The AR Show: Faisal Galaria (Blippar) on Overcoming the Risks of Market Timing

7:23PM Jan 31, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Faisal Galaria

Keywords:

ar

people

company

augmented reality

build

experiences

spotify

early

work

turnaround

skype

team

thought

world

product

technology

blip

opportunity

big

metaverse

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. Today's conversation is with Faisal Galaria. Faisal is the CEO at Blippar, a company creating the tools to enable everyone to create compelling AR experiences. During the course of his career, Faisal has gained over 25 years of experience leading and growing teams and some of the world's most disruptive consumer technology companies, including Spotify, kayak, Skype and now Blippar. Just prior to Blippar. He was the chief strategy and investments Officer at gocompare, which he helped digitally transform an IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2016. Previously, Faisal was one of the youngest ever senior partners of Alvarez and Marsal, the world's largest turnaround and restructuring company, where he founded and led the European Digital Media practice. Faisal was previously a senior vice president at Spotify, where he launched Spotify in seven countries, including its biggest market in the USA. He was also an early member of the Skype team initially as Head of Global Business Development and became the European director after Skypes acquisition by eBay in 2005. Pfizer took over at Blippar, about two and a half years ago after the company went from being an early AR, pioneer and tech darling in the UK, to a company fighting its way through insolvency. Under Pfizer's leadership, the company is releasing new products and has regained its stature as a key enabler of a broad range of AR experiences. In this conversation, we talk through the challenges of managing the downs and ups of tech startups, and the recent product releases by the company, we discuss some of the challenges and working through a turnaround and how they're similar to a fresh new startup. We also talk about the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that are common to the successful companies of which he's been a part. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. That's th e AR s h o w.com. Let's dive in.

So after high school, you were intent on joining the military, but your parents disagreed. What was the source of that conflict?

The reason for wanting to join the military was, I had spent probably previous four or five years at high school as an athlete running 400 meters. And so my reasoning for going into the military was really about continuing to focus on making athletics my career. And for my parents, who were immigrants from Pakistan, and India, who left everything behind, to come to the United Kingdom and build a life here different from different opportunities than they had where they came from. It was ironic for them that rather than taking the opportunity of going to university and availing myself of all the opportunities that go into university, which was something that wasn't available to them, they thought that athletics and running wasn't the type of career that they never aspired to, or even thought about. And so they were dead set against me joining the Marines, as I was planning on doing.

And how did you resolve that conflict? What was the outcome,

I'm a good Pakistani boy. I listened to my mother and I went to university and continued to run at university and represented my city, my county, my university, the north of England, and eventually I ran for the United Kingdom to, but never quite made it into the seniors team, I was a UK junior, and ran against some of the Great's of Ford meters at the time in the late 90s, early 2000s. But never grew quite tall enough to actually challenge somebody like Roger Black, who was running on two meters at about 45 seconds. So maybe they were right, at the

passion was there the commitment was there. As you kind of think about that level of passion, enthusiasm you had for that sport and sort of competition. mindset, I guess there's there how do you apply those sorts of lessons to your life now, as a, as a business executive and leader,

It's really interesting, because I think you've captured part of it in what you just said, You're, in order to compete at that level, and to run 400 meters. And to even consider that as a career. You need to have this competitive winning mindset. You know, and having done this from from the age of 12, or 13, and then followed it through until my mid 20s. It does shape, I think it does shape the way that you think and it also gives you a certain discipline in order to be able to go out and train, train hard, and compete on a regular basis and put yourself out on the track and you're either going to, to win or not on any given any given Saturday. And whether you win or lose, you go back out and you train for the next competition and the next competition. It is a very good discipline, and you have to have the belief that you can win and that's what takes you back each week. There are a lot of lessons and read across is into running a business, you know, the margin between winning and losing in a sprint like 400 meters can be 0.1 of a second. Now and if you look at some of the some of the differences that you can have in building an internet company, it's tiny differences that make all the difference. So I remember when I was at kayak, speaking to an Expedia executive who used to say to me, who competed against booking.com at the time. And he used to say to me, you know, the thing about booking and Expedia is there 100% better than us. I thought, how can you be 100%? Better? What do you mean by that? He said, look, the reason why they're bigger, they continue to grow faster, is because they do everything 1% better than us. And if you do 100 things, 1% better, will be 100% better. I think it's those small differences. You're competing for those 1%. That makes all the difference. And I think when you take the competitive sprinting mindset, you can win by a tiny percentage. That's all it takes to win that tiny percentage.

That's so such an interesting perspective, it makes so much sense. That's the lesson you draw from the sprinting. It really is the minor differences that end up making a really big difference in the end. And this notion, it also talked about this idea that whether win or lose on Saturday, you go back out and you train again, you work hard, and you compete again. And you strive for that extra win and strive to improve every week as you kind of go along. It's been about two and a half years ago, or so you joined Blippar. And that was one of those names. That was one of my first introductions into the world of augmented reality it started over a decade ago, one of the original AR content creation of publishing companies. And I think one of UK is first tech unicorns. But something went wrong. Over the course of that it was granted started very early that caught the wave very early on this arc towards augmented reality, but something went wrong. Can you kind of describe what went wrong there? And how Blippar ended up kind of struggling and ended up in an administration, as you call them, the UK or Bakersfield was calling the US what was happening there?

Let me start Jason with what went right, because I think we have to put this into context of Blippar being the pioneer of augmented reality, it always created 10s of 1000s of AR experiences, serving some of the biggest clients in the world, raised a well over $100 million of venture capital money and launched many of the world's first in AR. So they did a they did a lot, right. Yeah, they did a lot, right. And in many ways, you know, where we find ourselves as an industry now owes a lot to backpack flippers pioneering work over the last decade. And essentially, as you said, they did a lot right. But the what they couldn't control was being too early. Undoubtedly they were too early, launching augmented reality on two and a half gene networks on the very first smartphones. And also, perhaps even more problematic up eventually for the company was some of the investors and principally the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, who roughly had invested roughly half of the 100 and $30 million that had gone into the original Blippar. When it collapsed in the summer of 2018. It happened to coincide with blip and series he fundraise on when the lead investor disappears. That scale of company, trying to find a new lead investor, in short order in three or four months, just proved to be impossible. And as a result, the company ran out of money in Christmas of 2018 and went into administration or bankruptcy, as you mentioned, and it was bought out of administration in January of 2019 by some of the other investors and principally candy capital, who were also part of the original venture capital syndicate that invested in Blip 1.0.

And so now then 2019, early 2019, there's a rebirth, an opportunity to rise from the ashes. Some of the original investors are recommitting and you join the team. And you've been in the sort of experience you've seen this sort of turnaround sort of scenario has been several years as part of Alvarez and Marsal. And you've observed the companies that have gone from the sort of struggle that Blippar has gone through, which is primarily being early and just getting unlucky in terms of the financing and have the lead investor fall out in the way that they did at the timing that they did. But I'd love to kind of hear whether there are from your experience in working with turnaround companies, commonalities between the ways that each company is struggling, or is it more like Tolstoy and that each you know, unhappy family or struggling company that kind of ends up in this sort of situation is unique in its own way.

It's probably a mixture of both. There are things that are very similar about managing a turnaround situation and largely at our verse and Marcel The companies that we typically went into the first thing we did was get our was get the fiscal discipline in place and start really getting our heads around cash flow, and making sure that we can meet our day to day, week to week, month to month liabilities and, and managing cash and making sure that the company remains solvent is job number one. And clearly, that was important in Blippar, as well, you know, you unique cash as as the lifeline of the business in order to continue the business. That's probably the similarity across any turnaround. What was unique about Blippar is, it was so early, and it had created so much IP and technology. That's not a situation that's common, the where, essentially $130 million has gone into an entity they built, you know, world class IP, and then that's suddenly available to be acquired in a fire sale. That was a unique opportunity. And one which I was attracted to kind of like a moth to a flame, I guess?

Is there nuances or triggers or an approach that you like to manage the people side of this problem? One side is the cash flow, it's got to survive. But there's also the motivation right here, you have a team that has done all this great work over this period of years. And you need that team or portion of that team to go with you on this rebirth, this new journey?

It's an interesting question, because in many ways, early startup and turnaround are similar, I look at them as being the two sides of the bell curve, either you're growing exponentially and upward to the right, or you're cutting costs and managing the business through a downturn, it's the reverse side of the slope. But in either case, you know, understanding product market fit, managing cash, working with your partners, is incredibly important. You know, and in both situations, you know, hiring the best people retaining the best people is incredibly important and vital to the long term success of the business. In a turnaround. However, the big difference is, the team tends to have been beaten up through the process that, you know, going into administration and going through a turnaround process can be incredibly innovating for the team and a team that sticks with it. I think it says a lot for the people who go through that process and stick with the company. They're made of stern stuff, and they have conviction. And as the leader of a team like that, I think you're going to take your team on a marathon journey like that, it's really about being really clear about the goals, and over communicating all the time, exactly where you are, and being incredibly transparent on everything, so that the team buy into the journey, and especially when you're a new CEO, so when you're not the founder, and you're brought in as a turnaround CEO, and you need the team that has worked together for potentially many years to buy into your plan, you've got to be available, you've got to have conviction, you've got to be able to transmit that, and your plan to the team in order for them to follow you and not take up, the team had many opportunities to do other things. And I'm incredibly grateful to the team that stayed with Blippar as formed the genesis of liberty 2.0

This is maybe an overused analogy. But when people go to war together like that, when they've been through a stressful situation like that, there's an opportunity to really bond and create the sort of trust and commitment to each other, that doesn't exist maybe in a different sort of environment. And that can be really powerful. It's totally

right, you know, going through this kind of a process together, you know, we spend a lot of time together, we're here because we have belief that we have belief not only in our technology in the market, but in each other. And it's interesting, because in a startup, you know, also you have to have, you have to have belief in your product and your and the market and the product market fit. But there's something about as you as you describing, going to war, and going through all of the rigor of going through a turnaround, which is you know, can be painful, whereas startups are exciting and new and everything's, everything's possible, going through a turnaround, whilst everything becomes possible. Once you're through it. You've got to go through the turnaround first, which can be frustrating and tiring. And, and it's difficult to people. A lot of people went into Blippo 1.0 with thinking that they were going to change the world and seeing enormous success. And for that to all disappear. Not quite overnight, but You know, the space of a few months, and then seeing their friends and colleagues go away and being trashed publicly in the press and other places, is an incredibly difficult place from which to pick yourself up, re gather, and start again. And it's it says a lot about the team that the and the resilience and the grid of the team and the belief in, in what we're building. And this the opportunity that now seems to be coalescing, and everyone to now talk about AR and the metaverse, but these guys saw it 10 years ago,

in that period of time, 10 years ago, you mentioned kayak is one of these companies that you've worked with, you've also been at Spotify, you've been at Skype, these are companies that have been on the other side of that growth curve, they've really gone through that exponential, you know, hockey stick, way up and way to their, to the right, you know, high growth, highly successful companies. And you have an opportunity with Blippar, to put these guys back on that same sort of path. But when you're at Sky kayak, Spotify, what were the the conditions, the attributes that you thought allowed them to grow so quickly, and so pervasively?

That's a great question. You know, there's something about simplicity in there, you know, having a simple idea and a simple user experience, I think, you know, when I look back at early scape and early kayak, identifying, you know, what the user problem is that we're trying to solve, and focusing on, on how to make solve that really easy. So product, what, how does the product solve that problem and make it super, super easy, is something that I think is common to Skype, kayak, and Spotify and many of the other great consumer internet companies. So I think that's part of it. And the other part of it is they're all benefit by being network businesses. So where the value of the network increases with everyone, and knew that that joint, so you know, on Skype, of course, the more people that joined the network, the more people you could call for free, you know, and so these were network businesses, and essentially, the job of customer acquisition becomes the job of your users who add users. And that makes at least part of the growth story easier to to come about.

So you have this network effect, you have this really clear problem. And as from a user's perspective, as simple solution, even though from engineering perspective is often very complicated under the hood, but is presented an experience is very simple solution to a valuable problem. And these are these the recurring elements here that really allowed these products to connect with their customers and to grow quickly, are their internal factors are commonalities between Skype kayak, Spotify, between these companies that are kind of about usually talked about this extra 1% 1%, better? Across 100, different things can be 100%, better. This notion that's really about fractions of a second can define the winners versus the those that come in second or third. Were there elements of that sort of extra little bit of winning mentality or winning something at these companies that you're now bringing to Blippar? I hadn't

thought about it until you to be mentioned it I just had a flashback to a conversation that I had with Jeffrey Prentiss and Yanis Friess, who are two of the three founders of Skype, who took me to one side when they were promoting me to be the head of Global Business Development. And essentially, they asked me, what would I do to make Skype successful, where I to be promoted to run all of this development globally for Spotify, and this was 2000, maybe early to mid 2004. So we were still very small at that time. And so we had a discussion about, you know, what would I do? And I talked about the types of partnerships that I wanted to do the building on the Google and Yahoo toolbar partnership, the toolbar distribution deals, the distribution deals with Yandex in Russia and Matt Tobin, in the Middle East. And they said, no, no, no, no, you've got it wrong. What will you do to make Skype successful? Or grow internationally? We'll do more of these deals, we'll figure out how to take money internationally, wrong answer, what would you do to make Skype successful? I'm not understanding what is missing. He said, you need to do whatever it takes. It's that commitment to do whatever it takes go wherever be wherever they really meant it as well. I remember, a couple of months later, we were in a planning session where we were talking about how to grow Skype in the United States where Skype was struggling in 2014, struggling to grow in the United States. There were there were social networks starting in the states like MySpace and Friendster, back then, and we were growing in Asia and growing in Europe but but struggling to grow in the United States. And Nicholas Lindstrom, the CEO of scape, said to me We need to find a partner in the United States because we're not growing quickly enough, organically. So who's on the shortlist to partner? And what what type of partnership deal should we do? So I drew up a list of potential partners. And then Nicklaus always used to say, well, you know, what, the gifts and the gifts, right? If we do a partnership, what do we give? And what what do we get? So we went through that. And eventually we settled on MySpace being the potential partner, because they were big in the United States, we were big in Asia. And it made sense that if we partnered, they could give us access to their US user base, and we will be able to introduce them and give them a bigger Asian user base. And so that seemed quite complimentary. And Nikos, his response to that was, okay, now, go to the US and don't come back until you've done a deal. This was metaphoric, right? Go out and figure out a way to do a deal. And when you found a way, go out and meet them, but now he kind of expected me to get on the plane, you know, if not the next day that that week, and then I spent the next three weeks, sat in the office of Myspace, in Santa Monica, literally in their in their reception. Eventually, the session is took pity on me and gave me a Wi Fi access so that I could work from my laptop. And eventually, I was able to get a meeting, and found a way to build a partnership with MySpace, which was great. And it was as we thought it would be where we were able to pull our user bases. But literally, it required me to sit in their office for three weeks until we could get that first meeting. That was the way that they described it that was doing whatever it takes to get the deal.

Do whatever it takes. So you sat in that lobby, how did you ultimately end up getting the meeting, he just ran into the CEO and chatted him up as he's want to come in and go on?

No, so I was there. And they knew I was they knew I was there. And eventually, Kyle Brinkman, who was the product director, said, yeah, alright, let's sit and tell me what it is you want to do. Because remember that this time scope was small and relatively unknown in the United States? So they were like, why would we bother with this guy who's hanging out in the lobby? So I met with, with Kyle explained in setup that whilst we're small in the United States, which is what we do in Europe, and Asia, and this is a product and gave him some of the scale and then told him what we thought the opportunity was. And then he and the CEO, the time took me for lunch, and we started to talk about what the size of the opportunity was. And then the product teams got involved in it, and it went from there. But literally, it was me sitting in the lobby, and they knew I was there. I think more than anything else, it probably amused them. But you can't miss the same person right

there every day. Why is he stalking us? Yeah. That's amazing. What a great lesson. And I think when it comes to, as you noted, this measurement of fractions of a second, there's minor differences between companies. Are you willing to do what it takes to get it done to get that deal done? It's amazing. It's now here you are. And Blippar is now on its growth path, glide path up, not down. In this resurrection, you have all of these amazing assets you have this great team has been through so much together all these experiences from past companies that you're now able to pour into Blippar. What are the conditions here, that suggest is going to be successful going forward? Are there some internal or external sort of factors that paint the time that now is right for Uber?

You know, when I was looking at flipper back in early 2019, it wasn't obvious to me, I was coming off the back of a London Stock Exchange stock listing. And I was set on actually taking a bit of time out, and certainly wasn't thinking about taking on it a failed augmented reality company. When I reengaged, with Blippar, who I first came across, in, in 2012, when we were launching Spotify in the United States, because the way that you got early access to Spotify back then was to scan a can of Coke. And we've done have probably done a partnership with Coca Cola. And they paid for early access. So you got to an invitation code by scanning a can of Coke, which would give you three months of early access to blip. So I'd known about Blippar, but you hadn't really followed it since 2012. But you know, in reengaging with the with the team, it was a lot like looking at early Skype or early Spotify in that the team was amazing. They in terms of domain expertise and knowing their space there. These guys have been building AR for 10 years and it made augmented reality work in the most challenging of situations on early smartphones on two and a half g net networks. I was, I became convinced that if they can make AR work in those conditions, they can definitely make AR work today, those impressed by the team in clearly they built great technology, you know, having pioneered augmented reality and invested a lot of money in, in IP, there was great technology and there was a great team, you know, a great deal of conviction about being able to be able to build products and services that people could use to build compelling, immersive 3d experiences. And in that way, was very similar to, you know, looking at early Skype and early Spotify, where there were small teams of people that had big aspirations. And they were Uber smart wanted to solve these big problems. And so in many ways, they're, you know, they were as smart as the Skype and Spotify teams, and it was a lot like pattern recognition. The other thing that struck me looking at Blippar, back then was, there's something about the external conditions being right for a company to be able to break out, like Skype did and like, like Spotify did, no company breaks out into is as successful as those companies have been, without the ecosystem being ready and being supportive. In the case of, of Skype, you know, there was early rollouts of fixed broadband, there was audio compression, there was Voice over IP and sip technologies. And all of those things were happening at the same time, that allowed a company like like Spotify, to take advantage of the ecosystem and broadband technology to to be able to break out. And then if you look, 10 years later, at Spotify, there was 3g that was becoming widely available. And there was audio compression, there was Facebook, that was with whom we bonded, that was helping with virality, there was h2, six, four, and all the compression technologies. And again, there was smartphones that were becoming popular back back then and app ecosystem. And all of those things happened at the same time, which contributed to allowing Spotify to break out when I looked at what was going on at Blippar. And the ecosystem that was coming together. Finally, around augmented reality, there was 5g that was becoming more widely rolled out, there was talk about hardware, you know, like, like in, in Spotify, mobile phones, and smartphones, were a huge accelerant. We're now talking about AR wearables and AR glasses, I could see big investments being made by US companies and AR hardware and software. We could see Google, for example, integrating AR into native mobile search. So you could see animals, you know, whether it was a tiger or a lion or a bear, you know, coming up with mobile search and be able to see that in, in 3d, you know, and there was the ubiquity of AR core and AR kit, the tech stack, which is becoming available in billions of phones around the world. So you could see, like in, in Skype, and in Spotify, there are these predictable patterns where the ecosystem happens, and happens to to coalesce and come together at the same time, which allows successful companies to take advantage of all of those things happening. And I thought, we've got the right team and the right technology, the ecosystem is, is coming together, it might still be early, but we've got a much better chance of being successful now than we did back in 2011. That, again, is just looking back at those predictable patterns of the ecosystem being ready.

Now these building blocks are in place, you have a stronger foundation from which to build the house of Blippar. When you describe to somebody coming in as a new employee, or to your new partners, how do you ascribe the vision for the company today, going forward?

I hope it's really simple is that we want to be the content creation platform, the AR content creation platform for everybody. So whether you're a bedroom developer or an experienced, creative or developer at a brand agency or systems integrator, we've got the platforms and tools to help you build augmented reality, and publish everywhere,

build augmented reality and publish everywhere. You have recently announced a couple of key components of that overall offering. Can you describe the products that you've announced? Sure,

the latest one is slam simultaneous localization and mapping inside the flipbuilder. Blip builder is our no code drag and drop platform that essentially allows anyone from an eight year old school kid or their teacher to build AR by drag and drop. You can if you can use PowerPoint or Adobe you can use blip builder to build compelling 3d AR experiences and publish those everywhere. The addition of SLAM flip builder is the only drag and drop platform that has slammed means that on our side flip builder takes care of the real world physics by understanding the geography of the environment to where the ceiling is where the walls are, where the floor is, to ensure that things in augmented reality or in the metaverse are positioned where they're meant to be. So if you're looking at a car, it sticks to the floor. Or if you're looking at it using AR to demonstrate a TV, it's stuck to the wall as opposed to floating in space. So we take care using slab of the physics of the metaverse so that people can focus on creativity. So that's blit builder. And that's our on ramp platform that allows everyone to build augmented reality. And then we also launched our SDK, where they are SDK, which is our professional tool that's meant for experienced developers and creatives who want to build really expensive AR experiences. And this could be across healthcare, marketing, education, architecture, whatever the vertical is, if you want to build sophisticated compelling AR experiences that go beyond what's possible in a drag and drop lay on the ability to script either in HTML or JavaScript or really allowing great creativity. That's our web AR SDK tool, which again, comes with slam but also all of the features and functionalities that that you'd expect, like, like tracking and shadows, and all of the functionality that you'd expect out of out of a professional toolkit.

So you end up here now with two kind of primary customer groups to address a broader spectrum of the market, you have the no code platform, the blip builder, and then you have the lower level set of tools, the more professional who's willing to get a little bit dirtier in the code and with these kind of lower level offerings can build something more comprehensive. What are the types of experiences you're seeing your customers creator? What types of experiences do you hope they will create with the sort of tooling you're providing

the third leg to the business, which we did talk about, and I'll just mention that briefly, which is the studio. So we offer blip builder, which is for everyone to build AR experiences. We've got web AR SDK, which is our professional toolset. And then we have the studio, which is for largely for large brands and agencies that have an idea that want to build an AR experience and build it bring it to market quickly, perhaps don't have the AR chops or experience developers and creatives to in order to do that themselves. We offer a fully managed service that leverages our toolset and we've done more AR experiences than anybody else. And so it gives access to that team of creatives and strategist and developers who can, they can build fully managed experiences for, for clients. So wherever you are, on that spectrum, we're able we have a solution for everyone from bedroom developers to a brand that needs campaign in in four weeks. And in terms of to answer your question about the types of experiences that we're seeing being built on the platform. It's really varied here. Inevitably, when you put a development platform out in into the market, you're surprised by the ingenuity and the creativity that people bring to the toolset. So we're seeing hundreds of 1000s of people using blip builder, and they're using it for from everything from kids animating their, their homework, and building in everything from models of the planets, for example, or making the geography homework come to life and see animals in on safari, jump out of the textbooks and appear in their room, to people using it for simple ecommerce and making products on a 2d website, actually more experiential, and being able to see a product in 3d, which helps with engagement and ultimately conversion through to the professional toolkit, the SDK, where people are building really interesting, compelling AR experiences. And when we've seen some of the most exciting wandering in medicine, where we see people use AR to do training in medical context. We've seen people do product launches, but it's been difficult to launch products, like at CES, you know, that didn't really happen in the same way that we that it normally would. That's an opportunity for people to build an AR experience to replicate what would have happened in an in person environment. We're seeing product launches happen now in AR which was inconceivable even two or three years ago, so we're seeing some real ingenuity and creativity being applied. And then we have our studio where we're tasked by brands, agencies and systems integrators to build really exciting AR experiences. We built a number of the world's first AR experiences. Last year, we worked with OnePlus, to launch a new mobile phone globally for them, because they weren't able to do a traditional launch with a CEO on a stage with all the journalists coming to their convention center in the way that they normally would. So they asked us to actually bring that convention center and CEO launch to the journalists. And we thought this would be something like 500 journalists, because the AR allows this to scale. Infinitely, you're not confined by how many people there's a convention center hold or how many people? Can we fly into Shanghai? And how much is it going to cost to host all of these people, you can scale much more efficiently using AR, eventually, rather than 500, journalists, were able to do an AR live broadcast to 627,000 people. So journalists and fans of OnePlus. And number one, the nordplus. Phone sold out, that was a great return on investment. And ultimately, the AR experience was seen by over 7 million people, which far exceeded the expectations anyone's had. But it was a really exciting and interesting way to use AR, to replicate a real world experience. But scale it globally so that everybody could see it. And it was hugely successful from an ROI point of view for one plus as well.

That's a great campaign. Great success. As you look across the market, we have zabar we have wicky, tude, who's now I guess, part of Qualcomm eighth wall. These are companies that have been out there for a little while they're building also a set of tooling, sometimes also with the studio sort of side what they're doing. How do you differentiate? How do you win against these other companies,

we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what other folks are doing. We're we're really focused on our customers and making sure that we really understand what our customers need and obsess about delivering and delighting our customers rather than what some of the competitors might be doing. And partly because we think that the opportunity is so massive. Now we're talking about AR and the metaverse, we think about it as being the next internet. And if it is the next Internet, and it's an immersive internet, there's going to be huge opportunities for everybody in this space. But ultimately, the winners are going to be the ones that satisfy the customer's needs and satisfy that what the customers need and want the best. And so our job at Blippar is to build the best set of tools, and serve super serve our clients. I think, you know, what we bring is a unique set of services and tools, everything from as we discussed earlier, builder, which is a no code platform that everybody can use to build augmented reality, the professional tool set where they are SDK and our studio. And across those were were serving hundreds of 1000s of customers. And we think that we have great experience of doing that we're bringing 10 years worth of experience 10 years worth of IP, we're lucky to work with some of the greats, at&t, T Mobile, Porsche, Unilever, Procter and Gamble. Our clients tell us that we're the fact that they come back to us, you know, one plus, and Kellogg's, our recent examples. Our job is not to worry about what our competitors are doing, we'll never be able to second guess, what their product teams are working on. But we do know what our clients are asking of us. And our job is to work on making sure that we delight our customers

customer obsessed, that's great. If it's not the competitors, who are what in this industry, are you most concerned about over the next 1218 months?

The thing that I stay awake and think about is where are we going as a as an industry i i fully bought into the idea that we're on the precipice of a massive revolution, as big as going from laptop computers to mobile computing. And the way that's changed the way that we interact with the Internet. I think we're on the precipice of a another seismic change, where the internet is all around us, and is available all the time. And that brings some real challenges around privacy and data. Because we're going to be living in an always on world that the way that we live our lives is going to be as much on in this new era. Vironment as in the real world. And I think it's going to be really important to make sure that access to that to this new internet is open, and that we don't end up with bad actors who are controlling the space and controlling access to this new emerging internet, who have too much access to personal data, too much access to privacy and exacerbate the bad things that the internet has created. I think we have an opportunity to relook at that in in this new, emerging immersive internet. But I do worry that we don't learn enough of the lessons from the internet that we have today that we parley too much into what might come next.

Yeah, I hold a similar set of concerns. I'm hoping that some of the perspective or the technologies around a more decentralized approach to computing maybe will contribute to our ability to hold on to more privacy as individual citizens and not have all of the data go back. And AR is going to be an order of magnitude more data about how we're engaging with the world and how we feel about the world. Yeah,

given my background at Skype and Spotify, and I recently was part of the crypto spec as well. Yeah, I'm a big believer in decentralization, and believe that the next generation of the internet should be more like the early internet, which was built by many people, and didn't have any overall controllers was built by everyone. It was federated internet that gave everyone access, and everyone was able to benefit from them. And that's why we have the wonderful services and and the internet that we have today, I worry that we could end up with a Metaverse or a new internet that looks more like AOL 2530 years ago, where everything is controlled by one entity and everything and offshoot and controlled by the one entity which really is stifles innovation. I hoped that we would build a more open and plural internet that encourages innovation, and it's decentralized, so that everyone can benefit it is not controlled by one overlord.

Yeah, you'd expect this confidence, this one that I share that we are entering this new era, generally of how we engage with personal computers, and with each other through those devices. And we have talked about this, you know, some of the concerns we have, but on top of that, there's this other meta, putting that in double quotes here, action is going on, right, which is the awareness of what's going on this hype cycle built on top of AR, and really another one of those hype cycles right now. And a lot of it's been fueled by Facebook and its parent company changing names to Metaverse platforms. And of course, the hype bubble and the reality are often out of sync with each other, are not always directly reflective of what's going on across the two. What in your mind could pop the hype bubble itself? What do you think could cause the industry as a whole to lose confidence or lose enthusiasm for what we're building?

I think we've seen that before. If you look back 910 years ago, there was enormous excitement around computer vision or augmented reality. But it didn't happen quickly enough. And I think the danger here is that the expectations around augmented reality are so hyped up at the moment that it's going to be difficult to live up to the short term expectations. I think that in the in a 10 to 15 year, time horizon, everything that we talked about is going to come to pass. But if the expectation is that if people think that we're going to magically in the next two or three years, have everybody wearing AR glasses, and everybody interacting and going to work wearing AR goggles and interacting in an AR, or VR workspace a, there's a danger that we're going to build up the expectations. And that's not going to be realized. In the short term, I think we need to take more of a 10 to 15 year horizon, because that's how long it takes for for technologies to mature Opia, where this week, as you know, we're celebrating 15 years of the smartphone. And now we can't think about life without a smartphone. But it does take 15 years for that technology to become that embedded. So I think we need to look think about what Will AR look like in 15 years time. And I think it's going to be really exciting and everything that we that we talked about today and very possibly more.

As you look out 510 15 years from now for Blippar. You talked a bit about the vision but what does the company look like in that sort of time horizon?

In my experience, you know, it definitely takes five to six years for a company to get into its stride and start to become start to break out. So we're two and a half years into that journey I expect over the next two Two or three years will raise new funding will continue to grow geographically, we have tripled revenues every year since 2019. So for the last three years, we've tripled revenues. And we've doubled the size of the organization, every year over that period, in terms of what's going to change beyond growing the company growing the revenues becoming more international is, we've spent the last two and a half years building product and technology, I think what's going to happen in the next few years, is going to be working with the ecosystem, and building partnerships, because we build a platform, but that platform is consumed the technology, the output is consumed in different places, either on apps on the web or on social media, and is access through devices be AR glasses or mobile devices. I think that what we'll see in the next few years is big important partnerships. In the same way that I talked about Skype partnering with MySpace, and Spotify partnering with Facebook, I think they're going to be some important partnerships that we see over the next few years. And we look at this as being a content creation platform that allows developers to publish everywhere, but we're looking forward to working with the ecosystem to make sure that continues to be really easy, and to be on the side of creators so that it's really easy for them to build once and publish to whichever audience they want to put in putting the creators at the heart of this new emerging internet.

Let's wrap up with a few lightning round questions. What commonly held belief about spatial computing? Do you disagree with

that it's all about vision. And we think spatial audio is going to be huge as well.

Fairness, besides the one you're building, what tool or service do you wish existed in the AR market,

we're still trying to figure out, really great tracking. And so I think the next big frontier is going to be full body tracking. No one has yet figured that I'm aware of lots of technology companies and smart folks trying to figure that out. But it's a hard problem to solve in the same way that slam was this is, it's the next big problem for AR I think,

and the full body tracking enables what in your mind, what is the big advantage?

It makes things like virtual Tryon for clothing, even easier, more realistic. It's about bringing simplicity, AR experience. And if you can track somebody's body, you can make things appear on their body in their body appear, you know, in different places, and make the whole experience of AR more realistic.

What book have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

There's a British journalist, Matthew Sayid, who wrote rebel ideas, he writes about the difference between having a team of people that are differentiated and the power of different people and different ideas, and really talks about the most insightful innovations and the most insightful thinking coming from completely heterogeneous teams, as opposed to the groupthink that happens when teams, you know, have similar experiences and similar backgrounds. And so I thought that was very insightful because the startup industry that I come from, tends to have people that may look very different, but have very similar backgrounds, you know, university educated computer science backgrounds, and it did make me think about how do you create ideas and thinking that are going to be completely different and neat, new outcomes. And that's going to be from teams that think differently.

Diversity of thought, absolutely important. If you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Faisal,

it would probably be relaxed and enjoy yourself a little bit more. When I look back over the last almost 25 years, there are some amazing, amazing experiences. And I've been lucky and privileged to be part of some amazing companies, but I probably didn't enjoy the ride as much as I could have done. And I think to spend a little bit more time enjoying all the ups and the downs. There's something to be learned from both of them. But in experiencing them a little bit more rather than charging, constantly charging on there's a lot to be said about enjoying the journey,

enjoying the journey. Do you think that's compatible with this idea of doing whatever it takes in order to win?

I think it is, you know, there was something enjoyable about being in Santa Monica, having a mission and not leaving MySpace until I met with the founders of MySpace and the product team and had the blueprint of a partnership. If you don't enjoy that, and you don't enjoy the challenge of solving those problems, business development, but I was doing it it's I would be the wrong place to be. And I think there's something to be said about taking a small step backwards and seeing the wider picture and seeing yourself and enjoy enjoying that and realizing that whether you win or lose, there's going to be the next race, as it were. Enjoy the process of trying to win as well.

Yeah, great. And it doesn't touch you'd like to share.

I'm incredibly excited about this space. I'm looking forward to AR taking off. incredibly excited about being part of the ecosystem that people are beginning to call the metaverse and everything that goes with that, you know, decentralized, finance, decentralized systems, IoT. And for those people that are listening, and think this might be an interesting space to be, we're going to double the size as we have done every year for the last three years. Again, so if you're listening in this is sounds like it's an exciting place to be that get in touch with where we're hiring, and we're excited to meet great people.

And where can they go to find you find more about you and the work you're doing? pupper

we're on social media so you can reach out to us on social media, you can reach out to me personally on on Twitter, I'm phase underscore falls of that, fa i s underscore four, or reach out to a through our website at info@blippar.com. Awesome.

Buy some Thank you very much for the conversation.

Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. In it I speak with Brad Scoggin. Brad is the co founder and CEO of Arbor XR and xr device management solution for enterprises that is currently being used by more than 400 companies around the world. Previously, Brad was the co founder and CEO of Springboard VR, a venue management solution for VR arcades, which Brad successfully sold during the height of the pandemic. We talked about Brad's perspective working at the frontiers of tech as a non technical founder and the near-death experiences that startups faced. We also discussed the incredible growth that Arbor XR has seen over the last year and the foundation he laid to enable it. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time.