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XBorn of Burning Man, Topia Raises $5M to Allow Users to Create Their Own Virtual Worlds
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake

A combination of Zoom, Minecraft, Twitch and Wordpress with the spirit of Burning Man. That's how Daniel Liebeskind describes Topia, the browser-based social world-building platform he built to bring genuine interactivity to virtual conferences and events.
On Wednesday, his West Hollywood-based startup announced it's raised $5 million in seed investment, led by Seven Seven Six, the venture fund led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Bonfire Ventures also participated in the round.
"Our digital lives are not going away at all," said Ohanian during an online chat earlier this week with Liebeskind. "This is going to be the gateway for so many people to have so many great experiences, and we're all grateful here at Seven Seven Six to be leading this round of funding."
Topia allows users to explore virtual worlds customized by artists and designers. As users navigate a given world and come into proximity of other users, each of their video feeds come into view, enabling them to strike up a spontaneous conversation.
The world in which those conversations take place are built by Topia's open-source community of creators, who have already designed such novel spaces as an interactive theatrical experience and an NFT museum. Asana, a project-management software firm, used Topia for a digital party to celebrate its IPO last fall.
Just months after its May 2020 launch, Topia hosted 25,000 people for Virtual Burning Man. It will host a virtual version of this year's festival as well, for which it may experiment with two-way interactivity between the in-person and livestreamed events.
Topia founder Daniel Liebeskind
"This has been a lifelong journey of trying to build my own community and trying to build software that helps people have more authentic human connection," said Liebeskind. A multiple-time "Burner" himself, he said he built Topia to emulate certain elements of Burning Man from the beginning, including the serendipity that accompanies wandering through the Nevada desert and happening upon a new community of people who share common interests.
With the investment, Liebeskind plans to expand his eight-person team and stand up a marketplace within Topia that helps creators make money. The new creator payment ecosystem launches Wednesday. Liebeskind said his top performance metric will be the amount of money his startup pays out to creators on the platform.
As for where that cash comes from, and how the company itself makes money, Liebeskind said Topia is pursuing multiple revenue streams. The platform is mostly free to use, but certain features require payment, including customized URLs and incorporating single sign-on functionality into an event. The company is also building out an SDK and allows for ticket sales and subscriptions, which it will split with creators who design the worlds where those gatherings take place.
Creators can build their own Topia worlds and sell them as templates for others to use or build upon, similar to how Wordpress provides a marketplace for website templates and plugins. The designers can get paid for selling those templates and will also receive a percentage of the micro-transactions that take place within those worlds.
"The last bastion of things that I personally believe will ever be automated away are the things that are so uniquely human and empathetic and creative," said Ohanian, "so it's vital that we create new ways to properly reward that creativity and that empathy with money."
The marketplace launches with a collection of scenes designed by artists, including former Riot Games and Magic Leap Art Director Daren Bader, Void Bastards Creator Ben Lee and Ubisoft Senior Environment Designer Karen Stanley.
Topia has hosted about 1,000 events each month since its launch, for groups ranging from families to schools to big corporations.
Liebeskind has been building software since he was a kid and returned to tech full-time after a brief post-college foray into investment banking. He began creating the Topia business plan in late 2018, and constructed an early VR prototype in 2019.
"When the pandemic hit, I thought, 'Now is the moment for this thing that I was planning on building over the next 10 years'," he said.
Ohanian said that one of Reddit's most well known features, the "Ask Me Anything" Q&A format, was created by users, and told Liebeskind that he is excited by the user-generated trajectory of Topia.
"You'll be sitting here 10 years from now, being surprised by something where you're just like, 'Oh, I never would have imagined that,'" Ohanian said.
"The best of the internet is when you bring people together around a shared interest, and they make connections they never would have made otherwise," he added, reflecting on what has helped make Reddit into one of the internet's most popular destinations. "Leading this investment in Topia is a chance to look back now at community building [on the internet] from first principles."
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Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
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Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui On How Small Funds Can Better Support Young Founders
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui talks about why he moved earlier stage in his investing and how investors can best support founders.
Lui joined his friend—and first angel investor—Ben Ling as a general partner at Bling Capital, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage funding rounds. The desire to work in earlier funding stages alongside someone he knew well drew him away from his role as a partner at multi-billion-dollar venture firm DCM, where he was part of the team that invested in Musical.ly, now known as TikTok.
Bling primarily focuses on entrepreneurs looking to raise around $1 million to $3 million who are often early in their careers as founders. Lui said Bling evaluates companies on characteristics that go beyond whether they like the founder or feel that the market looks good. Instead, he said they take a hard look at the available company data, and quickly respond.
“And we send it back to them and say, ‘Okay, this is what's working, what's not working’,” Lui said. “And then create the playbook for them on how to find product market fit and get to like, ‘These are the milestones you actually need to hit’.”
When considering companies, Lui said Bling looks at the founder, the market, the company’s current traction and differentiation while asking the founder the questions they would expect to get at Series A and Series B funding rounds.
“One thing that I really admire about what [Ling’s] built with Bling is the consistency and the processes and playbooks— everything from the way that we evaluate deals to the way that we work with our portfolio companies,” Lui said. “Everything is kind of around playbooks and operationalizing things and also iterating to do those processes better.”
As part of its work to support founders, Bling maintains an extensive product council, which connects tech executives with the founders in Bling’s portfolio. Bling also has created numerous self-serve resources for founders so they can easily tap into the fund’s network and shared knowledge.
“We have a bunch of playbooks that we introduce to companies around how to hire efficiently, how to negotiate with counterparties, how to think about the founding team, business development…We just have these different things that we start to train our entrepreneurs on,” Lui said.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.