The Use Case Podcast: Storytelling About Zeeon With Dima Lylyk

Music:  00:02

Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s use case podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better. As we speak with the brightest minds and recruitment [inaudible 00:00:20]. And that’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup `

William:  00:23

Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup and you are listening to the use case podcast today. We have Dima on from Zeeon, or we’re going to be talking about the use case business case across benefit analysis, et cetera for Zeeon. So we’re we talking about a lot about kind of how he built Zeeon and what Zeeon does. And so we’re just going to jump right into it. Dima, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and Zeeon?

Dima:  00:52

Yes. Sure. Thank you William, for having me here. I love talking about my company. So if I do too much, just let me know. A few words about Zeeon. It’s a metaverse for public talks and coworking. My sweet tagline is when zoom meets seams. A back story, how I came up with this idea of Zeeon. So in my last company where I worked for as a marketing manager, I worked with various cool clients in Fortune 500 and some service startups. And besides that, I was helping our HR department to build employer branding. And to do that, I organized community meet ups for tech people, for ML engineers, for data scientists and for some other positions as well. So I was doing all those meet ups and I had speakers coming into our office and I had audience coming into our office and I saw how that environment looks like, works and how it affects the company and how people in the local market start feeling about our company.

Dima:  02:07

And I wanted to start my company. And when COVID hit, I saw the great opportunity. I felt like the world was going to change. And I also realized that zoom, Google meets Microsoft teams and other tools, even though they do the job and you can talk to people distantly, they do not provide a feeling of being present. So the idea was let’s build a virtual environment which looks natural, which looks like business environments offline, and let’s allow people to meet and communicate as they would normally do in offline environment. And that’s how Zeeon was born.

William:  02:52

I love it. So we’ll start with something I usually do at the end, but I want to get there faster. When folks that have never seen Zeeon, when they first see it for the first time, what do they fall in love with? Like, what do you, when you crack it open and you show them stuff, what blows their mind?

Dima:  03:15

So what blows their minds at the very beginning is the concept itself. People would not believe that it’s possible and someone has come up with that idea. But recently since metaverse is becoming a trend and Facebook announced Meta, they are not blown away with the concept, but they still see that bigger possibility of how to engage their people. And our main focus is engagement, which leads to productivity and to higher results. And they lo love it. They understand that instead of having their team meetings, for example, if we are talking about companies and their visual offices, people understand that employees will be more engaged and will have more fun, and they will have more reasons to make jokes about what’s happening in that environment. So they will be more engaged what leads to productivity. And when we are talking about conferencing in metaverse, organizers understand that, first of all, they can attract more people because that’s cool, that’s trendy, that’s immersive, vivid, prideful, and so on.

Dima:  04:31

They also understand that they can provide their sponsors with better booths. And because usually when we talk about sponsors at virtual conferences, they don’t see any significant results with booths. So only paid content works and inside of Zeeon and inside of any other metaverse, a sponsor can have a booth as they would normally do at offline conferences. And that booth might be very interactable, it might be really creative, even far more creative than those at offline events. And those booths can be intractable. For example, if a company is presented a new device, a user might come to the booth and play around with that device, see what’s inside play some game. Or I don’t know if the sponsor has any open positions, people can apply directly from that booth. So once again, for conference organizers, we provide better ways to engage and attract more attendees and possibilities to attract more sponsors. And also organizers realize that having their conference in metaverse allows them to do additional PR and social activity to attract more attention later.

William:  06:01

So getting started with Zeeon, what’s it like, what’s it been like? And what’s it like for your customers? They see it, they fall in love with it. They think this is a great way to engage talent. It’s a great way to kind of engage with customers et cetera. How do they get started?

Dima:  06:20

They would need to talk to me. So Zeeon is still pre offer and we have built the demo, which I’m happy to show and to get feedback and to negotiate anything for the future. We plan to launch in a couple of months and we are the raising funds to speed up the launch process. So what we currently do, I make the demo and we discuss when we would be able to start with that specific company, what we would be offering them, do they want a regular location or some custom location and so on. So we really try to make their experience as similar to their brand as possible. For example, we can even design their offline office, make a digital twin of offline office inside of Zeeon.

William:  07:20

Tell me a little bit about that. How do you mock that up and how do you replicate maybe the good things of what’s in a physical office for Zeeon and for Metas?

Dima:  07:37

It really depends on what a company wants. For example, if they have really invested much into their offline office, and now they realize that all that is gone, that everything has gone online, but they loved their office. Then we can do a digital twin and it would look very similar. It will have the same structure, planning, same walls, same decor, same branding and so on. But what we are trying to do, we embrace companies to think bigger and to think more open. And we can provide them with really creative spaces. For example, they can have their office in a spaceship or somewhere in the woods or at the bottom of the ocean. And we can really play around with that.

William:  08:32

I love that. And with metaverses, I’m saying it plural. If they want to have something different in each metaverse that they enter into, they can have a different rendering of their office, as you already stated so they can replicate what they like about their physical office, but they could also replicate it in different ways, in different metaverses. First of all, is that correct? And then how do you see that playing out?

Dima:  08:59

We see that playing out by building a marketplace from which will connect a customer, a company in Zeeon with creators. So for example, you might in instruct your creator to use some assets from your offline office and create something new. Or you might just go to that marketplace and pick something. What is ready because creators usually do some great job and they are inventive and they come up with great ideas and a company can mix what we provide, what creators provide and what they want custom. So, and the beauty of all metaverses is that they can take that, all those assets from one metaverse to a different metaverse because it seems like the trend is showing us that all metaverses will be interconnected and people will be able to take their assets as NFT from one place to a different place and is replicated there as well.

Dima:  10:12

So that means, for example there’s a metaverse, which looks very realistic and a different metaverse, which looks like some [inaudible 00:10:24] game or some crazy environment. And one employee can log in and see everything as a realistic environment. And this second employee can log in from a different metaverse where everything looks very different, but they are still in the same office communicating and doing their daily job.

William:  10:47

I love that. So one of the things, as we explore the metaverse and metaverses plural, it’s getting started for some folks, it’s getting them to understand kind of the long game, but also kind of the different stages. And you’re going to be advising people on how to navigate these things. What do you think is going to be kind of the first layer and maybe the second layer, third layer, because obviously communications there’s content, there’s a presence and then there’s a real strategic view to what you do and what you’re going to do and what you’re going to have your employees and candidates do in the different metaverses. So like it’s not all going to happen at once. Like you see international space station, right? It didn’t get built on one day. It’s going to be built over time. So what do you, how do you see it, the layers of this being built?

Dima:  11:49

I see that as every metaverse out there will start with their specific market niche. For example, there are already metaverses only for music shows and there are metaverses for quests. And what we are building is business corporate metaverse where companies can have their virtual offices and conference organizers can host their events. So I see the first layer is that every metaverse will explore their specific industry and space, get product market fit there, get people engaged, see results. And from there we will come up to the next level where metaverses will hard connecting to one another.

William:  12:37

Well, I love that for candidates and employees, from a perspective that industries get together and they start doing more stuff as industries. You can kind see candidates in the employees learning more about what’s going on in the industry just as you would learn something from the internet. You’d learn in a different way. So I can see the real benefit there. Do you see that also kind of extending into some of the things that we’ve historically thought of as HR, like training and development or recruiting. Do you see other kind parts of HR, if we start with the industry related stuff, people going into sectors and building kind of niche metaverses or parts of the metaverse that are really kind of niche oriented. How do we see the HR and recruiting function of kind of traditional firms blending into those niche metaverses

Dima:  13:36

Yes, that’s what we are already doing at Zeeon. So besides providing a virtual office for a company where their employees can meet for internal discussions, we also provide them access to the entire open world of Zeeon. So that means that recruiters can go out and find talent. The same can done by sales reps. They can go out of their office and meet people at conferences at some networking places, at the seaside and just do the sales. And the same will happen with engineers or other workers. They can go out, have access to all educational events, conferences, hubs, and hackathons happening there, and they can get knowledge. And on the different side, we can do training inside of metaverse. For example, if a company is related to engineering, people can have trainings, how to work with engines inside of a virtual environment. The same can happen with doctors. The same can happen with any other position related to physical world where you need hand skills. Also what we are doing and where we see a huge demand is youth education.

Dima:  15:06

So there’s one company who finds talented kids all over the globe and they want us to build official school where those kids can meet, can learn together and participate in scientific projects. So let’s imagine those kids come up together with some idea of an artificial satellite, and we provide them with small assets and they combine those assets and they learn how to build satellites and inside of metaverse, they even can play with the entire process, how to get that satellite to the orbit of the earth. And once they have success, it’s a signal for other companies that there is a talented youth who has done a similar project and they were successful. And since the entire project will be replicable, the company can see what went well, what went wrong, what might be improved and so on.

William:  16:13

What do you see? I mean, first of all, explain the kind of the development of metaverses because obviously we’ve talked a little bit about Facebook and Microsoft, but we’re going to wake up and there’s going to be a couple hundred or more than that different metaverses. And I totally agree with you that there’s going to be a fluidity of being able to move in and out of different metaverses. But like what’s driving the development of metaverses right now?

Dima:  16:43

I think regular progress. The time has its own rule and the direction of time is very clear. We had those first signs of metaverse back in the eighties when with the Book Snow Crash, and it became clear that one day it will become our reality. Then we had this movie Ready Player One, and it was also clear that one day it will become our reality. And we had simulations like Second Life and so on. So for me personally, it was very clear that we are headed that direction and it will be happening. And just with, COVID has accelerated the process and speed up things. So yeah, we are moving that way and it is very clear that technology and means of communication must develop.

Dima:  17:42

And it was happening during the past century. So we started with telegrams a hundred years ago. And when people invented phones, a lot of folks were very skeptical. Like I not remember, I read about all these jokes, like how stupid a person looks with two pipes and your end and mouth. And today we are to how can over zoom to people all over the globe. And it’s very clear that technology will get to the next level. And the next level is a metaverse.

William:  18:19

So, okay. So the questions that you would like when you talk to people for the first time, and you’re explaining Zeeon to them. What questions do you want to hear from them? Like, what are good kind of sophisticated questions about Zeeon specifically, and metaverse and more generically.

Dima:  18:42

That’s a very good question. So the questions I would like to hear are around how do we engage our communities and how do we do community management? Because when we talk about just event as a single, okay, as an occasional event, it’s very straightforward forward from the technology perspective. But how to maintain engagement across community over months and over years. That’s a really good question. And if I would hear anyone asking that, I would realize that this person truly understands the potential and truly wants to embrace all possibilities. Because when we talk about communities, there is always a small core of active part of community and a lot of people at the edges and how to keep them engaged inside of the mataverse is really a great question.

Dima:  19:48

So how we are going to tackle that, we are going to build a separate look, not location, a building for community, which is branded for that specific community. And people from that community will have access to that building all the time. And for example, if there’s HR community and you are a participant of that community, you can go to that specific building anytime, and you will meet folks with whom you can ask questions, with whom you can do something together, or you can get advice and so on.

William:  20:31

So what do you think about the concept or currently, or in the future about career fairs in metaverse?

Dima:  20:42

They will be happening for sure. So any event that is happening offline can be replicated inside of metaverse and career fairs will be replicated as well. And it will look very similar to offline event. There will be a venue with multiple companies presenting themselves and with multiple avatars running around, going from one booth to the next booth and talking to a representative, to a company rep in that booth. And what will make the difference is that when a person comes to a booth, a rep already understand who this person is, what’s a background of that person. Did this person have any training inside of metaverse? Did this person participate in some social projects and so on? So that will be an additional layer, but from the visual perspective, it will look very similar to how it happens offline.

William:  21:52

Okay. So last question as we think about where you’re at right now with Zeeon and where you want to take Zeeon. Just as, this is again the use case podcast. So we’re really trying to kind of get of people an idea of what’s out there and what’s available to them, which I think you’ve done a wonderful job with. What would you like to leave people with as they think about this. They’re going to listen to a podcast and go metaverse, okay. Now it’s a different way to engage a new way to engage with customers, employees candidates et cetera audience in general. Again, getting started, outside of signing up.

William:  22:38

What’s just a great way for them to kind of start getting their head around because I think, on some level, you and I have talked several times about this. But it can be overwhelming for people that aren’t steeped in it like you are, right. So they’ve watched the Mark Zuckerberg production, they’ve watched Microsoft, they’ve watched a couple things, they’ve read a couple things, but they still don’t quite understand. And so it is a bit daunting and could be a bit daunting for folks. So we’ve asked the or I’ve asked you the question about how the questions, what they should be asking you, but how would you like for them to get started?

Dima:  23:17

The first ad advice would be to realize that this will happen. This is our future, and it’s very clear that it will be happening. And the sooner you realize the more opportunity you have to win competition earlier. And then from that to realization, if you have never played any computer games, play any for an hour for two hours, and it will help you to understand how you can move inside a video game, how you manipulate your avatars, how you direct your person anywhere. And once you have the skill, how to manipulate your avatar and how to make it move, from there everything is very natural. So the same way, as in the physical reality, you have your body and you walk and you see a person and you go to that person and you start a conversation. The same will happen in metaverse. So the only thing you need to learn is how to manipulate your avatar. And that’s pretty simple, nothing complex. And from there, you understand how to work and how to talk to other people.

Dima:  24:37

And of course, talk to a company who provides mataverse, because what I described is user perspective, how to behave inside of the metaverse. But ask the company providing metaverse how to do business, how to enable your conference, how to attract people, how to make your working environment cozy. And so similar questions. And from there, since the market is appearing and all mataverses I knew, everyone will be happy to help you and to educate you and to show you all the possibilities and every mataverse is interested for your company to grow inside of metaverse.

William:  25:25

Love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Dima, thank you so much for your time today. And thanks for just schooling us and getting us educated on both Zeeon and also just metaverse in general. I appreciate you.

Dima:  25:42

Thank you, William. It was a wonderful session. Thank you so much for having me here today and for having this relaxed atmosphere.

William:  25:50

Awesome. And thanks for everyone listening to the use case podcast until next time.

Dima:  25:54

You’ve been listening to recruitingDaily’s use case podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform and hit us up at recruitingdaily.com.