Blog · Archive · 2022
The Business Opportunities of the Metaverse
In December 2022 the metaverse seemed like the place where the professions of the next ten years were being built. That's not how it went, and it's worth rereading that post — because the reason it was written still holds even now that the technology hasn't delivered.
Published 16 December 2022 · revised 16 August 2026
What it said
The metaverse as a networking tool
The thesis wasn't about the technology: it was that a place existed, still visited by few people, where entrepreneurs and the curious met and relationships were born that were meant to last.
The comparison was explicit and personal: the same feeling as the late 1990s, before the internet boom. Oscar Dalvit opened his first VAT number in 1998 and took Hardstore to €8 million in revenue with fifteen employees by 2008 — starting from the people he knew back then.
The part that holds up
That standing alongside people who are trying something new multiplies your opportunities, and that arriving early somewhere uncrowded is an advantage you can't buy later.
That's as true of the metaverse in 2022 as it was of the web in 1998. It doesn't, however, tell you which place will turn out to be the right one — and in 2022, that one wasn't.
How it went
The room emptied out
The headset sessions, the virtual happy hours, the academy: they existed, and they never became the place where the decade's professions were being built. The metaverse stayed an interesting technology with a niche set of uses, not the social infrastructure it seemed to be.
We're writing this here because the page is still online and should be read for what it is: a 2022 post about an expectation that didn't pan out.
Why we're not deleting it
Because publishing only the predictions that came true is the fastest way to make everything you publish worthless. The same rule that puts the 6% of matches that get no response in the same row as the other figures on this site applies to an article that missed the mark.
One word at a time
What that post was really looking for
Rereading it, the question underneath wasn't "where do we go now": it was "how do I get to sit next to the right people". It's a question that doesn't depend on any technology, and one that has since gotten an answer.
The 2022 route
Find the right place and show up there. It costs time, it requires guessing which place is the right one, and it only works as long as that place stays small.
Today's route
Don't look for the venue: declare who you know and let the calculation propose the meeting. It's the Relational Footprint — who you are, what you do and, above all, who you know, across nineteen business sectors — and the result is a match, with both parties saying yes before they sit down.
It doesn't need a headset, and it doesn't need you to have arrived first somewhere. It needs someone to put their own reputation behind the introduction (Sixth law) — which, in the metaverse just as at the bar, is what makes the difference between a meeting and knowing someone.
It didn't take a new world. It took knowing who knows whom.
The first step
Where your company stands, in one number
AIRA-SCAN© measures the Relational Capital your company already has: ten questions, three minutes, no registration required. Your browser calculates the score and it appears immediately, along with the dimensions where you're losing the most points.
The extended report then arrives by email, and within one working day someone calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis makes sense for your company. It's free and limited to twelve a week, so it isn't owed to whoever takes the check-up: it's decided together.
Would you rather just talk it through? The number is 0549 888808.