For Pierina Merino, emigrating from Venezuela was a matter of course.
At 16, she had graduated from high school in her hometown of Ciudad Bolívar. But with the country mired in a spiral of economic crisis and violence, she couldn't celebrate. Merino's family was understandably paranoid for security reasons, so she didn't even attend her own graduation ceremony.
"Venezuela was in total chaos - it was a matter of life and death, and there was no separation between the two," she said.
"I wanted to study architecture at some point, but in a country that was going downhill, the idea of becoming an architect didn't make sense."
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She left to pursue her dream. Now, at just 30 years old, Merino has not only realized her architectural ambitions, but much more. She's found success with innovative jewelry design and, more recently, with the launch of FlickPlay, a social metaverse platform that could be the next big thing.
"It feels like I've come full circle," she says. "Did I know things would be so aligned? Not at all."
Storylines and storytelling are often important to Merino, especially when it comes to Flickplay, which she describes for simplicity's sake as "a cross between TikTok and Pokemon Go."
With FlickPlay's augmented reality (AR) filters, users navigate real-world cities using an interactive map where they can find non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital collectibles (or "flicks") in physical locations in the form of objects and wearables. Artwork, for example, can be found and collected on walls or other locations. Users create videos showing off their NFTs and flicks and increase their social status through likes, comments, and collecting FlickCoins, the in-app currency. A "social graph" displays the social and ownership history of NFTs and Flicks on the platform.
"I can say with conviction that we are the first social ecosystem where core ownership is the fundamental driver of status," Merino said.
"Our thesis is that to truly be the metaverse in the real world, you have to permeate every layer of our cities and society and how they collaborate and coexist."
The user's avatar is Flicky, a goggle-eyed chameleon that can be dressed, changed and colored according to taste. He even has his own origin myth, explaining that he was sent to this planet from somewhere else in the universe to observe humans: "During a technological revolution on Earth, a group of innovators discovered Flicky camouflaging himself with one of the walls in their studio. They were experimenting with a new device that used AR, and when they discovered Flicky, they learned about Flickverse, another dimension in our world."
So far, about three dozen U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami and New York, have signed agreements allowing the gamified app to overlay its Metaverse world over their streets. With 23 employees, FlickPlay has raised $6.3 million so far, and more than 90,000 people have signed up for a sweepstakes for a chance to win a "Flicky" through Metaverse platform The Sandbox, with which the company partnered in April to allow players to use a blockchain asset on both platforms. Meanwhile, Katy Perry's "mocktail" brand De Soi is also getting in on the action, offering its non-alcoholic beverages to consumers who collect NFTs while playing FlickPlay.
When Lightspeed Venture Partners' Nicole Quinn announced her company's investment in FlickPlay last year, she called it a "genre-defining social app."
"What Snap's lenses were to selfies, FlickPlay wants to be to the rest of the world," she wrote.
Merino comes from an immigrant family. Her father's parents were Spanish and her maternal grandfather, who was Sicilian, had a particularly dramatic rags-to-riches story. He emigrated to Venezuela as a teenager in the 1950s and, after working as a miner, eventually became a successful entrepreneur in the hospitality industry. Merino is keenly aware of how his story influenced her own career.
"When I was old enough to learn what he had accomplished in Venezuela, it was pretty incredible because he came from nothing," she said. "He managed to build a huge hotel in our hometown and make a reputation for himself as an incredible entrepreneur who was respected not only professionally but also as a person. That was incredibly inspiring."
Her own parents continued to work in hospitality and tourism, and they were keen that their three children (Merino has another brother and sister) travel from a young age.
"We always had the idea that our children should be educated abroad to give them a bigger view of the world, to make them more tolerant," says Merino's father, Yuri. "And when they return to Venezuela, it will be with a slightly different perspective."
Merino's departure after high school was made more urgent by the economic turmoil and rising crime rate in Venezuela under the leadership of leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez. Around that time, her aunt was kidnapped - a common occurrence in the country in recent years - before she was eventually released.
"We didn't want our children to live like this, in a country where there are so many security flaws, political problems and constant dangers," Yuri Merino said.
Carlos Adame, CEO and co-founder of Piñata Farms, is a close friend of Merino. He believes her immigrant background has been instrumental in motivating her professionally.
"When I invest in startups and identify them as well, one of the mindsets I find strongest in entrepreneurs is the mentality that they've burned all boats and there's no turning back," he said.
"They think very strategically and in the moment every day. It's not like, 'If this works out, cool, this is fun.' No, it's like: 'I have to make this win.' And she has, and I think that's a big, big advantage for her."
Merino first traveled to Montreal, where she continued her education, with the goal of becoming an architect. After moving to Miami to complete an undergraduate course, she secured a spot at the prestigious Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). When she was about to graduate, an acquaintance suggested she apply for a spot in the studio of Frank Gehry, an industry legend. A few days later, at the age of 20, she was working at his Los Angeles headquarters.
"I got my dream job," she says. "I got the job that you work toward for five years after you graduate.
Gehry is perhaps best known as the creator of the dreamy titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. And fittingly, Merino was part of the team tasked with designing Facebook's new office in Menlo Park, California.
"At the end of the day, you work for Frank Gehry because you want to build the impossible, because you seek the challenge of creating things that are intangible," she says.
Looking back on her time at Gehry, she sees the values and disciplines she learned at his studio as a crucial part of how she approaches the world of social media, AR and gaming today.
"In the tech space, there's a community of developers and creators who are trying to push the boundaries of digital worlds or technologies," she explains. "But [unlike architects] they don't really understand how people interact in the real world, what creates emotion, how a space that's a foot higher or lower can completely change the perception or the emotions or the actions you take in that space."
But two and a half years after finding her dream job, Merino moved on. She had put out her entrepreneurial feelers and began to see opportunities that were foreign to the rarefied world of building design. It started with her watching architectural models that had cost thousands of dollars and tremendous effort to create get thrown away after they served their purpose.
"I thought, 'Oh my God, these are works of art that could be sold,'" she recalls. "And after the presentation, they end up in the dumpster. And you think, 'What, this is crazy!' So I feel like I really had this entrepreneurial drive."
She added as an explanation for leaving the firm, "Architects are like a cult, there's a very specific way of living and being when you're part of that ecosystem."
After leaving Gehry's studio, Merino began designing 3D-printed jewelry under the name Piemer (as in Pie-rina Mer-ino). It was a small business at first. But a chance encounter with a national buyer from Nordstrom department store in an elevator during a sales event suddenly changed everything.
"She gave me her card," Merino recalls. "And a month later, we had product placement in over 30 stores nationwide."
By her own admission, she knew nothing about producing for a national chain, so she had to learn everything on the fly - a skill that would serve her well in her next move.
"I would say the idea for FlickPlay came about the moment I started visiting all these different stores and realized that .... I wasn't talking to my customers, I was talking to their mothers and grandmothers who were going there because they were, I don't know, walking around the mall at 10 a.m. on a Monday and saying to me, 'Can you send these to my granddaughter's dorm?'"
The fact that young people were leaving the malls got Merino thinking about human behavior in general and, alluding to her architectural background, about the changes in where people choose to spend their time in cities.
Adame has been advising her since her early days in the tech world, when FlickPlay was just an idea.
"She entered this crazy world of startups and technology, and nobody knew her in LA," he said. "She had no reputation, and she just muddled through. I remember in those early days she had all the odds against her, and she said to herself, 'I'll go to any event, anything where I can meet people, I just have to meet people.'"
He added, "Her goal was, 'I just have to start gathering information, figure out how this space works, and what better way than to just throw myself into the fire?'"
Thomas Vu, an executive producer of the Netflix series "Arcane," was an early investor. He met Merino during a sponsored ski trip to Mammoth Mountain for promising entrepreneurs, but wasn't initially sold on FlickPlay.
"When I met her, I was scratching my head at first because she had no co-founders and no team. And I thought to myself, 'How is she going to build this?' What she's building is not easy and ... she had nothing. In the beginning, I thought, 'I don't know if I can invest in something like this.'"
But he found that Merino was a quick learner.
"And then all of a sudden she starts hiring people, and she convinces the right people," Vu recalls. "And four months later, that's when it happened: she had manifested a number of things that I could consider."
Merino often refers to psychology when explaining FlickPlay. She says the app's success is based on the fundamental sources of people's status in the real world: community, popularity and ownership. Facebook connects us, she says, and Instagram allows us to increase our popularity. But the human hunger for possessions, she theorizes, is not yet fully satisfied in the digital world.
When Merino began exploring social media and digital platforms in late 2017 and 2018, she felt that with immersive games like Pokemon Go and Fortnite and the interactive experiences of Museum of Ice Cream, a shift was already taking place that offered what she calls "a way to shape your reality."
FlickPlay, she says, was a natural next step, even if it took a while for the real world to catch on.
"Now it makes sense because of the NFT space and blockchain and awareness of what the Metaverse is," she said. "But when I started FlickPlay two years ago, the idea was to create a platform around identity based on things you own digitally ... not a lot of people understood why.
At FlickPlay, she explains, you don't start with zero status, you have a reputation based on the things you own within the ecosystem: "Ownership is more than just a profile picture, it's a fundamental factor in how you shape your identity."
To make her point, she drew on an autobiographical comparison.
"If I walk into a restaurant in a city where no one knows me, and I dress appropriately and drive the right car," she said, "I manage to walk into the room in such a way that I already have a certain status - no one needs to know how many followers I have or how big my community is."
The recent partnership with The Sandbox confirms that FlickPlay is on the cutting edge of technology. The two companies are pioneering the long-awaited concept of interoperability, which means allowing users to switch between platforms while using the same NFTs. Owners of The Sandbox NFTs will be able to use them on FlickPlay next quarter.
Those close to Merino feel like the sky is the limit for her - one of her investors calls her (only half-jokingly) a "rock star.
"For someone to come in here and build a startup, convince people to build a whole verification around it, and do it in an industry she hasn't even been in, that's the American dream, she's living that dream," Vu said. "She's living what most people are really striving for."
"She's connecting the dots in terms of how we can give this new technology ... give it a different form of utility that others aren't thinking about," Adame said. "I think FlickPlay and Pierina are going to be at the forefront in some areas."
When you think about it, a chameleon is probably the most appropriate animal to represent FlickPlay, considering the architect/jewelry maker/metaverse-changing founder is constantly changing shape.
But what about more mundane concerns? Should parents worry, for example, that Flicky the Chameleon is tethering their children to an app that is ultimately driven by possessions and status?
"The Metaverse could be a very beautiful and powerful way to evolve the way we experience the real world, or it could mean the destruction of humanity," Merino said, acknowledging that the idea of children putting on AR glasses and being completely removed from the physical world for hours at a time is troubling.
But, she said, "If you give a child an iPad and a toy, and research has shown this, kids will reach for the iPad. There's no going back; that's the world we live in.
"How we create awareness that a metaverse in the real world doesn't change reality, but it shifts the storyline of reality, I think is a more sustainable way to teach kids the value of the world we live in."