Phillip Wang and Nate Foss: Gather, and building the open metaverse

Into the Bytecode

This is a conversation with Phillip Wang and Nate Foss two of the co-founders of Gather.

Gather is a video chat platform that puts you and the people you're communicating with in a virtual space - and gives you the ability to move around and interact with them based on your locations in that space, just like in real life. It's had a ton of traction over the last year and is being used by millions of people around the world. It's one of the coolest products I've personally used in recent memory.

As you will hear in this conversation, Phillip and Nate are two incredibly thoughtful and mission-oriented people — and they plan to build Gather into a progressively open and decentralized system. So in this conversation, we went deep on what this could actually look like. We talked about how Gather is architected under the hood and how they think about decentralizing the game engine and the tech stack. We talked about identity, login, and social graphs. We talked about business models. And lastly, we talked about the metaverse and the path dependence of how the future unfolds from here.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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Show notes:

- Gather's websocket API.