Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast
Background
Mint Season 1 episode 6 features Jeremiah Owyang; an advisor to Rally.io, an active angel investor, and is well recognized by both the tech and media industry for his grounded approach to deriving insights through rigorous research. He’s also the creator of the social token $JOW has achieved dominant placement on the social token charts.
On this episode, we talk about his early insights into watching the rise of Facebook, Instagram, and other web 2.5 platforms and why they’re prime for disruption, how he became successful at building social communities, why he’s so bullish on social tokens, his views on the future societal implications of creator coins, his approach for thinking about utility frameworks for creator coins, and so much more.
Thank you to Season 1’s NFT sponsors!
1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/
2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/
Interested in sponsoring future seasons? Get in touch here!
Adam Levy: So why don’t we just get right into it? Tell me a little bit about your background, your story? And how kind of you got involved in the space?
Jeremiah Owyang: Yeah, so I was very early on in the social media space. You know, before it was called social media. It was just called business blogging. And I launched my blog way early in the market. And I helped companies, I had a whole industry. So social community was always a thing. That was so cool to me. I’ve always I was an industry analyst at Forrester covering social computing. And then I launched a number of firms and companies and now I’m in continue to be in Silicon Valley. So I even started a secular holiday called Community Manager Appreciation Day, which happens every third Monday of January. And that’s been going on for 11 years. So community’s always been a key part of what I’ve been doing and new technology. So thinking about people in tech, is what brought me to this social token space. So Hello, I’m coming to you from the tiny Airstream studios in my backyard.
Adam Levy: Amazing in, as you know, you being such, I guess, a forefront with adopting social currencies, and also kind of getting the greater crypto world in more mainstream world to adopt them as well. You’re obviously seeing communities are evolving, right? You having such a deep experience building communities? Now we’re shifting communities into more web three type of native model. Can you talk a little bit more about that? And what are like those major differences that you see from traditional communities? And now there’s shift being more kind of, quote unquote, web three native?
Jeremiah Owyang: Well, I mean, the whole if you go back to when web two emerged, it’s the exact same talking points that we heard and here’s what happens is the distributed players that enabled the communities, they ended up becoming the giant one percenters. Like, you know, at one point, the people creating Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, they were upstart, though they were rebels. They were anarchists. They’re like, let’s bring down the system. Let’s stop big media. Let’s stop press releases, let’s stop advertising. Let’s break it. Let’s bring the power to the people. And then they became billionaires. And then it started all over again. And I saw that same thing, by the way, in the next market, the collaborative sharing gig economy, where they all said let’s share everybody share everything, share the homes, share the car, share your time, those companies became giant behemoths as well. So that pattern repeats over and over, will it repeat with defy and web 3.0? And crypto? Probably, if history tells you anything, it’s going to happen again. So I’m actually a little concerned that we’ll see the same things like a lot of the rhetoric after the Bitcoin conference, and we heard you know, smash, you know, Wall Street, and you can see my work is, is trying to stop it. And New York’s not friendly to crypto is compared to Miami or San Francisco. Yeah, I hear it now. But Fast Forward seven years from now, I’m not sure.
Adam Levy: Yeah, it’d be interesting to see how it plays out. I mean, you see the development from web 1.0 being read only, and that transitioning and being eaten alive by web 2.0, where you create social networks and social communities. And now we’re like, kind of like a 2.5. Or we’re slowly transitioning into more of this ownership type of model, but still living on these more centralised platforms. I’d be curious, like, how that kind of comes into play on the more aggressive side, like you said, when it gets to the point where people are preaching these ethos is of like, decentralisation of ownership, community, blah, blah, blah, you’ll still have those players that I guess will take it to the next level in the extreme and kind of dilute that value, no.
Jeremiah Owyang: Two things will happen. So one is a 1%, or a big platform will emerge from the crowd, and they themselves will become a big platform. You know, any big exchange, for example, or any, anybody who owns a significant of crypto can influence and push people around? Right? There’s a lot of criticisms of Elon Musk of being such a person right now. Sure. And the second thing is there’s nothing stopping from those big companies, whether they be big tech, or big Wall Street or big bank from moving into this market, whether it be acquisition or launching the other the other stuff. Yes, yes, they’re slow. I get it, totally get it. But right now, you can’t find a single media company or traditional Hollywood company that doesn’t incorporate social media into their core business strategy, right. I mean, there’s, in fact, there in many cases that the primary revenue generators for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and beyond, they’re the same industry at this point. So it’s important to separate the rhetoric of rebellion talk versus integration.
Adam Levy: Yeah, no, definitely. It’s crazy because we’re so early into this stuff, and you’re still in that like lovey dovey phase kind of thing where people are talking about the community, the ownership and you haven’t gotten necessarily to the rebellion. Aside just yet, where you have these big platforms taking over and taking control of these, quote unquote creator coins that are destined to be more in the control of the Creator. Yeah. But you see it the other way around, you see platforms taking control of creator coins, while giving creators the tools and flexibility to utilise them. What do you what do you kind of see out playing here?
Jeremiah Owyang: So this is the goal that we need to do is enable creators to have the power to run their own economies. And, and so I’ve known the rally founder Kevin Chu for over 10 years, I was on his prior board. And he is a successful entrepreneur, his name, you know, he’s a philanthropist. His name is on the building at UC Berkeley. So he’s a trusted person in the community. And so that’s important because there’s other projects, you know, in the market, that you just don’t even know who created them. So the trust aspect is critical. And right now, many creators are beholden to the large social networks, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube, and at a whim that algorithms could change, and you could lose your audience. Or if you even signal they are in clubhouse, for example, as another one, people are unsure on how to navigate. And if you even suggest that you’re going to go off to another platform, they could, they could actually start to shadow ban you and you might lose your audience. Or if you if you try to bring your own new types of monetization, and it’s not approved by them that could create strife as well. So in many cases, these creators are beholden. In fact, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, today, during the apple keynote, was putting out messages on Facebook, like how they’re going to enable all of their tools to be free for creators in order to compete with Apple and at a lower cost. So we see them on messaging. But in history, they’ve never paid creators in the past. So it’s really not there. So lo and behold, we are now at the social token space. And, and I really love that idea of social token, because social is my background, right? Because I was one of the first tech analysts in the social networking space, over 10 years ago. Yeah, so all of this makes a lot of sense to me, giving the power over to the individuals and letting them and basically, the vision is this enables creators to turn their communities into economies, that’s the way I see it, turning your community or enabling your community to be an economy. So and that’s a very powerful thing. And the key thing is that it needs to enable the creators to work from platform to platform, you should be able to have those relationships with your fans, regardless of what platform you use. Today, it’s Twitch, maybe its sub stack. Tomorrow, is YouTube a third day, I’m on stream yard right now, right? You know, where am I going to be? It doesn’t matter, my relationships, my social graph, my economics should go with me as I create content.
Adam Levy: But that’s the trick how because all these platforms are going to have to find a way to integrate these social tokens very seamlessly into the interactions of their platforms, right? Like, how would stream yard like, how would they do that? Because their infrastructure is built differently? Sure. How do you take a more web three type of, I guess, infrastructure implemented seamlessly into more of a web to native infrastructure?
Jeremiah Owyang: Yeah, so there’s a term that we’ve been using called coin gate, just like there’s pay gate. So you could have a coin gated private stream yard or only the recordings of YouTube, you know, in for premium, maybe you maybe you put the short version of an interview, like the five minute version up on YouTube, so you have marketing buzz, and also, and then for those that want to see the whole 60 minute interview, they have to own the coin, and you can do an API call to the rally website, and then grant them access to different sites. For example, we’ve done this with third party developers in clubhouse rooms, we actually were able to use paid rooms.ch is third party developers that built that, and then then they could go to a private clubhouse room. Also a common use cases, we have discord channels for creators, and the discord. It uses a coin bot robot and it checks to see you have X amount of j owl coin, that’s my coin, J owl like j Wow, from Jersey shores. And but the most famous use cases Portugal, the man which is a music artists group, and they have their own private Discord. And you have to own 10 PTM coins and you can access this premium content. And so that’s a common thing that we do. And we’re experimenting to use it for premium newsletters, premium podcasts, or behind the scenes. Even with the show, you can integrate it like whoever owns the coin and you can do an API call. They can ask the first questions or they get shoutouts. Or if they donate coin during this live show. It could show it could you say John Doe has donated coin to us right now and really trying to make the conversation happen. So that’s the way you can make it premium.
Adam Levy: Let’s dissect that for a minute because you brought up two points. You talked about bringing in creating like access type of content where you have to pay to kind of consume, but then there’s also that conversation where people don’t want to create barriers to entry per se, and they rather reward people for participating. Where is that fine line? Right? How do you how do you kind of separate the two?
Jeremiah Owyang: Right? Well, first the mind-set is it’s really not always about creator and fan, we’re one community. And you hear artists like the really progressive artists saying things like this, like bt says things Imogen Heap like, you know, we’re a collaborative In fact, the best creators are collaborating with their fans, because they tell them what to what they like, what they don’t like, you know, I mean, it is a collaboration. And that is something that technology always enables us to do. So with that mind-set, what we encourage the creators at rally to do is to first reward and give away their coin to their best fans when they launch. And it’s a very simple mechanism, you can do it, you can send coin, and we ask them to actually fill out the rally ID, the users, the fans. And then once we have the rally ID, excuse me, we can send them I can send them the J l coin, or the Portugal the man coin, or whatever coin it is. And this helps to create the currency circulating within the community. And so that’s the very first thing. We’re also working on some features where we can reward our fans for sharing our content. So there’s features where if somebody tweets out, this is an account, this is a feature that exists. Third party developers build everything, by the way the third party developers can apply for the rally tokens as a development fund. Hmm. Real quick factoid 71% of rally, the economy is owned by the creators, communities and developers. Wow. 29% is owned by the team and investors and advisors. Hmm. So it is, it is not fully a DAO yet. But it’s we’re headed that way. But we do want a central team because it helps us to on board many creators who are not crypto native.
Adam Levy: Sure. I mean, if you look at like more traditional defy projects, like maker DAO, for example, they started off sure decentralised, or DAO point of view, but they had the foundation, that centralised figure that helped build and on board institutional money, retail money, education, etc, make them a dominant player. And now they’re working on transitioning and handing over the keys to the community, I think it’s a very that enter type of strategy. That’s so.
Jeremiah Owyang: So going back to the relationship creators, you want to give the coin to your community and you want to let them earn it, you know, those that are your super fans, like, like, give it to them. And then what craters do is they create up what we call campaigns. And you could turn in the coin that you have either purchased from the creator or earned or traded other crypto by bridging in and use that coin for whatever campaigns for example, I have campaigns for I have a decent Twitter following for my business audience and, and people have been purchasing paid tweets and I’ll tweet out their product or their show or whatever it is, of course, I have editorial approval, it’s got to be a fit, right? I’m not going to push out anything I don’t believe in personally, more people want my time. So there’s other ways. And we have creators that just use it as the coin gate, for example, we talked about creators that just have private rooms in clubhouse or in or in Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, or slack or discord, where you can do that as well. But the one thing that is unique about rally is there’s a dividend that is provided to coin holders, and this is called rally rewards. And there’s been a significant amount of money. So some of the creators that have very successful communities, I have the stats here right from the core team. They are driving 100,000 US dollars in rewards to the coin holders in their community, per week. Crazy per week. And so basically what happens is when people purchase the coin, the value of the coin goes up. And so there’s a dividend that’s released. There’s a formula that figures it out if is the current week in in coin activations higher than the last for rolling weeks. If so, then it kicks out a rally rewards every Saturday to the coin holders, who’s a coin holder? Anybody who earned the coin, bought the coin and of course the creator owns a significant but not always the majority, the successful coins, the community owns more of their coin, right? So in a way, it’s like a shared rewards. It’s a shared outcome. It’s aligned outcomes when the creator and the community are working together. And that’s really what I love about the project.
Adam Levy: So there’s actually a lot to unfold right there. So the first thing is an insane stat 100k per week being rewarded in dividends to people who are holding these creator tokens as a thank you as support. But what can they do with that 100k? Can they cash out can go to you can they go to uniswap? Can they exchange for usdc and put them in their bank account and spend that to pay rent? They can do that?
Jeremiah Owyang: Yes. So the rally Yes, they are yes, so the rally rewards up, except there’s some states were challenging. For example, New York. Okay. But that’s, that’s, that’s New York. So I’m in California. So what happens is I get my rally rewards, and I’m looking at them now. And my coin has issued around 10 to 15,000 US dollars’ worth of rally token to the coin holders. I own 43% of my own coin. Do I need to back up on the math? No. Okay. So I own 43% of my own coins. So it means over 50% of my fans have purchased the coin. So I’m not only benefiting many other people are benefiting from these rally rewards. And the rewards are issued out in these percentages in that way. And so what happens is you receive the rally tokens in your in your portfolio on the rally account, and then you could bridge out. Of course, there’s some states that where there’s limitations on that. And of course, you can bridge to your blockchain, crypto wallet.
Adam Levy: Got you. And if people are kind of like debating or creators are debating, I guess whether or not to do a more traditional way like an ERC 20 way where they meant a token on aetherium. Or they do it on a layer two like polygon, okay, to mitigate transaction fees, they create an eath X, they create an eath token pair, right. And that that kind of drives the value versus going through rally and leveraging the rally token as the underlying value for their token plus the supply and demand pressure from their friends to right. That’s how understanding how it works. So it’s not just pegged to rally. It’s also dependent on the supply and demand pressure. Right or more of the demand pressure at least.
Jeremiah Owyang: Perhaps I don’t have all the answers. So rally is a theory in Project ERC 20. So, but my I’m not a blockchain expert. Okay. So I can’t go much deeper than that. But I can connect you to the team. But what do you mean by the supply chain pressures?
Adam Levy: So a lot of like, the way these bonding curves work is that they appreciate the value based off supply pressure or demand pressures and the more people that buy into it, the higher the price, and that’s kind of how it sounds like with rally, right?
Jeremiah Owyang: That is true, right? It’s true. But there’s no, quote penalty. If you don’t, you know, it’s and creators do not have to purchase the coin, it’s by the way, it is there’s only been around 140 coins that have launched 134. So it’s invite only there’s a very strict review process. Like we’re looking for the right types of creators that have certain criteria, I can tell you about that later. So and they don’t pay money to join. So it’s not like they’re penalise but then you know, they’re just not. I mean, you want to incorporate this in your, as a creator, what you’re already doing. So it should aid you in what you’re doing. It’s not like you need to go out and, quote, pimp your coin, that’s really not the point of this.
Adam Levy: Sure, sure. No, I hear you know, I only asked that because, you know people are diving more and more into this crater economy, they’re realising that these web 2.0, 2.5 platforms are great at building audiences, but they suck at monetizing them. And they’re reverting more to these creator coins to try to create more access and incentives to motivate their audience to create a more intimate type of collective type of experience with their fans. And it’s super easy to go on rally and to launch a token. But there’s other options too, right? Maybe when a creator is thinking, should I go and launch my own ERC 20 token, a standard aetherium token? Right. So like, what when you explain these things to artists, how do you guide them through the shop process?
Jeremiah Owyang: So for many creators and artists and digital artists and podcasters and, you know, clubhouse folks, this literally is the first time they ever touch crypto, right? Literally like we’re this is me. And then of course there are fans even less likely to have ever touched crypto, right. Okay, maybe a few of them. We know that they purchase coins on Coin base. Right? Very traditional credit card like they many of them actually never even had a wallet. Right? So in many ways, this is the mainstream, you know, if you when you go to the rally website and create your own ID, you’ll see that it’s very simple to use. It’s a very simple UI, and there’s clear icons, and there’s like, you know, navs and it’s simple to use, it’s very different than using a wallet and you don’t see, you know, large you know, dexa has numbers and there’s no, there’s no gas fees to worry about. And you don’t need to worry about Do you have enough aetherium to cover transaction and what happened? You know, it all of that is stripped out. So it’s just simple for creators and their fancy use. Now, of course, the defy zealots like, well, everything should be complete, just distributed in your point of view. But for my auntie and my uncle, you know, and for you know, people that are not going to be crypto native. You’re going to miss that complete shocker, right, but I believe the stats are less than 10% of Americans own crypto. So when we’re dealing with craters, you have to make this accessible for mass market.
Adam Levy: Yeah, no, I hear you. And I think that’s a that’s a powerful selling point, because you’re right. These creators and I and I, and I think about this a lot, because like crater coins are a new era of influencer marketing, like they’re onboarding this new era of users, right, that otherwise maybe wouldn’t have actually tampered with crypto, they wouldn’t have even thought about using cryptocurrencies. So any platform that’s actually willing and able to engage these creators and onboard their onboard their audience, they have a lot of responsibility on their hand with making the process as seamless as clear and as cut as possible. And I think we’re where we’re at right now with aetherium, salonica, zilliqa, all these other like, layer one, layer two solutions. They haven’t really kind of like, done an amazing job with justifying that user journey. And onboarding people obviously, like, think about the NFT space, when you’re trying to mint an NFT on open sea, there’s an initiation transaction just to interact with the smart contract. And depending on the gas fees, you could be paying anywhere between $1 to like 800. And that’s without even minting just interact with a smart contract to kind of unlock your wallet with the network. So you’re right, the onboarding journey sucks. And I think that’s where rally does a really, really good job in in kind of showing creators that, hey, you can do this. And we’ve actually made it really easy as well.
Jeremiah Owyang: In a sidechain. That’s right. Yeah. And NFT’s are going to be launching on rally next month as well. So and that’ll all happen without gas fees. So we’re trying to make it a simple way for creators to manage an economy in that way.
Adam Levy: Yeah, let’s try to think like three, four years down the line, assuming all this crypto stuff gets easier, right? Assuming you don’t need more of like centralised platforms to help onboard crypto right comes easier to download a meta mask it comes it becomes easier to transfer eath from Coin base to your meta mask interact with smart contracts, that whole user flow becomes much easier. And creators start to realise Wait a minute, there’s actually power in doing in a decentralised way like these defy Maxis kind of for each right? How does that kind of play into rowdies timeline? How are you guys thinking about that?
Jeremiah Owyang: Well, I am not building the timeline that is for the rally team as an advantage.
Adam Levy: So I guess from your point of view?
Jeremiah Owyang: From my point of view, yeah, we shouldn’t ever say crypto, it should be completely in the background. So take, for example, 15 years ago, in the social media space, there was a new technology that was going to change everything. And it did it was called RSS, for those that don’t know, is a syndication protocol that enabled it at that time for people to simply subscribe to blogs or podcasts and then get updates in something called a feed reader. By the way, we don’t do any of that stuff now, because it happens seamlessly in the background, on your Facebook newsfeed in iTunes on your YouTube. Like we don’t have to deal Oh, you have to actually grab and SUBSCRIBE and find the RSS code and subscribe to it. And then add that to your feed is like crazy. Yeah, but it’s the exact same thing like right, like you take a feed reader that’s the same as a wallet today, like you take an RSS feed, that’s the same as you know, your hash code for you’re trying to get your coin, like all of those things are very similar. And that was done in a very decentralised way back then, because the files could have been stored on third party servers or on your own desktop or whatever is very different. So what I’m saying is, and from years from now, we should not ever even have to say crypto, we just say the jeremiad coin we can transact all those things can happen seamlessly in the background. Like if there’s a trusted relationship between me and my fan, and I say this is available for x coin, or you’re a premium member it should happen seamlessly wherever I go on the web. And I think that’s where we’re going to head.
Adam Levy: Yeah, it’s funny because when you’re when you’re comparing that example to where we are right now, you’re right, everything should happen seamlessly underneath the surface, nobody should be able to tell what’s going on right but when you’re when you’re using wallets right now you have that conversation of should this be a custodial wallet or a noncustodial wallet? Should users be able to have the option to own the keys to which their tokens are sitting on rather than leveraging like the seamless onboard experience when you open a new account and they just create a new Wallet for you off the bat because you don’t need to think twice about that stuff? Right? Like it’d be interesting to see how that kind of like plays down the line. Exactly with that example.
Jeremiah Owyang: And I understand and appreciate the defy movement and I understand why it exists and I’m and I’m for the crowd, but let’s not let’s not forget that Goldman Sachs fidelity and Schwab They’re headed this way they’re going to incorporate cryptos in their own wallets, like the main powers are going to incorporate it both ways, just as we saw Google and the big companies incorporate RSS. So I see this pendulum swing from decentralised to centralised, back and forth and back and forth. And that is the nature of the web of tech. So yeah, it’ll be fun. Yeah, it’ll
Adam Levy: Be really fun to see. So, you know, one of the biggest, I guess, questions when people launch their coins, they Okay, I launched my coin. It’s publicly trading, anybody can buy it. But what’s next? What’s the utility? How do I create value with it? How do you kind of approached that?
Jeremiah Owyang: Right, and every creator is different. So the way that I use it already mentioned, I’m using it to integrate with my Twitter interactions, trying to purchase my quote, reach or influence. I also use it people ask me for, Hey, can you look at this, you know, can you advise me on this, I don’t have a great way to do that. I’d have to set up a big contract or do it for free. Now I do with the $JOW coins, they purchase the coin, they donate it to me, it’s done. So simple. So easy on both parties. And I’ve done this and helped a number of start-ups. Sometimes I’ve Oh, I didn’t, I had a big brand huge brand. One of the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they hired me, as a creator to facilitate experiences in clubhouse when it was red hot in q1 2021. And I hosted a couple of shows. But one of the keys to success in clubhouse is having the right people on stage that trigger notifications to bring people right. So I took a third of the budget, and I hired create clubhouse influencers and I tip them using my own Jay l coin. Smart and they love that because it wasn’t enough money where we wanted to do like formal contracts. But it was like a tip to them. And some of them already have their own coin. So we so basically, it was like it literally was the creator economy on top of the clubhouse platform. But we don’t need to access the clubhouse API is happening in a very ephemeral way. So there’s a few examples of how I’m using it. And of course, we’re getting ready for NFT’s.
Adam Levy: That’s powerful. That’s really powerful. And that’s something that hasn’t been able to be done until now. And you can integrate these tipping processes mechanisms. Well, at least you should be able to do it with any platform that kind of goes back to what you’re saying in the beginning, that these social tokens need to be integrated across everything, right? Every single platform that creator is going to be touching, there needs to be some easy integrations, to connect those tokens to connect those wallets and facilitate those transactions.
Jeremiah Owyang: And it’s not just tipping, right? Because people say, well, why don’t you just use cash app or PayPal or Venmo? Yeah, you could. But the difference when I give somebody my coin is I’m building a long term relationship. Because every Saturday, they get a piece of that rally reward from my coin, and therefore they want to promote it. They were literally bonded, like, in a way. And many of those creators, they purchase my coin, I purchase their coin. And because we’re part of the rally network, we’d like if the whole rally network goes up, the value of all of our coins goes up. So we actually are cross collaborating as creators as well. So that’s, and we have our own back channel, we have our own calls. We have our own zoom sessions once a month, like we have our own thing going on. Again, it’s getting pretty powerful. This network. I wanted to share some other examples as well, if I could, yeah, please. Okay, so these are some other creators, as well. There’s a famous DJ named ill mind. And he will do custom beats for you if you purchase his coin. And he also uses it and other ways as well. There’s another DJ called jaws. And people are saying, hey, can you please include my track into your mix? And he gets asset all the time. So he says, you know what, you got to buy my coin, the BTS coin, and he created a voting page. And if you own the coin, you can vote up the songs. So he’s using it as a way for crowd curation. So there’s, those are just there’s so many ways we can use it. I mean, its programmable money, right? It’s software. Like it’s not just like me giving you know, $1, like you know, like fiat currency.
Adam Levy: That’s something cash up can’t do. That’s not Venmo can do.
Jeremiah Owyang: That’s exactly right. And Patreon can do yeah. And the point system on Reddit or whatever, like, like, literally, there’s an API, and we can use it to validate user or validate how many tokens to the owner, we can use it to gate, you know, there’s many ways to use it as actual software.
Adam Levy: Powerful, that is powerful. So when you’re thinking about creating utility, is there a framework that you use to generate this value to gamify incentives? Like what how do you approach that yourself? And what could you kind of tell other creators when they’re trying to think of that?
Jeremiah Owyang: So what we’ve tried to do is so every creator is different so that the Twitch streamers who I haven’t talked about enough, because I’m not from that world, sure. They use it to host games and actual contests, and you purchase their coin to buy into it and then you get rewards from like the alley. Strawser coin, Allie coin, for example. So they use it in their world for things they’re already doing. So the first thing we do is we tell creators, what are you already doing? And how can you integrate it? And secondly, what is something that people are asking you for all the time, but you just don’t get paid for it, it could be a small thing. Let’s use that with your corn and monetize it. And the third thing we say is this, what is some remnant value? Perhaps its photos that didn’t make it into your book, maybe it’s B roll from a YouTube video. Maybe it’s recording from a concert of the actual music artists that they just happen to click play, I’m sorry, record on the iPad on stage. And people are saying I want that recording, but they don’t know how to distribute it in the right way. So that remnant value from the Creator, you can put that up in a coin gated Discord server or whatever, and make that happen. So do what you’re already doing. Don’t make more work for yourself. Anytime anybody’s asking you for something extra. That’s a little something, ask for some tipping or coin. And three, find that remnant value. And coin gainer.
Adam Levy: Fascinating. Yeah, so cool. I’m so curious how creative these individuals are going to get when it comes to tokenizing, their value and incentives that they provide. And I guess more about this, because you brought up a really cool example from the social audio space with clubhouse particularly, how do you imagine social tokens being integrated on there even more like beyond which you talking about.
Jeremiah Owyang: So using paid rooms.ch. Club owners can create private rooms already, so we can expect and that’s a feature that clubhouse is going to do natively, but people will use a credit card to swipe. But we could do that in other ways, in different layers. So that’s one example. Also, you could prioritise you get on stage, there’s, there’s always this request to get on the stage or be the speaker. And that could be on Twitter spaces, right? It could be on your podcast, frankly, well, whoever is the top coin holder, you proven you’re a top fan, or who’s the longest term coin holder, right, you could see who’s been the longest fan. Or you could tip in order to say I want to speak so you can integrate it for engagement. And then thirdly, you can reward your top fans. For example, let’s say somebody wanted to transcribe, you know, one of the videos and put it into quick, you know, Cliff Notes, a short version, give them a piece of the coin, like tip them out. But then you take that that bit and you sell it on substack using your coin. Like there’s so many ways you can do this. Like, there’s just like no limit, like so many business models can emerge. I just can’t begin to tell you like we have this playbook. It’s like hundreds of slides of options.
Adam Levy: I love how excited you are about it. It’s so good. It’s so real. I love it. I love it. But again, so are there. Are you guys taking it? Or is rally? I guess from your point of view? Are they taking it upon themselves to create those tools to enable more utility? Or is that something that’s going to kind of be on boarded or independent from another third party company kind of thing? You know, or is it all going to be within you imagine it being all within the ecosystem of rally?
Jeremiah Owyang: Yeah, so it’s actually just you know, it is a community. It truly is. So that there’s a rally forums, there’s a rally discord, and we’re talking, there’s zoom calls called the community calls where we’re all discussing all different parties. So there’s the Rally Team. There’s the craters, there’s third party developers, and then the fans. And we’re all talking and saying what do we want. In fact, the creators, we have our own canny board where you can submit ideas and we vote them up. And there’s a team that reviews those as well. I’m, I have my hand in both camps. I’m an advisor to rally and I’m also creator. So I’m dealing with all that in and very involved with the project in that way. The rally has been hiring a number of really amazing folks from Patreon, and YouTube and Spotify and Kickstarter, like it is really a class a team that knows how to work with creators, and creatives. And they’re going to help put together roadmap as well as on board, folks. So to answer your question, it is a collective. And what the way things are done is the Rally Team listens to what is being done. And they put forth a proposal to the community. And then we in that proposal is put up on snapshot, and we connect our wallets. And if you own rally tokens, you can vote. And so we are voting for how the rally tokens will be distributed and who will do it and there’s an active discussion like for me to be an advisor I had to submit and do a video and then the community had to approve that I would be an advisor.
Adam Levy: Wow. So he when it came to onboarding and hiring internally.
Jeremiah Owyang: For this role, for an advisor that was done but for the core roles. That’s It’s not being done because often those people work out really great a platform. So we don’t want that to be.
Adam Levy: Yeah, no, for sure. You talked a little bit about these business models and I want to pull up a tweet that kind of it was what was announced yesterday, okay? It came from an individual called Khan land force again, whether this number is true or not. Okay, let’s just let’s just hypothesise for a minute and enter entertain the tweet, okay? Starbucks customers have something like $1.4 billion in balances and their Starbucks app at any given time, we give them a billion and a half a billion and a half dollar loan, no interest and only asked for back when we want them to buy some 90% margin coffee from them. Right. And these are points, essentially, that are sitting on gift cards, right? Or on the Starbucks app there are just sitting there, right? And a way to kind of incentivize users to come back. Isn’t this the perfect type of model for a social token or community token or brand token? In a sense, where if this was all done on chain, for example, Starbucks would release some form of stable social coin. Okay, that can then be natively integrated across aetherium, or the web three ecosystem. Yep. And you can earn interest on your yields like, wouldn’t this be the perfect type of place to interact and experiment with? What do you think about that?
Jeremiah Owyang: Absolutely. So to me that like the first player to do this would be like Tesla, for example, it makes sense that they could do this, for sure. So in this case, I am familiar with loyalty programmes, I did some projects in that in that space. And the big brands, they love it as loyalty, but also in the book, sometimes they’re listed as liabilities, too, because if they’re not used, so big companies really struggle with this. But let’s just entertain the thought of using a brand token. It can, in fact, one of the top Home Improvement retailer, the executives were reaching to me like couldn’t could we use this? And they weren’t sure. And in general, they’re going to struggle because they’re worried it’s going to conflict with their stock token on NASDAQ, or New York Stock Exchange. I don’t see it happening for a while. But yes, a social token could be done for a brand. But I would also extend it to let’s just say, I think Tesla is the good example. Okay, because you can use it to actually look for provenance of parts like is that third party like karma? Or battery that you’re buying? Is it really from a Tesla approved vendor and work? And did it come from a blood mine? Well, let’s go all the way back to like, where did the actual parts come from? And you know, is it been ethically sourced. So that’s one great way to use blockchain. But secondly, Tesla’s Great example, because as you generate power from your roof of your, your, your solar, or you’re using charging stations, you could use a Tesla coin to for the whole ecosystem to track that. And that’s a form of building loyalty. So I think that’s a wasting yeah, we can make that happen. Yes, but for Starbucks, I think it’s possible, I just highly suspect they wouldn’t really put it on chain, they would just call it like the mermaid coin and just leave it on app. And it’s on their, their Amazon servers only, to be honest.
Adam Levy: That’d be so big. I just I like to think that far in advance, because if we’re tokenizing, everything, that’s like the narrative, everything is going to be tokenized. Right? And you’re thinking about like loyalty and membership rewards and your team fan clubs. You’re trying to build like a more modern day fan club here. Right? And that extends beyond creators that starts affecting big brands, big companies. And it’s funny that you brought up that example, that it’s a public company that was interested in experimenting with social tokens, but they weren’t sure how it would fluctuate with their public stock.
Jeremiah Owyang: No, they were worried to be in conflict,
Adam Levy: It would be in conflict, okay, in terms of like, what should people buy and invest in or?
Jeremiah Owyang: They couldn’t launch. This is a big retailer, huge retailer. There’s several of them in every city. They’re like, well, I can’t launch my own brand coin, because I’m listing my own coin on NASDAQ. So it would confuse the market. They’re just worried about the Fed. And sec. It’s just like, you don’t know where to start and stop with that.
Adam Levy: Yeah, that’s like ripple, like, throwing out rumours that they’re going to take ripple public, but they still have XRP. That’s kind of publicly traded. Right? And how, how would that kind of work? And what would be the structure behind that? But anyways, different discussion for a different time.
Jeremiah Owyang: I think we could revisit that discussion next summer. And there might be some teeth to sink into that. But it’s too early. Yeah, I’m definitely thinking about that. Its like, how could that happen?
Adam Levy: Yeah, I want to bring up another point. And it’s I touched upon it with Starbucks for a minute. Yeah. So a lot of these tokens, they’re there. They fluctuate, right? They they’re variable. And from an investor point of view, they can be deemed as a great investment. If they believe in a creator. They want to help bootstrap liquidity. They want to support them. And on the audience side, they enable access, reward and payment to an extent right that’s right. But really the way I see it right now, social tokens because it could either be classified like as a security or as a loyalty, rewards and memberships type of token. And please correct me if I’m wrong, would it be wise and I haven’t seen anybody do this, would it be wise to issue tokens crater tokens as stable coins rather than assets that fluctuate? And the only reason I bring that up is because if you’re creating systems where you want to incentivize people and reward people, right, or you want to create access or gated kind of content, and you’re telling users to buy an asset that fluctuates, I’m thinking of this from the point of view that fans audiences, someone’s going to lose at some point, right? Don’t you think like someone’s going to lose when they’re buying a speculative asset? Or I don’t even want to call it asset, let’s say a speculative token, because I don’t know what to classified as per se, but they’re buying something that fluctuates up and down, based off the market’s health, right? What would it be wise to kind of approach the use case dependent? Would it be wise to approach it maybe from a stable coin point of view?
Jeremiah Owyang: I think that’s a great idea. I think that could be done. That that’s, that’s a really interesting idea. But I think you need a large enough economy and like, what would you base it off? Are you going to base it off USD?
Adam Levy: Exactly. So you create a pool on uniswap. That’s like the native token, and usdc, right, and you peg that tokens value to one of one. And they can use those tokens as a form of like, like, that’s where Starbucks could actually do a point system, right? That they can leverage those assets like from this tweet, they can leverage all these points that are being stacked up in the in the wallet as a way to kind of generate a new form of economy. So let’s say they have $1.4 billion, nobody’s using that they can lend that money out to pools on Ave or compound an interest off of it. And when users are ready to spend it, for example, they can process those transactions or kind of work out the kinks between you know what I mean? I’m thinking out loud here.
Jeremiah Owyang: And I’m sure it would be discussed, should a mermaid coin be pegged off the Starbucks price. Then as he goes, there you go. That would be another thing. Just real quick point on your earlier question on that, though, rally is a utility token, right? Because you’re usually guessing so yeah, to be clear, it is not a speculative investment.
Adam Levy: That’s right. I’m talking about in general, right. Yeah, in general from for the crater coins in general, because you’re seeing like big cloud, right. And you’re seeing those types of assets with steep bonding curve, and them appreciating value depreciating based off the demand pressure. But in general, right, like, at some point, you also think you want you want, you want to be able to like if you could crowdfund in early musician’s career, and that musician could kind of reward his early backers with on chain revenue, right? And you’d be able to track that, you know, I’m like, I’m thinking about this from like, different kind of point of views here.
Jeremiah Owyang: So my general take, Adam, is that the instability and is all part of the innovation curve and the early innovation curve and I think it’s okay, like, right now, only the early adopters are jumping in and like cool with it, and, and the folks that are joined in rally, they are folks that are have adopted digital first, like in every wave, I know, their background, I’ve recruited many of them. So I know they’re totally comfortable with that. And as the mainstream comes, in general, most In my opinion, most of these cryptos and broader though the whole space will start to stabilise right, as we have large institutions, financial institutions, and the ones I mentioned earlier moving in plus the Fed regulating. Alright, so I think its okay for fluctuations to happen. Yes, I know, we just hit a crypto winter this last month, you know, it had hurt us all who have our own wallets. And but I think we know that’s the risk that’s going to happen as early adopter. And that’s the way that you innovate is during those cycles. So, in my opinion, I think this just comes with that. Like, for example, that really social networking space, there was over 2030 different social networks that were doing micro messaging, only one really, one Twitter, right. And so you want to see what is best of breed. And so there was a high degree of fluctuation. So to me, I’m okay with it. It’s part of the game. Interesting. Its part of the innovation cycle. Yeah. And that high flux that happens, like within a few months in traditional industries takes 10 to 20 years. So it helps us to innovate faster.
Adam Levy: Yeah. And I guess what you’re building here is a network effect. Because the more you the more hodler is, quote, unquote, I guess the higher the price will go right, the more FOMO it’s going to create for other people to join in and kind of access those incentives and, and those gated content parks that people might build for themselves in their communities. Right. So I think, I think there’s value there. 100%. But you know what I’m thinking about this from I’m thinking about this from like, a black mirror point of view. Okay, let’s get like, let’s get super creative here.
Jeremiah Owyang: Let’s do it.
Adam Levy: Let’s do it. Okay, so it’s 2030 right now, okay. Everything is tokenized. Okay, people are tokenize their audiences and their communities are not the currencies, but their communities are tokenized their audiences can bind to them. Everybody is publicly trading on the markets, right? And yours is trading, which I checked earlier like about a couple hours ago at what $7.73. Let’s say Miley Cyrus has one that’s trading at $150 Justin Bieber has one at 200, etc. Right now we determine influence based off or a lot of society at least I don’t want to put everyone into shell but a lot of people in society determine influence based off their social their follower account, right? Oh, this person has 10 million followers are insanely influential. I think we’ll start shifting that narrative where people’s value will be determined based off what they’re publicly traded on the market.
Jeremiah Owyang: They’re interdependent numbers, for sure. Because the influence helps you to get more sponsors and an audience so they’re absolutely going to be intertwined. There’s no doubt in my mind.
Adam Levy: Yeah. But do you think that the dollar amount will have more influence over the follower count?
Jeremiah Owyang: I mean, but this? I think there’ll be aligned, I think there’ll be parallel. So I don’t think I don’t think one will be greater, I think you’ll see both numbers and know both numbers. And they’ll be intertwined. But none of this is new. We’ve always had, you know, different ways to I mean, one point is to own the most clamshell necklaces, or who had the most round size things in front of our homes. And no, you can’t you don’t have enough room in front of you on by the guys over there. I mean, even at the Bitcoin conference last week, if there’s the we’ll pass one BTC to get I mean, this this level of privilege, we will find a new number. For social media, we would use something else so sure, yeah, I think so. But in, in this case, this number represents your engaged community that believes in the creator’s ability, that’s a good point of view. That’s a great point of view. And it could be a more valuable metric than just followers, which we know people buy followers to. So if you’re going to buy social tokens, you’re actually using some type of quid. You’re using some currency, whether it’s US dollars, or eath, or BTC, to purchase it. So there’s actual perhaps even a more truer sense of value than just followers.
Adam Levy: Don’t know not to that’s a great point. That I’ve never heard someone bring that point up. That’s a great, that’s a very unique point. Yeah. Nobody’s brought this discussion to me. You brought it up, together. I love it. I love it. I love it. All. Right. I have a final question for you. Okay. At this at the time of this chat right now. JOW is trading at about $7.73. What is what does that price mean to you? If anything?
Jeremiah Owyang: To me? The dollar amount? Yeah, I mean, that’s great. I mean, I can tell you, I mean, that’s cool. That’s great.
Adam Levy: It’s a great number, by the way compared to like, if you the roster of like the 100 plus creators, right? It’s like it’s doing really, really well.
Jeremiah Owyang: We want everybody to do well, it’s not just about me, Bringing I’m onboarding my horse, so, or so did show with you. So the way that it works is, so there’s like a market cap of my whole coin economy. And so I own 43% I own over 50, so each creator issued 50,000 tokens. So I have 50,000 plus more, can I purchase on my own, times that $7 that’s how much the market cap is of that coin, plus the rally rewards and then plus people going to interact with me and use my token for the different creator things that I do or influenced or things that I do. So I mean, yeah, it’s great. But it only works if the whole rally network goes up if I’m pegged off the rally token the $JOW coin, but that is the main token of the sidechain. So if that is at a low price, it doesn’t matter what my coin is worth. So we want to collaboratively get all creators to be you know, kicking butt.
Adam Levy: Amazing. I think that’s an amazing spot to end off Jeremiah.
Jeremiah Owyang: [Cross talk] end on that I want to make sure I send you my coin a number of my coins to use Thank you. And I want to make sure you have it because we’re now bonded. We’re part of the same [Cross voice]
Adam Levy: Love that. I appreciate that. Thank you, man. You’ve been awesome your pool of knowledge. And it’s been a privilege to talk to you. Thank you for being on.
Jeremiah Owyang: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to hearing more. Bye
