Herman Narula has long been at the cutting edge of innovation since he left university. With more than one unicorn under his belt, as CEO of Improbable, he’s now a leader in deep technology and virtual worlds. And with M², an Improbable venture, he’s launching a ground-breaking metaverse that is orders of magnitude larger than the ones that we have seen.Narula joined TFN’s Founder’s in Focus series to discuss how he started, the growth of his company, Improbable, and how he is pioneering the metaverse.
Born to build: how a love of gaming fuelled a career
Narula’s background meant he was born for tech leadership. “My family worked in bricks-and-mortar businesses, which gave me an early exposure to some of that thinking early on,” he said. And that combined with his multicultural heritage, “I’m a very proud Indian-British-American person.” But he works in the tech sector because of who he is: “Really, I’m just a nerd who loves video games, and that’s always been my passion.”He started his business with friends at his family home after leaving Cambridge, although it wasn’t quite the garage-based stereotype. “It was a barn, technically,” he explained. “I think that that’s more British; garages are American barns!”His vision then was the same as it is today. “We started the company with the same north star we have today, we basically want to live in other realities. We want to live in virtual worlds. We want to power businesses that can leverage virtual worlds in ways that go far beyond gaming,” he told us.He illustrates how the work goes far beyond gaming with a stark example. “Some of the other co-founders and I are sanctioned by Russia,” he revealed. Used for military simulations, the applications of their technology now being used in the defence of Ukraine.Today, he is in the midst of launching Somnia, a blockchain that will be the world’s fastest. “It can handle half-a-million transactions a second,” he said. “You can take Visa and Mastercard, multiply it by a few times over, and still have room.”
Navigating the road to success
Narula is clear that success is not a linear journey, and notes that Improbable’s position as a holding company means it has ups and downs, “as a venture builder, we’re looking at the success of individual ventures.” But while it means their annual results may vary, it allows Improbable to take a longer-term view, “what’s exciting is we have a very long runway, over five years, we have the ability to invest in new ventures.”It also brings with it humility. “We’ve had lots of successes and lots of failures, all of which have allowed us to reach where we reach today,” Narula told us. “Being really honest with yourself about the state of reality, being in a place where you’re able to have honest and frank conversations with your team and them with you. I think it’s just critical to how we function.”It’s essential, Narula believes, because deeptech, like Improbable’s, is never easy. “The challenges remain the same,” he said. “You even see them now with people in the self-driving and in the AI space, you have technology and a lot of really smart people that are building something great, but it’s very far away from commercialisation.” The trick, Narula said, is to remain “really focused on creating a sense of urgency around everything the company is doing in order to make that work and to move that forward.”
The new frontier: An internet of Metaverses
Improbable’s latest venture, M², has been described by Narula as an ‘internet of metaverses’, it is, he says, the “technology to power massive scale virtual worlds that can have their own economies and can be connected together in all manner of elaborate ways.” He resists comparisons to other companies that might be considered metaverse providers. “We’re not working in the VR space directly, we’re building technology to let anyone build their own white-labeled metaverse,” he explained. But he adds that M² works at a scale and in a way that has not been seen before. “Our technology can handle tens of thousands of people at the same time, which no one else on Earth can do,” he said. Indeed, Narula feels that the technology is so far ahead of anything similar, they don’t have competitors in the traditional sense. “Our competition is really the market itself,” he said. “Is it ready yet for the capability you’re enabling? Is now the right moment to commercialise it? Are you on the right side of the relevant trends, and have you got the right stamina to be able to build out what you’re doing?”
Relax and play: Advice from a tech visionary
Narula and Improbable have been creating metaverses for over 12 years, and perhaps know more than most about working in a business that’s driving a technology forward and waiting for the market to catch up. However, with metaverses starting to become increasingly mainstream, we will soon start seeing ourselves in Improbable and M² metaverses, whether it’s in a game, dealing with a business, or supporting our favourite team or artist.For Narula, although he recognises that leading technology is hard work, he also wishes he’d realised earlier that there was more time for play.“I wish I knew how little anyone really knows what they’re doing in the frontier space. A lot of people present their advice or their journey as gospel, but really don’t really have much experience themselves,” he said. “I think knowing that, I would have been a little bit more relaxed, and allowed myself more room and more opportunity to experiment without taking it too seriously in the early days.”
