In this episode of Chasing the Insights, I talk to visionary and technologist Daniel Liebeskind.
Daniel talks to us about web3 and the metaverse. Particularly why we should be paying attention to it.
Daniel Liebeskind is the founder and CEO of Topia, a fully customizable spatial-based virtual gathering platform that launched in May 2020.
His journey with technology and entrepreneurship began at an early age and took him from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and now, Los Angeles.
Listen to the episode here
From music festivals, birthday parties, and reunions to custom-designed spaces for Fortune 100 company events, Topia now has over 10,000 registered users that are throwing dozens of events every day. Daniel’s vision has led to a platform that allows anyone to create their own event space for free and allows us to connect in social spaces wherever we are in the world. Easy to access with no downloads and simple to customize and create with an ever-expanding asset marketplace, Topia is the best and certainly most fun way to get together when we’re apart.
Daniel’s first startup at the age of 8 was trading, buying, and selling baseball cards based on their appraised value in Topps magazines. He taught himself QBasic and experimented by hacking on games like Nibbles. By the time Daniel was in high school, he was creating games in JAVA, and websites for friends and his entrepreneurial endeavors.
He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania where he started and led the real estate investment club. This propelled him to win one of the few coveted internships for Lehman Brothers Investment Banking in 2008. When the crash hit, he was fortunate to be hired full-time by Barclays Capital, and their newly established investment banking division. He made his way west in 2011, working as a technology investor for Summit Partners. During this time, Daniel was an enthusiastic networker, even building a personal CRM, a macro-enhanced spreadsheet of over 3,000 personal contacts that he would update in real-time.
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.
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.
He 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.
By April 2020, 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.
You can connect with Daniel here:
Website: https://topia.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dliebeskind
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daniel.liebeskind
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/exploremagic
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