2022-Korea-Showcase-SoWork

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 1: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

SPEAKER 2: All righty.

Testing. Yep, excellent.

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Vish, and I am the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, the workplace metaverse. So we're a Harvard incubated team, but my co-founder Emma is a joint Harvard and MIT PhD student. So that is one of our many, many MIT connections.

Aha, there we go. So right now, companies are struggling to find the right workplace experience, whether they're remote or hybrid or in-person. In fact, right now, if you're a remote or a hybrid team trying to build a high performance culture while using just Zoom and Slack, you-- and probably all of your employees-- can feel that something doesn't feel quite right. And in fact, this is one of the biggest reasons behind many companies' push to return back to the office.

But that's not really a solution that's going to work, is it? Because 95% of employees actually want more flexible work, so a blanket RTO policy doesn't really work for anybody. But still, companies have to solve this workplace experience problem. Because if they do, that will create happier employees, and happier employees will increase productivity. And those two things actually create happier companies. So that's actually exactly what we're solving at SoWork. We solve this experience problem for companies and their teams. Over the past year, we've had thousands of companies all over the world move their virtual offices into SoWork's workplace metaverse.

Here's a quote from a happy customer. "The best piece of software I've used in the past two years is SoWork and it's not even close." That is high praise.

So what exactly did we do? Well, we built the workplace metaverse. So it's like an MMO-- like World of Warcraft or Runescape or Everquest or ESO or any of those ones-- but for workplace. So we give teams the tools and the environment that they need to be happy, healthy, productive, and engaged.

So what exactly did we do? Well, we first started by building an immersive world where companies can build the workplaces of their dreams, just like in the Sims or in Minecraft, if you've ever played those two. And I'll show you a little bit about how that works later on. Then we allow employees to build their own fully customizable avatars, which is much better for their psyche than being just a little Zoom box-- a little video tile in Zoom or a name on Slack. Then we start to layer in all the things that businesses would need, so video and audio and chat of course, but of course, very importantly for businesses, enterprise-grade security, stability, privacy, and reliability. So you can actually get great work done.

So let me show you what a typical day looks like in the office. So if we can just hit Play on that one. Thank you so much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So this is me walking into my metaverse office. I'm Batman in the metaverse, obviously. I see a couple of my teammates, so I'm just going to jump in to a whiteboarding session with them. We're going to brainstorm a little bit. I see a couple other teammates playing games, which is nice, just over in another corner. I'm going to go up to my desk. It's not decorated enough for Halloween, so I'm going to open our mapmaker and I'm going to throw down some decorations. And then I'm going to check my missed connections. So these are memos and to-dos that my teammates have left me when I'm out of office sorted by urgency, which you cannot do in Slack.

Then I'm going to go up to two other teammates. Notice I just walk up to them, and videos automatically connect. Just like in real-life. There's no Zoom link. There's no Slack. There's no calendar. We just connect automatically.

I'm going to check Albert's working hours, because I need to talk to him and I need to catch him before he leaves the office. So I'm just going to check that real quick. I'm going to say hi to a couple of other teammates without actually disturbing their meeting. I'm far enough to not disturb their meeting.

I'm hungry because it's lunch time. I'm going to use our Uber Eats integration to order food to my actual house in real life. Then I'm going to build a new wing of our office, because we just hired a couple of people and I want them to have their own little part of the office. So I'm going to build this for them and they can modify it if they want.

I'm going to walk across the neighborhood. There's lots of companies that live in here. I'm going to knock on another company's door, because we're working on a partnership agreement. And in case you're wondering, yes, the partnership worked out. So all sorts of things can happen in the metaverse.

So SoWork will help you to get great work done, no matter where in the world you live. It's faster than Zoom. It's less ambiguous than Slack. It's cheaper than a physical office. So we actually give employees the spontaneity and the creativity that they've been missing, but they also get to keep the flexibility that they really, really love. And your company saves time and it saves money. It increases staff retention, and we're basically a competitive advantage for any businesses at this point.

Here's an example. We worked with Tinder's workplace metaverse team. You guys have Tinder here, right? Everybody hold up your phone if you have Tinder. Just joking.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm just kidding. Don't do that. So we worked with Tinder's workplace experience team to build the metaverse version of their real life LA office. It's called Tinder World. So Tinder uses Tinder World for their one-on-ones and their team meetings, their events, their hackathons, and my favorite, their new employee onboardings. So no matter where in the world they live, new employees at Tinder can onboard into the metaverse version of their office and get brought into the culture and the team like they never could before.

Here are some testimonials, including my favorite in the top left. It's a bit spicy. "SoWork has been a game changer for our company. It's also now my favorite app-- I will bleed SoWork until I die."

[LAUGHTER]

So, a little crazy, but I love it. I fully endorse that.

So of course, we want to help your team as well. So if you want to save time, you want to save money, you want to increase your staff retention, and you believe your employees are worth investing in, then come and open your office in the SoWork metaverse today. I'll be around. There's my email. There it is right there, so feel free to reach out to me directly and I'm more than happy to work with you and make sure that your team is happy. We also are looking for partners in Korea, distribution partners or other thought leader partners in the remote and distributed and hybrid workplace arena. So if that seems to fit what you are trying to do, then let's talk.

So again, thank you so much for having me. If you want to chat more, I'll be in that other room over there. Just walk up and we'll connect. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]