Startup Spotlight #96: Sophya

Sophya is building the world’s first MMO workplace - the 'World of Workcraft'.

Mar 10, 2021

Author’s Note: I’ve covered hundreds of startups over the past three years. Few stand out like Sophya.

Sophya will be as big, if not bigger, than Clubhouse and Zoom.

Latest F2F Case Study - Case Study: Convictional's Road To Product-Market Fit Was Paved By Focusing Only On Paying Customers' Feedback

I got the chance to speak with Vishal Punwani, co-founder and CEO of Sophya, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Sophya is building the world’s first MMO workplace - the 'World of Workcraft' where forward-looking teammates and companies connect, build culture, form communities, and get work done.

In Punwani’s words: We founded Sophya at the Harvard Innovation Labs in 2018, originally as a machine learning for edtech startup. During the pandemic in 2020, we had a critically important realization: “what business do we have optimizing learning, when so many students and teachers can’t even adequately connect with each other?”. We also were feeling disconnected as a team. We focused so much on culture pre-pandemic that when we were relegated to Zoom and Slack, we just felt things slipping. And the funny thing is, for both our company health’s sake and for the students and teachers that we served, we KNEW there was a better way. We knew there was a much more socially connecting way to get together online because a bunch of my teammates and I met while playing World of Warcraft 17 years ago. So we got to work initially building a virtual campus within a game-like world that would double as our office. We didn’t quite realize what we were getting ourselves into by doing that.

When we launched it, the students and teachers at the schools we let it loose at loved it, but even more so, our team loved it. And all of our friends’ startups loved it. So many people wanted to set up their own offices inside our virtual world, and we were excited to have them. Today, because of the way we’ve purposely engineered Sophya’s world, our team can bond better than we ever could with Zoom and Slack. We’re more creative. We’re more productive. We feel like a real team again, and we’d never in a million years go back. We now are home to hundreds of companies who have picked out ’surreal estate’ in Sophya’s world to establish their new digital HQs.

Enter Your Email Below To Receive Startup Spotlights In Your Inbox 3X Per Week:

Startup Spotlight: Sophya

Sophya co-founder and CEO Vishal Punwani.

Problem: For every single company on the planet, remote work is ruining their greatest asset: their culture. Companies just don’t have the tools to thrive as a team while distributed - Zoom and Slack help people work in a start-stop, urgent way, but they don’t help you build a strong team.

Market: Remote work revealed a massive business tool market with a combined market cap in the high hundreds of billions (Zoom alone is $110bn). Tech startups in the US alone spend an estimated $3bn on communication tools per year.

Solution: We built an ‘MMO’ for work - what we internally call the ‘World of Workcraft’. Sophya enables genuine team connection (not just video and text chat though we’ve got all that, too), real self-expression via high-quality avatars, and a real community where you can roam around and go visit all your friends on their own offices. Oh yeah, games are built-in too. Of course.

Team: In addition to Punwani, Emma Giles is also a co-founder and the COO of Sophya. Sophya has nineteen team employees in total.

Recent Success:

Punwani: Well, we built all of this from a pivot. And our team was like, 17 people pre-pivot focused on the AI in Edu company we were building. Pivoting a laser-focused company where there was alignment all the way up and down the company is harder than it seems - there’s so much work involved. You’ve gotta somehow convince your team that the new mission we’re pursuing is bigger and better than the one they’ve poured their hearts and souls into for the past 1.5 years. And it’s extra tough of a pill to swallow when…the company was actually doing quite well. So it’s like - why would we pivot?

Long story short, we got everyone re-aligned around the new mission in relatively short order - our angels, our team, our advisors, and importantly, ourselves. We managed to completely pivot the company and manage all of the relationships along the way with minimal fallout. I’m really grateful to our exec team led by our COO Emma Giles for spearheading a wonderful process there.

Recent Struggle:

Punwani: As you can imagine, moving from primarily a data company to a social workplace company changes the size of the playground. The beauty of anything data science-related is that it’s relatively ‘known’. Most of the business goals can be accomplished by just collecting and putting more data to work. So you kind of have a sense of the path ahead. Especially when working with such clearly sequenced academic programs like we were (primarily medicine and health sciences).

When we moved into building an entire world, surprise - there was an entire world of possibility that came with that. And customers didn’t make it any easier. Everyone wanted to use us for everything. Concerts. Art exhibits. Research fairs. Career fairs. Birthday parties. Offices. Networking sessions. Social mingling. Like everything, you could imagine. Of course, in our view, if you try to be everything to everyone, you become something for no one. So we had to almost put blinders on to ensure we got and stayed focused, and just took lessons from our data backgrounds to be data-driven in how we decided on the vertical we were going to tackle. We settled on the workplace.

Founder Advice:

Punwani: Ahh, where do I even begin…for any entrepreneur, I’d say that one of the most valuable things I learned early on was ‘what people say is different from what people do is different from what people pay for’. And sometimes (most of the time, probably), these three circles don’t even come close to intersecting. That was a tough lesson for me to learn in the early days and it kind of shattered many of the impressions I had of folks who I thought were supporting me in building my first company. But it was a priceless lesson and one I’ll never forget.

For CEOs now, specifically: It sounds silly, but seriously - if you want to be successful, you give yourself the best shot by doing your job. Do it well, and for the right reasons. Yes, your job is to set and evangelize the mission and vision. It’s to always have a bursting pipeline of talent and to keep your company capitalized, sure. But there are actually a few more things. You need to build and manage a world-class executive team that has high leverage over the rest of the company’s activities. You need to have difficult conversations all around the org - please, just run toward the fire’, to use Ben Horowitz’ words. Finally, you also need to ensure that nothing threatens your company culture. How do your teammates communicate with each other and make decisions when you’re not around? If you’re not satisfied with the answer, then you’ve got (plenty of) work to do.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Punwani: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Daniel Ramirez, Founder of Conjure: Conjure’s curated furniture rentals make it easy and affordable to build a home that evolves with you.
Khaled Kteily, Founder of Legacy: Legacy is the fatherhood company that is building a full suite of solutions and services for future, expecting and new fathers.
Mike Sheeley, Founder of Nurse1-1: Nurse-1-1 is a HIPAA-compliant platform that actively reaches patients early in their illness journey as they decide where to seek care.

Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:

Why you should become a paid subscriber to Founder to Founder:

Get connected to elite tech entrepreneurs through in-depth Founder Case Studies
Receive exclusive documents crafted by top founders on how to build your company
Access a growing audience of venture capitalists, product managers, software engineers, and people passionate about technology
Hear real, raw experiences from entrepreneurs that you won’t see anywhere else

Previous F2F Case Studies:

Previous Startup Spotlights:

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.