Why Immerse is the Future of Learning in the Metaverse
Meta partnered with Immerse as their exclusive language learning platform earlier this week. Immerse is the future in the making.
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Hello Readers,
As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and early-stage startup investor, I get roughly 10-20 requests every month to join some startups’ advisory boards. Since my book release “Navigating the Metaverse”, the request to join web3 startups has tripled!
While it’s humbling to be considered by so many as a person who might add value - much appreciate all entrepreneurs - it’s not possible for me to accept most of the invitations. And the reason for that is that my advisory style is rather proactive, being a person who contributes to the endeavor by guiding the team to take fundamental decisions.
The most recent startup that I am excited to have joined as an advisor is Immerse, a VR-based language learning platform.
In this article, I’ll be explaining how web2 has reached its limits and why Immerse is in pole position to become globally the most valuable (language) learning metaverse platform.
Before I get into the details of the platform let me give you a quick idea of what Immerse is.
What is Immerse?
Immerse was founded in 2017 as one of the first VR-based language learning platforms where users can learn a language by being in an immersive, real-time environment that accelerates the learning process. In 2022, the social media giant Meta partnered with Immerse as the language learning platform in the metaverse.
As someone who speaks 7 languages, I know something about learning languages and the challenges one can face from using books, audio classes, or apps.
But at the same time, if someone tries to learn a language by visiting the places where it is spoken as a native language, the process will be much faster, easier, and more natural.
The Virtual Reality environment inside Immerse makes it possible by enabling you to interact with other people, objects, and cultures by having users participate in real-life scenarios such as but not limited to ordering food in a diner, going through customs at the airport, having friends over for a BBQ, and so many other moments that make our life.
The question is, what was my assessment before committing to join Immerse as an Advisory Board on their path to serve the world?
Immerse’s Core
The Purpose
Why is Immerse more valuable in the sea of so many other language learning apps? This is the question I asked myself and the founder, Quinn Taber. In response, Quinn told me a story.
Quinn’s mother was born in pre-revolution Iran. At the height of the Iranian revolution, she left the country and came to America as a refugee. In the US, she got her education and dedicated her life to making the lives of middle-eastern women better.
As a result, Quinn grew up visiting places like the Middle East and Northern Africa looking at people who were struggling for a steady life. He chose the same path for himself working for charities and foundations that were helping these people.
While traveling to refugee camps from Morocco to Afghanistan, Quinn experiences life the majority of us haven’t. Education was a luxury many of these people couldn’t afford and the doors to countries like the US were shut due to the language barrier.
This is when Quinn understood what being able to speak English can do for the people in these refugee camps.
As a result, with his on-field experience and contacts in the US, Quinn dove into the language learning market. His goal was to create a language learning solution that will be profitable, scalable, and helpful to people who wants to learn the language.
With that goal, Quinn and his team raised $500K in 2017 and build the first Immerse product Oculus Go VR headset.
This is a story that reflects a clear sense of purpose, an in-built passion that will persist and persevere through every challenge.
In one interview, Stever Jobs was asked why passion is important to building a start-up. And his answer was straightforward—it’s very hard to build a successful start-up. If you’re just building for the money, you will either give up halfway or settle for the lowest possible outcome and exit.
Only if you have the passion and the purpose, a big why as your drive, you’ll have a functioning impactful startup.
I saw that in Quinn and his team.
The Spirit
The next point that I considered was the spirit. It’s part of purpose or culture, but I learned to treat the two as separate. As a matter of fact, company Culture follows the Company Spirit
In my over two decades now as a an entrepreneur, faculty and investor, I have experienced two types of spirit in a founding team—the spirit of abundance and the spirit of scarcity.
The spirit of scarcity has nothing to do if you have raised funds or bootstrapped your company. The spirit of scarcity is anchored in the DNA of the founders, it's what they bring to the table.
Attributes that are tangibly notable when a company is led in this spirit of scarcity are that it takes more from all participants than it gives.
Founders and core team members with a spirit of scarcity are rarely satisfied with outputs, as there are always major outcomes to follow. Therefore, encouragements are rare, and feedback on what else needs still to be done overrules the milestones. Scarcity spirits don’t have the confidence to be vulnerable and therefore are not accessible.
They don’t have a virtue of people’s relationships first, but the company’s speed is the actual priority. Scarce spirits don’t align the company vision and mission with the employee's wants and needs which depend on what phase in life they are in.
In other words, a spirit of scarcity always pushes, extracts, and rushes things to speed the process up. It eventually sucks the energy from a startup.
But startups that have the spirit of abundance have won already. Founders with a spirit of abundance have the capability to invert expectations with gratitude. They accept that good thing take some time to build, they trust the team members with responsibility and encourage ownership, and most importantly they believe in the value of sharing—sharing knowledge, ideas, inspirations, pain, joy, and ultimately individual empathy.
Here again, kudos to Immerse that checked all the boxes.
The Resilience
Building a startup and driving it up the road is an excruciating task that not many survive let alone succeed. You need perseverance; Having persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.
Immerse started in Virtual Reality when it was considered a fad. They stuck to their guns and kept developing the VR platform until the VR hardware reduced their costs and therefore lowered the barrier of entry for the masses.
Now Immerse is one of the few companies that actually have the experience built out and populated in VR when most are just starting.
Immerse’s Traction
It goes without saying great values need to come with great signs of success to complete the picture. As of March 2022, Immerse raised their $9M Series B. The industry behemoth Meta partnered with Immerse as their exclusive language learning platform.
Immerse had 15,000 downloads in the very first week of the launch. Their aim is to get 45,000 weekly users by the end of the year, and then double the number in the next year.
Immerse is on its way to collaborating with 500 brands in several industries and helping them with their services.
With thousands of daily active users, Immerse offers three features that make language learning much more easier and attractive to students.
Practicing the language: You’re practicing the language with real people in a realistic environment from the get-go. It helps you pick up the vocabulary quickly, cross the accent barrier, and makes you more comfortable while speaking.
Experiencing the culture: VR makes it possible for Immerse to create an environment where you can experience the culture firsthand. Culture makes languages come alive. In that VR environment, you will feel the proximity to a completely foreign culture and the excitement of learning new things.
Building a Community: Learning a language alone makes it 10x harder. Even in infancy, you were learning your native language among many people. A community of people who either speak the language or are learning the language makes it much easier for you to learn it. Immerse enables you with a community that you can interact with in real-time.
Immerse Opportunity
And last but not least Immerse is evolving into the web3 metaverse opportunity.
As Web2 has reached its limits and Web3 is responding to the evolving needs of transparency, ownership, and experiences, Immerse is moving its platform that reimagines how the metaverse will become the one-stop experience for education.
Immerse has three goals for its educational metaverse platform:
develop the best practices for immersive teaching and learning.
build a thriving virtual Edu global community.
usher in the next evolution of learning in Web3.
Needless to say that these ingredients will attract brands and creators, seeking to engage with a retained target audience of students that are participating in remarkable immersive experiences they all own equally.
Bundling the education market estimated at $115 billion by 2025 and the metaverse market will create a match made in heaven.
The headstart of creating immersive, contextual experiences and their existing strategic tech partnerships will catapult Immerse from an underdog VR language app, into one of the leading Edu metaverse platforms in the near future.
Closing Thoughts
As an entrepreneur, one thing that matters the most is your Core. The reason why you do what you do, the spirit of how you do it, and the DNA of resilience.
As you aim to get towards your vision you need to stay flexible on how you get there. On the path to it, optimize for distribution by design and target network effects.
And last but not least, web3 is the response to web2 limits. Within the next 5 years, most developers will be hacking on web3 infrastructure. Start experimenting.
Congratulations Immerse team. I am humbled to contribute to that vision. And speaking of language translation, all that remains for me to officially say is “Grazie”!
If you feel the need to learn more about metaverse/web3, here’s how I can help you: