Founder and CEO, Xsolla (Xsolla Inc.)
Once Upon Tomorrow: Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates by Shurick Agapitov
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About Shurick Agapitov
Shurick Agapitov, founder and CEO of Xsolla, released a book titled *Once Upon Tomorrow: Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates* in March 2024. In interviews promoting the book, Agapitov described it as presenting his vision for a "new internet" that some people call the metaverse, which he characterized as a 3D, video game-like iteration of the internet. He stated that he wrote the book to inspire the next generation of internet entrepreneurs and to encourage readers to find opportunities for themselves in what he called the "3D internet." Agapitov also discussed his earlier venture, X.LA, which he described as a platform intended to facilitate revenue distribution for intellectual property creators and owners, allowing contributors to receive a percentage of sales rather than a one-time payment. In various interviews from 2022 to 2024, Agapitov elaborated on his definition of the metaverse, stating that it is not necessarily about virtual reality or specific platforms like Roblox or Fortnite, but rather a new internet built with video game technologies. He expressed the view that the metaverse will consist of "meta sites" — 3D spaces developed by video game developers for brands and intellectual properties. Agapitov also commented on the role of large companies, saying he would not be surprised if Facebook (Meta) fails within four to eight years, and noted that the inability to create a currency that governments allow for transactions is a "deal breaker." He emphasized that he believes people in the future will work more for protocols and themselves than for corporations.
Transcript (49 segments)
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Chris Voss0:37
Hi folks, Voss here from the Chris Show.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen, the IR lady sings, that makes it official. Welcome to the Big Show. We certainly appreciate you guys having you here as always. The Chris Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, which makes it the best kind of family. As always, be sure to follow the show on LinkedIn.com/ChrisVoss, YouTube.com/ChrisVoss, ChrisVossOne on TikTok, and all those crazy places. We are on the internet today. We have an amazing young man we're going to be talking to. Shurick Agapitov is on the show with us today. He is the CEO and founder of Xsolla, 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 into the future of the internet, the metaverse, etc. As the founder of Xsolla, 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. Xsolla under his leadership is fostering a more decentralized and inclusive industry. Welcome to the show, Shurick, how are you?
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Shurick Agapitov2:04
Very well, thank you for having me.
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Chris Voss2:09
Thank you for coming, we really appreciate it. So give us any docs, where do you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better?
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Shurick Agapitov2:46
I like the exotic domains, so I have 80.lv, 80.lv, and I have a .for the consumer destinations, The Gamers Destinations, which is my new addition. And of course, Xsolla.com is my prime business, which I found this company almost 20 years ago now.
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Chris Voss2:48
There you go, I think I've helped fund it through all the video game purchases I made, so I'm one of your customers technically. So give us, we play a few video games around here, so give us a 30,000-foot overview of your new book, 'Once Upon Tomorrow.'
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Shurick Agapitov2:54
It's a book about the future of the internet, which some people call the metaverse. A lot of people misuse or overuse the metaverse, saying like Roblox or Fortnite is a metaverse. In my definition, those are virtual worlds, and the metaverse is a new internet which looks like video games. The first chapter is about how Zuckerberg got it wrong, and the second chapter explains my accent and where I come from.
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Chris Voss3:28
I was going to bring that up. One of my first questions for you, you kind of throw some shade at old Zuckerberg there in the first chapter. So how do you define metaverse separately from what his vision was, or is there a separation?
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Shurick Agapitov3:41
The fact that somebody could name their company Meta and then declare themselves as the CEO of the metaverse is 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. 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 again. There's a new thing called metaverse, and I want to own it. He definitely saw the future of it.
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Chris Voss4:30
Now there's a lot of people who talk about the future of the internet as this thing called Web3. Is your version of what the metaverse is different from Web3? How does that all work together or not?
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Shurick Agapitov4:44
Yeah, it's funny. A few years ago, people started using this Web3, and a lot of experts would explain what's Web1, Web2, and Web3 and the difference. I will not repeat that. I think a lot of people have heard that explanation in slightly different variations. For me, the most exciting thing is not Web3, but Web3D. I do believe the internet is getting as a spatial place or 3D, and life seems to be becoming like a video game.
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Chris Voss5:22
What's your thoughts on the new Apple Google Glass, basically?
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Shurick Agapitov5:26
Well, VR headsets like this are going to be a subset of the metaverse. It's not the metaverse, it's one of the many screens where you can experience the metaverse. I think virtual reality 3D glasses headsets are going to be consumer choice. Some people like to invest in full HD TV systems, some have movie theaters at home, but some prefer to experience the internet and content on a small mobile screen. The important elements of the metaverse are similar to the real world. There's an environment, rooms, I call them metaverse sites, there are users or people, real-world business opportunities. Web3 guys would see that as wallets, identity profiles, and stuff. Similar to real life, we have stuff, and the metaverse is going to have digital items. When we have virtual spaces and we carry a backpack of digital items like in video games, and then we can walk through one virtual world, say Roblox, to Fortnite through some sort of portal. The analogy in the previous internet is a hyperlink, but it's going to be a hyperportal. When you walk through that from one virtual world to another, that is the metaverse moment. That means we have the metaverse. In the future, you're going to carry digital items from every experience you have online. Right now, you go to every website and accept cookies. In the future, you're going to accept digital items as a reward for your attention and for being tracked by advertisers, and redeem those items for real goods or coupons.
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Chris Voss7:40
I know Amazon has a deal with different games like Destiny and Modern Warfare where they give you free ships and things because you let them track you through Amazon. Is it kind of like that? Maybe that...
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Shurick Agapitov8:01
Digital items have existed for decades with video games. What Amazon is doing is giving away those items for Prime users, adding value for Prime users. Right now, we cannot see who received those items just to be tracked. It's not that. It's a digital item very much valued by gamers, and gamers love them. There are 2.3 billion gamers out there. I just want to highlight that number for the audience.
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Chris Voss8:35
So in the future, will these be on the blockchain so you can track them?
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Shurick Agapitov8:39
Blockchain is one of the good candidates for the standard. Imagine NFTs, but it's an open API. The idea is when you accept those items, say you accept a virtual cup of coffee for watching an advertisement, so people pay for your attention. You get this virtual cup of coffee, and you can redeem that virtual cup of coffee in retail, or maybe transfer it to somebody else who would appreciate it. It could be on blockchain, but it's not necessary.
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Chris Voss9:19
Okay, let's come back to the book. Let's talk about you a little bit. Your second chapter 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 Silicon Valley and doing what you're doing now.
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Shurick Agapitov9:35
I grew up very, very poor in Siberia. My dad was an alcoholic, and my mom was working class. She always encouraged me to learn math and maybe one day have a desk job. I studied a lot, and math was kind of easy for me. I saw it as a way out. Unfortunately, I didn't finish the math university. I dropped out for it and started my business. I was 21 years old when I started Xsolla, really.
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Chris Voss10:14
What was the vision you saw there? What was the proponent for you starting your own company?
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Shurick Agapitov10:19
This was the internet. I was fascinated by the internet. The internet proposes and invites so many opportunities. You can learn virtually anything on the internet. I liked that concept, learn to learn. My mom told me I should learn to learn, but I chose to sit on the internet with so much more opportunity than whatever local job or career could offer. I learned many things on the internet and started my internet business.
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Chris Voss10:54
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 and snow. So what point do you come to America?
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Shurick Agapitov11:06
I came to San Francisco. I read on VentureBeat or TechCrunch that if you have a tech startup, you should go to San Francisco and maybe raise money in Silicon Valley. I moved to San Francisco in 2009, and I failed to raise money. I moved to Los Angeles.
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Chris Voss11:25
Yeah, there was a 2009 recession. Maybe something happened in 2008. Maybe it's my accent again. So I failed, and it turned out to be the best thing that would happen to me. There you go. So failure happens to everybody, but you persevered through it and kept it going. And now you've built this amazing company. The future is there. How is Xsolla positioned for the metaverse? I imagine one of the reasons you're writing this book is you see that there's an incredible future and maybe a profit center for your company.
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Shurick Agapitov12:01
I believe the future of the internet will be built with video game technologies. It's worth noting that a lot of innovation happened because of video games. If you think about Nvidia and artificial intelligence, they exist because of video games. Self-driving cars exist because of Nvidia, and Nvidia exists because of video games. If you think about VR, the future may look like before a surgeon does remote surgery in virtual reality. I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of gamers who will play, maybe not surgery games, but any kind of game. So we'll have virtual reality because of video games. Blockchain adoption is most likely going to happen for gaming, similar to when people buy computers to play video games and learn how to use the computer later. I think a lot of innovation will happen because of video games.
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Chris Voss12:59
There you go. I have a 4090 behind me in my computer, an Nvidia 4090. Being able to go fast works for video games, but it works fast for everything else. I sure wish I had bought Nvidia stock last year, because that thing is taking off. Which is probably an indication of what you're writing about and talking about in your book. You indicate that we're talking trillions of dollars here. Your chapter three, you see an incredible future market for this.
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Shurick Agapitov13:34
I think that's the future of the internet. A lot of things are going to be reset. User acquisition and privacy regulations are working against the current establishment, Facebook and Google. Those things have changed, and the way we experience it visually is also changing. As an internet entrepreneur, I want to share that vision with future internet entrepreneurs. It's going to be slightly different from before.
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Chris Voss14:05
There you go. Now you refer to the book in something called metaverse sites. What are meta sites?
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Shurick Agapitov14:10
It's a website which is built in the new internet. A metaverse site is every company that has a website today. In the future, they will want to have a metaverse site, which is basically like a mini MMO RPG. It could even replace commercials because developing games is getting easier and easier. Those are mini-games. I think every brand would like to have, every school would like to have metaverse sites. Because we have artificial intelligence-generated content, all synthetic content, an immersive experience is going to be absolutely necessary for users. There is so much information, and attention spans are getting narrower. People spend a lot of time on TikTok, but they spend more time on Roblox. That thing is crazy. Kids love that. That's how the internet may look in the future. Between different experiences, right now Roblox is a sample of the corner of the metaverse, but it's not the metaverse. It's a virtual world. When those virtual worlds connect with each other, that is the metaverse.
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Chris Voss15:32
That's going to be amazing. I was just sitting here thinking how can I turn the ChrisVossShow.com podcast into a video game so people can interact with it like you're talking about. Then I realized it would be really cool if somebody could virtually come sit in on an interview like this one, and then they could jump in and ask questions of the guest. An AI system would go 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?
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Shurick Agapitov16:04
Yeah, that's exactly how I think it's going to be. Virtual video games with a lot of technology and AI could build a very engaging NPC. I think in the future, brands will be represented by NPCs as characters because AI will enable us not only to have robot customer support but embed personality and character. You know how to feel about those different characters. People in Hollywood are developing characters professionally. I think it's going to work for brands and develop very interesting teaser characters with slight imperfection that represents the brand the way the brand wanted.
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Chris Voss17:00
Wow, so my future is being an NPC podcast host in the Chris Voss Show. Well, if you want that, welcome to the Chris Voss Show podcast. I am here to serve you. So there you go. You talk about Ethereum and blockchain and coin, I think it being a part of the internet. What are your thoughts on that, if you want to tease a little bit?
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Shurick Agapitov17:24
Well, as I mentioned before, those are good candidates for the standards. The internet needs to have open standards, like the email standard is working really well. We all use it, although there were attempts to make email a private technology and charge everybody a few cents for email sent and received. I think there could be some sort of standards, and NFTs are a good candidate for the standards. As an anecdote, every time we see a problem of too many standards, it's 10 different standards for one specific thing. For example, for how these worlds would connect with each other, how items will work, people come and say it makes sense to have one standard, and they create one standard, and at the end we have 11 standards. That happens all the time.
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Chris Voss18:20
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?
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Shurick Agapitov18:29
I think the metaverse or any internet, when it's a small city or small country-sized population, it reflects our society. Whatever bad things we have in every town, there's a bad corner on any sample of the population. So we'll have some bad neighborhoods. 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 the space in the future. What's some advice you give to entrepreneurs who are interested in entering the metaverse space?
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Chris Voss18:51
Well, look, you need to find the role. First of all, read the book and understand the vision. It's just one potential vision. Maybe it's not, it's my opinion. It's not guaranteed to happen in the next three months, next quarter, or next year. It's going to happen once upon tomorrow, or maybe never happen. Maybe we'll have something else. It's very hard to make predictions. As a general advice for any entrepreneur, you need to define if you can afford to be an entrepreneur, if you are willing to take the risk. If you have responsibilities like family and taking care of yourself, maybe you need to find a safer road. But for those who definitely want to be entrepreneurs, I don't need to tell them what to do. They know what to do. They have ideas, and those ideas, they fool around. Opportunity comes every five minutes.
Yeah, yeah. 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?
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Shurick Agapitov20:20
Well, I love Los Angeles. I grew up in a small town, and I love to be in a big town. We have a lot of great entertainment, good deals over sports entertainment. I don't know, Las Vegas is saying where the capital is. I think Los Angeles is really the capital of sports. We have every major team, two teams for every major sport. But on a serious note, I do believe in the future of the internet, storytelling is going to be much more important than technology. For the past wave of the internet gold rush, you had to be a developer, you had to understand technology. Now we have all the technology that enables the new internet. Maybe some infrastructure for 3D rendering, but storytelling is going to be the most important thing for the new internet.
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Chris Voss21:18
There you go. Do you feel that this can save Hollywood? There have been concerns where Tyler Perry recently shut down his $800 million studio expansion after we saw the ChatGPT Sora video generation devices. Do you think the metaverse is the thing that can save Hollywood and keep the storytelling machine rolling? How do you see that playing out?
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Shurick Agapitov21:46
I like how Bob Iger mentioned that the metaverse is a storytelling device. I like that expression. It is a storytelling device, and they partnered with Epic Games to make storytelling more interactive. What I know for a fact is that video games are much bigger than movies and music combined because they are much more engaging. The reason is every behavioral scientist working on video games knows that interactive content is much more engaging. Users want to not be ignored, they don't want to be a passive observer. Every game designer knows that if you can make the mark on the walls in games, the more responsive the environment, the more satisfying and interesting the game. People want to be at the center and go in wrong directions. They want the opportunity to leave a mark on the wall. Those games are much more interesting than others that are more linear.
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Chris Voss23:01
So probably where Nvidia is really blowing up is they have their thumb on the pulse of being able to provide, in the future, those immersive metaverse experiences you're talking about.
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Shurick Agapitov23:13
Nvidia has many reasons to be successful, including of course the strong video games and the current cycle probably mostly demanding on AI architectures. But with video games and rendering, it's definitely another wave.
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Chris Voss23:33
I was using an old video card and older computer up until about six months ago, and then we bought the new computer with the 4090. I was like, okay, how much better is it going to look? Oh my God, it's so much more immersive and enriching. It's night and day. It just creates such a better immersive experience. I imagine once we get into the metaverse and everything's 360 and I can move the camera around and look in different ways, I'll never leave home.
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Shurick Agapitov24:06
Imagine having projects like Wikipedia rendered in a photorealistic environment like triple-A games today. Imagine having any website you go in in that format. How it's going to change education, commerce, and impact marketing. That's the excitement about the next generation of the internet.
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Chris Voss24:30
There you go. Anything we haven't touched on in your book that you want to tease out to people?
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Shurick Agapitov24:38
Well, I think you did a good homework and we covered it all. You nailed it. I just want to say it's a journey. I do believe in the American dream. I do believe there is opportunity out there on the internet. For me, I am a living example of how the internet was a great equalizer of opportunities. You can still have a lot of opportunities for social economic mobility. I just want to tell everybody listening to this podcast to believe in themselves, try to become entrepreneurs, and find their place in the new internet, in the metaverse, and enjoy the game. And when you need payment processing, call Xsolla for your video games.
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Chris Voss25:30
There you go. Thank you very much, Shurick, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Give us any docs wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs as we go out.
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Shurick Agapitov25:38
If you want to build a metaverse site for your business, come to 80.lv.
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Chris Voss25:45
There you go. Order up the book, folks, wherever fine books are sold. It's available now, March 5th, 2024. 'Once Upon Tomorrow: Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates.' Get your hands on the exciting future and build a company. Entrepreneurialism inspiration. I love it. Thank you very much, everyone, for being on the show and visiting with us. Go to Goodreads.com/ChrisVoss, LinkedIn.com/ChrisVoss, ChrisVossOne on TikTok, all these crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.