Episode 38: Scaling Live Music Experiences

Hey listeners, welcome to SphereCast. A podcast all about technology, technology advice, technology inspiration, and how real entrepreneurs have used technology to build their businesses from the ground up.

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Nothing brings people together like music. It's almost like an affinity for music is written into our DNA, and doing everything possible to help people gather around music is good work.

Up to now, live event participation has been largely reserved for those actually in the venue. To catch a live stream or a replay of an event is very two-dimensional and leaves something to be desired. And anything a bit more experimental beyond viewing on a simple screen has been out of reach for the most. Until now, at least.

It's Luke here with another week of SphereCast, and this week our team interviews Yuli Levtov, Chief Technology Officer at Volta XR. Volta is a self-serve XR creation platform that makes producing innovative digital experiences accessible to all.

Prior to Volta's platform, truly engaging digital experiences were reserved for the makers with extensive resources and extremely deep pockets. With Volta, that is no longer the norm. Volta has initially focused on extending its services to the musical industry, effectively offering limitless scale to live music performance, but has plans to extend into other verticals as well.

For Levtov, Volta is a dream convergence of two of his highest passions: music and technology. And Yuli can rest easy knowing that he's doing the good work of making great technology and, by extension, great live experiences accessible to more people. On the podcast, Yuli lays out his history with Volta XR, recounts some of its early challenges, and discusses some learnings made along the way.

So without further ado, here's our conversation with Yuli Levtov.

Hi everyone. Ksenia's here. And today, we're thrilled to host Yuli from Volta Audio. Hi, how are you?

I'm very well, thanks.

Let's begin with an icebreaker. Could you share with us something interesting about yourself that most people don't know?

I guess my heritage is somewhat unusual. I certainly get asked about it a lot with with my name. So, my father is Israeli. My mother is half German and half Russian from the far Arctic Circle in Siberia. They both actually met in Russia, emigrated to the UK in 1980. And yeah, so I'm English, I was born here, but a name like Yuli Levtov is half Russian, half Hebrew. It's a mix. So yeah, I get asked that a lot, so I figured it must be of interest.

I wanted to ask you because I thought it was Yuri, first of all. Maybe I thought there was, you know, because that would make sense. That would make sense. Where's Yuli coming from? Yuli is not a very common Russian name, because I live in Ukraine now and I haven't heard, you know, that at all, so.

Yeah. Well, actually, I'm named after in in Russia who who saved my mom's life at a very early age. So, yeah. It's not a very common name. I think it originally maybe comes from Yulius, Julius. I think that's probably the original. Yeah.

Great. Thanks for sharing that. That's very personal, I guess, and yeah, interesting as well.

Very interesting. So let's jump into your most recent venture. In your own words, could you tell us what is Volta Audio and why did you join this company?

Sure. So, Volta is we're aiming to democratize the creation of XR experiences, especially currently around music, although we do have other kind of verticals in our sights for the future as well. We've essentially identified a problem with the current industry, which is if you want to put on a big live stream event, especially one with high production values, you have to spend a small fortune to do so. So really, it's only something that's applicable to the top 1% of artists.

We want to cater to the 99% of people who want to put on these kinds of events, but don't have the resources or don't have the skills to do so. So, we're making a free-to-use software package called Volta Create that literally anyone can download and use for free, and put on amazing-looking live stream events both into virtual reality, but also into 2D platforms such as the existing platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

Yeah, and that's kind of that's been our mission for since the since the company began just 18 months ago or so, which is roughly when I joined. I'm a co-founder with CEO Alex Kane, who he actually started the company as a master's thesis project when he was studying here in London at Royal College of Art and Imperial. Then he brought me on board initially as a contractor to take his very scrappy university prototypes towards something a little less scrappy, a little bit more robust. And that's that's kind of where I stepped in.

Then shortly after that, he asked me to come on board as as CTO, which initially I was a little bit nervous about. This is my this is my first CTO role. But, you know, something that's come up again and again throughout this company and for me in general is just being upfront and honest and communicating well about pretty much anything can get you out of any situation. So I was I was always very kind of upfront about, "Look, this is what I do feel like I contribute. These are where things where you might a more traditional kind of experienced CTO might do things another way or something."

And because we have that understanding from the very beginning, everything has been really been plain sailing. But I think in me, Alex saw the fact that I've got quite a broad range of experience, not only in terms of music and technology, but specifically around how we can take disparate bits of technology and put things together into an exciting way. And my specialty has really always been around interaction. So interactive music such as generative forms of music. My first kind of proper job was at a really innovative audio company called RJDj. They're a really early iPhone app, and they really pioneered this whole idea of reactive music, music that reacts to your environment in some kind of way.

So, I kind of cut my teeth there doing programming, and before that I was studying more traditional music technology. And then just over the years built up a network of interesting projects that I had worked on, great developers and people that I had worked with. So where I, you know, may be slightly further behind in terms of traditional hard skills like computer science and coding and that kind of stuff, I am actually like I know how to put together kind of products that put together a lot of interesting and and diverse technologies. In terms of why specifically I wanted to join Volta, I think it just aligned really well with with kind of my passions in terms of music and technology. Yeah.

Very interesting that that you say this. So you you kind of had the firsthand experience of being, you know, or very close to the consumer of the product you're creating. So you kind of are familiar with the pains and and also great interest in music and the industry, and putting such products together came natural, I guess, to you. So, interesting, you know, area this. We spoke with a CTO last week, and I'll tell you his story. He's creating music with skin and hair.

Okay? So he's from he's from Berlin, and he wears the suit, and based upon how his skin, you know, or various parts of body or skin is is is, you know, whatever mood it is in or kind of passing electricity through his body, he generates a certain, you know, kind of music. And this is tapes only, so no digital copies will be found anywhere.

Right. Right. Okay. Interesting.

I'll make the intro. I'll let you know who it is later on. Yeah.

Sure. I know I know some people who have done a lot of experimentation in this space. It's it's a really fascinating space. Definitely on, you know, I consider myself to be an experimenter, but that is that is far more experimental than than a lot of the stuff I've We've We've gone as far as making music out of how you drive a car, for example. So in real-time, generating audio and music based on how you're driving a car safely around a racetrack. But, yeah, that's that's how far we've gone. We've not We've not kind of dealt Although, you know, I've done collaborations with dancers and that kind of stuff as well, but no. I mean, actual body body sensing, Xth Sense, there was a project by a guy called Marco Donnarumma a while ago that that explored this space a lot. Yeah. Really interesting stuff.

So you've already talked about, you know, a little bit about the product. So you said when you joined the company, your co-founder or the the founders of the organization, they had some prototype that they built, you know, during their university time. So I'd love to know from you, as you started in the position of CTO, what challenges were you faced with immediately? And perhaps you can shine some light on how you overcame those and how you're still overcoming those right now?

Well, previously to joining Volta, I had just been working on a lot of like a suite of of VR applications in the interactive music space. Most recently with a big production company in LA called Within, for a band called OK Go. But before that, we had done a run of our own VR applications. This was a previous company of mine called Horizons.

So, I already had a pretty clear idea of how we could build Volta, and it was going to be built in a game engine called Unity, which is exactly the track that the company was already on. They already had some basic stuff built in Unity, and we kind of could lean into that and use our expertise to to kind of move along that path pretty quickly.

I think some of the immediate challenges we had was just how to get the end-to-end stack working. So it's quite a complicated system, we think, in that, you know, we have an editor tool, also built in Unity. People can create their virtual worlds, and then we have client applications. And between the two, we need to make sure that so much different stuff is in sync, including assets, 3D models. But then we also have to live stream a lot of components, and it's the kind of interplay between what's live streamed, what is sent remotely, what is already on the client devices, and all of this kind of stuff that we kind of had to do a lot of deep thinking about.

And I, very early on, brought on a long-term collaborator of mine, Owen Hindley, with whom I've worked for, you know, 10+ years on on various projects, and he's just a ninja kind of full-stack developer. And, you know, he brainstormed a bunch of different ideas for how we could do this, specifically around how to keep metadata and video data in sync. And, you know, this is a year ago, which actually doesn't sound like a long time ago, but in terms of Volta, it's an eternity. And we built a system that essentially bakes time code into video, such that we could kind of lean on a lot of existing platforms and tools out there that allow us to to stream video.

That has served us well for a year, but now as we scale further, we need to start looking into hardening that system. Cracks have, you know, been showing with with with our current stack, and it would seem that actually, you know, there are services out there that move video around, and and as as as a species, we've become pretty good at that. But there are still a lot of challenges around that, and so that's something that's something that we're we're we're still kind of working working with a lot, yeah, is basically keeping keeping video in sync across clients.

I see. Are there any particular, you know, programming languages that you prefer in this area, in the area of video streaming? Because I think I have some knowledge in this area. Ksenia too. We've worked on a product together, you know, in the area of video streaming in 2020, I think. Yeah, last year. Gosh, it feels like so long. So yeah, I would love to know a little bit more. Personal interest.

Yeah. I mean, we started off just kind of using Amazon services, and now we're looking at a few third-party solutions. I mean, it'll date this conversation very very heavily if I if I kind of mention the specific ones. But suffice to say there's, you know, there's a whole industry around this and there's a lot of products on the market. We're also We're We're a small team still, you know. In terms of developers, especially, you know, if I include myself, we're kind of five, six max. And so we don't have a quote-unquote "video specialist" on the team, much less a full media team within the company. So we're bringing on expertise to kind of plug that gap a little bit. And, you know, this is someone with extreme, extremely low-level experience around codecs, and they've written compression algorithms and all the rest of it.

And so this the This is the stage of the journey that we're at now whereas, you know, we're we're really hardening our product to make it you know, scale quickly. So yeah, we're we're we're basically looking at kind of We're We're not looking to reinvent the wheel. Let's put it that way.

Got it. Got it. Interesting though. Everything's, yeah, moving fast and keeping you Well, I guess there are some sleepless nights, but yeah. Let's

Those are more There certainly are. There certainly are. Those are more to do with time zones.

You've been with Volta for almost two years. Could you share with us the most valuable lessons that you have learned during your journey there?

Yeah. I think the importance of keeping everyone on the team aligned both with the product vision and the day-to-day development, I think has been has been really important for us. We try and be really transparent across the whole company. We have weekly meetings, all-hands meetings where, you know, we have a product one, we have a strategy one. We, you know, and and really, we we do fill everyone in on how everything's going, what we're planning on building, and pardon me, and we take a lot of input from developers and, you know, and everyone on that.

And I've worked at companies where that's not the case, and I can really say that certainly at where we're at in terms of size and scale, and where we are along our journey, that it's th- this works really really well. Doesn't mean that there aren't issues every now and then, but they do usually come down to miscommunications of some kind, be they big or small. So, open communication is key. That's That's certainly what I've learned here. It's It's something that I had an inkling of previously, but have really been able to put it to use here at Volta, and I think has been really helpful. And that goes for everyone on the team, not just myself discovering this and and using this tactic. So that's been that's been great. Yeah, I think I think that's the main one. And yeah, keeping everyone involved across all decisions, really.

I think that's that's an interesting point you you make there. I I do find it's very difficult to understand the the level of transparency or openness you you want to aim for, because what is too much and what is too less, you know? It's It's one of the attributes you have to just learn and and find a way. Find your own way around it. So I think it's very tricky one, but one of the biggest challenges, I agree.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we don't mandate people to come to all the meetings, you know, but it's it's just in terms of if people want to know more about this, or more about that, then then we don't have any, you know, big decisions that we are deliberately hiding from people, you know? As I say, we are at a particular point in our journey and these things might change. But certainly, for where we are right now, we you know, this is we're we're finding this to be quite effective at the moment, so yeah.

So next part is is one of the questions we ask almost every CTO who comes on to our podcast. So, could you tell us about the most difficult decision you had to make as as a CTO? I'd love to know that from you. I I'd love to see if there's any, you know, similar um if there's a, you know, particular, let's say, similarity that we can generate out of this, or any correlation between what we've heard in the past.

Yeah. It's hard It's honestly, it's hard to pick a particular one and say, "This is the hardest decision I've had to make."

You You can make it an area, maybe. You can talk about that.

Yeah, but certainly an area is particularly when you have limited resources—as every startup does, by definition—it's very tricky to know exactly where to be directing the resources all the time, in that inevitably there are lots of interesting opportunities on the table. Lots of interesting ways that the product can go. And actually, at Volta as a company, a lot of the interest and appreciation we've been getting from other investors, other companies, mentors has been our speed and our rate of innovation.

Alex, the CEO, is really good at keeping track of exactly where we were three months ago, six months ago, a year ago. And it's you know, it even takes us by surprise, really. We think back to a year ago and what we had, and and where we are now, and it's quite amazing. And really, I think that that rate of innovation is going to change obviously, you know, as the product becomes more defined. We're going to sort of dive deeper into certain features and stuff, rather than building 10 cool prototypes that that are all interesting in their own right.

So, a decision that, you know, I'm having to make every day is how to allocate our our resources, and how to make sure that we're building a product that's, you know, hardened and scalable, but also does what Volta's been good at, which is innovating. And a lot of, as I say, a lot of the attention we've got is because we come up with really innovative solutions that no one else seems to be doing at the moment. So that's a that's a constant balance to strike, yeah. So I think yeah, essentially, how to how to allocate resources, I'd say.

Thanks for sharing that. That that seems to be one of the pains we we we tend to discuss on our podcast. So, yeah. I can see that. But yeah, you you're very, you know, open there, so appreciate that too.

Okay, so Ksenia, next part is with you.

Amazing. I'm curious to know, has COVID-19 impacted your business at all? And if so, what steps have you taken to adjust to the situation?

Yeah, I think Volta is one of the few companies who I mean, we really made the most out of COVID-19. In fact, it really accelerated us down a path that we were considering going down anyway, but it really cemented the idea that, you know, this is the way the company should be going now.

Before the pandemic happened, it wasn't actually The The sort of emphasis was somewhat flipped in that it was actually more of a music production tool for artists to use in VR. Then still before the pandemic, we started kind of turning the ship around a little bit and thinking, "Actually, we believe that there's a lot more interesting stuff to do when you when you turn that around, and say the artists can use the tools that they're familiar with, and actually it's the audience members who might be in VR watching."

And then COVID-19 struck and then it was like, "Well, okay. Now we're off to the races, and this is absolutely the way we need to go." So it actually, for all the bad that it's done in the world, it's it's kind of helped our business a little bit in that it gave us a whole raison d'être. And yeah, we've kind of really leaned into it, and now it's as the industry is is coming back to physical live events, we're finding that there are actually really interesting ways that this is going to be relevant forever more now.

So it has obviously impacted our business, as it has everyone's, but we're we're very lucky and I suppose fortunate to say that we've we've been able to really capitalize on it and make the most of it as the product's evolved. There are other kind of things that it's thrown into the mix, like the fact that it's very hard to to have a unified team. We're pretty much fully distributed at We have C-suite and I, we're we're in London. We have a developer in London, then we also have one kind of in the in the Midlands, one in Iceland, one in Spain.

And again, it's a double-edged sword, isn't it? I mean, it's I love the idea of a physical office, and it's actually one of the things I missed the most, and I'm very very happy that we've been able to return to that. But it's opened up our hiring pool, as you can imagine. So again, trying to trying to turn a negative into a positive, and yeah, we've we've done pretty well with that, I think.

Amazing. Good to hear that. I want to mention something. So I was listening to Chris Martin speaking with Zane Lowe. For those, you know, Chris Martin, Coldplay guy. So he he mentioned something that they are constantly as as as artists, they are constantly looking for ways how they can reduce their, you know, the footprint, carbon footprint, while they are, you know, when they have to go around and do these these concerts, etc., with all the travel. They are They are spending a lot of, you know, they're producing a lot of So they are very focused on the the the impact they have on the environment or the ecology.

So one of the things they talked about was they're all constantly innovating or finding ways to do these remote experiences for their for their audience. And and COVID accelerated that. So, yeah. I mean, that's that's an interesting one. I'm I'm not sure if they're if they're a lead for you or I'm just

No. Always. Always. No, absolutely.

The industry has It's one of these From from these natural disasters that happen, the good things that come out are quite bizarre. I remember when the Eyjafjallajökull Oh, that's terrible pronunciation of the big volcano in Iceland that erupted I can't remember when now. But they they, you know, quipped People quipped that it was the first carbon-neutral volcano eruption because of all the flights that it grounded.

It really normalized the idea of doing more and more video calls and, you know, net maybe reduced business travel from then on when people got used to the idea. I think COVID is going to have a similar effect, but in different ways. Now we talk to the major labels and and and indie labels and stuff like that all the time. And and a lot of they know they want to take more control over their own touring schedules, over their own careers and stuff like that, and that they that a lot of them see live streaming as as here to stay, you know, and and hybrid events are definitely something that we see a lot of in 2022 and beyond. And Volta's here to facilitate that, absolutely.

Environmental impact of large tours, such as the one that, you know, Coldplay would be going on, is enormous. And so there's there's another there is an environmental benefit to moving over to live streaming as well. But I think it it does bring up an important point of what Volta is not, and it's we're not trying to replace live performances in any way. In fact, we don't really see ourselves as a competitor to live performances. We believe that entertainment is going to become more and more interactive, participatory, and the lines are going to be slightly blurrier between audience and artists and all of this kind of stuff, especially when, you know, AR and VR take more of a foothold.

So, you know, we're not trying to replace live events, but where we can augment and hybridize them, that's absolutely something that that we're working on. And yeah, environmental impact among many other things is is feeding into that, for sure.

Amazing. Amazing. I'm very excited to see what's, you know, what's lying in the future. So, yeah, absolutely looking forward to it.

Okay, so this was the end of the the, let's say, business or technology part of the episode. So now we are going to delve into more, you know, of the personal side of Yuli. So, Yuli, I'd love to understand from you, what does your typical day look like? Maybe you can draw a contrast between a typical day pre-COVID and typical day in the COVID times.

Yeah. Well, so well, specifically with regards to work and Volta, it actually has to go the other way around, because I really kind of started at Volta during, you know, when we were already in a work-from-home mode, as it were. So, you know, during during the pandemic, you know, a lot of a lot of working from home. I kind of completely rejigged the living room and made it very comfortable for myself. Got a standing desk in here. Got my good computer and stuff like that set up.

I really took advantage of just all the time that I saved on the commute and did a lot of personal development in terms of learning about new languages, did some kind of machine learning courses, all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, typical day, fairly standard. Up at 8:00, 8:30, that kind of thing. Got daily meetings with with the developers, stand-up, and you know, plenty of calls with everyone throughout the day. So especially to counteract the remote working, we really try and, you know, keep keep active on Slack and and video calls all the time.

But yeah. You know, work, lunch, and then yeah, more work.

So it's I I really don't have an interesting don't have an interesting answer for this one. But I guess, yeah, I I took up I took classical guitar back up. I used to play that when I when I was at a young age. And during the pandemic, I just found it the best time to, you know, just really get back into that. Obviously, we everyone had a lot of free time. Other than that, I mean, I just went through I think the the key for me during during the pandemic was just to keep things keep mixing things up, basically.

You know, I'd I'd I'd go through stints. You know, I think I watched all of The West Wing at one point, and then I spent a lot of time playing the PlayStation in the evenings, and then I got bored of that, and then I played a lot of classical guitar. Luckily, I've still kept that one going because I'm really that's that's good for the soul.

But anyway, I was going a bit stir-crazy with working from home towards the end, especially when the possibility of coming back into an office got closer and closer, I really started to crave it. So, was was elated when we got got our new office in London. And and now a typical day is, you know, very similar, but I it's a I'm half-hour cycle away from the office, which means I get to cycle an hour a day, which I also love. A reason to get out of the house.

But now with fewer restrictions, I'm actually I play drums in an indie band, so over the course of the week, I will have at least at least one rehearsal. That's one evening. Another evening I play tennis as well. Other evenings I actually, you know, have a guitar lesson. So, again, variety, just doing lots of different things in the evening, seeing friends. But yeah, working working life fairly typical. I'm not I'm not like one of those up-at-4:00 AM kind of people.

I was I was going to ask you like do you get up at 5:00? But you started off with like, "Oh, 8:00, 8:30." So I'm like, "Okay. Nice. Somebody" It put a smile on my face, by the way, cuz you know, I'm I'm I wake up at that time and I'm I'm thinking, "Am I the only lazy person here, or what?"

Hey, we're not lazy. We just optimize in different ways, right? I mean, this is this is So, I mean, look, don't get me wrong. We all put in a lot of hours in in Volta, especially us, you know, especially the founders, but everyone really.

And the nature of the business Sorry, I know we're going back to the business, but it does tie into the personal, is that the nature of the business that we're in is that not only are we a technology company, but we're at this point in time an events company in that we're facilitating a lot of the tentpole content, all of the live streams that we're putting on, which does mean that you know, we especially when we're supporting US-based artists, it can mean that we're on at any time of the night.

And we do that, we we love doing it, but to me, it kind of just means that you know, the extra hours come at different times. For some people, it's really early in the morning. Other people, it's late at night. And I think I'm fairly good at being sort of strict with myself in terms of work-life balance, and I think that's something that everyone in the company does really well, and we want to set that example for the developers.

The game industry, which we're very, you know, which we as a technology company are quite close to in some ways We actually use a game engine called Unity, so there are technical overlaps as well. You know, it's sort of renowned for having this mentality of crunch, and it's sort of expected in the industry. We really try our hardest to avoid anything like that. And, you know, as a company, we've not we've not achieved it yet, but we do want to do a four-day week at some point in the future, and so, you know, we're we're we try and be quite progressive about that kind of stuff.

Thanks for sharing that. Just so you know, you you still have like, I think, 5 or 10 things that you do more than I do, so yeah.

Well, you know, it again, it's not it's Yeah, I don't know. Productivity comes in different ways, you know. You've got to work hard uh work smart, not hard.

I agree. Well, I think this ties into my next question, if I may ask it. Yuli, if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career, what's one thing you wish you had known or what advice would you give to your old self?

I think to be more structured around personal development. So this is something that I now do, and now kind of really see the value in, and make time for. But especially if you want to be either, you know, a CTO or a founder or an entrepreneur or something like that, I think the best examples of that are they're sort of polymath people with lots of disparate interests. And I mean certainly my experience is is that the ability to pull in bits of expertise from this, that, and the other, it always makes something that's greater than the sum of the parts.

And in order to be able to do that, I think you have to take quite keen interest in learning, and always learning. And that's certainly something that I try to do, and I think the pandemic probably forced a lot of people into doing that. And, you know, I'm sure websites like Coursera and Udemy and, you know, YouTube videos that are teaching people how to do things probably saw record numbers during last year, and that's a that's a fantastic thing, and hopefully people can keep that going. But those resources have always been there, and now I'm taking a very structured approach around personal development in in kind of my professional life.

And I think when I say structured, I mean, you know, carving out time in your week to be learning about something new, rather than I mean, for me, I got lucky in that I I would have I attended a lot of events that forced that upon me, like hackathons and stuff like that. But actually, to to say that that's going to be something that you do is really really valuable. So that's definitely something that I pass on to, you know, my nephews and my niece and nieces and stuff like that. Like, that's definitely something I would I would recommend, for sure.

So regarding personal development, how do you stay on top of the latest technology innovations? Are you subscribed to any sort of online magazine, or the new Are there any podcasts that you listen to besides SphereCast?

Besides SphereCast? I I kind of keep up to keep up to date really I Nothing hugely out of the ordinary here, mainly Twitter, mainly through my network of people, like net network of sort of prior colleagues. And and, you know, I've got a really interesting sort of diverse group of of of people that I've worked with in the past and who have gone on to work at other places and stuff like that.

So yeah. Yeah, sorry, not nothing hugely interesting there. I mean Twitter, Twitter's a great one. Tends to be where I get a lot of stuff from, I think. And there's probably a few obvious ones I'm forgetting, but they don't spring to mind, so.

Yeah, I think a lot of people use Twitter. I know I do, Luke does, so it's a very good source of information.

Yeah, for sure.

Luke, do you want to say something?

No, go ahead.

All right.

I was I was going to, you know, this is not for the podcast, but I think Twitter is extremely toxic, but anyhow, we move.

You know, it is, but I I I tend to use Twitter in kind of read-only mode. My my own Twitter feed is is not the most exciting. But in terms of, yeah, I I also use I mean there's there's people in in Volta who are very active about posting interesting things that they find. So really, I think it's a network effect, really. You got to know interesting people, work with interesting people. They'll bring you interesting content and then, you know, you can you can kind of I mean, a lot of the a lot of the stuff that you see tends to be kind of variations on a theme anyway, so that's why I kind of don't dig too deep into that kind of stuff unless I have to. You know, like if it's for a particular product or an idea or something like that, then then I can go down the rabbit hole.

And but really, I I love kind of open-source projects, things where you can kind of get your hands dirty, and and also just commissioning friends to, you know, in a professional capacity, or people that I've worked with to build little experiments for us is something that that that we do a lot of. So, yeah. No, that's that's that's kind of how I keep in the loop, as it were.

Do you use LinkedIn also, Yuli?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've we've also been we've just been through Techstars Music accelerator accelerator program, which is also an interesting experience, because usually it's in-person in LA. But again, another sort of hidden benefit of the pandemic was that programs like that, that usually insist that you're in-person, actually threw their doors open to a global base of companies as well. So we were able to take part in that program, which has been great. But yeah, there's a lot of kind of networking and LinkedIn via Slack groups and stuff like that. Yeah.

Yeah, we have a group on LinkedIn for the CTOs that we, you know, interview or meet with prior to COVID. So, we would love to invite you there. We have a great resources and a great team there.

Please do. Yeah, would love to. Yeah.

The the the resources are building there right now, so we'll add you to the group. But slowly, I think in the next six months or so, you will see that the the content in the group will improve. And yeah, hopefully you'll enjoy it. We are we are hoping to bring something called failure, tech failure of the week, so hopefully that's useful.

Okay. Well, every every CTO worth their salt will have something to contribute to that, I'm sure.

Yeah. Okay, great. Awesome.

All right. So, we've come to the final part of our podcast. This is where we can ask tricky questions of our guests. So, Yuli, what continues to be your biggest challenge from a tech perspective? And also, second question, how do you wish technology would evolve to make your business more efficient?

So, in terms of the biggest challenge I think we face is, yeah, that is a tricky one. I mean, we we've touched upon we've touched upon like our kind of needs to to scale in terms of specifically around kind of like keeping things in sync across networks. Social, you know, elements of VR are tricky. We we we do have experience with that, but it's it's a really really difficult area that not many companies in the space have have cracked, for sure. So I think social and video, from a from a tech perspective, are going to be challenges that we continue to just sort of battle with, and and every company like this does.

In terms of how the technology would evolve, not sure if this is strictly around the technology, but in terms of the industry, we we are looking forward to when VR and AR become become more widely adopted. You know, we're strategically focusing a lot on 2D video platforms at the moment because that's you know, that's where the eyeballs are, quite frankly. You know, we we VR is picking up, and the Oculus Quest 2 is a fantastic, you know, entry-level headset at a good price point, but it's still not it's still not cheap enough for for it to be truly mass market.

So, I think the possibilities around immersive performances, immersive entertainment really goes to the next level when AR and VR are more heavily involved. So, we're looking forward to that. I wouldn't say it's a challenge right now. We're keeping we're keeping sort of our foot in the door there. But yeah, until until that happens, we're sort of taking a little bit of a backseat on that. But you know, it can change anytime, you know, when Apple bring out their VR headset or AR glasses or whatever it's going to be. That's undoubtedly going to be a step change in the industry, which we look forward to. But even now, we see it as a a core component of what we do, but probably not the biggest one.

I see. Interesting. I mean, that that will explode one day, I guess. It's just Absolutely. it's matter of time. So if if you place yourself, you know, in a good position by the time it is reality, let's say, not reality, but available to masses and and it's cheap as well. Not not cheap. I would say more more accessible. I think that's the better word. Then I think, yeah, it's a it's a and and not all your eggs are in that basket, so that's also a good thing. So, yeah. That's that's a good Yeah, exactly. I think it's a good position to be in in my opinion.

Yeah, we agree.

Okay. Amazing. So, Yuli, that's the end of the episode. I think it was great fun hosting you today. We really enjoyed. I really enjoyed it, personally. And I would love to host you again, let's say, in a matter of six months, you know, half a year later. We'd love to check on the progress you have made at Volta, and would love to have this conversation again. Maybe different questions next time.

I'm sure we'll be in a totally different position by that point, so yeah. Would would be very interested to chat again.

A special thanks to our podcast guest this week, and once again to our sponsor, Sphere Partners, for bringing this episode to life.

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