AITech Interview with Thomas Johann Lorenz
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in the industry?
I founded my first event company at the age of 18 and since then has been on a Journey of identifying and leveraging innovation potential. In addition to positions including the development of a lifestyle interior brand and as a partner in a model and promotion agency, I was deeply involved in the development of Berlin Fashion Week and led the business development and digitalization of Premium Group in the establishment of an international trade fair conglomerate.
I also co-initiated the #Fashiontech conference, which under my management developed into the world’s largest conference at the interface between the lifestyle industry and technology.

Together with Jeanny Wang, I founded veee.com in 2017 – a global digital B2B platform that scaled to the world largest B2B platform for the fashion industry with 2,500 brands being presented. Veee was acquired by NYC-based market leader JOOR in 2019, as one of the very few that have exited a company founded in Germany to a global player in the USA..

Together with my friend and  partner Christian Mio Loclair, I managed then Waltz Binaire, an internationally renowned creative hub for artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technologies and developed this into Journee in 2020, which is a world-leading technology to make Web3 and metaverse experience accessible to all across multiple verticals..
As a thought leader, what do you think are the biggest challenges currently facing the industry, and how do you think they can be addressed?
We see that the term “metaverse” definitely has negative connotations to it, some of our clients don’t even want us to mention the word “metaverse”, mostly driven through the performance of Mark Zuckerberg’s meta initiative that is lagging behind expectations but has steered the perception of the metaverse being just one place, instead of photorealistic 3D worlds that can be used to build for example a “Digital Twin Factory” connected with the organizations SAP.