Building a Virtual World from Berlin: Smeet CEO Sebastian Funke (Part 1)

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Sebastian Funke is the CEO and co-founder of Smeet, a free browser-based 3-D social chat game. He co-founded Smeet in 2006 directly out of college. Sebastian was born in East Germany and moved to Berlin when he was nine. Today Smeet is based in Berlin with a small office in New York. Sebastian studied business administration at WHU.

Sramana: Sebastian, where do you come from?

Sebastian Funke: I grew up in East Germany until I was nine years old. That is when the wall came down and we were able to relocate to Berlin. I did my studies at a small university called WHU-The Otto Beisheim School of Management, which is a popular school for entrepreneurs in Europe. We also had a few entrepreneurs from the U.S. studying there as well. When I was there I studied business administration. I lived outside of Germany and spent some time in South America, in the U.S., in Madrid and northern Spain, and in London.

In the end I returned to Berlin, where I was supposed to work for McKinsey. However, my friend and I were thinking about starting our own company and I decided to try that option first. I co-founded Smeet straight out of college when I was 26 years old. I wrote the business plan toward the end of my studies, and we went about trying to find money which is how we met some serial entrepreneurs who teamed with us to start Smeet. Today Smeet is a German company based out of Berlin with a small office in New York.

Sramana: When you started the company in 2006 what was your objective? What did you envision Smeet being?

Sebastian Funke: We started off with something way different than what we have today. They idea was to create a company that offered realistic communications. The idea was to be sitting in front of your computer with a 3-D room that had a top-down view only. We wanted to use your telephone to dive into the system and do realistic communications. When two avatars approached each other, they could hear each other better and better, and when they walked away the volume faded. We allowed this to be done with two avatars or 70 avatars.

It was a pretty amazing and cool technology. We wanted to change how people met on the Internet. The problem is that during the first two years we found out that our use case did not work out. The main use case was talking to other people. In reality this is done via phone for either business or leisure. Nobody has a problem using a phone for business reasons, and most people are very comfortable with that. Leisure communications are done with friends and family. The problem with a synchronous product online is the fact that in normal use cases our users are not online with friends and family. When our users were online, they were usually meeting new people. We found that because our users did not have a reason to speak, nobody was picking up the phone and talking. It was neat technology, but it had no business model behind it so things did not work out.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Virtual World from Berlin: Smeet CEO Sebastian Funke
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