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Welcome back to Who Are These Startups?

I am the startup coach, founder of Toronto Starts and with me today is Jerry Chen, CEO and co-founder of Gravity.

Welcome Jerry.

Thanks a lot Greg.

I really appreciate it.

What does Gravity do?

So we make it possible for anyone to create 3D augmented reality and virtual reality shops.

Basically in the marketplace right now, all the biggest brands are creating these virtual shopping experiences because they realize that kids are spending almost three hours a day in these virtual environments like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite and it's projected through reaching 2.6 trillion dollars by 2030.

So the big brands are piling in but the real challenge right now is that it's really complicated and expensive to hire teams of developers to create these virtual shopping experiences and with Gravity we basically make it super simple and easy for anyone to be able to create these virtual shops without any coding experience required.

What kind or size of business is Gravity for?

Well it's basically for any type of business to be honest.

It could be for a big global brand or it could be a small little retailer.

Similar to what Shopify has done for the ease of creating online shops, we're basically making it just as easy to create these types of immersive virtual shopping experiences.

What is your startup story?

So we actually started in the height of COVID or start of COVID back in January of 2020.

Myself, I had previously built the world's first billion dollar insurance program for cryptocurrencies convincing 20 different traditional property casualty insurance companies back in 2017 to put up a billion dollars and so from that experience I had quite a bit of a few different opportunities.

I met my co-founder Jason Harrington who is really a genius sort of product advertising guy from Spotify, Snapchat and Twitter and we embarked on this journey to really think about how we can actually create tools using AI and XR to help creators come up with better content in the social space.

That's kind of how we started our genesis and through that path we ultimately landed on you know being really focused on serving the virtual shopping space.

What drives you?

Personally I really want to empower as many people as I possibly can.

Having sort of drank from the Kool-Aid of locked-in crypto space, you know I definitely saw the fact that there's this huge future where hopefully we can spread the power and wealth I guess a bit better for everyone to create more accessibility and opportunity for smaller sort of players to you know stick their nose in and try to get some outcomes that right now are seem to be capped by sort of consolidation and big conglomerates in the world.

How do you define success?

Well for me it's really about you know how much impact I can have on people especially people that I care about but certainly I want to find that the path where people can have the best opportunity to maximize their own potential so that's truly what drives me and that's how I measure success is that if my team is doing well they're healthy they're successful my partners are successful I believe in creating you know win-win scenarios for everyone that I sort of get involved with.

What is Gravity's business model?

Yeah so right now it costs literally hundreds of thousand dollars to create a virtual shop and with Gravity you can actually create a virtual shop for free.

It usually takes you know months to create a virtual shop now you can create a virtual shop in minutes using our templates and our AI solutions and basically you can run your shop for less than a cost to run a shop on Shopify and so it's a monthly subscription plan and then we have the option depending on the partnerships that we have of also collecting fees on a processing fees on all the different shop transactions that are happening.

What is your funding situation?

We're basically at this point still grinding along towards a bootstrapping our business as far as we can go.

We have raised money through equity crowdfunding and we have raised money through government you know loans and subsidies and things like that but we've been trying to stay lean and mean and we're about now at the time now we're ready to scale so we're currently seeking and exploring all the different lean investor options to help us reach sort of our goals over the next six to nine months.

What is your biggest learning as a founder?

I think you know everyone tells you hey man it's hard it's a grind it really is and as big as your idea is you know I think and you hope that you can get funding for it.

If I was to go back in time I definitely would have picked something that is very executable where it doesn't rely on any venture funding for sure.

You know something that I can get to market quickly something that can be monetized and use that as a building block for whatever other bigger vision that you actually have so I think the commitment to analyzing the opportunities and being more thoughtful around you know what's realistic to achieve with the resources that you have at hand versus expecting or hoping or relying on the fact that a VC would have to come in the same day.

What's your biggest lesson in pitching your startup?

I think the biggest thing is when we started pitching it was like tell them everything that you possibly can about your product your business and you know make sure that you answer all the questions that everyone always try to predict I guess everything and try to try to tackle that in the pitch.

What I've learned is that's not what really matters because there's always going to be questions there's always going to be things you can't cover so find a really cool story a cool narrative that touches on the highest level key key points that creates curiosity and interest in what you're doing and establish this trust and belief that you can actually execute.

So that's kind of what I've learned over the years and certainly we've gone through literally hundreds of different pitch decks so yeah definitely being confident and having a very clear simple story to tell.

Being an AI founder what's your favorite productivity hack or AI tool?

It's not going to be the most unique answer here but I mean you can't ignore the impact that chat GBT has had on everybody and everything like the casual anybody who's just you know has any challenge in writing or understanding something or researching something how could you ignore that tool and so yeah I use it admittedly and it's saved me so much time and also I think what's unique for me anyways I use it for a lot of validation of like hey man I have this thoughts here's how I wrote something is there anything else that's missing that would be normally should be included and to me that's huge to have the confidence that you've covered generally what you think is the right topics.

You are in the next AI program can you tell us a little bit about your experience?

Oh man the next AI program has been awesome our venture manager Stephanie has been just incredible to work with.

I mean at any startup there's ups and downs and things that you're you're working on and we certainly had our fair share and they've always been there to guide us with sort of not just what best practices are but obviously what other you know other companies have dealt with and how they've handled it and you know the guidance they provided have been truly sort of invaluable.

The network that you're building I think it's super amazing like everyone's you know all trying to hustle on their own projects but I've never had a problem with anybody else you know reaching out to anybody else and saying hey what do you think of this with that and them providing with support and and hopefully they feel comfortable so we're doing that same with me as well.

So yeah it's definitely a very different accelerator it's not I wouldn't even call an accelerator you know they frame it as really sort of a founder development program and that's truly what it is.

You could feel like they're investing in trying to build you as a founder to give you the the building blocks to be successful and that's something that is absolutely necessary and I wish that we would have experienced next AI a little earlier would definitely would have saved us a lot of headaches and bumps in the road that we would be able to overcome quicker and maybe easier along the way so yeah nothing but great things to say and hopefully any other startup has the opportunity to be involved in that program.

Do you have any tips for founders?

As I said earlier the you know the concept of building something that's small and executable and monetizable in the beginning you know I think it can't be understated I think that's really really valuable to understand.

It also gives you a path where you're in control of what you're trying to do and you know I think you get pulled in so many different directions by so many advisors resources to people just kind of having their you know their thoughts and their from their experience but you need to shape your own path and I think having control by having a scope that makes sense that you're able to execute on really will streamline your experience and I think that's the biggest lesson that I've learned over the years.

As an AI founder what is your reaction to the current call to pause AI development and all the fear around it?

There's a fear warranted I think yes is it realistic to actually pause no I think it's just that's just the way I feel about it I feel like it's a lot of bluster PR based for the industry or for specific strategic reasons people are calling for it I think the Pandora is out of the box and I don't think there's going to be you know any way to actually put the genie back in.

For me it's really about how do we educate people enough to understand how people should be using it and for the malicious or bad players you know how do we actually build tools to detect and navigate that so for every problem that exists with this there should be a counter solution that should be available to really hopefully help stabilize and balance the market out.

Building a web 3 store sounds pretty daunting.

What kind of assets and time commitment is needed from a founder or a startup or any company really to do it with gravity and make it look professional?

Well actually we have shop templates just the same as a Shopify does and you literally just pick the template that you want and in a matter of minutes you could be live selling items so you know obviously there's some technical challenges that are still in our path in terms of getting products physical world products scanned in efficiently into 3D spaces but that's that technology is moving at lightning speed and we fully expect that by time we're fully scalable but that will be solved with all of all the all the things that we're researching and seeing in the marketplace.

It's something that we've made a point of trying to keep it as simple as you possibly can.

You literally pick a virtual space pick upload your logos your color your vibe your music or whatever you're choosing and your products and you're basically ready to go so we've kind of made it super simple to create a shop.

Everyone talks about hustle.

What kind of traction is gravity getting in the marketplace?

Yeah so actually our beachhead marketplace is actually Japan a place where virtual experiences and metaverse is part of their everyday life they're definitely leaders in that space.

So back in 2022 we were actually selected by the Canadian government as one of 10 companies to represent Canada on a metaverse trade mission to Japan and through that we've developed incredible partnerships and discussions with some of the biggest companies in Japan.

So we've developed three POCs already over the past three months and we have a pipeline of over 20 000 shops that we're ready to capitalize on so the projects are super cool working with some of the best anime companies, studios, studios that have over 4 000 tv and film sort of titles and so like yeah we're super excited to be there and you know what's really great about being there is that you don't know asks you why would someone want to shop in a virtual space because that's already happening and people are already sort of comfortable with that so it really creates a you know a headwind for us.

It's that right tailwind I'm not sure but it really creates a great opportunity for us to launch and you know I think that we have a lot of great support from the Canadian and Japanese government so we're super keen to keep pushing out on that pipeline.

Where can our listeners connect with you and Gravity online?

Yeah check me out on LinkedIn I think that's the place where I'm most active in terms of just being responsive so definitely feel free to DM me or follow me or whatever you like on LinkedIn.

Obviously our website is gravity.ai so feel free to check out where all the else you can check out our demo of our product which I think is pretty cool so yeah look forward to engaging with anybody who's keen to find out more about us.

I really appreciate you taking the time to be a part of Who Are These Startups.

Thank you so much for this opportunity Craig we appreciate it.

This has been Who Are These Startups.

Find out more at WhoAreTheseStartups.com and check out our live events at TorontoStartups.com/events.