Former Snapchat Employees Move to Genies Engineering Team
Virtual avatar company Genies wants to be the go-to option for online personas and it's targeting the wealth of talent and seasoned executives from the area's biggest tech firm, Snap Inc., to help make that goal a reality.
Genies' latest hire from the Venice-based social camera company is George "YJ" Tu, a former senior engineer who worked on its Snapchat app and Spectacles camera glasses. Prior to working at Snap, Tu worked for three and a half years as a senior engineer at Facebook and specialized in developing the company's mobile infrastructure.
Tu joins Genies as its director of engineering. Genies CEO and founder Akash Nigam told dot.LA Tu's main mandate is hiring engineers to continue developing its avatar creation platform and digital marketplace, where users can buy and sell digital collectibles and wearable items for their virtual selves.
Tu is the first engineering executive the company's hired since its launch in 2017, but it plans to devote a big chunk of its recent $65 million Series B raise to attracting new talent.
"I think we've landed quite a few Snap employees for a few reasons," Nigam said. "Genies and Snap are probably the two biggest social companies on the Westside in LA, so I think that's an attraction for people that are already local."
The company already has some big celebrity names using its tech to make and share avatars -- including Justin Bieber, Rihanna and hip-hop tycoons Migos -- and the next step is to bring in more users.
George "YJ" Tu is Genies' new director of engineering.
Nigam said the company's hired close to 30 new employees in the last three months, with about 80% of those hires being engineers. He added that roughly 90 people work at Genies, and estimated that 10% of them are ex-Snap employees.
"I think from a product perspective, we share a lot of philosophies and we're very similar in the way that we scheme and we game plan. Snap always is kind of shooting a few years in advance specifically within the social category."
Matt Sibka, Genies' vice president of recruiting, spent three and a half years at Snap creating a team for its CEO Evan Spiegel and was hired to do the same at Genies earlier this year. Genies competes with Snap's Bitmoji avatars, which got a 3D upgrade this July.
"Eighty percent of new spend after our fundraise, and anything moving forward for the next two years, is all going to be on engineering to become an engineering powerhouse," Nigam said. Genies has raised $110 million to date and Nigam previously told dot.LA the company wants to make "Ninety nine point nine percent of its revenue from selling digital goods.
Nigam said that the synergy between Genies and Snap wasn't a conscious choice, but noted that both companies have a similar vision – to advance augmented reality and encourage people to adopt virtual avatars that they can increasingly use as an extension of how they express themselves online.
Nigam's plan is to integrate Genies avatars into as many applications as possible. Currently the company has a deal with Facebook's Giphy that will let users bring their avatar with them to platforms where Giphy is integrated, like Facebook, TikTok or Snapchat – but Nigam said it wants to bring its avatars to popular games like "Roblox" too.
"That's the first API partnership, but we want to have hundreds of those," Nigam said. "So all of a sudden if you get ported into 'Roblox,' you can get any avatar."
Genies' next big goal is getting Generation Z to buy into the NFT hype by creating unique items for their avatars and then trading them. Genies is working with Dapper Labs, which operates NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, two of the most popular NFT exchanges, to create its own blockchain-based system for creating, verifying and selling digital goods.
Genies plans to make the marketplace available by the end of this year. Right now it's only accessible to celebrities, but Nigam said it'll open a beta version to customers by year's end.
"It almost becomes like a login authentication button, where you can port your Genie and your digital goods associated with it from one environment to the next, and in that case, we're kind of creating a new digital identity layer," Nigam said.
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Melanie Stricklan co-founder and CEO of El Segundo-based Slingshot Aerospace, credits Helms with helping launch the startup that counts NASA among its clients. To date, the company has raised over $17 million from investors including L.A.-based Stage Venture Partners and Noname Ventures. And Helms' guidance and insight has been key to that.
"She is a pioneer. She made way for lots of other women to go to service academies and after that to pursue engineering degrees like she did," Stricklan told dot.LA. "She was the first military woman in space; the first woman to inhabit the ISS."
Slingshot Aerospace CEO Melanie Stricklan (L) and Lt. Gen. Susan Helms (R).
Stricklan, who was an Air Force military officer for over two decades before she took her degree in aeronautical space engineering to found Slingshot Aerospace in 2017, met Helms when she was Stricklan's superior in the service.
Helms' mentorship has helped Stricklan and Slingshot secure contracts from NASA, the U.S. Space Force and Air Force, as well as private contractors like Boeing, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems.
But Helms also boosted Stricklan's confidence as she helped develop Slingshot Aerospace.
The company sells two products. Slingshot Laboratory is a mixed-reality space simulation training tool that can be used by NASA astronauts and K-12 students. Although it's still in beta mode, it's being used to train university students and the Space Force Guardians.
Then there's Slingshot Orbital, an air traffic control-like system for space travel. The system gives the government a more accurate idea of exactly what's going on up there, without having to actually send more crafts into space. Helms talks about Slingshot as if she's making a pitch for her own company. Slingshot Orbital, she said, is key to protecting the U.S. from foreign threats in space as access to the stars becomes more democratized.
"Space has now become so accessible, you have to start thinking of it as a place where conflict could take place," Helms said. "Therefore, you have to focus on it with resources and defensive strategies."
Both point out that every launch produces debris, and even an accidental collision with another country's tech could have disastrous consequences.
"Space is one of the most critical environments to make accurate decisions in, especially with all of the hundreds of new satellites increasingly filling orbits," Stricklan said. "(There's) millions of pieces of debris... It's not a hair-on-fire moment, space is big."
Both have been working in the industry to help the next generation of women in space
"We're no longer hitchhiking on Russian rockets, which I love," Stricklan said. "I love the fact that women are leading the charge," Stricklan said.
Most major aerospace firms now have a woman in their C-suite — Leanne Caret is the CEO of Boeing Defense, Space and Security; and Marilyn Hewson ran Lockheed Martin for seven years until June 2020.
"Elon gets a lot of credit for what SpaceX is doing but [its CEO] Gwynne Shotwell is terrific. When we got our ticket back as a U.S. entity to go into space on the first privatized ride, she helped Elon get there," Stricklan said.
In 2019, 75% of all the major science divisions in NASA were run by women, the organization said. This includes Sandra Cauffman, a Costa Rican-born engineer who was the first woman to be appointed to the NASA Inventions and Contributions Board in 1994.
Helms now serves as the vice president of Texas-based Astra Femina, a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging young women to pursue careers in space. Astra Femina was founded by Sandra Magnus, a former Department of Defense chief engineer and one of the few astronauts to fly on the final Space Shuttle mission in 2011.
"Some of them have to just see it to be it," Stricklan said about young women interested in the field.
Helms won't be satisfied until there's finally a woman who sets foot on the moon.
"The astronaut office was 25% female when I showed up," Helms said. "What I'm looking for are the days when it's 50/50. There's people that say, why go back to the moon if we've already been there, and my answer is well, only 50% of you have been there. When you talk about human exploration, you're talking about humans in general."
The anniversary has her feeling nostalgic.
"I'm feeling kind of sad that the spacecraft I flew on that day isn't around anymore," Helms said. " I usually don't think about the anniversary that much, but since it's the 20 year anniversary and it sets us on International Women's Day in particular, it seems especially poignant."
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