Building PROOF: A conversation with Kevin Rose and Chris Dixon

Transcript

[Music] thank you so you you and I have both been on the Internet working on the internet for a long time since I guess the the kind of early I would call it the early web 2 era of like the early 2000s um and uh I guess you know if any people know your background but it would be interesting to hear a little bit about your journey how you and particularly how you got excited about nfts and web3 and just how you decide to start proof and moon Birds yeah absolutely so I mean I've been following all things crypto for for quite some time

um just playing around with Bitcoin in the very early days and then ethereum in the very early days and uh I I just found an old podcast actually yesterday a friend sent me it was nine years ago and it was uh Tim Ferris and I were on a podcast together talking about ethereum and I said uh oh it's this weird coin I don't want to talk about it he's like come on come on talk about I was like ah it's called ethereum and like little did I know that this could be as big as it eventually became but it was like I just like Shrugged it off as no big deal back then it was so funny to see how how times have changed and I also mentioned Dogecoin back then which is crazy that was even around nine years ago yeah um and now meme coins are all the thing

which is just uh crazy that it's coming full circle again but um yeah I mean it's always just been for me experimenting and playing I think that any great Builder um were Tinkers were people that want to just play and kick the tires on any new technology in their earliest days and so that led me you know very and this was there was no skill involved in this but it led me to minting some of the original crypto punks when they came out and so um we weren't no one was calling them nfts it was like oh this is kind of like a a weird way to put you know art on the blockchain okay these are funny little characters like why not and so I immediately lost the keys for the wallet and later figured out how to recover that was pretty crypto kitties too I

think yeah I think so yeah yeah so um and then cryptokitties came and then there was just like this period of nothing yeah and and it was like you know a year and a half two years or something and then all of a sudden I remember thinking like oh somebody's like hey have you checked out art blocks and I was like what is that you know and I just happened to be running in those circles again on friends that tell you they tell you when something's cool and you should go check it out and so I I immediately thought well this is wow this space has changed super rare is out there now like I started noticing a lot of great digitally native artists coming online that weren't producing art anywhere else it wasn't like you know you have a well up here before it was pace and you know

pace is obviously top tier you know a traditional Art House um onboarding traditional artists into the digital space now and working in collaboration with our blocks and others we did a drop with them here a couple months ago and uh but this was uh sorry I swear I'll turn off these notifications This was um uh something where I had seen like artists that were coming into the space um that had for one hour there we go um that had essentially we're creating like living breathing art that hadn't been captured in a way before and so generative art always in my mind had been something where you pop into a gallery in San Francisco every once while you'll see something cool going on you're like okay but that's gonna break right and so now all of the encapsulated JavaScript and everything was sort of

Unchained um you know perfect proven provenance around where the stuff was originally created who created it a lot of these things have started clicking in my mind I was like well this is fun to where I should probably spend some more time here and so that led to a podcast that led to me you know thinking about nft as a membership club uh launching the proof Collective around that um that went quite well and then saying well gosh no one wants to have you know a badge as their as their identity they want to have an icon of something on Twitter so that led us to creating Moon birds and that was just then we were Off to the Races and it was all the chaos that came after that so can you explain then just a little bit the proof is a the difference between proof and Men

Birds I guess yeah so the proof kind of pass started off as a thousand members to have access to really our best content first so you know it was at the point in time where where we talk about a project and the floor would rise if we talked about on the podcast that many people were paying attention to like the podcast and so um you know we're like okay you get early access to the podcast you get a token gated community on Discord that is just for like-minded collectors um you get curated drops so we'd work with artists to like you know do drops and we had a product called Grails that we put out there that's that's done quite well so it was really just can we create this like little private club of

the world's top collectors um and that worked worked out quite well and it was it was just crazy because you know that pass sold out at one eighth and it was a Dutch auction um and eventually in the Heyday it was worth a little over 400 000 a pass which was just Insanity yeah um and you had no control over that there was there was nothing we could do to control that price um and you don't want to be the person on Twitter being like I think this is worth a little too much like you know you can't ever see that person undermine the kind of purpose of it right which is right it's supposed to be a curated a curators club but not so expensive yeah exactly I mean when you think of like the the world's top private clubs as they stand today uh you know you think

of like the ones that are scalable like Soho house or you know there's a handful of these um uh there's a few Napa Valley and you think about what are the membership costs and what are the prices Associated and this is like an order of magnitude larger than like the world's best private clubs you're like okay something's out of whack here this doesn't feel right um so you know that was but then then we couldn't have really anticipated what happened with moon Birds Moon Birds was just a free drop to these these users and then we sold some of them as well members is different because it's a it's a profile picture yeah it was just a pfp that we wanted to launch and do some Associated benefits with it as well and just have it be you know trait based rewards and it was all it was just right

place right time to launch something like that because the nft hype was really starting to take off board apes are doing quite well and um you know there's there's no way to put the brakes on something once it's out there yeah and so it's just like we launched it and it sold out we were very grateful and that was fantastic and then it skyrocketed up from Two and a half feet to you know 35 or so within you know a month and a half or whatever it's kind of the double-edged sword of of community ownership right it's like the good thing is the community truly owns the nfts and has the freedom to do different things the bad thing is you can be subject to these Market oscillations and things can get too high right yeah I

mean and you also have basically you have this it's like the best way I don't have a perfect analogy for this but the best way I describe this to to people is that that aren't in the know that want to or they know enough to be like okay well what happened there because that was crazy it was ramp up announced back down and I said well you know we kind of like it's difficult because you have members of the community come at you and say I paid 30 eat for this because with every seller there's a buyer on the other side right and so you have some people that are that love you because they sold at 30 and others that are just in the opposite camp and what we did is we sold them at two and a half right and so we sold the best knowledge I had was like

we sold a bunch of Vespas out there and then they started getting traded as Lamborghinis between other users and these users are like well you sold me a Lamborghini and we're like well we sold a bunch of Vespas like we're providing the warranty on all of them and we're doing all the great Community things we said we do but like it's it's really challenging because it's not like a web 2 product where someone's paying 12 for a SAS product if you don't like Spotify and you want to jump to Apple music it's two clicks and you're out right there's like you you may say if you're really on the The Edge you may say like uh I hate Spotify right and there's one tweet you're done right and so in in this world you have people that have

um a financial interest in these assets and they are so much more invested um emotionally in what you're creating and what you will create and what the outcome that they hope will will happen here and you know we have people that uh we just had to meet up here about a week ago um here locally and I had someone come up to me and said like you know I'm not in Discord and just so you know there's a lot of us out there that aren't in Discord that we understood going into this like you know this is a risky place for us to play and we're totally cool with it let's have some fun here and let's build something great together I was like oh I love that but then you also have the other person that you know

may have just not realized and like you know spent a little got a little over their skis and spent too much on something and they're really pissed off so it's it's a very difficult exercise in in community control and and how you how you deal with these different personality types yeah because they can become very toxic within your environment right yeah it's interesting because like you you know going back to your experience with you know creating Community software and the you know in the web tour obviously there's that kind of Community Management toxic elements Etc back then but it's it's different I guess now I mean it it's different in each small instruction and so I'm just curious yeah curious like how do you how do you view that the differences yeah I mean web two

and web three in some ways um there was with dig when I launched that site in 2004 um you know we grew to about 38 million people and the majority of them were logged out so the majority of them just didn't care yeah they were just there for like the funny front page stories or whatever it may be um then you had a subset that because we were based in San Francisco and we just had a tech following at the time there was a lot of left-wing related media that was hitting the front page and during an election cycle yeah you know I had death threats and all that other stuff so it was equally as bad in terms of like those people were really pissed off at us for a certain reason

um but then you just had a lot of users that I I would say this cycle is a little bit different um just because it does feel like people feel more ownership um they don't know what they own some people say hey I get it I own like a piece I own a JPEG and it's a piece of art and if the community does great things like we'll all more people want to be a member and and hold this art and that's great and let's go like that's the sentiment of a lot of people and they still understand that it's different right and so it's an education process and you have people just all over the world that you're dealing with I think that in web 2 it was like the majority of our traffic was us-based

a dig and and when you look at kind of like who holds our assets about the best of our ability it just seems much more distributed than it was before also 2004 the internet was just smaller right I mean there were the people using these kinds of sites too right it was like desktop right more hardcore yeah probably you know and I think a tenth if not less fewer users overall I think yeah so it's just much more right I mean that's one of the differences I think now is just suddenly there's five billion people and everything you know For Better or Worse right propagates out yeah absolutely so it's it's been it's there's a lot of like there's some things that you can apply uh from web to web 3 but I think largely it's it's kind

of just there's a there's a we we tried to be as Nimble as possible and not think any more than kind of three months out at a time just because the space is moving so fast yeah uh whereas web web 2 that really wasn't the case we could kind of plan for larger product development cycles and um so I just think that anyone that has a road map I think road maps are pretty dead now they that was like the hot thing to do in web3 for a minute um but because this the the the space is so rapidly evolving that we kind of think in in terms of months now yeah what are some you know for the folks in this room who are just starting out like

like I guess some kind of key learnings so far on your on the moon Birds proof Journey yeah things you wish you knew yeah a lot of things I I mean I think that in the early days of at least nfts is applied to web three there was this idea that we were going to create this new product uh um this new this new idea that like we would just build completely transparently in public and that was to a level which we hadn't done previously and so that was um it was fun it was fun to kind of like hold weekly product almost like not brainstorming sessions but product updates with your community both privately and publicly

and people say look they're shipping they're building well and when times are good people really enjoy that and they love it and they feel like it's it's part of the ride but then when something goes sideways or the market takes a turn then all of a sudden they're your board members and you have you know a thousand plus angry board members and it's very difficult because they're used to having a say and they think they just know what's best for you and they feel really vested in a way that in they can be your best brand Advocates you know which is amazing in good times but so I think just for us going forward it's less of a road map it's more about

tighter time-bound iteration and launching new things um less talking about it up front because talk is pretty cheap and I think it's more about just under promising and just dropping things on the community unexpectedly that has been to to feel a little bit better than just over promising or the thing that's really challenging is that over the last you know call it six months people don't understand you all as Builders you understand this it's like if you are whiteboarding and you're inviting in your community into your whiteboarding sessions they almost take what you're

saying as like reality and and like but when you're Building Product you're going to kill like 75 percent of those ideas you're just like okay this is like these are fun and it's a brainstorming session and guess what a week later we feel like these aren't really good ideas anymore or we changed our thinking on this and for them that's gut wrenching because it's like wait a second you said this two weeks ago in a Twitter space like why aren't you building that and well it's like most of the stuff that you build just doesn't ever make it out and they're very precious new ideas yeah so but if you've never built a product before you just don't even realize that that that's the norm and so um I just I I used to believe in hope that we could do more public building but now

I'm back to the uh old web two days of like maybe we just keep things a little closer to the to the chest initially and then when we have something a little bit more solidified and we're sure that we're gonna launch something we can start to circulate it and actually I'm a big fan of um you know Yuga pioneered this and and I don't know let's say Pioneer because there's been advisory boards for a long time but they they put together a community council um of about like 10 or so members that were their top holders yeah and they would bounce ideas early and off and offer those advisors and we did the same thing and and found it insanely helpful so more of a representative democracy and versus a direct democracy yeah so you give you exactly so you give the

community an outlet and saying like we feel like we have a voice and we can uh you know change these up every quarter so we can swap out members so a path to being on this I see that as a community member um now I now have 10 more Outlets to give feedback to casually that are my peers and not the company and also honestly it's just like when you're so close to the product building in web 3 just an outlet to have and I pulled it out of Discord into telegram because I wanted something that was just disconnected from a normal environment where we operate and then just have this like more of a casual conversation like Hey we're getting ready to launch this is there anything that we're not thinking through in the right you know

looking through the right lens and they've even helped us craft some of the messaging pre-launch that I think has saved us a couple missteps so I would say that you know once you're out in the public and if you're lucky enough to have a following in a community that that is starting to grow having some of those and if it feels like it's out of control like oh my gosh like I can't be on Discord 24 7 I'm a Founder I have to build like you can deputize some of your best community members to be some of these these these folks that have a more of a direct channel to you yeah that makes sense maybe um I'll ask one more question and then we'll we'll go to the um the to the to the audience here if you guys have questions um

so you know in the 20 plus years I've been on the Internet or working on the internet I've I've you know started my first company in 2003 I think you were 2003 also four or four and so that was for those who don't know that was a downturn period um that was sort of the post internet bubble crash period um you know I was in New York and there were the New York Tech Meetup was 10 people or something I mean it was you know relatively small community of people that wanted that were still excited about building kind of consumer internet products um and then of course 2008 financial crisis you know it was a big downturn um and then within crypto and then I you know I think of sort of like you started in crypto 10 years ago or so and this is

the third kind of quote unquote winter um so I think you know a natural question for folks uh here building things is sort of what you know what should they expect where are we in in the progression of both this technology and sort of the broader I mean obviously we're not economists and I don't even know if economists can predict the economy but but uh but you know having been through this a bunch of times like what are some of the kind of lessons Lessons Learned and things to think about yeah I mean I think one of the the most challenging things has to do with just um internal morale and mental health yeah and just making sure to surround yourself with other Founders and and

creating these bonds here so that you can go and have those conversations over coffee and both say well it sucks right now and builds like you know either grab a coffee or grab a beer or whatever your beverage choice is and just like have those heart to hearts and say like this is tough because it turns out like as you know as you've you know watched so many companies nothing is just up and to the right it's the roller coaster with all the loop-de-loops and everything else that that comes into being an entrepreneur and um I I just think you have to lock arms and like find like-minded people to have these conversations with because it can feel very um when it's small like that it can feel like am I crazy if we're wanting to build here because it seems like there isn't that many other people building

here and maybe I should go work in AI you know and like there's gonna be another shiny object that that pops up and um you know that's the I think the another big challenge is just making sure that we can create credible products here in a market that largely grabs the Press Cycles from the failures the hacks the schemes the meme coins like you name it and so that is the thing that is probably the scariest thing to me is like I know there's great builders in this space but we have to kind of like figure out a way to to lock arms and Elevate the great things that are happening here that are not tied to those negative press Cycles

um because I worry that you know there's this sentiment where you know a couple months ago I was in an Uber and the Uber driver like asked me what I did for a living and I remember just not wanting to say nfts because I just didn't want to get into the conversation where I'm like I don't want to talk about empties right now you know and I'm like well that's a bad thing okay like and as I started really picking that apart and saying well were we going sideways here and why is there this negative sentiment around nfts and you know it led me to the you know turning them into Commodities The High Frequency trading around them and like and then just like you know a lot of the pump and dump and rugs and all the other things that are going on and so

um yeah I don't know that I'm answering your question at all other than just having a therapy session with you now but uh I think my one of my lessons is that things that everything in Tech I think is ultimately product product LED um and to give you an example like I you know after my first startup my security startup I did a AI startup um in 2008 acquired by eBay in 2011. back then we didn't call that AI because AI was actually kind of a dirty word um because for those who don't know um neural networks first paper was 1943 Alan turing's famous Turing test paper in 1950 and then there were lots and lots of kind of quote Summers and Winters and by you know the time I was involved

AI had been this thing that was just sort of this notoriously overhyped thing and so actually the thing we call we called it machine learning if you go back and look at it that was the machine learning was that's sort of like the you know serious thing and and the Rebrand yeah it's like people I always think of people are like let's Rebrand nfts Collectibles or something like right and my my answer is by the way smartphones I got I had friends doing smartphone startups in the 90s like you know for those the Blackberry of course before that there was the trio and the and the Palm Pilot and like General magic and like it goes back on at some point you know smartphones 2004 five-ish you sort of eye roll like I'm doing a mobile gaming startup I had

a friend who quit mobile at that point because it was like it had been 10 years it's never going to happen you know this is all leading up of course to the iPhone in 2007. um you know and that's what that's what changes the right is like the iPhone like AI looks very real now what changed it is chat GPT right and and so you have these kind of breakout moments um and and to me that's that's kind of always you you said this too but like the key thing is you know the media side matters but really ultimately it's about people in this room other entrepreneurs you building great products great experiences that just kind of like over make offer overwhelming evidence that there's something interesting here and in doing so

you know reclaim these words that otherwise might have had a negative connotation like AI like smartphones like nfts yeah there's some there's certain Technologies where I when I look back I remember when I I first um invested in Tesla way back in the day and it was because there was a a a bus in San Francisco going up one of the really steep hills and it was like really couldn't make it up the hill this was really struggling and I and I remember just like electric cars just having that sound that just of no friction and just being like well this is the future like of course this is where things are going and there's like this like light bulb moment that clicks and I had the same feeling with crypto when you know I just thought about if if

if you're going to start a country today from scratch you're gonna go out and buy printing presses of course you're not everyone has a smartphone right a distributed uh Ledger like permissionless like makes a ton of sense like you would do that route of course you would so it there's nothing about the underlying technology is broken for nfts or crypto it's just it is waiting for that moment right and so that's what's being built by this whole uh Team here and by hopefully by us as well and and so you know when we think about digital art and collectibles does it make sense to have them on the blockchain um you know absolutely like there's there's so much to love and so many advantages that you get over a physical

object and and also the interplay between the two is also really fascinating so there are so many very exciting things that are being built right now that I think in the next few years people will be like oh why don't we always do it like that you know that's great awesome um should we do questions Hey Kevin uh Brennan with Kiki we're at the cross section of Beauty in blockchain so I think my question goes to adoption for a community that isn't necessarily traditionally associated with web3 or blockchain so we just launched yesterday actually and part of our launch is a world pass nft it's a soul bound token connected to your membership account um do you have any advice in terms of

creating an approach that is interesting to a wider audience that may not be familiar with web3 in order to convince them that it's worth engaging with that side of the business because of the promise of potential future use and benefit yeah that's a good question so um can you tell me exactly a little bit more about the product itself though like what what do you actually offer people yeah so with much more than just an nft membership so we're building a platform that allows people to co-create products together so right now what that looks like is voting on products earning rewards on on like makeup colors and things right is that right yeah exactly nail polish first out of the gate actually um and then all that information is tied to your to your world pass and there's tiers of those that you can level up and

get different types of perks the more you engage with the platform ultimately we have some really big exciting ideas of how we want to look at the co-creation model of products but that's what we're doing right now gotcha okay I mean it's it's challenging in that um I'm curious if you you know what the intersection of your kind of Target demographic and web 3 wallet usage looks like it it might be on the smaller side and so if that's the case like you know what are the rough edges that you can sand down for that audience to make onboarding is easy and seamless as possible possible and so I think about you know some of these services that do instant wallet creation and just where yeah it's like you don't it's a no-brainer it's like it's almost like the technology behind the scenes just disappears and and then that's a bonus

like a value add when they learn about it later down the road right when it becomes more and more mainstream the kind of the magic link kind of thing where it's behind the scenes yeah it's like what reddit's doing right now to be honest like like I have a buddy over at Reddit I was just talking to me yesterday and he's like we have so many nft users and the vast majority of them have no clue that they're all actually holding these as nfts right and it's just because it's all the magic done behind the scenes and like as this becomes more and more of a popular technology and there's ways to secure it on your phone and transfer like they'll just like slowly expose the feature set underneath it and you won't even have to think about it as being like Oh what am

I what is this gas thing or what is this you know like all these weird foreign terms that encrypted word is like of course there's gas you talk to anyone on the street and say hey how much gas did you pay for your to move your energy they're like what the hell are you talking about right so we just have to make sure we're not too In The Weeds on this stuff and can and improv I'm sure you'll get that from a lot of your like interviews with your your early customers the other thing I would add is Kevin alluded to this with dig is it in the web 2 model you always have this sort of 110 99 rule of like one percent of the users are hardcore and create content 99 are passive and maybe 10 are kind of in the middle like curating for

example and it might be something similar here where some sub small subset I don't know the product well enough so forgive me but I'm just guessing but like some small subset is actively engaged holds an nft or some other thing and maybe there's a broader group who has a more passive engagement maybe they're just buying the product but then there's a path to kind of gradually engage people right through the funnel which I sort of the web 2 Playbook right so you have the bigger group maybe you start off on Instagram just viewing but over time you start liking and then over time you start creating content and someday you're a full-time content creator or something you know I'm really glad you guys are saying that because that's the the approach that we're taking so to to claim your world pass you do not need to create a wallet you

do not need to pay gas anything of that nature in order to vote on products uh product attributes you don't have to hold a world pass we're actually looking at a model to encourage people to claim that path so that they can vote on products themselves that we're going to be launching and so the idea is that if you hold this pass it's essentially a much stronger membership card and perk platform that we can automatically apply things to you do drops that provide value and the whole time for the non-crypto user they're just like okay I have this great thing that is adding value to my life and to my product experience so I want to engage with it more and more yeah and so yeah it's a long tail Journey but we're excited about it cool awesome yeah the the other thing well congrats on launching the

other thing too it's probably worth mentioning is there's a lot of dows that you may want to go into and figure out where you can tap into your and find your audience um that that that might be a good place to go and find customers as well awesome awesome thank you thank you very much Emmanuel I run Shield security we're a web 3 security company building security tools for nft projects and web3 teams um so my question is it's a bit of a follow-on I think to what Chris asked at the end during the Q a um how do you think about focus and strategy in the bear Market versus the bull market how does it how does it differ in terms of uh your your approach to that

yeah I mean for us um well it's interesting uh when I think about just most we're a little bit in a different position in that we we kind of went through this cycle and ramped up so we've got some pre-existing products that have a big following that we need to kind of take care of that user base so um but I would say for for most of the the startups I see getting funded now it's it's about you know Capital preservation and keeping as lean as possible um and just making sure they have a couple years of run weighted so they can just keep building but that said for us we want to there's a there's two lanes like we have the art

and collectibles model that we can go after and we know is going to be like there'll be another Christies or Sotheby's that will be built that's more digital first that we can go after that market um but also at the same time we don't want to just go and try and say hey there's a one-to-one translation between an existing kind of brick and mortar company that we want to make on the digital side I think that's pretty boring and so we want to have those kind of like internal hackathons that we're not done experimenting and we're putting together like a a good decent chunk of our time on the product development cycle to make sure that we're trying the bigger Bolder ideas and just because we had some initial upfront success doesn't mean we

can lean on that for the next you know couple years worth of success like the the nft market I'm confident is here to stay for the long term is the pfp market here to stay for long term I really couldn't tell you so it's it's like we can't just lean on that and say just because we had the last six months you know we brought an X number of dollars of Revenue that's the path forward so it's just continuing to be nimble I think is probably and not planned too far out I think for us is is our strategy I don't know if that's the right one but it's kind of the one where we're going with here and I think too like I would just add that and this is not sort of cope I guess I I really believe that these downturns are the by far the best time

to be building and doing a startup I think that with the caveat that you need to preserve capital and you we need to raise Capital if you don't have it and you need to preserve it so so like but and that's trickier in these markets it's just harder to get money in um so but if you can manage through that part of it um these are just over and over again these are the times in which all a lot of the great startups are are created and frankly like having not having all the noise in the market is just clarifying and lets you focus and lets you kind of build better I think probably the quality of the community is getting built now are going to be better I mean like that early crypto punks Community you talked about like everyone who bought a crypto punks back then they

were like serious people like who really believed who went down to kind of a diaspora style do interesting things so I think with the caveat I also think it's you know it's I think the the hiring Market's pretty good right now for for crypto I think you know there are these pockets of other hot areas like AI but generally like you know the the it's just it's like a you know it's not like as crazy as it was two years ago when everyone was just sort of hopping around and the problem with bull market is you just get a lot of transient Behavior both from like recruiting customers just like it's not it's less authentic I don't know so I think with the yeah with the big

caveat being managing your like the number one advice I have for startups and in downturns is managing the runway and specifically we just don't know like if you look at it outside of the Great Depression like economic downturn there's been you know whatever there's been I think 15 economic downturns since then or something like that most of them I think I think outside the Great Depression none have lasted more than three maybe four years um but just the uncertainty around that like how do you manage through that how do you manage your psychology Kevin made the point about kind of you know it's very important and and frankly all markets for entrepreneurs to manage like work-life balance like psychology like there's just a lot of challenges I will tell you having been

involved with a lot of startups that's probably you know majority have serious issues around that um so just kind of getting through that building a great team staying focused building great user base preserving capital I don't know but I think this like my strong Instinct and we're behaving this way as investors is this is going to be a great a great period to be building in crypto awesome agreed yeah thanks guys thank you hi Kevin thank you for the talk for uh I'm Jay from etherid uh we provide a universal domain that works both on web 2 and web3 so we mint a domain like kevin.etherid that is both an ens name and because it has dot ID or Indonesia

uh actually evaluates on on as a website um and we paired that along with a Squarespace for web3 so it's a drag and drop interface to create create a crypto website that anyway anyone could do my question is uh thank you for being candid about the um the experience with open building in public with proof uh for most of us here uh we're fairly early on in our journey and we're building in relative anonymity I'm curious what are some benefits that we might not fully appreciate to that of building an anonymity yeah so I mean it's it's a fine balance because you don't want to be too quiet like I I think it's if you're just um

in a crazy bull market like people were loving building in public like they it was just like it was a great way we would see you know a thousand plus people come into our Twitter spaces and you know all be talking about it and retweeting it and getting super excited and I think it's important that at least someone on your team um it gets out there when the time is right and and you can have some type of public Persona out there in terms of you know how you it can help Propel and Market your product uh in in a way that is is really useful um I think where it gets out of hand is when you give to the keys to the

counselor the perceived keys to the castle over to the community where they think that they can help guide the direction of your company and they know best um it's it's kind of it's all how you kind of position that though so what what if what have you done to date like have you done any public speaking on what you've been building or uh yes so we've risked out to the ens Community um it's a fairly enclosed community that has already a passion for what three domains uh but we haven't really expanded beyond that so I I guess it's thinking about the timing of the next move or right now because like ethereum builds in public like there are examples I wonder if is that because it's infrastructure or it's been around

longer it does seem to work for some people I just wonder yeah they have a good system for proposing changes right like that's all structured yeah which is which is quite nice and most of us don't have that we just now got enough Dow tooling to where people can come in and actually propose things via the Dao which is more for their it's less about controlling the company it's more about you know um how they'd like to see off-shoot projects get funded yeah um so yeah I just wonder if it's if the lesson is don't build as much in public the lesson is representative democracy the product Council or the lesson is just better systems I don't know I don't have an answer I just

just wonder yeah yeah I I it would be I'd love to I think your point about now is the right time to build uh it's so much better than six months ago because six months ago if you launched something it would just go straight to the mirror let's call it a year ago it would just go yeah real feedback no real feedback no real feedback and just then you got a bunch of pissed off users when they're upside down when it all comes down crashing down so it's like actually really nice because you'll have a core community of people that are really there for the right reason that's true of Bitcoin ethereum isn't it Dogecoin like those are all people that came in during down markets for the most part so they were True Believers so you had that core nucleus of True Believers right

um I do think that's a big part of why those communities have stayed healthier right yeah absolutely thank you thank you thank you for the great talk um Nikita founder of chain Patrol uh we protect communities from scammers and phishing uh let's say there's a fake Moon Birds page we can have wallets like coinbase metamask and others have them blocked within minutes so any user visiting them look at a big scary warning to dome end here um my question was you know what was really interesting to me is like your kind of vision of how nfts are going to be used in the future the the wine example I've been looking a lot of like real estate and other ways that like nfts can be tied to like real world assets uh I'm really interested in

like what are some of the breakout cases you're you're thinking of like nfts uh Beyond profile pictures um and like how do you see the average user like the most exciting things you've seen uh that you know might be enough to use cases yeah it's it's a great question I I struggle to find really solid examples um for me it's you know I think that there are certain verticals of art that have emerged that are obviously like whether it be AI or generative like um that are now going to be kind of household name collectible type uh durable new verticals that will stay and and be accepted into the Canon of all great things art

um I think that's a no-brainer in terms of there being the we're still learning and playing with what membership means in nfts and and whether or not that is something that is sustainable and and really like it's it's a little backwards because in some sense you membership in the world of nfts as it exists today is like it really comes down to the person that has the biggest wallet and that's not necessarily the best person for your community and so I worry that you know when you think about membership as it applies to the things that we do in real life it's often an application process it's often like you know as you all know

from being here in this room it is it there is some kind of Clearing House to get into um a club or community and we don't we just don't have that and so I think it's such early days for web3 when it comes to all these other applications of nfts um there's going to be some great businesses to be built in this that I think when we were doing it initially it was just like okay here's a fun idea let's just launch it in the spirit of like good idea get it out the door in three weeks and see what happens and everyone went crazy um we didn't really take our time to think through all the edge cases and what might be the negative consequences that we hadn't really just considered

now you're going to see a regrouping and I think we'll have better products because of it I see there's a um there was a startup I was looking at the other day that we were considering uh deploying into our Discord and it did some really interesting things where it takes a look and rewards members of your community not for just positive contributions inside of Discord but also a whole slew of different things that they can do externally as well and one of them is it uses AI to detect whether or not they're actually using your nft as their pfp and and then rewards them for doing so and keeping that as like a badge of honor and there was just like all these little probably

10 to 15 little metrics that we had never considered you know baking into what means what it means to have a really healthy active participant in your community and I think we're gone are the days hopefully in the near future that everyone has the same microphone because it's really toxic when you get into Discord and you can have someone in there that can just control the entire conversation and then you ask them um hey can I see your wall address and then they send it and they they bought into the project a week ago or they're you know they're just not committed they're just they they bought in actually just to have a voice and to be uh a detractor from the project and so I

I think we need to do a little bit uh better in in figuring out how to elevate the best voices I know that's a little bit of a rant all over the place but I think nfts are gonna we went into like this rapid launch and just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks and now it's like I'm seeing some great products being built around that mess of what all fell to the floor yeah I mean I think that the legal Frameworks around it are important too right like the cc0 with the moon birds and um you know with real estate tying it to like actually like a deed for a house it's I think there's a lot of interesting developments there yeah that stuff is really challenging for me because I I feel like the more that government is involved and so the more

kind of regulatory hurdles there are in place uh I I feel like that those will be the last of fall um unless it's just so efficient and world changing that everyone says we must do this and they force the hand of regulators I think of uber like this like remember how illegal it was like you had to have a taxi Medallion to do anything and you remember how this all unfolded it was just like but it was the demand of the people that said I want this taxi suck and then they forced Regulators to actually make can happen in these different areas yeah it was a big fight for a few years that was yes it was very an Airbnb too by the way yeah exactly thank you Hey Kevin hi I'm JP I'm building friends

and friends we're a web 3 messaging app that's powered by uh crypto identity and payment rails so actually it was an early user of dig and I still remember like what it meant to get you know dug was that the right term um where you would get this flurry of uh activity on your product right and you clearly figured out a way to unlock the power of community there and I remember learning about proof on on the podcast interview you had with Tim Ferriss like this is 2021 um and I'm just curious like as someone who's built so many Community Based products how do you think about um seating that Community solving the cold star problem and then curating the community so that becomes something that

positive as it scales yeah it's a great question um I always think about how can you approach this with adding value right from the get-go and so you'll see a pretty common theme with a lot of things that I launched where it's let's get out there and just enter the into the community that is not someone just there to make a splash but really just get buy-in and trust and so you know with the modern Finance podcast around crypto or um the proof podcast it was like no advertisements nothing I was trying to sell you none of my own projects it was like build build on the community side and like stand out as someone that could

be somewhat of a a Force for good inside of this and prove that you're there to like um be a good citizen of the the web3 community first and then once we had enough people I remember when we hit the kind of like call it 75 to 100 000 people listening per episode I was like okay well these people are are clearly really happy with the product we've created so far now you know there there's some products that we can layer on top of this that might be interesting to take this one step further and so we had this built-in base in this good loyalty built up with this audience of people that we could then parlay into like some something meaningful whether it be the moon Birds launch or the proof Collective launch and so it was just

like I think a lot of this was was giving value back right away garyvee did that very similar approach actually with v friends uh as crazy as the art was I still give them kind of for that but like I think that the uh the the thing that he did is he taught people how to use metamask he had this massive following on Instagram and he created a bunch of series of videos on like this is what you need to do to prepare yourself for web three and it was like like him walking people through step by step by step and he bought up a bunch of great like he on boarded so many people into web 3 that would have never collected his nfts right like he just didn't they weren't in that world and and so that was bought him a lot of

Goodwill there as well so I've just encouraged like probably I mean everyone in this room to think about when you're attracting these first customers like it's not about extracting value from them initially it's like really providing value add in some capacity it's kind of like building a cultural generosity exactly contributing okay thank you so much yeah thank you hey thank you for the talk uh David from disco I'm building uh web3 Native social app um I'm curious what you would be working on if you weren't focused on proof right now oh gosh um well I really actually like a lot of the things that I spend my kind of nights playing around with how we can use

um AI to create code that becomes art and so that to me is really interesting I'm not talking uh prompt to to image outputs but prompt to code to generative images and so it's a slightly slightly different than than what's being done out there and I don't know if you can productize that in some capacity to create a unique product that might produce um or like is there a Photoshop to be made around coding I don't know like it's it's interesting because like I think that computer science degrees are going to die in the next five years um I just like the code is just I study computer science at school I I dropped

out and I know like now I have ai as a buddy and it is just so good at filling in all the blanks and helping with the syntax and there's things that I just like don't have the time to look up and it's like completing my my sentences for me and I'm like wow like if I can code watch out that means anybody can and so I I'm just like I'm fascinated with I think the my mental model is it won't replace it won't obviate the need for computer science degree but it will change what you do which is you'll be more kind of at the orchestration curation later as a you know like you'll be choosing among different pieces of code that feels more creative and putting it yeah I know I think I think it's a good I think it'll be a really unlock

creativity um I think it might well it allows us to iterate just so much faster I mean I used to code a lot and just you know as people know it like a lot of it is just the reason I stop coding is a lot of it becomes tedious and you're just looking stuff up on stack Overflow and debugging and that's why the AI stuff is amazing I don't think it removes the need for like architectural orchestration thoughts and creative thoughts right I don't know I think if anything it's an accelerant for that and I don't know so well I mean I guess the definition of a computer science degree might change and evolve it'll probably be less math focused and more of the orchestration and creative Focus I think an interesting question too is well like what will it do I'm sorry to take off topic but just one

thing we didn't really talk about it is you know when also you can generate any art instantly too what will that do I think it's I think it will it will make the human connection the authenticity the community the provenance 10 times more valuable and therefore make things like nfts much more valuable Because the actual and it also relates to cc0 like it's going to be I think the copyright thing is going to be forced by the fact that it just are just art is so abundant right and that it and you'll just have so much of it that it'll become more important that you're building a community and the human connection what does it mean and what is the humanity behind it anyways it's a longer conversation but I think it's

going to make creatives uh just at least 10x more productive because it it gives you like you know your best brainstorming friend where you're like okay this is the person I love to just like shoot the with and like try out new ideas on it gives you like a hundred of those yeah like and you can just go and iterate back and forth with it so rapidly like I I would I can get new algorithms for generative art you know every about takes about a minute and 20 seconds to produce something from chat jbt and like just alignment and iteration it's it's so fast it's it's so much fun anyway that's what I'd be working on is probably and I probably will start to work on that at proof is like how does that apply to all the

things we're doing with nfts should be a really exciting time for generative art yes absolutely cool thank you thank you how's it going Kevin my name is Adam I'm building Bellow we're building growth tools to help creators sell more nfts uh one thing that I want to learn about sort of your role at Moon Birds is how integral is on-chain data in the day-to-day of operating roombirds whether it be when preparing for drops managing IP managing the community like how do you look at on-chain data and sort of the day-to-day operations yeah definitely no more sophisticated way than we had been I mean it was initially just kind of doing analytics queries that we would spit back to say you know who are these people what are they holding

um who are biggest collectors to pay attention to um and there's been probably a half dozen or so startups that had started to fill and answer those questions and so it's not us writing queries any longer it's just us playing with these products where you know you you just paste in your contract address and um you know often your Twitter it starts giving you insights into all these different um collectors and and their habits that you would have never known before so a lot of that tooling is being created now or has been and we'll just get better with time but I think it's just if you talk to Frank from D Gods who I absolutely love you know I would say probably

a big chunk of their team does nothing but um just look at the data and so he has this like team that that his Engineers that they he he calls it like it's almost like they're they're Whispers like they'll say you know when like you see the president enter a room and like they have someone that kind of Whispers And they're like oh talk that's so and so pay attention to them like he has that but like with through on-chain data and so he knows exactly when to engage with certain customers uh on Twitter and so he'll be like okay this person's sentiment has been going a little bit sideways on d-gods I should probably interject and have a conversation with them today or like you know there's like these tools that they've built out that

allow them to preemptively reach out to problem members or you know it's just it's insane with what's going on in the back end so I would say it's more and more important every day cool and then as just a quick follow-up when you're preparing for a drop any sort of metrics that come to mind that you you eyeball in preparation for the big campaign yeah I mean it's certainly um in preparing for a drop the good news is that we have a community of of people that we're already serving so before it used to be you know using premen to kind of gauge of the excitement around a potential drop but even that isn't really working

well these days they'll have some I was talking to Brendan the other day and they'll have a a mint that you know 50 000 people will sign up for and then you actually say Hey you want a spot and it's like 10 of the people that won the spot actually show up to redeem it right and so it's it's a really good question as to how we figure out this problem of um well yesterday is a great example where I just think all bets are off right now uh in using data to try to prepare for drops like yesterday on the home page of openc was a drop that was free and it took like five hours to sell out because people didn't want to pay the gas fees and I was just like okay we're like I mean we've hit bottom now like it's this is good this is good so

um it was just it was crazy it was like those would have been something that would just would have been you're on the front page of Open Sea it would have been gone in right in 10 seconds if it was free so I don't know that you can use data on the drop side as much these days or if you can if you have something that you're not you're hiding please tell me because uh we don't have any good way to predict anything we'll be in touch yeah sweet thank you thanks for the talk uh I'm Nico from Skylab we're building Primitives for our own chain games so essentially um we just set the physics and the initial rules for the open world and anyone can build games on top of it and we are building games on top as well as well um and uh oh and we actually include

Moon bird as one of the pilots in our first open world awesome yeah so I'm uh I'm curious like what's your thought on the future of these communities because you know I think we did math like these communities collectively at the peak has over 500 billion values of all the Blue Chip nfts so like what is oh sorry 500 million so so what is the activities that these communities are engaging in and uh what do people when people gather together what do they do together yeah that's a great question um well I would say that a few things on the future of these communities I I think that we're going to learn what the

bottom discovering price Discovery in this new bottom is going to be really healthy for the entire ecosystem just because um no one really knew how to Value anything in the hype cycle and you know if you walk into a a gallery and you go and you you found an unknown artist you know you can find something really impressive I'm sure within a 10 block radius for a few hundred dollars right and so we have this conversation internally a lot where we're like okay well what does it mean to Value an actual nft like how do you figure out what that's worth and I say that as it applies to community because I I think a more stable natural price appreciation

of these Collectibles over time is just healthier for the ecosystem which will lead to a better community so for us a lot of the conversation is with the True Believers is like okay we're here now I I hold the moon bird it's worth a few thousand dollars like okay maybe this is where we should have started like maybe maybe these things should have been worth you know 500 or 700 like from the get-go and that's kind of how we slowly build from here and so the community now I would say is actually the diehards are really actually pumped to to feel like we've kind of hit bottom in some ways and and now it's like the the strongest of the community are coming together to kind of lock arms and say okay we build from

here together and it feels really good it feels healthy and sustainable um I would say that it's a really important piece for us and one of the things that we've noticed is that the best conversations are still happening in real life and so I would highly recommend that a lot of your initial Gatherings get done in real life for these real bonds to get set up and we always see a halo effect from in real life events not in terms of floor price but in terms of just the conversation on Discord because you'll have these like oh your so-and-so user Oh I thought you were an and now we're kind of friends and then that that kind of like extends into your virtual environment whereas if you're just yelling at

someone with some random pfp it's just like there's not the same you know uh um I don't know I just feel like we're we're a lot healthier I remember having a conversation with um Zuckerberg back in 2005 uh when dig was really starting to take off we were about the same size in traffic and now not so much but um he uh he was saying how he used real names on on Facebook and I was like oh we use usernames like why are you using really everyone uses usernames you know like and he's like no no like trust me like real names are best because people are more themselves when they actually use their real identity and I don't know if that's held up because there's a pretty bad people on Facebook but um I would say that these IRL events are just so especially during this Market

when people are feeling beat up they need to see that there's life still happening and and it's always a positive thing when we get together in real life oh and just a quick follow-up what do they talk about when they gather together honestly because they don't know each other right yeah it was just more like a lot of our conversation is around art and so it's a it's like what are you collecting what are you into oh this is a like uh we actually we were talking about this before we came up here you said the average mint price on manifold now is like sub ten dollars or something like that and like um so a lot of our our people are getting together are talking very good sign I think because it's authentic kind of patronage like Behavior exactly not specular Behavior so it's like a lot of

that where it's like oh I picked up this great piece of art for 100 bucks or for 75 and so it's like it's more back to that Grassroots like Vibes than it is about the hype fives which is I for me is is really really awesome so it's it's a lot of conversation around art and and collectibles at these gatherings got it okay thanks yeah hi great talk I'm Marielle from mentaport with the geolocation platform for web3 we're an infrastructure company doing location aware smart contracts to bring location applications to web3 my question is what's your advice on onboarding web 2 companies for example we were actually also talking to a wine company and then FTX happened and there it went so what is your advice yeah I mean I would say that the

majority of them the bigger companies have at least one internal web 3 Champion that you just have to find out who that person is um you know we just launched a integration that we did last week with Spotify and it's because they have this little tiny team internally that is like let's play and let's do token gated content and let's just see what's going to happen here and i i a lot of the bigger brands that we're talking to whether it be the designer luxury brands or you know a lot of the household names whether it be a sporting or apparel or you name it there seemed to be this like little pockets of like three to five people that are at these companies that have somewhat of a blessing from executive management to say okay go play here we don't know what

this might look like and so for for us it's been you know let's not try and ask for the world but let's just do something that is Meaningful for both of us that we can both put a win up on the board and then we both learn from together collectively and so it's not like hey Nike can you go make a moon bird shoe it's like hey Nike can we just do this like fun little side drop together that you know um that will benefit both communities that isn't you producing something physical that you know so it's like it's really um understanding that they're as scared as you are about this whole Space probably even more or so and in and it's just playing uh in a way that makes them

comfortable initially so that they you know can just not feel like they're gonna put themselves out there where they might end up in a bad PR cycle I would add to that um in addition to find the right person within each organization and you can also have you know as a startup you don't need every customer and so finding the right customers meaning the right companies um generally in most Industries right they're sort of one or two kind of Tech forward-leaning players maybe they're not always number one maybe the number two and they want to use Tech to get up ahead and Enterprise software they have this concept of Lighthouse customers which are kind of the you know in the insurance industry everybody knows that X insurance companies always on The Cutting Edge and you know in each of these worlds right

they have their own conferences their own you know social media you know you don't have to have everyone as your customer initially right you can go and you can not only choose the right people within the organization but choose the right organizations as well um so you know thank you it's funny uh oddly enough like conferences like consensus and others have been really helpful because we've gone there and you do these meetups and you go and you go to you know the art blocks Meetup out there and you go to all these like little Gatherings and you just bump into people that are working at these big brands that are in the industry that are curious and you're like oh like and if you've made a splash enough to where they'll recognize your name like hey I did members oh we know

moonbirds and then all of a sudden a conversation and dialogue starts around that and you're just like I didn't realize you were into web 3 and it's such a great place to like this smaller little niche events to kind of network and figure out what brands are curious you know yeah I think especially in a remote world you know where a lot of people have gone remote these in-person events become that much more important right yeah absolutely and like whether it's consensus or the like ethereum has a lot of great meetups um and it just self-selects and as you were saying earlier like there's nothing there's no replay we all love the internet we work on the internet but there is no human bonding replacement for in-person yeah interactions right so great

awesome well thank you so much for that uh Kevin and Chris uh please join us [Applause] [Music]