Metaverse Group

Co-founded by GDA Group with one of the earliest Canadian family offices active in the category, built from formation, and sold twice. The complete studio cycle, performed before the studio had a name.

Metaverse Group is the entry that makes the rest of this page checkable. Every act in the studio’s framework was performed on it — the position written before the company existed, the entity built from formation, two rounds raised, a chairman and chief executive recruited who had each already done it once, enterprise tenants sourced into a company too young to have earned those meetings, and a sale to a publicly listed acquirer inside two years.

Then it was sold again. In March 2024 the same firm led the sale of the business from Tokens.com to StoryFire — the second sale of a company it co-founded, and the transaction through which StoryFire entered the group and eventually became Flashy Social. The line from this company to the operating stack the studio builds on today is direct and unbroken.

The detail that matters most to the thesis is what transacted. Neither exit depended on the price of a virtual parcel. Both times, what was sold was an operating business with tenants, management and a record — which is precisely why both closed while the underlying asset class was repricing violently in the other direction.

And the thesis’s hardest sentence comes from here. The first condition — somewhere to be — was satisfied more completely by this company than by anyone else in the category, and it was not enough. The land was real, the tenants were real, the footfall was not. A world with property rights and no economy is a film set with a deed attached. The group knows that because it owned the best-located parcels on the set.

The reference case for the first condition, and the only entry in this portfolio where the group founded a company, capitalised it, staffed it, sold it to a listed acquirer, and then sold it again. It is also the source of the thesis’s least comfortable conclusion, because the group watched the correction from inside the company.