Company: Auxuman
Headcount: 9
Stage: Pre-Seed
Tell us your story
As a kid I was always building fantasy worlds based on my day to day life. My family and friends were all characters in different forms (animals or humans with strange physical attributes) and the happenings around me all translated into narratives that I used to shape these worlds. As I grew older, these fantasy worlds became piles of poetry, short stories, plays and videos I made.
When I left Iran for a 2 week trip to the UK, I never thought I would be calling it home for the next 13 years. The movie I had written and starred in, “No One Knows About Persian Cats”, a docu-drama about the underground music scene in Iran, had just won the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes. It had also made it impossible to go back.
Becoming a refugee can be a different experience for different people depending on individual circumstances but it nonetheless plays a big part in shaping one’s understanding of the world and of themselves. For me, it made me want to explore those big questions about humanity and its prospects.
In the quest to determine my raison d’etre, I studied Philosophy. One of the main reasons I got really interested in technology was because I saw it taking a stance on philosophical dilemmas. Think about the trolley problem in self-driving cars, the impact of language theories on NLP research, or (what was most fascinating to me) the extension of the physical/actual world into the digital/virtual and how we come to experience this overlap.
I’ve worked at a number of tech companies including Babylon Health and Spotify as a Product Manager before starting my own journey in Auxuman with our Co-Founder Isabella Winthrop, who brings her expertise in game design to the mix.
Spotify and Babylon might seem worlds apart, but what I learned from both experiences was how they have created the machinery that unlocks access to aspects of life that were not accessible before: predicting how your health might turn out in 10 years or providing a personalised audio experience.
Synthetic realities and virtual worlds too need the same approach: standardisation, scale and personalisation in order to become fully accessible experiences. This is what we are focusing on in Auxuman: building the mechanics for a fully-personalised interactive experience platform within a community driven narrative.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I recently watched ‘The Hand of God’, which in short is a coming-of-age story of Fabietto, a young man in Naples, whose life is shattered by the death of his parents in a tragic accident caused by a gas leak. He would also have succumbed if it wasn’t for his begging to stay back and watch Maradona play for his beloved Napoli. This grief and tragedy though became what gave the protagonist new meaning and purpose, and the perspective that allowed him to leave his town and become a filmmaker.
The movie got me thinking about the journey of humans. When we don’t have control, how do we respond to changes (loss or otherwise) that shake up the structures we’ve set? For example, our direct response to the way that the pandemic changed our structure of living. When we are challenged by change, how do we respond with renewed purpose?
Perhaps building and innovating is a way of coping for us, but at a fundamental level the act of embracing challenge is what drives humanity forward and accelerates progress in my opinion.
What can't you stop thinking about?
Leisure! I think a lot about what entertainment means to people today and how it’s changing. The entertainment industry has gone through a lot of changes from the advent of radio all the way through to broadcast TV and online streaming. This in turn has changed storytelling fundamentally. It’s made storytelling ubiquitous and continuous, across media and mediums.
Reading a book, watching a film in the cinema and watching TV at home used to be different experiences that people engaged with in different states of mind, different settings with different groups of people. The lines have now blurred between these modes of experiences. And what’s emerging is an entirely new phenomenon, one that’s exciting.
People are going to demand more from virtual worlds, not limited to the desire to escape. They will want virtual worlds to fulfil a range of needs, be they social or even financial. In some ways, leisure becomes the essence of wellbeing that can play a key part in driving societal progress. Web3 and blockchain have been leaning towards asking these deeper questions around the future of work and leisure and the next decade will show the importance of leisure economics and mark yet another shift in the evolution of entertainment.
If I could tell you just one thing...
If you don’t fit in, that’s probably a good thing.
As kids and young adults, we are encouraged to forge our own path but to also not steer away too much from what’s familiar or conventional. The job market reinforces this idea by hiring people with ‘tried and tested’ backgrounds.
I have come across a lot of people who believe they can't break into an industry or role because they don’t fit the familiar profile. I believe the opposite is true. If you don’t fit in, you have the unique ability, that outsider perspective, to recognise the stagnation of existing structures and challenge them. This aligns to the core of innovation: disrupting standards and building new ones.
So embrace being an outsider and use it to your advantage.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
I would love to chat with Hayao Miyazaki. He’s the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and a masterful storyteller who has created some of the best animated films like ‘Spirited Away’, ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ and ‘Princess Mononoke’ to name a few.
What has really fascinated me about his work is the way he has engineered such complicated yet completely contained worlds which lead you to believe their “realities” even though they are totally unbelievable.
Such immersive world building, I think, has enabled a new kind of narrative. Unlike a lot of Disney films, characters are not necessarily on a quest to overcome some evil. Endings are not always conclusive. And what’s broken is not fully repaired.
He opens a window into this imagined world and lets you immerse yourself in it for 2 hours and then, as if completely by accident, stumble upon the ‘story’.