, it's not guaranteed is going to happen, uh, next three months, next quarter or next year. It's going to happen once upon tomorrow, or maybe never happened.

Maybe it's, we're going to have the people and I'm wrong. So it's very hard to make the prediction. So as a general advice for the entrepreneurs, you need to define if you afford to be an entrepreneur, are you willing to take the risk? If you have the responsibility like your family and uh and um take care of yourself so it's maybe um need to find a way to um uh have a more safer road but uh for those who definitely want to have the entrepreneurs i don't need to tell them what to do they know what to do. They know what to do. But they have ideas. And those ideas they're floating around. Opportunities like coming

every five minutes. So in one of the chapters in your book it's titled I Love LA and So Does the Metaverse. So why is the metaverse so good in LA and why do you

hate San Francisco? Well, I love Los Angeles. metaverse so why is the metaverse so good in la and why do you hate san francisco well i i love los angeles but i i grew up in a small town and i love to be in uh in a big town we have a lot of great uh entertainment we have a good deals of the sport uh uh entertainment i don't know las vegas is saying they're a capital. I think Los Angeles is a capital of the sport. We have every major team, two teams for every major sport, right?

So, but on serious note is I do believe in the future of the internet, the storytelling is going to be much more important than technology. For the past wave of the internet gold rush, you going to be much more important than technology. For the past wave of the internet gold rush, you have to be a developer, you have to be

able to understand the technology. Now we have all the technology which has enabled the new internet. Maybe some infrastructure, maybe lacking some of the infrastructure for the 3D rendering, but storytelling is going to be the most important things for the new Internet. There you go. Yeah. Do you feel that this can save Hollywood? There's been some concerns where Tyler Perry recently shut down his $800 million studio expansions after he saw the ChatGPT Sora video generation devices.

Do you think the metaverse is the thing that can save Hollywood and keep the storytelling machine there rolling? Or how do you see that whole playing out? I like how Bob Iger mentioned metaverse is a storytelling device. I like that expression. It is a storytelling device. And they partnered with Epic Games to begin with, to make the storytelling more interactive.

What I know for the fact that video games is much more, video games is bigger than movies and music combined because it's much more engaging in its activities. And the reason is every behavioral scientist who is working on video games know the interactive content is much more engaging because users want to have not to be ignored. They don't want to be a passive observer.

So every game designer knows, if I can make the mark in the walls or in games, the more responsive the environment I'm interacting with, the more satisfying and more interesting the game. Because people want to be in that center and go to the wrong directions. They want to have the opportunity to leave the mark on the wall. And those games who are rolled out, they are much more interesting than others where they're just more linear

and the corridor. And so probably where NVIDIA is really blowing up is they have their thumb on the pulse of being able to provide, you provide, potentially in the future, those immersive metaverse experiences you're talking about, right? Well, NVIDIA has many reasons to be successful companies, including, of course, the strong video games and the current cycle probably mostly demanding on the artificial, special AI architectures. But with the video games and renderings, it's definitely another wave in the demand. Yeah, I was using an older video card and older computer up until about six months ago. And then we bought the new computer with the 4090

in it and you know i was like okay well how much better is it gonna look oh my god i mean it's so much more immersive and enriching and it's like night and day it's just it just creates such a better immersive experience so i imagine once we get in the metaverse and everything's 360 and i can move the camera around where I can look in different ways. I'll never leave home, basically. Imagine to have the projects like Wikipedia rendered

in the photorealistic environments like AAA games those days. Imagine to have any websites you go in the format like that. How it's going to change the education and how it's going to change the commerce and how it's going to impact the marketing.

So that's the excitement about the next generation of the Internet. There you go. Anything we haven't touched on in your book that you want to tease out to people? Well, I think you did a good homework. We covered it all, darn it. Yeah, you nailed it. I just want to say, like we like to say here at AVEXO, it's a journey. I do believe in American dream. I do believe there is opportunity out there on the Internet.

For me, I'm leaving an example how Internet was a great equalizer of the opportunities because it still has a lot of opportunities for the social economic mobility. I just want to tell everybody who is listening to this podcast, believe in themselves, try to become

entrepreneurs and find a place in the new internet and in the metaverse and enjoy the game. There you go. And when you need to do payment processing, call Axala for your video games. There you go.

So thank you very much, Shirk, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Give us any dot coms wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs as we go out. So if you want to build a meta site for your business, come to the 80.lv. 80.lv. 80.lv.

There you go. So order up the book, folks, where Refined Books are sold. It's available now at March 5th, 2024. Once Upon Tomorrow, Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates, and get your hands on the exciting future and build a company and entrepreneurialism entrepreneurialism inspiration i love it thank you very much everyone for being on the show and visiting with us go to goodreads.com

fortuneschristmaslinkedin.com fortuneschristmaschristmas one the tiktokity all those crazy places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time