Meet the founders #3 Tony Infantino - CEO

I have met with Tony Infantino, in Metagora.tech HQ in Paris 9th to discuss his approach in building a business, his vision for the company and where is the Honey Badger coming from ??!

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Honey Badger's might,

Bootstrapping with a collective,

Metagora's fearless dance

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Tell us how it all started 

I have always been an entrepreneur at core. I was excited by the perspective of a new digital revolution coming to life: Web3. Crypto or NFT weren't my thing but I started to look at where the technologies could meet to create something really game changer. Metavers at that point seemed to be promising. I started digging and It actually led me to do some consulting with C level who wanted to understand the opportunities in that space.

It taught me that the Metavers wasn't the answer. Yet  with the insights I gained through this process I figured out that was room for something different, a tech that will truly take all the best from 3D; blockchain, gaming with in mind that it should be something relevant from training, to ecom to all experience. I started talking to targeted pro  VC, AI, but also super pragmatic veteran from the distribution industry, then I had my seed investment and the advisors that will make Metagora not only an UFO in tech but one of the start up that understand the market and build solutions that are actually needed now and in the future.

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Metagora’s purpose is to bring ‘progress from operations to consumer interaction’, thats broad

One of the biggest challenges we are facing now as a society is attention. The purpose of metagora is to use the technology to make people active, grab their attention and have them interact in the immersive environment we are creating. That's where the tech convergence and flexibility of development makes us different from Metavers. We can train your operations team in your academy, make them play a game to put their skills in practice, track the results in real time to give you actionable insights, on the other side of the scope deliver an immersive ecom platform, enabling better storytelling, captivating attention with 3D HD products that your consumers can really interact with and engage with your loyal consumers unlocking perks for example, all in one place! We’ve look at really specific KPIs thanks to my advisors to build the tech with a purpose

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Tell us about your Co founders Mounji Merzouk and Johann Kaiser

That was no blueprint, I wanted to create something different so I also had to find people that think differently. Johann understood, modified and ameliorated the whole 3D tech in days, I was blown away, then he started rebuilding it better, dropped it, built his own that works faster, with better rendering, full AI integration capabilities on desktop and mobile. 

Mounji is a visionary, not only looking towards the future but also reading through the code making connections no one thought possible at lightspeed. His creativity enables us to explore new ways to do things

A unique connection between them created the magic. And yet they’ve also been able to transfer the knowledge and grow our team with success. 

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Grow your team, what's next ? Bootstrapping or next round of VC 

Bootstrapping 100%. The value of VC is to accelerate your business by scaling your teams and burn cash on running after the business you had to create after your pitch deck approval.  Today Metagora works smarter. We build on AI so our productivity is through the roof. Businesswise we want to scale with our clients, with our product suite developed with purpose. A VC would probably ask us to choose, but that is not the culture here, we want to make our own choice. And it works; we started the commercialisation in september and signed 4 international clients, that give us a 18 months runway, no need to give away our freedom. A company must be profitable, that's also what we all learnt in tech in the last few months. With our set up we can dedicate our time to go deep with our clients, we are very hungry but we are free 

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I guess that's what the honey badger is about, tell us more about this unusual mascot ?

AHAHA, it is a cute animal isn't it ? then yes this is an unusual being, impenetrable skin, resilient, cheeky intelligence and no predators. It embodies  the spirit of what we are doing, small businesses today will take over big corporations, because we are faster, we need to solve problems now and we are way more agile. It's a ‘Darwin’ situation, I have been inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book Anti Fragile had a real impact on me.   

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What is the culture at Metagora

It's unusual since it is built with unusual people. We are trying to build a new way to think ‘collective’, that's why I wanted us to explore new way to think the technology, sometimes in révolution some people lose sight on Whats the purpose and it becomes dictatorship like the obsession For décentralisation in crypto, that is not my vision of having a common goal. It may sound bubbly but we want to succeed together, Metagora and our client together; so we are truly fulfilled, it was also part of the VC discussion internally, we all aligned.

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