Blockworks Co-Founder: How I Built A Massive Media Machine

Transcript

There's a massive shift with media. We talked about advertising rates. That's one of the shifts. Um, and talking to like force, you have to talk to a core and a niche audience. The other shift is that the people follow people now. They don't follow brands. If the current kind of L1, L2, infra, altcoin market continues with where it's going, that that pool of capital is just going to continuously shrink as far as like people wanting to spend on marketing ads. Welcome back to the Rowup. We are your hosts. I'm Andy. I'm Robbie. And this is your home to learn from the biggest guest, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in

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Introducing Asset Runes. The future of decentralized finance. Stable coins natively on Bitcoin. Hedge against volatility. Diversify your portfolio. All directly from your Bitcoin wallet, secured by ZK Technology. This is asset runes available now exclusively on Starknet. All right, we're in the city, man. Thanks for coming out. Um, looking forward to talking about crypto media today. We've been in the space for a while. Yeah. Doing a lot of uh podcasts, newsletters, research, data, etc. And I think I mean I just want to have an open conversation about just trials and tribulations. Oh man. Yeah, man. I mean

there's a lot I mean so prior to you know jumping on air, we're just kind of talking about the state of things now. You guys have evolved to doing data and that's been, you know, sort of a big revenue unlock, one of your biggest quarters this quarter. Um, maybe just walk us through the the evolution to start of Block Works and kind of how you thought about it from the jump to where it is now and then I think that'll open us up a whole bunch of places to kind of Yeah. Yeah. pick in. Yeah. Yeah. Easy. Um, so it's fun. It's fun. We're recording this. We're on Broadway in New York right now. First off, good to have you in the city. We're record So Mike and I um Mike is my co-founder. We uh started this actually two blocks away from here. Basically just uh the

original thesis was that I was I was into Bitcoin. Mike was working in consulting. I was working venture and uh the original thesis was that I I don't know when you got into the industry but folks who uh were in the industry in like 2016 2017 will remember this it was an extremely retail driven industry still is today obviously but it was all the activity it was mostly on uh actually Reddit back then just starting to once our Bitcoin got uh channel got taken over by the Bitcoin cash people that's when everyone moved to Twitter and that's how kind of crypto Twitter got created but it was very retail driven industry Mike and I had this idea that eventually the industry would become this big institutional asset class. Crypto would become this big institutional asset class. Uh and the industry would grow by orders of

magnitude. And as that happened, the number of people who came into the industry would probably look less like honestly you and me. Maybe more like uh 50 60-year-old uh gay-haired capital allocators, uh financial adviserss, sovereign wealth folks, institutions, pensions, financial adviserss, RAS, that kind of crowd. And they were going to need a better source of information. And so, uh, our the whole idea of Block Works was look, if the, uh, institutional investor comes into the industry, they're going to want something that looks and feels more like maybe Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Faxet, Cap IQ, Refinitiv, a little less like crypto, Bobby on Twitter, and Crypto Panda on Reddit, right? And so, that was we said, let's go build the

information stack. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we're seeing that now, right? I mean, these types of players are are coming in in mass. I mean today Circle's up what 40% in from their IPO yesterday which is absolutely nuts. And and the like the entire industry is just growing up. It feels like um you know like like the type of of people that are coming in require a different type of of content or a different type of experience. Yeah. And I think that you guys have I mean I feel like you especially have recently kind of like shifted to being like okay like I I'm going to try to become more of that type of of face per se like like like let's just say Yano in 2020 was probably a bit more like DGEN and you know younger as well versus Yano in

2025. Yeah. Um I mean definitely was younger. The the difference though is that uh actually that's not true. We were so when we started the business there were all these other media players right? You had everyone from the big players like so CoinDesk was the 800 pound gorilla. They owned this event called Consensus. It was the massive massive massive conference in the industry. They had like probably 150 to 200 employees. You couldn't it it almost seemed impossible to compete with them. Yeah. And you also had other players. Cointelegraph. Uh the month that Mike and I quit our jobs that same months launched, the block launched, Decrypt launched, Banklist was getting off the ground would would soon get off the ground. You also had other players who are now defunct. Protos all all these different people. So it was a really

really really crowded space. We weren't playing at at that point yet in research and data. We were just doing media and events. Actually at the time we launched just with events. We said how in the world could we ever compete in the super crowded market? You got to pick a niche. You got niches make riches. We thought and we got to pick a niche and first dominate that niche. So what we thought was missing was the institutional serving the institutional audience. So that was actually the first audience that we really broke into the and that was the that was really until 2021 the only audience that we talked to was the institutional audience. Then actually when the bare market hit in 22 and 23 that's when we pivoted more into crypto nativity and that's when we

started saying look there's this huge pool of capital that is really being underserved by good content and those are the crypto native people. Uh we thought folks like the block and coines and cointelegraph were also they had originally underserved the institutional market. We thought in 23 they were underserving the crypto native market but actually our bread and butter was the institutional crowd. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's funny is like every every uh crypto company back in 1718 they always started with block like block you know blockchain or like it was you know the block or you can tell if someone's was founded in 2017 2018 if they start with coin or block. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. So now evolving into media, right? So we've we've been doing our media stuff for about four or five years, and we've kind of experimented

across a multitude of ways of monetization. I actually think it's one of the harder businesses to to monetize properly, efficiently, and scalably uh you know, over the long term while maintaining like integrity, reputation, uh and and doing it the right way. Um the balance there is something that I'm curious as to how you've seen Blockworks curate uh and your your you know personal brand as well like when it comes to kind of monetizing media what what was your like trajectory? So you started with okay let's sell ads you know or let's do this and then now it's gotten to be this podcast network kind of walk us through your like monetization business kind of uh thought

process as you evolved over the years. So maybe we can maybe the best place to start is not talking about Block Works, but talking about the media industry as a whole, right? Because you and I both slot into the broader theme of media, which is that media has been getting crushed. There's no way around it, right? Media has been getting absolutely crushed. And that's largely driven by social media. And so if we and and and really basically just attention moving online. So media companies were some of the best companies to own, right? some of the the the families of the United States, the the the the big billionaire families, they owned and operated media businesses and newspaper conglomerates and empires, right? Yeah. And when the internet came around, actually some of the media businesses were the first

people to move online like New York Times was one of the first people to really spin up a website like a professional website and that still things were still going well. Then what ended up happening was when social media came around those Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, they had the ability to target a user much much much better than any uh digital media brand did, right? So that drove down the C. So, uh, media monetizes advertisements and sponsorships through this thing called a CPM rate, which is cost per millie, which is how much money are you making per thousand per thousand users on your site or reading your newsletter, whatever it may be. So, let's say the CPM rate on something like CNN used to

be able to charge $20 CPM. Over the last 20 years, their CPM has gone from $20 to $2. And the reason for that is social media ate their lunch, right? It's far more, everyone knows this, it's far, if you're a startup, it's far more effective to use your marketing budget on Instagram ads or Tik Tok ads than it is to go buy ads from CNN. So, when we got into when we started Block Works, the first and very very very first thing we said was we don't want to take outside venture money. You can't use venture money to scale media businesses. We really strong we really really really strongly believe that you can't use venture money to scale media businesses.

And the uh historical reference we looked at here was in the 2010s. I don't I'm sure you guys have looked at this. There were all these big upstart media brands BuzzFeed Vice Vox Complex Huffington Post. Uh nine out of 10 of them failed. And the reason they failed is because they tried to use venture money to scale trust. So what is what is the rollup? What is blockorth? It's just trust. It's just trust with with an audience, right? Audience trust. So what those guys got wrong is that they thought you could spend a dollar to buy, right? A unit of of trust. You can spend a dollar to buy engineers. You can spend a dollar to buy a go to market team for your SAS product. You can't spend a dollar to buy one unit of trust. Trust has and credibility and reputation has

to be uh earned over years and years and years and years. And so uh what we when we got into block started blockworks we were like we're not going to raise venture money. We started with events. The reason we started with events is because those are profitable and you can make a lot of money and they kick off a lot of cash flow. Then we got into media. Media you monetize with advertisements. And to tie it all back to the original story is uh the CPM rate of media has trended down every year for the past 25 years really except if you have an audience that nobody else in the world has. That is the only way that you can charge an out that you can keep your CPM rate high. So CNN will go from being able to charge $20 per thousand users to

10 to five to two. Eventually, they'll be charging pennies. Yeah. For the thousand users on their site. Block Works and the Rollup, I'm sure, too, can charge these outsized amounts. Yes. Because if you're Coinbase, you can't go to Instagram and say, "Hey, I want to reach the hedge fund manager who owns Bitcoin and is interested in staking their Ethereum." You can go to Block Works and say that to us and we'll So, that that was the advertising business. And then obviously, we got into data and research. Yeah. I mean, the CPMs in in the crypto space, we've also noticed just over the years, they've I mean, even, you know, $40, $60, $80, you know, teams depending on on the on the on the niche specificity of what they're trying to achieve. Uh, you know, you know, it's it's it's like orders of magnitudes higher. And then you speak to CMOs who

are like who come from the traditional world, right? and they they have a readjustment to advertising in the space because it's so it's so niche and and there's only so so many options as well as only like so many people um to kind of talk to. Well, so the reason for that is so we we exper so in 2019 in the bare market 2018 and 2019 that was by far the toughest period Blockworks has ever gone through and Mike and I had to stop paying ourselves and was like you know it was very very very tough period and so we were like let's go nobody in crypto had any money and um when did the rollup started after that okay so 2018 and 20 in the bare market of 2023 people nobody asked the question is crypto

going to work again we all but in 2019 19. Oh yeah, Mike and I would have drinks like what do we what do we do if crypto doesn't work? Should we go get a job at Netflix or something? Like should we go get a job at Uber? So we started to try to sell to the people who had money which at the time was the DTOC brands. So if you listen to any podcast back then it was like Squarespace, Athletic Greens, BetterHelp, all these brands were advertising. The problem is if you talk to a marketer at Squarespace, they can buy ads on any ad platform in the whole world, right? They can do radio, they could do TV, they could do billboards. So the the the crypto a they don't care that what someone in our audience owns crypto. No.

So you have to if you are selling media assets in crypto, you you can only sell in a profit. The only business model that makes sense is selling to people who care that you have a niche crypto audience. And that's why the it's amazing. Right now there's a second wave of advertisers coming into the industry for the first time in history. Yes. Which are the financial institutions. You can now go to Fidelity and to BlackRock and say, "Hey, by the way, I've got a bunch of financial adviserss in my audience who they care about Bitcoin." New a new a new advertising segment has been unlocked for the first time in 10 years. And what also contributed to this was we we had an era, right, where and I think it still is pretty prominent where Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They

didn't allow for crypto and blockchain advertising at all. Right. So like that wasn't even an option at all either. So that was a huge amount of spend that that that could have been spent like trying to target you know different financial financial people on YouTube or you know channels etc. that that just completely was was trapped up. So it was kind of put into like this more organic uh you know niche community. Yeah. That money flowed into the rollup bank list coin block works etc. Yeah. Which is way different. Yeah. Exactly. So the the previous if you will era of of you know advertising and spend you know prior to this uh new uh entrance right being these institutions being these larger um you know financial services companies

players like that was a lot of crypto protocols and prior to jumping on the actual air we were talking about how a lot of the kind of altcoin market and L1 L2 infra a lot of it is is not performing And there's been a lot of uh you know VCs are are underwater. There's not a lot of returns there. Uh protocols you know they're not making revenue there. So like that there's like this this shift happening as well uh within the crypto space while these much bigger entrance with much deeper pockets are coming in. Um so it's kind of like this like like conflicting uh set of of of actors, right? It's like it's not that

that the that the crypto protocols are dying out per se, but it's like I think they're wisening up to like perhaps what they're spending their money on. Like we saw, right, the Ethereum Foundation is like all right, Treasury, you know, this that and the other. So I'm I'm just curious like how you're seeing the media landscape now with regards to kind of these protocols um and a lot of like like the last couple of years of of um customers and and clients and like where do you see that trend going? Yeah. for them. So, every couple years in in in any industry um including crypto, the bucket of advertising dollars shifts from one group to the next. And how an industry grows is you have a massive amount of venture that comes in. You

have an excess pool of capital floating around in those companies. Uh those companies are all competing. It's a right because usually markets end up having two companies that end up winning. Two of them end up like Uber, Lyft, uh VBO, Airbnb. You usually markets end up having these two companies that end up winning, but you have 50 companies competing for those two slots. They all raise a bunch of venture money and they spend a remarkable amount of money on advertising and media uh and and marketing, right? So that flows into companies who sell advertising and marketing and then what happens is those companies get big enough they own the one or two spots. They don't have to spend as much money, but then there's a new market that gets created. They start spending. So actually if you take a a snapshot of Blockworks's revenue going

into 2020, it was there's no there's no Salana, there's no Uniswap, right? There's no Hyperlid spending any money like that. It was the CFI companies. Yeah. Fireblocks, Anchorage. I I bet our top five spenders at that time were Fireblocks, Anchorage, Copper, uh BitGo, Coinbase Custody, folks like that, right? those f and then what happened is those folks started to the market actually figured out who were the winners there right it ended up being some of those players but at the time it was really unclear who's going to win the custodian game who's going to win the prime brokerage game you know other companies like this were BlockFi you know other other people like that Genesis people like that so then what happened is those

people pulled back their marketing spend because Anchorage is like I've kind of won in this space and Fireblock's like I've kind of won but then a new group emerged the L1's L1's are all competing with each other. Boom. Now the L1's are actually spending a little less money on marketing for the first So for three years it was the L1's were spending I'm sure you guys made a lot of money in advertising from the L1's. Now 2025 they're spending a little less money right as well. Yeah. And the L2s because now the chain race is starting to get figured out a little bit. But now there's a new group coming in. Right. We just closed a million dollar deal with an ETF provider. Yeah. Now there's the ETFs coming in, the institutional capital coming in. There's also uh things moving to the app layer, right?

The RWA players, that game is not figured out. Yeah, they'll spend a lot of money on advertising, marketing, media, things like that over the next couple of years. And then same thing, some some new group will come in. Well, you just have to be aware of where the market is and where it's going. Exactly. You know, the advertising sales team at New York Times or even a Barcel Sports or something, they're break they're broken down into uh segments, right? They'll be like the fintech sales team or the yeah uh consumer goods sales team or the DTOC goods. You can't you can't do that in crypto because if we had a um custodian sales team like a a seller who was just focused on custodians that seller might have brought in 7 million one year but then within two years maybe it fell down to 1 million and the person

doing L1's would have taken all the so you actually have to have these really flexible ads. We have a 10erson ad sales team. You have to have these very flexible sellers. If the current kind of L1, L2, infra, altcoin market continues with where it's going, that that pool of capital is just going to continuously shrink as far as like people wanting to spend on marketing, ads, etc. Maybe, but there's three things that they want, right? So, if you think about uh if you think about why these folks spend money, there's three different buckets. There's number go up technology, right? They want their token to go up. That's an obvious one. They want users and they want developers. So what you what you also we're talking very much from the ad sales perspective, but from the content

perspective, you also have to have a range, right? You have to have a r you have to have content and an audience that's interested in buying tokens and things like that, right? To be able to market to that crowd. You also maybe need uh if you're a crypto media brand, a market that has user an a content channel and an audience of potential users like onchain users. You also have to have uh an audience and content that serves the developers, right? So then you can basically in a bull market the only thing that someone wants is number go up, right? And and actually users too. In a bare market, nobody's trying to talk to users and number go up. They only care about the developers and the founders trying to build on their thing.

So you actually have to unless you want to be at the whim of these markets moving up and down. You need different uh content brands. And that's why that's why we've moved from Blockworks as a single brand to Block Works as a house of brands. I was actually kind of like at ends with that strategy. Like we we kind of attempted it a little bit. Thought about it. Um but we've just kind of kept coming back to being like, "Okay, we just want to go all in on like getting our show as big as possible and and kind of own the real estate of like Rob, Andy, the rollup and and be able to leverage that in the future for different uh opportunities. We talked yesterday, you talked about how, you know, went from media to events to research, data, potentially like onchain protocols. Something that I thought

about as well. I just thought about the roll up in media as like this this and I think you you said it as as a launchpad. I thought about it as as just like this foundational business like okay dropped out of school uh started doing like online media stuff online marketing stuff then got into crypto bought a bunch of crypto started the roll up and this has just been like okay now I'm in a much better financial spot I'm able to then now take a bigger swing um and so my thought has been more around okay growing the growing our brand and our name uh more than trying to orient around different brands but you're saying that basically we With one brand, there's only there's only so much surface area for these types of of uh let's say market segments which

advertisers will want to speak to. With a house of brands, you can have more market segments for advertisers in a in a in a variety of niches and that's and that's how you've seen success slightly. I would adjust that slightly. I don't think we're talking a lot here about the advertisers. I don't really think about much from the advertisers view actually. I think about it from the audience's view and what kind of content they will actually love and there's a historical precedent and it's going to keep it's going to keep happening which is there's a messy middle for media where media companies go to die. So it's extremely easy. It's not the hardest thing in the world to get a media company to like 10

million in revenue. Once you pass 10 million in revenue, you enter the messy you enter the messy middle. And um the messy middle is uh this area where your audience is growing to the point where you're trying to you're trying to grow the audience and so you end up serving them more and more general content and you don't even realize you're doing it. But every quarter you more and more general content, more general content. Maybe you add you're in crypto, maybe you had some fintech news, maybe you had some payment stuff, maybe you had some like uh news about stocks because there's all these, you know, crypto public stocks. But before you know it, you're just a gen you're just serving them general content. Yeah. And what ends up happening is you lose this dedicate. You lose your edge, your

content edge. Because when the rollup started, for example, uh you guys were like deeply deeply deeply embedded into like I don't know probably like covering L2s or something like that technical. And then as you go, you're going to start to try to compete with Banklist and you're going to try to then compete with Blockworks and and then you're you're competing with CoinDesk and then you're competing with Bloomberg Crypto Team and then you're just a generalist media company and you lose your edge. And when the second that you go generalist, there's an upstart media brand that's creating really, really, really niche content where a user uh can find that niche content is going to be better for the user. So what we said was, you know, we had gotten we've been doing this for a couple years longer than you. We had started to get into

that messy middle, right, where you're entering the revenue range of like, you know, 30, 40, 50 million in revenue, which is awesome, but you start creating all this generalist content. Yeah. So what we did is we broke it into a house of brands where we now own different brands. So uh, Supply Shock, Supply Shock just talks to the Bitcoiners. Yeah. Die Hard Bitcoin community. Um, uh, Lightseed just talks to the Salana community. Xerx research just talks to the research community. Thousandx just talks to the traders. Empire just talks to founders and builders. Now, obviously some founders and builders will listen to the trading podcast. Some traders listen to Empire. But that's that's how we think the right that's how we think that you scale a media business. Yeah. I

think that um as as we've grown, right, we've thought about it uh in in in the bear. We were like, okay, we want to become very technical, earn the respect of the important people in the space, founders, developers, etc. I think we did a pretty good job of that. But now we're looking at where there's a lot of infra exhaustion. You know, there's a lot of technical exhaustion in some capacity at least. Yep. Um people just want apps, they want revenue, etc. A and so now we're looking at the space um and trying to figure out okay how do we how do we grow the audience and then how do we also grow the rep the revenue in a meaningful way and and I'll tell you it's been a little difficult because like okay we did really well last year like blew it like blew it well beyond

what we thought this year is going well but like it's hard to see like the 5x from here in terms of like pure revenue or pure uh like audience growth unless you just get a massive bull run right um Yeah. So, I'm kind of struggling with that. So, there's two ways to scale advertising, right? If advertising is is a it's either grow the audience or grow the rate that you can charge an advertiser. Yeah. For the thing. So, that means you either need to how do you grow you either 5x how do you grow revenue? 5x. You either 5x the audience growth. Yeah. Or you can 5x the amount that you can charge. Yeah. And we think we thought that you could if you 5x the audience, you end up getting stuck in this messy middle where you you're just trying to create like Yeah. If I I we could five

we could we could actually probably 20x our audience overnight. I start writing about stocks. We start writing about fintech. We write an article about Trump. We could write an article about Trump. We have great SEO. We'll get a million page views, right? But the but you're actually hurting your relationship with the audience if we start writing about Trump, right? Um uh so I'm not saying Trump if Trump did a crypto thing, we'd write about it, but like you know, general news. So, uh, for us it's like go create go create niches. And you see this, by the way, this isn't like a we're not geniuses, right? Bar stool does this. There's bar stool, the holding company brand. Bar stool has 47 different podcasts, right? Uh, Morning Brew. 47. Yeah, I think they have 47

different podcasts. Morning Brew, right? Morning Brew has their You need a flagship brand. need like like Bank list has the Bank list podcast, but they also have these other subbrands like uh Bartool has like pardon my take and and some flagships, right? Um, Call Her Daddy as well. Uh, and so you you know, Morning Brew has their daily newsletter, but then you also expand out into other things and that's how someone like Morning Brew is able to grow from 20 million in revenue to, I don't know, 80, 90, 100 million in revenue. Yeah. Axios has all sports, local, yep, you know, their their deals newsletter. So that so that's that's how we think about it. The other thing that that's been like on my mind for the last two years is like figuring out what the what the exit is.

So I have a lot of friends that work in e-commerce, right? They they're kind of much more behind the scenes, right? They they they build these businesses. They, you know, build a lot of revenue. They sell physical products, sell the entire brand for multiple of of the revenue. Media is a bit more difficult, especially in our case per se, because it's it's it's our face there. Yeah. It's our brand. Uh Blockworks is similar, but different, right? I think the house of brand strategy allows a bit more of that. But like what are your thoughts on on exits for media companies as a whole specifically for like podcast type of media companies as well which are a bit more oriented on you know the brands of the hosts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um why would you ever want to sell? Why would you ever want to exit? Media companies are the best companies in the world to own, right? Uh they are a launchpad to go do other products. So yeah, like everything we were talking about so far, it's not the not the best business model. No surprise, right? Advertising, sponsorships, not the best. But what it can do is it can kick off a lot of cash flow. Yeah. And you can own this relationship with your audience. If you talk to a founder, first- time founder, they're going to say, I'm really focused on the product and making the the engineering stack. You talk to any second time founder, they say, I'm focused on the distribution. You've built the hard thing. We've built the hard thing, which is distribution. Now it's what can you do with that distribution? Uh monetizing an audience

with advertising and sponsorships is the lowest value thing that you can possibly do with that distribution. Right. Yeah. You can do apps, softwares, etc. There's a million more valuable things that you can do. So we look at there's a massive trend I think in media right now which is combining this top of the funnel stack with something at the bottom of the funnel. So this could be u you know bar stool sports not just monetizing with merch and ads and sponsorships, it's betting and gambling, right? So, at the bottom of the bar stool stack is gambling. Um, there's a food blog that was really popular in New York. I don't know if you've heard of it called Infatuation. They got bought by Chase.

Seems like a really weird acquisition. Chase, JP Morgan buying a food blog. Why do they do that? Cuz Infatuation, the food blog, is the top of the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, Chase put the cha the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, right, to drive into the it's a credit card signup platform now. So, that's the future. Um uh media for us serves as the top of the funnel. Uh you build a really really really strong relationship with your audience where they trust you and you have credibility. And then for us we put our data platform at the bottom. So the first several years of block works really from 2017 to 2022.

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financial technology. This is Mantle. I I put out a separate tweet that was around um you know if there's other profitable companies in the space that aren't like blockchain related and I mentioned the rollup block works unchained you go on you know um you know why don't these launch tokens and Kaido I think is actually done that in a way right Kaido has no onchain tracks there's no blockchain there's no app onchain it's just a pure private company that makes I mean they there's rumors about what they they charge and whatnot, but it's very clear that they make a they have a profitable business and then they just launched this token for it, which now ties into to the business. You

mentioned onchain IPO. I had uh Prrenav from Van on here. They're super excited about that. Uh you know, he mentioned like what if only fans did an onchain IPO instead of doing an actual IPO. I was like, okay, it starts to make sense. Anyhow, kind of getting to like the meat and potatoes here, like I is it sensible to think that in the future a media company like Blockworks like the rollup or any of these kind of more private commercial businesses, you know, whether they get to this stage big enough to to IPO or not, uh, you know, is there potential to launch a token to like tokenize the the ownership of this as a form of exit or as a form of contributing to the operations? Yeah. Um there is I wouldn't use it as a form of

exit necessarily but what will if you think about IPOs IPOs used to happen at a at a at a medium stage of a company right you you get to maybe like X amount of revenue and you IPO now what's happened especially after 2007208 and the global financial crisis is it is so so so hard to IPO right it is so hard to IPO because of all the regulations the costs and the size of your business that you need to be it's really difficult to become an I a public company. Crypto has been around for 15 years. How many crypto public companies do we have? Real crypto businesses, too. You have Circle and Coinbase. That's it. That's crazy.

You have other ones, right? Public Miners, Galaxy, Exodus, but like those aren't, let's say, real crypto business. You only have two, Coinbase and Circle. And so, I think this is obviously a broken system. Companies are staying private longer and longer and longer. You look at Stripe, which is like a hundred billion dollar business or 50 billion or something. that should be a public company. Why aren't they like they should, you know, that should be pulled forward. And so I think what you I think moving on chain is the obvious next step here. I don't think all businesses like I don't think you guys should go public on chain. We're probably a little too small as well right now. Um but should the barrier be 500 million to be a public company? 500 million in revenue? Yeah, I don't think

so. I think that's too big. Right. So, should Anchorage and Fireblocks and BitGo be public? Well, they're all doing like a hundred million in recurring revenue. To me, that's a pretty darn good business that public market investors should have access to. So, I think the solution here is building I mean, internet capital markets is the right term for it because someone like Yeah. Someone like the rollup, I don't know if you guys are the size. Block Works. I don't know if we're the size, but when you get to 100 million in recurring revenue, that should be there should be public market investors that there's there there's demand from public market investors to buy the equity on a liquid basis in that in that company.

Yeah. So, I think what will happen is like the anchorages and fireboxes and bitos of the world, not saying them, but companies of their size will launch tokens on chain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's going to completely, and I use Kaido as the example, that's going to completely change the way uh we think about tokens. I mean, we talked to a lot of lawyers after Kaiito. Yeah. Because we said this is I mean, this that's a great model. Yeah. Lawyers told us it was illegal and that we shouldn't be doing it in the United States. So, that was the that was also the the answer. But as these as these regulations get a little more not I won't use the word lax, but uh buttoned up and it's more clear of how companies can move on chain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I like Block Works could IPO one day, we could

also IPO on chain. I think that's a more I mean, let's let's think about the who the buyer of the of Block Works equity would be of Blockworks equity would be. We can do a road show. We can hire JP Morgan or Goldman. Go do the road show. Go talk to the institutional crowd. But what about the We'll do 15 million downloads this year on our podcast. What about the 15 million podcast listeners who listen to our episodes? I bet they would be way more interested to buy Block Works equity than some random institutional investor investing out of like, you know, Los Angeles's pension fund. Yeah, 100%. You know, this is going to be this is going to be the the trend for like we say tokenize equities, but it's more like it's not like tokenizing, you know, Tesla stock and bringing it on chain like we saw in

DeFi. It's like no no no companies going and opting out of doing an IPO because of the restrictions and the difficulties and opting into uh doing an onchain IPO which is going to be Yeah. They're not mutually exclusive too. I think some companies could IPO onchain and they could IPO in the traditional sense of an IPO. Yeah. Yeah. And then that's going to be an interesting dichotomy as to like where there's value and like you know kind of dividends, revenues, etc. that that's kind of a side thing like like let's say let's say um in an IPO process let's say blockworks wanted to sell 20% of the business in an IPO well what if we sold 10% in we hired Goldman we did the road show we we did uh 10% of our business we IPOed on NASDAQ and 10% of our business we IPOed on Ethereum

right that's a great that's possible yeah it's great that's great so kind of coming back to the media side then um looking at at the scope of media in the space A and even outside I I do feel like media in crypto has a lot more nuance than kind of uh traditional media does. Uh nuance in the sense of knowing who you're speaking to. Nuance in the sense of the culture as well. Um a and just like the entire way of going about of creating content in crypto has a different form than uh nonfinancialized forms of media and then even when you look at like the traditional finance world. Now again, I I brought up that

you have done a pretty damn good job of putting your company and yourself in that in that little uh crevice in between what I would say more buttoned up traditional media and traditional finance and then crypto. Um I'm just curious like where do you think the big like for a company like the rollup or a company like a similar you know even like a competitor to block works where is the opportunity right now with the institutional uh kind of like capital institutional interest is it an information thing it's a research thing it's a data thing you know you mentioned all these angles like where is the opportunity for institutions for crypto media companies I'd probably break that

into two buckets okay The opportunity for the institutional crowd right now is is in we call it there's soft soft soft information and hard information or top of funnel and bottom of funnel. Same we use them you know you can they can be interchanged here. Top of the funnel would be like podcasts, newsletters, news stories, tweets, things like that. The bottom of the funnel is where we're really really really investing in right now and that's our research and data platform. Um, and that's what the institutional crowd the institution So there's three things to building an information platform. There's the facts, there's the insights, and there's the distribution. If you want to build a successful media company, you can just do one or maybe even two of those. If

you want to build an information company, you need all three of those. So there's we talk about the facts as being well sourced articles, onchain data. That's the cold hard truth of the industry. Then there's insights, which is layering on the context. Yeah. podcasts, uh, you know, partnering with like big names to bring them in house. Aby and Jonah from Thousandx, like that's the insights layer. And then the distribution is being able to distribute it to the right people in the right in the right mediums and the right channels. So for us, the opportunity with the institutional crowd is definitely with the research and data. I would say the uh sorry and being a connecting point. So the institutions, if I'm at Franklin Templeton, I don't want to just go talk to Fidelity and Black Rockck and Van, right? Cuz they're

talking to each other all day long anyways. So the reason I think D was so successful this year is it brought together these two really unique audiences of the institutional crowd and the crypto crowd, right? So they actually get to you know meet and that's why that's why events even though events are uh they get they're a low multiple business they're really really really interesting thing that is does is very core to our business because it brings together these two distinct audiences. Zooming out you're asking the question maybe at the first half of the question of like where's the opportunity for media. Yeah. Uh media is changing right now like just med there's a massive shift with media. We talked about advertising rates. That's one of the shifts. um and talking to like h force you have to talk to a core and a niche

audience. The other shift is that the people follow people now they don't follow brands. So the brand of the rollup and the brand of block works probably is less important over time than the people who work inside of these businesses. Yeah. And a good example of like old school would be the Atlantic 100%. The Atlantic doesn't even put their journal their writer names on the stories. You ju it's just the Atlantic article. That is super old school. New is Yeah. We I mean we we've studied I mean the content we maybe is different than ours but bars sports like that's what the future of media looks like is for us it's partnering with the bigname

people who can own their own distribution and where they have these kind of cult followings loyal people like Felix Felix who runs the Ford guidance podcast he he is the single best person to go follow if you want to follow macro and macro at the intersection of macro in crypto and he's got I mean there's a Ford guidance telegram group. It's got like over a thousand people in it and they're just locked in. I mean that thing's like there's like a thousand messages in that group every day. It's firing. So we want to build brands around these core personalities. Light speeded, right? Lightseed's got you. So all of our brands kind of follow a similar model. You've got an operator inside of the brand and then you've got

like a we need to find a bigger a better word for this. a ko, an influencer, a big name, a thought leader, whatever, you know, word you want to put on that, you get the operator and the and the and the thought leader. So Mert combined with Jack, that's Lightseed. Me combined with Santiago, that's Empire, right? And so you need that for these different brands. So media as far as I mean, I've I' I've noticed this just from like the engagement perspective as as well. like the brands don't get nearly as much engagement as like a you know any content from my account or from your account. It's very clear. Um also people just buy from people and people associate that more than anything. Um trust trust in institutions and brands

is at an all-time low right in society. So I think people follow people not brands and that that's why it's important to build a collection of people inside of your business, right? Yeah. That that are like uh that have their own voice that have their own voice. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So the the old school model of being like a journalist like veiled behind the scene of of being a journalist and just like writing the news. Yeah. It's an it's a there's a place for it but the place is diminishing. Yeah. And because the the business model doesn't make sense, right? Yeah. So, if you like, for example, if you work at Blockworks, you need to build your own distribution. And if you can't, there's a lot of other places that are probably good for you,

but like we we need people who create content at Blockworks to build their own distribution, build their own channels out. Yeah. Then you've just got this kind of like spiderweb, if you will, of just all these different niches being hit. Um a and these people are going out there and and then effectively building your core brand block works for you as a result of wanting to build their own brand i.e. their own podcast or whatever it is uh you know to to get more listeners or to do opportunities on on their own as well. By the way, there's aligned incentives here. The single greatest thing that you can do for your career, let's say you're 24y old reporter, 24y old data analyst, 24-y old researcher, is to build your online brand. This is the single greatest thing you can ever do for your career. Yeah,

it is not writing a better article. It is not building a better research report. The single greatest thing you can do for your career is to build your is to build your online social presence and online brand. It is unlocked it will unlock more doors than you could ever imagine. And so when we have a research analyst or a reporter, we don't have to say, you know, there's a financial incentive to go build your brand. It's hey we will put the full force and strength of Blockworks' distribution and brand and the 85 other people who work here who also have distribution to boost you and in turn you got to serve the mission as well and it's uh if you can build it well it becomes this kind of unstoppable force. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think I I mean you see on Twitter, you

see the Blockworks uh be on on tons of different accounts uh from a variety of different niches and and it it it just feels like this these people that are that are interested in collaborating for the sake of the brand but as you say then helping to grow their their own personal brand. I mean it opens up opportunities like as you say like no other. I mean I came to New York what two months ago. Had I came here with on a completely different life track and just kind of ploped down uh you know working a job or something, it'd be a way different experience. The last two months have been have been nuts, right?

Just you know this that meetings there, dinner there, that that going on. It's just been like wow, you know, in as far as uh opportunity goes and and I don't know, it's just it's it's good. It's good to be grateful for that, right? And and it's it's powerful. I mean, it's good for your it's the single greatest thing you can do for your business is to build an online presence. And um I mean I ask a lot of our new hires, we have this like online, we have a kickoff basically with new hires whenever they join. I always ask like how did you find out about Blockworks in the first place? Probably nine times out of 10, more than that, 95% of the time they go, "Oh, I follow I follow new data analyst the other day. Oh, I follow Dan on Twitter for years. I see him tweeting. Oh, I

follow you on Twitter. Oh yeah, I saw I saw Mike on LinkedIn." That's it. They come through social. So you guys have been uh doing a lot of So all the podcasts are like longer form uh conversations. Yep. Um and you guys, you know, you guys do some short form stuff, but like if I was to give a constructive criticism, I think the short form stuff for Blockworks could be improved. Agreed. 100% agreed. And I mean, we're going to come to permissionless and do a full live stream, do a ton of and we're going to, you know, we're going to do a ton of clips, help there. And I think that I've seen on Twitter just the last like two weeks, you guys have been kind of like pushing it a bit more.

What's your thought as far as like the attention span uh like like effectively appealing to the short-term attention span for people now with content uh versus like these longer form podcasts? The right model for podcasts. So, first off, we are just at the beginning of growth in podcasts. Five years ago when Mike and I were really focused on pod, it was like podcast we thought were going to be the medium. We're like this we are we were obsessed with the medium. Still are actually. Yeah. Um people were like podcast like that's cra like that's crazy. like go do newsletters or something like podcasts are the most important medium outside of social we believe um for content distribution. So what's the right model? Well podcast started with like Tim Ferris and like you know Gary Vaynerchuk like just doing

these kind of interview shows. Then what it emerged what it built out into is like pretty highly produced shows like the Ringer. Yeah. Gimlet um uh Wondery. you know, they hire a bunch of producers and uh that that model's bad. That's a bad that's like factually a bad model for podcast is like highly produced. Um then we went back into like, you know, what we're doing here, which is like interview based whatever. I think the future of podcasts ends up looking a lot like um uh actually I think Barcel's done this well. I keep mentioning them.

TBPN, those guys are doing it well, which is these like uh who's the um Theo Vaughn is doing it well. Actually, Joe Rogan got it right. Basically, these long like really long authentic podcasts where the user or the listener can tap in if they like the episode and if if they want to. Like for me, if I see an ep guest guest episode, like let's say uh let's say I see uh like Patrick Collison going on a podcast. I don't want a 45minute podcast. I want a three-hour podcast. Yeah. Give me that three-hour podcast. So I I think the future of these podcasts is like long authentic, not cut up, not produced authenticity authenticity authenticity combined with

super short, clippable, bang, bang, bang, bang. So the future of podcasts is give me a really long authentic show where you're getting into a bunch of stuff. You're not clipping it. Someone goes to the bathroom, boom, leave that in. Whatever. Someone starts eating some food, boom, leave it in. Combined with like 10 to 20 short clips from each episode. That's the future of podcasting. Yeah. You think that like the Joe Rogan style and these longer forms where you can just have these these deep conversations, right? Okay. But then we you you orient the conversation in such a way that there are enough moments that can get somebody's attention to then pull them in to watch the entire thing if they just see a clip on. Exly. Exactly. The clips are how you grow. And it's um the

reason for this model is because there's a an over supply not an over supply but the supply of podcasts uh of podcasts have grown right so it used to when it like let's take uh the extremes here when it was just Tim Ferrris doing a podcast you had to you subscribe to Tim Ferrris you listen to every Tim Ferrris episode more and more that's not how it will go I doubt any listener just listens to every episode of the rollup or every episode of Empire there's too many good podcasts out there so what they actually do is they have guests that they want to listen to and they see like oh The rollup did a did an episode with Bellagi. Boom. I'll plug in for that. And if you're plugging in for that, you clearly like Bellagi. So, you want to hear I don't want to just hear

Blah's take on the network state. I want to hear like what's he doing with his money? Where's he living these days? Why did he leave the US? What's it right? So, that there's a uh you want to get into every single question and every single thing with that person and uh let the use let the listener decide when they want to opt in and opt out of it. So on that note then um when I brought up the the uh okay Blockworth could do more short form and I was like okay we're kind of you know prioritizing it trying to do as much clips as as possible like I said app permissionless the thing that that uh I I sometimes think about and struggle with is like okay how much are we going to care about views and like watch time and like you know you know how much are we going to

optimize our our our business for like getting these these like very clippable you know like like high view content versus just making like really good content that we enjoy and like and know is good that may not perform as well. So, it's kind of like a a bit of a tale of of two of two cities here, if you will, or you know, two different uh kind of opposing forces where one is like, okay, we want to optimize entirely for views, clickthrough rate, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then two is kind of like, okay, we just don't really care about that, but we want to optimize for the most for the best content possible, which they can kind of o o overlap and oftentimes they do, but like how much do you care about like the views or the downloads and like how much does that

affect your you know your strategy? We care about it, but we will never let the we will never let views and downloads we will never sacrifice content for views and downloads is what I'd say. thumbnails and stuff like that. Like crazy just Yeah. Like you got to do it to a certain extreme like Yeah. Like thumbnail thumbnails on YouTube are a good example. Um you could do you can do insane thumbnails with like me with my shirt off with the crazy face. Yeah. Like this 100x. Yeah. Yeah. That podcast is going to get listened to more. But also my audience will cringe when they see that.

For sure. So I'm If you were building, let's say we were building Blockworks for the next 12 months. We want to sell it. Yeah. Boom. doing every single one of those growth hacks. But if you want to build blockworks for the next 10 years, you you you figure you figure out what makes sense for your audience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's how we thought about it as well. But it it can be um by the way, you can do you can grow so fast without doing all that stuff. Doing that stuff like TVPN is a perfect example like TVPN, they're streaming hours a day and they've I mean that show has probably grown 100x in the last like two months.

So, you can grow crazy fast without all these things. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So, that's I think that's what um that's how we think about it. Yeah. I think the live streaming thing is also another interesting concept because that actually it's all moving to live stream. It's it's all it's all going live stream. I mean, look, I'll be honest. We saw TVPN. We saw a couple of these other guys and we're like, "All right, like this is crushing. We're just We got to go." No, we're we're getting into it, too. Like live streaming is the natural reason for that. Insane, too. And YouTube for us. Yeah. The reason for that is that so a uh there's no natural distribution of podcasts, right? There's no Spotify and Apple don't help people find the shows. No, it's just if you're subscribed. Yeah. So, the the natur the

only way to get your show out there is to do these short form clips, which is what you're doing. And you're telling us we need to do better. It's almost like spamming it, though. It's It's kind of annoying. I know. I saw I did that thing and there's like six clips of me already. We're just trying to get you to promote that to your audience. Exactly. Like even just one retweet. Streaming embeds the podcast directly into the distribution channel, which is why streaming is so amazing. The other Yeah. So the the the other reason for this is the news cycle used to move you know there used to be like a weekly news cycle then it became a daily then then it became like a every couple days now it's a daily news yeah now now it's like how many news cycles happened yesterday you had the Elon in the morning it was

circle right by the afternoon nobody was talking about circle it was all Elon and Trump obviously that's an outlier thing but like the news cycle moves so quickly and I was listening to um to Portoid talking about this at bar stool he's like we used to get out episodes about NFL, you know, NFL Sunday. You'd get it out on on Monday afternoon because that's how long it took. Then he he's like, "We rushed it. We would get it out Monday morning." He's like, "Now, uh" he's like, "Then we moved to live streaming right after the games." He's like, "Now we just live stream during the games." Yeah. That's what people want. By the time Mondays happen, no one's actually talking about the Sunday games anymore. They're on the Monday news story. So that's the same with crypto. Yeah. I mean, I think the live and and so what the live stream actually

does on Twitter and YouTube is YouTube, it puts you at the front of somebody's any any subscriber or if somebody who's kind of like watched some of your content in the past, puts you right on the front page. You go to YouTube, they're all optimizing for live stream. Twitter, you're up in the top bar in the mobile um or on desktop, you're in the sidebar in they're all because they want to keep people on the platform. The number one thing that the metric they care about is how many people are on the platform and how much time are they spending on the platform. Yeah. Yeah. And live streams drive that. And this model that that like obviously you know some you know we mentioned bar stool TVPN some of these others have pioneered with like multiple guests shorter segments clips. It's like the amount of

distribution. Like we've just been trying it for like two weeks or like three weeks. Now now we've scaled it to three times a week and and like we've gotten into different niches of crypto and Twitter that we would never have been in the past with our podcast. Totally. podcast is one person, one topic and it's not very like like and also we again we prioritize technical content because we wanted to be we wanted to establish this kind of like respect this knowledge. Um and now our clips are going into all these different little little pockets totally and people are engaging with them because it's like it's not I mean it's just fun content too. It's great. So yeah I think I think we're going to lean into it heavier. I mean I think we're we're going to try to get to four or five days a week. Yeah.

Now imagine where this goes with AI. So I think what people are thinking about with AI is like how can you pump out more articles like and that ends up just being content slop like that's not a good that's it's like oh how can you like write you know 100 articles a day for SEO like that's content slop what about uh big news story happens so Trump Trump and Elon happens right or circle IPO happens you probably had a couple people in your head where you're like oh man I really love to hear that person's take on this yeah for sure oh man like you know I really like I was at a thing last night and this guys like he's like, "You know, I actually really want to hear um uh Friedberg's take on this."

Freiriedberg from All-In. Yeah. Um he's like, "Ah, it kind of sucks. I got to wait till tomorrow to hear like the All-In podcast." Well, what if Friedberg had cloned himself? Yeah. And there's probably what, 300 episodes of All-In at this point. So, you know, this AI knows what Freedberg's take is going to be from 300 hours of listening to Freedberg. It's got his video and his audio. What if Freedberg had boom within 20 seconds turn on his take five minute clip goes out of his take on Trump? Yeah, there's like 700 hours of me on on YouTube at this point. Yeah. Right. So like something happens. Boom. By bit hack. What if Jason could be a clip of me on Twitter saying what I think? Now if it's the AI is going to get like

probably 98% of what I actually think. Honestly, it will. We don't like to think that, but like it actually will. So yeah, Ralph Paul's been doing that. I don't know if you've seen this stuff. Yeah, I've seen this. Yeah, right. He showed me. We we use the same company, 11 Labs. We'll see how how trippy and and weird that AI stuff gets. Um I don't know how much you guys have been optimizing for it. I think I've seen some some tweets about using 11 Labs and and uh I mean, so all all of Block Works are ads. If you listen to an Empire episode right now or a bell curve episode, that's not Mike and me reading the ads. Yeah. That's that's an AI Jason reading the ads. Yeah. Yeah. So what you from 11 Labs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what so they've clon So our team cloned me.

So and they cloned Mike too. So what used to happen is you know Coinbase is like or you know whoever the advertiser is like hey guys I want you to advertise this new staking product that we have. And then they send it to the producer. Producer sends it is like you know hits me up is like hey you got to record this ad. So I record the ad. Then I send it to the producer. Producer sends it to Coinbase. Coinbase is like ah yeah but you screwed up this one thing. Sends it back to the producer. Sends it to me. I got to get more time on my calendar. It was taking like two hours a week to record these ads. Total pain in the ass. So now what happens is Coinbase sends it to the producer. Producer puts it in puts the words into clone me. Clone me

says it. Yeah. Sends it back to Coinbase. They're like, "That looks great. And by the way, next week when Coinbase has a new product they want to promote, they can just send it to the producer. We can change the ads. It takes 30 seconds." My production manager like joked about this two weeks ago because I was recording an ad here and I was like, "Bro, I am very very like just like doing this is is just a big pain. It feels like 2020 work in a way. Like my head is in a whole different landscape as far as like where I'm trying to focus." Yeah. Yeah. It's not a good It's not just not like clone just clone yourself. And he was like, "Dude, we should just find something that is like" And so any any public personality on the internet, by the way, if it's

going to clone themselves and will be cloned by other people, by the really. You'll be you'll be like someone if I can clone myself, someone else can clone me. Yeah. You know, so it's just inevitable. Okay. Well, that's uh I appreciate that tip. I uh I'm going to I'm going to clone myself. Go clone yourself. Yo, appreciate your time, man. Yeah. Thanks, man. Speak soon. F.