Daniel Liebeskind has been working to build better communities on the internet for several years. His vision for a better internet, one where we built one relationship, conversations, and community, rather than attention, is the driving force behind the company that has now raised over $5 million from celebrity investors like Alexis Ohanian and Kevin Durant.
What was your journey like to get where you are?
Daniel’s journey with technology and entrepreneurship began at an early age and took him from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and now, Los Angeles. Born in White Plains, NY, he watched and learned from his dad, who commuted to the city every day, where he ran a financial services firm and invented technology platforms for the insurance industry.
He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, one of the top business and accounting schools in the nation. There, he started and led the real estate investment club, which propelled him to win one of the few coveted internships for Lehman Brothers Investment Banking in 2008. When the crash hit, Daniel was fortunate to be hired full-time at Barclays Capital and their newly established investment banking division, where he specialized in healthcare technology companies. He made his way west in 2011, working as a technology investor for Summit Partners, specializing in SaaS and healthcare.
During his time in venture and investment banking, Daniel was an enthusiastic networker, even building a personal CRM, a macro-enhanced spreadsheet of over 3000 personal contacts that he would update in real-time. Daniel commuted an hour each way from San Francisco to Menlo Park, and he started coding again on his train rides. In 2013, Daniel attended Hack Reactor, where he rediscovered his passion for coding, creating, and building companies.
Over the next five years, Daniel would create approximately 30 apps and companies: mobile games, a mobile drink ordering app for bars, a motion-activated drone interface, security software, blockchain-based crowdfunding technology, and more. In 2015, he founded a startup called BODY, which was a webRTC-based platform for fitness professionals to create their own virtual studios and teach interactive classes where the instructor could see the participants and participants could see one another.
By 2018, Daniel became Chief Product Officer for Everipedia, working to provide economic incentives for knowledge. Here he nurtured his interest in human connection and reimagined and rebuilt Everipedia to be a social platform. Daniel began creating a vision of building an immersive platform for customized experiences built around microtransactions and AI. He saw a need for a community-based immersive event space, one that was spatial, where groups could connect from around the world in a way that felt like being together in real life but enhanced in ways that could only exist virtually. A service that wasn’t focused on a one-to-many or few-to-many and could evolve the way we socialize and come together online. Then the pandemic hit.
By April 2020, Daniel thought he might have missed the boat on his idea. But in just three weeks, he and his team built a prototype of a spatial experience where users could wander in and out of conversations with people just as they would in a real-world setting. The result was the first iteration of Topia, and their first event was for a festival celebrating life through the recognition of death and grief.
By August 2020, Topia had become a co-sponsor and hosted over 25,000 attendees of Burning Man, one of the largest community arts-based festivals in the world. Next, they would host a global corporate event for Asana for their IPO. Today, Topia is leading disruption in the virtual meeting and events space by focusing on community and engagement rather than meetings.
In a simpler phrase, what is your company exactly doing?
Topia is a free-to-use social experience platform using spatial video chat in customized virtual worlds right in your browser.
What about Metaverse are you most excited for in the future?
The Metaverse is going to solve many of the problems we see with the current use of the internet. A network of interoperable companies and features will see the end of our attention-based internet economy and give rise to relationship and community-based economies focused on creators and influencers.
Why should we be paying attention to the Metaverse?
Every big tech firm is betting heavily on the Metaverse, and in many ways, it is already here. As broadband continues to expand the ability to communicate in real-time within virtual worlds will become the new normal!
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