Suresh and Dave chat with Hrish Lotlikar CEO of Superworld

In this episode of the Web3 Marketing Association Podcast, hosts Dave Wallace and Suresh Balaji are joined by Hrish Lotlikar, co-founder and CEO of Superworld, to explore the bold vision of building a virtual layer over the entire planet.

Hrish shares his extraordinary journey—from investment banking and venture capital in emerging markets to launching startups in AR, VR, gaming, and entertainment alongside Hollywood names like Michael Bay. These experiences inspired the creation of Superworld, a platform that allows users to own, create, and monetise virtual real estate mapped directly onto the physical world.

The conversation explores how Superworld combines gaming mechanics with real-world relevance: users can “put down roots” in virtual plots of land linked to real geography, while brands can build immersive experiences, experiment with new products, or extend customer engagement into hybrid physical-digital spaces. Unlike purely virtual worlds, Superworld’s foundation on Earth ensures durability and relevance—your virtual assets retain value because they’re tied to real locations.

Hrish also emphasises Superworld’s mission to be a life-enhancing platform, not a life-escape platform. Inspired by the lessons of The Social Dilemma, the vision is to use AR, VR, and Web3 technologies to enrich people’s real lives rather than distract from them—what Hrish calls “live to earn”. Accessibility is key: Superworld is designed to be hardware-agnostic and interoperable across web, mobile, wearables, and future devices.

This inspiring discussion highlights how Web3 can reshape ownership, identity, and community—not by drawing people away from reality, but by enhancing how we live, connect, and create in the world around us.

Transcript

Speaker 00: 0:01

What kind of world is it when a traveler, tech whiz, and all-around expert in areas from entertainment to real estate decides to do nothing less than put the globe into a virtual reality that all can experience? It's a Superworld, and today on the W3MA podcast, Suresh Lutlikar, the founder and CEO of Superworld, walks us through his incredible vision and explains how it can change people's lives in all sorts of untold ways.

Speaker 03: 0:39

From the studios of NMD+, comes the Web3 Marketing Association podcast. latest thinking at the very cutting edge of marketing. We aim to bring you insightful and interesting discussion about Web3 and the metaverse and other emergent digital trends. And here are your hosts, Dave Wallace and Suresh Balaji.

Suresh: 1:09

Thank you for joining us for our Web3 Marketing Association podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you here. We've been so looking forward to speaking with you. Of course, Dave and I are following you on LinkedIn and on Instagram, and I've been seeing where you've been to NFT, NYC recently. You've been speaking at a few forums. It looks like you're having a phenomenal summer. So great time to be speaking with you. Thank you for joining us.

Hrish: 1:34

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be on and very excited for this conversation So thanks for the opportunity to allow me to share our vision and what we're working on at Superworld. Awesome.

Suresh: 1:45

Awesome. We can't wait to get started. So for our listeners, Rish is the co-founder and CEO of Superworld. Rish is a Web3 OG, if I can call him that. When Rish was doing Web3, I was still trying to figure out content for our website in Web1, right? Rish also, he's got an incredible personal journey, which I really want him to talk about, living a nomadic life, being influenced by the things that He's seen around the world setting up startup accelerators. What a story. Rish, I don't think I'll do justice. I would love for you to tell us your story, your background, and your focus on gaming and entertainment that's brought you to Superworld. Tell us that for our listeners, please.

Hrish: 2:25

Yeah, sure. I've always been driven by my passions and what really excites me in life. And so that has naturally carried me through a variety of experiences that have both taught me, but also enlarged my vision of what's possible and all that has culminated in Superworld. I'll kind of give you a sense for my background. So I was born in India. I grew up in the United States, went to Rice University in Houston, grad school in Illinois. Again, as you said, I've been a nomad for a number of years now, kind of grew up traveling. So between college and grad school, I lived in Madrid, Paris, and London, kind of expanded my vision of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to live. Ended up doing management consulting out of grad school. I worked at investment banking I was at UBS and HSBC. I started off in real estate investment banking of all places. Again, we're creating the category of virtual real estate. So it's funny how you can't connect the dots going forward, only backwards, as Steve Jobs said. So it's interesting. But about 12 years ago, I had a crazy idea, which was, wouldn't it be cool to go somewhere in the emerging markets and do venture capital? So I did venture capital for a number of years in New York and thought, how can I do that somewhere in the emerging markets? decided to go to Eastern Europe back in 2009. Didn't know anyone. Went to Ukraine, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Moldova. Took me about a year and a half, but I started a venture capital fund backed by a well-known investor named Viktor Pinchuk, who's a very prominent investor in Ukraine. We invest in about 25 companies in the region. We started an entity called East Slabs. Preply is one of our companies. They're the largest online tutoring marketplace in the world. Promo Republic is one of our companies. And then I did the same thing in Belarus. I'm on the board of TechMinsk. The company that Facebook acquired that does all of the face filters for Instagram and Facebook is a company called MSQRD. MSQRD actually went through TechMinsk and got acquired by Facebook. So had early exposure to AR through that. After that, I was early at a company called TopTel. I was the first biz dev at TopTel. TopTel is a talent marketplace backed by Andreessen Horowitz, and it's now the number one talent marketplace in the world. So learned a lot about growing and scaling platforms there, how to be nimble and experimental. And then about six years ago, I started Rogue Initiative Studios, which is a film, television, gaming, and virtual reality studio in Hollywood. My co-founder produced Call of Duty, Modern Warfare series, and Ghosts. And my production partner there is Michael Bay. The action director is known for Transformers, The Island, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor. So at Rogue Initiative, what we do is we build franchises from the ground up, new original content, and then to do a feature film, television show, game, immersive content, all the way to amusement park rides and toys. And that's how I got into AR and VR. Rogue Initiative is backed by all the top AR, VR venture capital funds in Silicon Valley and globally. So I came from that industry. And basically what happened was about six years ago, Pokemon Go came out, right? And became this huge worldwide sensation.

Dave: 5:29

I'm only laughing because I followed my son all over the world trying to find bloody Pokemons on Facebook. So yeah.

Suresh: 5:36

Yeah. I know it well. You're son, Dave, and also all of Hong Kong's white-collar workers who are riding the tram. It's amazing to see people ride the tram and collect Pokemons.

Hrish: 5:50

It was just remarkable what that game and what Niantic did there. And they were a great inspiration for us. And we thought, you know what? What if you are interested in music or sports or art or history or travel? How could we empower anyone to create a virtual world on top of the real world? And then And how do we integrate Web3 into that so people actually can own those places, own the spatial environments around them and own the content. And that was the inspiration of building Superworld.

Suresh: 6:20

Wow, what a background, what a story. Yeah, I'm just super inspired. Thank you for sharing. Why is a real estate investment banker interested in virtual real estate? What's the investment story here? What's the value upside?

Hrish: 6:36

As we realized through my experience in spatial computing, AR, VR, as we understand the main tenets of what Web3 is about, which is read, write, and own the web, right? The own being the important part of that. And as we are all realizing that due to a variety of inflection points, technology-wise, society-wise, COVID, And the technology side, 5G, AR technology, software, hardware, connectivity, IoT. As we're moving into more of these connected environments, spatial environments, the opportunity, just as we do in the physical world, to own these spatial environments is very interesting. In addition to that, the ability to utilize Spatial computing, as well as Web3 in combination, to give people not only the ability to own, but to infinitely monetize using a variety of business models is very compelling. And so being able to create a real estate or virtual real estate, virtual layer on top of the real world that actually has connectivity to the physical real estate and the physical world, you know, it really is the essence of what the metaverse is about, which we can go into, into more detail there, but it's really that physical, virtual, virtual, physical, and the real estate part of it's super interesting for me, as well as, you know, coming from that background, again, having an understanding of the physical real estate world and applying many of the concepts on the finance side that again, can have a very strong interplay. What's what's happening in the physical world. If you think of what web three, is potentially going to help us accomplish in terms of seamless transactions and transparency. And you can bring that to the physical real estate market by creating a virtual real estate overlay. I think it's super compelling. So that was part of that story of why it's interesting.

Dave: 8:54

The sort of whole notion of virtual world, it's been around for quite some time. I mean, I can remember Second Life as the first iteration. And now we're at a stage where the super world plus a few other companies out there building out the virtual world. It's fascinating for me because I watch my sons playing games and I look into their computer screens and I can see worlds in their computer screens, which are sort of becoming more and more realistic. The question is how important gaming is to driving this trend at the moment. Do you see it as a driver or something just completely different? I mean, it's just something from my perspective I'm interested in. And there's how important gaming is to what's going on.

Hrish: 9:39

Yeah, it's a great point. Gaming is a huge industry comparatively to film and television and other forms of entertainment. And so it's also been a way that we've seen an access point for people to get involved in new technologies. Games have really driven the internet and the mobile web and other platforms. Console gaming, you know, really been huge for the overall sector. If you're talking about IP and every movie often makes a game. So gaming is a very amazing way to build this industry. I have a slightly contrarian point on that. While I do recognize gaming is definitely going to be huge. And again, I come from a gaming background as well. The way that we're thinking about this and the way that we're going to see a broader mass gateway to the metaverse is from things that people are doing in their analog lives And how can we integrate Web3 into those activities that they're already doing in the real world? And the reason for that is, even though gaming is huge, there's a lot of people that aren't going to necessarily play a game. But can we take those same mechanics, those same ideas, and bring them to their real life? And I think, you know, again, Pokemon Go is an example of this. It is a game. But ultimately, it gets people to go and do things in the real world. And I think, you know, And that's, I think, what's the very compelling part of that game. But now if you can bring those same mechanics to you going to volunteer in the communities, you know, do something you're passionate about, maybe play a sport, maybe go to a concert or an event, maybe interact with a brand that you love, and create a way that you have that incentive or that loyalty engagement type mechanism. where you can get points and get benefits from that activity. That's kind of how we're thinking about it. So it's kind of the abstraction of the game, but looking at the utility and benefits of that gaming mechanism and bringing that to a real world activity that you would do.

Suresh: 11:57

It's fascinating, right? I mean, there's so much potential in this intersection between real world and virtual world. And there is so much potential in just the virtual world because it can literally be anything you want it to be. And so here is my next question to you, therefore, right? If we are building a world where you can be whoever you want to be, and it can be what you want it to be, why overlay super world on planet Earth? Why is it not anywhere else?

Hrish: 12:23

Yeah.

Suresh: 12:24

Why does it need a reference point of Earth?

Hrish: 12:27

Yeah, as you look at, and David aptly stated that we've had virtual worlds for a long time. We've had these gaming environments that approximated what's happening now for a very long time. And there's a few things happening if you dissect historic versus opportunity and specifically what we're doing at Superworld. So first of all, in many of these environments, virtual worlds, they were centralized. So the players and the users weren't able to have some tradable way of achieving some, I would say, ROI on the time and resources that they've spent in a game. Meaning if a centralized entity wanted to shut it down, that was it. In this new Web3 environment, the idea is that these NFTs or the time that you're spending there has some tradable benefit, maybe in another virtual world, or you can keep these things or trade them outside independent of this centralized structure. So that's one thing. Number two is the virtual environments, because they're completely virtual, over time, some other new virtual environment comes out, right? And people, very naturally gravitate to this newer place. What we're doing at Superworld is we're saying, look, the overlay of Superworld is on top of the real world, first of all. Second of all, you can create anything you want. So you can create a virtual game or virtual environment or experiences. There's an infinite number of filters, but all of this is based on real world geography and real world virtual real estate, again, on top of the real world. And the point being there is that always has relatability it always has this value because we're always connected to the real world because that's just where we live and access these environments access these technologies and so there's this persistent value when you build on top of the real world that doesn't disappear because it's not virtual it is connected to places in real life and so that reality aspect of it, that real world physical location aspect of it has durability. And that durability is what enables one, if they built one game on an environment, not only do you have the assets, which I brought up in the earlier example that you can take to another environment, but that environment built on the real world has the durability of that location. And so that's what's very compelling about building on top of the real world.

Dave: 15:05

So you can just basically use Google Maps within the virtual world. You'd and have to kind of build more maps or anything like that. I love this point about moving things around because I totally love what Balenciaga did with Fortnite in terms of the avatar skins. But I was left feeling like if I'd spent all of that money on a skin, I'd want to move it into other games as well. So abstracting out the NFT so it can then go into other places, I think would be a lot more valuable to people. So it sounds like... That's part of what you're trying to crack with this is the movement of objects and assets around, which I think is just completely the right way to go.

Hrish: 15:48

Yeah, that's the first part of it is the location provides a durability, but also on the user side, you're able to justify the time and resources that you're spending in a virtual environment, even if it's on the real world. And you're able to justify that because the assets that you're creating or interacting with You can own and you can transport to another virtual environment. And all of those environments, again, would be built in the real world on top of the real world and real world geographies. Over time, you're creating value to those locations as well because you're creating those assets in locations. They have some geographic element to them or accessibility that's geographic. Again, just as you think of the real world, a lot of people, when they move to a city and if they buy a property or they sell a property, they buy a property. start a business, they're putting what a lot of people call this, putting their roots down, right? When you're spending time in a virtual environment, if that environment is linked to the real world, you are putting your virtual roots down in the real world.

Suresh: 16:52

Amazing. I'm just amazed by this entire conversation. Mind blown. So it's all about the location. I was sort of snooping around Superworld and everything is denominated at 0.1 ETH. If it's all about location, location Y is Piccadilly Circus 0.1 ETH. And so So is my village in India 0.1 ETH. Shouldn't Piccadilly Circus or Times Square be more valuable in some way because it's got the durability and that residual overlay to it. So tell us about your pricing strategy.

Hrish: 17:23

Yeah, and you're 100% right. So I think to your point, it's probably a good time to buy because you can buy properties that are in amazing areas or highly valuable areas. And those are the same price as maybe some place that's more rural or the desert or the ocean somewhere. Part of our strategy there was to, again, keep it pretty simple as we started to be very direct. We wanted to enable anyone to purchase at a 0.1 Ether price, which is currently what it's at for anything unpurchased, which is about $190 or whatever it is right now, $100. You can buy a plot and then you can reprice it to whatever you want. You are, as a buyer, able to capture that upside based on what you think the value of Piccadilly Circus plot is versus the $100 that you're buying it for the 0.1 Ether. What should that be valued at? You can decide and you're able to keep that upside there. However, you're 100% right that probably the value of a plot in the major city or a valuable area should be priced differently than a plot somewhere else. That could change. So it's a good time to buy and acquire properties. While that's still the same, we are evaluating pricing. The other thing that we also felt really good about is just accessibility. So that was another part of it is at that price point, at 0.1, kind of a baseline price, anyone could just get involved anywhere in the world.

Dave: 19:00

In essence, you're building a digital twin of the world, aren't you? And then offering people the chance to buy stuff. I guess the question I've got is if I was a brand, what are some of the potential use cases? There's probably no end to those use cases, but just an example is we spoke to the CMO of Cathay Pacific, and he was talking about the value of of virtual worlds is they can try things out, which they can't do in the real world. And I think that's a really interesting idea that you can actually go and meet a community. You can try things out with that community, but do it almost face-to-face in a virtual world. So I just wondered, any others come to mind? Because what would be great is for brands to have a look and start thinking about the opportunities that this offers them. Whilst I go and buy up Piccadilly Circus, by the way. And then every brand needs to have a look at Piccadilly Cirque.

Hrish: 19:56

First caveat to that is to be clear in super world, there's an infinite number of filters on the world, right? So I could go into Cathay Pacific's world. I could go into Coca-Cola's world, Nike's world, any location, there's an infinite number of filters. So on the monetization side, as an owner of real estate, you benefit from all of the monetization that can happen on the virtual real estate that you own. from any of those brands or individuals that are monetizing content. To your point, I think the idea that you mentioned, which is brands can use these virtual environments to experiment with new products, with their customers, and do very innovative things is definitely one use case here. I think another very important use case is in Superworld, because we are built on top of the real world, the thing that we hear from brands a lot is, We want to get into the metaverse, but we're in the real world. How do we build content and put that content where our customers in the real world can, one, access that content, maybe in our stores, maybe in our events that we hold in the real world? And how can we get them to do things that a majority of our customers are going to do? So it has kind of mass appeal with our customers. base. And that's a lot of the reasons that they come to us. They want to get into the metaverse, but they want to do something that has real world applicability, because they're in the real world.

Dave: 21:34

I'm thinking in my head, I've got a particular place, we all love going on holiday as a family. And actually, we love going there in real life. But what I'd love to do is visit it every month. You know, we get very dark winters here in the UK. I just love to even just visit it virtually, you know, and see how things are going. You can kind of almost see how experiences become even long-tail experiences through things like virtual reality. And I think this whole notion of, okay, I want to preview it is part of the story. So I can really see how this could work.

Hrish: 22:10

Yeah. When you experience it, have something to take home with you, right? An experience to relive that.

Dave: 22:15

Exactly. Exactly. We're sort of running out of time, but I did have one question, which is around access. And at the moment, people will be accessing through phones and their computers. But I guess, you know, you've got meta with the Oculus headsets. And every sort of few weeks, we hear that Apple's going to do an AR. I mean, have you got any views on how we'll be accessing these worlds going forward?

Hrish: 22:41

Yeah, definitely. So I want to bring up a very important point here that I didn't touch on to answer your question as well. There's a very important documentary that came out a few years ago called The Social dilemma. Have you guys seen that? Yeah. Okay. And it's a documentary about how we're all living in these algorithmic bubbles. It's how we're all staring at our phones all day. If you lose your phone, it's a catastrophe. It's about how we're obsessed with making Instagram and TikTok posts and kids are just plugged into Fortnite. I have two kids. I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old, right? And part of the driver here in our mission for Superworld is how do we create a life enhancing platform and not a life escape platform. The last thing we want to do is build a virtual world that sucks people into it. That's not what we want to do at Superworld. We want to keep you in the real world and we want to use these technologies to benefit your real life. So back to your question, how do you access Superworld? First of all, I think the point of that is I want to make it as accessible as possible. However, I want to make sure that you're able to do the things that you're doing in your real life without having to stop doing those things to use Super World. So Pokemon Go is a good analogy for this, is people are out there doing things in the real world. Niantic actually measures how many footsteps people take, right? That's part of their KPIs. And so if you think about that, you know, back to your question, what I'd love to do is have people plug into Super World and get these virtuality benefits from doing things that they're doing in their real life without having this interruption to real life. Technology shouldn't get in the way of you living your life. We want to make it as accessible as possible, but at the same time, keep you in the real world. We're available on web. We're available on mobile. When glasses come out, we'll be on glasses. We could be accessible in audio. We'll be accessible in haptic suits in the future. And so we want to be hardware agnostic, software agnostic, cross-platform, blockchain interoperable. accessible, but really the vision there is in how do we keep you in the real world and bring these technologies to enhance your real life so you can do the things you're passionate about. I call it live to earn, which is using tokenomics and incentives as well to enable you to do the things that you love to do and not suck you in, but enhance your real life. So that's a big part of our mission. That's powerful, Rish.

Suresh: 25:16

That is really powerful.

Hrish: 25:17

I think that's

Suresh: 25:18

a massive transformative purpose there. And I think that social Dilemma documentary was shocking when we all watched it because we were living it and we didn't know we were living it till somebody had to tap us on the shoulder and say, mate, what are you doing here? Oh, shucks. Yes, I'm thumb scrolling. I think life enhancing technology versus technologies that only help you escape life. I think there is a big thesis there. We could have a podcast series just talking about that. It's phenomenal. Thank you for bringing that up.

Dave: 25:46

Yeah, well, thank you so much. We could literally go on for hours. Yeah, it's such a fascinating talk. My mind is very open to some possibilities around this. So thank you so much for joining us. It's been a fantastic interview.

Hrish: 26:01

Thanks so much for having me. And again, if these ideas and the vision resonate, I think the message here is that we all build Superworld together. And so if you love that vision, definitely get in touch. We'd love to have you on our virtual real estate platform, help you create together. And brands out there would love to talk to you. So really appreciate the opportunity to be here and spread our vision and message. Thanks for the opportunity.

Dave: 26:23

Fabulous.

Speaker 03: 26:28

You have been listening to W3MA an NMD Plus production.