Meet the 19-year-old CEO who started a professional Minecraft building company

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It's pretty amazing that there is even such a thing as professional Minecraft builders—teams of architects and designers who get paid to create intricate worlds from a bunch of digital blocks. Varuna is one such team, a business made up of 34 members, who get paid to craft spectacular creations for their clients. 

Varuna has created numerous real-world and fantasy builds, from underwater kingdoms and enchanting castles, to futuristic cityscapes. Their work is spectacular and a testament to what a group of dedicated creators can do with Minecraft's toolset. I spoke with Varuna's nineteen-year-old CEO and founder, Thomas Sulikowski, about the company's humble beginnings and how they build their amazing worlds.

Sulikowski was in high school when he first heard about the Minecraft building community. He started playing just like any other teenager would. "My high school friends were actually the ones that introduced me to the game," Sulikowski says. "Every day after class we would play a few hours. I think in my sophomore year of high school, I kind of transitioned away from the more typical survival games and started really diving deeper into the creative side of Minecraft."

He posted photos of his builds to online Minecraft forums, and began to gain attention from players who were interested in commissioning new builds. This was the first time he had experienced Minecraft as a business opportunity. "Pretty quickly, I started doing some more research and I found that this was a whole industry within Minecraft that you could actually thrive in."

Above: See my interview with Sulikowski inside one of Varuna's builds.

As he delved further into specialised building servers and building communities, Sulikowski started to make bigger builds, going from small homely cabins to full recreations of the Empire State Building. But he soon realised that juggling both school and a growing Minecraft business would be difficult. He decided to expand. "When it was my time to go back to school I realized there's no way I'm going to be able to finish all these orders by myself. That's really when I had the idea of having a team or a company that could continue building whilst I was in school."

When I was in school, I was too busy worrying about finishing my homework to even think about starting a company, but that's exactly what Sulikowski did. Now, Varuna has 34 people from 12 different countries. "We hire a lot from Poland, from Germany, from Spain," Sulikowski says. "There's a few in Australia, one in Jordan, one in Egypt, obviously a lot from the United States, and I think there's one Peruvian and a few Colombian members as well."

Varuna: Aqua Princess (Image credit: Varuna)

A multinational company that earns money from building in Minecraft would have been unheard of five years ago, and even now it's crazy to think that an entire industry has sprung around Minecraft. Sulikowski talks me through how a commission works, from a client approaching them with an idea through to the finished project. 

"A lot of times clients don't actually know what they're looking for themselves," Sulikowski says. "They just want something that's really wild. It's my job to actually narrow down exactly what they're looking for. The main thing that a lot of people struggle with is pinpointing a size. It's hard to estimate the size of Minecraft builds because you can build in different scales."

There are definitely some incredible Minecraft builds out there. There have been projects like WesterosCraft, a group of builders who are recreating the entirety of Games of Thrones' Westeros in Minecraft. There's also The Floo Network, another team who recreated an elaborate Harry Potter RPG inside the blocky sandbox. As a business or even just a hobby, Minecraft naturally fosters creative talent. 

The Floo Network: Hogwarts (Image credit: The Floo Network)

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Varuna has its own portfolio of eye-popping builds, and Sulikowski graciously gives me a tour of several of their best ones. A build he shows me is a charming red-brick town, which I first think is a fantasy build, but Sulikowski tells me is actually based on a Monteriggioni—a medieval walled town in Tuscany. "We rebuilt this in 2017 and everything is exactly as it is in real life," Sulikowski explains. "We used photos from Google Maps and Google Earth to be able to really see the fort from different angles."

Varuna has a YouTube channel that features time-lapses of their builds. You can see all the detail that goes into the Monteriggioni build, from the cobblestone paths to the slatted roofs. Sulikowski tells me that Varuna keeps in constant communication with the client throughout the whole process, making sure that they are happy with every step. Each build usually has between two and eight members per commission, and the team plan everything out themselves with the client's input. 

Sulikowski tells me that there are three types of clients that Varuna usually get. The first is companies, who are now seeing Minecraft as a huge marketing tool to gain attention. This could be in the form of a map relating to one of the company's projects or a recreation of their headquarters. 

The second type is organisations, like the charity Block by Block. The charity was set up by Mojang in 2012 to support the United Nations Human Settlement Programme that helps communities who don't have access to high-end 3D design architecture software use Minecraft instead.  "If people want a new supermarket, they'll actually prototype it by building it in Minecraft, seeing if it would be possible to add it," Sulikowski says. "It's a really cool project that gives everyday citizens a voice in what they want."