Shara Senderoff attended a dinner party in the Los Angeles backyard of her friend and occasional work collaborator, Jamie Gutfreund, in late 2020. The two had met a decade earlier at a meeting between their companies.

Guests at Gutfreund’s pandemic party included a Broadway composer, a French billionaire and a BBC journalist. They huddled under the covers and near the heaters while Senderoff talked about the metaverse. Concepts like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrencies, and decentralized autonomous organizations became popular recently, but Senderoff had been talking about them for half a decade.

“People didn’t know what he was talking about, but they were fascinated,” Gutfreund said. “It seemed like we were on a camping trip and an old man was telling us the secrets of…