The Story of Equal Reality

I have been building games and communities for 12 years. I was employee #7 at Meta. I joined Meta to experience building tech in Silicon Valley and go through YCombinator. While at Meta we raised $72M, where I was the glue between their hardware, software and developer community. I was responsible for passing on the knowledge of leaders experts in the AR VR space to our developer community, and the needs of the developer community to the team at Meta. I had incredible insights into the technology, how it was used and its strengths.

I left Meta to apply my learning of VR & Startups in the space of EduTech. To find the best content & application for VR. It was on this journey I met Rick Martin.

Rick is a co-founder at Equal Reality, and a Social Entrepreneur honoree of Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and a Young Alumni of the Year at UWollongong. Rick is also an Optus Future-Maker, a Halcyon social impact fellow, a winning team member of the UN’s UNLEASH Innovation Lab, and an alumnus of MIT’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.

Before working at Equal Reality, Rick had previously worked with clients in the tech industry at Bloomberg, and IBM. While studying Law and Commerce at University Rick had stints working in Corporate Law in Malaysia, stockbroking on Wall Street, and was a Reservist Infantry Officer in the Australian Army.

Together we prototyped an application around unconscious bias, and published a report on the potential of VR for unconscious bias which went viral in the HR space.

We received funding from Remarkable & The Cerebral Palsey Alliance to build inclusive technology for people with disabilities, and released our first public VR training application around gender and disability.

We took on the Royal Australian Navy as our first client. We worked directly with the Chief of the Navy training the executive team. developing VR training for Sexual Harassment, Culture Bias on aboriginal inclusive & Gender Bias around maternity.

We received funding from Queensland State Government, and took on Australia’s largest bank as a client building and running VR training for LGBT Descrimination. A case study of 161 people. 99% of people understood descrimination. Receiving an NPS of 91, when world class D&I typically gets 60.

As our client base grew, we did more case studies. A nation wide roll-out with Domain & MWAH saw everyone in the company share an experience, embedding D&I in their culture and resulting in 96% feeling prepared to act on it in the workplace.