BC Business
Founder Adrian Moise helped revolutionize mobile gaming and is now turning his attention to the metaverse.
It’s always a bit harder to believe when people make predictions about things that aren’t tangible, like the metaverse and XR (a catch-all term for VR/AR). But when Adrian Moise talks about how he and his company, Vancouver-based technology and software consulting company Aequilibrium, plan to use those concepts, one is more easily swayed.
After all, Moise, a Romanian native, has enough degrees on his wall to inspire confidence from even the most hardened skeptic. There’s a masters in computer engineering from the Politehnica University of Bucharest, a PhD in computer science from SFU and a post-doc in the same subject from UBC, as well as certificates in executive education from ivy league institutes the Wharton School and Harvard.
And if it’s work experience you’d prefer, he has that in spades, too. Moise started his career with French video game giant Ubisoft before going west for school. He considered a career in academia and did a stint as a professor of computing science, but ultimately took a job at Burnaby’s Electronic Arts building the mobile gaming division.
“At the time, Nintendo DS and the Sony PlayStation Portable were coming up,” he recalls. “Game manufacturers were saying that mobile gaming is going places—we should probably learn how to build mobile games.” Moise started the department at EA with three managers under his supervision. In the next six months the department had 120 people and seven games to its name.
After that, it was off to Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington headquarters, where he served as a program manager before coming back to Vancouver and working as a director for marketing firm Blast Radius. A few years later, in 2012, he decided to start his own venture.
“I didn’t want it to be another digital agency, doing WordPress and digital marketing, I wanted to solve complex business problems by bringing together strategy and technology,” Moise says.
That’s what Aequilibrium has been doing, and the company has been growing “anywhere from 25 percent to 100 percent year-over-year,” according to Moise. It counts firms like Hootsuite, Kit and Ace and Central 1 among its clients, and currently has 70 employees, with an expectation of hitting the century mark this summer.
“It isn’t about putting warm bodies in seats. I’m an immigrant, if you look at our composition, we have top talent from all over the world. The way we collaborate and the pedigree our team members bring is kind of what separates us. I call the company Aequilibrium because of this balance between technology and user experience, between craftsmanship and speed. That idea of balance has stayed with me.”
Balance is going to continue to be key for the company as it makes advances in new innovations like the metaverse and XR. Aequilibrium helped build one of the first mobile wallet applications in Canada and has made advances into chatbots as well. Now, with Zoom “not really cutting it,” according to Moise, the company is looking at other options.
“Can XR close of this gap of what Bill Gates called Hollywood Squares to make it a better, more immersive experience?” asks Moise. Aequilibrium built a possible solution to that problem and launched it at the Immerse Global Summit in Miami last month.
“We were part of the Canadian delegation at that event and are working with some of the government, including San Francisco’s Consulate General of Canada,” says Moise, who is trying to solve a core pain point for employers with the new technology. That problem? That too many workplaces are the exact same now.
“Employees now can say, If everyone gives me a laptop, a Zoom screen and a cheque, why would I stick with you?” says Moise. “How do I get and keep top talent? What do I do different from everyone else? How do I improve the way I collaborate? I think we have solutions that can help.”
At least one old-school business pro is intrigued by what Aequilibrium is building, as Moise recalls an interaction at last year’s BCBusiness Top 100 event (not to toot our own horn or anything). “We were showing off some of our XR technology, and Jimmy Pattison came to our booth and spent tons of time trying everything out,” says Moise with a big smile. “I think he was a big fan.”