Building Dapper Labs | Roham Gharegozlou

Transcript

[Music] thank you know to set the stage for a lot of the folks in the audience we're going to cover off on a couple of themes today um you know things that most of us in the audience might be thinking about trying to glean from your experience um you know continue with passion and ambition as we Forge forward in the space so we'll talk a little bit about your Founders journey and then finding product Market fit in in the crypto space and along the way we'll have hopefully have some have some fun that sound good let's do it cool um well we're going to dive into blockchain and web3 that's why we're all here but first with the room full of Founders I would totally be remiss not

to ask you about your decision to leave what might seem like a stable uh biology MD PhD path at Stanford and start your Venture Studio Axiom Zen what kind of went into that decision-making process how did you make that decision well I mean I think um the best piece of advice I got at that age was from my academic advisor who's a very interesting guy Robert sapolsky you should read his book why zebras don't get ulcers I'll make a plug there but he said hey if you're not sure what you want to do go try it and I was on this path of hey biology and and you know biotech and all this stuff and then the goal wasn't to become a doctor but to go into biotech and and so I took a year off from Stanford and went to biotech

internship just the first couple of weeks I realized hey this stuff's going to move too slowly so I think it was more of a it my personality is just fits with technology where I can do something hit a button and see the reaction and I was that it was kind of an incident instant decision I didn't first start the the um the Venture Studio I went through a Security's path uh joined the non-profit helped some Founders um find in in Middle East connect with VCS and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to provide mentorship got to meet a lot of VCS and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley through that process got an internship at a venture capital firm helped them start a seed fund got to understand the zero to one sort of you know process of ideation and what seems

to be successful it seems to not be successful and and sort of and this took two and a half years or so and then sort of uh quit that um to to start my own thing um and that was in 2012. it's about three years after graduating okay and you know I think we all kind of have that person who pulled us down like the proverbial Rabbit Hole crypto Rabbit Hole I don't show of hands like can ever like who can identify the person who like got them into crypto okay so a good majority of us can remember like not pointing at each other yeah right exactly so good a good majority of us can remember that moment remember that person is do you have a moment do you have a person in your life

where you kind of reflect now like nearly kind of nearly a decade on like uh that was my aha moment yeah so I started axioms then December 2012. um April 2013 I got an email from this ex-apple engineer Dieter Shirley it was kind of a one-page application half a half uh just a cover letter no resume well um with a very simple sort of like bullet point resume and he ended up joining our team a couple months later as Chief Architect at ax seems then and he's he's been mining he had been mining Bitcoin on his laptop and sort of home computer at you know from sort of earlier days when that was possible um and so he kept bringing it up as a technology shift um that we should pay attention to rather than hey go buy the

currency um and then about a year late after that we started kind of playing around with Bitcoin um did an internal hackathon and and a few months later went to Vegas for money 2020 where he won the grand prize of the hackathon two of our three projects were Bitcoin projects sort of like little one was a little game where you could challenge someone else in Bitcoin so I could wage your Bitcoin play a little flappy birds thing and if if I beat you you would you would win the Bitcoin um and so we kind of had those ideas since Earl from early on because you know in 2012 if you think about it you're at kind of the you know the Mobile Shift is is happening we built a Apple app of the year app but it's a red ocean like it's a lot of competition a lot of a lot of

pressure and so we're finding hey what's a new kind of Channel what's a new platform and um and so crypto we looked at it in in that aspect of how can we build things that it felt freeing you can build something that any anyone could come in and wager a million dollars theoretically in Bitcoin now obviously the user experience was terrible you have to sort of sit there for a long time you know most transactions failed like it wasn't a thing that was going to work but but it was a intellectually exciting kind of uh exercise so that was from back then I mean we didn't really go heavy in on it but we were playing we were playing around with it for for a while and so when the waves started happening in 2016 with ethereum um we were kind of attuned to hey let's

pay attention and see if there's something we can do here it's it's really like great to hear you kind of like informally talk about that sensation of building in the space like this concept of it being open and free and um so you know 2016 ethereum is you know obviously growing from a network perspective and you are writing an open source standard for nfts so one I would be like remiss also not to ask like do you think you are the first person to use the phrase non-fungible token we've tried to we tried to find other examples I can't find it okay because I can't either the um you know the the first

draft of it was non-fungible assets nfas which wouldn't have worked if you think about it because NFA is not you know not Financial advice so it's kind of it wouldn't have been deemable in a in a way and so uh and so I'm glad theater ended up changing it wasn't me it was it was Dieter Shirley to be clear um but you know this concept of a non-fungible x has been you know that's what it is it's a definitional term but but kind of applying it to blockchain digital assets and and then identifying that there needed to be a standard otherwise they wouldn't have the network effects that it that it could because crypto punks existed at the time where Pepes there were colored coins on bitcoin there were examples of digital assets that were non-fungible but because there was no common standard

it was difficult to build on top of that it was difficult to have a Marketplace that displays that have a wallet that can display the art have you know loaning platforms and D5 platforms that you could you could collateralize with that that's sort of where um where we felt the standard was necessary the decision to create an open standard and to write an open Center for for non-fungible tokens how like kind of walk me through or walk us through that decision making process like is it the general ethos of the space that the reason behind it was in this open standard and wanting to help proliferate you know the technology what was the inspiration behind putting it out there um it was it was sort of two things in parallel one was the idea of crypto kitties wasn't the only idea we were

sort of brainstorming and wanted to explore building on ethereum at the time you know there were icos Brave had just done a 30 million dollar sale that was sort of the biggest at the time and we were looking at you know the promises people are making and saying well this isn't exactly possible but there's a lot there's a lot that's interesting here um and so and so we you know the the goal of the non-fatible token like crypto kitties was one of several ideas multiple of which needed a common standard um and including real estate fractionalization including how do you represent plots of land and if you wanted to put land and title on the blockchain how would you even represent that because do you create everything as an individual cryptocurrency do you create new coins for every type of digital asset for every type of really

just didn't make sense and so sort of other ideas led to it and then and then once we had the idea of crypto Keys once we sort of started testing it and realized hey this thing's really fun we realized that having a kind of a go to market that included a you know shift to the technology as big as erc20 would would kind of attract the right kind of attention and it would be a it would be a good base to launch from so we we published the the first draft of the standard September 20th um and then launched the game October 28th as a beta at the first ethereum Global event so it took like a month for the product to come out on top of the standard and no one cared about the standard until the product came out yeah which is which is the reality you know

the the tech by itself is sort of it's intriguing to some people but as soon as the product hits and users start using it that's when people's imagination gets ignited of oh wait you could apply it to all these other all these other things and and then everybody got involved to kind of Flesh it out and and incorporate it as a formal part of ethereum I think that's a really nice way of thinking about you know the group here and building um on open source technology and with open source technology and you know the canonical use case for that open source standard is cryptokitties and I want to spend a little bit of time talking about that because I think it's a really nice way to unpack some themes for the group so you fast forward a little bit crypto kitties becomes one of the most widely

used applications on the ethereum blockchain like kind of infamously slows down block time brings ethereum to a halt and so you're in this moment do you have like there's this one hand of really concrete product Market fit because you brought ethereum to a halt there's so many people using it um but unearthing maybe a design flaw at the time with where cryptokitties was deployed so I how did you rationalize those two things happening at the same time yeah I mean so so it's crypto kitties at one point represented 30 of all the gas spent on the ethereum network so it sort of was a real um was a real um problem for for you know icos and all the early fintech kind of applications

um but but I think that this happened again with topshot really successful products sometimes make you think you have product Market fit even though you're making the revenue but you might not have authentic product Market fit because a lot of the energy underlying that revenue is actually speculative so that level of energy I think is is good because from a certain perspective it brings people it sax people it you know gets gets money in the door and helps you fund future development those you got to ask the question hey is that the fit with the right Community right and is that Community there for the right reasons um and how can I kind of build on that and and um and make sure that you know you're treating it in the right way now on ethereum though we saw terrible new user conversion rates where you know if you

had an ethereum wallet and you had ethereum you could play the game and it was fun but if you didn't it was nearly impossible um and then secondly of course it was the performance question um so that's partially why we started after Labs we launched cryptokitties as a bootstrap company that you know I was so um shareholder of and and we'd never raised outside money and the um and we decided to make Dapper because we realized holy crap the Gap is actually big and to enable the next wave of developers people have to simplify a lot of these um bits and pieces because even building that crypto kitties was really difficult but then realizing oh wow now I have to solve scalability and solve the user

experience problem and there's there's no nothing there at the time um so there's no open C there was no you know Alchemy there was no like none of the products there was no Zeppelin there was no crypto startups yeah there was no a16c crypto right and so so it's sort of a lot of the stuff that we rely on today didn't didn't exist um but but it was a complicated sort of Securitas route to get us to where we are today which is NBA NFL on Flow and just the different sort of uh stage for the next fair market if you will yeah you cut your teeth for us like for sure yeah I think um you know it's a really uh interesting concept and maybe one that we all hear kind of grapple with from time to time is you hit these

technological complexities or roadblocks and you know I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made of like you could have looked at the issues with ethereum and thought like isn't this somebody else's problem but so you decide to build flow and like what gives you like how do you find the confidence to take that on you you're going from deploying an nft based game to now building an entire ecosystem yeah I mean look at the time we built crypto kitties we also had uh developer facing products so we built Zen Hub and and some other things so we we always knew how to interface with developers but but for the first year and a half we didn't have that confidence and in fact you know most of our uh most of the advice we got was hey stay focused on on on what you should

you know what you're good at which is building applications for consumers um but the more we interfere you know I spoke to vitalik firstly I spoke to all of the current Builders of all the top layer ones and at the time there was no nfts wearing a thing 2018 2019 the idea of web 3 for consumers wasn't a or you know crypto for consumers crypto for Consumer applications wasn't a wasn't that interesting it was about D5 it was about you know the future of Finance it was if it was about onboarding institutions I mean to an extent for many people it still it still is and so the the platforms the way they're built weren't as a product person we were taking it was too much risk it was too difficult

it felt like trying to build Angry Birds on the BlackBerry right it's just not fun for the customer and it's not fun for the developer and so something's got to give and when I talk to um all the Builders of of these layer ones they don't have empathy for the pain we're feeling as consumer developers and so we reinvented a lot on Flow but but uh but before we did we built the first smart contract wallet on ethereum for consumers first of all to do uh Gas pay gas on behalf of consumers first of all to do key recovery on behalf of consumers first of all to integrate credit card payments perhaps he's on behalf of consumers we built two of the most complex ethereum games that exist crypto kitties and cheese wizards cheese Wizard came within 42 bytes of the evm by code limit so we we went deep

on ethereum we were you know we had written more smart contracts than anybody first open C smart contract was for crypto kitties first actually smart contract was for crypto cues um all the open Zeppelin drafts for crypto keys so like the we were deep on ethereum but all this stuff is just too hard it's hard to build a house on a on stilts right it's sort of as a developer you're spending all your time just catching up and so that's why we created flow and flow like it's three years old so it's it's still or you know two and a half in a sense and it's still um um early but today is fully decentralized fully permissionless um we had to build a whole new programming language from the ground up that works a lot like moved us today but it's so much easier to read write reason

with it's so much more capable because we've ran more smart contracts than anybody and we wrote it for Consumer applications so the whole you know everyone's excited about account abstraction on Flow that's on on ethereum that has existed on Flow at the protocol level um from the beginning and more recently we've implemented changes that actually make it really easier for you think about a mobile app are you going to pop out of the mobile app every time to sign a transaction to go back in that's insane for a customer like when you if if you're a game you're gonna say hey to sign up for my game go sign up for this other wallet or pick from this list of 12 wallets that's not gonna that's not how consumers are going to behave and so so how do you let an app onboard a

customer and then let the customer connect it to their wallet afterwards and how do you cycle keys and how do you have all of these like things that sound simple but we're just incredibly hard to do on on ethereum I'm very costly right the upper wallet ended up costing us insane amounts just in gas fees to maintain that smart contract infrastructure which by the way is what you have to do to do account abstraction um Etc and then the solutions people suggest that sharding layer two State channels um and people were so sure the state channels were the future do you hear anything about them no I bet you guys plasma right you guys have heard of plasma or you know there's there's things that people were so sure was part of the future that that sounds really hard man and it sounds really sort of

far from from like me being able to build a business on it like that was the problem is people were a lot of Theory without a lot of how do you build a business on it um so and and look but I don't know if it was the right or I know it was the right choice but I don't know if it's the right choice to do that again now because the market is much more mature and and in a sense it was maybe the wrong choice to even enter the market at that early on because think about it was six years ago and it was through like forward-sighted Visionary investors like you know Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson and others who who said well hey this is small today but it'll be big tomorrow and so let's sort of spend a lot of money trying to like get it there that

that we got it there you know it was a um yeah it was pretty heavy heavy lift well I think it's good to take stock for a moment like relative to where we are today in this cohort the technology they're building on today looks very different than the technology six years ago as you were mentioning what gives you if you could impart on the group like again like what gives you that confidence to kind of just like set the goal post and like don't let it move and just keep going towards it um you know and granted you will probably have to call an audible on your way down the field sometimes but like how do you find that conviction like what gets you up like excited every day like how do we how do we all maintain the level of enthusiasm that you clearly

have for for what you're building I mean I just try to keep it simple and to be honest it was a lot harder during the bull market times to keep people focused because every little thing was like hey these other guys are so successful that has to be the right way these other guys are so successful that's and but the reality is anything you tossed up in the air flew right like it wasn't it didn't correlate so now it's a little bit easier because everyone's depressing so you offer a vision of the future and everyone's like okay that that makes sense but but if you think about it it's just super simple does ownership matter to humans yes or no right will Digital Life matter as much as physical life yes or no that's all that matters right so will ownership matter in the digital world

should ownership be adjudicated by a single company right like these are very simple answers ownership should not be educated by a simple comp by a single company can't be and so it hasn't existed on the modern internet the concept of ownership only exists inside games or you know 99 cent stickers or whatever it is how is that human right it's it's a it's it's a blip on The evolutionary time scale right for 10 000 years people have been expressing their identity through ownership whether it's what they wear or what they hang around their necks or seashells they collect and give to their to their love and whatever it is and so people haven't been able to do that digitally now this is people doing that digitally what manifested during 2021 2022 of like people are getting so hyped up on on on

a particular expression of digital ownership that's like that's kind of what happened during 99 2000 when people get hyped up on one expression of um transferring information across uh telephone lines right but where where you know yes it's website.com and sort of banner ads and all that stuff but what the internet came to matter 20 years later is much more than that and I think web3 is the same where we get so hung up on one aspect of it because there's so much money in it too right like we're we're all entrepreneurs if there's you can toss something in the air and get 10 million dollars for you're going to do it and so it distracts from you know what's how do you how do you add real value to real people

um so you know well and for so I highly recommend uh Rohan give a talk in 2017 called life is non-fungible uh it's a TED talk if you have not seen it I highly recommend you watch it um you're kind of the reference to seashells makes an appearance and talking about some of these Concepts so definitely please after this definitely watch it you'll definitely have some questions coming your way after folks get a hold of it um but so I wanted to just take a step back and and think about again where we are we're in a period of time where this cohort's building on technology that looks a little bit different so success in this space is hard to Define but I would largely argue that you know crypto kitties NBA Top Shot bringing the likes of major Global web 2 Brands into

the space could be a measure of success how did you think about that transition from okay we own the IP for crypto kitties we're gonna go now work with the MBA license that IP and build this really uh like aggressive at the time project for them what was the thought process around that um so we launched crypto kitties end of 2017 and and then a lot of Brands came to us and so we had been talking to the NBA for a long time kind of just educating them on you know the platform and things like that but in the middle of 2019 like industry perception was very negative regarding um you know nfts in particular but both of crypto in general and so we we thought that it was very important to to

bring something that kind of shocked people out of their um complacency in a way and said hey this is and and just the analogy of sports trading cards is so perfect because it's just a physical thing now you're just making it digital and it's better you at the time there was like a year-long wait for PSA ratings it's still you know six months or longer at the time you know still today it's so complicated to sell stuff on eBay here's on a digital Marketplace you can sell a thing for a dollar pay five cent fees then you're done right and so that that no postage stamps no rating no authenticity guaranteed on so the the category made a ton of sense and in like big VIPs and startups don't usually mix and that's for good reason I would heavily recommend against working with

big eyepiece um just just kind of in general as a startup because it takes a lot of effort unless and unless it's like you'll know it like you should the rule is there now obviously people the rules are there to be broken so people can break the rules but like the only reason we broke the rules was we had a long history of working with um bigger companies and it's a really tough balance to play and so you're you're um because at a startup what matters is iteration speed what matters is changing direction what matters is learning something in the morning and acting on it before noon um and that's just not how bigger Partners work so like I want to kind of make sure I give that message because it's it's very it adds a huge level of complexity to to anything that that you do but at the

time we sort of had the Playbook digital ownership trading cards but digital and so we wanted a big brand that we could we could sort of shock people out of complaces de-risk distribution to an extent you know you're guaranteed to to and and so um and and so you know and and the NBA has just been fantastic Partners in the whole whole way um so I think that that Sports IPS um and kind of digital ownership in sports is gonna be one one of the biggest categories of digital ownership just like it is in physical ownership right like Collectibles of jerseys and trading cards and lots of like people why do people collect to express and they collect to express and fandom and fandom for most people not as much for technologists but but for most of the

world is concentrated in sports right and technology is other things maybe gaming or whatever it is but but outside of Technology Sports is what still sort of runs the world so that that was very important to us and then going from MBA NFL and and um you know we have premier league and and others as well it's it's um it's a big we are going outside of sports as well but Sports is going to always be a core core um pillar for us and the sports viewing experience has not evolved at all in the digital world you have streaming that's about it right and so there's no um digital aspect to fandom and Silicon Valley is very skeptical of sports right if you look at the top sports companies they're terrible at product and if you look at the top product companies they're terrible at sports so you know

Amazon's doing Sunday Amazon's doing streaming YouTube's doing streaming Facebook's had Partnerships with sports League the whole time they're not good at figuring out what a sports fan wants um and sports companies like Fanatics and others are not good at Building Products so it's just a good place to be but it's very tough to work with big IPS and sort of educate them on how to work with startups well I'd love that that you had that piece of advice like surfaces and a talk like this it's I think it's really valuable for the cohort and for everyone who's thinking about you know that that bold call to action statement of like on board the next one billion users to crypto like how do you do that how do you solve that and um sometimes looking at the web 2 Partnerships is is a theory that could

you know maybe hold true in helping make good on that statement so on this topic of advice um I want to make sure we leave time for questions but on the topic of advice what is one piece of advice that you may be unsolicited even that you're really pumped that you got and listened to and then flip side one piece of advice you're really thankful you threw away and did not listen to that's a great question so so the one that's top of mind for the first one is uh Paul Graham's do things that don't scale um because it's one thing I'm sort of pushing my team a lot right now so we're a big company but still and so sometimes people are like oh that's not a big enough ideas no go grab your iPad sign people up one by one talk to the

customer like that's do things that don't scale um and I think that that's that's really really important um and then in terms of advice to not follow um it's generally always good to follow the advice of focus on sort of you know being very focused on on you know your mission and your theory but in a lot of ways we gained a lot from having our ears to the ground on other on other things and a lot of our experiments failed and we had backup plans you know in parallel with doing a lot of the scalability research well in parallel with meeting with all of the vitaliks and all the people working on there too figuring out how to build on you know with algorand work with Solano work

whatever we were doing our own research of what it would look like to build our own channel so that's a big part of what gave us confidence we're working on it in parallel with the NBA we're talking to them for a whole year as we were trying to build on ethereum and and you know build our own projects cryptokitties cheese wizards we were we were telling them hey this possibility that there might be this new network flow.com that we're we're working on so we're sort of always having an idea of well what if we're wrong and what's our plan if we're wrong and how do we know we're wrong as early as possible so that's um that it's just a Nuance I guess uh approach well um I definitely want to open it up for questions I just first want to say I'm very grateful we are very grateful as a

lot of the cohort Works through their their own Founders journey to be able to you know sit up here and pick your brain and have this access to you so thank you for joining us we are going to open it up for questions um so there's a microphone is everyone's familiar with the drill here um please you know questions for Rohan on his Founders Journey finding product Market fit uh whatever is burning feel free to to lob his way thanks for the talk this is Jess I'm building blockcus we're a web 3 gaming infra company um so uh also Canadian I'm from Toronto so um uh love Dapper Labs like from crypto kitties to NFL all day to topshaw you guys just like I have to say at the

you know risk of offending others you guys have got the sauce in terms of like taste and Vibe check really really appreciate that um question is around like what's your vision for the flow blockchain you know especially when it comes to engagement within the sports area like gaming like is the vision to become like the chain for sports gaming like running tournaments like having games on top of there that's licensed by the same IP like yeah or maybe something completely different just want to hear your thoughts on vision for the flow blockchain um yeah that's a great question thank you and so the flow was always built as an application platform that's sort of what it was um ideated as so applications could include games or other kinds of products

but but this concept of products serving mainstream customers so you need really good user experience you might need to do things on behalf of the customer you might need to have paths from custody to non-custody and so doing all of that in a way that's seamless but decentralized that's sort of what the objective of flow has been across its its existence and also making it really easy to write complex smart contracts so if anything is so that that's sort of what Cadence is built for um so mainstream customer user experience complex smart contracts or composability with others um that's sort of the the long term of where um what the technology was built to enable now in terms of like gaming in

particular there are a number of games on Flow and coming to flow and the the number one thing that I think makes flow easier for games is the hybrid custody piece where games can start a user off with an application custody wallet that the user can take and connect to their self-custody wallet at any time but the game retains authority to um to sort of make uh to make changes within uh within that application ecosystem so if you're in the app you don't have to leave the app to sign transactions you sign the transactions right there in the app but the app only has control over the assets of the app at the same way your sort of phone works um with with you know the the that each application is access to its own sandbox and but the user sort of has the up the

operating system has access to everything so self-custody would have access to everything so flow in the sensors make to make it really easy for developers to build easy user experiences and complex software that is seamless to the customer um whether it's games or anything else there's a full Unity uh SDK now on reels coming soon and so all of those pieces are getting easier and easier over time hi I'm Brandon thanks so much for the talk uh our team gets constant feedback that we should make it feel more like NBA Top Shot in terms of like how great it is for consumers so you know just great job with the product design I feel like it's a pretty legendary move to write one of the biggest smart contracts on ethereum and then kind of fork and go write your own blockchain like that's

pretty dope now that it's 2023 would your advice for Founders today you know in terms of like achieving consumer ux and blockchain scalability would it be build application specific blockchains build on flow or trust the vision of L2 scalability um I mean you know obviously I have sort of a horse in the race I think that um I think there's really interesting things happening with with the ethereum L2 space but um um it's a lot of unanswered questions like how is the complexity going to work um over over time and sort of there's an assumption that hey developers will figure it out but the more layers of

developers there are the more complex the end user's job is and the more Stills that they have to rely on so what the hell is the point and so in a lot of ways flow is built to say hey you can build it right on a protocol and we do all of that account abstraction and all the stuff that you need to enable the right user experience um or we as in the flow the float network does but of course you know third parties and other infrastructure layers can can exist and so I think if you're interested in building for crypto audiences it's very obvious that the ethereum space has uh extreme Network effects and the sort of the place to be if you're building for a mainstream audience they need to enable a mainstream level user experience I think we've been the team that's been focused

on that since 2017 and so we have all of and on our entire ecosystem is focused on that so we have all of those pieces in place which is why projects like doodle said hey the marketplace is on Flow are actually easier to use with the Target customer for Doodles too whereas like the Doodles themselves they can stay on ethereum because they're you know thousands of dollars each and they're not you know targeted at that at that sort of mainstream audience so that's kind of I guess the advice I would give is which which audience are you optimizing for um and because in a sense that's the audience that those platforms are optimizing for cool thank you hi thank you for your talk I'm Nikita

from chain Patrol uh veto is my co-founder of team at Yuri Denver um I wanted to ask you know you kind of started building a lot of web kind of like web 2 like traditional applications and then you transitioned into the kind of the crypto space like how did you like how did you take the time to learn about the space and how did you kind of like I guess upskill or like train your whole your team and then how do you think about like hiring like new developers do you hire like experience that like people who have experience in the crypto space or if you hire inexperienced people how do you make sure that they have all the knowledge they need to like work effectively on Flow like building a blockchain from the grand op yeah um that second one's been been

challenging because I think well at this point there's so much information out there that that you know if a developer walks in not having even looked at sort of solidity code or understanding the Dynamics of digital ownership and and this kind of thing then that they don't have that intellectual curiosity in the space so I would say you know it's really important to go after people who are just and things change so fast that it's you just want people even if they're maybe not like raw the top computer scientists Etc that are just passionate about staying in touch with how what are people doing what's risky what are the you know most recent exploits what are the you know user experience patterns and how are people accomplishing it's just so much context right and so that would be what

we've seen is like product minded Engineers that are passionate about the mission of building products that are web3 based that customers want to use that's what you need right now because all of the there's so much technical risks and complexity at every level of anything you want to do um that that you know and and whether you're building on apis or building you know if you're building Raw on the on the layer one obviously there's a high degree of complexity if you're building on apis you need to understand what all of the abstraction layers that you're building on right now what's the risk that you're taking and who's you know what does that mean for your customer and all that stuff so so I think that just intellectual curiosity about the space is by far the number one criteria and then use that in sort of

that should be demonstrated right if someone shows up to your interview and they're not prepared it's not good enough um you know for for us um like all in the years pre-axims then we were not just building normal software the whole the mission was um shape the impact of emerging technology so we were always kind of on that blurred line between you know we're looking at crypto looking at you know early national language processing stuff um which kind of funny how you know things turn out um and then and then early sort of um AR VR kind of applications and um and even our mobile stuff was centered around hey how do we create sort of open things and you know even at one point exploring

airdrop based games and stuff like that so so it was always like how do we what's the next thing because the last thing is just you know you it's it seemed too um crowded uh in a way and um and and and just not as intellectually exciting um so one thing axioms then did do is do so so we bootstrapped the whole company and part of what we did was provide services Consulting to bigger companies um where we would help them with emerging technology so hey you know Lululemon what does machine learning mean for you and how do you think about like hey you know recommendation engines for your carts versus whatever it is and how do you even like what is an innovation process and how do you we help CAA set up their first um Venture Studio or kind of incubator

in a sense so um but but how do we originally train people you just take back-end Engineers that are you know really um intellectually curious but also you need a little bit of the not the move fast break things people but the let's take this seriously drop you know architecture diagrams think of the abstraction layers like you need a little bit of that whereas for the smart contract layer but remember apps are not just smart contracts here I'll just say one one little thing most of the crypto space is in this mindset that that kind of the analogy I use is open source so I think majority of software used today uses open source but majority of software use today is not open source right we use software itself that has

closed Source components as well as open source components the entire crypto space behaves as if the majority of software in the future will be open State like it'll just be serverless it will be just smart contracts served directly to like you know web interfaces that there's nothing in history to to to uh sort of imply that that's going to be the case we believe the majority of software in the future will have open State components it'll allow people to come with their own data log in with their own sort of access Keys have control over their own assets and information but yeah there's going to be mobile apps in the future and they're going to have locally hosted code right there's going to be back-end soft code in the future and guess what most business business logic should exist in the back end because it's easier to

manipulate and as long as it doesn't break trust for the customer you want to prioritize iteration speed not you know just some intellectual idea of decentralization right you just put decentralization of where it matters to the customer um so that's that's my quick sort of bid on that as you're going to need all all types of engineers right and you're going to need especially the kind of people who are going to be user driven enough to say insist no this piece needs to be decentralized because otherwise we're breaking the promise to the customer versus and look we haven't as Dapper Labs we made some mistakes on that by the way or some compromises that took too long to uncompromise um but but you know you you know if you guys don't have to make the same mistakes so thank you for the really detailed answer for sure

how's it going uh my name is Adam I'm with Bello part of being in CSS is talking to users right for the category of the product that we're building in I'd argue you fall in line with what we're building in we build nft analytics so I'm trying to understand better like what does your data stack sort of look like like your tooling stack to measure audience Behavior engagement to track the success of on-chain activity um who your collectors are like I'd love to just kind of like pick your brain on that for a minute um so to be honest our tooling style our data stack is completely off chain right now where you know it's all instrumented front-end back-end and we the but but it's a little frustrating because all that information includes all of the on-chain data but it also

includes you know people who come to the website don't make a purchase people you know it includes more than just the people who aren't even logged in ETC um but I think that and there aren't really that many good tools for developers to use um in terms of on-chain analytics actually our our hackathon project that each Waterloo in 2017 was kind of like a little Unchained mixed panel um so I think there's a lot of value there but it's not yet well set up and also it's not yet well integrated like there's no on-chain component of mixpanel or or whatever it is um and so maybe it'll follow the same trend of mobile analytics where it's just like you'll have specialized tools and then they'll get kind of um either soaked up or blown out into the the generalist tools but you sort of

need end-to-end visibility right like before my customer touches the chain they are still important to me right like they're from from the moment they hit the website we need that kind of um uh we need we need to be able to follow them um and and soon when they have the mobile app um but but sort of the where the on-train comes into play is we should be able to tell what else are our customers doing right because this is all right there right what other applications are participating in do they have other funds in their wallets so on so forth so um I think there's a lot of untapped opportunity there right so I think it's a big big space you're playing in and there currently aren't good Solutions um and maybe one just suggestion I have

for you is how can you provide your capabilities but have them fit into like a segment or a um or a sort of wider data stack or you know is there an easy way to pull it directly into bigquery or or you know Tableau or whatever it is and and sort of even even have that as a parallel check on on the back end data because that would be valuable because chain data is always true and so sometimes our community beats us where they have more accurate data than we do because they've built all their data all their tools all the data analytics on the Chain directly whereas all of ours are um are off chain and last question you mentioned mixpanel another like off-chain data sources anything to choose from chain to just see activity as of now

um no they just pull it directly or or we have um so flow access notes have like a data layer and then um we have um we have like community uis that that you know the the literally Community team goes in and uses third-party interfaces that sometimes have better data than we do um so open to open to chat uh let's do it absolutely yeah cool Adam respect the prospecting in the Q a yeah yeah always be selling love it um thanks for the talk uh Matthew from capsule here we're building better transaction signing infrastructure um wanted to just ask um you mentioned a lot of like very Salient points around user experience the challenges the ways it's all improved um what do you think

are the remaining challenges around actual like barriers to more mainstream users coming into this space whether ux otherwise um well I think the biggest challenge or the biggest thing that that I think is the biggest unlock will be new uh value propositions to new groups of users so we have I think in cryptocurrency with specific value proposition and in nfts we've been very high including us we've been very hyper focused on the value proposition of this is a better collectible for people that enjoy collecting people who want to express their identity through ownership join other communities based on ownership of you know similar assets Etc that's like one angle of what digital ownership could mean right you can imagine

infinite varieties of what else is coming so I think that that's one unlock is like going beyond the hey this is about you know minting 10 000 things and then putting them on a Marketplace and sort of them going up or down in value and like that's it like that's the only usage of the product or the the technology um I think I think but I think it's danger it's sort of um it's going to take discipline or or guts to go out of that because you know that's a multi-billion dollar market that could grow into a hundred billion dollar even trillion dollar market so it's a very rich area for exploration um you know future of digital ownership but but I think it's important to sort of start branching out from there and then when you talk about user experience

the user experience is still terrible um you know even on Flow uh the user experience of you know which wallet do I choose not all wallets half parody none of the you know block toe is actually cross chain flow and ethereum which is nice but but to a customer it's kind of crazy you have to use a different browser to use a different corner of the internet that doesn't that doesn't that that's really challenging and then you have things like hey you have an NBA Top Shot which is the you know top NBA collectible but then you have MBA you have an MBA Ticketmaster uh um nft that comes from a ticket stub of a game you went to both of them happening to be on the same chain they don't do anything together yet right so what is that promise to the customer of hey these are assets that

interoperate and value that kind of compounds if that hasn't happened yet and then you have the biggest nft Marketplace open C or blur or whatever where you can't take your NBA Top Shot nft into and so that those little little things to us is like oh well obviously that's a different blockchain but to a customer is like the are you talking about you know like what's the point of all of what you just said you're talking about open internet and interoperability and all that stuff like what do you even so I think there's a gap of like just the reality of that and you know I think um will it be Bridges will it be my theories that the wallet itself ends up being the multi-chain thing right like the interface of the of the customer into multiple things um but but but um and then when you talk about kind of

ethereum what is the best in class user experience is you buy an asset and it goes into either a fully custodial wallet in Nifty Gateway Etc which is kind of like what's breaks a little bit of the the the point or it goes into a fully on custodial wallet where you either have to go get a wallet for yourself or it's kind of like you know maybe magic link et cetera tied to your email which is fantastic but then where do you go from there right the path is sort of a little bit stilted and broken um and so I think that's what we're trying to fix with hybrid custody but it's not even implemented that way in our own products right were you onboard into NBA Top Shot and you're still in a custodial environment and we they're still not that next step to okay I plug

in my metamask and um and now I sort of have self at least I have the option of South custody over over my accounts and that gives me access into a universe of other applications which don't have to talk Tapper and don't have to care who Dapper is and and so I think there's um like even that onboarding path is still kind of stilted um on on crypto which is again lots of opportunity for for developers but there's that chicken and egg of like how much of the tech do you build yourself how much do you focus on being a tech provider but then how do you bring the users without enough application Builders and I think that that's both the chicken and egg and the reason that I think crypto will be an opportunity for the next few years because it's going to take people that

sort of see through a little bit of the the fog and also yeah I would just pick things that are um uh pick value that you can deliver to customers easily so I don't know if I cover all your questions but but that's that's sort of my long answers for short questions no definitely covered it thanks so much I love that concept of like wait what the we're talking about like interoperability is just like a new synonym for what should just be called easy or useful right like I love the answer it's just like friction is is to a customer it feels like a Breaking of the promise and and and in a way we're not that far from fixing at all but we're still still gonna take you know six months a year minimum of like pretty conservative Bill sorry

I'm fascinating company labs and the journey is incredible um maybe I would like to ask you perhaps a reflection of what you have seen in the past two cycles right that we have of nfts um how this the past cycle like most of the nft projects they were based on the crypto Bank model of 10 10 000. and now they are kind of like I suppose of your model of the crypto kid it's not that you had like a I guess it's around 2 million crypto giddies right now um so there are two different models and and I would like to ask you for your opinion about how you see

I mean of course you David last evolve it right the company but how you see this new company is that they're kind of like stuck into this model of scarcity or the 10K like how how do you see them like evolving or create keeping like a creating the network effect of without increasing increasing Supply um yeah I just your opinion about that yeah well I think the master class there is is I think you guys done a really great job of saying well hey we're gonna we're gonna limit the supply of the actual nfts but we're going to build a big brand around um around the assets and um and I think Doodles is exactly kind of on that same track where the the supply of the original nfts is constricted

but they're they're building tools that let Millions more people potentially engage with the brand um and I think that you know whether it's through gaming experiences whether it's through sort of um different kinds of Cheaper mechanics whether it's through uh kind of more the path you guys taking with experiences Etc I mean Doodles doing doing the same as well um I think that that's one approach to sort of um keeping the original Supply constricted but being able to engage more and more um more and more people um I also think that valuation models evolve over time like right now the valuation model for and it's evolving but but very much during this last cycle evaluation model for most nft Traders or investors was hey floor price mint count

um that that's usually the the thing right what's the floor price what's the med count what's and so for a crypto kitties or an NBA Top Shot it's a it's a very tough sort of place to be because we're always been focused on hey the cheap trading card is worth nothing the expensive trading card is worth something and in fact you need that sort of variance in order to have energy AIDS make the special things feel special but also have the ability for people to just play with it for fun it's okay for people to have five things that are worth nothing that still brings joy to someone you know what I mean that's that's a fundamental sort of part of our philosophy where it's not enough for us to say hey we're gonna um but but but I think that communicating that is more complex we haven't done um

the best job we haven't even put um until recently we haven't taken the right steps to put limits on sort of the high end of our economy and all that stuff I think that what the team's Gonna Roll out with sort of Top Shot um 2.0 where basically all of the Dapper last projects Top Shot NFL um and then the ones um that we haven't announced yet are going to relaunch as sort of fully mobile native uh mobile first kind of experiences um you know throughout this year Top Shot first and then all day before before the next season and the goal is to bring a new scarcity model um in which says hey yeah this is the you can play around with this stuff these are cheap cars these are cheap packs and then these are the very expensive sort of

um um they're they're they're a class of asset that has clearly defined rules not just today but also far into the future and so you can sort of have both things exist in parallel and they they're designed not to cannibalize each other um that's how I think the space will evolve in the future because that reflects more how things are in the real world right you have in in almost every collectible class you have the low end things people play with and you have the the high end um and if digital ownership evolves to being Beyond Collectibles and it's really a tool for self-expression um then most self-expression is actually happens for free right it's today's social media right so how do you what is the sort of how do you what does digital ownership mean in that context I think

it's still too early to think about that because there are a number of real wallets in existence that are here for non-speculative reasons is very small so until we grow that it's almost like uh you know we shouldn't we should sort of get too aggressive with with Supply would be my advice for sort of you know nft economists in a way and every new project will attract speculative uh demand and just make sure that you know you're you're separating hey this demand is speculative and that's fine that's natural this demand is sort of fundamental and it's kind of the kind of thing I would imagine my user base being full of five years in the future ten years in the future um yeah thank you for your answer um maybe this is a tough question but

what do you think about um or you have an opinion about how yoga Labs is actually uh because it seems to me like a deeper maybe it's kind of like a from the last cycle it was like the biggest company that came out with nfts and now this second cycle like a yoga Labs were born and that is is a very important company um what they are doing right now is like they are increasing we are they're coming out with the codas the the other this okay so this place already I don't know what is the number but it's maybe like a 200 000 assets um but they are keeping like a value it's kind of like a high it's just there they managed to do that so what do you think about or prediction or what do you think how they're gonna evolve or how

you see it well I mean I I I'm rooting for those guys I think it's a really cool um I'm rooting for everybody in the space because at the end of the day we are so freaking early that anyone that wins will bring more people more sort of water into the whole space and and Rising title lives all about so like there's no um and and I think they're they're taking an approach that's you know the Gucci stuff like it's all very very interesting um now still you sort of say to an average individual hey come you know participate and these are all the things that you know test that out for yourself in terms of like you know how how much it makes sense to what group of user and and and how you know

I think I think that that's the um but I think that it's it's it's it's it's just really important for us all to take that kind of collaborative mindset of like you know we're in such an early phase in the ecosystem that let's learn from each other right and have that experiment run and be awesome and have that company be huge and successful and and there's so much space for for others because we're we're still kind of barely scratching the service of adoption I think 200 000 those these numbers in the space in the scale of consumer internet are minuscule right they're surrounding error on a daily usage of a you know of a obscure feature buried in you know the settings page on on Instagram right like it's that you know what I'm saying like it's

just not it's just too early to sort of say oh this is right this is wrong it's kind of like yeah let's do it all and let's let's let's see um what excites people um and what's real and let's double down on that no thank you hi thanks I'm Jana we're building Kiki which is a beauty brand on chain so we're one of the few people in the room building a consumer product um and you build both consumer as well as applications as well as services and he also raised a lot of capital so my question for you as a CEO is where do you think that there's best Richard on Capital how do you think about Capital allocation and where you think you can create most value from like a consumer brand Unchained versus Services versus

building flow or other sort of infrastructure things and how do you advise that entrepreneurs at this stage of crypto think about that from a consumer brand perspective like do you think it's important we have our own Tech and how how do you think about that yeah look I mean my number one thing would be you got to do what's right for you and that's not like a Dr Seuss thing that's like a you know you need that founder product Market fit right if it's not the right product for you then you'll always be kind of not you know not in the right um just not in the right sort of head space I mean for us I'm kind of add as hell so it's always been natural to sort of have a a leg and two uh in in two fronts but the teams are very focused like there's

a the studio teams which focused on all the application stuff and then the platform teams do the platform things flow is just its own separate beast and has been for a while and you know Dieter runs it and is um and is sort of uh uh you know it can everyone in there can have a uni sort of a focused mindset and I think that that's really that's really important um you know where is the biggest return on Capital um I think I think again like for for us what we are best at is saying uh what can we do for the mainstream customer and there's so few people focus on that um mission that um or at least like building the products for those people to use that

that's still the best place for us to to play in and compared to other teams in crypto we can we have the capacity to go way lower in the stack and so you know we're not um but but in a sense you you don't want to you know and and the NBA Top Shot like the NBA Top Shot team they have access to levers that they can just pull they don't need to if they need to work on a smart contract that takes you know they sort of escalate that that's a whole separate um uh abstraction layer on so even in our own company we sort of try to keep people very focused and and enable people higher up the stack to be able to move fast without um without having to sort of daily struggle with the abstraction layers um but but so my advice would be you

just need to understand every piece that you're building on it's very challenging to build every piece yourself it's not healthy and and it is actually the number one kind of a thing a CEO should resist from their CTO right and it's funny coming from someone who let my CTO build a new programming language but you don't know what the tension was to get to that point and like like we had we built so many smart contracts solidity before you know we finally decided okay we need to sort of bite the bullet but that's not a usually not a good decision like 99.99 of the time it's the wrong decision 99.99 I think you guys you're the investor you can back me up you want to kind of iterate quickly you want to be able to find product Market fit without having

to spend six months on the next big technological you know like you publish the standard but no one uses your product your Master's not gonna be very happy about that you know what I mean and so so I think and and in terms of building a platform for customers just make sure there's demand there right and so make sure the Market's big enough make sure the Market's mature make sure that because it's very hard to then build a platform no one's there to want it and then now you have to Pivot to building apps on top of the platform and it's sort of you know it's just a different DNA is it's challenging um we study Netflix a lot in the early days because that's like a studio you know how do you create kind of original content but then also run it on a

globally scalable platform that has a huge portion of the internet bandwidth um and you just have to keep those cultures they're somewhat separate like the craziness of you know let's build game mechanics and and all that stuff is just different from the and test everything every day and you know move fast break things it doesn't matter it's just different than the stability of okay well a simple economic shift here could mean you know hundreds of millions of dollars of value being being lost or or or you know whatever it is cool thank you hi everyone thanks for being here I have a question around uh let's say what would be the ideal business model on top of uh let's say all of this concept of digital ownership we had a talk this morning about royalties and nft

marketsplaces yeah I wonder what you think about that um especially because you're focused on consumer and like outside of crypto there's so many business models once you create enough demand like in gaming in esport you can always Empower creators Etc so just wondering how you think about that well I mean in a sense I don't think we people have figured out the ideal business model um I think the good thing in crypto has been the average revenue per user is so high that typically just focus on getting users and the revenues is there um you know in terms of consumer facing products um like so so so I mean one expression my one of our board members Hamilton

Helmer he's like this big strategy guy but he always uh says The Rudder doesn't work if the ship isn't moving so just focus on getting the ship moving and then you know you can like navigate navigate in different places so like growth is maybe more important than and like building stuff people want is more important than okay which part of the value stack am I going to capture right now um we spent maybe too much time thinking about um you know the part of the value stack and that's primarily why we like to stay close to the user because at the end of the day if you're close to the user then everything else has to go through you and so every you know at the end of the day you can swap out any piece of it but if you own the user's trust

um then then they have to go through but at the same time you could say that about you know hey if you're stripe and you just get the scale and you provide the Best in Class little widget that everyone needs then that's also fantastic too so it kind of goes back to founder product Market fit of I've just built something that I think you and your team are really well suited for um but I think this early on in crypto just builds stuff people want and the monetization is off the charts right you sort of have to slow it down rather than speed up this is not true on B2B because most B2B in crypto is like people getting paid to do stuff on top of platforms um so so that's that's sometimes a little tougher right or people raising Venture Capital to sort of fund growth

but that's also fine and it's been seen in different platform shifts before where again you're building stuff that makes the developers lives easy you're probably offering it for free or cheap to start with um and then as those developers become bigger and bigger and bigger than you offer enterprise plans and and this sort of thing um but my my thing has just been to stay close to the customer um and then and then the closest thing to the customer is figuring out making how to make the customer an owner right at the end of the day if you can tokenize and and for real not for but like have the actual product or service you're providing via protocol rather than the company and your your customer has a piece of it that's that's sort of Nirvana um and it's very challenging because of a million reasons and you know

regulatory being a big big part of them but I think that um but but not that many people have sort of you know cracked that nut either you know and and who knows if that's the ideal business model either right like like things involve pretty quickly um so um you know we we've we've sort of we're still keeping our bets open all three layers of the stack cool thank you awesome um thank you so much again for your time uh everyone please join me in thanking ROM again [Applause] [Music] thank you

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