Hello everybody, we're back and as you can see we're here with none other than Yat Siu. Yat, it's great to have you with us.
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Absolutely. Yat, we've been trying to get you on MSG for the longest time. The reason being because MSG is the official Upland UC broadcaster. Oh nice. We're also now the Sandbox Ambassador. So the entire Upland community wanted to hear from you, and I really wanted to get you on MSG because they watch us. I really want to get your comments on that, but it's great to have you here with us. Let me start off with the hardest question. Upland and Sandbox have partnered finally. How do you look at that?
I think it's very bullish. I think one of the things that I like about Upland is that it kind of created a web 2.5 type of meta, in terms of bringing people who are not web3 natives into the web3 world through an interface that was much more ahead of its time in that thinking. Whereas Sandbox is very much more web3 natives; you have to have a MetaMask, you have to have a wallet before you can start using it. Bridging the two creates an opportunity where you can cross-mix the audiences, get more joint benefits. At the end of the day, I think of it a little bit like metaverses unite, especially with the market the way it is. I do think that gaming and metaverse is in many ways grandfathered memetic in a way, because it is about culture and it is about social. So I think it's very exciting.
Sure. Have you seen the Sparklet token that Upland just launched? The U token. What's your opinion on Sparklet token and the tokenomics, and the way it has given the thing to the users and not to the investors? They've given Sparklet to the users that have actually used it.
I think it's exciting. I think it's great. It's a kind of community engagement model. I think one of the challenges of Sparklet has been around the fact that the metaverse meta hasn't been as popular, right? So if Sparklet launched as a meme coin on Solana, it probably would have a very different type of messaging. But I think what a lot of people might not fully appreciate is that memes really is culture, and it doesn't really matter what culture it is. So there's a kind of expression. In many ways, I would argue that Bitcoin is a meme in and of itself. If you think about it, it's got a very faith-based, cult-like following in a way, but it's still memetic in nature. Sparklet is the same. They just maybe fell a little bit out of favor short term, but at the end of the day, they've got a community, they're growing from that, and of course there's work to be done. Once a token is launched, you actually have work that needs to be done. You got to put it on more exchanges, you got to talk about it more, you got to bring institutional backing. One of the things that I keep saying is that in this era of tokens, the institutional support of the tokens starts to become more and more important. How do you stand out among millions and millions of tokens in the ecosystem? It's not going to be just because you're one meme and you're another meme and maybe you hit the jackpot. That's possible because maybe Binance has an interest in you or something, or luck. That happens. That to me is more like a lottery. But at the end of the day, how do you distinguish that? I think it comes down to: are they building? Are they serious? Does it have institutional backing? Is it there for the long term? To me, that's what matters more longer term.
Absolutely. So we did a bit of due diligence and we know you're an Uplander. You have an account in Upland. Do you play Upland?
Yes, so I wish I had more time to play, but as you know, I'm on a plane a lot and I'm all over the world. So I have an account on Sandbox, NFTs, and so on, but unfortunately time hasn't been possible for me to do so. But as you may also know, Animoca is an investor in Upland, and I'm also on the board of Upland. So we do know about the progress and we're very supportive of them.
Sure. Can we expect you at the next Upland Genesis Week or any of the following ones?
I guess I'll talk to Dirk about that and see what we can do. I think the community would love for Animoca to be there. We'd love to hear your guidance. It would be a pleasure to be there. I think both the team there, we have regular calls, and I think again timing was tough. Remember, they're based in the US and so on. A lot of things that maybe they wanted to do, they just wouldn't do or shouldn't do. I think now we have an opportunity with a new direction with Donald Trump, which I think will be great for a company like Upland that is based in America.
Absolutely. You've talked a lot about how the next bull run of metaverse is going to come from AAA games. Can you talk a little bit about how you see that?
So maybe to clarify, it's not specifically just AAA games. It's gaming as a broad concept. But I would say that we've kind of gone through the second stage already, which is the social gaming led very much by TON and Telegram in terms of creating user adoption in that area. And by the way, I think meme coins do the same thing. I think meme coins are onboarding lots of people into web3 that are maybe not really into web3 per se. They go there for economic reasons, and then they actually stay for the culture. Once you have a wallet and once you're there, you're like, 'Okay, what else can I do? Maybe I can trade some tokens, maybe I can do something else, and then maybe I can start experiencing a metaverse experience, maybe I start playing a web3 game.' But there are certain types of gaming experiences that I think are going to onboard a much larger number of people, just because they already have something where people say, 'I'd love to play that game,' not because there's tokens involved or because they understand that meta. So if you look at Off the Grid by Gunzilla, which is also one of our portfolios, they actually have a really high-quality game that is now early access number one on Epic, trending also on PlayStation and Xbox, and has a gaming experience that is on par with Apex Legends or PUBG. That's actually where the next distinction needs to come from. These games take three to five years to make. It's not something that can be done overnight. I think the first phase of gaming seemed to disappoint because people said, 'Oh, the game doesn't look that great, but hey, it's only been around for a couple of years.' Now after three to five years, you actually get those high-quality games coming out. It's important to know that the web3 gamer through TON, through Axie, even Sandbox to some extent, Upland a little bit different, is that many of them are people who aren't traditional gamers in the classic sense. They're there because they're maybe farming, or they play a different type of game, or they don't play games and then they've experienced it that way because they own it and it's a passive type of gameplay. And that, by the way, people don't sometimes fully appreciate: there are 3.4 billion people who play web2 games, and there are about 2.8 billion people who don't play games. So what web3 games are doing today, the classic ones, is they're actually onboarding more people who don't play games into gaming. But games like Off the Grid are the ones who are actually moving the 3.4 billion into gaming, because what you're competing with is not a visual experience like Upland or Sandbox; what you're competing with is a visual experience like PUBG or Fortnite. That's the next wave, and I think that will drive a lot of mass adoption for our industry.
Absolutely. Since you talked about a lot of bots, how do you as a VC distinguish when you're looking at a project between bot users and real users?
