Founder Spotlight: Travis Wu From Highstreet
With so many Metaverse-focused projects coming up recently, it’s often hard to tell which ones will be able to stand out from the crowd. But the with up-and-coming commerce-centric MMORPG Highstreet, it’s quite easy to see its pioneering potential. Founded in 2021, Highstreet is working to combine a VR-based game with meta-retail including partnerships with several household brands. They’ve recently launched their first Initial Home Offering, where homes in the Highstreet world are being sold as NFTs, and will also be granting players access to their alpha Metaverse very soon.
Helping shepherd the project along is co-founder Travis Wu, who is no stranger to the VR space. In 2015, Travis co-founded LumiereVR, a VR company with projects in the U.S., Canada, and China. Travis is also a prolific investor in the DeFi and Metaverse space, having advised over 20 projects that have strong synergies with Highstreet. We had a chat with Travis about his previous experience in VR, how Highstreet plans to differentiate itself in the Metaverse space, his thoughts on the Metaverse mainstream adoption timeline, and more.
In the beginning, how did your previous venture, LumiereVR, help inspire you to build Highstreet? Where did the idea of merging VR with blockchain originate from?
During LumeireVR, we’ve done a great deal of experimentation with different brands and sectors. We’ve looked at how VR and immersive technology can elevate sales experiences. When digital assets started trending, we knew there was a massive opportunity to bridge the two worlds together. In the transitional period, 99% of the world wouldn’t understand the desire to own virtual goods, but by tying physical and digital together into what we call “Phygital” products, we provide a middle ground between early adopters and observers. We hope to de-mystify crypto to everyday consumers through our commerce centered metaverse.
What would you say is Highstreet’s biggest competitive advantage over other open-world Metaverse projects? How will Highstreet continue to capitalize on it?
Highstreet has a distinct focus on commerce and has a curated approach to building our world. You can say this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. While user-generated content allows the worlds to be developed much faster, you essentially outsource the building to the collective creative capability of your users. I think the philosophy behind this is amazing, but simply put - today’s technology for building virtual worlds isn’t like shooting 4k videos, you can’t just pop in and do it and expect anything polished or refined, so for now we have to be a little more curated as we target branded regions. This allows us to focus on a slightly older audience that perhaps this generation of teenagers will eventually mature into. Our approach lets brands that we onboard create their own version of Disneyland, and I believe that as technologies become more immersive, brand rivalry will also become more of a competition of storytelling.
What do you think is the biggest challenge that open-world Metaverse projects are facing now? How does Highstreet plan to overcome this obstacle?
I think it’s obviously adoption: if you tell me today that the world is going to live 100% in virtual worlds anytime soon, I’d say you’re even more delusional than the ones building these virtual worlds. Right now we have a lot of kids and teenagers who are spending their days in games, but how do we reach a wider audience? Brands are convinced because of the current tech trend, but while we see the PR statements, we haven't seen the actual business models follow suit. These are all challenges that we are trying to address. The only way to overcome this is by filtering out the noise and focus on testing business hypotheses. Whether something works or not - if it does, we will need to figure out how we can scale it.
In addition to the commerce and shopping element, Highstreet is also building an extensive MMORPG game. How do you think these two fields, retail shopping and gaming, will converge? What kind of target audience do you envision to reach out to the most — gamers or shoppers?
I think our phase one with Real Estate and Homes will mostly be comprised of crypto users speculating on NFTs, or those who are already familiar with our community. In Q2, when we roll out commerce, we hope to establish products that are Phygital and worth buying for those outside of the current demographic. Finally, in Q3, when we aim to launch play to earn, we’re hoping to foster communities beyond the crypto space to adopt to the game. Right now, most crypto players are farming and dumping tokens, and this is not good for any game. We focus on commerce before the game in hopes that we can identify reasons for players to spend rather than sell tokens - or essentially figure out if there are products worth more than pure cash. If we can successfully identify this balance then I think we can scale to a much wider audience than what we have today in Web3.
Lastly, congratulations on recently launching Highstreet’s Initial Home Offering! What’s the next big step or milestone for Highstreet — and what is the timeline for it?
Initial Home Offerings are done for each region, so our goal is to make this a monthly event as we announce and launch new regions at a more frequent pace. Aside from that, our Move-In Day is coming up in under 2 weeks, meaning that Solarium homeowners will be able to move into their homes. We hope for this to be ritualistic as well: IHO followed by Move-in Day will be the norm to come while the rest of the team focuses on ramping up our commerce plans.
Disclaimer: None of the information in this blog constitutes recommendations to buy/sell any cryptocurrency or security. This is not financial advice. You should always do your own research.
