Tony Pearce, co-founder, Reality+
Doctor Who and Top Gear interactive experiences are set to arrive in the Metaverse thanks to London-based startup Reality+. The Web3 business has teamed up with BBC Studios to to launch a collection of immersive experiences in the metaverse later this year, like racing cars in Top Gear land. It’s the first time the network is entering this 3D-enabled digital space, which utilizes Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and semiconductor technology to offer life-like personal and business experiences online.
Reality+ provides a platform enabling brands to launch and manage their Web3 strategies including blockchain games, multi-chain NFT experiences and metaverse development. The BBC deal builds on similar Reality+ partnerships with ITV Studios, FIFA and others. The startup previously helped create a Doctor Who trading card game where each card is a unique non-fungible token (NFT), a digital asset that has been tokenized via a blockchain.
For co-founder Tony Pearce, a serial entrepreneur and mobile games pioneer, who worked with Sega back in the 1990s, the joint venture is a natural progression of a career built by looking ahead of the curve. His first start-up was with Telstar Records, known in the 90s for creating compilation albums like ‘The Best of Dance’. “Telstar wanted to expand into video games and asked me to join and help set it up. We went onto launch one of the first PlayStation 1 games,” Pearce says.
From that point, Pearce was hooked on starting companies and scaling quickly. Some failed and some were successful. Pearce’s most successful start-up to date was Player X, which developed mobile games, and taught him to ignore naysayers. “I remember colleagues laughing at me saying games on mobile phones would never take off. But good entrepreneurs have a vision,” Pearce says. “Never give up if you have done your research and truly believe in your business.”
Pearce met his co-founder in 2016 when he was seeking funding for his augmented reality game Reality Clash. They were both interested in utilizing blockchain to enable gamers to own their in-game items.
“It was a no-brainer. Why would gamers not want to own their in-game items and have the ability to sell them or take them into another game? By tokenizing these items on the blockchain this was now possible. When we first started, the phrase NFT did not even exist”, he says.
Later, Reality Clash became the first mobile game to integrate NFTs. Four years later, Pearce co-founded Reality+.
One of the greatest keys to his success, Pearce says, is partnering with the right co-founder.
“I’ve started five start-ups, four of them with co-founders. Co-founder breakup is one of the leading causes of business failure. There should always be a visionary and an integrator, a yin and yang and both know their strengths and weaknesses. Work on something small at first. My co-founder and I continue to have constant check-ins about new skills we need to learn. Most relationships sour over time because co-founders have different ideas of what success looks like so make sure you have a conversation about what success looks like individually for you.”
Finally, Pearce says the best advice he’s picked up along the way is to fail quickly, hire slowly and fire fast.
