By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.
a16zThe Challenge of Replicating Reality with Steve Zhao from SandboxVR
Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Sandbox VR Founder Bets Savings, Survives Bankruptcy, Builds Full-Body VR
- Zhao traces his path from building shareware games as a teen and in college through Blue Tea Games to founding Sandbox VR after missing the mobile wave.
- With funding gone during the 2017 VR winter, he put about 95 percent of his savings into a bare-bones demo and got his six-person team to commit to six more months.
- A shareable highlight video and a zero-foot-traffic Hong Kong location produced a viral loop, sold-out days and the first institutional round.
- The pandemic cost the company 110 percent of its revenue, forced layoffs of about 80 percent of staff and a Chapter 11 filing, but focus on a few key levers and landlord-funded buildouts helped it recover.
- Zhao positions Sandbox as the new movies, with new content and IP such as Star Trek and Squid Game, a white-label operating system, and more locations as the growth path.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasConstraints drove the product's best feature
Needing customers at a location with no foot traffic led Zhao's team to create the highlight video, which became the engine of word-of-mouth growth. He summed it up as constraint breeds creativity.
Hedging with two bets kept the company alive
Sandbox started by building a VR game for revenue while developing a location-based platform. When the game earned too little, the team went fully behind the full-body platform.
Focus deeply on a few levers
Before product-market fit, Zhao's team went deep on getting people to the store. During the pandemic they focused on the few levers that move margin, such as cutting video generation from about 20 minutes to two.
Believability is the core product
Zhao says they never cut fidelity, using outside-in tracking, low latency, wireless streaming and patented prediction and data batching. Customers forgot they were in a simulation, to the point of screaming loudly enough to force an early closing time near an IMAX theater.
Sandbox sees itself as competing with movies, not headsets
Zhao argues out-of-home experiences must be 10X what people can get at home. He frames Sandbox as an active, social, shareable counterpart to movie theaters with a rotating slate of experiences.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesRunning a startup is hard. Running a retail startup during a pandemic is really, really hard. And running a retail startup during a pandemic while going through Chapter 11 is really, really, really, really hard.
— Steve Zhao
One of the biggest lesson I learned, uh, from mobile games is you don't create what's popular today. Because by the time you're done, it's gonna be 10 months too late.
— Steve Zhao
I grew up watching The Matrix. You know, you can get plugged in, and you can be anyone and be anywhere, and I thought that VR was that last technological p- component to create that. So we're like, can we actually create a minimum viable matrix?
— Steve Zhao
So in a way, the technology that we created was, like, how we ran our startup. Like, when things don't go well, we find a way to make it go well.
— Steve Zhao
Like, we couldn't have done that without that, you know, trial period of, like, running out of money and figuring out, how can we get people to come to a location that has no foot traffic? So constraint breeds creativity.
— Steve Zhao
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
