"Don't hesitate to ask for help." Founder Dima Lylyk of Zeeon.space shares with us his bold venture into the Metaverse and the support he received along the way.
“The metaverse is something happening for the next decade,” says Dima Lylyk, CEO and founder of Zeeon.space, a metaverse platform for education and co-working, “and not just for a few months during the pandemic.” Lylyk, an enthusiast of extreme sports like free-ride skiing down virgin mountains and downhill bicycling, has it in his blood to boldly venture into the new, uncharted space of the metaverse.
What exactly is the metaverse? Wired has acknowledged the amorphous nature of the term, but conceded that it represents “a broad shift” in our engagement with technology, indicating deeper engagements in the virtual world through virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), virtual economies and more. The hype, according to Lylyk, is currently focused on open-world gaming experiences such as Decentraland (a 3D virtual world platform) or Sandbox (a virtual gaming world). Zeeon takes the best of these open-world concepts from the gaming metaverse and brings them into the corporate world through open-world classrooms and conference centers.
“I really appreciate people with the vision and passion, who have learnt how to leave their fantastic visionary worlds and make those visions into reality. I learnt how to not only dream, but actually do what you dream about.”
As much as the metaverse is also a ‘fantastic visionary world’, Lylyk is a start-up founder with business priorities in the real world. He shares about a roadblock common to many start-ups: a poor initial co-founder fit. He attributed the obstacle to the rush to move fast, and the fear of losing time to capture the opportunities that the metaverse presented.
How did he overcome this obstacle? “Ask for help and introductions…as there is always someone who’s gone down a similar path who can advise you,” counselled Lylyk, who gained significant support from the coaches of the Workplace Accelerator and his technical advisor. His realisation that the metaverse is not merely a passing fad, but a long-term development merely sped up by the pandemic also helped. “Once I realised that [the metaverse is here to stay], losing some months with the wrong people didn’t seem so frightening anymore.”
Like many start-up founders, the hardest decision was to give up the comfort of one’s old lifestyle to venture into the unknown. “I wanted more than just being a good employee, and once I had the idea for metaverse, the way I felt made me realize ‘this is it, I need to sacrifice everything for this dream’.
And I did.”