Sandbox VR

“The nice thing is that what happens is every time you use the product, you're going with a group of friends. It's fun to take photos. You generate a video at the end of your experience that then you share to social media. And that means that this type of compa…”

“On retail, it's not a bet towards the success of the future of malls and the future of these retail spaces. It's actually kind of a bet against it. It's actually saying, like, look, there's actually really attractive retail opportunities because of the fact th…”

“And, ah, in terms of repeat usage, 18% of our guests for just that first test room have booked two or more sessions.”

“This is going to be like a retail, you know, large retail like chain that is going to need to employ one day, Many, many, many thousands of people on the ground, and it was going to be extremely operationally complex.”

“So I think by actually going negative, it actually felt more real.”

“And soon, by the end of summer, the end of this year, we will go from, we have 14 rooms now, to over 50 rooms.”

“The company's gonna be a publisher one day.”

“In order to win the market, you have to own the content, right?”

“The fact that both of you guys have you know, games DNA as opposed to Hollywood DNA was actually a really part, key part of the investment thesis.”

“They came into the company where they reduced the salary by half, and then half, and they still stuck on.”

“If you think about content and home VR, the focus is around where you get to be, and sort of the story, and this world around you, but because of the limitations of the hardware and experience, not enough of it was about who you get to be. And I think that, mo…”

“There's no technology, so we have to build technology. There's no stores to place this technology, so you have to build a store. And there's no content, so you have to build the content. But over time as you get scale, all of that changes.”

“And so I passed on the, you know, on, on, on, on the seed round, which is a really interesting, you know, place to start, start the whole conversation.”

“Based on Steam data, we were at the top 20% selling game, but we lost over 90% on that title.”

“We have a CODA database of I think, it ended up being over 400 investors, and we went through everyone who has ever invested in any kind of game, or VR or entertainment, or media.”

“We started at 30 dollars, and then during the weekend, it was booked out two, three weeks in advance, so we try to, like, control the volume, and then we adjust it, and it kind of peaked around 38, 40 dollars, and then the pandemic happened, and then we made a…”

“In the early days we worked with IMAX to bring a sandbox in the New York space. It was right next to the theater. And we found out that we had to shut our store by five PM. I was like, why? And they said, well, because people were screaming so loud that all th…”

“We're able to open in our Chicago location. And during that time, we were in a mall that had zero foot traffic. But a hundred percent of our customer booked ahead online.”

“What we had back then was just 200,000 dollars, 300,000 dollars with six people with a lifeline of six months left.”

“We were trying to raise that Series B during the early 2020, and we had about three, three months of runway left. So we had to let go most of the folks. We let go about 80% of our team.”

“In a shared space, it needs to be tracked from the environment rather than from the headset, which is inside our technology, which is tracking, you know, from a single, like cameras within a headset.”

“When we launched that, we were surprised that half the audience were female.”

“We ended up getting a location in Hong Kong. Even though Hong Kong has seven million people, we were able to find a building with zero foot traffic, and the rent was insanely cheap. You know, the water pipes were broken, and we were on a 16th floor. There was …”

“For us, we're gonna double down on immersion. We're gonna make it as real as we can, and just do a lot of tricks in our bags, We haven't used yet.”

“So that's when I decided to basically take my life saving and put it into you know, Sandbox. And I remember the moment I did that was at the bank. Even the bank executive was like, are you sure you want to do that? That's like, 95% of your savings. I'm like, y…”

“So generally, it takes about 12 months to build a title. Internally, three months of pre-production nine months of production work, but we also work post-production to make sure things look goes according to plan or any changes that we make while it's live to …”

“There is a very small subgroup that would chase a high score, and we've seen people play our zombie experience over, like, 12 times just to get a certain outcome.”

“Once you were in the experience, the game itself onboarded you.”

“We're starting to have experiences that are starting to hit box office numbers. Our titles are starting to hit, like, theatrical releases, the average US theatrical domestic box office release revenue.”

“Nowadays, people are splicing our videos and putting it on TikTok, and we're getting like, ten million views, fifteen million views, and it turns out that what we created was sort of an expression that they can use to, you know, to showcase themselves and the …”

“We're able to create this prediction algorithm, which actually allows people to be able to move and, Being VR, even if they're being blocked. So that was one component to it. And the other component was we're able to batch the data, how, how we send wirelessly…”

“So what happened was, pretty soon, we booked out our space, you know, a hundred percent a hundred days in a row.”

“For us, we lost a 110% of our revenue, because not only did people, we couldn't open any of our stores, so there was no sales, but we also had to refund everyone that booked.”

“Every location that we open up in about within two months of operations are profitable. There are some locations that the profit margin is comparable to a software company.”

“One fascinating aspect of this experience was they're bringing you up these elevators and it really does feel like you're moving up, which of course you're not.”

“So one of the things we're doing is actually, we're creating, we're rebuilding our operating system so that it's white labeled, that other developers can actually build on top of our system.”

“And that is why we decided to partner with Netflix on Squid Game.”

“If you were able to hand them the video before they leave they have a tenx chance of just talking about it, sharing it going about it”

“We were able to convince landlord to fund our project entirely.”