🔦 Spotlight on Landvault’s Sam Huber
Founders Factory Startup Bulletin #42
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Metaverse, immersive technology, 3D internet. Call it what you want—Sam Huber is confident in a future in which our physical lives intersect with virtual worlds.
His conviction stretches back to the start of his career, moving across game development to in-game advertising, now to at the helm of Landvault, one of the biggest 3D world builders and immersive tech developers. They now play a critical role in helping brands create and authentically monetise virtual real estate.
This month, they announced their $450M acquisition by immersive tech giant Infinite Reality. To celebrate this, we look back at an interview with Landvault CEO & founder Sam Huber, highlighting some of the most valuable things we learned.
Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:
Our top recommended reads
Highlights from our portfolio this month
Opportunities across tech—surveys, startup programmes, EIR roles
📣 Refer a friend, colleague, co-founder…
We’ve launched our new referral scheme on Substack:
⭐️ 5 referrals = Newsletter shoutout
⭐️ 15 referrals = Startup spotlight in our newsletter
⭐️ 30 referrals = 1-2-1 Zoom consultation with a member of our Ops Team
💡 Four things we learned from Landvault’s Sam Huber
In the wake of Landvault’s $450M acquisition by Infinite Reality, we share excerpts from our interview with CEO Sam Huber, and the lessons he’s learned along the way as a founder.
Embrace creativity and experimentation where possible
Sam Huber’s entry into the world of gaming was through ‘hyper casual games’, the minimalist mobile phone games like Flappy Bird that are compelling and easy to grasp. Despite their simplicity, he relished the opportunity they gave him as a developer and a founder to embrace creativity.
“Gaming felt like the ultimate expression of creativity: a chance to create your own characters, your own narrative, as well as environments on top of which people can create themselves,” Sam says.
On top of this, it taught him some valuable lessons about building MVPs—and why momentum is often far more valuable than perfection.
“For a SaaS business, you need a proper vision and a plan; with a game, you can just build something fun! It felt like the perfect opportunity to just create something fun, put it out into the world, and see how the world reacts.”
Find opportunities to solve your own pain points
The idea for Admix (Landvault’s predecessor) actually came from Sam’s experience of developing games—in particular, trying to find opportunities for monetisation and advertising.
“In-game advertising was terrible. No matter what we tried, it was too intrusive, it broke the game down, and ultimately you’d spend more time watching ads than playing the actual game. Gamers hated it, developers hated it, even brands hated it, but had no alternative. It was a necessary evil.”
Building Admix, and eventually Landvault, was an opportunity to fix this problem and design an in-game advertising tool that was actually beneficial to all parties, offering content creators the tools to monetise real estate within their games via product placement.
Always look for untapped markets
But while the principal focus of Admix was on in-game advertising, Sam never took his eyes off an even faster growing opportunity in the background: the 3D internet, which encompassed gaming but included metaverses, virtual worlds, and cryptoassets.
“I’m a believer in blue ocean strategy—rather than competing in crowded markets, creating new market space where you can dominate. I was aware that no matter how well we did at Admix, our upside was capped, and we’d always be competing with the scale of Big Tech companies.”
Pivoting into 3D world building would require expertise and experience—and when the name Landvault popped up, it appeared to be the perfect partner for metaverse activation and brand building. They were already known as one of the most prominent 3D world builders, quickly growing in size, and attracting some of the most exciting metaverse projects out there.
In June 2022, Sam announced they were acquiring the business and merging under the new name, Landvault.
The Metaverse isn’t dead
As quickly as the word ‘Metaverse’ captured everyone’s attention, it shrank back into the background. Billions of dollars of investment seemed, for some time, unable to deliver on these new immersive universes where we’d do our shopping, attend concerts, and so on. So is the metaverse dead?
Sam believes that investing in the metaverse is an investment for the future, for staying relevant with younger consumers.
“When older people say, “Oh, the metaverse isn’t for me, I'd never use it,” they’re probably right. Generation Alpha will be the citizens of the metaverse. And moreover, over the next 5 to 10 years, this generation will become the biggest customer segment in the market.”
📚 What we enjoyed reading this month
Bryan Everlasting (The Generalist)
Technology Trends Outlook 2024 (McKinsey)
When AI teammates come on board, performance drops (Harvard Business Review)
Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit? (Goldman Sachs)
🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community
Landvault was acquired by immersive tech giant Infinite Reality, valuing the business at $450M
Versed AI announced their acquisition by Exiger, a market leader in supply chain management. Cambridge University spinout Versed uses AI to enhance supply chain visibility and monitor risk
Byway (founder Cat Jones pictured above) closed a $6.4M Series A, led by Heartcore Capital with participation from Eka and other existing investors. Offering a flight free, sustainable alternative to travelling, they’re building out an AI trip-planning tool allowing customers to design custom trips
Xapien announced their $10M Series A, backed by YFM Equity Partners, to scale their AI engine for due diligence
We launched our new B2B SaaS Fund in partnership with SyndicateRoom, to invest in eight promising pre-seed businesses
📍 Opportunities
Founders Forum have launched their Big Tech Survey, seeking to understand the level of support offered by the six big tech firms (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA) to startups and scaleups in Europe. You can take part here
Tech Nation have opened applications for their Upscale programme, catered for startups on the road to Series B. Applications close August 19th—find out more & apply here
Seeking Entrepreneurs-in-Residence—we’re currently for several founder roles to lead our latest businesses in our Venture Studio. These include:
Regeno—financing the transition toward regenerative farming
TuttoAposto—personal savings AI agent
Ökofix—retrofitting platform for private landlords
MietMagie—rental rewards platform
See you next month 👋
Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.