The talk was delivered by Kaspar Tiri, co-founder of Ready Player Me. Looking back on more than a decade of building, Kaspar traced the journey from a 19-year-old founder in Pärnu with no startup background to raising over $72 million from investors including a16z and Plural — and eventually selling the company to Netflix.

Ready Player Me wasn’t an overnight success.
It was eight years of pivots, mistakes, and learning — combined into one product.

The early years: technology without a customer

The story began in 2014 with a strong intuition that avatars would one day become a core part of digital identity. The first product was ambitious: a full-body 3D scanner that captured people head to toe and turned them into physical figurines.
Technologically, it worked. Commercially, it didn’t.

The team brought the product to shopping centres, pitching passers-by on the idea of being scanned and printed as an action figure. The reaction was clear — confusion, hesitation, and polite rejection. The problem was not execution, but focus. No customer interviews had been done, no clear audience defined, and no real product-market fit achieved.

By 2015, the company was out of money, out of runway, and facing shutdown.

Survival before success

At their lowest point, a simple insight changed the team’s mindset: running out of money should not be the reason to quit. As long as the team chemistry and belief in the mission remained intact, survival itself became the goal.

The founders stripped the idea back to basics. They rebuilt prototypes using whatever was available, validated demand before building, and focused on reducing cost and increasing scalability. Instead of pushing a finished vision, they became scrappy learners again.

This phase taught two hard lessons:

1. building something impressive is meaningless without understanding who it is for
2. survival is an underrated skill in startup life

Hardware, pivots, and hard-earned insight

Even after early traction, hardware remained expensive, slow, and unpredictable. The team raised small rounds, joined Startup Wise Guys, and eventually made a decisive move to the US — not because it was comfortable, but because that’s where the customers were.

Life in Los Angeles was far from glamorous. Shared apartments, Starbucks as offices, and constant doubt replaced any illusion of startup glamour. Deals progressed slowly. Closing was hard. Momentum came in waves, followed by long stretches of uncertainty.

Still, something important was happening. By installing scanners globally, the team collected large datasets of face scans. These datasets became the foundation for something much bigger: software-based avatar generation.

From hardware to platform

What looked like a detour turned out to be essential preparation. The hardware business enabled the team to:

• understand avatar creation at scale
• identify technical edge cases
• build deep learning models for avatar generation from selfies

This knowledge was later used to build SDKs for large partners such as Tencent, Huawei, H&M, and gaming studios. While this enterprise work generated revenue and insight, it also revealed its own limitations: long sales cycles, lack of control, and dependence on other companies’ success.

At the same time, the market was shifting. COVID accelerated digital identity. Gaming and virtual worlds expanded rapidly. Few companies could afford to build full avatar systems — and that gap became the opportunity.

Finding real product-market fit

Ready Player Me emerged as a plug-and-play, cross-game avatar platform that lowered the barrier for developers worldwide. This time, the approach was different.

The team:

• defined a clear ICP
• built closely with a small group of partners
• focused on ease of integration and scalability

The result was immediate traction. In under a year, the platform reached thousands of developers, raised major funding, and finally delivered what founders often struggle to define: a clear sense of product-market fit.

For Kaspar, the moment became undeniable when Meta publicly committed to avatars and the metaverse. After years of explaining why avatars mattered, the world suddenly caught up.

Long-term people, long-term missions

Looking back, Kaspar highlighted that endurance — not brilliance — was the defining factor. The company survived long enough to become an expert, and when timing, technology, and market aligned, it was ready.

Several lessons stood out:

• founders choose very few people who truly shape their lives — co-founders matter enormously
• missions must be big enough to justify years of uncertainty
• there are different kinds of luck, but luck favours motion and action
• patience is not optional when building something new

The eventual acquisition by Netflix marked a milestone, but not an endpoint. For Kaspar, it was both a validation and a reminder that meaningful outcomes often arrive much later than expected.

In a culture that celebrates speed and shortcuts, this session offered a different message. If you want to build something truly new, you will be misunderstood, rejected, and tested. Your job is not to look successful — it is to keep swimming until the world catches up.