The Creator Economy Emerges | Li Jin, Morgan Beller, Anne Favre-Willis, Cooper Turley

Transcript

all right all right welcome welcome everyone today we are here to talk about the crater economy so by a show of hands here who has heard of the creator economy to get us started i'll take it we got a modest 25 to 35 percent there gives us some good uh subject to dive into so i want to start by just giving a quick round of intros to our wonderful panelists here for those that i don't know my name is cooper i'm excited to be joined by morgan beller the general partner of nfx and fawver vp of special projects at openc and legion co-founder and general partner at variant so with that in mind we're going to start we're going to go down the line here morgan why don't you give us a quick introduction on yourself and tell us about why we're here today sure thank you for having me cooper and

the permissionless team so i'm morgan beller i am originally from long island new york and moved out to california about nine years ago to work at andrews and horowitz and i was there when they kind of had their come to jesus crypto moment but i was too dumb then to dedicate my life to it but the first crypto deal i worked on was actually media chain with jesse which was all about the creator economy fast forward ended up at medium which was about the creator economy but in a web 2.0 sense so we could maybe talk about that and then realize life's about network effects and that despite the fact that medium was founded kind of to go against facebook i ended up at

facebook where i helped start the cryptocurrency efforts there and most recently joined nfx i'm here because i love all the creator i guess uh streamed throughout the past nine years i love it you've seen it all i've not seen it at all and tell us a little bit about yourself and some of the work you've been doing at openc i think it's a fascinating space that i've been to yeah definitely so first i'd say just super happy to be here and i think i'll do a quick shout out and say there's um an nft gallery that we're sponsoring that's just around the corner definitely recommend checking it out a lot of awesome creators there um but i'd say yeah thrilled to be here today um i've i've been in the space for a while and i like to think about what matters

to me with creators really is starting from the tech side um so what brought me to the space was really this promise of what blockchain can do about giving ownership and control back to individuals and as well as creators and i think it's been really exciting to see what nfts have done in more broadly in the ecosystem to really drive that sense of control and ownership for everyone in this space but i think specifically for creators so excited to dive into that a little bit and talk about some of the benefits and also some of the things that we still need to continue to work on and make better i love it and thank you so much for being here lee i'll pass it over to you next as someone that's been very involved with the term the creator economy i think you have a great lens on this um

love for you to give a quick intro and then tell us about what you're working on hey everyone it's really great to be here as mentioned i'm currently a general partner and co-founder of variant fund we're a generalist seed stage crypto venture firm i've been personally investing in consumer software for about six years beginning initially at andreessen horowitz where i was covering consumer marketplaces social platforms the creator economy and many other consumer categories and after that i then started my own fund called atelier ventures to invest in the future of online work which included the creator economy and that is how i got interested in crypto and web 3 in the first place it was really from

the perspective of how do we enfranchise the participants of all of these multi-sided networks who previously didn't have ownership in this very sort of unbalanced way despite contributing the bulk of the value to these networks so that's what drew me into web 3 in the first place and i remained very interested in the creator economy to this day i've invested in platforms like sub stack and patreon on the web 2 side as well as platforms like mirror and foundation and many others on the web 3 side and then on the side i'm also a part-time creator myself with a newsletter podcast courses that i've done many other things so i think have lots of different

vantage points on the creator economy i love that and you have such a nice framing of the creator economy i'd love for you to take us back to really the three phases that you talked about in the development of the creator economy and maybe how that leads to web 3 creator economy and where we are today absolutely so often times when we hear about the creator economy it's presented as something that is new that is emerging for the first time ever even the name of this panel is the creator economy emerges and that's kind of a misnomer because the creator economy i like to say has been around really since the dawn of the internet ever since we had social media platforms and ugc platforms that enabled everyone using those platforms to become a creator to create on the internet so

really since the late 1990s early 2000s when we had the beginning of social networks that is what i consider to be the dawn of the creator economy so that is what i call the creator economy 1.0 and since then we've gone through multiple phases of the creator economy where i consider the next progression of the creator economy to be the rise of the influencer in the early 2010s and so this was a period in which some users of those ugc platforms gained a lot of influence amassed outsized audiences and and became influencers they were able to monetize by usually being a conduit for other brands and companies to advertise their wares they

were monetizing through things like youtube adsense or by selling sponsorship posts on their instagrams so that was the creator economy 2.0 the phase that we're in right now is what i call creator economy 3.0 which is creators as businesses in their own right so instead of being a channel to sell other brands products or shell you know other other wares they themselves are the product they are the face of their own brand and so they are pursuing more direct monetization channels like tipping or selling their own subscription newsletter or having their own branded merchandise like mr

beesberger but in any case the phase that we're in right now is really creators becoming businesses in their own right gaining a lot of power and influence pursuing a wide range of direct monetization channels and that leads us to then the web 3 monetization methods including social tokens and nfts that i think really represent an extension of this period of time in which creators are emerging as very powerful businesses i love that i really want to hyper focus on that word ownership because i think it's so important specifically for web3 creator economy as you mentioned users have been generating content for so long but for the first time we're seeing these creators capture ownership of the network so they create value for you know and i want to toss this over to you

because you've had such an interesting perspective working with creators at openc and specifically in the midst of this whole nft bull run we'd love for you to talk a little about sort of your relationship with the creators on your platform and you know how you guys interact with them some of the challenges they face and some of the benefits they've had just by being so present in the web 3 environment yeah totally um i'd start by saying i think one of the interesting things that lee's highlighting here is also just this removal of friction across the across time and so we see obviously pre-creator economy 1.0 there's obviously you know thousands of years of art and a lot of it then is how are you taking friction out of the process for actually delivering that art delivering other types of creation um to your audiences

to our to other folks who want to collect and ultimately in the end like creating other owners of that of that work as well and so i think what's really exciting about web3 from a just channel distribution perspective is this idea that you're really removing all of that friction it just makes it much easier for creators to engage with their users and sell things that they're really passionate about it's obviously much more than that though and so the other thing i'd say and honestly what really so excites me about web3 every day is this ability to turn customers or users into your community and into people that are invested in the project that you're a part of as well and so what's been so cool about that i

think nfts are an example of this social tokens definitely is that you start to see people really have a stake in the game themselves getting engaged themselves whether it's in a discord channel or being involved in real life events with the creator but it's really different than sort of the transactional relationship that you might have seen before in web 2 where you see something you might like the person you follow them but it really doesn't matter to you how that person does like this is about a much more tethered back and forth relationship and so thinking about open seas role in that we really just see ourselves as a conduit for those relationships and for um creators to promote and show and highlight the work that they're doing

and to connect with their community but also bring in new community members as well and so yeah i think it's been very cool to see that i think some of the things for us that um are exciting but also that we want to continue invest in right are like us making sure we're creating safe spaces for creators both to engage with their community but also to engage with each other one thing we found actually is we've had a couple experiments where we've actually just like this is so simple but like tested out smaller groups where we're engaging creators who have similar interests or similar chain interests with each other and allowing them to innovate and connect with each other in a safe space where there may not be collectors so creating those types of environments where they

can be supported is really important um and then certainly finding more and more ways for creators of all sizes whether they're you know the biggest ones yugo labs etc or um indie creators that are just getting started giving them a platform both on our site but also through all of our social channels as well to really make sure that um folks can find the the community that's most excited about them as well yeah i find it fascinating just the diversity of creators that are on the platform you have so many different asset classes so many different categories you have everything from a hugo labs to someone just minting nfts out of their bedroom and so there's no one playbook for everyone you know it's a very iterative model and i think that's um a really amazing position just to be in because we are so early and

went through creator economy that all of that can live under one roof whereas we're so used to these different platforms taking on different verticals you have you know instagram for example versus a spotify versus a youtube and right now one of the benefits of openc being so early is that it kind of houses all of that content in one place and so for you as someone working with creators i'm sure that's probably a really interesting position to be in and i'm sure that there's no shortage of uh difficult conversations being had every day yeah i think definitely a responsibility for us also to use the the surfaces we have to make sure we're giving voice to a big diversity of creators as well whether that's our homepage or on discord we've also recently um there's just a proposal that went through on friends with benefit to

actually give some of the control of our homepage actually to friends with benefit and actually allow others to help us identify and call out strong creators as well that you know we can work together to to share with a broader community as well i love that and i think the word curation really comes out to me there because i think we're going to start to see more of an evolution where creator economy nft social tokens all these things are really being dictated by the communities that drive their value and so for someone as big as opens you to say hey this homepage is monumental on the space of web3 let's have a really tight-knit community help influence what's on that page i think that's a really amazing step in the right direction yeah morgan i want to pass this over to you because you've had a

really big opportunity to work with some major creators yourself in some of your projects you're actively investing in the space and the creator economy talk to me a little bit about some of those early conversations you have with big creators coming into the space and their relationship with starting to do things like nfts sure so i think what cooper's alluding to is i worked on this project called stoner cats so stoner cats yeah you want to talk about stoner cats okay donor cats came to be because mila kunis and her production partner lisa sturbikoff they had a show called stunner cats and they were having trouble having it financed by traditional studios because a it was drug content so either studios wouldn't purchase it for that reason and or b they wanted creative control

and the show is about a woman who has alzheimer's she gets prescribed medicinal marijuana she falls asleep her cats get the marijuana they become sentient and the woman who wrote the show her mom has alzheimer's it was a very personal story for her and therefore they did not want to give up creative control to a studio so they asked me they're like hey we don't really know what nfts are about but we keep hearing you talk about them and can we use them to finance this show and i was like maybe but we really need to think about it because you are celebrities like this will look like a cash grab unless it's actually solving a problem that cannot be solved in any other way so we spent a lot of time thinking about that including cooper thank you you were

helpful advisor early on the highlight of the whole project by the way was cooper calling mila a boomer which was a real thing that happened and email is for boomers i think is what he said and uh kind of true stand by it stands by it so we did come to the conclusion that this would be a unique way to fund the show and that we could directly connect the creators of the show with the consumers who wanted to see the show and there were many learning lessons from that we did this about 13 months ago and the idea was that there would be 10 420 of these cats and that they would provide they would be an access token for the show

we actually initially so one of the learning lessons is i thought crypter lawyers and the crypto legal landscape was a pain in the ass if i'm allowed to say that uh it turns out like entertainment times crypto law is like exponentially worse so there were you know uh i don't want to say prop there were things we ran into such as we wanted everyone to be able to watch the show because you want as many fans for sonar cats as possible but it was actually for legal reasons that you could only watch the show if you bought one of the nfts that was one example another thing that came up is we realized something we were just talking about backstage is despite the fact that we believe and others believe that maybe nfts are more of a mainstream use case

and that that is a product that more you know normal people have a mental model for versus like let's say yield farming and so despite the fact that that might be true the same rube goldberg is required to get to that you know light at the end of the tunnel and that you need to like buy crypto you need to go through exchanges you need to set up a wallet so we felt very very responsible to educate the potential user base of stoner cats i'm like this is what metamask is and we did like videos and various forms of content to educate people and even still we screwed up some things so that was a learning lesson just like yeah same rube goldberg machine is required and just the gap in education is still huge um

i can talk about center cats for a while so maybe i'll pause sure i mean the two things i want to pull out from that um moving forward i think celebrities are going to play a major role in the web 3 creator economy i think so far people have really been going on a ledge to get out there and try these things like stoner cats but i think one thing that i'm personally really focused on i know that a lot of people on stage are is just making sure creators feel welcomed when they're entering web3 you know if i am someone that has a major audience behind me and i want to do nfts how do we better recommend playbooks and standards that they don't feel like they're going to get ridiculed or isolated by their fan base and i think it's such a delicate balance that that

project really fascinates me and another thing i'll highlight there is just sort of that on-ramp and off-ramp and that sort of visibility problem where if you want to release something that's web3 based you have this sort of buried entry where you can't just upload it to youtube or just put it on instagram you kind of have to jump through these hoops to even access the content in the first place so that me it singles that we have a far away to go but it's at least exciting that we're starting to ask those questions i think it'll allow us to get further along i have two more points to make about stoner cast that might lead to a broader conversation so none of the talent for the show got paid until the nfts were sold which was a huge leap of faith that everyone from the sound engineer to the animators had

to take so that was we were grateful that they said yes because otherwise we would not like they literally no way to pay these people um and the other was there are still web 2 web one or even prior generation types creators like for stoner cast there was he was a animator who drew everything by hand and you still want those types of creators to make their way into web3 so like tool kits for those folks as well is hard and third their last point was also realizing that you can't just have art um like the community part's a huge part which i think is what cooper told us he's like you can't just sell these cats you need to you know have a discord and you need to make

consumers feel like they're engaged in the process and that's definitely something that we're still tweaking because on one hand you have consumers who really feel like they want to be not only owners but contributors to the whole creative process and on the other hand you have people who are professionals at doing their job so for example like we said that if we sold 100 of the cats we would create a dow where the community could vote on aspects of future episodes and that is a spectrum and we're not really sure where to land because again on one hand you want them to feel like they have control so do you let them choose like what brands the cereal box is in the background of one of the shots but on the other hand like you have people who are professional writers animators

etc and you don't really want them to not be able to do their job so finding the right balance of having the consumers contribute to the creative process i think is also tough yeah i actually see this being a constant friction with new creators in the space they'll sell some nfts they'll hear about a dow or some sort of community based activation it's one thing to put ethan to a treasury it's another thing to give someone who comes and likes your post creative control over your future vision and so and if i had to turn this over to you what do some of those conversations look like with these bigger projects that have done extremely well for themselves so they start to think about ways to bring their community on board or ways to get deeper involved is this something that you guys at openc are

helping to talk to creators about or what is the role that you play in some of these projects as they get bigger and look to sort of scale up their communities yeah well first i wanted to touch on what we were talking about a little bit earlier which is just to say what the story you walk through just reminds me of how early we still are because i think is i mean look i come from a blockchain tech company so having a wallet with a gui is like a massive step ahead right it feels so easy to me but for most people and for us really to get folks involved in this and feel like they have ownership ownership is both like this on chain idea but it's also about empowering them effectively right and that means educating folks on what the right

playbook might be giving them all the tools they need to do that whether it's running their own business which many instances this is building out a community um and giving them the support along the way to frankly do what they do best which is be innovative and creative and um give them the tools to sort of avoid some of this operational friction so i still think there's a long way to go and i think the story you're noting definitely highlights that for bigger creators honestly i think it's some of the same i mean i think for for everyone in this space right like we've seen a huge amount of demand and interest in this space frankly much more quickly than i think anyone expected and so with that also comes some really amazing stories of

creators who've just totally taken off in the space and with that i think some of the same questions what does a playbook look like also it changes things are moving so quickly that making sure you're being both innovative but also responsible and responsive to your community is a balance right now and so i think those are some of the things that i think we hear as well um certainly as as this scales and grows and becomes more more mainstream trust will become even more important both for collectors as well as creators and so that's something we also see here as well is how do we make sure we're representing the the view and and sort of rights of these rights holders in many ways and at the same time also empowering them to

make their own decisions decide what what is a creative inspiration and so finding that balance is is i think an interesting thing that we'll see a lot of innovation on as well i love that if we were to put into perspective let's assume that a creator has trust and they have a community um lee you brought up a really amazing report back backstage about a16z state of web3 there were some amazing statistics on the creator economy that helped us really put into perspective what's happening today i would love if you could just briefly talk about some of the learnings you pulled out of it and some of the takeaways that we should know in the audience yeah there was a there's been several really interesting reports just kind of um citing how like where are we in the evolution of the web 3 creator economy

today especially as compared to the web 2 creator economy like we we talk a lot about nfts and creator dows but how large is this right now and the the facts and figures behind it basically say that it's super early in terms of overall like absolute numbers of creators participating in web3 but the revenue impact that they're having is is very outsized so to illustrate this um this morning's report on the state of web 3 from a16z showed that there were about 20 000 creators who earned from some mechanism on ethereum last year that could be nfts that could be social

tokens whatever it might be but 20 000 creators experience any kind of earnings using ethereum in 2021 that is minuscule in comparison to the overall creator economy most recent estimates that i've seen about the overall size of the creator economy say that there's about 200 million creators worldwide who are monetizing their audience in some way so 20 000 is a tiny tiny fraction of that you know in as a as an investor if we saw an application that had 20 000 users in web 2 that would be like a pre-seed investment so the overall number of creators participating is still very small but the the revenue that they're earning is substantial where the report

the same report showed that last year those 20 000 creators earned something like 3.9 billion dollars using ethereum in 2021. 3.9 billion dollars is nothing to sneeze at and it's actually in the same order of magnitude as a lot of traditional web 2 earnings mechanisms that creators have so for comparison youtube paid out about 15 billion dollars in total to creators last year youtube has obviously been around for you know about 15 years much longer than ethereum has been around and yet the web 3 creator earnings are very quickly catching up to a very traditional tried and true social

platforms and so what that tells me is there's just so much latent desire out there on the part of consumers to support their favorite creators and what crypto uniquely enables is the monetization of super fans to be able to capitalize on the true desire and willingness of a fan to pay for their favorite creator at a scale that is honestly unprecedented so whereas the youtube cpm would be you know three to five dollars for a thousand views from selling one nft to super fan for let's say even one eth represents probably millions of views on that same video so crypto is enabling creators to

monetize at a huge scale versus traditional mechanisms and i think going back to something that we were speaking about before with regards to these tokens being a mechanism to create community and to create a base of folks who feel more than just a sense of support for the creator but they feel that they have some skin in the game in the creator's success i think where this eventually leads us to is an actual dissolution of the creator economy into the next phase so creator economy 4.0 um to continue the evolution that i was saying before where creator economy 4.0 is actually um the community economy wherein the

boundaries between a creator and their fans dissolves and becomes less binary less clear and their fans become active participants in the creative process they become enfranchised and influential in the creative process and they actually have a financial exposure to the success of the creations of that entire community that's hugely different from where we are today where the creator economy exists in pretty much a top-down way especially on these web 2 social platforms where a creator creates an audience consumes what we're starting to see in the web 3 creator economy is that playing field becomes a lot more level where there's less of a clear distinction between

who's a creator versus who's their audience and everyone is becoming a co-creator in their own right with financial exposure to the success of the creative output of that community i love that and i want to build on it one of our close friends jesse walden has this amazing concept called patronage plus if you can give a quick overview on what that is and more specifically how it relates to the people that are actually collecting these nfts from creators i think that'd be a really interesting perspective yeah so patronage plus is this concept that was coined by my partner variant jesse walden patronage plus is basically the concept that in web 3 the reason that you would support a creator through buying an nft or buying a social token is not only patronage it's not only the desire to

support them out of altruism because you like them the plus stands for the potential for profit so patronage with the potential for profit is the underlying motivator for an audience member a consumer in the web 3 creator economy whereas in web 2 there was no way for you to profit off of supporting a creator if we think of watching a youtube video or donating to someone's patreon or even subscribing to someone's newsletter one you did that really out of the benefit to yourself that was in terms of like knowledge or the content that you got exposed to but there was no potential for profit from that from that engagement

and so in web 3 for the first time ever it introduces this new pool of people into the creator's orbit which are people who have a desire for profit who aren't just there out of the purity of a love for that creator necessarily which is really interesting so you have speculators for the first time ever in the creator economy and i think what the impact of that has on the creator economy is that it actually flips the order of a creator life cycle so in the web 2 creator economy the life cycle had been create content for free for years slog through that process of uploading videos or putting out content out there into the world hoping to build an audience

and then years later once you have a masten audience turn on monetization through tipping or adsense or whatever it might be but in the traditional creator economy basically you had to create content and build an audience for free for a long time before you could ever monetize and because web3 introduces the speculative element through tokens through patronage plus it's actually flipping the order of that playbook to where people could mint a token initially sell it to a base of speculators potentially or fans use that token to bootstrap both funding and an audience and then use that funding to create content

and hopefully with that content then attract additional audience members and achieve content market fit but it's it's really interesting that that that life cycle is flipping to where monetization comes first monetization actually bootstraps distribution and then funds the content creation and i think we're just starting to see this playbook being put into effect with examples like mad realities the web3 dating show or even profile picture projects that have these really ambitious metaverse or gaming roadmaps are an example of bootstrapping content creation by using this upfront token yeah i love that and i think the

interesting thing on my perspective has been being friends with people that have hundreds of thousands of followers on instagram or something like this it's very rare that these creators are capturing any of the upside of those platforms you know and for their careers you know as you mentioned they're basically uploading four years at a time in advance and then they start to get brand deals in and their livelihood is dependent upon an outside company coming to them with an offer to post content on this platform which is very different from me being able to collect their first post on the platform as they amass a following of a million plus people you know being able to share in that upside in that collective growth and so i think that begs the question here um morgan i want to tell this to you as someone that

used to work at medium what is the role of some of these web 2 platforms in this emerging web 3 creator economy you know we've seen instagram announced they want to start working with nft spotify starting to do some tests there do you think that it's viable for them to help slot into the mix here what does that relationship look like we'll see i i over corrected and went from facebook to a seed fund so um i guess i'm kind of voting with my feet there but to the creator economy evolution that we so beautifully mapped out just to rewind to that for a second like lowering the barrier to entry isn't a web three thing where like if you wanted to be a creator before you had to get signed by a talent agency or cast on and or cast on a show and now

or even prior to web 3 you can have an instagram post that goes viral or youtube posts that goes viral so lowering the barrier to entry to get to scale and have your voice heard like that was really a web 2 innovation i think the web 3 big unlock and we haven't used this word yet i'm like waiting is like incentives like it finally aligns incentives with all parties the platform the creator and the consumer and that for me is the bigger unlock than the lowering the barrier to entry part because again i think that was done by web 2 arguably better than web3 today because nfx stands for network effects i mentioned i joined facebook because i believe in network effects and if you want to have your voice heard by the most number of unique people the web

2 platform's still a bigger scale open c is obviously the leader in the web 3 platforms but i think to lee's other point it's a quality over quantity conversation in web3 right now where you might reach a smaller number of users but the rpoo per each of those users is exponentially higher all of these metrics are really conflated but because it's also the arp is higher because we're playing with like monopoly money in a way so it's like we'll see where it all nets out um but for the web 2 platforms in the role that they have i think i don't know if this is going to make me any friends but um i think there's a lot of experiments to be done i think there's a lot of like low hanging fruit and kind of table

stakes like you need to enable nfts to be able to be used as profile pictures you need to allow people to pay in crypto you need to like have a crypto wallet on your platform like that's kind of like okay fine and every web 2 platform ken should and will have those pieces but for me it's like you don't have the web 3 part unless you have that incentive mechanism which aligns the platform the creators and the consumers and i haven't seen any web 2 products do that today it's a bit hard to put that sugar in the cake once it's baked because if you're a public company of a fiduciary responsibility to your investors and that part obviously screws with that a little bit

but unless someone does that i don't think they'll get it but i'm curious i don't know if you agree or not yeah i think we're in a very uh read-only state of web 2 platforms integrating nfts you know platforms like twitter you can connect your pfp but you're not minting directly through the site and you're definitely not capturing shared upside of any collective growth of twitter yet and so there's you know sort of these inclinations that things are moving in that direction i think one of the things that i'm excited about is companies like openc that have been building in the space for so long the fundamentals are just so much stronger with some of these platforms there's a fantastic book called the innovator's dilemma that talks about how these legacy companies oftentimes are unable to adapt to new technology because they move very slow

and by the time that the boat has moved you know they've kind of missed that wave in the first place and so to turn that into a question i'm really curious to see how you see something like open c fitting in the mix with a platform like instagram integrating nfts spotify integrating nfts what's kind of the role that opencv plays in that conversation yeah well first of all an awesome clayton christensen reference yeah good uh yeah that's good um yeah i'd say um i mean look i'm much more bullish on this web 2 integration to me i think it's at a minimum good signal that there's something that's going right here in web 3 and with the creator economy that they see so at a very very minimum i think like to your point these are companies that have to make trade-offs and the fact that they're choosing to invest in

this area is a really positive thing the second thing i'd say is i think that you know creators have done very well on those platforms a lot of them have good relationships with these platforms we can argue about the goods and bads but there's a lot of positive that's come out of it and so seeing those as channels really to introduce a lot of new creators who maybe have been a little nervous about going full hog web 3. to me is a really wonderful opportunity to introduce um the value prop and the the real value of of what social tokens and nfts can deliver to just a much broader group so if we think about expanding out this 20 000 person creator group like this is one really strong way to do it i think it'll

take time and i think um you know excited to see what kind of really sustained investment will be made by these platforms but um it is exciting to see i think even in instagram's early days of some of their announcement you know it at a minimum it's just given creators an opportunity to highlight something and link to their their nft right that in itself is really nice the same is true for twitter like so many people posting their pfps early on and i remember like when i actually feel like i got into nfts in part by following people on twitter and being like what is that and originally right you'd be like what is that like now i have to search like you know ape in hoodie like what what is this thing and so like those little integrations actually i think go

a long way in actually educating folks and like driving them to the art that they like the newsletters they like all of the type of creation and so yeah i'm optimistic about it i think there's questions we can talk about around um decentralization and all of that but um too early to tell right so excited about where it's going yeah one of the things i call out there is that there's such a prevalent culture within web3 that as you mentioned when you see someone with one of these profile pictures it begs the question of what is that you know yeah and now i've gotten to a point where people are very aware of certain things that they see online but i love the idea of creating you know arena games for status where we have our physical house with all of our properties and attractions and our cars

and whatnot but we don't quite have that for our online presence quite yet i think one of the valuable roles that these social platforms can play is if i have a board april if i have metaverse land connecting that to my instagram profile being able to show that off in a way that i see fit you know it's a very exciting opportunity lee i want to turn this over to you as someone who can help give some color to what creator economy in web 3 looks like today you know maybe give you a chance to highlight some of the portfolio companies that you work with and then also more specifically this fantastic report you wrote on the update of the ownership economy recently one of my favorite pieces of the year would love you to talk through some of those findings and just help people

leave this panel with a little bit of an understanding of what the creator economy looks like within web3 today yeah that was a really long question um so i'll i'll get into this question um through the same angle from from the question about web 2 platforms and what do we think about instagram and spotify and all these companies entering nfts and web 3. i really welcome it firstly so i totally agree with anne that i think it's going to be a huge education driver for mass adoption teaching people what an nft is how to set up a wallet et cetera about these different concepts but i

think ultimately it's going to be a gateway into a much broader world of digital ownership that extends far beyond those web 2 platforms so these web 2 platforms are currently adding web 3 features as an additional feature onto their platforms whether that's the profile picture feature or showcasing your nfts on instagram or whatever whatever have you but these are small point features in a much bigger platform that they already have that's already fully baked and i think ultimately users will use these experiences and learn about being able to actually digitally own something what it means to own a piece of a digital

asset and realize that there's a much broader world out there of all forms of digital ownership that extend beyond the individual passive form of owning just a piece of media into actually owning a part of a network governing a protocol being a co-owner in a much larger collective effort and i think that's the much more powerful eventual form that we'll get to that users will first be trained on via these these web 2 platforms and that brings me to the ownership economy report which we recently published on the variant site basically taking stock of where are we in web 3 today and for those of you guys who aren't

familiar with variant our entire thesis as a firm is what we call the ownership economy where we believe that digital ownership is going to become a really powerful new mechanism that extends throughout all new forms of software from financial marketplaces to media to gaming to social networks but the most powerful networks of the next generation the best software that will be built are going to be the ones that turn their users into owners and that ownership has a very broad spectrum of different experiences ranging from individual ownership to collective ownership of a platform from the passive

to the active but i think eventually where i would like us to get to and i think where a lot of us agree that we should get to is users becoming co-owners of the networks that they're contributing value to and that's something that the web 2 platforms can never offer and so i continue to be really bullish on web3 networks that make ownership truly a keystone of their user experiences i love that well guys i think that's a fantastic place for us to end up on i would like you to go around really quickly and maybe let people know where they could stay up with your work we'll start with morgan here first i'm morgan beller i'm at bellar on twitter and i'm morgan at nfx.com which i might regret saying which is

pretty obvious i guess that's ballsy yeah you can figure it out have a great day annie fob a-n-n-i-e-f-a-u-v on twitter um you'll find my invisible friend walking around there nice and i'm lgin 18 on twitter lead.substack.com and you can find variant at variant.fund see there you go nice and uh i'm cooper at koopa troopa thank you guys for coming out and listening to us talk about the creator economy look forward to it and thanks for permission that's from us out here thank you good job