Author: Adam Levy

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 3 episode 5 welcomes music producer and artist Daniel Allan.

In this episode, we talk about:

• 0:00 – Intro
• 2:55 – Getting Started in Web 3.0 
• 7:16 – The Future of Artist Management
• 12:37 – Overstimulated
• 19:55 – Selling out in 12 Hours
• 24:30 – Getting the Fans Involved
• 25:51 – Launching on Party Bid 
• 34:09 – Outro

…and so much more.

Show Notes

Pre-save song 1 ‘Say What You Want’ from his EP ‘Overstimulated’ debuting Friday! https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/danielallandeegan1/say-what-you-want

Check out his Mirror campaign that raised 50 ETH in less than 12 hours: https://danielallan.mirror.xyz/crowdfunds/0x18f623e397EF28F1A5a094840f7F6f5587828b94

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Thank you to Season 3’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Intro

Mr. Daniel Allan, welcome to Mint. How are you doing, man? 

I’m good, man. Thank you for having me. 

Thank you for being on. Let’s jump right in. You made a lot of noise on Twitter in the last couple of weeks. First off, congratulations on launching your first crypto project overstimulated, which is based off an EP that you’re releasing soon, but before we even go into that, tell me about yourself. Who the hell are you? What should people know about you? We’ll start there. Take it away.

For sure, man. Yeah. So I am Daniel. I’m from Louisville, Kentucky originally. My family is from Kiev Ukraine, former Soviet union. So, shout out to them. But yeah, I had a pretty musical upbringing for the most part. In some senses, I think both of my parents were in music, like my mom’s degree is in musicology, and then my dad was in bands growing up. So I had always seen it my whole life, but I kind of did the route where I took piano lessons as a kid, and was kind of forced into them. Like I had a super Russian piano teacher, and I remember she would take her thumb and put it into my back for good posture, and I never really had a choice of what kind of music I could play. So, I kind of fell out of love with music I think in a lot of ways when I was a kid. And then funnily enough, I ended up playing tennis. That was my way out of doing music. So I took tennis really seriously, and when I was like 15 or 16, I kind of started to get a little bit burnt out on that. So music actually became my outlet in general. So yeah. 

Are your parents musicians?

Yeah. My mom is. In fact, when I took piano lessons, I was really bad at reading music, but my mom could read music like none other. So to get ready for recitals, I would just ask her to play what I was supposed to play and I would just memorize it as she played it. And yeah, my dad grew up in bands and was super cool. I mean, he ended up being like a scientist essentially, but it was more like throughout high school. My mom did pursue it a little bit more seriously. So I grew up like having it around me for sure. 

Got it. And siblings, do you have any siblings?

Yes. I have one older brother whose name is max. 

So are they musical as well? 

No, he is creative though. For a long time he was working on cinematography and stuff. 

Got it. Okay. So you’re a musician at heart, super talented. And how many instruments do you play? 

 Just piano and I’m really good at computer stuff.

Do you find that a lot of musicians nowadays tend to have very dual skills between the tech side and the musicianship?

Yeah. So I think that, just generally, things in the boxes we call it, which are like, just being on the computer has opened a lot of doors for people who maybe don’t have as much of a standard musical background. I think that for someone like me, I know enough piano to write songs, but I definitely don’t consider myself a pianist. However, I think that having this many resources, I use Ableton and things like splice, the accessibility to people becoming artists and them becoming producers is a lot easier. So I think that there are multiple types of producers. I think that there are people who maybe approach things from the technical side a little bit more and kind of just strictly stick in the box, kind of like myself. And there are people who literally will just use their computer as a way to record their instrumentation. But I think that it’s kind of like the best time right now to be a producer. 

Getting Started in Web 3.0 

You know, I wanted to have you on because one, full disclosure I bought into your Overstimulated project on mirror for everybody that’s listening. And the second thing is, everybody has a unique journey into crypto, into web three. What was yours? And as a follow up, what were you like before crypto?

Hm. Okay. So let me start with the first question. So the way that I got into Crypto was through my friend Cooper, Cooper Turley, who’s like, he was a project manager on Overstimulated and he’s like now become one of my closest friends. But, the way that he and I met actually, I was doing a show in March or April. It was low key. It was like still very much at the height of COVID, and I did a show in my friend’s backyard in Sherman Oaks. I did two parts of the show. So the first part was me playing music that was already coming out, but then the second half of the show was me playing seven or eight, just totally unreleased songs. And I invited a bunch of music industry A&Rs, friends, things like that. And after the show they had all come up to me and they were like, “oh man, we’re really stoked on your new music blah, blah, blah. Like let’s, let’s keep the conversation going”. And one of the other people that came up to me was Cooper, and he kind of mentioned, “Hey man, if there’s ever a way that I can help you put out music, then you know, I’m happy to have that conversation with you. So a month passed, and I had advanced in some of the discussions with various labels and whatnot. I just wasn’t a proponent of some of the deals that were on the table to be blunt, and so I revisited the conversation with Cooper and I was like, “Hey man, you know, I’ve kind of shopped these around a little bit. I haven’t really found anything that I’m super stoked on. Why don’t we talk a little bit about, you know, you think this can work”. And from that point on, he was like, my first steps were minting on catalogs. So I did my first series. It was called the drifter series, where I would go to a random location, take a disposable camera and mint NFTs like that. Just with audio and the cover art, and I entered those on catalog. That was definitely my first foray into it. Then after that, I spent three months kind of in discord servers and individually talking to people on Twitter and whatnot. But the second question that you asked, what was I like before web three. So I moved to LA in January of 2020. When I was in school, I was very much doing music with school on the side, rather than the school with music on the side. So every summer, I wasn’t seeking out any internships or anything traditional like that. I would just be here, live on my friend’s couch, and just try to do as many sessions as I could. So when I moved in January of 2020, I definitely had the privilege in a lot of ways to wave the full-time musician flag. But, by the same token, It wasn’t very glamorous. I think that I had done some small deals and whatnot, but primarily I was doing a lot of things that I wasn’t passionate about. Because in my mind I was like, oh man, if I can just weather this storm of being here and doing it, then eventually something will figure itself out. But I think that the nature of it was really, I was just doing a lot of mix work, which mixing is really important to me. I understand the technicalities of it. I just wasn’t necessarily as passionate about it as I am about just creating music in general. So, I think in some ways I was happy that I was in LA and doing it, but I think at the same time, I thought that there was a lot more out there. So kind of the intersection of my music career and then web three was like a perfect fit.

So when you got into Web 3.0 first,, you just mentioned that there was a lot more out there. What does Web 3.0 have that kind of possesses more out there? What did you come across that you’re like, “shit, like, this is where I belong.” This is what I need to be doing. This is where my focus needs to be?

Sure. Well, I think the first thing that stands out is definitely, there’s a very big sense of community. I think that people throw that word out a lot, but one thing that I kind of realized early on was , If I’m to put out music, I really don’t have a direct way of talking to fans. Like I can post something on Instagram and someone can like, and comment on it. I can put out a tweet and someone can, you know, maybe respond or like it or retweet it, but Web 3.0 and discord, I mean, I know Discord is typically a web platform, but so much of Web 3.0 lives on discord. And that was the first way that I could directly talk to people who care about me and care about my music. And that was something that Web 3.0 aside, didn’t really exist, you know? And Web 3.0 was kind of what got me into discord in general. I think another thing was, when I started my mirror crowdfund, I had like 200 Twitter followers or 300 Twitter followers. Like Blau, who was so incredible for what he did, was already somewhat established as an artist, very established. For me, I was just at ground zero for the most part, and for people to really take a risk on me and to believe in me, that was something that I don’t think could have happened in a Web 2.0 world. 

So interesting. Such a unique insight coming from someone who is as rounded as you, and then comparing it to someone like, wow, you killed the game. You set the example for many artists, and I’d even argue one of the core reasons why we saw a lot of the snowball effect in March. And I think it’s so cool. You as a musician, what are the details? You’re not signed to a label, you’re independent, right? 

Not right now. 

The Future of Artist Management

Oh, really? Okay. I feel you’re gonna get a lot of DMs after this now. So you’re independent. You don’t have a manager. It’s just you and your creative team, and pieces of individuals from Web 3.0, from crypto, et cetera. Do you think that’s the future of how artists are going to be organizing?

I mean, to be honest, I’ve had this conversation a few times with friends because we’ve all talked about management and things of that nature, and without getting too much into management, I think that probably. Because, with management, I think that it’s kind of a tall ask unless someone is already in Web 3.0 to kind of pursue that in general. My kind of philosophy with this is pretty entrepreneurial. I just kind of find people that are really good at what they do and I give them the keys and I’m just like, this is your thing, you know? Cooper, for example, with him, I was just like, yo dude, anything that is like super logistics, super tokenomics wise, I’m going to lean on you for, but nothing else. For Lisa, my creative director, girl of the year. I’m just like, dude, like everything creative, the way that we want this to look , that’s you. For me, I want to focus on two things and that’s making music and being as involved in the community as possible. Those are the two things that are coming from me. I have Henry, my community manager, I have Maria who’s in charge of finance and budgeting on things, but generally speaking, I really like how this is working. I think that I just trust everyone who’s involved, you know? And I don’t think that there are any hidden motives, you know? 

So for those who aren’t familiar with your music, can you talk a little bit about your genre? 

Yeah, for sure. I think that the music that I have out is somewhere between that electronic and pop realm. I think that with overstimulated, I am taking a little bit of a turn. I think that I’ve always enjoyed working in a hip hop space, enjoy the more electronic side of things. So I think that moving forward, a lot of my music is definitely going to be electronic without a doubt, but has more Indy and hip hop influence. But yeah, I think that’s the genre. I mean, when I’m asked that at a party, that’s my answer. 

And when people ask you some of your biggest inspirations that led you to pushing out your most recent pieces, what do you fall back on? 

Yeah, for sure. I think actually, recently, I think Kanye west. I have a picture of him right over here, but I think for better or worse, like politics aside, I think that he’s an incredible creator and an incredible musician. And I think that Chicago, I’m from Louisville, Kentucky, but my brother moved to Chicago when I was a kid, he’s 15 years older than me. So Chicago was very much my city growing up. I mean, it was the first time I went to a music festival and, you know, it was really the first downtown that I had ever seen, the first skyline I’d ever seen. So I think there are a lot of reasons that I resonated with him and his music. I think that Flume is like the first artists that I’ve ever seen live, and that definitely changed my shit up for sure. But yeah, he was definitely one of the first artists that I saw live and I was like, wow, that’s really cool. So I would say, primarily, those two are in the conversation of people that inspire me the most, but there’s so many others I can think of. 

All right. Let’s jump into the Web 3.0 side more. And specifically, focusing more on you as an independent artist and using cryptocurrency to own your creator economy, as people like to say. And doing so in a way where you’re building your own team, that each individual in that team specializes in their own respect, giving them the autonomy to do what they do best. And you focus on the music, this person, focuses on the crypto, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you were building this team out, when you’re preparing for your mirror posts, when you were about to go live and literally getting into the trenches of discord, how was that process like getting started, and what were some of your biggest fears, if any, or concerns that you had getting started? 

I mean, I generally think if you have fears, you are NGMI. I think that generally speaking, you have to just kind of go all in on it and send it. Because for me, like my worst case scenario here was I put out an EP that maybe has like a thousand or a couple thousand dollars into it, and I could make that work. That was my worst case scenario, but my best case scenario is kind of a small part in my changing the narrative and the music discussion. I think, as you mentioned, I was definitely in the trenches and I think that was probably the scariest part. In full disclosure guys, I’m in the scheme of things, a noob. I have fundamental understandings of a lot of things in the Web 3.0 space, but I’ve had to lean on a lot of my friends for advice. But I think the hardest part of all of that early on was like finding the people that weren’t embarrassed to answer my questions. I’ve had this conversation with Cooper before. When I was first starting out in music, all of my friends stuck with me, so we could send each other stuff and we weren’t embarrassed to be bad. And we weren’t embarrassed to send bad music together because we knew that we were all on that level. When I had first started out in this Web 3.0 world, which hasn’t been too long, it was really intimidating to find people that were also noobs like me. So what I did in building out my team was kind of just being as transparent as possible and asking stupid questions. For every 10 questions that I would ask in random discord servers, like maybe one or two people would get back to you, but those people are my friends now and people that I can really rely on. And so, I think that kind of the biggest fear here was just being afraid of sounding like a noob, but I think as I joined, I was fortunate enough to get in FWB early, and obviously like that’s one of the best platforms to kind of openly ask questions, you know? And I think finding those communities early on, as soon as I did that, was kind of the catalyst where I was , okay, I can really get moving on this.

I think the hardest thing to do is to get to that mentality where you feel comfortable feeling like a noob. Feeling like you know nothing, and not being scared to ask random people, random questions. And being okay with being the dumbest person in the room, because that’s part of growth. That’s part of learning something new, it’s part of experimentation. So I think you’re spot on with that. 

Sorry, just one note. I hope that I’m the dumbest person in the room for the rest of my life. Like that’s the best case scenario, because then you can learn from everyone. 

Overstimulated

That’s spot on. Let’s talk about Overstimulated. The reason why I have you here and also we’ll get into the party bid stuff that you’re messing with too, which is super, super exciting. But for starters, overstimulated, the EP. The monumental post, making a hundred K in one hour, 20 ETH in one hour, and filling your crowd fund, in what about 24 hours? Less than 24 hours. 12 hours. Take me from, start to finish. What is overstimulated? What is over stim? How did that come to fruition? 

All right. So I’m going to go back just really quickly to the Cooper story. I had started mentioning on catalog because I wanted autonomy in the NFT space. What minting on catalog did for me, was it kind of showed me the super bare essentials. I set up my Metamask, I got on Uniswap, you know, just very simple stuff. And after about a month of posting on catalog, and people, gauging some sort of interest and it’s like my art and like what I’m working on. When I went back to Cooper, this was about may, and I was like, “okay, man, I am ready to drop.” Like the songs are all ready, let’s send it. And he was like, “absolutely not. You have to spend months in the community.” So for three months, really all I did was talk to people and say hello. And it was stuff behind the scenes. It was like most of my days were on Twitter and discord reaching out to people individually. So in terms of overstimulated, after I had kind, I think, paid my due diligence in that sense, when we were ready to go, I mean, there were a lot of Setbacks. I mean, we had to find artwork people. We had to find canvas people and, you know, we had to make sure that the distribution was set. But in terms of how it came together, I think that Cooper kind of had assigned things to me. He was like, look, I can take care of like the tokenomics and things of that nature so long as you write a story, and for me, I’ve been a passionate music maker for all my life, and I’ve enjoyed writing as well, but even then, I felt a lot of pressure to make sure that I really got the story right. Because for me, like I said, this was the first time outside of, I guess, blogging like a big artist, like a small artist like myself was going to do something like this. I mean, if you want me to talk more about what overstimulated is for people who don’t know I’m happy to do that.

I want you to take me from a to Z. So keep on going where you’re going, because I think that’s also a good point to bring up the whole comparison to Blau again. But continue. 

Yeah. So, I mean, I think that for me, the first thing that we had to kind of go through was the logistics. I think that most major label deals are like an 80 20 split. For me, I was like, okay, look, I’m just going to give up 50% of my artists share, and I just want to gauge the interest to see who’s down. Maybe the people who I’ve spoken to over the past few months are interested. Maybe there are other people in the project management network or whatever the case may be. Maybe there’s some people in FWB. I think that a lot of the way that these things work sometimes is like, here’s a sum of money, whether it’s a label or whatever the case may be, and then we want you to give us an album down the line. Some people have the album ready, some people don’t. For me, it was like I had the music ready to go. I think that the craziest thing of all of this is that people believed in the project without hearing the music. I think that’s pretty crazy to me.

Let’s pause there. They believed in the project, they believed in you without actually hearing the music. They might have searched you up on Spotify and saw over a million streams on this one song, and you’re active, you’re publishing stuff. So you have some type of presence, but people believed in you and the idea of the model that you presented to the crypto world, right? Continue on that. 

And I think that that’s something that I was a little bit scared of at first, because in some of my preliminary meetings, I was like, man, I want people to really mess with the music. And I think Cooper just kind of reassured me on it and he’s like, trust me. If they believe in you, then when the music comes out, it’s only going to be a cherry on top. So, I thought of some artists for example, and one artist that came to mind is Lil Yachty, right? A lot of people just really like him as a person, music aside, cause he just does cool shit. He has a cool personality and he’s just a fun guy to be around. Or even like Omer Fedi, right? A lot of people just know that he’s the super sick energy in a room, and then when his music comes out, it obviously speaks for itself, but it’s just like a cherry on top of him being a cool person, you know? So for me, I kind of wanted to reverse engineer it that way as well, where I was like, look like I’m trying something totally new, here’s the story. I have 200 Twitter followers. And if you guys believe in this, I promise that the music will be worth it, you know? And because to me, this is definitely ,without a doubt, my best body of work. I’m incredibly, incredibly proud of it, and that’s why the risk was so big to me early on, because I was like, man, I don’t want to jeopardize the music doing well. This is like me, my thought process, like six months ago, really. But I was like, man, I don’t want to jeopardize the music doing well on traditional metrics because I’m so immensely proud of it. But I just tried to explain that in the post. I tried to like, bring that emotion over into it and hoped that people bought into it.

And one thing that you brought up that cannot go looked over is that beginning component of spending time in crypto, and being in the trenches of all these different collector communities, discord communities, et cetera. So walk me through those first three months too. I remember when we were talking behind the scenes, you’re like, that was the most critical thing that I feel like spiraled the success of overstep. And by the way, I think that’s something that people look over and they’re like, okay, I’ll draft your post. I have this idea. I’ll put it out there. Let’s get the money, you know? But, it’s not like that.

I think it’s not like that because it’s not glamorous. Like I said, I came to Cooper, and I said the music is ready, and he was like, you’re not even close. That three-month window. I had put out music once a month for 15 months. And someone who I barely knew came up to me, Cooper, and he was like, yo dude, you have to focus on this. Like you have to go all in. So for a three month period, all I was doing was, one figuring out what discord was cause I had no reference point for that, two, figuring out the servers and just doing my research on Twitter. I would say 10 hours of my day, probably like 8 to 10 hours of my day was individual outreach. I think that some people had tried doing the crowdfund or similar things to it, and I think that that’s the missing component, that because it’s not something that’s advertised. It’s not sexy or cool to get laughed at for asking stupid questions for like six or seven hours out of your day. But as soon as I made my first friend there, early on, was Jeremy Stern, who’s one of the guys on the dev team at catalog. And he was down to help me, and then Brett shear who bought some of my first early NFTs. As soon as I met those people, they were just down to help me, and these are people who were very knowledgeable in the space. Like they work on life-changing platforms or with super prominent investors. When they were down to help me, then that just gave me all the confidence thatI needed. Just the first and second friends. So then when I was getting all those nos for three months, it was no biggie to me. Cause I was like, I know there’s another Jeremy and another Brett out there that are just down to help me down the line. And now I’m at a point where like, if I have a super specific question, I know which friends I can rely on, and that’s a pretty great place to be. 

That’s awesome. I looked at the amount of collectors, if I recall, there were 87 exactly. I want to ask you this question, because I think new people coming to the space don’t realize the proportion between how many collectors, you know, versus how many are your friends. So for those who put a dollar where their mouth was and supported you, how many of those did you know and how many of those did you not know? 

So I need to look at the list, but I would say it’s probably between 40 and 50% of the people I had spoken to in one way or another, and I think the rest was organic after it took off. I would say that’s where it’s at. 

And did you get any legal help before?

Yeah, I mean, I had asked a lot of music industry friends, and just had asked a lot of my lawyer friends just like, is this okay? How do things look? But I never hired a lawyer to actually look at everything. It was more just asking me favors and just being like, yo, does this section make sense?

Selling out in 12 Hours

Can you walk me through your emotions at the first hour of seeing 20 ETH? What were you doing? Where were you? Like walk me through that day.

 Funnily enough, I was at my friend Grady’s. Grady is also a musician who’s pretty involved in the space. It was me, him, and bloody white who is also super involved. Grady had just dropped an album yesterday and he was showing it to us. He wanted us to come in and listen to it, and I had heard it a few times cause he had sent it to me. So this was kind of my third time listening through, and I think the weird thing about the fund is we dropped it at a weird hour. Like me and Cooper went back and forth on when to do it. We were going to do it the next day. Actually the morning of when we were doing it on mirror, we were going to drop it at 11:00 AM. The way that it was structured was there were the three categories, silver, gold platinum, and then there was one winner. Then we realized that you have to do a podium and then you have to have a big pool for all the other bidders, but you can’t have one winner. So we needed two additional NFTs made that day. So because we had the NFTs for silver, platinum, gold, and winner, but we had to make two more. So shout out to Metsa, because he made the other two podium NFTs that day. He sent it to me after he got off work because he has a full-time job, and it was like 7:00 or 8:00 PM and we were still making edits to it after months of staring at this stuff. I think it was 9:00 or 10:00 PM, something like that in the evening when we had to put it up. So I was in the other room, and I had clicked submit, published this crowdfund. I was on FaceTime with Cooper, had published this crowdfund, and then I sent the link to my phone just to make sure that it worked. And it was at 1 ETH. Just from sending it to my phone. Cause I had published, hit the tweetstorm, texted it to myself, and checked and it was at 1 ETH. I was like, okay, crazy, whatever. So I go and I sit down and Grady’s gonna show us his album, and I was like, yo, I just published it, now I can chill out, relax. But of course, I have the urge to check because I saw that I texted it to myself and it was at 1 ETH. He plays the first song out. It’s like two minutes long, and I check it. It’s at 3 ETH. I show bloody, Lucas sitting next to me was like, “yo, this is crazy.” And the album just keeps going, and Grady is just kind of vibing out. And he just looked back at me, and my eyes were just huge because it was like 3 ETH , and then it was like 7 ETH, and then it was like 10 ETH. I’m just like sitting here, and Lucas was just like, “yo, this is nuts.” Then I go on Instagram and everyone’s posting about me on Instagram. And then I go on Twitter and everyone’s talking about me on Twitter. And this is all within like the 40 minutes or however long Grady’s album is. By the end of the album, it was maybe 15, 16, Ether or something, and I’m just sitting there. That’s when Grady was like, “oh man, tell me more about what you’re doing.” That night it was just a blur because I felt like everyone in my life called me, you know? I stayed up just talking to people. Everyone’s asking questions. Everyone’s like, “oh, how did you do this?” Yeah, dude, it was a trip. That’s the way that it all happened. I remember the feeling very well. I texted my parents. It was a proud moment. 

So today’s Saturday, October 16th. This is the day we’re recording. Overstim crowdfund finished what, september 28th? What has the progress been like so far? What has went down? Talk to us. As a collector, and as others who are listening. Because in that mirror post and I’ll link it into the show notes, you go very detailed into what are you spending my money on, how long the timeline’s going to be from when you guys are actually going to see the EP, et cetera.

So right now we’re six days out from the first single, which is coming out October 22nd. So the way that it’s set up is there are three singles. Say what you want with Deegan is out October 22nd, feel like that with Idarose is out November 12th, too close with bloody white is out December 3rd, and the project is out January 7th. I think so far, what we’ve done is I have all of the artworks ready for every project. I’m still working on finalizing the visualizers for it, and I just got someone on PR. So we’re finalizing, just the general marketing push and things of that nature. I think that for me, the music part to me is pretty standard. I’ve always understood how the distribution has worked. I’ve been in music, I think, for a few years now. I think that to me, the biggest learning curve and the things that I’m personally focused on the most is making sure that I’m being active and to kind of hold the attention of everyone. So I’m just being as active as I can on Twitter and really, really, really hyper-focused on the discord community. For the first time in my life, I have this responsibility to 87 people. I don’t necessarily like to think of them as shareholders because I think that that’s a little bit too proper for the scenario, but even some people that believed in me and I kind of have this duty to be like, “yo, like I’m working my ass off.” So for me, I’m trying to just live on the discord and I’m trying to make that as cool as I can and make sure that really every single part of the project, people feel like they got their money’s worth for essentially, you know? So yeah, for me, that’s about where it’s at. It’s really exciting. I mean, there is definitely this awkward buffer period of like a month, from the fund ending to the first song coming out. So it’s kind of a relief that I can finally be like, “yo, here’s the package and it’s coming soon.” So we’re making really good strides and I’m really excited about it. I’m doing an Overstim call in like 15 minutes.

Getting the Fans Involved

And before we pivot to this new project that you’re working on as well, while you’re pushing this project, me being a collector, 86 other people in the discord being collectors and contributors, do you imagine including them in the creative process? For example, do a live stream in a discord and be like, “yo, this is track number three what do you guys think? Should this snare be on it, it or that snare? Do you imagine yourself doing stuff like that? 

I mean, I think for overstimulated, I already have the masters for it, but I think that in general it goes beyond overstimulated. And I think that there’s still plenty of creative ways for people to get involved. Like on the artwork, front on the visualizer front, especially. Like there’s a drop that I’m going to do in there that’s like, okay, here are artists, here are people that I want to work with, I want y’all’s thoughts. I think that that’s definitely the development of what I want in my career. I essentially want to have all the people backing me and all the patrons would be as involved in the creative process as possible. Like I want to send 30 demos and be like, which of these are the sickest? Let’s do a poll. Like, do you guys have any thoughts on who this can sound like? Who could be on this song? The big picture thing is to have the patrons involved in the creative process. A hundred percent. 

Launching on Party Bid

I think that’s the way to go. I really think so. Let’s pivot for a minute. Party bid. So catalog, party bid, new songs that you spun out of nowhere, and you just published and tokenized and spent what you told me behind the scenes, like $5k uploading and making sure they’re on chain. What is going on there? You published a tweet storm too a couple of days ago. Walk me through that, and how does that differ from Overstimultated? 

So kind of to preface that, overstimulated is my number one priority. I think that it’s definitely the biggest project that I’m working on. It’s the one that means the most to me. It’s all of my music. I think at the same time, and I got this advice early on, I think that a lot of people think a lot in this space and don’t necessarily do as much, and I’m for better or worse, just an executor at heart. So I just like, if I have an idea, just acting on it, and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I think that generally speaking, like everything I’m doing, hopefully will lead back to Overstim because I’m giving a percentage of all of my sales from NFTs back into Overstim. So, the project that I just dropped was more of like a passion project to drive eyes back into it, but generally it’s called Idlewild cause we did it in Idlewild. We as me, bloody white, and my creative director, Lisa. And so bloody and I guess this is my first time publicly saying this, but we’re starting a band next year called pollen. It’s going to be all after overstimulated comes out. Totally separate thing, but we wanted to do a soft debut to kind of get ingratiated into the Web 3.0 world in general. So, in 36 hours we did five songs together. Lisa did all of the artwork for it. It’s probably, I think, the coolest shit that I’ve put out on catalog in terms of, definitely height, like from an artistic and musical perspective. I think that it was the first music that I’ve been able to put out since the whole crowd fund has happened, which has obviously been very creatively liberating for me. So, yeah, these five songs. We threw them into a project and we wanted to kind of act quick on it because Overstim is coming out next Friday, and that’s what my week is about. But yeah, I’ve never done party bids before. I wanted to experiment with that. So all five of the songs are up on catalog using their new spaces feature, which I wanted to experiment with, and there was a party that was set up for every single. 

For those who don’t know what party it is, give us a quick recap, and why is it so critical to music? 

Yeah, I think that party bid is sick. This is my first time using it, but I think it’s critical because to my knowledge, correct me if I’m wrong, I think that you can contribute any amount of ETH and then you essentially just own a percentage of that NFT. Typically I think that their biggest one was a zombie punk, which was like 3.5 million USD, but it’s like people can contribute X amount and just own X amount of the NFT. I think that the thing about my crowd fund is I think the lowest contributor was 0.05 ETH, which is what like $170 bucks give or take. To some people, I mean, I think that is a lot of money in general, but what if someone wants to contribute with like 30 or 50 ETH on a smaller scale? That’s why I think part of it is really interesting, and the other thing about it is it definitely creates community because it’s like, oh, like, I feel like I am involved in this regardless of my stake. It’s not necessarily a competition or whatever, or about the money per se. It’s just about creating a group. Some are owners of a crypto punk. So I think that’s what’s really interesting about party bid and why I’m super keen on experimenting with it.

Just to add more context for creators who are listening, part bid is basically a way for you to collectively bid on an asset that you want to own together. So you basically have an asset, there’s a shared link, you access that link, and then if the community reaches a threshold of what they want to purchase, then collectively split that asset. So if it’s an NFT, it’s fragmented and split it to everybody that bid on it. So in the use case of a song, you crowd fund the success of an NFT from even your micro collectors, your macro collectors, or like everyday fans, right? That’s the inspiration, from what I understand, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I just want everyone to feel involved, even if they don’t have the financial leverage of a whale, you know?

And how is that going so far? 

I mean, I need to promote it more for sure. Like I said, it was definitely a quick window of experimentation, but I’ve had people hitting me up about it, which I think is super encouraging. I want to talk about how it’s like relating it’s Overstim a little bit more because I don’t want anyone to be confused. My portion of sales on this is going to go back into the Overstim treasury. This was like more of a passion project for me.

I think that’s important because that was my next question. How do the two tie together? Also behind the scenes, when we met up yesterday, I was like, it all works together. It’s all tied together. And you take the Gary V approach. Gary V tells people to just post shit. Just post content. Nobody cares. Post post, post, post, post. You know, you’re taking that approach.

Yeah, dude, it’s just like people remember the W’s, you know? That’s kind of my approach here. Like have I had NFTs not sell on catalog? Sure. Have I had things to do well? Of course. When I was in college, I did this thing where every single day for my entire career in college, I sent out five emails to music industry people a day, weekends included. So the way that the breakdown was, it was 35 emails a week, five of them would respond, three of them would respond with a no, one would re would respond with a maybe I’ll get back to you, and one would respond with a yes. And over the course of the year, that’s 52 new people and new approaches that are involved, but you can’t find who that one in 52 is if you don’t send the other 35. So for me, like I said man, this is so much of the wild west right now that I am just going all in on experimentation in general. So I think that in a way they all tie into Daniel Allen, like myself as a project, whether it’s Overstim or it’s not. It was also kind of the last thing that I’m going to be doing before Overstim in general, so it’s just something that I wanted to get out there and not wait until later. Because my next few months are really just, you know, 110% focused on Overstim. 

That’s awesome. Before I let you go, I want to ask you a little more technical questions for anybody else that wants to follow your footsteps, and is exploring this independent route of crowdfunding success, successful project album, whatever may be and building a team around it. So for starters, how do you go about pricing a song? What goes into that? How do you determine if something is like $100k a song or like one $1k? How do you feel about it?

Are you talking about a catalog post or for a mirror crowd fund?

For example, like a catalog post. 

 So a catalog post, the thing about digital assets is, the value is only created by the creators. Like before that, a value doesn’t necessarily exist, so it’s kind of up on the onus of the creator to decide. So if you throw something up on catalog, which I would encourage people to do, you just need 0.05, ETH in gas, maybe with how things are right now, 0.07 ETH. You don’t even have to set up an auction. People can just throw offers at you. My first NFTs were selling for like 0.2 ETH and I was so grateful that anyone was even interested in doing that. So I think that for artists who are looking to get into it, you’d have to invest like a couple of hundred bucks to cover your gas fees, but you’d be surprised because catalog is still very early on, even though it’s starting to gain a lot more traction. You could just put it up and see what offers come at you. Because at first I also had no idea what to price mine at. I only decided on pricing for the crowdfund and things of that nature, after I found out that there was interest in general, but any new artists can just post on there once they got onto the platform. 

And how much does it cost to put something like Overstim together?

I mean, are you referring to putting the project out? 

The project has variable costs depending on the artist, depending on the project. I’m talking from the point of view, the project is ready now, let’s bring it on chain, mint it, start a mirror campaign and go through that process.

Dude, I think the main thing was like 0.1 or 0.15 ETH. Like it wasn’t crazy. Like I said, the kind of crux of all of this was my individual reaching out to people and just making sure that there was a really dope story behind it because the price of putting it up wasn’t too crazy. I don’t think it was that heavy of an on-chain lift because it’s not like I was uploading the actual WAV files. All I was uploading was a document.

I love it, man. What an example to future creators, future musicians. What an exciting time to be in the space, throw shit at the fans, see what sticks, and have success come from that as well.

One note I just want to give to every creator is like, you guys are early. You can play outside of the rules and kind of make your own job description and do it your own way. I know that it takes a leap of faith, not to be cliche, until you jump your parachute won’t open, you know what I mean? So you should definitely go all in on it and just see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and you can go back to trying your own thing. But I think that it’s such an exciting time. For me, after my crowd fund, the money was cool, but the coolest part was the 250 plus artists that have reached out and were like, “man, I want to try this, like, I feel like there’s a new way now.” That way exists if you really just put time and effort into it, and I don’t think that it takes a super smart person. I just think it takes someone that is down to experiment and down to try things out, because there’s definitely a way that isn’t the traditional label that owns your masters and you just kind of see what happens.

Outro

I think that’s a perfect place to end off. Daniel, you’re the man, bro. Where can we find you? Where can we learn more about you and your upcoming EP? Shill yourself. Shout it out. 

So definitely join my discord. I’m sure we’ll find a way to link that in here, but on Twitter, it’s @imdanielallan. I’m on Instagram as Daniel Allen music. And yeah, I think that hits everything. If you want to look on my mirror posts, it’s DanAllan.mirror.xyz. Carpet. 

Perfect. And we’ll have you again soon, after the EP comes out, and we’ll do recaps every now and then kind of following your career, following your journey in Web 3.0. Bro, I appreciate you being on. Much success, you’re going to kill it obviously, but we’ll get you next time peace.

Awesome. Thank you for having me brother.

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 3 episode 4 welcomes Tally’s Founder and CEO Dennison Bertram. Tally is a platform that builds governance infrastructure for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

In this episode, we talk about:

• 0:00 – Intro
• 2:24 – Magic Internet Money, Organization, & Society 
• 9:15 – Creator DAOs and The Value of Decentralized Governance
• 20:08 – Making DAOs Mainstream
• 28:20 – National Elections, Radical Transparency & its Pitfalls
• 35:10 – What are you Excited About in Crypto?
• 40:03 – Borderless Employment
• 46:39 – Outro

…and so much more.

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Thank you to Season 3’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Intro

Let’s just jump right in. Who are you, what were you doing before crypto, and what are you doing now? 

There is no before crypto. I was just kidding. So my name is Dennison Bertram. I’m CEO and co-founder of Tally, and we are DAO tooling and a dashboard provider. Basically, our goal is to make on-chain governance. We believe that governance is critical to the future. DAOs are critical to the future, but there’s a lot of tooling necessary to make that work. So we are really building a lot of this tooling, trying to give insight into communities, help people participate, drive participation, help people build functional DAOs, sort of all that. We’re really steep in the DAO. I haven’t always been in DAOs, although I have kind of always been in a crypto. I entered the space in 2011, 2012, actually ran one of the first Bitcoin exchanges in the Czech Republic in 2012, and then did a whole. Sort of slew of things. Those are like the early post-Satoshi crypto days. But the biggest thing I was before full-time, I was a fashion photographer for a very long time and had a creative technology company that really worked on helping fashion brands be more modern and, in some cases, even actually try and sell them on blockchain for supply chain solutions. Although up until the recent history, you sort of mentioned that DAOs are like the hot thing, I think crypto’s the hot thing now. It’s kind of awesome to have been in the space long enough to sort of recognize it’s only been the past couple of years that we weren’t the crazies. Almost all of crypto history, we’re just crazy, and then one day suddenly we weren’t crazy anymore, right? Like Snoop Dogg is buying NFTs, and you just think, wow, all right, that happened. Like, so suddenly you go from a world where everything is crazy that you’re doing. Everything’s magical internet money, magical internet art, selling JPEGs, and then all of a sudden, it’s the future. 

Magic Internet Money, Organization, & Society 

What led that transition of it no longer being the weird kids club to the cool kids club? 

So I think about this a lot, and my sort of philosophy around it, or the way I like to think about, and I talked about this a lot; there was an article a long time ago that said, “you don’t understand Bitcoin because you think money is real.” That is, I think probably the best way to sort of wrap your head around crypto from the beginning anyway, that money is kind of the only human concept that’s not native to the internet. Like I can send you a letter and transmit my love for you. You know, “Dear Adam, how I love you and miss you signed yours forever, Tally.” Right? You’ll get the email, and you’ll feel loved, right? I’ve sent love to you in an email. I can’t send you an email, certainly in 2007, that says, “Hey Adam, here’s a dollar,” right? So money is like the only human concept that really can’t be transmitted natively on the internet, and machines can’t natively transact with one another. So we have this sort of like history of primitives that was necessary. In the very beginning, it was magic internet money, right? Like Bitcoin was magic internet money. And when Bitcoin was created, it was quite literally magic internet money. Years ago, I think the economist, they’re late to the game, but they did a cover about bitcoin and Ethereum, cryptos, unicorns; it’s like magic internet money. But this primitive is a concept, right? The first thing that we had to do, and it took me years to do, was to make magic internet money, a concept that was real. We had to make it real. So once magic internet money was a real idea, then you can start building things on magic internet money. You can build magic internet banks, right? The only thing crazier in 2017 than magic internet money is magic internet banks. Like people can kind of get their head around like monopoly. People can’t really get their head around you going to build a bank, but trades in monopoly money. Like that’s just like, okay, that’s really stupid. If you were to then tell them that they could go take their magic monopoly money, put it in Adam’s monopoly bank, and earn monopoly APY interest on it, you know, at some point, it’s just like stupid. 

But then, if everybody accepts that monopoly money, then we’re golden. 

Well, that’s the thing, right? So, first, we have to make magic internet money a primitive that’s real, right? Once that’s real in people’s heads, then you can build magic internet banks. MakerDAO is a really great example of this. The idea that you could have dollar-denominated monopoly money is stupid until you have real monopoly money, and then suddenly, building a bank on top of the monopoly money is not so crazy anymore. But even when we first had Bitcoin, and once we started to sort of accept that primitive, the magic internet bank was still a leap too far. People had to build that, and that had to work. So you have folks like maker, native magic internet banks. Well, now that you have magic internet banks, you can build magic internet finance. You can build a magic internet financial system. If you said millions of people around the world are going to take monopoly money and quit their jobs to go build monopoly money farms and monopoly money this, it would have just been super, super ludicrous, right? Then you’re just in the absurdist land, but once magic internet banks is real, the magic internet financial system is real. So we had to build these primitives and make these things real in our minds as concepts, and once you got to that point, then we really can start solidifying magic internet organizations. And magic internet organizations actually start earlier. They probably would argue they were around in some shape and form since probably the beginning of the internet, depending on how you define, like what a DAO is. Really what sort of happened, you know, in 2017, you started to see folks really saying, ” no, we can build this magic internet, organizational tool, this magic internet decentralized autonomous organization.” But a little bit early, right? Some people were trying it, and some people were on it. But it wasn’t really high throughput, and there wasn’t that much yet to really govern because it still wasn’t real in people’s minds. Even today, folks really have trouble on Twitter. Some days they love DAOs. Some days they hate DAOs. Some days they love governance; some days they hate governance. They’re like, “ah, governance minimization.” It’s sort of like, “ah, magic money minimization”. It’s sorta like this concept is kind of like a bridge too far. But now it’s becoming real, and we see it becoming real. The steps to getting to these places gets shorter and shorter and shorter, right? Convincing you of DeFi was a lot easier than convincing you of Bitcoin. So these primitives, the time that it takes to become real, gets shorter, shorter, shorter. Now we’re kind of at the phase of magic internet organizations. That’s why it’s kind of the moment because suddenly we have a really big magic internet financial system running. Like DeFi, it’s a huge machine. There’s tons of legal liability. There’s tons of money. There’s tons of individuals. There’s tons of stakeholders. How are we going to balance all these things? You kind of need DAOs to manage all these things, but at the same time, you have something else going on, which is, somewhere on the side path of history, people go magic internet money, well, what do I do with that? And they’re like, well, you know, I guess, buy a JPEG, which was again, the day before the first JPEG was sold, the dumbest shit you ever heard of. Like why would you buy a JPEG? I’ll just go on Tumblr and click it. You know, earlier in the NFT craze, I’m going to say like, you know, a few months back, you saw a lot of people being like, oh, I’m so funny. I’ll just right-click and save your JPEG on Twitter. It was like a meme. You don’t really hear that anymore, right? Like, it’s not that it’s just not funny anymore, but it’s also, yeah, you buy JPEGs. The people who mocked it kind of have to accept the fact that that’s what we do now. So you have this other primitive that’s become real, and sort of what you see now is you see the people who create JPEGs and people who are James from cloud lab put this really well at MCON, even these JPEG groups are kind of a DAO, right? Suddenly you see magic internet organizations for everything. You got Opolis which is doing healthcare for freelancers. You’ve got the graph, which is doing data for blockchains. You’ve got nexus mutual that’s doing insurance for DeFi, and maybe more stuff. So suddenly, oh, magic internet organization, DAOs, this is not just real, but it’s necessary. In my own personal opinion, and in sort of the grand scheme and goal of Tally, the end state is magic internet society. Which, of course, sounds ludicrous, right? Like this is the dumbest thing ever, but you know, probably to, you and me it doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. We get it. Like, yes, it’s going to be hard. Getting there is going to be long. It’s going to be fraught with difficulties, but the leap to accepting Bitcoin was a million times bigger than the leap to accepting this will be all things.

Creator DAOs and The Value of Decentralized Governance

A million times bigger and like 10 million times harder. And as people adopted Bitcoin, then they transitioned into DeFi, and then you were talking about how it was easier to get convinced about DeFi. Now it’s becoming easier to convince them about NFTs. As skeptical as people are about these digital JPEGs, these MP4 files, MP3 files, they’re buying into them. And when I was explaining it to more normies, why is this craze happening? Value is subjective. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and a lot of people see value in different things. Back to this magic internet concept, now we’re diving into magic internet governance. And this is something that you brought up in the beginning. As you were introducing yourself, you’re like governance is critical to the future, and I want to reverse it on you. Why is governance critical to the future? 

Because governance represents participation by the users, and this can look like a lot of different things. From a really practical point of view, governance is critical from the future because we today do not actually know exactly what the future looks like, but we know that we need tools to allow us to adapt to whatever that future is. Folks like to talk about governance, minimization. That’s great, but you don’t know what the future looks like. Imagine if we had created some sort of protocol standard three years ago. Would we still be using it? Even solidity is different today. So from the sort of base case, I think the most convincing reason why we need governance when it comes to the idea of constructing things like protocols is because we don’t know what the future looks like, and we need to leave the optionality to be able to adapt to what that feature may or may not be. From the community side of it, it’s effectively, would you rather join something you’re a part of or join something that… 

Exactly. We’ll just leave it at that. Join something you’re a part of. The way you become a part of it is by buying into it, or like allocating it or earning it. There are different ways, but okay, continue. 

Well, you don’t actually even need to buy into it, right? Like if you think about it, Ethereum is a kind of DAO, right? It’s decentralized, it’s autonomous, I don’t do anything, and it keeps going, other people who do do important things, if they stop, Ethereum would keep going, and it’s kind of an organization, right? Like we believe in Ethereum. We try to get it when it’s cheap, and hopefully, we do something useful with it. When it’s expensive, we cry together when gas is expensive. We send out little tweets, and we’re like, oh shit, gas is cheap. Like we are an organization, it is decentralized. It is more or less autonomous. So how did we get into it? Yeah, I guess you could argue that we bought ether, maybe we’ve earned it or something like that, but maybe that doesn’t have to be a prerequisite. You could gain membership to an organization by virtue of who knows. Maybe you own a punk, and somebody else creates an organization just for punk holders. I guess he bought the punk. I don’t know, membership, I don’t think needs to be a buy-in, but it certainly could be. I mean, it’s certainly the easiest way to get into something is to buy a membership. 

You know, one of the most exciting DAOs for me right now are friends with benefits, forefront, M club, and seed club in general, and a lot more of these creator DAOs that are forming by these individual talented people that just are scattered online that are good with graphic design, creating really cool pieces of art, and rather than for collectors, into more of an intimate type of circle that they’re building. I believe we’re going to increasingly see creators create their own creator DAOs, right? Creators will be forming their creator DAOs. They can call the fan clubs, and they can call them online organizations, group chats, whatever. You want to call them. How far away are we from seeing that? Right now, we saw that with DeFi, everybody’s forming DAOs with DeFi. It’s already been a thing. We’re seeing that more and more with NFT collector groups, like fingerprint or pleaser DAO, et cetera, all these investment collective groups. When are creators going to start forming what we call fan clubs, like their creator DAOs? 

They’re either already here. For example, I worked on a project with a friend of mine called solos a number of months back. It’s an artist, Jeremiah Palecek, based in Prague. He did a line of generative NFTs on his paintings. He’s on Twitch every day, just painting. So he’s interacting with this community, and the users actually earn a governance token for having done an action, which was putting the metadata of their token into Arweave as a permanent hash for the token, and they receive royalties from their Open Sea sales, and that’s what they get to manage. So the users there have the ability to spend money on doing things like putting on exhibitions or hiring somebody to print something. Another great example, a project that I worked on too is the Dope Wars DAO. I always shill this stuff. It’s always a shill to be on television. “Hey mom, how are you”? The dope wars DAO is based on loot. So loot is a really great idea of a creator DAO, really creator at its core, right? Like the NFTs are just ideas, and the creator has to go make it real, and people are going and making it real. 

This is like a TV show, just so you know. A live TV show. I’m just giving you the supplies to build something. 

Do you know what I mean? Like ideas are forming right now. Put a bunch of artists in a house. They got to create it at a T. Whoever has got the most sales on Open Sea. We got like Tyra banks to come in and put them through challenges. “I don’t know your floor price, it’s gotta be over 0.1 or you are cut”. “I really thought my Bored Panda ape crossover would be a hit”.

Which network are we going to get to do that on? 

It is definitely going to be on the history channel since they don’t show shit anymore that has anything to do with anything, right? They released like ancient aliens or whatever that it was just like, alright. I don’t know why I haven’t done those yet. So yeah, the dope wars DAO, right? It’s like loot, except for it’s based around the old calculator game, dope wars, and the community actually built it from scratch. Well, I mean, they actually didn’t build it from scratch. They took the loot contracts and just swapped everything out for stuff like guns and drugs, rather than frail armor or the sword of Damocles. So anyway, it’s dope wars, and again, they are an NFT. What we did was we swapped out the ERC -721 for the nouns DAO, ERC-721, which is checkpointing built-in. So it’s compatible with open zeppelin governor right out of the box. So what that means is you can vote directly using our NFTs. All the dope wars NFT holders have the ability to vote in on-chain governance, and the governance receives 5% of the sales on Open Sea, which today is sort of like somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000. So this community that’s this fan club of this calculator game from the nineties; they’ve come together, they’re building games and a kind of universe altogether, and they’re paying other creative artists that have applied for grant money to do the pixel art. There’s a guy building a Starkware version of the game in collaboration with Starknet. They’re building out all this crazy stuff, and that’s a crater DAO, right? Like, that is just creators. Right now, it’s just creators creating stuff from stuff that other people created. And again, a lot of creators in that line, but what’s kind of amazing and the sort of like unlock that you see here is, you know, if you remember high school, there was always like some kid who was drawing some manga, or like swords of Damocles.

Was that you?

That was definitely not me, and I could not draw at all to save my life. They are going to be stick figures, which would be a great NFT. But, suddenly, these people can start an organization. Thousands of people, millions of dollars doing what they love, doing stuff that other people appreciate, and when you think about where are you better off spending your money? Well, I could give my money to some huge faceless corporation that imports stuff manufactured somewhere far, far away or, “Hey, Adam is drawing these really cool orangutans that look drunk and high most of the time, and I’m into drunk and high orangutans. And oh, by the way, now there’s a lot of us into drunken and stoned orangutans, and now he’s starting a bar, and you can only go to the bar if you haven’t drunk orangutan, and you spend all Saturday on like a discord channel. Like, that is such an incredible, powerful idea because that’s silly. Another example that I pull out a lot is Pizza DAO, and I always get the mechanics of how they did it wrong because it’s kind of crazy, but someone had said, “Hey, let’s raise a bunch of money and on pizza day, give away free pizza around the world.” To fund it, they did NFTs with pizza toppings. This is the part I’m always a little bit fuzzy on. They did like NFTs of pizza toppings, like pepperoni or something like that. And they put out just a spreadsheet being like, “oh, sign up if you want to be into it,” and they raised a million dollars. I think here in New York, and I think they ended up partnering with slice again, maybe the details are wrong. And then they gave away pizza around the world. Which again, sounds like a pretty ludicrous, dumb idea. “Oh, you’re just going to waste all your time and energy, kids, and give away pizza around the world?” But this NFT DAO, what they actually do when you really think about what happened is, they organized individuals globally to raise money, to address food insecurity on a global scale, right? Maybe it’s just giving pizza away. So it’s not actually food insecurity, but that’s the concept that’s being trialed. And they did it at an efficiency rate that’s like a quadrillion million times higher than the US, right? So, this loose-knit organization was able to do something at an efficiency rate, that all those funds that are like asking for your money on TV and showing you pictures of starving people never managed to do. And so there you start to see, as we started talking about how we make magic internet organizations real, you start to see what the power of that might be. My co-founder Raphael Solari is frequently talking about how people might start building these collective fan fiction universes, right? What if Marvel was actually owned by the people who drew the pictures and wrote stories and went to the movies, rather than the people who were just making it for us. I mean, I don’t want to put Marvel on the spot cause, actually I love them. They’re doing great. I watch everything they put out, but let’s say DC and Warner bros-

Making DAOs Mainstream

Whatever it may be. Just that concept of people who contribute, make the vision, the movie, the TV show reality are co-owners in that, but it’s such a different model though because Web 2.0 models are traditional LLC corporate models. There’s the executive team, and then you’re getting a salary. Maybe you get some stock options for making this a reality. Obviously, now that people have tasted the sugar, there’s no going back, and now anybody who is already in the space, they’re going to expect that when they join a project. But there’s millions upon millions of people who are so used to the traditional way. How do we get to a much more mainstream adoption of people understanding that they can not only contribute and do what they love, but also co-own that process at the same time?

So I think that is happening. I think that’s kind of like an invisible hand in the market, just like the evolution of culture, right? Someone told me the other day that 40% of Americans hold crypto, something crazy like that. You look at the success of Robin hood and meme stocks, right? AMC, last quarter announced on their call, the majority of AMC shareholders are just retail. And the retail probably was focused on Robin Hood, who probably goes to the movies, probably goes to AMC, so you had this really weird thing where he was offering to create some sort of shareholder program where if you’re an AMC shareholder, you get free popcorn, and some other benefits. 

They did that.

That is a DAO, right? Like, I mean, that’s a corporation realizing to innovate or die, but at the same time, the idea is reaching back into the regular world, right? It’s like Twitter adding your NFTs for your verified picture on Twitter. That’s the crypto primitives becoming real in the minds of ordinary people. “Oh, would you like to upload this JPEG to Twitter”? Sorry, you didn’t buy that JPEG, so you can’t use that JPEG. 

It’s like identity theft. 

Right. But, the thing of the year is that music corporations were trying to put some sort of weird copyright protection into the software to keep us from playing music. All of a sudden, there’s no JPEG lobby that’s lobbying Congress saying, “Hey, people cannot be allowed to use those JPEGs,” but we have actually shifted the thought process of, “oh, you don’t own that Ape. “Man, that’s pretty lame if you’re trying to pretend like you own that Ape,” and Twitter is like, “yeah, we agree. We think that was lame. So now we’re going to let you verify that you really have the NFT”. I think that mainstream adoption is actually happening. It’s happening in a way that maybe people didn’t expect. I think a lot of people coming out of the magic internet bank imagine or like magic internet financial system primitives are thinking we’re going to onboard the world with 2000000% APY, and what I think they are overlooking is that most people aren’t really motivated by money. People are motivated by money in the sense that they need jobs, and they would like a job that pays more than the last job they had, but people aren’t motivated by money if you say, “take magic potion a, mix it with magic potion b, do all this weird shit with Metamask, and if you fuck up, you lose everything you’ve ever owned, and if you’re lucky and it was audited and doesn’t get hacked, you will have a little bit more magic potion A than when you started. That’s not really incentive, but if you tell them, “Hey, remember how you used to stand in line at like a Supreme drop to get something in the run home on eBay and flip it for three times the price. Remember how you did that”? Well, now you can do that on Open Sea. People are like, “yeah, I was already there earlier this morning,” right? So people are onboarded because also, like when you go through Twitter, “OMG, I just sold my first NFT collection. It all sold out”. There’s this one NFT that somehow always comes up on my thread, and it’s an animated pixel art of these just butt cheeks. It shows up on my feed all the time. Maybe I’m following the crypto butt cheeks NFT crew or something like that, and it sounds crazy, but somebody out there is making a living drawing animated pixel art but cheeks, which probably sounds crazy to everybody outside on the street, but it’s actually really liberating. Because that’s if that person makes it. Grammy award-winning like a musician can make it. People were so pissed when Beeple sold. So angry. They were like, “how dare that guy who committed to something that he had no idea what the outcome would be for years and put in his labor and creativity get rewarded for it”? Meanwhile, you know, some other corporation’s CEO robbed everybody and got like suspended three months, house arrest, and a Cayman island sentence and still got his like bonus payment of a hundred million dollars. But no one really cares about that, and they got to shit on Beeple, the artist in high school, who’s like sketching his notebooks sitting in the hall. And it’s just like of all the people in the world who deserve $60 million, Beeple is just like so much higher than so many people who are ostensibly doing the real work. So what we’re doing is we’re unlocking the power of individuals to care about other individuals, and that is really core to the whole DAO concept, right? Because prior to NFTs, prior to crypto, it was really hard for me to appreciate you, Adam, in a way that you could live off of. I think it’s been a horrible failing of Ethereum so far that somehow they haven’t been able to transition only fans. How that business model hasn’t been able to be disrupted. People can actually reward other people directly. Obviously, only fans is a specific kind of genre, but you know, when you look at NFTs, they are kind of the only fans for everything else, right? If someone had said that Bored Apes would have made a hundred million dollars in one day because they drew a whole bunch of pictures of stoned apes, that would have been crazy, but it’s just as crazy as anything else. Like, Why not, right? We enable so many things. Everything in between, you know, the volume Open Sea does is just insane, right? There’s a world filled with people being artists, making stuff, and other people liking it and then connecting directly over the internet. And now, because of DAOs, they can organize together, do something over the internet. Like they all hold this like text NFT, but now they actually can vote, and their voice matters, and they’re part of it. So when we talk about how we’re going to like, make this mainstream, the option sort of starts to be, when you join a company, you kind of expect that you’re getting screwed somehow, right? You’re definitely not getting paid as much as the guy at the top, and there’s nothing you’re ever going to be able to do at that. And like, best case scenario is, you’re able to go earn marginally more money, getting screwed by somebody else. With DAOs, it is very different. You go in, and the community is like, well, what can you do? And you’d be like, and I can offer the community this. The community can either be like, you know, screw off, we don’t want you, or are they going to be like, all right, join. When you join, you see everything. People are literally saying, Hey, we have a vote on how much to pay you. How much should we pay you? And everyone votes on it. And if you can say, Hey, this is the value I bring, people are like, okay, because they’re all like, well, I’m trying to bring value too, so we should reward it, and there’s no pie to take away from someone, right? Like if you join Facebook, every like, you know, whatever 0.0001% share of Facebook stock you get is like that much less that’s available total percentage to Zuckerberg, but in DAOs, it’s very different, right? Like you can work for, you know, I mean, Uniswap and Sushiswap, maybe no,t because they are a little bit like a classroom community, but really you can work for all the DAOs at one. Like you can work for Compound and AAVE and Uniswap all at the same time, and it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not like, “oh man, you know, Uniswap has got to destroy Compound. No, actually, you’re working for both of them to go up, and you see people on Twitter. They’re like, oh yeah, my comp is going up, or my uni is going up, and it becomes more collaborative. It’s just a different way of working, but we need a lot of tools to make it work better.

National Elections, Radical Transparency & its Pitfalls

We’ll talk about the tools in a minute, but I want to talk to you about the comparison behind structured, closed organizations and radical transparency through decentralized organizations. What’s the downside of radical transparency?

So in college, I was a political science major in, you know, early two thousands. You know, and anarchy was still something that kids were like, yeah, anarchy at school.

By the way, like all these Bitcoin conferences, for example, a lot of the core developers are in our case. They believe that they shouldn’t be reliant on anybody. They should be their own banks. They should have their own financial system. They should have their own, et cetera. So fuck the government. But anyways, okay.

I think that doesn’t rise to true anarchy anarchism, but I’m totally convinced it’ll never work. A thousand percent convinced that will never work. If anyone has ever run a discord room, a discord chat group, you will know you’re a hundred percent convinced anarchy can’t work, right? Like you take any anarchism in the world and be like, all right, run this Discord Chat, man, and by the way, there are 10,000 people in it. It is never going to work. Why do you get to pick the channels, man? That is never going to work. Because he started this discord group, he gets to choose the mods? Never gonna work. So radical transparency isn’t for every organization. And indeed, there’s like a faction in crypto Twitter that’s trying to figure out how to do private voting, which I personally am not yet convinced how well that would work, but are trying to figure out how to do transparency and lack of transparency. I think in crypto, it’s different than transparency. It’s maybe some things need to happen secretly, but they can’t be nefarious. It’s a very strange balance, and I don’t think anyone’s actually gotten it just right. This sort of structure sort of happened naturally, right? There’s an asymmetry between some members of the DAO, like some members that know each other better, we’re able to coordinate better, they have a little bit maybe even greater access to information than other members of the DAO. Also, maybe they’re just more interested in the DAO. Sometimes people like to really crap on some DAOs when they have a small number of people who make all the decisions, and they kind of discount the fact that maybe that small group of people actually just pays attention all the time, whereas everybody else maybe checks in every now and then, or they show up when there’s a big boat, and it’s like, yo, where have you been for four weeks? But the communities end up deciding what the organization looks like in many ways. So I think that people like to attach to the sort of transparency natively to DAOs. I don’t think that those two are actually bonded to one another. I think that they are sort of two concepts that tend to overlap because we are on a blockchain, so we can generally look in and understand what’s happening. That may not always be true in the near future, right? Like a lot of the moon path kind of allows you to prove things about knowing exactly what those things are. So we may be seeing more of that, but I would say something that distinguishes a DAO is not necessarily only like the permissionless ness of the entry and exit, kind of the permissionlessness at the entry and exit. Forgive me for never having bought a Bored Ape, but like today, I could join the Bored Ape club. So you could argue that nobody can stop me from joining theBored Ape club. Of course, I would have to have a lot more money to join, so you can say that’s the barrier to entry. But also, the barrier to entry is like a function of time. Like the day Bored Apes came out, if I had known and gotten into it and believed in it, I could have been a member right away. So yeah, I’m not sure if that answers your question. 

No, that answers my question. I guess I want to get more futuristic now. Let’s say we get to a point where everything is tokenized, and all forms of voting occur on-chain to the extent where now we have either a local election or a national election conducted in token format, where everybody can sign onto their computer, cast their vote on Tally, for example, for the next president of the United States. Do you see that happening? 

I do see that happening. I don’t see that happening in the next election, unfortunately. You know, Joe Biden, give me a call. I don’t imagine that happening anytime soon, like magic internet society, right? That’s still primitive. That’s a bridge too far for most people, right? Like we’re working on magic internet organization, but magic internet society is still a little ways away, but I think we’ll get there. Blockchain does enable us to do better forms of running elections. Of course, DAOs run into the same problems that the federal government does. It’s not the machines that count the ballots that are the problem in the system. So, will we solve that aspect right away? Probably not. I think that we’ll probably end up getting to the future in a way that people don’t expect. People thought self-sovereign money was going to revolutionize the world. It is, but not in the way that people thought. Like people didn’t really care that they could go open a Bitcoin wallet and they would have their own Bitcoin. People started to care when the price went up, but most people still didn’t care just because the price is going up. The price is going up on something all the time, and you’re not freaking out. Holy shit. Beyond meat signed the deal with burger king. It’s going up. Yeah, I don’t really care. So that’s not really what would revolutionize the world. NFTs, I kind of feel like they’re revolutionizing the world. Like NBA top shot, dapper labs just did a deal with NFL. That’s mainstream, and if I was going to be like, “now for the halftime show, we have, I don’t know, crypto punk number 8946, look at those pixels.” Wild, but maybe that’s how we actually get there because that’s how we’re actually getting there right now. So I think when we talk about how we get to voting in your local elections, I think something’s going to happen differently before that. I think somehow the politicians are gonna raise money with crypto, or the politicians are going to get elected talking about crypto. Or crypto is going to solve some sort of major problem, or eventually, the fed is going to be forced to tokenize the dollar, and then it’ll just be this weird flip over where it’s just suddenly how it is. Of course, behind the scenes, there will just be countless innovators and entrepreneurs trying to build things to make these things sort of work, but you think of how at one point in time, you had to go sign some shit with a notary. You’re like, oh yeah, I’m doing this. I got to go find a notary who is open after five and get them to notarize something. And then, all of a sudden, you were using DocuSign for everything. And now people send me contracts, they’re like, “can you send me a DocuSign? Otherwise, deal’s off”. I’m not opening this PDF shit, downloading Adobe Acrobat, and like signing, you know? So I think the flip is going to happen in a way that we really sort of don’t anticipate, but it’s happening right now.

What are you Excited about in Crypto?

It’s happening right now on a small scale on an inter-DAO level when DAOs like, let’s say FWB, and they’re scaling and growing at a rapid rate. Then being a social DAO, now they’re opening up different chapters in different cities, from what I’m understanding. Now I’m getting DMS from members, “we’re running for governance and operations roles,” and they need to be voted in and elected at those positions. So you see these things happen on a very micro, micro level, and I think that’s just the only way they happen. Right now, the government is still fighting crypto. They’re still fighting blockchain. The people in power that are governing the US they’re anti-crypto, some may be pro, but the ones that really matter are anti, and they’re making all the headlines. So, starting small, experimenting small, building from there, that’s just the way to do it. What are you excited about right now in crypto that’s happening around the world of governance? And this could be within Tally, but preferably outside of Tally. What are you starting to see that’s like, wow, this is super cool, I’m fired up, et cetera? 

For me to not say NFTs and DAOs, I mean, that is, what’s really exciting right now. 

The formation of DAOs via non fungible tokens.

Yes. For me, that just is wild. 

And is that from the point of view of collector DAOs? Like fingerprint or Pleaser DAO, or like NFT artists who sold open editions to collectors forming DAOs? Like, how do you define that?

I would say more of that, right? Like, yeah. Okay. Let’s all get together and invest in NFTs together. Sure. Okay. Got it. I’m going to go draw some pictures, I’m going to make like 10,000 iterations of them and sell them, and then we’re going to all vote on how to spend that money. And maybe, we’ll just do crazy burning man out in the forest and all take our Bored Apes with us. Wow. That’s pretty cool, right? I keep on DM-ing Open Sea, so I hope they write me back one day, but like when you combine the fact that you can create an NFT, which sort of self-selects for a community that cares, and then you can fund it by the sales between one another, suddenly, you have this incredible vehicle, right? If you look at nouns DAO, which they don’t really trade the token on like Open Sea, although I guess they could, they’ve amassed, I dunno, like 7,008, some crazy amount of ETH, and the sort of opportunity for them to use that is sky-high. It’s one thing to create a DAO around like, oh, we’re going to pool our money, and we’re going to buy stuff that’s going to go up. It’s another thing to say, like, oh, we’re going to start a doubt. We’re going to make something that people care about, and the velocity of people caring about it, moving in and out of our organization is going to actually power our organization’s ability to move forward. The idea that you can raise capital via creating artwork is just really fascinating, and it’s going to come down to some legal showdown at some point, right? Someone the other day said, all NFTs are equity, and I think in some ways they’re right. I countered that all NFTs are free speech, which I also think is right. Like, there should be no limit in these great United States for me to draw a picture of a stone ape and sell it to you for $5 million. There’s no reason why I should not be allowed to do that, and people are doing that. Maybe not apes or punks, but people are doing that. Right now, the thing that gets me really excited is that we can mix the NFTs with DAOs. So the NFTs represent your membership in this community, and the DAO represents your community’s collective ability to take action. That’s what gets me really excited.

So, you’re saying like, NFTs are the top funnel layer of issuing membership, right? And then it kinda comes in like that a little bit.

Yeah. Because you could do it for anything. I’m sure you went to high school, and if you were in some sort of sports or track. In my high school, before we would do track events or whatever, we would do a spaghetti dinner, and, you know, a bunch of kids would just cook a metric ton of spaghetti and sell it to parents for like 50 bucks a pop to raise enough money to pay for a bus, to drive the track team to like state or nationals or something like that. Because school wasn’t going like pay this shit. Let me just say that. But suddenly, you can do that for any idea you want, right? Like you could say, Hey, let’s make a nudist cabin retreat in Saskatchewan, and we’re gonna all draw pictures of naked people and sell them, and if you own it, you’re a member, and you can come to take off your clothes, and we’ll take the money from the treasury to build the cabin so we can all hang out here naked every year. And when you’re done being naked, you can sell it on Open Sea, and the proceeds from that go back to the fund cause you got to repaint the cabins every year. 

You must drop your gig at Tally and start consulting nudist groups about their NFT strategy.

I’m going to travel the world, and then I won’t need any of this stuff. It’s like two, three months. Let’s go around.

Think about the money you’ll save. 

Borderless Employment

Totally. But you know, what’s crazy is that that would have been so hard to do two years ago. What are you going to do? Open an LLC and, you know, mail people invites to your naked club in upper Canada? It’d be like, “Hey, send me 20 bucks.” But it could be anything, right? Like you can feed Peeps around the world. You could do Bored Apes, so they go build a club or bar or whatever cool thing that they’re going to try and do now. People are trying to NFT buildings. So you’re going to see Tik TOK houses that are like an NFT house, right? Like buy this NFT, We build something, a percentage of whatever you build goes back to the house so that the house can continue on as this autonomous organization. And as we start to wrap DAOs and legal entities, we can say, oh yeah, this Bored Ape guy actually owns the building. And this building is owned by this corporation, which is represented by the NFT token holders, but that audience could always be changing. So suddenly, you can create things that you could never have created before. And that means there’s really not a limit to what people might do with this. Like clubs, organizations are everywhere you look. Parent teachers association, block associations, those addicted to something or whatever you’re trying to get off. Like there’s everything. And all of that is so highly frictioned by setting up an LLC. You know, one example that I haven’t given yet today, which I think is really critical about DAOs, is that, in the United States, and in most places actually, we don’t even think about this. It’s kind of like a fish don’t know they’re wet type of thing. If you come up with a cool idea, wherever you are, let’s say you’re in Detroit, and you have a really good idea. You’re like, okay, I’m going to go start a company and start an LLC, or start a C Corp. You’re like, all right, I’m going to go hire Adam. It’s pretty easy to hire you, but what happens in that onboarding, hiring process? I mean, if you accept the offer. I have to verify yourUncleoyment eligibility. I have to ask the federal government, please, uncle Sam, may I please hire Adam? And maybe Adam, you are the best person for this job on planet earth, but uncle Sam could be like, “nope.” “Oh yeah, we checked this cryptographer. Yeah, he’s in Somalia. It sucks for you. You can’t have him. But, you know, Apple could, because they’re rich enough to be able to go hire him, or Facebook could cause they’re a global organization with billions of dollars. But oh, you with your idea, wherever your base. No, you’re not allowed to go hire that person because we have rules, right? I think rules are important. I’m really pro-rules. 

But it’s also the point of being borderless, right? It’s also the point of accruing value and contributing, collaborating, no matter where you are in the world.

Yes. If I go hire you in Somalia, and you are contributing to whatever knowledge or application we’re doing, right? What are you actually doing? I call you up and say, Adam, Hey, you know, you’re the best guy in the world for this uncle Sam won’t let me hire you. I just need you to tell me what to do cause you’re a consultant. Uncle Sam says you can’t tell me. Like you can’t share that information with me. You’re forbidden from giving that information to me, and I’m forbidden from compensating you for it. And if you start to think of the level of friction that that actually is on our economy and the level of friction that is on if you start a small business in Detroit, you can’t get access to the best talent in the world. You can go through a green card lottery where we like dangle citizenship like a pinata over people’s heads and be like, you got lucky. But, you can’t go hire someone anywhere in the world who’s the best. And there’s this great term. I bring this up all the time, talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not, and I think DAOs can help distribute opportunity more fairly, and that is really important. Because the vast amount of the world, right, we’re watching right now, it’s like Taliban says, oh, women can’t go to the university anymore. Pretty soon, they’ll be like, ah, they can’t even hold money or earn money or do anything like that. So many parts of the world are just not privy to opportunity, and that is because our existing structures are just so ingrained in us that we just accept them as normal. Of course, you can’t hire someone in Somalia. Are you crazy? Who cares if you’re the smartest mathematician, cryptographer on earth, and absolutely perfect for what you’re doing and you pay taxes here in the United States? You can’t hire them period. End of story. I talked to someone before who was like, oh, you can PayPal them, and it’s just like, maybe you could PayPal them. But then, the flip side of that. Let’s say you do hire someone in Somalia, and you do find a way to wire them money. Can you give them equity in your company? Can you give them healthcare benefits? Suddenly, you could build an organization where you say, “Hey, I’m going to start an idea here,” and they don’t do this yet, but I think it’s on the roadmap, and I’m going use Opulus so that all the people who work for us can get health insurance benefits that travel portable with them so that their dependence on being able to stay alive doesn’t depend on me. Like their health benefits come from a collective organization that do collective bargaining on their behalf, and we’re going to get decentralized insurance, and then we are going to issue a token so that they can actually have access to the upside of this idea. It’s incredible, and people don’t appreciate how big a shift that is. Because like, when we started this company, we have team members outside of the United States, we were trying to figure out, “oh, how do we pay them”? And it’s still an ongoing thing where we’re trying to figure out the best thing. But you know, we talked with these PEO firms. They’re like, oh yeah, we can help you hire people in other countries. It’s like, okay, this is great. Sounds good. They’re like, yeah, these people? You don’t owe them shit. We lend them to you. We hire them. We take 20% off the top, but you don’t owe them anything. You don’t have to give them equity. You don’t have to give them health insurance. You don’t have to do any of that, don’t worry. It’s just like, yeah, that’s the future? They’re like rattling off this list, “oh, you know, we work with these VCs, we work with these companies where this is great. Everybody’s doing this. It’s like, that’s the shit we’re done with, right? Like that’s what we’re trying to get rid of. That inefficiency. I’m going to pay you 20%, so we have no obligation to our team members who are helping to build the future? And that’s the fish don’t know water is wet. It’s just so normal that people don’t walk around outside noticing that that’s just like another layer of inequity, and I think that DAOs fix that. 

Outro

I think that’s a perfect place to end off. What a powerful, final statement. Before I let you go, where can we find you? Where can we learn more about yourself, Tally, everything that you guys are up to? Shill. 

 So I am always in this room. You always find me here. You can find me at Tally. So that’s. www.withtally.com. You can find us on Twitter @votewithtally. We have a link to our discord as well. You can also always email me dennison@withtally.com. Maybe I’ll write back. I’ll try. I’ve got a lot of spam. But no, seriously, reach out. If you’re building a DAO and have questions, just email me directly. I love talking to people about how to build DAOs. We really think the future, right now, is currently in NFT DAOs. Like you see what’s happening in DeFi with inflation, a little bit of a chill in the room around that, but, you know, NFTs are freedom of speech. Like it’s your right to draw a picture of a stone ape and sell it to me for a million dollars. That’s your right. So we’re really pushing hard to help people build and deploy these DAOs, so if you have any questions, we are here to answer them. I’m not sure when this is going to go out, but we will be at ETH Lisbon. So we will be at DAOist, and ETH Lisbon. So if you are around, we will be walking around. Feel free to hit us up and buy us a drink.

Love it, man. Thank you for being on. I hope to have you guys on again soon. This was a great conversation. You’re super knowledgeable, and it’s been a pleasure. 

My pleasure as well. Thank you so much.

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 3 episode 3 welcomes OpenSea’s CEO and Founder, Devin Finzer.  

In this episode, we talk about:

• 0:00 – Intro
• 1:07 – Devin’s Startup Background
• 2:35 – NFTs in 2021
• 3:31 – The Explosion at OpenSea
• 9:57 – The Future of Web 3.0
• 13:44 – Governance Tokens and the Gatekeepers
• 16:48 – Valuing Community
• 18:42 – What Will Eat Web 3.0?
• 20:37 – Advice to Newcomers 
• 21:21 – Outro

…and so much more.

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Thank you to Season 3’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Intro

Let’s jump right into it. You guys had one of the craziest years, specifically in August. $3 billion in total volume. How was that period for you? What was going through your head? How was your team dealing with that? Walk me through that. 

That was a really exciting time, but also a very chaotic time for the team. We went through this sort of hyper-growth phase as a company. We were really, hands-on; all hands on deck. Really proud of the team that really stepped up and filled in the gaps. We brought on more members of the team. We have really great people joining. We’ve really shored up the operations and the product development at OpenSea, but we know we also have a long way to go in terms of building really great products for users, and it’s been pretty amazing just to see how much excitement there has been in the NFT industry. I think it’s a testament to all the hard work that the whole ecosystem has then been putting in over the last four years and really building out the core NFT experiences that, you know, delight the users of today. So, it’s really fun to see this.

Devin’s Startup Background

So walk me through a little bit of your startup background. Obviously OpenSea, I feel like, is that one thing that really snowballed to be this insane startup that has a lot of exciting potential. Around when you guys were going through this phase of the month before August, we went through August now. It’s September, and we’re approaching October, right? Even September is what over $2 billion right now? Did you ever imagine you’d be running a company at this scale with this much excitement? Like how did that come to fruition? Talk to me about your thoughts. 

No, I actually never quite envisioned that. I mean, I didn’t not envision it as something that could happen, but it was more just, you know, starting with following our curiosity. So yeah, great question. I did not envision this exact outcome for OpenSea, but also just didn’t really have specific expectations when we started. It was more kind of following our curiosity and just doing things that we were excited about, and building a space that we thought was early, but had really incredible long-term potential. Yeah, the excitement and enthusiasm around NFTs was just so remarkable that we just kind of had to keep on building. But it is definitely a bit surreal to be in a position where we’re able to drive so much volume and have such a big impact on people. I do think at the same time, despite these sort of crazy growth numbers, we’re still at day zero for the NFT space. It’s really just kind of the wild west days, comparable to the early internet. So it’s really exciting to be in this position, but we have a long way to go.

What’s Exciting about NFTs?

So as the craziness kind of spun out, what are some of the more exciting use cases you’ve seen come to fruition around NFTs? Whether it’d be like profile pictures or individual drops, it could be anything.

Yeah. I mean, I think gaming is really exciting as a use case it’s been in the works for a really long time. There’s a lot of really cool projects like Axie Infinity that run these sorts of things, virtual worlds. So, I’m really excited to see what comes out of gaming in the next while. The other areas that people have been talking about for a while are music, event tickets, even physical items represented as NFTs and traded around and then redeemed for the actual physical. Those sorts of use cases I think are really cool and really interesting. So, for people who are kind of looking to build new projects in this space, I would look to some of the early experiments of late 2017, early 2018, where people tried things out, but the market maybe wasn’t ready for them. I think we’ll see a lot of those experiments come back and really start to resonate with people as there’s a little bit more mind share around NFTs. 

The Explosion on OpenSea

Yeah. During that crazy period for you guys, on average, how much sleep did you get? Were you always online, were you buying stuff yourself, were you just trying to burn fires if any arose? What was that time like for you personally?

Well, I wasn’t making a lot of purchases myself just because I do tend to focus on just the company building side of things. I find that I’m not able to multitask super effectively, but yeah, definitely. You know, there were some nights where it was a lot less sleep, but I think it was also really important to be able to function effectively and make good decisions. So, it’s certainly been an extremely busy time for the whole team, but we do try to make sure that we’re lifting our heads up and not being sort of silly about getting that right healthy balance. 

What would you say was one of the most challenging parts in the business when you guys encounter that growth wave? Any things that you expected to happen that happened? Anything that happened that you didn’t expect? What was that like? 

Good question. Well, I think it was sort of expected was everything just started breaking, but I think we didn’t expect it to happen so fast. I do think that our trajectory is pretty unique relative to other companies. You know, when companies get to undergo this type of growth, it is always pretty crazy, but ours was particularly unique in just the amount of transaction volume that was happening on the marketplace. So, things definitely started breaking. In terms of surprising things, I guess it was surprising, or pleasantly surprising, just that the culture was able to kind of hold up pretty well. I think we made some great hires early on, and we continue to have a high bar for our culture when we think about new employees. I think everyone on the team is really there for the right reasons and is really strong and works well together. So it’s been surprising, I guess, that things haven’t broken down more on the cultural side, but I will say that it has not been surprising that things have become kind of chaotic on operations. 

One of the most exciting things for me seeing this entire NFT wave, and I’d love to get your point of view on this, is we had that DeFi summer of August, 2020, where we had like a lot of financial buzz, a lot of all these DEXs, all this yield farming, liquidity pools, a lot of the non-sexy side of crypto, and then NFTs come into the picture; and you have a lot of the creativity coming in. You have artists coming in, musicians coming in. One thing that I love that’s happening for crypto, is that it’s becoming more maintstream, and I think it was important that NFTs had their moment of fame to bring in all these creative minds to make crypto more interesting essentially. As you guys were building OpenSea, and you went through these last three months, and I emphasize these three months because it was a milestone for NFTs, what was some of the biggest feedback you got from newcomers coming into the space? Like artists that jumped in, creators that jumped in, musicians that jumped in that issued stuff on OpenSea, from a talent point of view, from a market point of view, what was some of the feedback that you got from these individuals?

I think the feedback is still just talking to people who are trying to use these sorts of products for the first time. It’s very challenging, right? A brand new space where you have to kind of understand all these things, still a lot of technical overhead and, you have to learn about everything before you can even really try it. So I think that’s an area where the whole space, and especially ourselves, has to improve. But, on the flip side, it’s also impressive that people are just kind of willing to get their hands dirty and try these things out and go through those hoops. So sort of two sides of the same. There’s lots of things that people want to improve the platform, better discovery, better onboarding, you know, better curation, all of these things. We have long lists of feedback that we want to integrate into our roadmap, but overall, the high level, it’s exciting to see people really dig in and kind of experience Web 3.0 in a real way. I think there was a lot of conversation around like, how do we make Web 3.0 seem opaque to users, so that people don’t have to worry about blockchain. Well, the reality is I think people are kind of still worrying about figuring it out and how strong of a pull there is for all this stuff. 

What does a marketplace like OpenSea evolve into as the space matures? Is it more the social side, is it more the DeFi side, is it more the wallet side, or just really dialing on the NFT market? 

I would say that we’ve remained really focused on just building the best possible NFT marketplace. We want to sort of be the one-stop shop to buy, sell, and discover NFT projects, and for now that’s a pretty big undertaking, and there are a lot of challenges surrounding it. So yeah, we’re pretty simple that we’re really investing in our core and just ensuring that we can serve projects, developers, and users effectively. 

How do you feel about all these new NFT decentralized exchanges slowly coming to market. While there aren’t really like main ones yet, but there’s a lot of talk across crypto Twitter, do you think it can be done efficiently in a decentralized way? 

Well, it depends what your definition of decentralized. I mean, we’re a decentralized marketplace in the sense that we facilitate transactions through a set of smart contracts. So yeah, it depends on what you mean by that. But you know, I would say I think the critique of OpenSea is that there are these centralized components to it. Which items show up in the feed, which items are promoted, which items are verified, and those sorts of things. I think there are definitely interesting solutions where you can try to decentralize more and more, but I think you also have to balance that with being practical around like, you know, some things do make sense to sort of have managed by one single entity or company. So we try to take a practical approach. You know, we obviously want to be contributors to the ecosystem. We want to embrace these ideals of decentralization, but then we also want to build a great product that people will use. 

Give me an example of some of these critiques, right? I know you talked about curation as being one of them. What are some other critiques that could be fixed through decentralization or that should be centralized to begin with? What are some things that come to mind? 

I think, for example, we do as the best we can to ensure that there’s strong trust and safety on the platform so that the item that you see is actually the item that you want to purchase, not a knockoff. And so we have a lot of measures in place to have warnings if the collection hasn’t been reviewed, indicate that this is a collection with low volume, give the buyers more education about NFTs or about what NFTs are buying. So, I actually think building out a core competency around trust and safety is something that a entity like ourselves really add a lot of value in. There’s certainly approaches where you try to kind of decentralize that, but for now, we’re sort of starting as kind of the lowest hanging fruit. So that’s probably a good example. 

The Future of Web 3.0

I want to pick your brain more on the keyword that you brought up Web 3.0. I guess nobody really imagined NFTs being a cornerstone in onboarding a lot of normies into crypto. What do you imagine Web 3.0 looking like as the next billion users usher in? 

I think there’s going to be lots of different applications. Some of them you can kind of predict today, and then some of them are impossible to predict honestly. I mean, NFTs are one of those applications where you have these unique digital items. You can kind of move between different applications, where you can connect your Metamask to one site or OpenSea and buy and sell. Then you can connect your Metamask to the Decentraland and use your NFTs inside of that virtual world. So sort of this identity layer. I’m not sure if it’ll be a specific company or specific project that sort of manages identity, but I think those will emerge from your wallet and the things that are inside your wallet. So that’s a really interesting thing, to have this identity that’s not tethered to any specific application provider, but rather has sort of this third-party blockchain platform. So that’s kind of how I see it as a sort of a new online identity that really works across many different platforms.

As Web 3.0 matures and evolves, do you think it’s going to be more of the composable point of view where protocols are building on top of each other and there’s an application layer that integrates all these protocols? Or do you think it’s going to be more of the Google approach where they can speed up production and software development by centralizing a lot of core components of their services? How do you kind of imagine that evolving? Let’s say there’s social application layers that use different crypto protocols, NFT protocols, DeFi protocols to build on top of. Do you imagine it being more in-house, a centralized entity building trusted tools and services for crypto? Do you imagine it being more spread out from a decentralized point of view or is it in between? What do you think?

It’s a good question. I think there’s services that will provide certain things, right? We provide a marketplace, and we kind of bundle it with other things. You can bundle it with maybe the ability to display your items in certain ways, like connect a social profile or something like that. But ultimately, I think lots of applications are going to be messy. I think probably in the short run, where there’s lots of apps that have some way to connect your social media profiles to them, I’m not sure that there’ll be one identity service that emerges. I mean, maybe it’ll sort of emerge from one of the platforms. It’s hard to say, but it’s a good question. I gotta think about it. I don’t know if I have a great answer. I think some of the most successful companies might end up building something like identity solutions. 

Speaking of applications, you guys just came out with your mobile app in the app store. A lot of attention on crypto Twitter. Congratulations. It looks beautiful. I use it. I look to see the explore tab and all the cool features that you guys rolled out. What do you imagine the future of mobile applications looking like specifically in crypto? We can take it from like an NFT point of view, and then I guess from a broad point of view. 

That’s a great question. I think what ‘s cool is that the infrastructure around mobile for crypto has evolved quite a lot, right? Like when you rewind to 2017, you couldn’t even use anything on mobile. It didn’t exist. There was a wallet called Toshi, which was Coinbase’s first iteration of Coinbase Wallet, and that was the only place, and I think you could barely even do anything on it. It was just so basic. Now you have so many different wallets. You have metamask obviously, and then you have rainbow wallet, which is more geared around NFTs. And interoperability is starting to emerge too. For example, with the OpenSea app, which is still really in its infancy, you can go connect to your Metamask and link your NFTs in in, and then you come back. It’s not not necessarily the smoothest thing, but you can actually have a mobile experience, which is awesome. So I think like it’s hard to say exactly how it plays out. I mean, there’s a world where a lot of stuff still happens on mobile, but I do think the OpenSea app is kind of a cool example of us going native, and you can still bring your own wallet. Which I think is actually, right now, really important for users to be able to connect their Metamask with their existing stuff without having to kind of have an OpenSea specific wallet.

Governance Tokens & The Gatekeepers

How do you feel about the whole Apple monopoly, and more specifically, when it comes to in-app transactions, how do you guys think about that at OpenSea? Cause it’s not just an OpenSea problem. It’s an entire industry problem, right? With more and more transactions obviously being on chain, using Ethereum, crypto, whatever it may be, and Apple sticking to traditional Web 2.0 type of payments, how do you guys plan to overcome that? How are you guys thinking about that?

Well, I think it’s exciting because, you know, there was recent news that is driving apple to be a little more lenient on what kind of payment applications that we are allowed to use. And I do think that the 30% has just been so problematic. Having these like gatekeepers for mobile payments, and I think that really needs to change. Finally, they’re getting some pushback on it. And so it’s hard to say the exact timeline around these things, but I think eventually there will be other ways of purchasing digital items that don’t go through these kinds of more centralized gatekeepers, and that’s really ultimately very, very important. So excited to see that space move forward. 

Speaking of gatekeepers, obviously a lot of the ethos of crypto, a lot of the ethos of decentralization, is removing those gatekeepers, pushing down the boundaries, making users owners of the protocol and the products they use and consume. The next thing I want to talk to you about is how you’ve been building OpenSea for four years. You’ve seen a lot of successful token launches, a lot of failed tokens, and I would think that you guys explored this idea of what does a fully decentralized marketplace look and feel like. What do you think are the pros and cons of shifting towards a token route, specifically for an NFT marketplace? 

So, what I’d say is I think we’re still in the early days of understanding how token models work more generally, right? If you asked me to kind of point to the most successful token models today, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other layer ones, I think that it makes total sense to have a token baked into the layer one. But if you look beyond that, if you look at DeFi, if you look at other projects, obviously the ICO wave, if you look and you try to point to kind of one that has really nailed it, I think it’s hard. To use an example, you can point to tokens that have really high market caps, but one that has nailed the sort of incentive structure and like it’s actually working from like an adoption perspective, I don’t think you can really say that there’s one that stands out. And it’s just because we’re such early days. I do think if you’re a company, you have to decide where you’re going to innovate. Are you gonna innovate on the product and the core user experience? I do think this is sort of uncharted waters and that’s the decision, right? You can certainly sort of dive down the path of unchartered waters, but you may find that you get into areas that maybe you didn’t expect to be in if you’re thinking long term. It can be great to have these short-term growth hacks around distributing tokens, or maybe you’re both competitors and use it for that reason. I think if you look at these DeFi projects, they’re in a sticky situation when it comes to how to actually build the protocol, how to get the right governance. And I think there’s a lot of merit to focusing on product and product marketing.

Valuing Community

I agree with you. I think there are many different types of models and there’s not one yet that kind of proves to be the one, right? A lot of people, they go and start centralized. They build a product, they find a product market fit, they build a network effect, right. And then they issue the token, rather than with others based off of these centralized platforms, moving to decentralized after that, forming a DAO, issuing a token and building decentralized. My next question to you. There’s a lot of commentary online of super users of OpenSea, fans of OpenSea, people who buy and sell or whatever category they are in as a user, who want to see OpenSea launch a token. They want to see the open sourcing of smart contracts. What is your response to that? Like how do you feel about the community ushering in their voices and their opinions and trying to push more towards traditional decentralization? 

Well, I think some of the criticism was specifically a contract that has not yet been open sourced, but our core marketplace is open source fully. I think there’s maybe some kind of like misinterpretation or just confusion because it’s a new space. If you look at OpenSea, the way that we operate is we’re a peer to peer decentralized marketplace for digital items, and the facilitation of the the buying and selling is all done through a single smart contract that is open-source. So, whether or not we have a token is a sort of governance decision. I think it comes down to that math equation that we did before, but generally, I would say I think that OpenSea can do a lot better when it comes to really fostering the ecosystem and fostering the community. A lot of the ways that we’ve been behind there are really just resourcing. We’re a small team. The number one priority is keep the website running and keep things operating effectively and investing in areas where we can do more outreach and do more ecosystem work, but it has taken us a little time to catch up because of this crazy growth. We know that we can do better there, and we definitely want to.

What Will Eat Web 3.0?

I want to kind of pivot and end off with this final question here. I’m a big fan of watching the growth of the internet, specifically learning about the history of Web 1.0 and how that transition to Web 2.0, and how Web 2.0 ate Web 1.0, and now Web 3.0 is supposedly gonna eat Web 2.0. What do you think is going to eat Web 3.0? 

Oh, man. I have no idea. I mean, Web 3.0 basically doesn’t exist. I mean, it exists, but it’s infantile. Gosh. Oh man. 

Let’s take this from the point of super extreme. The whole concept of Web 3.0 is like ownership, right? All data is public on-chain, right? So I guess a follow-up question is, what happens when all data is on chain? What’s the downside?

Okay. Well, I don’t know if I necessarily agree with the exact description of Web 3.0. I think you said that all data would be public. I don’t think that’s actually the case.

On-chain I meant. There’s going to be privacy, but all like technically on a blockchain, right?

Yeah. What happens after that? I mean, maybe humanity turns into like this giant hive mind, where we’re like, all like coordinating across the blockchain. I don’t know. Like AI maybe emerges. Or actually, here’s a good one. Imagine an autonomous agent, running on this thing, where it’s sort of plugged into all the humans and it sort of emerges as this kind of smart intelligent being and sort of takes on a mind of its own, and then I don’t know if humanity gets replaced or something. I think that’s kind of possible. Because if you think about these things, they are unstoppable, right? They’re unsolvable programs. And so what happens when you create an unstopppable program that happened to tap into everything, and has intelligence associated with it? I think that’s pretty interesting to think about, I’m not saying that’s going to happen anytime soon. 

Would you like to see that happening?

I don’t know.

Advice to Newcomers

No, this is great. I’ll leave you with this final question. For all the new creators, all the new artists, all the new graphic designers, wanting to enter the NFT space, make a career; give them some words of wisdom. What can you recommend to them starting off in the space?

I think just sink your teeth in and try everything out or go down all the discords, go through all of the Twitter accounts, go use all the applications. If you’re not doing that, it’s really hard to just get involved. And then, if you’re up for it, be public and interact with people and make friends. I think what’s underrated, especially now that things are opening up again, an underrated opportunity is to go to meetups and things and just meet people. Get all the information you can from them and then make friends with them, and learn from there. I did that in 2017 when I was first learning about crypto, it was really helpful.

Outro

That’s a perfect place to end off. Devin, really quick, where can we find you on Twitter? Where can people follow you? 

@Dfinzer is my Twitter handle and then@opensea is the company.

Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 3 episode 2 welcomes the iconic generative algorithmic artist Tyler Hobbs, who’s most recently known for his work Fidenza.

In this episode, we talk about:

• 0:19 – Getting started in crypto
• 3:15 – Thinking like a creative in tech
• 8:42 – His first mint
• 10:28 – Art Blocks
• 14:49 – The Crypto Renaissance
• 16:03 – The birth of fidenza
• 23:24 – Getting technical
• 31:39 – NFTs in the creator economy
• 35:45 – Fidenza in the future
• 39:47 – Painting the impact
• 44:37 – Outro

…and so much more.

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Show Notes

I asked Tyler to share some of his early works as a kid. So here they are:

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Thank you to Season 3’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Getting Started in Crypto

Let’s just dive right in. I want to talk about you specifically and start with your background. What were you doing before crypto, and where are you now? 

So before crypto, I was working as an artist and spending a considerable amount of time doing that. Mostly selling my work through my website and selling a lot of prints, doing commissions, commission murals, things like that. Also, I worked some day jobs as a software engineer, which I did enjoy doing. I had a couple of different tech startups here in Austin. But generally, my life was kind of a balance between doing my artwork stuff, doing kind of the day job, of course, normal everyday activities. But post crypto. So I heard about art blocks earlier this year, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, and released Fidenza in June of this year, 2021. That was really my first real NFT drop. And that’s sort of went bananas. People seem to really like that. And since then, everything has been totally different, like living in a different universe now. And I’m really tied up in the crypto world. Like I’ve gotten to meet all these really interesting people. I mean, it’s a wild scene, and there are so many new things happening every day. It’s a struggle to keep up with. I get some really amazing offers for project ideas or collaborations or things like that every day at this point. It’s so cool to get all those opportunities. I can’t keep up with it, and I need help, but I’m really enjoying trying to keep up with it.

All right. So what were you doing at tech startups? Like you’ve been talking about generative art, algorithmic art for years now. I’ve seen like a catalog of you doing speeches, talks, et cetera. What were you doing working at startups and why? 

Well, normally, it doesn’t really pay to be an artist. Maybe that’s a little bit different now with NFTs. But man, to be a full-time artist, let’s say in 2020, you have to grind it out really hard. Like I’ve been working for years to build up my sales number. To build up a network of collectors and fans. And I was doing really well. I felt like I was building a pretty solid base to where I was able to go full time back to creating artwork full-time in February of this year before I did any sort of NFT stuff, and I felt pretty comfortable with that. So I was making it okay. But it can be tough to transition from something like a software engineer salary to an artist salary. I mean, there’s a pretty big difference in pay. Also, I studied computer science. 

Where did you study? 

I studied computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, which is a fantastic school. Yeah, I was working at tech startups. The one that I spent the most time at was a company called data stacks, and I worked on an open-source, distributed database called Apache Cassandra. And I worked on the database itself, sort of the internals of the database engine. I spent a lot of time working on the client drivers, so the Python driver for interacting with the database. So that was a lot of actually really interesting engineering work. It was very challenging, very performance sensitive. There was a lot of a community aspect to it since it’s an open-source project, which I really liked. So overall, it was a really good job. There’s very little for me to complain about with those jobs, which is part of why I think I continue doing it for so long.

Thinking Like a Creative in Tech

How has your time working at startups kind of translated to what you’re doing now? Is there any correlation? 

Yeah, absolutely. When you’re an artist, you’re ultimately also an entrepreneur. The product you’re selling is your own artwork. Sometimes as an artist, it’s not comfortable to think about it that way, but if you’re going to be pragmatic and realistic, I think that’s ultimately the story. And so, working at startups gave me a much stronger sense of how to run a business. And I was lucky enough to be in really early stages at the startups I worked at. So I got a really clear firsthand view of how you think about marketing and sales and accounting and things like I don’t know total addressable market. It’s nice to be able to put on that businessman hat and analyze things through that lens. I definitely have to play a lot of roles. As I said, there’s like a marketing role to it, and as much as it makes me uncomfortable, I have to sometimes sort of put on that marketing hat and look at these things through a marketing lens and say, okay, who’s my audience? Who are my fans? Like who really enjoys this artwork? Who do I want to connect with the most? And so my time working at startups really helped solidify that mindset for me, and also the mindset of sort of being able to tackle any problem that you set your mind to. When you’re at a startup, you encounter all these really unique challenges all the time, and you have no choice but to try to tackle them. Otherwise, your company is not going to make it. So, I think it kind of taught me a little bit of resiliency as well. That’s been really beneficial. 

Can you talk to me a bit about your upbringing? I know behind the scenes, we said you’re a drummer, but how creative were you growing up too? Like when did you start tinkering with software? What’s the story behind that as you grew up?

Sure. I grew up probably a pretty vanilla childhood. I grew up in central Texas. Middle-class. I went to a pretty good school. I was a good kid. I did do a lot of creative activities. I was always drawing and painting. I loved Legos and Play-Doh, and I remember going to a lot of afterschool art classes and painting and things like that. My first encounter with programming. I have an older brother who’s about four or five years older, and he taught himself to program pretty early on, and he was always kind of an inspiration to me. So I think I first started dabbling with programming when I was, let’s say, about 14 or so. I remember writing a Q basic program, one that made a ball bounce around to the screen and another one that played a tune with the little beeper on the computer. And from there, I took computer science classes in high school. And when it came time for college, I wanted to go to art school. I felt a little more strongly about that. But my dad kind of talked me into studying computer science for more pragmatic reasons, which is not necessarily bad advice. And so that’s why I kind of went down that route. But yeah, I’ve always had a little bit more of an independent history. When I was a teenager, I spent the majority of my free time actually skateboarding. That was probably the dominant thing that I did. If I had the athletic ability to be a pro skater, I think that’s probably what I would’ve done, but I just wasn’t blessed in that way. And maybe I didn’t have the full level of insanity that’s required for that as well. But music as well. Yeah, you mentioned drumming. I’ve been playing musical instruments since I was about 10. I think I can play maybe five or six different instruments decently at this point. Drumming is my favorite one. Yeah, I played in some punk bands when I was in high school. And then later on, a little more interesting music. I got into post-rock a lot and played in some post-rock bands. So creativity has always been a huge part of my life. I considered skateboarding to be a really creative activity. And so for me, it’s always just been kind of like a choice of which one of those I want to focus on, and ultimately art kind of won out over skateboarding and drumming. 

So at what point did you kind of become self-aware enough to see that your creative side was merging with your development side?

That was actually a really explicit thing. It didn’t happen by accident. I was working at these tech startup jobs. I enjoyed it, but in the background, I was starting to take art way more seriously. And I was spending a lot of my free time pretty intently trying to learn and create new artwork. I remember hearing advice that artists should try to create work that only they could create. And part of how you do that is by involving as many aspects of yourself and your life and your personality as you can into the artwork. And for me at that time, programming was such a big part of my life that it would have been a mistake not to try to involve it in my artwork in some way. And so I started actively thinking about how I could involve programming in my artwork, and that wasn’t as clear of a thing to do either, as you might think. I had a few missteps. But eventually, I kind of had the idea to create a program that generated a painting. That was my sort of initial thought. Those were kind of the first steps that I took in. I wasn’t really aware of the generative art scene or the history of it at that point. That was just kinda my first step into merging the two, and it went so well right away. It wasn’t polished, but it was interesting right away. I could tell that it was worth investigating. That was about seven years ago, and I really haven’t looked back since. 

I’d be curious to see some of your sketches as a child and see what that was like compared to what you’re creating now. Do you have any of those? 

I have like a lunch bag that I drew on and wrote, like, I love you, mom that’s hanging on my wall. I think I must’ve been four. So I don’t know if you’re going to be able to connect a lot of dots between those two. I’ll dig some up, and we’ll put them in the show notes.

His first mint

Let’s dive more into the crypto side of things. I know that you grew up super creative. By the way, it’s somewhat like me. I got started playing the drums at like five years old. I also doodled, but not to the extent that you did. Unlike you, I only know the drums, and I always still stuck with the drums. Growing up, it was one of those things where my dad, when I told him I wanted to play the drums and I was five years old, and he’s like, what about piano? I was like, I want to play the drums. What about guitar? He’s like, no, I was like, no, not guitar. And then we got a drum set, and the rest is history. I think starting as a creative and then transitioning into crypto, transitioning into NFTs, I think there’s a lot of interesting purview insight. Because you see the world of like the creative side merge with what started as very technical. Very experimentative. Now it’s more creative through NFTs and whatnot. But, you get to see the merge of two different worlds. I want to talk more about that merge with you, but more specifically, you came across NFTs this year through art blocks. What was the first NFT you bought, and if not, was it just one that you listed for sale? 

Yeah, that’s a great question. The first one that I bought, I minted something through art blocks. I want to say it might’ve been sub scape by Matt Doloria, which is a fantastic art blocks release. That was either the first one or something soon after or something shortly before that. However, I’ll say I did do a little test mint on HEN. Mostly because there was a specific show that I wanted to get into, you had to have an NFT in order to get into the show, and although I had this art blocks release coming up, the deadline was earlier than that. So I put something out there without really talking about it in order to get it into the show. So I have a couple of really early things on HEN. 

Art Blocks

So for those who don’t know what art blocks is, can you give a quick breakdown?

Yeah, absolutely. So art blocks is a platform based on top of Ethereum, and essentially they’ve designed a smart contract and a website that enables generative artists like me to do the following. Basically, we can write a program that generates artwork in JavaScript. We actually write it to the blockchain, to the Ethereum blockchain. Then whenever collectors use our blocks, they go to the website interface, and when they click the mint button, at that point, it triggers the script to be run and to generate a new piece of artwork and to generate an NFT that is then instantly transferred to the collector. So at the time of purchase, neither the collector nor the artists or art blocks knows exactly what’s going to come out. Everybody has seen some of the output from the script. So you have a general idea of what you’re going to get, but you don’t know the specifics of it. And the artists also set some basic parameters, like the number of mints. For example, with my project Fidenza, there were 999, and they had a fixed price at the time. Now there are some more complex auction models, but essentially the gist of it is, generative artists can put up these programs that generate artwork and NFTs, and collectors are able to enjoy and purchase.

So can you talk to me more about your aha moment? Do you remember where you were when you said, holy shit, I should be making art here. Everything that I’ve been preaching, this was made for the last few years. Talk to me about that. 

Yeah. I think the exact moment for me was, I saw an archetype program. I think he tweeted about it. This was his big art blocks release. And I’ve been a big fan of his work for years. I’ve been following his work for years. Seeing how he did it for art blocks just instantly sold me on the concept. And I could just tell how perfect of a fit this was regenerative art. And generative art has had such a hard time being monetized in the past, like earning a living for the artists. And this was the first time where it felt like such a good fit between the artists, the collector, kind of the purity of all these outputs coming straight from the program—this totally provable documented way. I was fortunate enough to be able to see he had done his work, and Dimitri Chernick had also done ringers. Just by looking at those two projects, I could tell this was going to be amazing. I think the exact same day that I saw that I put in my application to be on the art blocks program.

That’s pretty big. That’s pretty cool. And how long have you been preaching about generative art? And I only asked that because I literally came across a video of you doing a lecture on YouTube that was dated two years ago. So you’ve been at it for some time.

Let’s see here. I’ve been writing essays about it since I think 2015. Maybe it was 2014. Because I found the ideas and the conceptual aspect of it to be really interesting, I think it’s a whole new design paradigm introducing randomness into how you do design, and it’s about building a system. There are so many interesting aspects of, like, what does the computer mean to the artwork? How is it involved in the artwork? How does it affect our aesthetics? How do we take the outside world and view it through the lens of computers? Like, what’s the relationship there? There are so many interesting aspects to it. So I’ve been trying to write about it and talk about it at conferences for years now. I think, let’s see, I did a strange loop talk called “how to hack a painting” in 2017. It was about a watercolor algorithm that I designed that a lot of people found to be kind of inspiring. I did that to show them a little bit about what generative art means. But all the way to this day, I continue to write essays. I wrote a couple this year that I feel pretty proud of. There’s not a lot of thought leadership in the generative art community and from a perspective of thoughtful analysis of what the word means, how it’s different from what preceded it, and where it has the potential to go. Art critics have sort of distanced themselves from this medium for decades now. Very few of them have any idea what’s going on here. And so I think it’s kind of up to people in my position. Like artists who actually know what’s going on to try to educate about it, and evolve and advance our view of what’s possible and what’s going on. That’s part of why I write those essays. To help educate collectors and other artists as well. 

The Crypto Renaissance

I want to pivot for a minute and talk about this creative Renaissance. Some call it a Renaissance, and I’d love to hear your point of view. Are we in the middle of a Renaissance? 

Oh, I would be surprised if we weren’t. This is basically the first time that digital artists have ever been able to earn a living creating their artwork. Not just generative artists, but digital artists in general. Usually, that was a sentence to poverty. And digital art is so important. So much of our lives are digital now. We spend so much time in front of computers. You and I are talking through a computer right now. And you probably spent the six hours before this looking at a computer, and I’ll probably spend the next six hours looking at a computer. Digital art is created and exists in a realm that we spend a lot of our time on now. And I think it’s so important to bring that artistic influence into the digital realm and to value it there just as much as we value it in the physical realm. So this has been such an important opportunity. Now that digital artists actually have the opportunity to focus on this work and earn a living from it, I think the results are going to be absolutely incredible. So it’s still early days, but as I said, I would be incredibly surprised if this wasn’t the start of a sort of Renaissance. 

The Birth of Fidenza

It’s cool. My earliest interaction with NFTs started in 2017 with crypto kitties. And I would argue that maybe that was a lot of other people’s entrance into NFTs, but I never did anything about it. I was in college at that time. I was just taking my first blockchain course, learning about smart contracts and even programming a little bit, or at least attempting to. It wasn’t until October, probably also September of last year, September 2020, where it really started kicking in. I finally understood what this media was. And then I saw artists doing really cool things with it. And then I saw musicians monetizing and fractionalizing their songs with it. And then I saw people who otherwise wouldn’t have made a dime off their work, becoming hot shots online. It’s almost as if the stigma of the starving artist was starting to decline, but only for a certain group of people, maybe not for everybody. Cause a lot of people are trying to become NFT artists and do their thing, and I’m sure everybody has their own unique approach. For you specifically, Fidenza is something that stood out to me. I saw it trending on Twitter, and the likes of the founders of Three Arrows Capital talking a lot about it made me absolutely fall in love with the work as well as other people. And I got to tell you it’s super unique and not to toot your own horn. I really enjoy looking at your stuff. I’ll tell you that. I love the color palettes that you use. And I think it’s super neat. My next question is, how did we get there? How did we get to this style of art? How did you get to the point where you were inputting something and outputting another, and it was outputting another thing? You’re like, wow, this is it. This is Fidenza. This is me. Talk to me about that. 

Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic question. So Fidenza did not come from a vacuum. It is absolutely the culmination of years of work. With all of my work, I tend to use parts and pieces of previous algorithms. One of the amazing things about this medium is that you can do that so easily. And so some of those pieces that I’ve reused a lot one that I’ve written about is called flow fields. This is not necessarily something that I came up with. It’s kind of a general algorithm that some other artists use as well, but it’s something that I find very special, and I’ve had a lot of creative luck with it. Let’s put it that way. And so that’s sort of the basis of the Fidenza algorithm. And I’ve been experimenting with flow fields for about four years now, and I’m just trying everything I can think of really to see how it looks and to create something new. During that time, I’ve also been experimenting with different color palettes and building my taste for colors. That’s not something that comes easily. I think every artist has to discover their own set of colors that works for them. It takes a long time to find those color relationships that are harmonious or that offer the types of interests that you enjoy. So those sorts of things built up. Over the years, I’ve been influenced by so many artists, particularly a lot of painters; honestly, my biggest influences, I would say, are painters. So I think you can look at, for example, there’s a particular set of Kandinsky paintings that I think are probably pretty influential with Fidenza in terms of the color palette and kind of the rhythm and spacing of the shapes and the use of negative space. But yeah, there are so many different artistic influences that have all played subtle roles in shaping Fidenza as well. I think if you look at my past work and trace it up. I think you’ll see that chain of influence and how those ideas evolved, and how I was able to build on them. I think it’ll continue to go that way. I don’t plan to do any sort of like Fidenza 2.0, but all those ideas are still available and in play for my future work as well. I think it’s just been sort of the culmination of all these parts and pieces that have stacked up. They all kind of came together at the right moment and sort of the stars aligned. I got lucky that I had the right algorithm ready to go at the right time for Fidenza to be a thing.

Well, one thing that’s super unique about Fidenza, and I guess your work in general, is the aesthetic portion behind it. And one thing that you do really well is turning aesthetics into code. What does that mental model look like? How does that work in your head? Do you know what I mean? Like, paint that for me. How do you turn aesthetics into code? 

Yeah, that’s the real challenge, isn’t it? It’s so interesting with generative art. So I’m going to compare and contrast with painting a little bit. When you create a painting as an artist, you have an internal sense of aesthetic, and you kind of learn to follow your intuition when you create a painting. Sometimes you’re explicitly thinking about, like, I don’t know, leaving a particular amount of margin or leaving more space at the bottom or not making things top-heavy or focal points or whatever. But by and large, you’re following your intuition, and you’re saying, like, let me try this. Does this look good? Or does this look bad? If it looks good, I’ll keep it. If it looks bad, I’m going to try and change it. So you’re making all these sorts of micro decisions. Based on this loose internal aesthetic guide that you have. When you’re a generative artist, you can’t do that. You have to make everything much more explicit in the sense that it has to go into the code somehow, especially with something like Fidenza, where there’s no room for curation. Anything that comes out of the program might end up in the hands of a collector as a finished work. So you have to do your best to figure out why you have a particular aesthetic, why you enjoy something looking a particular way, and you try to turn that into kind of a set of guidelines. Now with generative art or most of it, especially something like Fidenza, the program is not an explicit set of instructions to generate one image. You’re designing a whole system or a whole program that can generate sort of a realm of different artwork. There’s randomness that’s very carefully mixed into the program at a kind of a structural level so that each time you’re on the program, you get something different. As a result, the program becomes a really loose set of guidelines rather than an explicit design for one image. You start thinking, generally, a lot more systematically about those aesthetics. You start thinking a lot about the relationship between the components, and you start thinking about probabilities. I spend a lot of time fine-tuning probabilities. So there’s a lot of functions that are dedicated to picking colors or shapes. Those will have probabilities of selecting different colors. The probabilities of each of those are very fine-tuned. Sometimes they are influenced by things like proximity to other colors or the size of the shape, or the position of the shape. You do your best to come up with these rules that might, on average, make it look better. But you also have to be careful not to stifle the program. There’s a lot to be said for this property of emergence, which is when something happens that you don’t expect, right? So these programs have relatively simple rules, but sometimes the randomness and the rules interact in a really unexpected way, and these really cool results emerge. If it’s at all possible as a generative artist, you want to allow room for that emergence to happen. So there’s a careful tension between trying to lock down the program so that it only has sort of good output and still leaving enough breathing room so that this sort of emergence can happen. It’s really tough to achieve both of those at the same time. 

Getting Technical

I gotta be honest, you lost me, but listen, I’ll take your word for it. What I imagine, please correct me if I’m wrong, is when you’re looking at your screen or screens, and you’re developing these probabilities, writing this code, is it just like you have a terminal, and then you have like what the output would look like, and you’re constantly changing different variables until it looks like what you want it to look like?

Yeah. More or less. Basically, what I’m looking at is a screen full of code. Like take your stereotypical hacker on a movie, and that’s basically what I’m looking at. And then, yeah, I have a second window that has the output from the program. And so I change some code, I rerun it, and the image updates and I’m able to tell whether it looks good or not. I repeat that cycle over and over again, hundreds of times while working on a new program. 

What goes into choosing the probabilistic color palettes that you choose and that you’re after? How do you find that inspiration? Where does that come from? 

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s really tricky. Sometimes I have sort of sets. Sets of colors and balances that I’ve used before that tend to work, and I’ll use those as a starting point. So like with Fidenza, the most likely color palette, whilst it is the main color palette, it’s the Lux color palette. This is the one that kind of has a cream background and a lot of color variety. There are about 16 different colors involved in it. Those, I started with a core set of colors that I really enjoy working with. So some reds, some yellows, some pinks, particular shades of blue. I was just looking for ways to expand that and so adding colors that didn’t conflict with what was there. And so sometimes that means adding more, you know, more neutral colors in order to add variety without a sort of turning it into a giant rainbow. So I might, in that case, add Browns or tans, or like a really desaturated yellow or something like that. In other cases, for other color palettes, maybe I had more specific thoughts. So another Fidessa one, there’s the rose palette. For that one, I was really thinking about a Rose Bush. I think I’d absolutely like sort of floral combinations in the sense of the tones of the foliage and kind of the depth you get there. Then just these pops of the really saturated reds and pinks and peach colors. So sometimes, I have maybe a physical reference that I’m at least thinking about. I don’t really ever use a photo reference. I never take colors directly from somebody else’s work. But sometimes I’ll think about things. I’ll think about a sunset or a landscape or a Rose Bush and Kind of use that as a conceptual starting point for the color palettes. 

Do you know what I think about when I see your work? It’s actually so funny that you tell me your background. I don’t think you mentioned this live, but you told me behind the scenes that you were a jazz drummer, right? Your art really reminds me of jazz music for whatever reason. And you use certain keywords to describe the curves and straightness and the edginess and whatnot. So forgive me if I butcher it, but I imagine the one specifically with, I think, the Lux color palette or the tan background. That really reminds me of jazz music. It really reminds me of all the curviness on how everything is literally about to touch each other and how that feels, but it just fits. It works. It looks, and it feels good. And when you’re listening to jazz, it’s so experimentative. It’s so out there, but it gets you thinking, it gets your curiosity going, and it’s weird. Is there any correlation?

I think about the relationship between music and visual art all the time. I love that you brought up that connection. I think it’s a fantastic one. I mean, so for people that aren’t familiar with jazz, kind of the way it works is there’s usually a set of standards. So there’s like one or two or 300 songs that basically every jazz musician knows, but the part that they know is like, it’s kind of like the intro and like maybe like the chords for the chorus. Then so they’ll start out. They have that structure just to get started. That’s the standard part of it. Then there’s all this room for improvisation in the middle, and that’s where they take solos and do whatever they want to do, really. So it’s this really interesting blend of structure, and let’s call it chaos or creativity. Generative art is very much the same way. It’s very much, at least for me, very much a blend of that order and chaos. I love taking that structure and then just bending it and warping it and seeing what direction it can go when you inject that kind of chaotic element to it. So yeah, there’s, there’s a big parallel with jazz there. So I love that you spotted that out. 

Who were some of your favorite jazz artists, whether they be individual players, groups, or generally?

Let’s see here. I mean, maybe this is too cliche, but miles Davis has always been huge for me. Let’s see. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Jack Wilkins, who was a jazz guitarist. A lot of bill Evans, who’s a great pianist. Some of my favorite drummers, I’m going to say probably Tony Williams, Mel Lewis a lot as well. That’s not going to mean anything to anybody, unfortunately, so I won’t keep going, but I love some contemporary stuff as well. Makaya McCraven is super cool because they take jazz, and they start to blend it with this like real electronic computer influence. So there’s a lot of parallel with generative art. 

Do you listen to jazz, or did you listen to jazz, or what type of music, if any, did you listen to when you were creating Fidenza? 

I’m certain I listened to jazz. I tend to listen to instrumental music. It was probably either jazz or post-rock. I listen to a lot of Spanish language basically because it’s a little easier to kind of have in the background in my head. 

If I could name one song that reminds me of Fidenza, it starts like standard experimentation and giant steps. I’d say that’s a good comparison for me. At least subjective. 

No, I like that. I’m going to need to listen to that while looking at the artwork now. 

I wanna pivot more and talk about the creator economy with you. Because I think you’re the epitome or not the epitome, but you’re a good example of people tapping into their creative side and taking it one step further and being experimentative and exploring your medium. For example, your base and your foundation growing up or in your early career was software engineering, working with startups. You build traditional and non-traditional products for companies. But you always had your creative side. You still practice what you preach. You still did the conferences, you still talked about generative art, and it wasn’t until you met the medium of NFTs where everything I feel like kind of at least started to sink, and here we are today on this podcast. And I think you’re a good example of maybe there’s a lot of software engineers out there that have yet to tap into their creative side and experiment more. How can we get more developers to tap into their creative side? 

Wonderful question. First of all, I think you’re spot on. I think programmers, in general, are a very creative bunch. I mean, when you’re programming, there’s not a set way to tackle any problem. There’s always a huge number of trade-offs and a huge number of options, and coming up with those designs is a very creative enterprise. So I think there’s a huge potential for programmers to get involved in a more creative medium. Just like you say, whether that’s a visual art, whether that’s music, whether that’s film, architecture, textiles, the list goes on and on and on. I think there’s a couple of aspects to how we can get more people doing that. First of all, it’s just showing those people the opportunity. So I get emails literally every day from software engineers saying they saw my artwork or they listened to one of my talks or they read one of my essays, and they had a mind-blowing experience when they realized that they could take this skill that they’ve honed for years and they could use it towards creative personally fulfilling means or ends, I should say. I think part of it’s just creating that awareness that this is even an option. I think the second part would actually be kind of going the opposite direction. So making people in those fields, let’s say architecture and textiles and whatever, making them aware that programming is a technique that they could use for their own work because it’s so, so powerful. It almost doesn’t matter what you apply. There are exciting things that you can do whenever you involve programming in your field. So I think making the tools more accessible, making the education more widespread so that more people have programming skills will play a role, and just creating some opportunities for crossover, like allowing software engineers to pair up with these people in their existing industries. I think all those things will help to unleash more creative power around computation. 

NFTs in the Creator Economy

How do you see the future of NFTs kind of transforming the creator economy as we know?

Big question. I think that there’s a chance that it changes the relationship that artists have had with existing institutions. So specifically, I’m thinking of galleries and museums. People have played a gatekeeping role in some ways. Gatekeeping has a strong negative connotation, and I don’t necessarily mean it in that way. I think they bring a lot of value in terms of bringing an open-minded and educated background to evaluating artists and doing their best to expose what they consider to be the best work to collectors. But definitely, NFTs create the opportunity for a much more direct relationship between collectors and artists, and that can be healthier. In some ways, it’s probably not the right model for everybody, but I think that’s a possibility. I’m really interested to see how DAOs play out long-term. Like I’ve been hearing about DAOs funding feature films and new style museums and funding new work by artists. That’ll be really interesting to see. Man, it still feels so early, and everything is changing so fast that even being in the middle of it, I have a hard time predicting where it’s gonna go. I’ll just say overall, I have really positive expectations for the impact of NFTs on artists and other creators.

Why do you think collectors woke up to the idea and value behind generative art and algorithmic art all of a sudden? Because you’ve been doing that for years, right? Do you think it’s because of the art blocks platform? Do you think it’s partly because of the timing of NFTs and people looking for pieces and one-on-ones? What is the explanation here for why the world is waking up to this today? 

That’s a great question. Behind the scenes, I felt like the energy for generative art has been building over the last few years. So just to give a quick history lesson, generative art has existed since the 1960s. And it was pretty rudimentary back then, but basically, since then, it’s been panned by critics and mostly ignored by collectors. Right now, we’re on what I think is fair to call the third wave of generative art. And so I would put artists like myself Dmitri Chernick and Matt Deloria and Alexia Andre, and so on and so forth, in sort of a third wave where I personally feel like the quality of the work has gone up a lot. I think we’re starting to get a more diverse set of backgrounds, focusing on creating generative art. So I think there’s more interesting artwork for one. I think that NFTs have essentially made collecting digital work palatable. Like you know, everybody jokes about buying a JPEG or whatever, but collecting digital art in 2016 literally meant buying a JPEG. Like you would charge your credit card, and they would email you a JPEG, right? Like it’s just not satisfying. There’s something deeply not satisfying about that, and for whatever reason, NFTs changed that. Like we have built a social consensus that owning an NFT means something, and when that social consensus exists, almost nothing else matters. If we all say it means something, then it means something. So I think people feel empowered to collect NFTs. I think they feel that it’s meaningful now. I think they enjoy that it goes directly to the artists in most cases. I think that it creates so much more of a community now. Everybody can see who’s holding all of the pieces from an artist. You can see exactly who bought and sold and for how much. And you can trace the history of every individual piece, and with something like generative art, it almost kind of for like something like Fidenza, like a long-form generative algorithm. It almost builds a community itself. Like there’s a set of Fidenza holders that have overlapping interests, and they sort of all meet through the artwork, and it builds a community pretty naturally. There’s a real culmination of factors that it feels like almost overnight have really enabled generative art to finally have a moment in the sun.

How do you imagine the future of your creator economy? Your personal economy forming and manifesting over time? 

Oh, you’re essentially asking, like, what do I see for my future? 

Fidenza in the Future

Yeah. But, but in a sense, where, because now you’re at the core of ownership, right? The core monetization, direct to the buyer. You’re now developing a unique relationship and unique communication channel with your collectors and the rest of the world who’s watching, which over time will manifest. You’ll build an even bigger audience. At least, I’m betting on that. You’ll build an even larger collector base. You’re basically redefining what it means to be a creator. You’re building your own micro-economies essentially, right? How do you see that kind of forming and transforming, and manifesting over time? 

Oh, man. I wish somebody could tell me that. Here are my main goals. It’s easier for me to talk about what I would like to see happen. First of all, I like to make artwork, and I like to try to make good artwork. That’s something I think about every day. What steps can I take that will help to make sure that I make good artwork? I’m definitely interested in the quality of it and trying to do something new and trying to just keep myself interested. Like that’s why I started making art in the first place. And I think it would be really foolish for me to put that aside. Like I’m doing my best to keep that front and center just because I love doing it, and it makes me really happy to make artwork. So whatever helps me to make artwork is kind of at the front. And second, I would say I really do love the community aspect of it, and I want positive outcomes for the community. I’m hoping that that involves learning. I’m going to do my best to help to educate people about generative art, about what makes it interesting, about what other artists are doing great work, and maybe just about, you know, the history of artwork in general. Just helping to educate people and get people interested in artwork is a beautiful thing. I love helping to grow a community that has positive vibes. Maybe that sounds naive or whatever, but anything we can do to just make happy places where we get to just be friends and hang out and enjoy things is awesome. Like there’s no reason that we can’t do that. I’m sure there’ll be challenges, but I would love to help cultivate that sort of sense of positive community as well. Maybe a community of giving back and being charitable. That’s something I think about a lot as well and have plans for. I think that’s what I would like to see the most are those things, and who knows what sort of financial things will happen to affect that. That’ll go however it goes. I think as long as we keep our eye on the important goals that we can tolerate sort of whatever else happens along the way.

Part of your important goals, the community side, and part of growing a community is increasing the amount of collectors that collect Fidenza, and part of increasing the amount of collectors I could argue is also the fractionalization of Fidenza. Does seeing your piece fractionalized excite you? Does that scare you? Does that say yes, more people get to have a piece of my vision and what I’m creating? Like what, what does that mean? 

 It’s such a weird new experience that I never imagined people hunting fractions of my artwork before until this year. So I haven’t had time to develop a full set of thoughts on it. It is strange not to have one specific owner for a piece of your work. There’s definitely probably a part of me that’s coming from a traditional sense that wants to see just a single owner of the work, maybe hoping that they take care of it in some way. I mean, it’s silly with digital work, but there’s some part of my brain that’s telling me that. Then I also think about it, and it is democratizing the work in the sense that it’s allowing for communal participation in any sort of financial upside. I really try not to think too much about the financial upside and all that, but I’m sure that for collectors, that’s part of the equation for them or at least some of them. So yeah, I’m well aware that Fidenzas are out of the price range for many people. Like, I couldn’t really buy one of my own. Like it would be a stretch for me. So I’m well aware of that. If there is a financial upside, I don’t know that art is necessarily like a great investment strategy necessarily, right? Like it’s artwork. But if there’s a financial upside, I guess allowing regular people to participate in it too is a good thing. So yeah, it’s a weird thing, but overall I think there are some positive aspects to fractionalization. 

Painting the Impact

That’s a good way to look at it. I think just because you talked about the financial side, I want to ask you one thing. But when you saw one of your pieces for the first time get sold for seven figures, what was that feeling like to you? 

Man, I feel like I’ve been in Wonderland for like months. It’s just been a daily progression of things that I can’t believe stacking on top of each other. I feel like I left reality a long time ago now at this point. And so you know, like a seven-figure sale was just like another wild thing on the list. I don’t even know if the impact of it has fully sunk in yet because it’s so far from what I expected to happen this year. Yeah, I mean, it puts me in a small group of very fortunate artists. I’m very fortunate to be in this position. Absolutely. I believe my work is good, but there’s a lot of artists out there that have fantastic work and don’t get the same sort of opportunity. And so, I feel incredibly privileged to be in this position. I don’t know. Hopefully, I can do something good with that. That’s all. 

I love to hear it. Pre NFTs, when you are creating your pieces, did you ever feel at the moment like, why am I doing this? Like, what’s the point? Like people don’t get it. Should I just stop and focus on something else? Did you ever have those doubts, those fears? Can you walk me through that? 

Yeah, absolutely. I said this a little bit earlier, but pre NFT, making it as an artist is a real grind. I had lots of months with no sales. I had lots of commissions that went poorly. Clients didn’t like the work. I got turned down from numerous shows and other things that I had to apply to after working as hard as I could for years on something just kind of barely scraping along. Yeah, I absolutely questioned things and kind of wondered if I should just go skateboarding instead and just enjoy my life a little bit more. But ultimately, I mentioned that doing artwork makes me happy, and anytime that I stopped making artwork for better or for worse, I would get unhappy. And so I always went back to making the artwork, and I was fortunate enough that there were other people out there that believed in me. I had a core set of collectors and friends that enjoyed my work and supported me in every way they could. And all those small positive interactions stacked up and kept me going and made me feel like I actually had a chance and that I was on the right track. So even though I did have doubts, I also felt well supported and had some faith in myself.

Powerful. Super powerful. Do you ever take a minute to think about that and reflect on those days and kind of see how that changed? It feels like overnight, a lot of people would say. I only asked that because you’re saying every single day just beats the next, and you see seven-figure sales. Not to talk about the money, but more about the awareness that you’re creating around this type of art and the level of appreciation that people are having for it. Back in the day, you went through so many days where it was just like, like, what the hell? Or at least from what you’re telling me. And I only highlight that because it’s interesting to hear you as a creator, you as an artist to just go through that wave. Seeing where you are today, it’s really beautiful. 

 I hope that that maybe provide some motivation for other artists that are out there. I mean, I think it would be extremely unrealistic for me to promise anywhere near what I’ve been lucky enough to experience this year. But, if you do keep grinding it out, I mean, you will catch a break sooner or later. Not always huge breaks, but there will be something there. And again, it’s kind of a cliche saying, but luck is at the intersection of preparation and opportunity, right? So like if I hadn’t had everything ready to go for this Fidenza algorithm at the same time that art blocks were coming up, then Fidenza never would have been the thing that it was. As I’ve already admitted, I did get very lucky with that, but if I hadn’t been preparing for years, then I wouldn’t have even been able to be lucky. If you’re an artist or a creator, you sort of have to just accept it might take some time and just keep working and make smart decisions every day, and hopefully, those add up to something positive for you. 

I’m going to ask you this final question. What can we expect next for you? Are we thinking Sotheby’s or Christie’s? What are we thinking over here in terms of art?

No, I don’t think about auction houses or anything like that. I have announced that I plan to put out more work this year. I haven’t said anything about it yet, but what I’ll say is For this year, this will be a little bit smaller projects. So I’m not looking to like one up Fidenza this year.

Which, by the way, I don’t think is in your control per se. Right? 

But I do plan to continue working on more long-form generative work like Fidenza. I have some ideas that I’ve been playing with around that which I’m really excited about. Mostly I think about just ways to create new artwork that I think is going to be interesting and try to do the best work that I can. There’ll be new work; hopefully, it’ll be good. I think it’ll be good. Other than that, you’d have to wait and see. 

Do you have a date for when the next piece is going to come up?

I have not announced any dates yet. 

Okay. I’m trying to get some alpha here, man. It’s all good, man. It’s all good. Before I let you go, shout yourself out. Where can we find you? Where can we learn more about your pieces? Give us the show. 

So pretty much everywhere online. My handle is @tylerxhobbs. So on Instagram and Twitter, I’m @tylerxhobbs. My website is tylerxhobbs.com. Those are pretty much the three places to go. I have a discord channel now as well, and I hang around the art block scene as well. So that’s pretty much where you can find me, and I hope to see some of y’all and meet some of y’all sooner rather than later. 

Awesome. What a good way to end Tyler. Thank you so much for being on Mint, and I hope to have you on again soon. 

Thank you so much, Adam. This has been. Awesome. 

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 3 episode 1 welcomes the President of Vayner NFT Avery Akkineni. She leads the company’s mission to build long-term strategic NFT projects for the world’s leading intellectual property owners serving brands, celebrities, athletes and associations looking to incentivize and reward brand advocacy and customer loyalty.  

In this episode, we talk about:

• 0:00 – Intro
• 1:39 – From Google to VaynerMedia
• 4:18 – VaynerNFTs
• 8:37 – The Vayner Group
• 11:57 – Defining Web 3.0
• 13:08 -NFTs and Intellectual Property
• 25:48 -How NFTs Lead to Enhanced D2C Models
• 35:20 – Creating Mutual Value Through Collaboration
• 40:11 – Outro – Closing Out

…and so much more.

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Thank you to Season 2’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Tell me about yourself. What were you doing before crypto? And like, what are you doing now?

Awesome. So I’m originally from Nashville, Tennessee, Southeast part of the United States. Music City. Amazing place to grow up, and I moved to California for university, and I loved it there. I thought it was amazing. I started my career in marketing at Target corporate, where I worked in the Southern California division. And after that, I had this incredible opportunity in 2011 to go work at Google, which was a major dream job for me at the time. And I learned so much and stayed there for like seven years. And during the course of my time at Google, we launched a bunch of awesome products and a bunch of amazing campaigns. The company grew and grew and grew. And I also kind of came in touch with the Vayner team and Gary, and I was really impressed with what they were doing. So much so that I jumped from Google to join Vayner, which was a little bit of a crazy thing at the time. But ultimately, it was a really exciting move for me. And I’ve been at Vayner for about four years, helping to lead our media team. I moved to Singapore to open our Asia Pacific offices. And then I just came back here in July to open up our Vayner NFT practice. I’m currently in Miami, but we’re, we’re all over the United States. 

Nice. So how was it jumping from Google, like an insane corporation with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of employees, to, well, how big was Vayner when you joined? How many people was it? 

Several hundred. So it was a medium-sized company. Going from a company that had, you know, hundreds of thousands to hundreds was a big adjustment just in terms of how we like to operationalize at Google versus kind of being more of an emerging company who is really different. But one thing that I loved, and this is something that, you know, everyone decides for themselves, but for me, I was really interested in being in a place where your work and every person really matters. Every person’s work sort of shapes the future of the company in a much more dramatic way when you’re working at a smaller-sized company. You get better access to executive leadership. You know, you can really see what your work is building in a really direct fashion, which is awesome. And at Google, it’s just such a big place. And like, you know, it’s billions of dollars per second; basically, it’s a bit of a different ball game. So I really appreciated the ability to take on sort of a more direct role, where you see your impact pretty fast. 

When you pivoted into Vayner, what were some of like, I guess the biggest shockers moving from such a big corporation to, I wouldn’t call it boutique, but Gary himself was such a powerhouse. And it still is at that time, moving from that end to that and like, what was that?

Well, everybody thought I was crazy. Especially since, you know, when your brand side is often perceived to be like the good side of it and going agency side is not very common for brand people. So everyone was like, whoa, are you serious? But I was really excited about it and excited to learn. I think that’s one thing that you’ve really got at an agency, and the way that Gary runs Vayner is so fundamentally, hugely different from how other agencies operate. And I was excited about that. So I think a lot of people might have questioned that decision because I was going from a really stable thing to, you know, still a relatively unknown company at the time. Certainly, it’s nowhere near this. Vayner is nowhere near the size and the scale of Google yet. But I knew it was the right decision for me, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn from people who were really at the time; Vayner were known to be experts in the social media space. It’s a place that Gary stakes a lot of his career. He really built his personal brand on social media, on YouTube, on Twitter, on Instagram. And then we were helping our clients, who were mostly enterprise brands, to build sort of their social presence. So I wanted to learn about social. I wanted to get really hands-on with it and kind of learn from the best of the best as it related to social. 

Adam: You know, one thing that I love about Gary’s story, particularly, just because we’re talking about Gary is he’s a type of person that experiments on the personal level before scaling it to other people. He verifies and proves that he can do it. And he’s the example of that and then makes the example for other people. And we saw that with social media, and now we saw that with NFTs and that insane campaign with VeeFriends. Starting Vayner NFT, and doing that for others and taking those learnings, taking those principles and applying it to mainstream corporations or whatever that the customer is at the end of the day.

So I guess my next question too is why NFTs for you? Like, what is it about the medium of NFTs that gets you fired up?

Yeah, it’s a good question. And Adam, I appreciate that you can just see, like, you can read our strategy, like a book, right? Like it’s the same way that, you know, we put Gary on Tik TOK first, then we start doing it for brands. Like, you know, that’s kind of our rinse and repeat formula is using Gary as our first test case to make sure we understand the media before we go and, you know, help other brands do the same thing. And I think that level of practitioners hip is really rare when you look at the professional services ecosystem, you know, consultants and most ad agencies, they’re not like doing it themselves, like putting their money on this. And I think that’s helped us stand out. But for me, it’s a good question. So I’ve been investing, you know, on a personal level in crypto for many years, I lived in San Francisco for quite a long time, and it was pretty normal. And I remember sort of the first boom of Bitcoin being an exciting time. And obviously, that you know, it goes into ebbs and flows. But I’ve been personally interested in that. And I remember, you know, in maybe 2017, my friend first telling you about Ethereum and how that was going to be like the next big thing. And he was definitely right. So shout out to this guy, Oren Barak. And yeah, so I, I was a little bit interested in that. I think NFTs, it’s more like reading the consumer adoption cycle. I think we’ve seen this type of thing happen before many times in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, and it’s happening for Web 3.0. And if any of your listeners are familiar with this sort of like market adoption curve kind of goes like this and it starts, you know, like there’s the early minority, then you get into early adopters, and there’s the early majority, the late majority. And then it gets into the laggards, and you can see a lot of this like fundamental tech setup is happening now for there to be a really massive shift in the way that consumers use the internet. NFTs, I think are just one part of Web 3.0. We called it VaynerNFTs because we think it’s a big part. And we think, you know, it’s, it’s something that people can understand. People understand collectibles. It’s kind of started with collectibles. But this is going to be much bigger than just collectible NFTs. And I think how I got into it was, I started talking to Gary about NFTs, like almost a year ago now. And when he was first kicking around the concept for VeeFriends and creating a community around his values and his doodles. But, more importantly than that was just understanding and seeing all of the variables in place that I think are going to drive a huge consumer trend. And I saw that before, like I mentioned, I worked at Google and when I started working there in 2011, like, it wasn’t like everyone Googles, everything. Like it was still like, this was a startup, and this was a new thing. And, you know, people would say like, oh, You know, they didn’t believe in it the same way that you do now. Even email, like Gmail was like a new thing, which now, of course, it’s so prevalent, it’s just so everywhere. But I think I had done a good job of sort of understanding that’s where things were headed. And I started to see how Google was building something, and that’s why I wanted to be a part of it. And then you know, Google made an acquisition of a company called DoubleClick. In, in sort of the late 20 teens, and I was on that team as well. And it was all about programmatic media, which is basically just using machine learning and AI to automate a lot of manual tasks. So I went to that. I saw that as being a huge change in the way that people bought media to do it more transparently and more fairly, and all these things. And then I wanted to go do social media, cause I thought that was also another thing that was really changing, which is why I joined Vayner. And now I say this with NFTs. So I think, you know, in my career, I’ve really tried to understand where consumer adoption is going as it relates to sort of consumer technology and, and then hopefully, you know, catch the right trend at the right time to see if I can help contribute in my own small way to being part of something that fundamentally makes people’s lives better.

Talk to me a bit about the branches at Vayner. So there’s VaynerMedia. There’s VaynerNFTS. What else is there at Vayner? Fill in the blank. 

Yeah. So VaynerX is our kind of holding company for all of the inner companies. And Gary himself has other companies outside that interacts, which could be like a Resy where Gary’s the Co-founder or Empathy Wines that Gary is also a co-founder at. And so Gary himself is probably the CEO of like a hundred businesses, but a lot of them are in Vayner X. VaynerX is very heavily Vayner media in terms of just number of staff perspective. But we also have a company called gallery media group, which does publishing. So we have a site called pure wow or 1:37 PM that is focused on lifestyle. Some focused on women, some focused on male content. So there’s Gallery Media Group. You also have Vayner productions, which is a production studio. We have a huge studio in Long Island City where we help, you know, shoot commercials and have directors and editing and all that stuff. So more of a traditional production house. Then we have Vayner speakers, which is an amazing group of speakers. 

Adam: The only reason I jumped into that is because Vayner is like the one-stop destination, right? Like there’s all these different branches. And Gary’s like really good at jumping on these trends and realizing what’s important and making an example of himself before or licensing it or whatever scaling it, you know, to many other people. And now that Vayner NFTs is not just another branch of that, but it’s such a core component. All these other branches, I feel like fit into this greater vision of what’s to come. Do you know what I mean? And I see this, like when a brand comes to you guys and like, all right, what’s our media strategy. Well, the media strategy comprises many things. It’s not just the media. It’s also production. It’s also this, and it’s also NFTs now. And you guys have all those vehicles under one roof. 

That’s exactly right. Yeah. We can do many different things in house. Everything from, we have Vayner talent to Vayner speakers, to Vayner productions, to VaynerMedia where, yeah, we want to be the one-stop-shop for modern marketers and modern communications. 

The problem that you guys are set to solve at VaynerNFTs, what is that? What is it exactly like what’s missing in the world that Vayner is like, this is where we come into place? 

I think there is no other NFT consultancy that does what we’re doing. To my knowledge, I think we’re the first NFT agency. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot, but we’re probably the first mover. What you see in the NFT space is there’s a lot of technology solutions. So it’s like you can work with dapper on what they’ve built, or you could work with open sea and just mint directly there. But there isn’t a consultancy that exists today outside of Vayner, whose role is solely to focus on helping intellectual property owners navigate the world of NFTs. It’s just too new. So you know that the more traditional consultancies and advertising agencies and marketing firms haven’t yet dedicated a practice just to help this happen. I’m sure that they will, but I think the role we play is really that strategic partner to help understand what’s the right tech stack. What’s the right strategy with the right launch? What’s the right creative? Bring all that stuff together for awesome NFT projects that are not just for today and not as part of a marketing effort, but really as, as an NFT program, that’s designed to be successful, not just in, in 40 days, but in 40 years.

No, that makes a lot of sense. At Vayner, how do you guys kind of define Web 3.0? What does that look like from your point of view? 

It’s a great question. And you know, I think that what it looks like right now, like connecting your wallet in the top right-hand side, is just such a little tiny part of it. That’s what it looks like today. What that’s gonna look like in the future is authenticating your access in various ways, much more blockchain-enabled than it is now. Think with the fundamental principles of decentralization being much more prevalent than they are in today’s sort of Web 2.0 world, which is pretty centralized. I can’t predict exactly what Web 3.0 is going to look like, but we see, you know, a huge future, probably not in the next year, but in the next few years around the metaverse I think there’s a lot that can happen with AR that still hasn’t happened. It’s really cool, but so few people use it right now that it’s just not even mainstream enough to really drive any massive behavior shifts. But yeah, I think that, you know, crypto is gonna be a big part of it. Blockchain is going to be a big part of it and NFTs will be a part of it, the metaverse will be a part of it. But it’s just, you know, fundamental, huge evolution of the way that people communicate and the way that people use what we see as the internet.

You know, one of the main things that got me excited personally about Web 3.0 is the ability to own. And this layer of what this gentleman, Jesse Walden, coins as the ownership economy and how tokenized assets allow people to basically be co-owners of the products and platforms that they use. And if you look at the traditional sense of Web 2.0, Web 2.5, is people are the products of the platform, versus the owners of the platform, like there’s starting to be in Web 3.0. Do you think that’s going to be like a point of hesitation, a point of friction when brands start to kind of understand, like, wait a minute, the people that we’ve been selling to and trying to provide products and services for now, they need to, co-own the things that we provide them value for, do you think that will resonate well? Do you think there’ll be some friction with that? And I only bring that up because it’s such a core primitive to like crypto, it’s such a core primitive to Web 3.0 as a whole. It’s such a corporate motive to NFTs. Buying into an artist, let’s say from an art point of view and following them, not only on their social timeline, but also having co-ownership in their assets and the things that they produce.

Do you think this concept of ownership is going to translate well in the corporate world, for example? 

Yeah. You know, it’s a relevant comment. And there are some products, some really successful NFT projects where you do co-own, but there are somewhere you don’t. Like you don’t have the IP rights to a CryptoPunk, like Larva Labs does. You know there are cases where what you’re saying is definitely true, but there are also cases where it isn’t. I think that co-ownership is more of participation. And of course, it’s important for brands to be thoughtful about the way that they’re entering the space and that they do so in the right way. But branding fundamentally like that’s just a consumer behavior, right? Like the reason that people are going to pay 40 ETH for a Bored ape is that that’s the new hot brand. That’s the Nike of the profile pack world. So I still think a lot of the principles that built value for brands in consumer goods as an example; you see that exact same consumer trend happening in the world of NFTs already. So I think brands just have to be smart around the way that they think about their IP and the value that they can bring to users. Because you know, if you’re into gaming, you’re with this space, Adam, you know, wearables, people are spending more for a Gucci virtual bag than they are for a real bag. So I think that, ownership, there’s a way to create value for both parties, which I think would always be our goal, right? Like, do I think that Gucci is going to be licensing their IP, and they’re not a client of ours, so I’ve no idea, but I don’t think it would be licensing their IP to every person who buys an NFT. But I think they would be limiting the number of pieces that they create to create rarity and scarcity and value which would then appreciate. And that still is valuable to the holders of that. But, you know, maybe some brands will be smart and very forward-thinking and license out some of their IP, but a lot of them are also multi-billion dollar companies and even like their own IP structures are set up in a crazy complicated way, global companies where you know, subsidiaries own certain things. So it’ll be interesting to see how that happens, but I don’t think that joint ownership of brand IP is a necessary requirement for brands to enter the space successfully. 

Adam: Interesting. You know, you’re seeing a lot of the ownership model kind of take place with defi protocols, people owning governance tokens, and voting on the future direction of a decentralized organization. Obviously, you’re also seeing artists issue their own art NFTs and merely just buying that piece of IP for the sake of buying it like they would buy any art piece. I don’t own the artist, rather I just buy to enjoy, you know, buy, to collect, buy to flip kind of thing. So there’s definitely multiple worlds and Web 3.0 has yet to be defined exactly. All we’re seeing is that it has to do with the next evolution of where digital is going.

I want to jump into more of the Vayner side of things even. What are you guys most excited about? Like what’s getting you guys going?

Well, what we’re excited about this afternoon is, you know, the demo that the Twitter engineer put up, we thought that was pretty fun. And you know, I’m excited to see what other social platforms do to follow. I think what we’re most excited about is the fact that it’s super day one and, you know, people are like, oh, we missed the boat on this. And that it’s like the boat, the boat hasn’t even like-it’s not even in the water. It literally felt like building the boat. Like, don’t worry, you didn’t. Because it’s so super early and that makes us excited because we can contest a lot of things. And some of the things we do have been slam dunks, and some haven’t, and that’s okay. And, you know, we get better every day, and we learn what’s resonating, and what’s also resonated a few months ago that doesn’t resonate anymore, and we have to stay sharp on these things. I’m excited and my team is excited around the potential that NFT provides both for celebrities, for brands, for IP owners, for new IP. There are just so many different things that you can do as part of the smart contract, and we’re excited how early we are and how much there still is to figure out because it gives us a lot to do and a lot to think about. And yeah, we love following the news. We’ve got you know, just this awesome squad of people who are super into the NFT space and really genuinely care about the community and, and how to get NFTs in the hands of more people. And the reason I bring up sort of the Twitter demo of, you know, they were doing like a demo showing how you could verify your profile picture and that that was your own avatar. It’s pretty cool because it’s not just going to be Twitter. It’s going to be Instagram. It’s going to be Tik Tok. It’s going to be like other social platforms will follow. Like Mark Zuckerberg has been very open about his designs on building the metaverse, whatever that means. I think that right now there’s such a relatively small group of like, you know, people flipping on Open Sea it’s, you know, 200,000 is like the latest estimate for sort of active users. And we know there’s 10 million out of another, which is just great. Still a very, very, very small number. We’re excited for that number to be sort of 200,000, 200 million and then 2 billion, you know, there’s just so much more to go. We want to spread NFTs to the world. 

So who are the ideal customers you see rallying into the NFT side that come to help? Is it big corporations? Is it individual internet personalities? Is it celebrities? Like who’s coming to you right now?

Okay. A lot of people are coming to us. I think our sweet spot and where we can probably drive the most value is helping current IP holders, whether they are athletes, mainstream, celebrities, influencers, people of interest creators, helping them understand of course brands, helping them understand the world of NFTs today, and then what might make sense for them on how to launch a program. Like, you know, what we did with Gary’s was one example, but what we did with Nastya , who’s the most followed YouTuber in the world, even though she’s seven years old, was a completely different program that was designed for her fans. And, you know, if you look at the artificial project that was designed for high-end art collectors, versus what we did for the US Open, which was designed for tennis fans, like there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all approach. And you know, I think that helping IP owners understand the space and then navigate it is really our role. But primarily like enterprise folks, I think we’re sort of caught up fast to help enterprise folks. And, because we have had a lot of demand, we’re kind of prioritizing those who’ve been in the Vayner network, like friends of Vayner are getting first dibs on us since we are still only about 30 people. So we have to prioritize where we feel we can really make an impact. 

Yeah, that makes sense. So from all these people that are coming to you, let’s say you’re focusing first on the Vayner family. What are some of the biggest, I guess, questions and or misconceptions that they have before entering the space? 

Yes, the questions are, where do we start? They will hear about what an NFT is and say, oh my God, we have to call Gary and the Vayner guys. We have to do something with them. And then, you know, I think misconceptions are, people don’t understand the amount of work and thought that it takes to really strategically launch an NFC program just because you’re a celebrity and you have 50 million followers doesn’t mean we can do an NFT launch next week. The reason VeeFriends has been so successful is if you look at, I mean, you can look at the floor in June or anywhere. Like that has built over time, that wasn’t something that was like a super hot initial drop. Yes. The initial drop was solid, but the value is really created on the backend and on secondary, even though it’s only been a few months. So I think that’s a misconception. If you’re a big name or someone, you know, a household name, that this will be a success. There’s plenty of celebrity and brand NFT drops that have been a total flop, and we are trying to help advise at least friends of Vayner; even if they don’t do it with us, we can be friendly and help them think about the space in the right way. Because the thing about the blockchain, the beauty and the curse of the blockchain is everyone can see it. Everybody knows. So it’s important to be really thoughtful around it and make sure that your first impression is strong because it does matter. 

Adam: Yeah, but how do you teach that thoughtfulness? When it’s so easy to fall short of all the cash grabs that are happening in the scams that are happening, that are setting a bitter taste a little bit. Obviously, there’s a big picture here. This is a big opportunity. How do you guys find yourself educating these people to say that this is a long-term play? Like Gary makes it explicitly vividly known that this is a 45-year, what’s his number that he throws out there, 49, 39-year plan? Do you know what I mean?

How do you communicate that same feeling, that same emotion, that same level of long-term thinking to these corporations or celebrities or brands that are trying to issue NFTs?

Yeah. Transparently, I show examples. I show like, Hey, this works, this is how this worked. This is how this works. These are like 10 successes across categories, across music, sports, art, you know, whatever. And then we show some notable successes, and you’re like, “Hey, like actually, the same week that Coca-Cola dropped an NFT and sold it for 600 grand, another very, very, very well-known American brand dropped an NFT that sold for $600”. So there’s like a huge spectrum. And you can see the difference and the thought that needs to go into it in order for it to hit. Because I think particularly on the celeb side, they’ll just be like, “Hey, I’m doing an NFT. I want to get $20 million from this”. It’s like in order to get $20 million, you have to really invest and like to educate your community. And these are parts that we need to go to. And I mean, there’s a lot of operationalization that goes into launching an NFT if you are an established company. Because there’s no consumer regulation, there’s anti-money laundering. There is, you know, potentially needing the ability to pay in credit card versus cryptocurrency. There is the requirement that you’re actually holding a wallet that’s holding that key. Yeah, there’s real thought that needs to go into that. And I think that’s also another thing that we spend a lot of time doing is building the right operational infrastructure for some of these projects to be successful in 45 years. So I think with Gary’s project, it’s a little bit, you know, we’re not a publicly-traded company, it’s not the same level of scrutiny, and yeah, we have a little bit more flexibility than some of our partners who are much bigger international entities that you know, of course require a lot of diligence behind every partner they’re working with. And there’s, unfortunately, some nefarious stuff that does happen. And we want to make sure they’re super clear about that because there are some real risks. 

You guys are increasingly working with more of the mainstream crowd that’s trying to transition into this new crypto-cool kids club, you know? When do you imagine we’re going to see the majority of fortune 500 companies either holding an NFT, issuing an NFT or holding some type of crypto asset on their balance sheet?

Maybe five years.

Why five years? Because some people like to put things in a 5 to 10 years time frame. Why are you leaning more on the five years?

I think that there will need to be maybe one or two players that drive a big shift in consumers. If consumers are there, companies will get there. Like if this becomes a thing where a lot of consumers care, then the companies will have to support it. And you do see some companies taking cryptocurrency already. It’s just a space where there isn’t a lot of precedent when it comes to law. And I mean, you probably know too, taxation. It’s not very clear right now. So when councils and legal teams are doing due diligence, it’s hard to have a very clear direction of this. It’s not black and white necessarily. Consumer adoption will need to drive it to a point where there is clear sort of legal guidance and companies can be set up to do this. I definitely think they will like a hundred percent. And then it also, you know, starts little by little the same way, like companies started their social media pages or their websites. Like it starts a little by little and then, then they start selling e-com, and you know, now it’s a supernormal thing, but even 10 years ago, it wasn’t.

Adam: Yeah. You know, I can’t wait until corporations and big brands like the Nike’s of the world start realizing the potential of opening and issuing token gated communities. Right. So once they have their assets in place, and then they’re creating micro-communities or macro communities around these assets and the people that invested into, whatever it is they sold, you know? And I think down the line, Like obviously we saw at least like shifts in how people use social media, whether it was from Instagram to Snapchat, to Tik Tok. And now, these new digital assets are proving to be interesting ways to not only foster but create new communities and introduce new people to your brand. And they’re doing that by having token-gated Discords, right. And issuing proposals and having their consumers or their customers vote on things for the brand, you know, and having a more of an active voice.

I forgot where I read this, but there were some stats, and you’d probably know way better than I do, so please correct me if I’m wrong. But brands are increasingly after having a direct to consumer experience, and really capitalizing on that intimate level of relationship that they can form. And I think NFTs are the medium and the primitive to do that. Would you agree, would you disagree? How do you feel about that? 

I couldn’t agree more with you. So direct to consumer, just for it to give like a little context, the people who, who might be listening, there are a number of, I think in the last five years, there’s been a big shift to brands going more directly to consumers. But if you think about it in the past, like say you were buying a mattress, you would go to the mattress store, and you would try out many different brands, and then you would buy it from the mattress store. Or if you’re buying, you know, a bag of Halloween candy, you got it from the grocery store. And you were, you know, buying many different things and paying the grocery store. So if you think about it, if you were actually a mattress brand or Halloween candy brand, you weren’t actually in direct communication with your consumer. That transaction happened through a sort of intermediary, which would be their mattress store, the grocery store. And then that started to break down. Right? You see a lot of direct-to-consumer everything, whether it’s a vitamin brand or a skincare brand. Some of those types of brands started this revolution where, Hey, you can save 40%. You can save that grocery store margin, or you can save that mattress store margin and also get better pricing and also learn way more about your consumers directly if you have that relationship with them. So this then sparked a kind of mass movement for not just niche brands, but like bigger corporations to not only sell through retailers. But to sell directly to consumers where they could often, you know, have a better understanding of what their consumers wanted and blah, blah, blah. And there were some, a better experience because then, oh, your mattress ripped, you can go directly back to people who made it, not to some intermediary. So that was really cool and NFTs. That’s like the perfect place to not just have that relationship, but have it an authenticated way that’s transparent and sort of provable that you have purchased this on the blockchain. And I think loyalty programs that are powered by NFTs are certainly going to become way more mainstream because loyalty like I remember I was like in the Britney Spears fan club and I was like 10 right, posters, nails. And that behavior isn’t new, it’s a behavior that’s existed forever, but now you can authenticate that with NFTs and have, instead of shipping posters, you can say, Hey, download this link or join this virtual concert or whatever, and have that token game, which is just such a smarter way to do it. I think the same way with like, you know, loyalty programs like savings cards or whatever. Like you can do all of that through NFTs. And because everything is going to be powered by smart contracts, it’s just so much more scalable and efficient. 

Adam: It’s almost as if, like, if you’re already talking about Britney Spears, which part of me wants to film an entire episode of understanding, like your love for Brittney stare. All of these like big media music, publishers, and recording record labels that manage all these artists. You know, I think it’s going to get to a point where they need to start waking up and realize there’s a level of fandom that comes from NFTs and that I was able to buy a juice world NFT while he was still on sound cloud, and prove that I was a juice world fan before he became juice world and develop that level of fandom, that provability and showcasing my love for something. That’s the equivalent of you buying a Brittany Spears poster, but now you’re able to prove it. Beyond just like crippling beyond just like getting old and the color fading. That lives immutably on a shared ledger on a shared internet network that’s literally taking over the world, right? And I think like all of these utility-driven use cases are things that brands are gonna wake up to. And I think there are reasons why we saw it kind of develop on the individual artists’ level, but like really talented graphic designers. And now we’re seeing that shift into the music scene in artists, tokenizing their albums and issuing shares of their songs or fundraising for EPs.

Where are NFTs going to go next? And how are brands going to like, take that and hold it by the neck, for example, you know, and like make the lead and make the noise around that? Do you have any thoughts on that? 

Yeah. So I think the first thing that brands need to shift into doing is instead of one-off drops, which is what you see a lot of today, it’s like, Hey, one job. Like, we’re just doing this as a campaign. I think it starts with fundamentally launching an NFT program, which is designed for long-term success. And like, you can use Adam Bomb as a reference. Cause it’s probably like the first brand who’s done something, it’s part of the hundreds, which is a streetwear brand. To me, they’re the first actual brand that is launching a full-on program. You’ve seen a lot of flirting dabbling, but this is like an actual, you know, committed program. And you can see it on their site. You get access to things like the t-shirt. You actually do have ownership if, you know, your bomb is put on a piece of merchandise, you actually get a commercial rupture of that and some cool stuff that’s a little bit more in that line. I think you’ll see a lot of that. Dropping an initial NFT program. That’s kind of the key that can give you access to different things. And brands have access to a lot of cool shit. Like they sponsor leagues, they get free tickets. They have celebrity endorsement partnerships. They have new flavors that they launch. And I think a lot of that they can tie up in the value of the NFT. And you know, you might be a huge fan of Juice WRLD. Some people are a huge fan of bud light. You know, people love it. And you know, if that’s a way for you to reward your community and give to people who are in on stuff. You know, I’ve worked for brands for my whole career. And like people line up, like, you know, they sleep outside, like in the wet storms. I was going to say, yeah, people do that for I-phones. And like everybody knows that people like to wait outside for Black Friday sales, like in the sleet, people line up around the block when like we’re launching new flavors for different brands. So I feel like that is awesome. If you have the token, then you get first access, which is already a huge value. And then you can get special perks. Like when we have an extra club level, Or, you know, we can create so much value on the backend. It’s so much more beyond just the primary sale. And I think that’s what you’ll see brands do is realize that we have like, Hey, you want to have Leo Messi do a private chat with you. Like, that’s something we could give to a holder. You know, if a brand is sponsoring him, there are 1,000,001 ways we can create value for our holders. 

Adam: Yeah. Like, think about that in a function. Let’s say Budweiser was to do a collab with Messi, and only the top 1% of Budweiser NFT holders would get access to this secret group chat that would unlock that only them and Messi could join, and then they would be in that group chat, and then that channel would close, and they’d be back into the greater sense of the discord server, you know? Like unlocking perks and utility and levels of access based on your level of membership and your level of, I guess, stake in the community is definitely something that I’m excited to see brands go out and do. And it’s almost as if these NFTs, like there are layers to this. They peel like an onion. And I think many people are going to be experiencing NFTs as a top-level funnel of getting people just to have a membership badge. A level of loyalty, a level of rewards that then kind of funnels them down into more purchasing layers and upselling them within the ecosystem. I saw this prevail primarily with this guy. His name is Mad Dog Jones. He did a really cool NFT drop, and he was the first person I saw to do this, where he had one drop on Nifty gateway, and then he did a special drop just for his NFT holders that only they could buy, if they had these certain tokens in their wallet, they get access to it. And it’s almost like he was bundling them in more and more and more, more and more.

How do you think brands are going to be approaching their web3 funnel? 

You can look at what we did with Gary’s project, which isn’t necessarily a funnel. I mean, because we are sort of communicating that on the outside. It was like, Hey, do you want to FaceTime frog or a core? And obviously, there’s a price differential there, but there’s an access differential as well. And we did various ones. Some are courtside, which is like, you can go to a game courtside with Gary, and some are hangout Hawk, where you can be on a group hangout. So I love the way you put that with the onion and the tiers. Cause I think we think about it a lot the same way. Like we know that not everyone will be able to pay for courtside, and even a VeeFriend, in general, is a big investment. But yeah, I think that that’s probably the right way to think about it. We often think in three tiers it’s like core, which is basically maybe you get the collectible and some kind of group-level then there’s maybe the rare which would be, you get some kind of access. You get some kind of perk that’s a little bit more rare and unusual. And then of course there’s the ultra-rare. One of the ones that are, you know, really incredible experiences that money can’t buy kind of thing.

Yeah. How do you imagine the evolution of creator-to-brand collaboration? For being over time with the adoption of these digital assets? And just to add a little bit more to that, let’s say from the point of view of creators, we’re seeing a trend of them tokenizing themselves and launching their own creator coins, and building their own micro-economies within their communities. How do you imagine brands kind of taking advantage of these influencer circles or influencer communities and shilling their products into these micro-groups? 

So, I wouldn’t say taking advantage. We never want to take advantage. We want to create. 

Adam: That’s not the right word. You’re right. 

Create mutual value. And I’ll just give you one reference that we can speak to you of what my advisor Tom Sachs did. You know the Tom Sachs like rocket factory project is amazing, but it has like 10,000 followers, versus you have like Budweiser, which has millions. So I think that the right collaborations come when it’s of value to both parties, and it’s like, okay, great. You get a lot of distribution, and you get a lot more reach, you know, a lot more awareness for your product in a more mainstream level, if you do some kind of collaboration. And that one was natural because like the rocket literally said Budweiser on it and that wasn’t planned. It was just like something that happened and it kind of tied. So I think that’s one example, and I think of brands the same way that we did Peeps. Like okay, Pepsi with peeps. You know, that was just like a fun thing. I think co-marketing works. It always has. And always will. And when you’re able to bring both creators together to co-create something cool, that’s when it’s the most valuable and fun. And you got value for those existing communities. I think the smart way to do it would be also like, great, so you should be giving a value to the existing token holders, that’s like the joint thing, and then you can launch your own thing and maybe get some credibility in the space. I think that’s a really smart and really strategic way for brands to enter the space and build that authentic connection and credibility, rather than just launching a cringey drop that, you know, sells for 0.2 ETH on Open Sea. 

One thing that I kind of see happening down the line is all these creator communities that have their fan bases that are co-owners of the community itself that have some form of a voice in determining the path of that community. I think we’re going to see buy-in from brands that they’re going to buy into their tokens. They’re going to buy and have a heavy stake into their market caps, for example, and be core contributors in developing their communities. And I think this is a really strategic play for brands who have a lot of money, but how can people do this? Like how can brands do this if they’re like a startup, and they’re trying to tap into these micro-economies and these micro-communities? They’re niche, but powerful within themselves. What do you think is a good approach? 

I think it’s almost easier if you’re a startup cause you don’t have a, you know, to worry about being a publicly-traded company and all the shit that goes along with that. I think if you’re a startup, I would be thinking much more like, how can I make NFTs part of my core business from the get-go. Not like how I can retrofit my multi-hundred-year-old business to now include NFTs. I would think like great, I wouldn’t even launch a loyalty program that wasn’t based on NFTs. Like, I’d be like, okay, awesome, my tickets are going to be based on NFTs. This is how I’m going to fundraise. This is how I’m going to have my loyalty programming. I think if you’re forward-thinking you can embed NFTs into your business much more proactively versus reactively. So it’s an incredibly exciting time for startups to think about NFTs and, you know, set yourselves up to take crypto, immediately. And set up collaborations with different NFT groups already. And there’s so many cool things that you can do. I would be super jazzed to be at a startup right now if I was passionate about NFTs because you can really build that in at the forefront versus trying to fit it into an old school model. 

I want to pivot for a minute and talk about this $25 million fund that you guys set up at VaynerNFT. Can you talk to me more about that? What are those millions of dollars going to go towards? Are you guys investing in startups that are pushing the needle forward? Like where’s that going? 

Yeah. So that is actually outside of Vayner NFT. That is the Vayner fund which is an important clarification. But I think that actually, that’s provided us with a lot of interesting understanding of the market and access. There’s a guy called Phil Toronto who runs that fund for Gary. But, like you said before, we kind of are a one-stop-shop. So, sometimes people will be pitching me something. I’m like, Hey, you guys should talk to the Vayner fund or vice versa, right? Like they hear an interesting pitch or a solution, and they’re like, Hey, you should talk to VaynerNFT because they might be able to use what you guys are building and partner with you. So I think that Gary is a very successful angel investor, and there’s no secret about that. He likes to be in on things very early and help sort of shape the direction of it. And I think through his investments, Gary gets a really good sense of what works, what doesn’t. He believes in investing in founders that he thinks are game-changers at an early stage, and yeah. I think it’s 25 million in some NFT programs has been quite exciting and something that Gary will probably continue growing with Phil, but slightly outside of the VaynerNFT world.

Cool. I love to hear it. I’m excited for you guys. It’s an exciting time to be in the space. I’m glad to see all the energy and positive vibes coming and from your team. The success that you guys have had, I’m here for it, you know, so I keep at it. Before I let you go, can you let us know where we can find you where we can learn more? If people wanted to do something with VaynerNFT, where could they go? Give me the whole spiel.

Awesome. So I’m Avery Akkineni. Long last name, but you can find me on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, Discord, all the places. So that’s me. And VaynerNFT is VaynerNFT.co. You can find us at our website. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on Discord. You can find us on Instagram. So, reach us in whatever form of DM is convenient for you, email, all that. We are happy to explore new partnerships. Whether some of your listeners have an NFT program that they’re looking to find people to work with or brands or celebrities, we’re happy to help. And yeah, super excited to be on your podcast, Adam. I love your stuff. I love what you guys are up to and am honored to be here. Thank you all for taking the time to listen. 

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 2 episode 14 welcomes Jeff Marsilio and Jordan Lyall of Nifty’s, who are building the ultimate destination for creators, collectors, and curators.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Web2 social media vs. Web3
• On-chain curation
• Building social products in web3
• Art collabs via Common Canvas
• Introducing Damien Hirst and SpaceJam to NFTs
• What will eat web3?

…and so much more.

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Thank you to Season 2’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

4. Celo – https://celo.org/

5. PrimeDAO – https://www.prime.xyz/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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Jeff and Jordan, welcome to Mint. I’m so excited to have you guys on let’s just jump right into it. I want to save our time. So Jeff and Jordan, give me a quick brief about yourselves. We can start with Jeff and then and then go to.

Jeff Marsillo: Well, I’m the CEO of Nifty’s and before Jordan and I and some other co-founders started Nifty’s.

I was at the NBA for the last eight years where I was senior vice president of new media, which meant my group was responsible for things like partnerships with social media companies and app distribution and digital content strategy. And one of the areas that we were. Responsible for was you know emerging technologies and how they might impact the fan experience.

And as part of that, we created a blockchain working group that ended up creating NBA top shot with dapper labs. And of course you know, they did that for labs. I think that all the hard work and, and we also had some good luck with timing, but it ended up being a an NFT. And for me, what that meant was that I got a front row seat to NFT’s entering the main stream.

And I came to appreciate that, not only is it an extraordinary revolution in the way that people can engage with creativity, create, and, of course, own things on the internet, But it was also still pretty early and there just was still a lot of opportunity. So I met Jordan at around that time, you know, just this last winter.

And we got to talking and we came up with Nifty’s and here we are.

Give me a quick brief about yourselves. Who are you and what were you doing before crypto?

Jordan Lyall: Thanks, man. Prior to joining up with Jeff and the rest of the founding team I was at consensus, so I spent two years at consensus as the product lead for Defi. So I ran several teams that innovated in the Defi space in the early days of Defi Created several projects around risk within Defi and we issued a couple token staking platforms. Prior to that, I was a chief product officer at a Dex startup called total. I know your former employer is really close to total invested. Prior to that, I sold a web 2 startup to a company called Jib jab, a big entertainment, digital media company in LA.

So I worked on, you know, fund media, digital content for a few years. Then I was doing blockchain for three or four years. Now I’m doing fun digital content on the blockchain with NFT’s. So it’s a fun kind of career arc for me. And You know, without bearing the lead too much. More recently, about a year ago, we just celebrated one year of meme.

We launched the meme project in August of 2020, and that really led to innovation with Defi but also with NFT’s and that kicked off this project in the community and Jumped into the NFT community with both feet and got to experience the amazing community here. And it really, you know, taught me about building for not just, financial tools, but being able to have, have like creativity come into play and building maybe more some of the things that I learned in my startup and then selling to jib, jab, and working at jib jab about building consumer products for the first time on a web three stack. And then we’ve come full circle here and we’re building something with that tries to take that delicate balance of focused on new users who may not be, who may not know what a, what a private key is and introduce them to something that Changes the game, to use that phrase.

 It’s something certainly exciting. The ability to own content and own digital content for the first time and transact and provide incentives. And now for the first time, it’s like known IP as we do several big brand partnerships. So it’s super exciting. We’re having a lot of fun.

Adam Levy: You guys are two OGs in the space. And I really do respect and applaud your progress so far, which kind of leads me to this question. You’ve obviously seen a lot of the development of the NFT, the space over the few years. What’s the current state as of now, where are we seeing like, just to throw some metrics out there, we’re seeing open sea achieve a billion dollars in transaction volume in a month.I think a couple of days ago it was like a hundred million dollars. Crazy amounts of money. And also keeping in mind, a lot of these NFTs are high ticket items, which also contributes to it. Right?

So what’s the current state? I’d love to get both of your points of views.

Jordan Lyall: For me, it’s still early and we’re really experimenting..

We’re seeing a little bit of FOMO. We’re seeing people that are buying NFTs just because they think they may go up tomorrow. So there is a ton of hype, whether it’s justified or not. I think so. And then what’s super cool is that we’re seeing some of these big brands and some of these maybe more experienced and established product builders enter the space.

You know, the first couple of years it’s always developers building for developers. Now we’re actually starting to see well-funded companies. Big brands, big budgets enter the space and we’re seeing it for the consumer experience that it can be.

Jeff Marsillo: Well said, I mean, I look at some of the numbers and there’s, there’s something that’s kind of out of, out of whack in a way. There are extraordinary sales volumes though. But the numbers of individual people who are actually engaging with NFTs as a medium, whereas the technology is still really small.

So I think you’ve got a group of passionate, early adopters who are willing to, you know, put up with some of the complications and difficulties of engaging in a new space, some of the risks of engaging in a new space, but you’re seeing the average person. And frankly, the average company kind of waits on the sideline until they feel like it’s ready, the space is ready for them to enter it. And, you know, even the NBA, obviously a big brand and maybe a little less risk averse than other big brands. So relatively early in this game But with, with top shot, the numbers are in some ways extraordinary, but still relative to the billions of people in the world who are NBA fans, the number of people who are engaging with NBA top shot, I think, is pretty small.

So you know, that’s kind of where we come in. I mean, I think a big part of it is just making it a lot easier to use, removing some of the Obstacles some of the some of the jargon simplifying that, and then bringing in the opportunity to be social around it. So it’s not just about what Jordan was talking about, right.

Speculating on value. It can also be. Joining communities don’t get me wrong. Community is like the name of the game and the NFT space, but there hasn’t really been a home, a native home for that community to emerge. So we are trying to build one of those homes and really emphasize engagement, really emphasize, ease of use and invite everybody who’s on the sorta, you know, the sidelines to enter the space and have fun with everybody else who’s already here. Just being creative and engaging with this creativity.

Adam Levy: Agreed. The current state of NFTs from my point of view is it’s very, multi-platform right. You’re living across discord. You’re living across Twitter. We’ve been slowly dabbling into Instagram a little bit, but it feels very scattered because you also have to go to open sea and to all these different NFT platforms. So I think this kind of gets me to my next question here, I’d love for you to kind of build upon what is the grand vision for Nifty’s here.

I know you touched upon it and talked about more of a central hub for NFT’s, but what does that look like? What does that really mean?

Jeff Marsillo: You know essentially I kind of think about it as a difficult to analogize to current examples because currently in the world of web 2.0, we talk about marketplaces and we talk about social networks and social media companies. And really what if these want to be something like a merger of those two? So Jordan and I will often call it a social marketplace, but it is a place. And by the way, the reason, the reason being. The distinction between commerce and content is by definition blurred. When you talk about NFT’s and if these are content and commerce.

And so we believe that the complete experience that isn’t don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that in the future there’s just one NFT home and that’s it. I don’t think it’s like that. I think it’s like video or even bigger than that, where there will be many, many homes, but a really complete experience is going to need to embrace commerce and embrace, embrace social.

And that’s what we want to do. We want to be a marketplace that has a home for communities. And then as a place where the average person and the average brand can come and engage with this new media.

Adam Levy: Yeah. It’s interesting because like, you look at web 2 social media right now, they kind of, they use the user as the product, leveraging their data, promoting advertisements to them, etc. And when you’re talking about social media being web 3ified quote on quote you’re kind of like, you need to, re-imagine what that business model looks like. Right. Instead of exploiting user data, we’re seeing a lot of trends of platforms, putting users at the core of what they’re doing, giving them governance tokens, and making them core contributors to how the platforms move forward. Jordan, obviously, they have a lot of experience with that with me and kind of the rise of meme and how that started from literally a tweet. And now it’s this grandiose platform, right? So there’s a lot of history guys.

How do you guys view the business models kind of evolving for these web three or social media platforms? And you can take this either from your point of view, what you guys are doing or how platforms in the future are going to be leveraging this new form of user data.

Jeff Marsillo: I mean, I think it’s, it’s a super challenging question. I very briefly I think that we don’t know exactly how it will evolve. We have some ideas about how we’re going to approach it. But one of the things that’s just extraordinary about NFCS is they really open up the possibilities and a whole bunch of new directions that just, you know what, weren’t there with web 2.0 web 2.0, sort of inevitable that you that you end up, you know, essentially monetizing engagement through.

Because you know, the unit of media, the individual video, the individual photograph, or whatever was static and not very smart, right? Like you just, it’s just a video with NFTs. The unit of media is itself programmable, so you can put rules. That relate to how you transact with it, how you engage with it how it makes money, how it pays money out, how the rights are managed, that are just almost infinitely flexible.

So what it means then is everything is kind of possible now. And probably what you will see is you will see you know, kind of cornucopia of platforms and their means of monetizing engagement and monetize. Content for nifty is where we’re starting out is where a lot of other platforms have started out.

We monetize by by taking transaction fees because people are right now are buying and selling. Yeah. We don’t have any plans to simply monetize data. Like you suggested that just isn’t anywhere in our thinking or on our, in our roadmap. But I do think that our way means of monetization could potentially evolve beyond the simple transaction fee down the road. But I don’t know exactly where it might take us.

Adam Levy: You know, one thing that I like to think about. All user data is public, right? Everything. Now on the blockchain, it’s all like anonymized per se. But you can build interesting narratives around wallets, Based off the currencies that they hold based off past transactions that they’ve made. Like the first thing that comes to mind is, and I use them a lot in mantas friends with benefits, That’s like a social community that if you hold these tokens, like the 77 tokens. You could make an assumption that this user is part of this community, right? If you hold meme to an extent, right? So meme tokens, you can make some assumptions that that user has some involvement in the meme community. If you look at his past transactions and you see that he’s maybe used either nifty or open sea, or this platform or that platform, you can kind of build a narrative about where the expertise you’re actually able to build is like decentralized social graphs. And build narratives around users. And I see Jordan, you’re smiling and you’re nodding your head. I feel like you’ve thought about this before from a product point of view.

How do you feel about the role of on-chain data in building products?

Jordan Lyall: No, you’re hitting the nail on the head and I’m really glad you went there because you’re right. It’s public information. It’s all on the blockchain. Anyone can easily see what a wallet holds, pick any wallet and you’ll be able to just, okay, they hold these tokens, these these NFTs and you can kind of.

You can kind of find out more about their identity or identity for maybe for the first time is, is on public display. You just can’t really access it at all. One thing that’s always kind of been the through-line through everything we build is the ability to showcase your collection. Right now we’ve got a playlist where silver surfer has identified the top NFTs in his own personal collection.

We’re really starting to scratch the surface of what it means to be able to curate an NFT gallery. And it doesn’t have to just be for people like SilverSurfer with a lot of ease to burn, right? Like he’s, he’s one use case. Another one is I don’t have to collect physically own these NFTs, but I’m able to curate and put together a playlist and match up different art styles and But it all comes back to the user type.

And for the first time we can, now, when someone connects their wallets and fifties, we know a lot about them, not in a super-secret way where we’ve, we’ve been spying on them. Although there may be some education that’s needed as web two users may not be familiar with some of these practices. And we want to be as compliant and user-friendly as possible in everything we do, but you’re almost building out the.

Web three identity for everybody that connects to the site and you’re able to, Hey, I see you like space jam. We’ll have you, have you checked out tough shots or vice versa, or you’re able to identify the user before they even take an action on your platform. So I think it’s about combining kind of these, these things that we’ve been building in web to some of these Integrations and practices about really building a worthwhile product that provides a lot of value and then applying it to the unique tools that we get in web three.

Adam Levy: Yeah, you know, this moment in time really reminds me of a very iconic period in tech history. Do you guys remember that whole scene? I was really young during this time, but I kind of remember it starting to develop. Apple introduced the iTunes store and the ability to buy songs for a dollar 29, right. Or at 99 cents. And their main reasoning is that the problem they were trying to solve is one making streaming more accessible to the end-user, without them having to store it, all the songs and illegally download stuff. And they realize there’s actually a market for people who want to support artists and purchasing. And that’s obviously before streaming came out, etc. Now people just pay a one-month fee to access unlimited songs, but the point being a lot of that moment of time caught, it reminds me of where we are today with NFTs, right. The purchase and consumption of media.

Do you guys ever like have a reference point in times when you’re building out Nifty’s? And kind of reflect, like, why are people spending so much, what does this level of ownership mean to the end-user and how can we integrate that? What do you guys kind of think about that process when building it out?

Jeff Marsillo: You’re getting deep here. It’s a I think first and foremost, it’s, it’s social in the sense that all of these things have valid. Only in connection or in relation to other people, how we feel about other people, how we want other people to feel about us. Jordan was talking about how your wallet can almost be your identity.

And that’s really because NFTs are a form of self-expression, right? You’re you are, you are expressing something about your preferences and it’s not enough, frankly, on Nifty’s you can make playlists. And those playlists can showcase things that you are just interested in, things that you own, things that you created, but you don’t have to own their creative them to make a playlist.

And we think playlists are great and it got to be a great way to get into this space, but it’s not the same thing as owning an NFT because when you own the NFT, you’re saying something else you’re saying I have invested time. I’ve invested in. I’ve invested myself in this, this unit of culture that I’m now showing off.

And so that I think that investment and that sort of showing off, go hand in hand and have cultural meaning for people. I’ve got a book on my shelf over here, somewhere called culture and consumption. It’s basically, it’s basically it’s premise is that. All of our choices, all of our choices in commerce, all of our choices and you know, our commercial goings about our cultural decisions.

They’re decisions that we make about how we fit in with other people and how we express our support for other people and how we express ourselves. So, you know, look, I think that we referenced that, that point about human nature. And everything that we do, it’s really the foundation of what nifty is, is and you can look back and there are examples of this through time.

I mean, it goes back to probably the first caveman who found a shiny rock and hung it around his neck. Right. I mean, that’s it’s really not very different from that. Intrinsic need to have something valuable that says something about yourself and show it off to other people that goes back way, way earlier than.

Adam Levy: No, for sure. I think I only really liked that example because you were able to get songs for free. And now Apple came out with this concept of being able to buy them. Right. And you’re able to save pictures and in torrent videos that are technical enough to use also for free, but people see the value of owning it. Right? And it, it really causes us to really reimagine, rethink. What is value on the internet, especially for things that you can’t touch and you can’t feel, you can really only see, I mean, you can get like intimate objects and like frame your collectibles and you can technically touch them, but you know where I’m going with this, this whole movement of like digital ownership, digital scarcity, so many it’s, it’s very new.

Jeff Marsillo: Well, It’s very common and it was very common in the physical world. I mean, if you look at basketball cards or baseball cards, they’re just pictures that are commonly available on 2 cents worth of cardboard generally. But there’s something about the.

And it’s, again, it’s a social construct, something about the fact that these are the ones, these real ones are the ones that were authentically distributed by the person who was responsible for creating it right by the creator, in the sense of the NBA being the creator of basketball. So that just translates to the internet.

What what’s different now with blockchain, of course. And this goes back to, I think something Jordan said. Is ownership is now possible in a way that never was before we feel again, that we really own something on the internet now, because nobody can take it away from us, unlike iTunes or unlike Kindle, where when they shut that app down, you don’t get to take that song and bring it somewhere else.

That’s really their song. You’re borrowing it here. Now the database of ownership is distributed. Nobody can take that away from you. You can pass it onto your grandkids or do what you want with it. That’s the that’s I think the big difference here. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to pivot for a minute into your collaborations and all the projects that you guys are working on, which is super exciting and super mainstream. The first one that comes to mind is Damien Hirst. That’s like selfishly, one of my personal favorite collabs, seeing that documentary come to life, seeing that piece of art come to life and then his first experimentation in I guess dabbling with NFTs was through Nifty’s. I’d love to hear the story of how that kind of came together and what was that process like working with one of the most, I guess, famous artists of our time.

Jordan Lyall: Yeah, it was an interesting one to kind of kick off the platform with right. The Damien Hirst project was organized by Henny and they’re an investor in the fifties. It was collaborated on by consensus and their blockchain. Which is our exclusive side chain platform at the moment.

And I was really close to consensus having just left consensus to start this company. And it just all lined up perfectly that, Hey, we’ve got this, this project that we’re thinking about at the top artist, we’re going to need a secondary market and they need the marketplace. One thing led to another and it just, it just made a lot of sense.

It was an interesting solution to how it kinda came about. The Damien Hirst project was launching at the same time that NIF DS was launching at the same time the Palm network was launching. So it makes for fun stories. We’ll have to have over a beer one day, but I think it was really, it’s a really fun project.

Not just the fact that top artists, maybe the wealthiest artists, living artists chose to do something with NFTs and to in some way, partnering with nifty. But the project is innovative on its own. In a few months, everyone that holds a Damien Hirst tender as they call it, we’ll be able to decide, okay, do you keep it as an NFT or do you turn it into a physical NFT, thus burning?

The NFT. Do you turn it into a physical piece that you can receive in the mail, the choice of physical or digital? It’s a really fun project. It was something great to kind of put our brand next to those brands next to Damien Hirst. Yeah, it’s a tremendous project. And we’re excited about the future.

Jeff Marsillo: Look, I just think it’s a, I didn’t think about it this way at the moment you were asking the question, Adam, but it’s kind of the perfect. Illustration of what we were just talking about, right? Because it is this, this art project that explores and sort of teases out what we mean by ownership and what we mean by nonfungibility and fungibility, and the fact that it kind of forces this choice between physical ownership and digital ownership.

I think the hypothesis of that experiment is at least my hypothesis would be many people are going to choose digital. And when you put physical ownership against digital ownership and many people choose digital ownership, you’re kind of demonstrating, Hey, enter ownership on the internet is really here, right?

People have chosen among the two, they had an equal choice and they chose digital. I know that’s what I’m going to choose. I think that’s what’s going to be.

That factor is also super dependent on who you’re targeting, right? Because if you go more to the normie crowd and you still try to explain to them what digital ownership means, they still don’t get it, they’re not there yet. If you go to the crypto crowd, obviously they’re going to choose, you know, the digital one, or at least most. And that was actually my next question. What do you guys imagine being the outcome of this? Right? Because it’s a perfect test, a user test, right. To see what they value. And Jeff, you say they’re going to lean more towards the digital side.

Jeff Marsillo: I don’t really know if a lot of people are going to choose digital. I mean, I, I think, especially with all the excitement around NFT’s, I don’t really know. I never really speculate on these kinds of things because people surprise you. You know, I think one of the cool things about this experiment is they just made the choice available.

Now it’s up to everybody who bought one to make that choice. And we’ll see.

Jordan Lyall: To be honest, I think a majority of people will choose digital. Okay. I think just. It’s a really, really tough question. But I think with the amount of people that are crypto native crypto collectors that participated in that, I think enough people see the value.

Several people have more than one. So we may see a situation where it was like buy two and burn one. So you get one of each. But just for the benefits of like, why, why are NFTs cool where you can display them anywhere digitally there’s a market for them. I can easily sell an NFT a lot easier than I can an 8 x 10 print out, right. There may be a secondary market for the, for the actual printed thing that emerges. But just, you know, buy NFTs in general.

Jeff Marsillo: Really good point, because the way the experiment is, is designed. Everybody owns the digital version for. So you’re forced to experience all the benefits that Jordan just described.

Some period of time, you’re going to be able to show it off digitally. You’re going to have a liquid secondary market, and then you’re going to have to decide, do you want to go back to fiscal? That’s really what the decision is. Do you want to forego all those benefits of NFTs and go backward? And now I, and then I hear Jordan say it that way.

I think he’s got a great point. And I think, you know, probably most people will decide to stick with digital.

Yeah. You know, another cool project that you guys brought to life is the collaboration with space jam, which was also super cool. I know I fangirl over it. I got all the free ones and the one you can purchase too. My brother also went crazy over it being the basketball fan that he is. How was the process of bringing that to life? Two very different projects. One’s like a mainstream franchise. The other one is a very famous iconic artist. Right? How was that like, tell me the story behind that. How did that come to form?

Jeff Marsillo: Yeah, sure. Well look, one thing that I learned when I was at the MBA working on NFTs and working on top shot and all that stuff, is that yes. I mean, of course there’s this enormous opportunity for brands and companies to engage with fans in new ways, but. Even today, and this was true then, and I think still now there aren’t actually that many platforms for brands to do that.

And so, you know, you could do what we did and go work with a great, great company like dapper labs and build one, build a platform for, you know, your brand. Beyond building one yourself and all that investment and all that risk and all that time. There, there, there haven’t really been platforms to engage for brands, to engage with their audience in a large kind of scale way.

So that’s, you know, obviously been the pitch that we’ve been making to the market. Like. You could go on any number of marketplaces and you can do a drop and you can sell, you know, one of ones and you can probably make a lot of money if you’re a big brand. But what we know is this. Is that for most of these brands, a million fans is worth more than a million dollars, right?

And when you’re trying to market a movie like space jam, right, with billions of dollars behind it and multi million dollars in expectations of revenue to make a million bucks on it and selling NFTs is not your primary objective. What you really want to do is you want to get a whole community of people to engage with the brand, get excited about it.

And then there are lots of other ways that you’re going to make money, including selling tickets and maybe including selling entities. So that’s our pitch to the marketplace, you know, are these brands in the market. And that was our conversation with our friends at Warner brothers. And obviously it aligned with their interests.

They wanted to engage fans like they had already made the property and they knew their money was going to be made from the movie. How do we engage a large scale audience? So what we did. And this goes to, you know, George’s point about this sort of stack of everything we did, Palm was being created. If these were being created, Damien Hirst’s, you know, currency project was being created.

The space jam project was great at the same time and launched on the same day. And on that day we distributed about 92,000 NFT’s.

That’s actually insane, think about this for a minute or these like more crypto native users, because I know the way you guys set up your onboard and your funnel, it was super, super easy to claim one. Right? You could claim it literally in a heartbeat to connect your credit card and all that process was streaming Perfectly. Right. So were these more like mainstream users? Or Are they more crypto native users?

Jeff Marsillo: It was, it was easy when it was working really well. And so I want to just acknowledge that for most of the day, it wasn’t working very well.

It was our day, one of our platforms and, you know, a few parameters were kind of set the wrong way for that kind of scale. And then suddenly LeBron James posted on Instagram. But when it was working smoothly, when it was working the way it was supposed to be working I think it was one of the smoothest experiences for getting NFT’s.

Now, Jordan will tell you he’s not satisfied. He’s got a million ideas. But it was a pretty smooth experience relative to what you’ve seen in a lot of other places. And as such, because of that, because of our message to the world, Hey, this is going to be easy. This is an IP that everybody can get behind.

Come try it out. Many, many of our users were much more of a much more casual variety. I kind of think of them in three buckets. I think of them as. Crypto native, you know, they’re on open, see, they’re maybe using meme and they’re using some of the more advanced platforms. And then the sort of middle is the top shop.

People who are used to a relatively easy experience, but they know what NFTs are and they’re, you know, they’re they’re, they’re engaging, but, but it’s maybe not with, you know, with a metal basket, things like that. And then there’s this new group who like, read about this in variety. You know, or read about this at fortune magazine had seen it before.

I’d heard all about it in New York times and on on the news and thought, all right, maybe this is my chance to try it out. And we got a ton of those kinds of users as well.

Jordan Lyall: Also, you know, as a crypto guy, as a defy guy, thinking about this, you know yeah. We issued 92,000 and FTS in one go.

In half a day. But we, we onboarded tens of thousands of users to the world of web three in the world of defy cause whether they know it or not, when you sign up for nifty is, and you claimed your account, you were given a theory of address our Apollo address. They’re given a crypto wallet. We use a tool called magic link and we’ve created a nifty wallet for all our users.

You can also optionally add in your Medimap. But as just someone that’s interested in like growth of defiant general, I was totally geeking out about that stack about, about that stat, about how, how big a step forward in the macro level. We contributed to onboarding users, the mainstream audience into, into defined the world of web 3m, really fun

Jeff Marsillo: The day afterward. When, you know, we were stabilizing the platform and, and dealing with all this inbound interest for what we had, just what we had just done. And, and getting a ton of questions from people who had just gotten their first NFT, you know, like, Hey, what can I do with this?

You know, all these, all these interesting questions about what it now meant to own a space jam and a C and D Jordan and I we’re together. Because we were visiting San Francisco and he was up there. He and I were both visiting San Francisco for a meeting while we were launching as another thing that made it extra hectic, but we kind of turned to each other and we’re like, yeah, We’re now responsible for this space jam community, you know, like that, like, this is, this is not only tens of thousands of new people and new wallets, but it’s now it’s a community of tens of thousands of people in there and their wallets and, and and like, we just were like, we can’t let them down.

You know, like now this is a responsibility we’ve got to shepherd this, this community. So we’ve been. You know, working with w and Warner, by the way, it feels the same way. I mean, they were thrilled and just thrilled that they could reach so many new kinds of fans with something like this.

But they don’t view, you know, space jam. This has like a campaign. And then like you go and hopefully you watched them to theater and then they’re done. They want to grow a community too. So, you know, we’ve been working with them about how this transitions from a movie campaign, to a real community.

Now we’re talking. I can only imagine the airdrops and when they get sued in my wallet for getting all those NFTs this is, this is great, guys. I want to, I want to kind of pick your brains on what can we expect from Nifty’s is in the future. What’s to come, what can you share publicly? What alpha can you leak? Give it to me.

Jordan Lyall: I think he just got a little bit alpha there where this is not, not just a one and done space gen. And we’ll, we’ll have some follow-up you’ll be able to use some of these NFTs. I won’t say that utility where but you will be able to use them for additional fun experiences. I think it’s not just about NFT is about it, about experiences and the unique benefits you get by building on a crypto stack.

More ways to participate in the community. More ways to collect not with just space jam, but other properties, not just with Warner brothers, but with other big brands and organizations. We’re not forgetting the little artists or the up and coming artists. We’re going to be doing a drop here in the next couple of weeks with some really cool artists.

We’ve got the rest of the calendar year and already into 2022. With some of these big tent-pole releases planned, it’s going to be really fun. And then in addition, as, as we roll out the product and improve the products and improve the user experience and making it super easy for brand new users without crypto background, to be able to join and participate Start to see more ways to communicate more ways, to collaborate more ways for communities to reach out to their collectors or ways for artists to collaborate with other artists.

We see this as not really these like branded drops, driving the train, not the platform, driving the train, but really together. Pushing the gas here. I think it’s going to be really cool with what you’ll see in the coming months.

Jeff Marsillo: I would just, just to elaborate on two things, one you know, we Jordan and I met in the winter.

We met in February, so we brought this together really fast. We launched our company. We announced our company in March. We launched our platform and. And we kind of had a tough decision to make. I mean, we could move it forward and just get started or we could wait until it was complete and kind of you know launch it only when it was kind of tied up with.

And obviously we decided to do the former. We decided, you know, we could do enough. That was fun. That would be interesting and new and valuable to the space that nobody had done before, but it wasn’t going to be our complete vision. So when we launched on July 12th is in some ways a kind of a teaser of what’s to come in itself.

I mean, you can only. Explore nifty today and you’ll, you’ll discover some dead ends and it’s almost like, you know, there’s a sign, there’s an invisible sign there that says roadway calming, you know, like men at work. And you’ll find a bunch of those on NFTs. Where are you? Like, oh, okay. You know, when I see that there’s a road coming in here and it’s going to connect to somewhere, that’s really, really.

So, if you’re kind of interested in where we’re headed you can kind of look for some of those, those road signs on Nifty’s where you’ll find some things that are missing. I’ll just give an example, but we are really excited about this idea of NFT playlist. I mentioned. NFT playlist is an incomplete feature on niftiest.

You can make a playlist today and you can showcase it, but there’s some limitation of what you can do with it. You can’t edit it. You know, there’s some limitation on what you can do, we’re going to be over time, dramatically expanding what’s possible with playlists on nifty. So that’s just, just an example of where if you mess around with playlists on Netflix today, you might’ve said, okay, this is kind of cool, but like, where are we going with this?

Well, you can see that there’s a road being paved ahead of the. The, the other, the other thing that I just want to elaborate because Jordan teased this drop was coming up in a couple of weeks. And I think it’s to just maybe elaborate a little bit about it. We haven’t said too much about it, but I don’t think it’s it’s you know, I don’t think it’s saying too much to just go into some detail here.

We are, we’re going to be doing, we’re going to be not just working with big brands, but supporting independent artists. And we’ve got something that we call common canvas. And the idea here is we work with a creator to identify a canvas. And in this case it’s a skate deck and that canvas.

We’ll be used not only by that creator, but by a number of other creators from their community that they help us to identify and kind of recruit into the project. So it’s a little bit like a group show from the art world. And you know, a little bit like an individual collection that is shared by a number of creators, but in this case it’s a skate deck and the creator that we’re working with goes by the name of Spain.

And he’s a professional skateboarder and artist. He’s helped us to recruit a bunch of really, really cool artists and skateboarders. You know, some, maybe a little better known than others, but all of them have a really, really cool kind of enthusiastic grassroots following. And we just thought like, you know, it, actually, the thought came to us from, Damien Hirst, like Damien Hirst crosses over in so many different directions.

What’s an unexpected, next thing. Next thing that we could do. And, you know, we thought about the escape backs. He had done it with Supreme, the shoes that he had done with vans. And we’re like, let’s hack into that community. You know, there’s like a bridge to be built here and let’s, let’s go, let’s go for that.

So, you know, that’s the next one, but there’ll be more of those kinds of projects, more bridges being built between different demographics who maybe haven’t wholly embraced. But have all the propensity to do so. So you know, that’s, that’s what common canvas and everything else that we do in nifty is going to be all about.

Yeah, that’s exciting. That’s really cool. I’m stoked to see that come out and hopefully by the time this episode comes out, we’ll see more information about it and more things to learn about it. But before I let you guys go, I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up before I let you go quickly plug yourselves and the project and where people can kind of find more and learn more. We can start with Jordan.

Jordan Lyall: @jordanlyall that’s where you can find me and my fun Twitter activity. That’s probably the best place to reach out to me as well. I’m on all the channels.

Jeff Marsillo: I’m @jeffmarsillo both on Instagram and on Twitter. I’ve never really gotten the bug. I’ve worked a lot in social media, but I’ve never gotten the bug to post a lot. I’m more of a lurker, I guess. So you won’t find a lot of opinions. Maybe I can learn from watching Jordan A.

Little bit, but nifty is you know, not only do we post about stuff that we’re doing, but we try to support the NFT community and the creator community. And so you’ll find some, some really good things hopefully in some useful information there. And of course That we, you know, drop information you know, about upcoming releases and projects and updates is on our social handles.The other thing we should probably mention Jordan is our discord, right?

Jordan Lyall: Yeah. it’s at Nifty’s.com and you’ll find a link in the footer to our discord.

I just joined today. So I’m in there. I’m alive and let’s get going guys. Thank you so, so much for being on and as nifty is developing, I hope to have you again in the future and kind of do a recap as we get bigger and we reach a billion users, more power.

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 2 episode 13 welcomes Rafa, a community builder, Web3 operations contributor, and an active supporter of local artisans in Puerto Rico. Currently, he’s most active in web3 communities like ForeFront and creator cabins.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The biggest recaps from MetaCartel’s MCON
• How can DAOs nurture a space for experimentation
• How to narrow the gap between passive and active contributors? 
• What DAO-related problems would he like to see tools or platforms solve? 
• His idea around Contribution Zones
• How creators should be approaching their DAOs
• Tourist tracks for DAOs

Links

Contribution Zones: https://ff.mirror.xyz/UJa9qpbbYftlN4xMOD9W3TBgeJS3gxK8ec4FKUJFhuM

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Thank you to Season 2’s NFT sponsors!

1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/

2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/

3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/

4. Celo – https://celo.org/

5. PrimeDAO – https://www.prime.xyz/

Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!

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All right, guys. Here we are MCON, we’re doing a post recap of MCON. With me, I have an OG DAO contributor who was quite active across multiple communities, including forefront, including creator, cabin. His name is Rafa. Welcome Rafa, how are you doing? 

It’s great to be here. It’s been a long week and you know, we’re in the stretch. I think it’s time to digest a little bit about all the different conversations that we’ve had at MCON this week. 

So before we get into MCON, give me a quick brief about yourself. Who the hell are you, what were you doing before crypto and DAOs and kind of where are you now?

So as you said, my name is Rafa. I’m Rafa the builder on Twitter. And I’ve actually been practicing organization design and studying organization design for the better part of the last decade. And so I worked in manufacturing for a little bit. I worked in consulting, strategy consulting and most recently in human resources technology for Web 2.0. But I’ve always been quite, I guess, dissatisfied with the type of contract that employees have and the fact that it’s mostly a model about resource management and value extraction from resources. Where I would want to be able to see something more about reciprocity and being able to create value together. And so through that conversation and through some experience and building in real life communities in London, I was looking towards the future of the creator economy and how, you know, you collaborate on Instagram nowadays. And what that future of collaboration looks like. And that ended up here in crypto and in DAO land. 

So tell me, tell me about the past communities that you built while you were in London. What do those look like and how do they kind of relate to what’s happening with DAOs right now? 

Yeah so, I met one of my good friends in London about eight years ago. And one of the things that as a young adult is you move to a new city and you want to make new friends. And What no one had told me was the fact that you can actually make friends quite consistently and you can make deep friendships and you can create a community of friends by consistently showing up and by just creating events. It sounds very obvious in retrospect you know, all you needed to do was host a couple of dinners that I learned from my friend who kind of was doing it in London, and I realized that you can build a community around people who just want to be friends together and can become a source of support for each other. So in London, we intentionally build a community of just folks who wanted to spend time together. We hosted a book club, for example, for a while, and a community group to about a group of, I’d say about 200 people. 

 Why do you think you’ve naturally drifted towards organizational design? What is it about it that kind of like gets you going?

Oh, there’s a good story here. So, my first internship my parents wanted to teach me the value of work. 

I feel like that’s like a core principle that any family tries to instill in them. 

Yeah. And, you know, coming from a family in Puerto Rico, they called my uncle who had a hardware store where they make doors and sell doors back in Puerto Rico. And they said, you know, you’re going to work there this summer for essentially minimum wage. They did pay me a little bit more than minimum wage and my job was to count screws. So what that meant was I had to spend eight hours a day taking this huge bag of screws and putting them in little baskets of a hundred screws each. And I had to do this manually. So I had to pick up the screws and I had to put them in little baggies and I’m sitting there and, you know, eight hours I’m in the basement. And I go to my uncle and I say, you know, why don’t we weigh them? You know? It’s not just an inefficient. It’s also the probability of me making a mistake is extremely high. So I could increase the accuracy and increase my speed and doing it. And my uncle is like, no, like you’re here to work and you need to learn how to work. And I like go back and I continue counting. And I’m like, How is this producing any sort of value for this company? How is this company profitable? How is my uncle making money? Because if they’re spending an entire full-time equivalent of me down here in the basement, which I also thought was a complete waste of my interest in, for example, business development. But put that aside, I was like, this doesn’t make any sense. And there was a bunch of other people on the payroll and I just kept on asking, why is this like the case? And I still can’t get that question out of my mind. So I kind of followed my nose on that. And every single job that I’ve had is continuing to understand, you know, how do humans organize and like actually create value. 

Interesting. You know, when you look back into your career and you try to piece the moments that influenced you the most. And obviously in the moment you kind of question, like how the hell does this make sense at all? But those core experiences end up making you like who you are today, you know? And you’re counting all those nails, like, how is that equivalent to organizational behavior and DAOs right? And how does that kind of pertain to how people work in a decentralized manner? Have you found those similarities? Like what is the correlation? 

I think what kind of takes you from point A to point B is that, one of the things that I realized and this is part of the book club in London and part of conversations and also just human relationships in general. If you sit back, there’s two different types of decisions that I think humans make. One type of decision is intended. This is roughly speaking and this is a false binary, but let’s go through the theoretical exercise for a second. One is intentional which means you wake up and you make a decision, right? You have another type of decision, which is script based. You’re thirsty. You go get a glass of water. You didn’t make that decision. You just went and got a glass of water, right? Similar to that, there’s a thousand other scripts in life that you can choose to follow or not, and you can choose to analyze them or not. So, getting a job and going to college is a script. It’s a community script, making sure you don’t drop out of high school is a script. Actually dropping out of high school is also a different type of script that you could follow, right? And these are tied to different cultural components and community environments that reinforce certain scripts that you have. Now where I’m going with this is that when one of the scripts that we don’t challenge enough is actually the employment script. So we have a social construct where you must get a job and you must get paid. And the majority of the value extracted in that partnership actually goes to a central institution. And that is a tax, and not in a bad way, that is a necessary tax to be able to manage transaction costs. That makes sense. And that script makes sense because as an individual, if I try to do something and I didn’t have the distribution power, or I didn’t have access to the right technology, then the probability of my failure as an individual is actually very high. So what are my options? I can go high risk, high reward, right? That’s entrepreneurship. Or I can work for another company which has already solved the transaction coordination problem. Now that script is actually outdated. And why DAOs exist today is because we’ve realized that that script, that acceptance of that specific coordination distribution tax, actually no longer is the case. As an individual, the creator economy is coming through because an individual has access to the right technology. And the transaction costs are low enough that your probability of success, of finding a niche market and monetizing, is actually much higher than most people realize. It might take 7,500 tweets to find a niche, but if you tweet enough about the same topic, you develop the audience, or you find it. Whether the audience exists or not, that transaction process happens. And then you can monetize the value that you’re actually producing. That means that me counting screws, which was a transaction cost. I’m working for an employer. If I tried to count screws by myself, I would have to find everybody that wanted their screws counted, which might take a lot of time. I might have to tell them how I’m going to count screws. And by the way, I’m going to have to charge them a lot more than minimum wage because it would cost too much to do. So all of that doesn’t work. It’s better to be on the payroll. And I might be at a loss as an individual, but overall the company might still be profitable. 

So, what is it about the decentralization part of organizations that helps kind of fit with your theory of scripts? 

So, what happens is, when you start thinking about what you can do as an alternative. There are new models that emerge, right? And you know, one potential model is actually the creator economy as a freelancer, right? The decentralization component is a new script, which is now evolving. And the script goes like this. A group of people can get together on the internet and make money. That’s it. That’s the script. That’s a new one though, that didn’t exist in the public conversation in a long time. And I would say, as we say on Twitter, it’s still early. But that script is really grabbing people’s attention. You know, there’s a bit of a hopium is how people describe it because there’s so much opportunity, people say, hold on, I have an alternative to employment. And so now employment can go under scrutiny. And decentralization, where a group of people can get together on the internet to produce value, actually becomes an attractive alternative to it. 

Talking about people getting together. MCON. First of all, how was MCON for you? I know behind the scenes you were telling me like, wow, what a conference, but tell me a little bit more. 

 So I recently quit my web 2.0 job. I wrote an article about why I made that transition. I talk a little bit about some of what we spoke about here and I aped into it. I was like, look, if I’m going to go do this, I’m just going to go full in. And so a couple of weeks back it wasn’t even a week I bought my tickets, you know, maybe. You know, two weeks, like a week before the conference. I emailed some people and I was like, I’m going to go, we’re just going to go this, full on. And the conference was so much more than what I expected it to be. And I think the driver of that kind of energy, because really it was great for the community to provide itself some validation to each other for the work and what they’ve done for so long. You know, there’s a lot of perseverance here that has gone into it. I can’t really count myself in, not yet, you know, I’m still new. But it was really wonderful. It’s something really magical to be surrounded by what I would call community stewards, who have a vision of cooperative development and have a vision of creating generational wealth across individual communities. It’s really inspiring. 

Adam: I’ll tell you my experience at MCON. I used to produce a lot of events. Many, many events like the last two years, and now I’m finding myself attending more events. And MCON was one of those gatherings where one, the selective group of people that came, was strategically done in a way where you could have like high quality caliber people. And you just felt just like the dumbest person in the room all the time. And you’re listening to these conversations and you’re listening to the people behind them, and you’re listening to how critically people are thinking about this stuff in their free time. It just makes everything fun. That’s why they called it MCON.fun. 

So what were some of the biggest takeaways for you from MCON beyond the partying? 

I just want to mention one point, you talked about the caliber of the person that was attending. I think part of that is actually the pandemic. It’s like the people who came were the people who paid the tax, the pilgrims, one might call them. And like any pilgrimage, you know, you go to burning, man, it takes effort to get there and to participate. And so I think one of the things that MCON did, I know the community is small to begin with, so you have like a group of hardcore people. But I think part of this is the pilgrims got together, right? They came together for a specific vision and they came to lend tribute to, you know, the vision and the community development that it has and it needs to be serious fun for someone to say, I will be a Pilgrim, right. It takes time. 

You know, one of the most memorable points for me, this was on day 3. So yesterday on Friday, you know, you step outside of the woods brewing company and you just see like a circle of people just sitting in the middle of the street, you know, Ideating on like DAO philosophy and talking about the future of the organization, the future of collaboration on the internet, tokenomics, mechanism design.

 Do you know how that started that circle on the floor? So a couple folks on telegram got together and since Friday didn’t have any programming it was just a group of five people on telegram that said, Hey, let’s get together at the chili pad. So Meta Cartel’s kinda like pad and let’s discuss it. But you know, when I got to the event center and I was like, I was like, why are we going to the chili pad? Like, why doesn’t everybody come here? So I texted the telegram group. It was an executive decision. We’re doing it here. So we sit down and there’s like six people there to start and we start having a conversation and then more people join. One at one at a time. And then we’re like, well, we don’t have enough space on the table. So let’s start sitting down and we sit down and more people join. And then people start crowding around and they start listening and they decide to contribute. And actually that is exactly how decentralized organizations work. It’s exactly the same way. You get a core group of people who just want to do something. But you do it in public and you’re not necessarily loud about it, but you’re consistent about it. Talk about it for a while. And other people start listening and they start contributing and you see people move through this concept of like contribution zones. We’re going to lurk. I’m watching from afar. There’s something going on there. I get a little bit closer. I decide to invest a bit of my time or resources in it. And then I might decide to contribute or to listen and maybe participate or signal as we might say, and then determine a specific course of action and actually then to get involved in production.

What would you say are like some of the biggest alpha takeaways that you think you picked up from MCON? 

 For those who are listening, I don’t know if you’ve come across this concept of what alpha is, but it’s, you know, the hot topics and like the good insight. There’s a couple of different ones. Like actually I read a Twitter thread about this this morning. I think a couple of things stood out. The first is like the level of ambition is really high, but it’s ambition from a group of people who are humble and honest about what they’re trying to actually get. That’s really impressive. And like there’s a lot of insight that actually comes from that discussion because the principles that these people are using to think about product development, to think about community development is not a, “I’m going to create wealth”. You know, you might go to a startup conference where they’re going to talk about cash flow and talk about runway and talk about, you know, how can I get a bigger multiplier on my evaluation. I didn’t hear a single conversation about valuation discussions and that’s because the valuation is not the end goal. The end goal is actually creating a movement of people who believe that there is an alternative script. An alternative way to actually produce value in the world, which is not competitive, it’s collaborative. 

How do you think we scale this movement without diluting its value? 

So during the circle yesterday, this was a very, very important topic of discussion. Because what makes the magic and what gives you the energy today is actually a fact that you have this ethos, you have these vibes, right? It’s all about vibes here. I’m mostly here for the vibes. I’m like, how do you scale vibes? Startups actually talk about this quite often. They say, how do I scale culture? At five people, I have a founding team. I’m like, tight-knit squad. You know, how do I scale culture?

And the only way to do it is with memes. 

You joke, but that is the answer. The answer is you scale it with memetic information that reinforces a specific value system. You can introduce new memes and they can introduce new metaphors. I really like thinking about the language that’s actually used. And during the circle, we talked about the importance of developing a common lexicon of vocabulary and values that we want to use. Doctrines one might say, I don’t know if anybody here is familiar with Wordly maps, but he’s another person who works on strategy and or design very, very well known and talks about doctrine. So one of the first components of any type of collective collaboration process is, we need to be able to understand each other. And with a new Dao ecosystem, or I prefer to call them digital native organizations because some are not autonomous or some are not decentralized, but they’re all like internet natives. We don’t have a common lexicon yet. Here’s an example of what I just said. Like, what is a Dao? What is all this coordination for? What is our compensation structure? What counts as a token or an NFT? Like what is a contributor? And we’re in the process of that emergence in terms of both a value system, which we’re trying to identify without locking ourselves in place, because you know, self-referential problem here. And the operational process so that people who want to participate in this process, we’re going to have a tsunami of people joining us soon enough. They are already coming. And how do we help people maintain the same conversation, the same value system using the same language and foundational processes. 

Adam: I want to pivot for a minute, because you’re a DAO contributor across multiple communities, right? Between forefront, between creator cabins, I want to kind of pivot into your time at forefront and bring up two or I guess one primary article that you recently published on behalf of forefront, talking about contribution zones, which really stood out to me. And I don’t think it got enough attention. So this is me putting it on blast and giving it more light. 

or those who don’t know what forefront is, how would you summarize forefront and like an elevator pitch?

Forefront is the port of entry to web 3.0 is how we want to describe it. I say we as, you know, forefront but the truth of the matter is, you know, this is like quite emergent. Now, what does a port of entry mean? It means that we want people to be able to go to forefront , get the right resources, be able to find the right DAO for them or the right social token or social engagement. And so forefront is kind of like a content first organization where we’re publishing doing research with regards to different organizations online and right now trying to help other social organizations partner with each other. We think all these organizations are digital native, or just as cities, right? The metaverse. 

Adam: There’s a really cool graphic that you guys put together and I’ll put it in the show notes for everyone that’s listening. Like this was the first time I got to visualize a DAO right. And do so in a way where it felt relatable from the architecture of a city. And I think you guys did this so strategically and so beautifully and the color coding makes it all. So right now, just for those who are listening, and go to Adam levy.io/blog, and you’ll be able to see the image, but there’s four colors, blue, green, yellow, and red. And blue is governmental green is space yellow is residential and red is commercial and it looks like it’s the architecture of basically a city in first off Tallahassee. This is Tallahassee. That was my first question. And second, what is going on here? 

Let’s talk more about Contribution Zones. How did you kind of come to the idea of color-coding specific areas that specific color. So give me, give me the rundown. What’s going on over here? 

So I read this book recently. Well, not right. Not recently, that’s a lie. I, I had this book, which was recommended to me by Ben Kat, who does like ribbon farm and breaking smart, and some other blogs. And I sent him a direct message and he’s like this really big guy. I love the work that he does, really forward thinker. And I said, Hey, if you were going to recommend one book on the org design or like a couple, what would you recommend? And he recommended two. He said it looked like a state and he recommended another one called images of organizations. And within that book, the author talks about how, depending on the language and the perspective that we do, we can envision organizations as different types of entities, whether machine we can say like operational effectiveness of an organization, right? If you’re thinking about a metaphor of a machine that has specific inputs and outputs, or you can think about it as a brain and talk about learning loops or as a series of other entities. That book really kind of I guess made me realize that organizations can be essentially whatever we describe them to be. And when I was thinking about digital organizations, I was thinking about this pattern of people getting together. You know, if you go to different discord channels, you know, they’ve got the chit chat channel and it feels like you’re walking around a neighborhood. And you move between discord channels into another, and people talk about teleportation, but that’s what ‘s happening. You’re teleporting yourself from one digital city to another. And so, when I was thinking about that, there was a question in forefront, which is, we need to figure out, how are we going to pay people? Like, how are we going to talk about different members? Because different members are contributing in different ways. And then these two ideas just kind of collided and said, well if the digital city has different neighborhoods, well, maybe there’s different zones that people are participating in. A commercial zone or a residential zone. And I was like, but maybe there’s different levels of commitment and engagement than that we have. And maybe each person then flows through different contribution zones in different neighborhoods. And maybe I’m a lurker, downtown, not really going anywhere, but I’m just a tourist. I’m just hanging out. That’s one level of commitment in a specific area of your digital city. Versus maybe you’re an active contributor in the suburb where your home is. You know, you’re part of the board, and you’re actually doing specific work and you’re committed for a specific amount of time or for a specific project. And so then, when we started thinking about what language we want to use to describe these digital organizations. I really wanted to stay away from thinking about them as machines with inputs and outputs, because that’s actually not how they work. They’re too complicated for that. They’re these like organisms where they react to a specific environment. But you know, we also need to be pragmatic and make it simple enough for people to understand kind of what’s happening. And I was probably lucky and inspired. And just like these ideas kind of collided. And suddenly you can see them, right. It was quite eye opening to write the article because as I was writing it, I was transforming the way that I was viewing the online landscape.

These contribution zones are very much like operating models. Right? How can DAOs kind of nurture a space for experimentation to find that right you know, contribution zone, that right operating model? How do you think about that? 

So, in forefront, what we identified was that we had three main I think contributions zones, right? You had three levels of participation. One when you’re watching one that you’re actually doing and one which you’re actually maybe enacting the community needs. So being more like a steward. And this might be common across many DAOs, but it actually might not be similar to what you’d describe. It might be different because a DAO or a digital native org that you’re working with, may actually have a command and control model. Where you have a very central group of people then delegating work to others. Maybe your organization is closed and you don’t really have lurkers, or you might be recruiting people specifically to work in the digital environment. So how do you explore your digital city and the digital city that you’re creating? Well, it’s similar to moving into a new city. What do you do when you move into a new city? You walk around. 

Like Europe, you’re more like around people. It’s different culture. I feel like I’m in LA. Ok, Meetup.com. 

You look for people, you look for things to do and similar to any type of digital city, you have different layers to it and different different meshes of environments, right? You have in, in Europe specifically, you have the tourist track, right? You have this in the states. You can go all through New York and see only the tourist stuff. Go to Times Square, Logan Square, you know, and you’re going to get overpriced, terrible merchandise, and it will be the New York experience. It’s terrible, but it’s true. That’s the tourist trap. Right? And in digital cities you have it similar, you have different layers. You have local neighborhoods. When you’re thinking about your digital city, number one, I’m not for central planning, so don’t try to design your city. You don’t do that. Similar to how cities are encouraged to grow. You can actually define specific zones of specific types of work. So you plant seeds in terms of it. I think listening for these specific signals and during a tour of your own city that you’ve been creating and reflecting on how people are engaging is the best way to actually learn. And it’s emergent, you know, New York is not the same New York it was 50 years ago. And your digital city is not going to be the same digital city next month. I mean, we’re moving at a way different pace, right?

Let’s pick apart this tourist track for a second. Because just to recap you, New York, you could take the tourist track and see all the very like low quality, but what everybody else sees. Like it’s high quality, but there’s more to New York beyond just the tourist track. Do DAOs need a tourist track? And if they do, how do you even design a tourist track for DAOs?

 That’s a great question. I don’t know. It ‘s just gut. 

Do you know what I’m imagining right now? I’m imagining myself going online and having, like in LA, and all these micro DAOs, you know, and being able to navigate through them and kind of pick apart just the higher level takeaways. That’s what I would consider like a tourist track, you know?

But what are the monuments? You want to go see the monuments? 

Yeah, exactly. You know, but what does that look like in a DAO? 

I don’t think we know yet. I mean, at MCON here, we spent like all these days and one of the hot topics was actually onboarding. And this actually relates to that type of onboarding experience, which is when you visit one of these digital cities and you’re trying to figure out where do you want to move in whatever engagement level that you would be interested in having, what information do you show and who do you want to attract? Tourist tracks attract tourists. Do you want your DAO filled with tourists? Maybe because maybe your DAO sells DAO merchandise, and maybe you want tourists to come and hang out and drop and buy an NFT and then leave. And not bother you anymore. 

It’s almost as if these DAOs will have like galleries comprised of user NFTs. And the tourist track is literally understanding the culture of each DAO and navigating through each micro museum. You know what I mean? 

That’s one of the many, many different ways that you could create a certain type of experience for a specific type of person. Or I prefer to call them agents that come into the DAO.

You know what I’m thinking right now, like what’s the Hollywood tour bus moment? Like what does it look and feel like? 

And does it provide value? And do you want it? Does your community want that type of experience? In forefront, one of the things that we’ve been talking about is there’s so many people coming into a server, but they don’t necessarily know where to go. And similar to a new city, which has buzz, you know, you got a gold rush going. And all the people are like coming in and they’re saying, I found forefront and I found the blog. I came here and it turns out that we don’t have well-paid rural roads yet. And people are like crowding in different places and asking the shopkeepers, Hey, I want to move in. And the shopkeepers are like, well, number one, do you know what you’re moving in for? Like, when they’re like, no, you haven’t told me. They’re like, yeah, we probably would just take my money. And they’re like, I just want to spend my time here. Like, what can I do to help you? And the shopkeeper is like, look, I’m really busy right now. I’m making some shoes. Like I have a lot of shoes to make for the people who are already here and you want to hang out, like, why don’t you go make some shoes? And they’re like, I don’t know how to make shoes. And they’re like, will you teach me how to make shoes? And so the shopkeepers are trying to balance now between their own internal production, but also onboarding the new people who are coming in.

It’s almost as if you need to develop micro apprenticeship programs, you know, people just like watching, like the Shoemaker making shoes right. And learning from them. And what does that look like? 

You don’t want to sacrifice. Like, there’s a big balance here between like automation and like actual human empathy and engagement and belonging. Part of the reason why digital organizations are so specialist is because people are actually finding a source of purpose in participating in this different script. And so it comes back like I help run a nonprofit in Puerto Rico, which is called Obras Del Pais and we do micro documentaries for artists. And we’ve learned a lot about how artisans also engage and bring people in and onboard them. But similar to the artisans, the people who are really full-time in DAO land. They’re like craftspeople, this is n’t automated work. This is community management and community stewardship. Takes time, you know, to take that raw material, just like a group of people and turn it into a source of value and production. You build a community in real life. You’re not going to get a community in a week, no matter how hard you try and how much hazing you do to, you know, have them bond. It takes years of consistent conversation to get to different layers of participation. 

Adam: And you know, the equivalent of entering that shop to talk to the shopkeeper who’s making the shoes is, and I would take this again. I’m looking at the contribution zone article that you wrote, and again, I’ll reference it in the show notes. Every single person that’s entering the shop starts as a casual contributor. And if they want to start helping build the shoes, then they become a core contributor. And then what if they want to open their own store? Then they become staff. 

And moving through, I think though, there’s an important distinction here. It’s easy to conflate contribution zones with a career ladder. And that’s actually not the case at all. So contribution zones are supposed to be personalized preferences. So maybe I am a casual contributor because maybe I don’t want to have my own store. I don’t want to commit over a period of time. And it’s really important to differentiate between career level, which is an old script of a traditional organization, versus what we talk about in contributors zones, which is a personalized experience within that digital city, which is for you. As an individual and your preferences and needs and opportunities. 

That makes sense. One thing that I continuously see across DAOs is there’s a lot of like active contributors and passive contributors. How do you narrow that gap? How do you get more people in the store? And how do you develop it in a way where the Shoemaker there’s a ton of them that the system welcomes and allows, you know, but also encourages, you know what I mean? I feel like it’s a fundamental problem across many digital organizations that have the token, retail is going to ultimately speculate on it. And we saw it a lot with friends with benefits recently when they did their raise, you know, and it reached to about 200 a token. Retail investors seeing the opportunity and et cetera, et cetera, even now with forefront, and they did their private quote unquote raise. You know the select raise. 

How do you narrow that gap between passive and active holders?

So I think you’re actually referencing here another traditional script, which is growth as a primary objective. That’s not necessarily needed. And maybe you don’t want to narrow that gap. Maybe you just want to have a bunch of low level contributors and you wanna make it hard to become core and stuff because you don’t want that many.

That’s a new perspective that I heard. 

Yeah, growth is not the end game. It’s actually just purpose and mission and tailoring and creating a community, a city that provides you a specific experience. There’s a lot of small towns that don’t want to become a city. There’s a lot of cities that don’t want to become a mega-metropolis. And like that I think we collectively, as we move into digital native organizations, we need to be quite conscious of the fact of chasing growth or capital, valued development for the sake of it. And kind of realize that maybe we don’t want any of that. Now, in most cases it looks like if you’re founding a city, you do want to get some staff and some contributors, right? So narrowing that gap is still important for specific areas. I actually think this is going to come back to pods. I mean, chase and I joke about pods and it’s a joke, pods, pods, pods. But I think the answer is that the unit of maturity actually is not from an agent perspective as an individual. It’s actually maturing via different squads or small groups of people or becoming more involved and committed together over a period of time. And you might move between one group and another. You might be part of multiple groups, but I think it’s going to be similar to the cohort-based courses and that’s what we’re seeing, and there’s this really great book about it called ” situated learning”, and a legitimate peripheral participation that talks about this. That is about getting better at contributing. And we can provide people tools to become better contributors, and we can give them new scripts to become better contributors. I think part of what we need to do right now is let that emerge a little bit because we’re not, I think there’s no hard-coded answers yet. 

One thing that I’m really excited about with the development of DAOs is the increase in development in tools and platforms that will help better organize DAOs, better communicate between peer to peer. What are some of the biggest problems that you see needing to be solved right now with tools and platforms that could be solved with tools and platforms or products, for example. Anything that comes to mind?

 I mean, I think this is such a new environment, there’s this, like, you can pick any product and go at it. So think about how much software a standard startup uses today. And they use a ton directly and even more so indirectly. Each piece of software that they use uses another hundred pieces of software in each of those hundred, like use another hundred. If you look at the marketing advertisement landscape, like HR has hundreds of products. Like the hundreds of products that are named, not even like that someone put on a map, like how many data analytics tools that you have? But I do think that there’s a common trend here. I actually had this conversation a couple of days ago with Meta dreamer and we were talking about product development for digital native organizations. And I think there is a paradigm shift that’s happening because operational tooling in web 2.0 has traditionally been much more about the input process. I’m oversimplifying this. I’m sure this isn’t true across the board. Let’s just do a mental experiment for a second. But you use Salesforce or let’s say HubSpot. And you input data into HubSpot, right? In digital native organizations, there’s something a little bit different going on, which is the software is built around the information feed, which exists. So collab land, you don’t input information to collab land. Collab land reads your wallet. So it reads your transaction feed. And I think we’re going to see a major operational change in which we’re going to have all this like a new toolkit, which is going to read the information and the conversations that we’re having, and then provide value on top of it. Kind of like how we have discord bots.

You know, the most relevant example of this startup that I met at MCON, they ‘re in FWB. I’m blanking on their product name. I see the logo in my head, but the takeaway is they’re trying to develop tooling for treasury management. They want to help DAOs identify things like, what’s an employee cost or like a member cost. What’s an expense cost, you know, what’s an overhead cost. Merely based on the snapshot proposals that get accepted. 

You’re not asking someone to come in and input the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s the previous approach. We had to input information. And like, so the new products that we’re developing, and so to get to your question before, which is what operational opportunities we have. I mean, all of them. You have all of them. You have all of the opportunities. You have opportunities for scheduling and calendar management, where it’s reading your agreements on calendars and like pinging you and telling you, Hey, by the way, you have a conflict at that time with a different discord or a different digital city. You’ve already committed to teleporting to this other digital city at that time. Would you like to delegate this to someone else? What do you like me to record the meeting and send it to you? Not reschedule. Like what type of participation would you like to have? Since you are already committed to be in person in this other environment? 

My mind is blown right now. Is that already happening by the way, do those tools exist?

I don’t think so. And if you want to have a conversation about this, like the primitives have changed. Like I tweeted this earlier, primitives always change. You know, your engagement with reality is always off. I don’t really see the world, right? I see a projection of the world as it is. But there is something really, really important, which is our foundational coordination mechanism is no longer data input. It’s actually data synthesis, the data exists and we’re producing it. And we now have an opportunity to build a completely new toolkit, and operating model, which is not based on me moving from one interface to another. But having these programs read the engagements that we’re already doing, read the chain, read the ledger, and then make recommendations and help you produce value.

That’s deep. That’s a new perspective I’ve yet to come across.

Well, and this is the, you know, when people ask me, why did you quit your job? I said, because you can’t unsee this. You can go back to building a product like Salesforce, asking salespeople to input information when you know that the future is going to be based on sales people getting nudges based on transaction profiles that are automatically generated. And, you know, every single engagement is going to be recorded. And you know, you’re going to live in these digital cities. And the salesperson is going to move from one digital city to another and create audiences of purchasing, not like single point of control decision making. Like you see this change and you’re like, am I going to wait? Am I going to build this for the next five to 10 years for an enterprise solution? By the way, they’re obviously going to make a lot of money. Like I’m sure they’re going to make a lot of money. That industry is not going to go anywhere. Web 2.0, I’m sorry, folks, hot take here, it’s going to be here forever. But we do have a new economic model, which is going to be developed in parallel. We still have traditional manufacturing. And like there’s still some farms that, you know, have people picking fruit. You can still have old models of work and maybe those aren’t good examples, but you still have old models and new models of work. The world has not been digitized completely. And in the same way that the world has not moved to digital transformation as the enterprise says we haven’t done the mobile transformation. We’ll have an AI transformation. Yeah, we’ll have collective intelligence or digital city transformation. They’ll pay McKinsey for it. 

I don’t know if McKinsey could do it. They’ll create, like graphics for what they need to know. 

They need to know the top five leadership skills, which is like the DAOist. You know, top five leadership skills. Executive retreat to learn about community stewardship, you know, the way that we had the same way that we have servant leadership. 

Is that how we know we’ve reached the top? When we see shit like that?

I mean, I don’t know, man. Like, the world is weird. I don’t think we’re going to understand when we’ve hit the top. I mean, what’s happening is a mass migration of people from one ecosystem to another one, the same way everyone went to tech. And we’re going to see a massive wave of people moving from corporate to tech and now from tech to digital cities and it will self-select. And like, yeah, it’s, it’s hard to unsee the pattern and to see the opportunity. And to say we can build something new and it doesn’t need to be exploitative. I mean, exploitation is never right. You should never do it. But we have an opportunity to, instead of extracting value from an audience to create a community value together. Grow the pie as a foundation. 

So many things unfold here, to dive deeper. I want to end off with two more questions. What we’re talking about right now is I’d argue is a bit philosophical, right? We have yet to see an organization really execute on this. How does this tie back into creators and how does this kind of tie back into them monetizing or being stripped away portion of their efforts across web 2.5 web 2.0 platforms, right? How can they adopt this next era with their communities that are inherently web 2.0?

I think, yeah, that’s a, that’s a really good question. I mean, right now we still have like a bunch of gatekeepers. Right? You pay the tax, the YouTube tax, Facebook tax, like Snapchat tax, Tik Tok, tax, all taxes. Because you still have gatekeeping. But there are different ways. I mean, you’re seeing it with the NFT landscape where people are making their entire year’s salary worth of YouTube ads in days by putting their video up on glass.xyz. I really love this. Someone told me years ago we were having a conversation, we were talking about paying for a blog. We were like, no one’s going to pay for a blog. I don’t know how long ago this was. This was like five, 10 years ago. No, one’s going to pay for a blog. It’s just words on the internet. Like, it’s your opinion. We’re going to pay for your opinion. And then the next time it was like, no, one’s going to pay for a blog post. Like who’s to pay for a blog, you have a subscription service. It’s like, one’s going to pay for it. And then Mira shows up and people are buying blog posts and the next conversation would be no one will pay for your paragraph and no one will pay for your sentence. And the reality is that they will, and they’ll get micro referenced across the board and you’ll create new network economics where I write a blog post, and I reference you in a portion of my money using, for example, splits will get reallocated and we’ll create a passive income economy where as you create online, the rewards will flow back to the sources. 

Adam: One thing that I’m really excited about and there’s a company that a project or a DAO that’s going to be on season 3, called global coin research and their whole model, and I tweeted this a while ago, it’s like, I don’t want to pay $1 subscription for a yearly access to the New York times. Like it’s a dollar, you know, like, but I just don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go through that funnel. All right, enter your first name, your last name, your email, and you’re gonna get spammed with other promotional offers. I’d rather just connect my wallet, hold the amount of tokens and get access to a flood gates of knowledge. I’d rather buy $500 of your token than pay $1 for a year.

But it’s so true. And the reality is like no one wants to input information. So going back to the product development organization we just had, right. I don’t want to put my name and my credit card and give you my personal information and have you grab my cookies. It was like, can I just sign in and kind of just like read and consume and like automatically stream, like micropayments, based on the information that I’m consuming and have a budget, whether we’re I set, and I have a product that is telling me how much budget I’m using on information consumption and make recommendations on it. And I think that is a future that is here. And the tooling is here. 

What’s going to eat web 3.0? 

I don’t know. So, like if you asked me like five years ago, what was going to eat web 2.0 I don’t think I would be able to answer it.

Adam: But the reason I ask you is because you’re already identifying pain points that’s happening in what 2.0, and like what happens when you scale those solutions on web 3.0? Is there any detriment to that? And what could that be? That might influence web 4.0. From an organizational point of view, I guess.

 It was Neal Stephenson who had wrote this book. I can’t remember what the name was, but in the book he talked about feed customization. And so I think right now we don’t have control over the information flows that we actually consume. So I think if web 1.0 is read and web 2.0 is read and write or read and create, and web 3.0 is read, create and own. Web 4.0 is probably gonna be read, create, own and curate. 

 What do you mean by curate? Elaborate on that. 

It’ll be a customization of the engagement that you have. Right now, we don’t have control over the information feeds. You join discord and you’re a part of every channel that you get assigned to. You get every piece of information and you have a lot of noise and we don’t know how to control that right now. And even the web 3.0 tooling that we’re developing is enabling ownership over the data that we’re producing, but it’s not enabling the customization of the data that you consume. So maybe that’s what comes next.

That’s a great take. Before I let you go, where can the audience find you? Where can they learn more about you? And of course I’ll reference your Twitter and all these things that we talked about. 

So you can find me on ForeFront at cabin DAO which is supporting different creators and creating a decentralized city. But for the most part, you can find me on Twitter at @rafathebuilder. And if you want to connect just send me a message, and definitely support your local artisans and your local crafters.