Makers of The Metaverse: Freddie Hickman Of Hyper SQ On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Move forward with pace and intensity, but allow mental space to connect the dots. Have aggressive self-directed timelines, keep momentum high, but at the same time allow time to let things sink in. Sometimes the most pivotal ah-ha moments come from the times you least expected it, often when you’re not deep in work and in a relaxed state of mind.
The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Freddie Hickman.
Freddie Hickman [CEO & Co-Founder of Hyper SQ] spent half a decade at Expedia Group (the largest tech travel company in the world) across product, finance, and commercial roles. He noticed that the travel space in general is ripe for disruption, especially on the consumer discovery side. Prior to that Freddie worked at L’Oréal for 3 years helping to build out their ecommerce function.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?
Born in London, swiftly migrated to Stockholm with my mother and started life as a fully fledged Swede (with the accent, of course). 14 years later, I returned to the UK with a music scholarship, shipping straight to boarding school — I had played the piano since the age of five, and so it seemed at the time that I was firmly within the musical path. In fact, the plan was originally to study Music at university, though one week in I realised this just wasn’t for me, so I switched over to Economics, Politics, and Music as a combined degree. University was far too much fun, so I decided to stay another year and study for a masters. Fast forward almost a decade later, and I had spent several years across a bunch of product, strategy, and commercial roles at L’Oréal and Expedia Group, before finally building the overdue courage jump ship into the startup world and building something from the ground up.
Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
‘The Magic of Thinking Big,’ by David Schwartz. I’ve probably read this book about 4 or 5 times. The one thing most of us can get better at is simply thinking bigger. I’m obsessed with the concept of leverage. Virtually anything you think of now, can be thought of on a scale that is bigger, bolder, and more daring. I’d highly recommend getting stuck into that book for anyone looking to truly accomplish big things.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The journey so far is littered with fragments of mistakes (some less humorous than others!). The hardest thing for me was having to unlearn the stuff you get taught at large companies, where I had spent most of my career up until now. Getting out of the ‘employee mindset. ’In the early months, I was looking for a software development company to help us get started before eventually migrating technology in-house. I set out and in hindsight, grossly over-analysed over 40 vendors in this beautifully formatted excel spreadsheet (that by the way, no one will ever read through apart from myself), with tons of criteria, score systems, and conditional formatting. Classic big company efforts — it looked pretty to be fair. This all felt great until my buddy asked a simple question — so have you chosen your vendor yet? Ah..
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Rather than a single person, I’ve got a group of crazy talented friends who have without a doubt led me to where I am today. Virtually all of them started off in either consulting or banking, but swiftly veered off and got ‘red-pilled’ into the untrodden path. Most of them are now venture-backed founders, doing incredible things. Everyone challenges each other, keeps each other accountable, and helps one another think big and bold.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Every ounce of my attention right now is focussed on building one thing: our Web3 startup, Hyper SQ.
We’re building the first true Explore2Earn experience that rewards people for getting out of their homes to explore the world. There is a lot of criticism today towards large tech giants and how they have optimised and designed their products to make us addicted to our phones, through carefully engineering addictive compulsion loops, making us hungry for hearts and likes. Rather than fight this, we’re taking the technical progress and turning this into a force for good — getting people out and exploring. Having worked at Expedia Group, one of the largest travel tech companies in the world, for over five years, I saw first-hand how much could be disrupted.
Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?
Without a doubt for me it’s the paradigm shift in how we think about incentive structures, made possible by crypto tokens. The list of use cases is endless where the incentive structure is fundamentally flipped, whereby value is accrued to the true value creators (typically end-users, early participants, creators, developers), rather than the centralised entities. Well designed incentives, as we know, are extraordinarily powerful human motivators.
The concept of interoperability is also a fascinating one, particularly in the context of metaeverses whereby they should all be connected to each other seamlessly, along with all the assets and elements within them. That there is no ‘closed-economy’ which is the case for most games available today, for instance.
Of course, the concert of decentralisation also blatantly comes to mind. And with regard to metaverses, that there is no single point of failure nor control.
What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?
We’re still early in the S-Curve of adoption for these relatively new technologies. General momentum is going to matter for these industries to truly breakthrough into the mainstream. Which is also why the fact that the metaverse vision and technological progress is being controlled and led by a few large companies (several public companies, at the mercy of market conditions and investors risk appetite) is a risk in itself. Much of the mainstream adoption will also be linked to the physical hardware development — building products that are convenient and affordable for consumers.
I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?
For one of my advisors we strictly use Oculus to meet for our weekly catch ups. Though the kit is still burdensome, and the graphics have a long way to go, it’s fascinating how connected it makes us feel, despite being in different continents. Your typical Zoom meeting just doesn’t get anywhere close to this. Once the hardware problem is solved, and we have more practical equipment for everyday office work, VR, AR and MR will all have a huge place in solving also the remote work problem by bringing us closer.
Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?
They will make us feel more connected than ever before, at a time when we are often geographically dispersed. A guilty pleasure of mine is a healthy dose of the multiplier game Warzone with my buddies. We joke to say we were the original adopters of the metaverse. Though this might not be too far off. I’ve had old friends who I hadn’t spoken to for over a decade, now become a part of life again (and in real life) as a result of gaming alone in these digitally created online worlds.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?
I noticed this all the time — the majority of people still have this idea that the metaverse/crypto/web3 industry is full of ‘degens’ (to be fair, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot here by referring ourselves to this too!). There is a sense that this is still the wild west with plenty of bad actors. The reality is some of the smartest people I know all work directly or indirectly in this space, and this pattern is becoming more apparent by the day.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”
1. Move forward with pace and intensity, but allow mental space to connect the dots. Have aggressive self-directed timelines, keep momentum high, but at the same time allow time to let things sink in. Sometimes the most pivotal ah-ha moments come from the times you least expected it, often when you’re not deep in work and in a relaxed state of mind.
2. Get to market as quickly as possible, iterate based on real feedback. Classic product 101, though often overlooked or misunderstood. What can you do today to get something to market, even if this is just a small part of your grand vision? So you can get a quick and early signal that you’re building something people actually want and will use.
3. Trust the process, and see the true potential beyond what is in front of you now. It’s just the early building blocks of what is to come. The larger the ambition the harder it will be to fight this and visualise the possibilities — the metaverse is a classic use case for this.
4. Speak to as many people as possible in this space. Everytime I speak with someone, I never regret it. Something new is learned. The ‘easier’ thing to do is to read books and continuously study. Might be slightly controversial, but I believe the most impactful and high leverage activity is just to source information directly from others. Not only will you build relationships whilst learning, but you will also often get information not publicly available.
5. Build in public. This is a hard one — the temptation is to keep things in private and wait for the big reveal. If you can get your early community of users to join you on the product development journey, you’ve already won half the battle.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
This is going to be biassed based on what we’re building! We want to create (literal) movements of people for different causes through the power of our technology. Getting people out of their comfort zones, out of their homes, and exploring places en masse.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I’m torn between Elon Musk and Chris Dixon of a16z
Elon to learn how he truly operates, and to get a glimpse of how his mind works. Chris, since a huge amount of influence of what we’re building originated with his original thinking.
Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success in your great work!
Makers of The Metaverse: Freddie Hickman Of Hyper SQ On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
