From Concept to Combat: Scaling New Heights in AR Gaming with Jadu

This episode explores the innovative augmented reality (AR) gaming platform created by Jadu, focusing on how they integrate AR into mobile gaming for immersive and spatial experiences.

1. Jadu specializes in AR experiences that are immersive and utilize the player's real-world environment.
2. The game allows for real-time combat with avatars that interact within the player’s space, whether indoors or outdoors.
3. Jadu has focused on optimizing avatar sizes and interaction mechanics to suit various physical spaces, aiming for what they call the "Goldilocks zone" of AR gaming.
4. The development team employs an iterative process, continuously refining gameplay based on real-world testing and player feedback.
5. The scalability of AR technology on mobile platforms has enabled Jadu to pivot towards more accessible and widely available gaming experiences.

1: Introduction to Jadu and Its Founders

Jack Gerard and Jake Sally introduce their company, Jadu, which focuses on creating immersive AR games for mobile devices. They describe their game’s unique approach to integrating digital elements into real environments. Jack Gerard: "We aim to bring a life-sized experience that balances the game's scale with the player's available space." Jake Sally: "Our game transforms your familiar spaces into exciting gaming arenas."

2: Technical Insights and Design Challenges

The founders discuss the technical challenges of developing AR games, focusing on device capabilities and spatial recognition, which are crucial for integrating gameplay smoothly into real-world settings. Jack Gerard: "Our technology needs to understand and adapt to a variety of physical spaces to provide a seamless gaming experience." Jake Sally: "We are constantly testing and tweaking the game’s spatial algorithms to perfect the player's experience."

3: Business Strategy and Company Growth

This chapter covers the strategic decisions behind Jadu's growth, including funding, team building, and market positioning. They emphasize the importance of adaptability in the rapidly evolving AR market. Jack Gerard: "Navigating the startup phase involved balancing innovation with practical business strategies." Jake Sally: "Our growth is a testament to our team’s ability to adapt and innovate in a challenging technological landscape."

1. Explore AR Capabilities: Start with simple AR tools to understand the technology’s potential and limitations.
2. Focus on User Experience: Design AR applications that are intuitive and enhance the user's interaction with their environment.
3. Iterative Development: Regularly update and refine AR applications based on user feedback to improve engagement.
4. Leverage Existing Platforms: Utilize platforms like ARKit and ARCore to accelerate development and reduce costs.
5. Market Strategically: Position AR products in a way that highlights their unique benefits over traditional apps.

"We specialize in creating experiences that are immersive and spatial."

Jack Gerrard and Jake Sally of Jadu AR take us into the development of their groundbreaking augmented reality game on this episode of Founders In LA. They describe the innovative challenges and creative solutions involved in bringing a mobile AR fighting game to life.

Jack and Jake discuss their philosophy of creating immersive, spatial experiences that push the boundaries of traditional gaming, using augmented reality to enhance player interaction with their environment.

They also delve into the iterative process that shapes their design decisions, from avatar scale to gameplay dynamics, revealing how they balance technical limitations with user engagement.

Throughout our conversation, the duo highlight the potential of AR to transform not just gaming, but how we interact with the digital world. Tune in to discover the future of augmented reality through the eyes of two visionary builders.

People

Jack Gerard, Jake Sally

Companies

Jadu

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Jack Gerard, Jake Sally

Content Warnings:

None

Jake Sally

We really specialize in creating experiences that are immersive and spatial.

Ethan Cole

Hey everybody, thank you for joining us. And welcome to the founders in LA podcast. I'm your host Ethan Cole and this is an opportunity to shine the spotlight. Through a product lens and some of. The exceptional founders we have as part.

Jack Gerard

Of the LA community in an unedited. One take organic conversation. Today we have Jack Gerard and Jake Sally. Thanks so much for taking the time. To come to studio fellows.

Thanks for having us man. Yeah, really happy to be here. This is a good one. But first a word from our sponsors. Founders Joey is brought to you by Nearshure Nearshare is a trailblazer in nearshore outsourcing and staff augmentation.

Ethan Cole

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Join United Club and experience co working like never before. Learn more at www.unida.com dot Club Sorry, that's www dot Unita dot cl u b. Our guests today are Jack Gerard, co founder and CTO, and Jake Sally, CEO of Jadu Ar. Could you guys give us a 32nd description of Jadu? Sure.

Jake Sally

And just I'm co not CEO yet. Yeah, so Jadu is an augmented reality game for mobile. We really specialize in creating experiences that are immersive and spatial, and we've been working exclusively on augmented reality for the last seven or eight years now. So to give folks a double click into what does it look like when the gaming experience is in augmented reality? Yeah.

So when you open the app, what you're going to see is you're going to see your avatar in real world space, wherever you are. So if I'm in my bedroom, if someone else is out on the street, you're going to see this character, and then you're actually going to see your opponent. So this is a fighting game. So things Street Fighter esque in the real world, you're going to see your character, the opponent, and you're going to be able to get into a fight right then and there featuring incredible visual effects, characters, and customization. There's a whole host of things you can do in the app, but really what we care about is creating a game that utilizes, really the power of.

Jack Gerard

Your smartphone, and it's the world around you. So if you just want to have little characters fight on the table in front of you, you can just kind of center the phone, have it figure out what the floor is. Basically, it figures out your location by setting up a 1 second camera image. Or how do you get set up in the game? Patrick, you want to talk about?

Yeah, yeah. So basically, you know, one of the things that you touched on that's interesting and something we've always been a focus on is the scale of the ar we're going for. You know, there's a few approaches you could, you could go at it. And something that we've always thought is, like, the most immersive or most interesting is, like, closer to the life size humanoid model. But, like, it's an interesting balance we always have to think about as, like, okay, like, we want to utilize space.

So tabletop, it doesn't really encourage kind of like, walking around your room or like, having a whole spatial awareness. It's kind of just like targeting one little spot while, you know, having them too big. Then you're in a small space, and you can't really be moving around in the same way or, like, interacting with the space because it's too cramped in these environments. So, like, we've kind of aimed or ended up in a place of, like, you know, kind of like 13 year old, like sized avatars. Feet, basically.

Jake Sally

So we do want it to be bigger than tabletop, I think. Tabletop, it's a whole great genre of augmented reality for us. To Jack's point, we want to use your full space, and if you're a teenager playing the game and you're in your smaller one bedroom, it's not really possible. True to scale, if you have a six foot avatar in that space, it looks great, really hard to move around that space. So it's a little bit of the Goldilocks zone.

We want it to be bigger than tabletop. We want it to be smaller than true to scale. And that gives people a lot of flexibility in how they play. Yeah. And to go back to your original question about what the setup looks like currently, it's a brief, like maybe ten to 15 2nd scan of your floor until we recognize your floor.

Jack Gerard

Then you place your avatar and you're put into a match via with a real person or like a bot of like, you know, our tutorial set up and soon to have a campaign sort of mode. And you're instantly just in combat, like right off the bat, just fighting. Drop you in the world real fast. Drop you in your own world with a little avatar fighting. I just.

I don't know why this one comes to mind immediately, but when you talk about scale, one day can imagine like a augmented real life rampage in like a New York City area. You just like create your own donkey Kong or Godzilla is just like breaking apart buildings. Yeah. It's been a long internal debate with the team. I'm honestly, I've gone back and forth on it.

I've typically been the one who's more like, we should let people do whatever scale they want, you know, like King Kong or like tabletop. You know, I'm like very scale liberal in that regard. But it's kind of two camps that have arisen. Like, do we like, turn that knob all the way up or do we keep it contained and have that as like, you don't want to give the user all the choices. You got to make some for him?

Jake Sally

I think what comes with that also is it's a new type of gameplay. People are used to a certain type of augmented reality. There's kind of like, on one hand you've got face filters and the type of things you see on social media where it's like you're having a short form experience with the ultimate output being a video or a picture. The goal is it's a spatial experience, but the end result is still 2D Media. And then on the other hand, you've got things like Pokemon Go, which is awesome.

But the input for AR is really your specific location, determines what's going on in the experience. And for us, we really want people to be using, yes. Where they are, but really the space around them matters more than anything. And I think that really starts helping to ground it. And it's a bit of a new play pattern for people.

So as they get more familiar with it, I think that's where we get to crank up how liberal we are in terms of what that scale and size, but giving someone a uniform experience where they can feel comfortable, they're like, great. I know my character size. I know where I am in space. I know how to navigate this space provides a really good bedrock for a lot of that. So a lot of our listeners are building their own, like building projects themselves, building companies themselves.

Jack Gerard

Where are you guys right now in terms of the company building process? And then how are you solving these challenges? You're saying there's internal debates, like, how are those debates arising? And then how are you coming to resolution of what path to take? Yeah, so I'll give a sense of where we are and kind of like our particular path, and we can talk about this probably a bit more later.

Jake Sally

But Jatu, as a company, is on its 6th or 7th iteration in terms of how it's scaling, what our focus is. But while we're focused on augmented reality fighting, we are post series a. So we've completed that raise we've been building for two years specifically towards the goal of the AR fighting game. We're feeling really good. We have, I think, scaled to about a size.

It feels pretty comfortable for us. We've really fine tuned what a lot of our processes look like as operations. That's definitely been my day to day, but it's feeling pretty stable at this point, which is nice. How many folks are there today? Yes, we have about a 40 person team.

So it's a good midsize studio, I would say. It's a really interesting blend of, we're very design forward, but designers, engineers, creatives. Most of the folks we're working with have some amount of experience, specifically with augmented or virtual reality. So they have a good understanding of how this type of content works spatially, which is like a completely different ballgame than, I would say, a traditional video game. Yeah.

And then in terms of how we resolve things, we like to let things cook. We're very comfortable, very iterative. So when we have these conversations, we're like, okay, the size of the avatar, multi month conversation, we kind of a. We're actually iterating. So we're seeing what it looks like in AR, playing with that experience and kind of trying in a lot of sizes.

You know, our CEO lives in a bigger spot, so we have some more open space. I, for example, like, I'm in like a one bedroom in Denver right now. So for me, it's like the perfect counterpoint where you're like, okay, this is like a relatively cramped space. How does it work in all of these different types of spaces? Indoor, outdoor, you know, small character, large character.

And we usually end up finding kind of, like I was saying, this Goldilocks zone of what we think is best, especially for people where this is their first introduction to spatial gameplay. And that's really, I think, started to resonate quite well. So, yeah, we go back and forth a lot on most of these things. Yeah, I'd also say, like, you know, after having tried several iterations, these conversations, I would never say that ever fully resolve. You know, they kind of just keep going and knowing the speed of iteration, how many iterations you put out, really, like, the weight of each decision.

Jack Gerard

Like, if you don't win the fight on this iteration, you might later, like, it's like, if that doesn't work, you always have the opportunity to be like, I think that we should try it this way. And, like, being flexible and not getting tied down on, like, ideas is like, I think a pretty key point of, like, why we are able to, like, work the way we are is because the second you close the book on that, the second you're close to innovating it as well, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say there's no hard rules. It's very.

Jake Sally

We're not big on, like, hardcore dogma. It's very much everything is a flexible. Line and figure out what's working and double down on that. What's working, double down on it. And to Jack's point, you know, even this iteration of the game is very different than what we started with.

And as kind of the player interactions change, you do have to revisit some of the fundamentals of okay for the new kind of playstyle. Does this form factor work? We were pretty set on a slightly bigger version of the characters, a few iterations back. And as the gameplay has changed, it's become a little bit more fast paced. Scaling it down has made a lot more sense.

Some of our heavy attacks where you're kind of hitting characters and the opponent's flying across the room, it's kind of one of those scenarios where, like, okay, we need them to be a little bit different size to make this feel good. You know, a lot of it is feeling oriented. And that's, you know, when we're talking about a fighting game, it needs to feel high impact. It needs to get your blood pumping. So that's usually how we orient, especially when it comes to the gameplay.

Jack Gerard

I'd love to double click into, you know, the journey to this iteration. I think that's something gets lost on exiting. Founders who founded something like ten years, they started something ten years ago, and now they're exiting for people who are building today. I'd love to learn more about how did you find the thing that started to click after sounds like multiple iterations. You found one that's working for you.

You're building, you're growing, you're scaling. What was it that clicked? What led you guys to identify, hey, this is the. This is the right move. This is the pivot that actually is the one that's gonna make us grow.

Jake Sally

Yeah. Do you wanna talk about. I think there's a couple, like, key problems to think about. One of them is, what device are we building for Jack, I would love for you to talk about that. And then I'll kind of touch on, I think, why a fighting game and why that's really meaningful.

Jack Gerard

Yeah. So it's kind of hard to talk about without starting from the very top in that regard. Right. To how we worked out that mobile fighting game is what we're going for. We first had to work out what we didn't want to do.

So when we started working together, us, and I, the CEO, he came to me in college and was like, hey, I got a project. I need a sound guy for it. And at the time, I was a music major sound guy. I was like, sure, let's do it. Don't know what that really entails.

And he's like, we're going to Sundance. And it was way before we'd ever even talked to anyone from Sundance, but I was like, all right, we're going to Sundance instantly. It was just all the way in. And we got our start, really, with the Microsoft HoloLens? With the Microsoft HoloLens one.

And we were experimenting with Depthkit, which is a New York based startup who were doing volumetric video capture with the Xbox Kinect. And so what we originally started off doing was documentary content in AR using a combination of volumetrics and headsets. So you could basically kind of, like, in this context, you could put somebody with the headset, like, put the Hololens on them and then place a hologram in the room with them. So you. I would be sitting down talking to a holographic version of you, which we'd cut up these videos into essentially a branching narrative format.

So it was an interactive 3d interview simulation, which turned into our first project, Terminal three, which was a political piece about muslim perceived identities being stopped at airport screenings. And it was taken to Tribeca Film Festival with the help of Jake Sally, our producer at the time. But before he was on our team, he was working with Verizon on mixed reality projects. So that went really well, and we used it to go into our next project, which was the jester's tale, which was sort of a criticism on AI, and, like, its perception is like, you know, a thing with agency, which ended up that one did go to Sundance. The dream was finally realized after two hard years of work.

We were still in college coming out, and that also went really well. But, like, the interesting thing about terminal three and a jester's tale was that we had gotten to the top of what that headset based stuff was at the time, right? We had gone to all of the big festivals, we had raised the big money from companies, and we had made the project. But then after that, there was no real market adoption for these because of just the amount of people who have AR headsets at the time. Things like the HoloLens, things like the magic leap, weren't really consumer used products yet.

They weren't in the market. There wasn't enough appeal at that point. Coming out of those two projects, we decided, okay, if we keep doing this, we're going to continually be just living project to project, raising money to get to the next project, until we're just waiting around for the market to be ready for us. This realization moment somewhere in that time of there is a very capable AR device that everyone in America, and beyond that, the rest of the world, smartphones in general, as an AR device, are highly underutilized and the capabilities of them even now, are still not fully recognized. So while we're waiting for the headset thing was our approach at the time, let's start working on mobile stuff.

And just that idea, over time, has just continued to prove itself true is these software companies keep developing these smartphones that keep getting stronger and better, to the point where, like, my smartphone's now is as strong as the computer. We made, like, these headsets on in a lot of ways. So, pivoting into the mobile market, we kept the AR and the volumetric through line. We started working with another company who were doing more high def volumetrics. We were like, the thing about the depth kit volumetrics, where they're essentially, you can't go around them in the same way.

So to be able to give it to, like, they capture from the front back unless you configure a few of them. So the company we started working with, metastage, were doing bigger captures, and we were able to capture much more high definition things. And at the time, we were really looking to like, okay, there's this big market happening with TikTok. It was right at the start of all that. And, like, Instagram is doing a thing with face filters.

TikTok's coming up and really trying to essentially create this platform, Jawdew, which is at the time when we came up with the name, and it was essentially a platform where we would go and work with artists, musical or otherwise, and get volumetric captures of them to place in your space and shoot promotional content or anything the artist might desire. Little music clips of holograms of the artist for sharing in social media so that kids could go and place them in their space and be like, oh, look, I just did a skit with Lil Nas X, or I just did a skit with a little house phone. You know, a ton of artists. We had a wide range of people there. And after a while of doing that, just, we hit another point where it was essentially, like, the form factor of, like, you can't interact with it in the same way.

Like, it's not immersive. Like, it's fun, it's, like, cool, and it's like a gimmick and not like a gimmick, but it has novelty to it. Right. But the amount of time you actually want to be doing that for was not what we were looking for in terms of the scale of AR we want to achieve. Right.

Growing up reading snow crash and thinking of all these metaverse things and being like, we're pivoted into a place where we can really actually push ar forward as a medium, it just. It became apparent that we need to do something more interactive. And with that ally. Right. So it sounds like part of it is taking the technology started in a niche space that, you know, the latest technology and the Hololens with, at the time, a lot of promise, like, oh, people will start using these headsets.

I think it was similar to when Google had, like, first launched Google Glass, too. So it was kind of competing things in the marketplace. It felt like this might be where things go. Taking that probably further than most people could have possibly taken it. If you actually made projects, got funding, and took it to Sundance, that's probably, like, in terms of, like, the Hololens achievements, it's probably their hall of fame somewhere.

But then recognizing that, hey, that medium is not the right one, it's just not accessible enough for us to be able to do what we want to do. And these phones that everyone's walking around are actually powerful enough to provide this experience that we want to share with them. And Jake. Oh, yeah. I mean, the ubiquity of the device.

Jake Sally

And I really want to double down on what Jack was saying about, you know, we had really, we'd shown these at these festivals, we had museum installations of a lot of our work that were pretty elaborate, and we were like, great, okay, we've reached this level of achievement. Where can it go next? And we were hitting a real ceiling on it, and we were like, we've shown the 10,000 people in the world who care about this format and go to all of these things. It doesn't scale any bigger. And as a Business, that's a problem.

So, yeah, so for us, we ended up going in the mobile direction, the early iteration of Jata, where we're doing the holograms in people's physical spaces. And really, you're like, hey, you can still stunt cast Lil NAS X in your room. People love this. But to Jack's point, it's like, there's technical limitations on what you can do with the volumetrics and the holograms. That was, I think, also limiting.

And we wanted. What we were starting to see is that people themselves wanted to, I think, enter these spaces and enter other people's spaces. So the framework, I think, for the fighting game was like, on one hand, we want this to be something that utilizes avatars in real world space. So taking the hologram concept of people and transmuting it into avatars, something that you control, that you can manipulate, having it be third pErson. So most augmented reality experiences are first person experiences.

When you see the hologram, when we were doing our headset work, you are embodying a character, and you're interacting with these holograms. For us, this transition, which is pretty non standard for armor, of actually having it be third person, it opens this other access of interaction where it's like, I can physically move around with my device and I can move my character around. And now you've got two opportunities to move in a spatial way that's really, really nice. It opens up so much more flexibility for the player. So you're like, okay, now we have this much more open space.

I can move around, my avatar can move around. What do we want those characters to be doing? And I think AR is still very novel, especially spatial architecture, that we want it to be something that's quick. It's easy to understand, you know, exactly what you're doing. Fights are super straightforward.

You're like, it's me. It's someone else. It works really well for the constraints of mobile, which is it's harder to have, like, 710 20 characters in a space together. So let's keep it constrained to two characters doing something in a spatial construct. What could that be?

Fighting is very natural. It works well with kind of like, the mobile game market itself, and it's something that we feel like we can build on and iterate quite quickly. It also looks great on social media, which for us is a lot of people. Also, I think one of the other big things we landed on, at least for now, is vertical versus horizontal. We don't do landscape mode with Jahdu because we want people to be recording their videos in a format that's native to how people consume social media.

So that was a huge switch. Also, when people are holding things in landscape mode, their hands are often over the cameras and sensors. You need to make AR work. Well, that's interesting. If you also think about how much, like, when you're holding it vertically versus horizontally, how much actual screen space your thumbs are taking up relative to the screen.

Jack Gerard

Horizontally, you're going to have your palms resting on either end. Like Jake said, you might be covering the camera, and then you're looking at essentially a square between your two thumbs, while vertically you get probably about three quarters of the screen and, like, hold it with one hand. You know, there's a lot of these kind of ergonomic decisions that end up affecting product decisions later, you know, just for the sake of the experience. It's kind of an interesting one. The idea of a fight in Ar, too, I think it's really good at.

You know, you think about these action movies where, like, the coolest fight scenes are like, oh, they're spiral, look, they're off a bridge. They got thrown into a lamp. There goes your lamp, you know, and something that can be done there is, like, there's a lot of interesting spatial interactions that just come from the nature of, like, like, you know, like a tavern fight in, like, a fantasy movie or like a cowboy scene, something like that. But it's also a lot of Ar right now. It's very, like, polished pastel.

Jake Sally

You know, it's designed to be something that's a little bit more calming and aesthetic, maybe a little bit creative. But I think what's missing is content that's reflective of kind of, like, the chaos and fun of the Internet. And we are, you know, we're an independent company, so we have that flexibility to say, like, yeah, let's go a little crazier with it. Let's get a little bit more ruckus with it. And we really like that.

And I think people really respond to that if they're like, look, we love things like Pokemon go. We love the face filters. But we want something that has, you know, gets your adrenaline pumping. That's funny. I can almost picture a version of it down the line where it's like, yeah, you're like, you have your phone, they're fighting.

Jack Gerard

And, like, in this little world in your phone, like, they break your window as the guys like that. That's ridiculous. But it'd be fun. It'd be ridiculous to the user. But I think there's room for you guys to build to that.

I mean, it feels like the way that. I mean, I guess we got the CTO sitting right here. Is that something that could happen in a future roadmap years down the line where it's actually. It's not just the characters are there interacting with each other, but they're actually modifying your world through the window of your phone? Yeah.

So it's funny you say that. We've actually had iterations and we've used a lot of those kind of similar, like wall breaking in particular is one that sell. It's great. That's the money shot. Like, things coming out of your wall, breaking into your wall.

It's like the technology is far enough along where object recognition is pretty good to a point where your phone knows what a window is, it knows what a table is, it knows what a chair is. The AR software itself can't tell you the difference between a dog and a cat by any means. But big macro objects that usually fall within a similar range are easily recognized. And something that we play with a lot when we talk about the innovation. The medium not being used to its full hardware extent right now is something that a lot of the AR experiences you see are missing.

Like, if you think about, like, the number one AR game right now, Pokemon go. Like, they're not like, their main iteration that got them really big wasn't even actually truly using AR in any kind of meaningful capacity. It was just like a video overlay to a degree. And now they've come a little further along, but still the full capability of what's actually going on behind the scenes of how this software is currently working and set up. I think a lot of people don't realize how far along it's come just because none of the consumer facing products are really starting to think in that direction.

So it's something that we think about pushing it. I think you were touching on this a little bit, which is just like, I think it's a lot of relationships. It's like your relationship with your phone, your relationship with your character, and then those character and that phone redefining your relationship with your space. Like, that space is a bedroom. You're like, cool, I hang out in here, watch TikTok in here.

Jake Sally

I sleep in here. Suddenly now it's kind of redefined what that space can be. We're like, oh, I can be in the middle of a brawl in here. I can have, depending on what I do with my avatar, it's going to directly impact what my space looks like, feels like, sounds like, and we think that's a really interesting kernel of just, like, player behavior that we want to be leaning in on and really helping people open the aperture of their mind of, like, what your phone is capable of. Like, it's capable of so much, and it's really underutilized.

Jack Gerard

I can't help but think of, you know, you mentioned 13 year olds are kind of, like, of range or not probably like 14 or 15 year olds. You know, people around that age would be an ideal customer or potential customer. And that's definitely an age where, one, you're probably in your bedroom more than you want to be, and two, like, you know, you probably want to be somewhere else. And so the ability to take this person who wants to be somewhere else but stuck in a location and giving them the option and opportunity to modify it is, in a way, like, I don't know, therapeutic for them. Yeah, I never thought I'd be saying, oh, yeah, the fighting, the AR fighting game could really be therapeutic, but it does.

I bet that there's a lot there to that where these folks who are stuck in this room feeling this angst, they'd love to be able to uppercutting. Someone into your wall feels great. And it's funny, because that exact thing you're talking about actually led to one of our other big product decisions, which was the form of AR multiplayer we were going for. When you think, if you know much about AR, when you think about AR multiplayer, the first thing that you probably think of, I say, because it's the first thing we thought of is two people in the same room looking at the same thing on both of their devices. Right?

Like, we place an avatar here, and then when we both pull out our phones, we are looking at the same object on both of our devices. And there are several companies that are working towards this direction. There are demos out there that exist, like, simulate this. But the less low hanging fruit that took us a while to come from or come to was the idea of, like, okay, what about two people in two different spaces meeting up in AR? Right?

So, like, what does it mean? Like, if I'm in my room, I don't want to leave the house. Jake's in his room. Like, in Denver, he doesn't want to leave the house. But we both want to interact with each other in AR, what does that look like?

So after trying several things, what we landed on was like, okay, how do we make these two people's spaces combined into a way where, like, both of them in their own isolated environment, are having a uniquely enjoyable augmented reality fight, taking elements of their room and space? What are we translating to the person across in Denver? What are we keeping for that person in Denver? And really, like, innovating on that idea. And I think still to this day, we're the only company who's really doing that in this capacity of essentially third person remote multiplayer.

You guys mentioned the team and I guess going through multiple iterations. How do you look at building the team, especially in the earliest stages of this iteration of the company? It's pretty interesting. The earliest iterations of the company, you know, we just had in college, it was all just kind of, you know, like, when we were working in the studio days of, like, film festivals, it was really just like our friends from college and after that kind of stage boiled down, left college, and, like, we were all kind of going to start. Me and Usid, Asad and I were the only two, like, remaining members.

We ended up working with another friend from college who became one of the founding members, Julia. And from there, the team kind of just started to build itself. It was pretty interesting. We didn't have enough money to really be posting job posts, like job listings or anything, putting out any kind of resumes. But our first four or five members were people who found us out of interest.

Our first engineer, Olivia, was a friend of a friend who knew what we were doing and was like, hey, you should hit up. These guys hit us up, and we're like, oh, yeah, you want to work for us? We don't have money, but you can work for us for free. And it was like, sweet, I'm coming on. And then we had our next developer, one of our next developers, Usama.

He was just a user of the app who dmed us on instagram, being like, hey, I found this bug in your app. I know how to fix it. Do you mind if I help you out? And we're like, yeah, come on. You want a job?

Yeah, sure. Come here. You know, like, Sam, another one of our engineers, he was one of the hologram artists we were working with at the time. Poppy. He was, like, huge fan of this artist.

Like, found us through, like, our, like, our app, and then similarly, just cold emailed being like, hey, I'm graduating. Like, will you, like, give me an internship? And we're like, yeah. Like, you know, like, we've been doing this for a year. We've never had a job.

Like, internship is, like, all we are. Like, I mean, we're all. We're all executives and interns at the same time, you know? So it's kind of really, up until even after that iteration, when we raised our first smaller seed round of funding, we didn't have to look for anyone. Then we got people who we'd already been working with peripherally for a while who we're like, all right, as soon as we have money to pay these people, we're going to get them.

Because at the time, it was just kind of like our original founding engineering team, and first few members were like, who has the. Who's gonna work for free? And who's into it? And then we got to a point where we're like, now we can have these people, and then only until after the next stage do we really have to start? Yeah, I think a lot of it.

Jake Sally

There's this real passion, gravity well, that brought everyone together in this first stage. Again, there aren't a lot of people building army, and I think that, a, makes it a lot easier because the pool of people that are, a, have to be excited about it, and then, b, they just have to really want it and have any amount of experience. It's a small pool of people, and since then, yeah, it's kind of. It's transitioned a little bit, but it's still, I think, fundamentally is, like, people who are working here really are interested in augmented reality as a medium and the different ways that it can be used. Like I was saying, to, like, redefine relationships with spaces and characters and people, and those all start to really factor in and just kind of, you know, that aha.

Moment that, you know, I'm coming out of it from, like, a VR side, that moment where it's like, oh, what? Like, you can do this? We love giving people that, and I think it's something, especially as we kind of continue to build out and now iterate on a product that we have that's getting better and better versus a project that we take and then throw away and then do another one. The depth of that experience, the density of it can start to get really, really high. I think what's incredible about this story is that you were able in the early days, to build a community, or you build excitement around it such that people are like, hey, can I work for you for free?

Jack Gerard

Yeah, we're all working for free right now. But, like, how did you. How do you think you got to that point? Like you mentioned, you know, right now, the product is built around social media. Did you start, like, how did you build that community so much that those early adopters, as early engineers, knew who you were enough to say, yes, I like this, I want to join.

Jake Sally

Yeah, I mean, I will say it's built around augmented reality, but we're realistic, which is the world. You know, the underlying layer of the world is social media. So it's optimized for sure for social media. I'd say, like, going into that, there are a few factors, one of which is our CEO is an absolute beast, and, like, you know, he kills it at that. But, like, to Jake's point earlier is, like, when we were at the festival stage, and there's only these select few people who have this weird niche piece of hardware.

Jack Gerard

The only outlet for a lot of this actually ends up being the media and the community you build around it and the hype you generate, because you know that, okay, only a handful of people are going to get to see this at this film event. How are we going to make this worth it? And ultimately, it has to be, if people can see where the technology is going and what it's going to be, that's the most success you can ask for on something like this is like, get people excited about not just the hardware or, like, the thing, but, like, the concept of Ar as a whole. You know, like, to accept AR is the heart of our company. And at where we were at at the time, we had to get really good at making this something that everyone could participate in, not just the people at this thing with this hardware.

Jake Sally

I think you guys are also doing a good job. When I first got introduced to the earliest version of the team is a lot of the teams that were making augments were like, hey, we're going to place an object in your space. And that's an AR experience. And then these college kids come along and they're like, hey, we're going to do the absolute most complicated version of asset creation, volumetric capture. All of these different cameras.

We're going to cut all those up. I mean, the file sizes of these experiences were like tens of gigabytes. And we're going to. That's not enough. Then we're going to make it an interactive, branching, narrative, voice powered experience.

Like the layers and how far it's getting pushed beyond what's normal was, I think what blew my mind, especially on the initial push and, like, just the raw energy of it's AR. This is peak VR hype cycle, too. And even in the face of that, when it would have been so much easier to lean in on VR, there is a real dedication to augmented reality. And making sure that this does connect with your real world, because there isn't an escapism to it. It's designed to recontextualize what you already know in a new way and people.

It resonates with people. Do you think it helped that you are building it sounds like you guys went, like, just a mile deep into it, right? Do you think it helped that you were doing that as students so that you're able to dedicate the time to it without, you know, with a minimal distraction? It's interesting. Maybe a little bit.

Jack Gerard

But at the time, we were starting on our first project, us and I were still, like, mid finals, and, like, we were like, yo, can we, like, have this class off to go? And, like, I think. I mean, I almost failed out of college just, like, pursuing this thing because, like, I ended up in this point my senior year when, like, all of my teachers were being like, we know you have this big thing going on, but, like, you need to show up to class or we're gonna fail you. I'm like, look, I'm in college so that I have the skills to do the thing I want to do, and here I am doing the thing I want to do, and you're telling me, come back to college. I'm not skilled enough to do it yet.

So I kind of hit this point, and, like, you know, the faculty of my college ended up kind of, like, getting it and coming around, like, giving me a lot of. Just like, all right, you can. You can pass, but, you know, it's like, there's never going to be the time where you actually can sink in those hours if you don't make the time. You know, even when we first, like, came to La after we had done, we're like, we're not doing film festivals anymore. We had no money.

We had no funding. But, like, I was postmates driving every night so that I could, like, have enough money to live while trying to get this thing going during the day. And I was like, there was that temptation of like, oh, just get a full time job and let this be the thing you're doing in the evenings. You know, it's like this. You can, like, meet up with us at after work and then, like, maybe, like, mess around.

And it was kind of like, no, like, this is gonna be the main thing or it's not going to happen. You really have to, like, go at it with that mentality, you know? How long did you do the postmates thing? I was probably, like, a good, like, four months. That was a good four months of when we first got here.

Then we picked up. We ended up working with Jake and Verizon again. Jake came to us that time. Yeah, Verizon was doing, really wanted to. They had these 5G educational classrooms all throughout the country, and they're like, hey, we want middle school students to have fun, innovative experiences.

Jake Sally

I was like, what better, what better narrative is there than, you know, recent college graduates making innovative experiences for the next generation? It sold itself also. No one else could, I think, do it at the scale and at the speed and at the quality that we were looking for, where it's like, look, I don't want middle schoolers to have, like, tap to place an object. I want them to have, like, a much more rich experience. So, yeah, of course, came to the team, made a ton of sense, and they absolutely crushed it.

Did two experiences for them, and students loved it. Yeah, those are really, really fun projects. I'm curious. One of the things we ask about is early customers, and I think you had very early customers, but did you keep the same company name through those iterations and you keep the same social account. So did you build, did that kind of build on top of each other, or did you start fresh when you went to the latest iteration with your social accounts, I guess, specifically?

Jack Gerard

Yeah, so we did change names and stuff. We originally a studio, or we are framing ourselves as a studio, and our name was Wonrich one Ric. And that was when we were more in the festival days. And actually with oneric was when we first started working on Jawdew, the volumetric hologram app, as it was at the time, that was our app that we were calling Jawdew. And it was kind of at the same time we were doing these education initiatives.

We were kind of like, okay, this studio has these two projects, Irelia and career day. And then we also have our app, Jawdew. And just during that cycle, realizing and coming to the terms of like, oh, this is actually the thing.

We changed the name to Jotty. We did keep socials, I believe. I haven't opened a social media account in years, so I wouldn't know. But I assume we kept the same followers and everything changed our social names. But we did change.

We left the oneric stuff behind. We didn't repurpose the website or the idea of oneric, but we used that moment to be like, all right, that was then. Now we are Jadu, and we are an AR company. We're not an AR studio. And we are focusing on this product.

This is our flagship. And use that moment to wash the hands of the past almost, and be like, if you were with us then, you're still with us now, but we're doing a new thing. Yeah, that's super important. Even if you rebrand. This is lesson I've seen from a couple companies.

Even if you rebrand, you don't want to lose the community you've already built. Even if you change, if you small pivot or even if you change the name, you can often rename the social media account to something new. But don't start brand new at zero because you're doing yourself a disservice and you're losing the people who already trust you and believe in you. So that's awesome. So grounding is back in LA.

We love to ask on this podcast, what was your most La moment? It sounds like you guys might have a good one, having been at Sundance and been a little bit around the industry. Do you want to go or do you want me to? You go first. I'll give two quick ones.

Jake Sally

One. I started my career on the talent agency side. My first week of work, my first week of work in LA, I'm living three people in a one bedroom cannot, barely making ends meet. And to get into the office, you go up this elevator, and the elevator ride on Monday was in an elevator with Snoop Dogg. The elevator on Thursday was with Drake.

And it was kind of like, oh, this proximity to town is staggering. This is real. But I think my favorite one, honestly, is I held off for two years, but eventually my now wife and I, we were like, okay, let's do a juice cleanse. Let's just do it. We're gonna do it.

We get all the ingredients over the weekend. We're like, our grocery bill is triple what it would normally be. We get the nice blender and everything. Monday morning, great juice. Love it.

Monday afternoon, loving the juice. About Monday afternoon, I'm basically seeing stars. I call my wife. I'm like, I don't know if I can do this for a full week. She's like, oh, I already ordered a pizza.

You should come home. And I was like, great, let's do it. So I, you know, I think I've never really gotten on to any of the dietary trends that La offers, but I tried. I tried my damnedest. I love.

Jack Gerard

I love that you held off for two years. It's a very la thing, too. Like, all right, I succumb to it. But I did hold off for two. Years before we just, like, go outside.

Fantastic. I think mine would have to be. It was, like, probably, like, right after we had started working on Jotu one, like, you know, we had started just kind of getting into the La music scene, like, working with a lot of these artists in, like, you know, kind of the new rock kind of areas and hyper pop and things like that. And we worked with this one artist or this one band, play Royale, who their guitarist Sebastian, ended up inviting me and us into one of his parties, and we were like, oh, man. Like, you know, like, hell yeah, dude.

You know? And so we went and, like, he's one of my best friends now, but just, like, that moment of going to, like, this big rock star, airbnb, you know, and just, like, I was, like, just looking at us, like, giggling, like, dude, dude, like, you know, like, look at us. And he was just like, stop it, man. Like, but no, it was pretty. Pretty cool moment.

And, like, just, like, over time, just, like, you know, learning, like, oh, man. Like, everyone who's, like, in. In it and you just kind of, like, see through the phone and see on social media and just realizing that's so curated and really everyone's pretty similar. And there is this weird taking of just people in general off the pedestal. That happens when you're just around it, I guess, to a good amount, and you're like, oh, the difference between me and anyone is not that big, you know?

Yeah, I double hear that, too. Like, I think what people forget is, like, when they see people on tv, like, how much production is around that. They're like, yeah, there's, like, full teams of wardrobe and makeup and hair and so for, you know, women who are just walking around, like, don't understand that. Like, yeah, they would look a lot like those women, too, if they had amount of, you know, teams in production around what? What those people on tv.

So it's not fair to compare yourself to someone on tv because, like, that's not what they're really like, they're more often like us. And so la, I mean, it's the guy, it's the guys, it's everyone, I think. Yeah, it's the dogs. Every, everybody is looking their best self. Yeah.

Jake Sally

It's a humbling experience for sure. The athletes in my friend of mine has a daughter and she's in a soccer league and like Mia Hammond, Nomar Garcia Perez kid is in that league and she's just like scoring ten goals a game sometimes how la it just attracts you, that type of person. Well, thank you so much for joining us, guys. This is really fun. We're speaking with Jack Gerard and Jake Sally, sorry, of Jadu Ar.

Jack Gerard

And where can folks find Jadu?

Online or on the App Store? You know, you can download our app, it's Jadu fighting AR or online at HTTPs Jadu ar and Jadu. Jadu ar.

Awesome. Well, I'd like to thank our sponsors again. Nearshirt, Unida and Prodhub AI. You can build better products with Prodhub AI where innovation meets efficiency. Automate your prds, fast track story creation.

Ethan Cole

And speed up your product team with a single platform. It's your co pilot for product management. Discover how at Prodhub AI. That's p r o dash u b AI. Like to thank you again for listening to us.

Jack Gerard

If you like what you hear, please. Smash that subscribe button. Thanks again for joining us and we'll catch you next time on founders in LA.

Ethan Cole

Thanks again for joining us and we'll catch you next time on founders in LA.

Jack Gerard

Thanks again for joining us and we'll catch you next time on founders in LA.