If YouTube is the world's compendium

of videos of cute cats and unboxings, then the Sketchfab platform is

well on its way to becoming the equivalent cultural database of

user-generated 3D objects. CEO Alban Denoyel discusses the origins

and the future of the service with Alan in this episode.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is

Alvin Denyuel-- I screwed it up already. How do I say it?

Alban: "Deh-Noh-Yell."

Alan: “Denoyel,” OK. Today's

guest is Alban Denoyel from Sketchfab, the world's largest platform

to publish and find 3D content online. Imagine it's like the YouTube

for 3D. Prior to Sketchfab, he worked for four years in the 2D world

of photography. He loves making 3D content with photogrammetry or VR

sculpting. He's a graduate from the ESSEC Business School in Paris,

France. If you want to learn more about the wonderful work they're

doing, you can visit sketchfab.com.

Alban, welcome to the show.

Alban: Hey, Alan, thanks.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

I've been looking forward to this episode for so long. I've had a

Sketchfab account for about four years now and I've only managed to

publish a couple of things on there. But it's so cool. I mean, you're

literally making the YouTube of 3D models. How did you guys come up

with that concept? Where did that come from?

Alban: Actually, it initially

came from a technical challenge, I guess. My-- So, Sketchfab is built

on top of WebGL, which is the first web-based framework to display 3D

graphics in the browser and WebGL was initiated by Mozilla back in

2011. And my co-founder and CTO, Cedric, had been a 3D programmer in

the gaming industry for 15 years, was hired by Mozilla to make one of

the very first demos of WebGL for the launch of Firefox 4. And then I

just started peeking around the tech and started building an MVP to

essentially help the people he was working with in the 3D industry to

be share and display 3D assets with just a euro and a browser.

Alan: Incredible. I mean, you

guys have come a long, long way. How long have you been doing that?

When did it start?

Alban: Cedric started in 2011, I

met him early 2012, and we officially launched in March 2012. So it's

been more than seven years.

Alan: Wow. Seven years. And how

many 3D models are hosted on Sketchfab today?

Alban: I stopped counting at

three million. [chuckles]

Alan: So there's over three

million 3D assets hosted on Sketchfab today. And I would assume over

the next 10 years, as everything moves to 3D, that number is going to

probably end up at 3 billion, at some point. So why do people need

Sketchfab?

Alban: So people use this mostly

in two ways: either to publish content or to find content. So

published content means sharing, embedding, displaying, hosting 3D

files that they have. So these are as 3D creators, or brands, or

architects, or any number of industries. And so they have 3D files

and they need a way to embed them on a web page or share them with

someone who doesn't have 3D software to open them, or use them in VR

and AR and so on. And then other people come to Sketchfab just

because they need content. Either regards to presentations, or it

could be to build video games. It can be to build AR/VR experiences,

it can be to make a video or two-dimensional learning. Again, the use

cases are pretty diverse as well.

Alan: Let's start with the way--

where you guys came from, because up until recently it was a free

platform, you could host your 3D models on there. And it was just

kind of more-- it seemed more consumer-facing. And it, over the la