Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb, co-founders of Myspace and Jam City, are on to their next business venture with the launch of West L.A.-based Plai Labs, a Web3 and artificial intelligence-powered social platform.
With a $32 million seed round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz that closed on Jan. 13, DeWolfe and Whitcomb are bringing their experience in gaming and social media to the next generation of the internet – Web3 – by intersecting a variety of emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. The funding will be used to expand Plai Labs’ team of engineers and designers.
The company’s first product is the blockchain open world role-playing game “Champions Ascension.” Players embark on quests, battle one another and trade digital items. Bringing in the Web3 aspect to the game, players have to purchase their characters in the form of an NFT, or nonfungible token. Players can also buy NFT pets to accompany their characters.
The Prime Eternal Champion NFTs, which were released last February for players to purchase, are priced at approximately $1,159. From this initial drop, 7,622 NFTs were minted — or published — on a blockchain, allowing them to be bought, sold and traded. The total sales volume for these digital assets was about $69,000, according to NFT Stats.
Andrew Chen, Robin Guo and Arianna Simpson, Andreessen Horowitz investors, said in a blog post, “(DeWolfe) and (Whitcomb) have been at the forefront of past eras of technology, and now they are laser-focused on the future. We believe that the future of social networks begins with games, and the best games have strong communities, enticing core gameplay, and robust meta-progression systems that together define how players interact and socialize with each other. Web3 games in particular have the opportunity to create the decentralized metaverse of the future with their distributed infrastructure and focus on empowering players through asset ownership.”
The Vision
DeWolfe said he and Whitcomb have always been on the lookout for trends and believe in starting the right company at the right time based on those trends.
The pair co-founded the social media platform Myspace in 2003, which sold to News Corp. for $580 million in 2005. They went on to build the mobile game studio Jam City in 2009, jumping on the next wave of gaming.
“Then, not a lot happened from an innovation perspective on the web until the last couple of years,” DeWolfe said. “There’s something really big happening. There’s a new iteration happening on the web, which is both blockchain, which gives people ownership, kind of takes big tech out of the middle and … involves the whole community. And then there’s AI, which has been around for a very long time, but now all of this technology has been unlocked to the point where you can actually put it in the consumer’s hands.”
DeWolfe said the pair’s mission with Plai Labs is to create new social experiences using their expertise in social gamification and new technologies.
With their previous forays in building startups, DeWolfe said he learned what to do — but also what not to do— when scaling a company.
“MySpace was literally the largest website in the world. We tried to do, in my opinion, probably too many things instead of just focusing 1,000% on the user experience in the early days,” DeWolfe said.
He explained that with Myspace they tried too hard to monetize their user base.
“When you try and overly monetize a site or a service during its growth days, it can bump up against the user experience,” DeWolfe said. “What I’ve learned is that user experience is always first, especially if you have a service that people come to rely on and that they use every day. If you have a great service that everyone is using on a daily basis, the monetization always comes. And if you focus on those users and you focus on retention and engagement, the money always follows.”
Plai Labs’ main focus is to bring new technologies directly to consumers.
“I think the big difference is going to be building these products, which we’ve been working on for the last year and a half from the ground up, and using these technologies and having them be decentralized, giving power to the community and sort of taking big tech out of the middle,” DeWolfe said.
Earning trust
Wes Morton, chief executive and cofounder of the West L.A.-based business consulting company Creativ Strategies, said building a startup with Web3 technologies is “extremely challenging” for two reasons — it is an immature industry, and it’s not easy to market these companies. He said Web3 clients he has worked with have had a difficult time marketing their businesses on mainstream social media sites.
“The nascent state of the industry makes it very challenging, but obviously investors are taking a gamble that it’s going to be big in the future,” Morton said. “You can’t advertise on main social platforms for certain products … because I think there’s been so many bad actors in the space and good companies have a really hard time breaking through because these larger media tech companies have just kind of put the kibosh on all advertising.”
He said DeWolfe and Whitcomb’s experience in the tech space will help them raise funding and gain exposure for Plai Labs.
“The guys have a nose for innovation, so I think the track record lends them a lot of credibility,” Morton said. “I think that’s why a big VC like Andreessen Horowitz invested in them.”
Morton said the co-founders of Plai Labs, and other players in the Web3 space, have to work extra hard to earn consumer’s trust.
“So many companies have kind of soured it for consumers and the media; there’s been so much fraud… that a lot of people have shied away,” he continued. “I think the one interesting marketing innovation that’s coming out of Web3 is a focus on community. Something that brands didn’t really do before, but that the Web3-native brands are really good at, is building communities on Discord and Twitter. Out of all the successful NFT and crypto projects I’ve seen, it really comes down to the community that they’re building that is going to make or break these different companies.”
