How's your business these days, and who are your key customers?Д«usiness is going great, and we're hiring like never before. 'We have a more obvious path through AR,' Sketchfab CEO Alban Denoyel said. So we started charging for the tools and the content, which a lot of people are actually willing and ready to pay for. Once you understand that, you either have to raise $100 million to finance a company with no business model, or you take the pragmatic approach. Just focus on growth.ДЄs we progressed, it became apparent that the YouTube vision of content creation and consumption becoming more mainstream was more like 10 years away than 12 months away. When we started, we were able to raise money on this YouTube vision, betting on 3D capture getting more mainstream, which meant we didn't have to worry about monetization in the short term. The YouTube model is an ad-based business model, which works if you are mass-market. I could see the potential of 3D, for this file format, there was no platform to publish, share and embed it.Д«ack then, you wanted to create something akin to a YouTube for 3D. I met him a few months later, and had more business background. So he an MVP, solving a problem he had himself. He was working for the gaming industry, where 3D artists shared 2D screenshots or videos of their 3D files for lack of a better way. My co-founder was one of the first programmers on earth to work on WebGL. Each file format gave birth to a publishing platform able to read and display it.ДЇor the 3D world, this wasn't technically possible before WebGL, which came as a new initiative from Mozilla. If you create a slide, you share it on SlideShare. If you create a video, you publish it on YouTube. If you create something, you need to be able to share it online, to publish. What was the original impetus to launch Sketchfab all the way back in 2012? It doesn't mean that this mission cannot be achieved, because we are achieving it at Sketchfab. They shut it down because they didn't achieve that mission. They launched it under the umbrella of Google's mission to organize the world's information, with the goal to organize the world's 3D information. It doesn't mean it didn't get traction, it was just not Google scale.

It never seemed to have had as much traction as Google would want. Were you surprised when Google announced the shut-down of Poly? This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. In a recent conversation with Protocol, Denoyel explained why Sketchfab is succeeding where Google failed, how the company shifted gears when it became apparent that building a YouTube for 3D files would take a whole lot longer than expected and the role AR and VR play for Sketchfab now and in the future. To this day, there are just seven 3D Cybertruck models on Poly. For instance, when Tesla announced its Cybertruck in late 2019, artists uploaded hundreds of 3D renditions of the futuristic car to Sketchfab within hours. Running a de facto competitor, Denoyel had kept a close eye on Poly over the years, and noticed that it hadn't gotten a whole lot of traction. Sketchfab CEO Alban Denoyel, however, was hardly shocked. How could a corporate giant like Google give up on 3D, just as AR and VR are growing in popularity? Google's recent announcement that it was shutting down its 3D file repository Poly caught many 3D artists and enthusiasts by surprise. Editors' note: Epic Games acquired Sketchfab on July 21, 2021.

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