Flox founders Alistair Bryan and Jaie Genadt: Disrupting events with revolutionary metaverse vision

As tech advances and customers demand more from all manner of experiences, Jaie Genadt and Alistair Bryan saw an opportunity to create something that would shape the future of events. Their metaverse platform, Flox, is lowering the monetary and environmental cost of hosting events and converging the physical and virtual experience. It’s also giving event hosts a way to truly engage their employees and audiences from the boardroom to global arenas.

In this CEO.digital exclusive Q&A, we ask the Flox founders how their business came to be, what challenges they’ve had to overcome, and why the future of hosting is inclusive.

Meet Our Guests

Alistair

Alistair Bryan
Co-Founder of Flox

Alistair Bryan is co-founder of Flox – a metaverse for events platform on a mission to make more connection in virtual and hybrid events. Prior to starting the business, he was an advertising executive running global marketing agencies (Omnicom, IPG, Havas, The Mission Group and Cheil) working on experiences and events for American Express, Microsoft, SAP and UPS. At Flox he brings his extensive experience to help clients redefine their virtual and hybrid events and brand experiences.

Jaie

Jaie Genadt
Co-Founder of Flox

Jaie Genadt boasts over two decades of strategic digital expertise. As Managing Director and CTO at renowned creative agency, Immersive, he curated a client portfolio featuring BMW, Nike, Samsung, and Unilever. Jaie’s was also the Chief Digital & Technology Officer at experiential marketing agency Momentum, during which he expanded the agency’s digital and technology capabilities by 2000%. Jaie is also a judge for Campaign’s Technology Awards and BIMAs Emerging Technology Awards.

CEO.digital: What Does Flox Do?

Alistair Bryan (AB): “Flox is a metaverse virtual events platform that offers the first full feature metaverse experience to create more engagement for virtual and hybrid events. Our mission is to empower businesses with a game-changing virtual and hybrid platform that delivers unforgettable experiences, drives competitive advantage and propels success. Flox can enable business leaders across all industries to minimise the carbon impact of events, support diversity, reduce event costs (up to 85%) and measure the effectiveness of their spend.”

Jaie Genadt (JG): “Many existing players in this space offer a 2-D experience like webinars, meaning they are passive and unengaging. Our focus is on the user rather than the technology. The result is a three-dimensional experience which offers more interactivity, more engagement, and the best connectivity between attendees.”

How Do You Prepare to Launch a Startup Successfully?

AB: “Mainly it’s about having a clear vision and then getting many things to line up for success, including the market being right for launch and building a strong product. There’s a need to be massively resilient to the pressures of starting up a business, as well as having real adaptability to change in the product evolution lifecycle. Knowing what success should look like is also vital.”

JG: “True innovation in our eyes comes from evolving the product based on user feedback. In other words, success is synonymous with building a user-first platform, making the users the owners of the product. Getting early adopters, investors and advisors on board early on is also critical; followed by bringing the brightest talent possible on board.”

How Does Flox Overcome the Issues of Wearable Proliferation?

JG: “We’ve democratised the experience by making it browser-based, without the need to invest in additional hardware. Simplicity for users is key for adoption, taking baby steps as tech can be scary for most people. We’re currently setting up our roadmap for the evolution of the hardware, and as VR headsets become better and more available, we’re likely to see more wearable solutions as the level of immersion and experience becomes more comfortable.

“The exciting thing about mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) is that those specific pieces of hardware are earmarked to replace the smartphone. As smartphones go away, people may lift their heads leading to more social engagement. But today, inclusion is the most important strategy for our product to become mainstream across all industries. “

What Challenges Did You Need to Overcome in Building Flox?

JG: “Keeping resilient throughout the journey of designing and keeping your eye on that prize, while not letting the day-to-day ups and downs impact you. Saying to yourself over and over that you’ve got the right tools in the toolbox and that you’re going to get there is huge – the challenge is being able to do that!”

AB: “The other thing is the imposter syndrome that goes with it, which is inevitable I guess after a few hard knocks. This makes it hard to dust yourself off and keep going. My biggest lesson is: Don’t do it unless you properly believe you’re going to make a success of it. You need to be resilient to pressures you’re put under and be adaptable. Challenges like finding the first investors and learning to be comfortable with failure are also big ones to surpass to get the big idea off the ground.”

Hybrid is the likely model that events will first adopt, but in five years hybrid won’t even be a ‘thing’, it’ll just be that’s how we do events.

Jaie Genadt – Co-Founder of Flox 

How Do You Envision Virtual and Hybrid Events Evolving Over the Next Five Years?

AB: “We’re only touching now on what will inevitably become commonplace. As behaviours will be so engrained by then, people will think nothing of whether they’re turning up physically or virtually. The biggest thing to get right is enabling meaningful connection. With the risk that tech can make people insular, it’s at its best when it connects people. The problem is that, right now, virtual is sometimes seen as a lazy way to tick something off a list. We’ll see that change as brands embrace tech to build entire communities virtually.”

JG: “Hybrid is the likely model that events will first adopt, but in five years hybrid won’t even be a ‘thing’, it’ll just be that’s how we do events. I’m hoping the hardware in AR and MR will allow as natural an experience as possible, to connect audiences between real and virtual, and enhance the physical event. As tech becomes central, we’ll likely see a new generation of digital native events management roles that think in a virtual and hybrid way. Organisers are already making virtual a central part of their wider marketing strategy – they’ll focus more on what happens to the audience between events, and how it has relevance after the event.”

How Do You Envision Virtual and Hybrid Events Evolving Over the Next Five Years?

AB: “The Flox platform enables measurement of the carbon impact of metaverse virtual events, and our team of technical experts can calculate the likely carbon impact of events in real life to present the comparison for clients. For instance, one of our clients saved over 338 metric tonnes of carbon by hosting a virtual event for 3000 participants instead of hosting in person in New York with attendees from 70 different countries.

“Beyond these enormous carbon savings, from an ESG perspective, there are huge diversity and inclusion benefits by giving broader access to events, not to mention saving around 85% of the cost of hosting the event on location.”

Finally, Any Words of Advice for Our Audience?

JG: “The pandemic was a huge influence; it was a precursor to getting us prepared mentally for the pace we’ve had to move – we had to come up with solutions fast and to build and iterate quickly. In the world of experiential I’d been working in before, it’s important that creative and tech are not two separate things. Some brilliance comes out of both coming together and that’s something that’s been core to the success of Flox.”

AB: “When you’re working in something so slow paced, you realise there’s a need for agility and speed, taking thoughts to actions and developing them quickly. Our combined brand experience has been critical to our success. While many tech businesses are driven by engineers, with little thought given to user challenges, we continually think about the customs and challenges that businesses face in communication at scale, and creatively develop solutions using tech to solve these challenges.”

Learn More About Flox

Flox Logo black 2

Virtual events platform, Flox, offers events managers, organisations and brands a three-dimensional web – or ‘metaverse’- experience to help create the most human virtual and hybrid live events that revolutionise the way we do business. The powerful, easy-to-use and immersive platform allows participants to access a virtual 3D event experience where information can be easily experienced, captured, and shared for boundless collaboration, in limitless languages.

Co-founded in the UK in 2022 by advertising and digital events leaders, Alistair Bryan and Jaie Genadt, Flox’s diverse and impressive client portfolio includes Fortune 500 companies and organisations across industries including retail, tech, finance, energy, government, pharma, education, and many more. Use cases include conferences, summits, exhibitions, trade shows, product launches, networking events, internal communications and concerts and performances. Flox is proud to be a principal member of the Metaverse Standards Forum and a Microsoft partner.