Risa and Shawn of BUD: A Metaverse Created by and for Gen Z

**Hans Tung** (0:19)
Coming to you from GGV Capital, this is Evolving for the Next Billion, where we interview local champions and global giants in tech industry who are shaping the lives of the next billion internet users.
My name's Hans Tung. I'm a managing partner at GGV Capital, and I've been working at and investing in startups across the US., China, and other emerging markets for the last 20 years.

**Rita Yang** (0:45)
My name is Rita Yang. I'm the marketing manager at GGV Capital. On this show, you will hear stories about ambition, ingenuity, and resilience unfolding every day from Singapore to St. Paul, Beijing to Bangalore.
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Today on the show, we have the co-founders of BUD, Risa, and Shawn. BUD is a global virtual platform for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that means young people and even younger people, to create and share 3D interactive experiences. It is also one of the world's largest 3D item markets.
Before founding BUD, Risa and Shawn were colleagues at Snapchat, where they worked as interactive and software engineers. Risa graduated from Cornell in 2017 with a degree in computer science and math. With a deep interest in computer graphics, she started building her own indie game since college. After graduation, she joined the Snapchat AR team as an interactive engineer, working on Frontier AR Experience and the developer community at Snapchat's AR Engine. Shawn graduated from Rutgers with a major in computer science. He interned at Meta, Facebook, in 2015 as a software engineer working on video ads recommendation in the newsfeed. In early 2016, he joined Snapchat full-time where he worked on Android performance optimization, rewrite and friending recommendations.

**Hans Tung** (2:26)
Great. Welcome to the show, Risa and Shawn. We're very, very excited to have you.
I think you're the first pair of guests we have on the show that actually fits into some of the hottest buzzwords these days. For people who have not used BUD before, how would you describe what is BUD?

**Risa** (2:49)
Sure.
Yeah, so first of all, we are super excited to be on a show and share our journey and vision on creating BUD. So we think of BUD as a global virtual UGC platform that everyone can create and share their own 3D interactive experiences.

**Rita Yang** (3:07)
So it sounds like 3D content feels a lot more intimidating for users to generate compared to, say, a TikTok video. So who are these creators currently on your platform? And how did you first find them?

**Risa** (3:21)
Right. So when we first started, we really want to build a platform that can truly democratize the creation of 3D content.
So when we are designing a creation tool, we really want to lower the burden of entry for creating. So actually, our creation tool is mobile native and is very intuitive. So our creators do not need to have any pass coding or modeling experience at all. So as a result, because it is just super fun and easy to create on BUD, most of our creators are actually casual gamers or even non-gamers. So we don't really go out of our way to try to find them.
They often just kind of naturally merge on a platform as our user base keeps growing.

**Rita Yang** (4:04)
So can you give us an example of the type of 3D experience people create on the platform?

**Risa** (4:12)
Actually, there's a really great wide range of variety of experiences because our philosophy of designing a creation tool is such that we have a really high degree of freedom. So creators can get to create whatever they want. So we don't provide any templates. We provide the basic primitives, like cubes and spheres, and you can build whatever you want. So the types of experiences kind of range from social experience. So we have creators building birthday parties for their friends, and we also have very game-like experiences, such as some RPG games or adventure games. So those are kind of popular on our platform. And also hobbies, so top one experience definitely hobbies. So they can all kind of play together.
So because the creation tool is such high degree of freedom, so our creators can actually create whatever they want.

**Hans Tung** (5:06)
I remember when we first invested Musically, they did Lip Sync really, really well. And that was what a lot of them shot up to, you know, top three, top number one on the social apps in the US.
You guys only be doing this for a few months, and you've shot up to as high as number five in the US. What do you think you guys did right to make that possible?