The DeanBeat: Why Neal Stephenson is starting a metaverse company 3 decades after Snow Crash

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It’s not often that you get to hear things from the horse’s mouth. In this case, I was able to do an interview with the guy who came up with the term “metaverse” decades ago. I feel like I’ve been waiting decades to talk to him.

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson recently announced he was teaming up with crypto entrepreneur Peter Vessenes to create Lamina1, a blockchain technology startup dedicated to the open metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, as first depicted in Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which debuted 30 years ago in 1992. I interviewed both Vessenes and Stephenson yesterday, just a day after McKinsey & Co. predicted the metaverse would be worth $5 trillion by 2030.

Tech leaders like Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games have warned that we are in danger of having a closed metaverse if the big tech companies are the only viable candidates for building it. While Sweeney argued an open metaverse is a matter of enlightened self-interest, it feels like the open metaverse believers could use more help, considering some very big companies are likely to build what they want instead of the open metaverse. It’s a big issue, and it’s also why VentureBeat started its Metaverse Forum for thought leadership in the open metaverse.

So it is something special to see Stephenson step up and take responsibility for making the open metaverse happen himself. In our conversation, Stephenson noted that it’s better to take a constructive view than to start from a defensive position of trying to stop a closed metaverse. Stephenson had