AltspaceVR CEO Eric Romo joins Facebook months after selling his startup to Microsoft, will join the Social VR team
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Eric Romo's move lands in the middle of a two-horse race for social VR. Facebook had already stood up a dedicated team for exploring social interaction in VR in early 2016 (a group led by Daniel James and Mike Booth) and shipped its own four-person hangout app, Spaces on Oculus Rift, ten months before this hire.
Romo, meanwhile, had just taken AltspaceVR — the multiuser meeting app that launched on Gear VR in 2016 — into Microsoft's hands. Joining Facebook weeks after selling to Microsoft makes him a textbook [[/concepts#quasi-exit|quasi-exit]] case: the founder of one platform's flagship social product signing on with the direct competitor.
First-order effects
- Facebook's Social VR team gains the founder of the most prominent independent social VR product, adding competitive intelligence on shared virtual spaces just as Spaces rolls out beyond beta.
- Microsoft inherits AltspaceVR without the executive who ran it, leaving the integration to new leadership inside Redmond.
Second-order effects
- The rivalry between AltspaceVR and Facebook Spaces becomes personal as well as corporate — the two platforms' roadmaps are now shaped by people who know each other's products intimately, pressuring both on features like user capacity and cross-platform reach.
- Facebook's pattern of absorbing VR leadership rather than only companies continues, raising the price Microsoft and others must pay to retain their own VR founders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social VR consolidates around a few large-platform owners: Facebook went on to fold all AR/VR work into Facebook Reality Labs in 2020, while Microsoft's later stewardship of AltspaceVR trended toward tighter control, including the 2022 shift to mandatory Microsoft-account sign-in and removal of open social spaces.
- Founder acqui-hires become a standard exit path for VR startups too small to out-build platform owners, thinning the independent middle layer of the ecosystem.
The trend: Social VR is consolidating around platform giants, with founders of independent apps exiting through acquisitions and landing inside the very competitors they once faced.