Creator to founder: A conversation with Greg Solano, Co-founder of Yuga Labs

Transcript

[Music] thank you so Greg and I have had the opportunity to work together for about the last six months or so right as I was joining a16z I got to meet Greg and his co-founder Wiley um and and do a little bit of work together and uh the first time that I met Greg I was honestly a little bit Starstruck I mean a meeting like one of the two uh two Geniuses behind board API club and uh and I was trying to think of like okay like how can I introduce myself in a way where I'm not going to look like an idiot uh and so I'm like so yeah so nice to meet you

you know tell me about what kind of stuff did you work on before you guys did uh b-i-y-c and do you remember what you said um you can you can tell the story yeah I don't so we're we're outside uh shooting baskets and Greg turns me and looks me dead pan and he goes um I was the editor of an adult Harry Potter coloring book ah and so maybe you can talk about how you went from that to you know creating what what I think everyone would agree is like the biggest original Ip company in the space awesome yeah thank you for that very kind introduction and um I yeah I mean exactly like you know two

Geniuses more like two idiots um was it was uh I was a book editor um that was like the only career I had before um starting Hugo with with Wiley and and uh my other two buddies crime and zeeshan um and it came out of the fact that I grew up just wanting to be a writer um I like decided that's what I wanted to do when I was 12 years old and kind of like mapped out the rest of my you know life at that moment as if like that was the plan um because what I really liked was just the idea of like owning something from start to finish and like just doing it on your

own it felt like rather than working in a big company or doing something like that that like you know a writer gets to just like do something on their own and craft it over years and and put it out into the world and so um I went to NYU because that seemed like a good writ early school to go to and I and I got an MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia and you know which was an amazing experience best two years of my life by far just getting paid to just type in graduate stipend to sit around and write poems all day um and then couldn't get a job right after that of course because I went to school because you're a writer yeah yeah but um lo and

behold then I got a job as a book editor uh first at a vintage espanol um working on all kinds of Latin American books um and then uh I fell into license publishing um so it was working on like big um coffee table books and learnings you know helping video game Publishers tell stories of like how they created you know content and and uh that kind of thing but hilariously yes like I went to school for poetry um and you know in particular read a lot in like translation and wrote it a lot in Spanish too but the most successful thing I'd done was

the Harry Potter adult coloring book it's a very funny thing to go to school for poetry and do that but it was like it sold like a crazy amount of copies to be yeah and and talk about maybe how uh you know so so from there when you think about bayc was there like a single Inception moment or was this a was this one of you know 50 Concepts that you guys thought about and workshopped and ultimately arrived at this one yeah I mean it so we it was a it was a long process um and I think kovid was a big part of it I was um yeah I just gotten a coveted pay cut as I think a lot of us did around that time

um so even though you know some of these books were selling for you know millions and millions of copies um we're not quite that many a million copies um they um book publishing like everything else was taking a hit in in early Covenant and left us with a lot of time at home um thinking through things and I remember it was early 2021 um Bitcoin and ethereum had been um you know the Talk of the Town again um and I you know saw projects taking over crypto Twitter called called hash maths and it was uh the end of January early

February and I I texted Wiley um because it felt so exciting because it felt like a moment where oh here's a non-technical project for the first time that's like center stage in crypto it says like from a technical perspective there's actually nothing that interesting about this this is actually just content publishing making use of the blockchain but meeting it where it is it's like not it's not like uber for crypto or whatever it's like oh no it's you know how does owning a thing as simple as a JPEG change um when you introduce like the ownership that we have like decentralized ownership on the blockchain and um that was exciting and um we started to

think about any idea that we could have and I think the very first thing I you know I was going back um recently um found an old text uh with Wiley were you know I said we should make something and the first thing we were drawn to actually was like um like out of copyright like Public public domain and stuff like oh is there something with like HP Lovecraft or or something like Winnie the Pooh right yeah like whatever I don't know I guess like you know could have waited two years and done Mickey Mouse now or something like that but um and then we have we had some very dumb ideas to be honest um and it was only after you know it was actually like a month

and a half later that we landed on the idea of of what we would eventually do um and that was born out of trying to evolve the idea past like oh this isn't an art collection this is how do we make something that's like a a membership like a token it's like a club um and but also like not taking ourselves too seriously and trying to do something that felt um authentic to like you know it felt a little like authentic and like cheeky to the space you know it was a time of like Wall Street bets and everybody was talking about you know um aping into stocks or crypto or something like that

um and so we we came up with the idea for board Apes out of that but also trying to be make fun of the whole like wrong and be rich and and go to the moon and on Lamborghinis and him with the idea or what if the board of yacht club is like the derelict swamp in the Everglades and it's crappy and punk rock and all that and and uh you've said uh in other conversations that at the time you you were super worried that that the that you were too late to the to the party uh and talk about you know what was driving that feeling and why that turned out to be actually it turned out that your timing could not have been better what do you think were the factors that went into that yeah um so in February

late January early February sold out like seemingly instantaneously in a week for 16 million dollars or something um and then all of a sudden a dozen other projects sprouted up um half of which I can't remember the names of now um there's one on like why Fusion was one and there was one called Chubbies that got in trouble um because it turned out their art was like stolen from somewhere um and but then the space just went like similarly went quiet like there was a lot of projects that were trying to Mint out that would meant like 300 units of a 10K collection and then

hit flat [Music] and so we just thought like we're done for this is it like you know we spent three months and and which doesn't sound like a long time but you know when you're doing it 12 hours a day next to your day job it feels like a bigger commitment than it does in retrospect um and uh and so we we felt like yeah if we and I think we felt like the it was the window has had closed because it had for if we were doing the exact same thing if we were doing a version of of hashmas um then you know of course there wouldn't be room but that led us to think about how do we

do anything possible to land on something that is distinct in some way and so we came up with everything from doing like a a treasure hunt on the very you know first day that was like how we opened it was a like an opening pre-sale where we we were giving away one Ethan aboard ape um to somebody who could solve these like three puzzles um and every person in our Discord didn't care about minting board Apes at all they wanted to win the one East um and uh including like some of our like long most long-term members like originally came for that Express purpose because we basically said we will bribe you with two thousand dollars to be here yeah come for the contest stay for the nft

yeah and uh you know the nft was worth 200 bucks the youth was worth you know 1400 or whatever it was at the time um and we also just started to realize like you know what else can we fix like if everything's doing the same thing that everyone else is doing isn't working then how do we flip it on its head and so instead of doing these kind of bonding curve sellouts where people would say you know the first 300 nfts are a certain price the next are more expensive and and on you go we said everything costs 200 you know um we thought it would be interesting you know if you own the jpeg then you actually could own like the IP to this thing in a

certain way and and so we we threw that in too and um you know what would this location look like it's not just ten thousand Apes you're actually you know how can we like create this world and this like little bit of a story around it let's let's add that as well can we make special ones and tweet them out at influencers let's do that too like we just basically went down the list every single day of what else can we do given the fact that we don't think this is gonna go anywhere um and also I think part of it was when we landed on board API Club it was just such like an absurd silly name and idea that I just remember like walking around the neighborhood thinking like

yeah if like this goes nowhere at least like it's a pretty funny story though like we tried to make a a club in the swamp for Apes on the internet and like that's how we spend our summer that's awesome I remember I remember I don't think I've told you the story before but I remember uh talking to Alex and Devin the two openshee co-founders this was probably uh August of 2021 and I asked them I'm like okay you know in a how do you tell the difference between uh high quality nft project and a run-of-the-mill project and they said that they're like well um you know with bayc all you had to do was look at the Discord and you could just tell there was a level of creativity and energy and engagement

that you just you hadn't seen anywhere else at that time and I think that um you know if you look at I mean everything looks super uh super organized and like it was all destined to be in in hindsight but uh you know at the time you guys after boyc you did uh you know mutinate Yacht Club uh uh board a Kennel Club uh more recently you did uh the trials of Jimmy the monkey you've had this I'd say succession of just incredibly creative Innovations in the process um talk a little bit about how is a how is a first as a small team and now as a relatively large company how do you keep that creative uh juice flowing into you

know just kind of continue to Delight your uh Community again and again yeah I mean uh starting at the first thing you said I think the Discord is so important I think for all of crypto like Twitter and Discord and certainly any business or project that's trying to be Community focused like 80 of the work in those few months like that happened in Discord and not like externally and I think that's weird to say like you know it's it's a crypto is a little like anarchic obviously and um libertarian and then people don't like rules or anything like that um and managing a Discord finding a way to like build a community and like that kind of

space is is tricky and the only way we did it was we were there in it 14 hours a day 16 hours a day um talking to people joking around with them trying to set like a fun tone like you know hearing about what other people were trying to build participating in that Fielding like DMS about any number of things um and I think that's been you know a huge blessing for us is that that community that was born out of Discord in those earliest months so like some of our best employees are absolute best employees most important people came straight out of there um and because like that when we're talking crypto like the

economies of scale here are so small it's like we're some little data is like yuga's like 70 of the top 10 like nft collection volume of all time yet our holders is you know lifetime like sixty thousand or something like that um and so you can that's not that big that you can't know a lot of them um and just meet them and be there for them and um and yeah I think like Discord was a was a huge part of it and as the and in terms of like the Creative Energy I think

you know why I were both writers and we just wanted we had certain ideas of like how do we do something that we feel like is very high effort that there's like you know you could just go to the boic website and it felt like there was just more there than there was on other places and more like love of detail and that kind of stuff um but it is like not taking itself too seriously because that's like the the death knell I think and and how do you communicate to your community in a way um that's authentic but not like I don't know like you can never pat yourself on the back and like you know we started from nothing and we it's never been one stupid rocket ship

emoji ever or anything like that um because if you're like authentic and like playing face in that way I think um it's infinitely better than than you know these like momentary blips of trying to like create hype um and all that which just accelerates the downtrend yeah and I think you're the the job that you guys have done of staying I think true in north and authentic to the like original organic Vibe of the community with with every thing that you've put out has been pretty amazing thank you and like the so you mentioned like boarded Kennel Club like that was a special one because that was a month into the project um and it was just like how do we

do something surprising and have fun and reward people [Music] um you know nobody had gifted away 10 000 nfts to somebody to a community that already had an nft before and we had no idea how it would work if these things would have any perceived like you know interest or value ascribed to them um and the idea just came straight out of like you know uh I didn't have a dog I wanted a dog my wife didn't want to get a dog she still doesn't really want to get a dog she knows I work too much to take care of the dog but so it was like how do we you know what if we gave everybody like an imaginary like nft um and what if we did it for free and

what if we did you know to really underscore that this was just like a fun moment um and just about like creating community and engagement we decided to donate all the royalties associated with it to to animal Charities and yeah so it was like a month in we done you know a two million dollar mint and then we ended up raising a million dollars for animal Charities right after that um and yeah it was like huge week There's still to this day a a non-profit called the Rangers Outreach um that does a ton for renting some Borneo and they bought a board ape soon after that because they we donated a bunch of money to them and the founder wanted to like be part of this thing and

support it and then they ended up making like even more because of the appreciation right 600 bucks oh that's amazing um anyway um cool let's um talk about I mean so we've talked about some of the good times I think you know you guys like everybody in the space have faced probably more than your fair share of like oh [ __ ] moments um talk about one that really sticks out in your mind you know what was it how did you navigate through it and what did you learn from it yeah um it's it's difficult to just find one uh but I will say that like you know Wiley and I would talk to each other a lot

about how uh our job as Founders we felt like you know it was to eat [ __ ] sandwiches which is like oh this is like a very painful thing um that like I do not want to do but it's best for like the company or the community if I do it so like that's what we're gonna do and that a lot of our job as like co-founders was like keeping each other honest to like do that um and I think the times that we've been able to be true to that spirit and also push ourselves to like uh to do it authentically like you know how do you throw your arms around like a thing rather than kind of uh get timid about it that's been good

and where we've Fallen apart is only when the ones that keep you up in that or it's like oh you took somebody else's advice on on the idea like if you're if it was you're on syrup like you can you can fall asleep but if you did something because like a PR person told you or something like that it's like that those right you did it against your against your better judgment yeah we've talked a little bit about where you guys came from and and the tremendous success to date but I think that that you know what you've done so far is only a sliver of what your Ambitions are going forward so talk about what you're doing what you're building

with other side and what you what you think that could become yeah um I mean we're in this transition period moment where you know the things that you guys historically extremely good at is like content creative and community um we have a very like our engineering team crushes it and delivers things very fast and is amazing but that hasn't historically been like what we're known for or anything like that and yet now we're doing things um doing more and more in gaming you know we did dookie Dash a couple months ago um and we have we did other side second trip which was you know seven thousand

concurrent users and in in one space so um you know kind of exceeds the end the the monthly active users for a lot of for a lot of metaverses in just like the two hours that we were getting people in there um all together which was special and I think what I think about a lot now is like how do we build these very complex ambitious things but in a way where we're doing it in public and doing it actively and constantly like showing pieces of it like the whole like crawl walk run is like the The Motto where with dookie dash for example crawl walk around and kind of managing expectations

so dookie Dash was a game it's a simple game it's an endless Runner game um you had to like you know kind of ride a jet ski through the sewers and and Dodge things and collect stuff and yeah it was super well executed version of that of that yeah and and that's like I think that's the sweet spot is like how can you do something that's like fun and feels like a well executed version of a thing rather than trying to do something you know setting the bar too high and and not being able to manage expectations and failing and um so I think dookie Dash was amazing as a that's what we wanted it to be which is a skill based mint it was a moment for people to kind of hey compete in

essentially this like Global arcade game to achieve you know what nft you're going to use for the next activation um and similarly for other side we think a lot about like okay how do we build alongside the community and have these building blocks of like these moments where we can open things up and do special things and then improve on that and do it again in two months and in two months and and have something like more and more active and I think I'm excited about other side because we're we're really at the point now where we have several several different teams like you know internally and and around the world each like building different parts of the game consistently and and you know I can I can be in like Zoom meetings now

and like have other side on my second screen and just be like jumping around flying around messing with stuff and then it's a and when you when you dream big about what it could become like how do you what what role do you see a playing you know for for Yuga in crypto in general uh how would you think about it in comparison to some more traditional things like uh you know fortnite or uh or other large immersive worlds like where does it where does it fit in your mind yeah I think so Discord and Twitter are incredibly important I would love for people to want to engage with each other more deeply in other side I I also want it to be like a meta layer that sits above nft communities for

people to come together and like you know I want pudgy Penguins or whoever to be able to build the space for themselves there without my permission without like you know in in the true crypto permissionless nature uh that can engage their community in the best way and then for them to be able to derive value from that and so whereas like you know meta or somebody else might want to take 30 40 50 60 of something how can you keep the margins extremely low keep it permissionless and um and have it be like you know web3 enabled on like those open rails in that way so that you can just

be the best option for for creators um fortnite is amazing the the unreal like uh the fortnite creative mode is Bonkers it's so cool um that said you think about things like like YouTube creators um it's hard as like there's a lot of people who who can make like hundreds of thousands of dollars or even like millions of dollars on YouTube as like as content creators um but if you talk to those people they're like deeply unhappy with YouTube and scared and they feel like they've built their business on like a powder keg um and if you're going from like and

there's rare it seems like somebody who's able to take a million dollar business built on YouTube and make it a billion dollar business like that doesn't happen whereas I think I think with other side part of the vision is how can we make it so that somebody can build a business that can scale past what like a web 2 business can enable because it's built on these like open rails and uh interoperable in these ways um and so there's there's a lot of like Devil in the details for all that stuff but like that's part of the North Stars what we're that's guiding us amazing and and actually as you guys have marched down this path you've had to really recruit a set of talent I mean like most recently Mike silver is your

new CTO who was who was CTO of Epic most recently or Ryan yeah right yeah um you know how how have you done that while still keeping the the culture intact that uh that sort of made you guys what you are today yeah um so there's a couple different ways that we think about culture um and and it's hard because the tricks you use for like the last jump in in like size of company don't work for the next one and so you keep we keep leveling up like how we do these things you know at first it's like okay we're gonna have

more frequent all hands and and all that but at a certain point like you know we've hired seven people in the past two weeks and I've met two of them so far you know it's like it's it's hard to keep up with this stuff um and so some of the things that we've we've been able to do though is like um number one it comes down to the kinds of leaders that we bring in it's like people that understand what they know what they don't know it's like the worst the worst thing that you can have is somebody that's very confident in in what they think web3 is when they haven't been kicked in the head in a Discord ten thousand times um and uh so I think that's that's a big part of it and also making sure that

some of the people that are most um that came out of the community that they're part of the company now that those people are continually elevated um and working side by side and kind of onboarding people like for example yeah it's Daniel Allegra our CEO he came from Google and uh from Activision Blizzard um extremely you know entrepreneurial within some of these bigger companies and starting Google China or or uh you know working on payments you know or starting Google Latin America or all these different things um but obviously does not have the same web3 experience as as most of the people

like on the team [Music] but his ability to kind of synthesize and learn from other people is has been integral and at the same time like I think that's where like the early people that we brought into the company were are have been most important and the ones I'm most proud of are the ones that just were like Anonymous people in Discord that um were like giving their lives to this community as like mods or like just first as like people in the Discord just helping out and then as like paid mods and then eventually part of the mothership um and uh I'm just immensely grateful to like that cohort because and I feel like they're the ones that really carry the

culture for for everybody else and um I think the worst thing that could have happened though is if those people stayed those people have now like you got to kind of tear them away from Discord and from the community sometimes and say no actually you're gonna go like be head of like this thing over here and that's important yeah you always want to go back to your comfort zone uh in times of stress right and yeah or just like they love it like that's what they they want to be part of that um but at the same time like they're they're you know infinitely valuable I think in in helping carry the culture and um and also like we have a the other thing I think we've done

what's been important from day one is like we really feel like good ideas can can come from anywhere and like testing things and you know um very obnoxious I'm very obnoxious around like pulling everybody on like red or blue red or blue kind of thing um and it can kind of be funny if like you hire like a hot shot creative director from like an agency or something like that that wants to be like creative director with like you know Capital C and capital D and you're like no I want to know what like PP man has to say about this orange or whatever they sometimes they can be they like to control the taste uh The Taste in the cell um and and so as you think about what you're building towards in the future um and and you evolve uh you know the

the company makeup the culture uh you think about bringing other side to life uh is there something in particular that keeps you up at night uh I'm sure there's many things but like what would be one one thing and how do you how do you turn your anxiety into uh you know a positive momentum in the company yeah um other side is hugely ambitious and it's like just there's more people that are going to be working on that than than anything else in the company um and it's gonna just keep growing and so It's Tricky um I just think about who's hiring for other side is like my biggest thing and process because just trying to think about the things

that like scale um and but as part of that too is like yeah how do you teach uh uh game designer who doesn't know anything about web3 like the principles of this thing um in a way that they can rock quickly and um and not just put their you know foot in their mouth in in design wise or otherwise and um that's you know and the way I keep doing that I think I keep we keep elevating people essentially out of the community of mods or other things and trying to put them like in positions of power as like checks and balances on this stuff

and the best people that come out of web 2 Embrace that love that take it to like fish water and then they they um join in and if they're not you just got to find a way to um you know move on and um find somebody that will so um yeah I guess maybe um maybe one last question for you so you know you've had you've had a tremendous journey and ride it's only actually been two years right since you uh a little more than two years since you yeah launched but I mean I think should have come a tremendous difference distance if you um if you think back on uh the journey and the decisions that you've made along the way

you know sort of anything that with the full knowledge of hindsight you would do differently or or advice that you would give uh to the crypto startup school team as they embark on on what you guys started um I mean I think you all have like a massive leg up on so many stuff with this with this group able and just the the connections just in the room among you probably um you started like I had no idea how to do anything business-wise in terms of like you know and the weirdest thing was even when we started like made money and like could throw money at the problem like couldn't find an accountant that would even want to work with us they were like what is

this what it's the swamp club for Apes on the internet go away um and I was like I'll pay 10 times your hourly rate just like do my taxes um and nobody nobody would do it right yeah or they said they would and then you wouldn't hear from it was like it was a disaster so like yeah my wife learned QuickBooks to be our first accountant and like my you know there's all kinds of weird stories like that so um I think looking back um it's funny like yeah we were I didn't know how Equity worked until like we were gonna raise uh pretty big valuation and then like um so I think part of it has been like we were just kind of segmented in our little

hole for a long time and we didn't know anybody we were just focused on what we're building and we were just talking to our community on Discord I would um I think the like outward networking and connections and investor relations and all that kind of stuff like we were just late to that game and uh so I think that was that was probably a mistake and the other thing is just also trusting your gut more like because we had that you know imposter syndrome of like not knowing what we didn't know um you might think that like oh somebody who you know has run XYZ company is going to come and help us on this thing or that thing [Music] um but you know some of that stuff doesn't work out and having somebody that like

just finding the right people that are like if you're lucky enough to have a community at the start like finding people like out of that Community is just I'll sing that those Praises all day um because we were finding people that were just like mods that we I would send you know mods and we were hiring for like Community managers and uh so we'd say hey I don't know what your situation in life is I don't even know your real name or anything about you but if you know you want a job we can pay 60 Grand a year whatever it was going to be at the time but like don't be offended if like you're a hot shot and sure enough you know like you know one of our best employees to this day he was like a VP at a bank but before he told us that he

was like yes I will take your job for 60 Grand or whatever because you like believed in it so much um and yeah so just like finding the good that's already like forming around your company and the you know Crypt is a very small space so like your there will be people that show up in your Discord just get to get to know them and find the good and like nurture that um those relationships because those have been the most worthwhile hi Greg uh Jay from etherid um thank you for the uh what a wonderful talk uh well my question is concerning that um that that tension between speculators and hodlers for the True Believers in your community I'm curious how you negotiated with that

yeah I mean I think for us it's always been around like we this the secret is then like don't try and make like a like a pointy moment try and keep it sustained and you know in that way if you're like if you're not shouting out like we're about to do something spectacular rocket ship emoji rocket ship emoji moon emoji whatever it is like that's that's a like you know that's catnip for speculators and um you know we just try to be very upfront about like managing expectations on like what we would be doing and um being authentic with the the community and like engaging with people like if

you're talking to people day in and day out and they're part of your community and you're in Discord with them like they want to stick around this is more than just like an nft you know a just a five thousand dollar nft or whatever it is to them um and if you're thinking about what that person wants what that person needs that's that's a much better signal why we would talk a lot about like you know what the person who's still holding an ape to this day who bought it for 200 bucks two years ago like what's that guy like you know and how do we build for that person in mind um of course some people might get mad be like oh but I've just bought my ape last week for x amount of money but like I think having that long-term view um has been very healthy for us

um and something that we think about a lot thank you sir hey Greg thanks for the talk this is Jess from blockcus we build web 3 gaming infra um first of all I just want to give a shout out for that Creator to web3 like founder moment I think that's super awesome like creators for the longest time like did not get the spotlight that way so I feel like nft's really brought that out and that's like super cool to hear your story and just see that Trend in general my question is really around how do you think about skill and Community right so um if you look at the actual PP holders there's like a couple you know tens of thousands but for a big um you guys are leaning heavily into gaming so for a big MMO you need a couple million concurrents right so how

are you thinking about Skilling and growing that Community yeah I mean that's like the the giant question like that everybody's thinking about of course um honestly for me I think more about like how do you do it um in a sustainable way so to me it's around like how do you do this in a way where everything that we say about web3 gaming which is like hey it's the same except you actually own your assets and you take custody of them it's like you know instead of Magic the Gathering online where it's like you know you don't actually own them it's like real magic cards where you do own the magic cards and you can take them home with you um like how do we keep that part of it

like safe and Alive um and keep out a lot of the like the speculation or the um feeling around you know Safety and Security that that that's what kills skill actually and so for me it's like we think a lot about like design and ux and UI stuff around that and like communicating extremely clearly like if you follow us on Twitter you'll notice like every single tweet we put out we say and this is the last tweet in this like series of tweets and any tweet under this is a scam because Twitter's like completely broken and um and we have like a Blog that is the most

uh our news site is actually like hilariously um bad for new people coming in but it's very good for people to know whether they're on they're like the right sites so they don't like click a bad link when they're excited and get their board ape fished um and so to me it's like as we start to solve some of these infra problems and like UI ux things and and wallet stuff um a lot of these other problems will will get easier um like we already saw what massive demand for a thing that wasn't like properly media when the infrastructure wasn't

there to meet it look like um and what that looked like was a lot of people getting their assets stolen hi great talk I'm Marielle from mentoport with the platform that does geolocation for web3 you mentioned Discord a lot and I'm wondering do you have any tips to start that Discord community yeah um I don't know how you know I'm probably the worst person to ask because it's been I know so many people get like I get DMS even like oh I want to be a moderator for your Discord now or all that and I'm like I don't trust you at all I have no idea like this is this is scam Central when we started it wasn't you know wasn't like that it was easy enough to find people that were being authentic and that like you know you felt like you

could you could trust and all that I will say that I think the best advice like around moderation is a is important I I know the Forgotten runes guys they said want some and they made a decision to moderate their Discord like it was like the living room of their house and I think that's like great it's like so you've invited this person into your house and like so they're okay to be there but like you know what are you okay and not okay with this like going on here and treating it that way I think was like a really good like yeah just north star on like what's Gonna Fly and what's not gonna fly and then finding the right moderators um with the right sense of judgment um one of our absolute best moderators our first one our first paid you know

Community manager um we offered her the job after she was like you know a volunteer moderator helping out and we were astounded how good she was at this and we're like What can you come full time work for us like we think you're amazing you know tell us about yourself and she's like yeah I'm a third grade teacher and I was like oh this makes total sense of how this is working here um and yeah awesome hi thank you thanks for your advice I'm Nikita with chain Patrol uh we actually stopped fishing attacks targeting communities um with a wallet block list so um but my question actually isn't related to that I was interested in you know other side and you know it has like

some like MMO aspects or some some of these areas but I I'm a heavy gamer and you know a lot of MMOs they're like they built years in advance and they have like a long road map and they basically tell you exactly what you're they're going to give you and you've kind of taken an inverted almost approach here where it's um it's kind of like it feels like the road map is like giving out pieces and you know one how did you decide to to go through that that you know this kind of inverted approach and how do you keep your community excited while um and also having faith in that you're gonna you know kind of deliver everything yeah um I mean I think we've been blessed that our you know we we launched other

side after we've done a lot of stuff like to build up our community and um I think part of it too is we want this to be a Creator platform in addition to like having you know essentially thinking about like two different modes like creative mode and campaign mode kind of thing and um doing those two things in conjunction has been tricky but I think we have the right like road map for that going forward and um to me it's also around like um creating you know creating special moments for other people to participate in and and hopefully have a much more active role in building alongside us

um we have a lot of engage creators that are constantly 3D modeling different things and and testing out how they might look in in our world or any other world um and as we start to open up the doors for more and more developers you know starting with more Pro ones and more amateur ones I think that's going to be The Virtuous cycle that keeps them going because that's what we saw also with with boyc and anything else is that um the best way to build a community is to like give them stuff to do um and ownership in a thing and with boyc that was as simple as this is your and this is your ape you're part of this club and you have VIP rights to this and

you can like launch a business offer or do whatever you want and that was much more powerful than than we could have imagined and a lot of stuff has come out of that okay that's just one more quick question what what are your thoughts on uh PVP in in this space you know like playing you know with Pokemon cards Playing for Keeps or like RuneScape Wilderness where you go and you know lose all your gold to somebody that killed you um how does that like kind of what are your thoughts around that what these assets are worth like thousands of dollars yeah I mean It's tricky because the other thing that's going on that's underneath that question I think is like cheating you know anytime you have like huge Stakes like that you're you know cheaters are highly incentivized

and there's no game out there that hasn't you know people don't find a way to cheat and so um it's I think it's a constant like negotiation of like all right how do you create spaces for people to opt in to like yeah hardcore like red server mode or whatever it is and how do you um but how do you punish people like keep the incentives properly aligned so that um yeah you don't spin out and have like a horrible situation where you know cheaters are are yeah winning assets for crazy amounts of money and you have no way to intervene yeah yeah thank you sure great talk Greg um I feel like ever since we got into CSS it's just been a bunch of Frameworks

and mental models of how to build a startup I'm curious if if you have any sort of particular mental models or Frameworks that you use on a day-to-day basis for making decisions when it comes to web3ip or running Yuga as a whole um yeah that's a good question um I mean I think some of the refrains that we would have they're like I don't know if the Quake qualifies as a mental model but it's like kind of just constantly asking yourself if like you were being authentic to your community in that moment are you you know we put together a list of like 10 ways of how we like to communicate for example like when we realized we were getting

you know big enough that we weren't scaling how we talk um and so it was as simple as like never pat yourself on the back you know like you don't take Victory laps like if you do something right then the community will celebrate and then you can celebrate alongside them on the moment but like if you're you know celebrating at first that's just looks bad and I think a lot of times it's also just trying to think from a Founder perspective like are you actually doing the thing that that's can scale that's that that's actually like the hardest thing you should be working on at that moment or are you doing the thing that's like you're more comfortable with um I think for the first year

um it was very easy to like wake up in the middle of the night and feel like oh I gotta go work on this thing right now uh because no one else is going to do it and then you can fall into a place though where it's like cool there's 130 people working here now and like you know a bunch of them are Executives or all these are other things like surely someone has thought of XYZ or like you just tell part of your brain that like somebody's got that but it I don't know I find that it pays to be paranoid and a little crazy though I mean I'd ask just like looking from the outside that you and Wiley both have an unbelievably High bar in terms of what good looks like and your and you're unwilling to compromise uh in terms of

nothing gets out the door I think that doesn't that doesn't meet that bar and that's that's hard to maintain that and and unusual but you guys do it great yeah and I think that's the last thing is like to having a co-founder that can really push you and that you're pushing them constantly that was always like why and I were extremely codependent and crazy with each other we would literally be talking through every decision for six hours on the phone every day um because to us especially with web3 like the decisions that you make are just the start of an interaction like if you're if you're you're basically creating rules for an ecosystem and if you're not being thoughtful about that then your ecosystem can spin out in all

kinds of unhealthy ways and so some things as simple as like who we would ban for the Discord and from what in those early days like we might argue about that for like six hours before we did it um but hopefully out of that we would come up with some like general idea of like okay that's how we're gonna handle this this decision will scale We're Not Gonna argue for six hours every time we ban someone but like we needed to do this today to feel good about this going forward and just as a follow-on you brought up like the keyword authenticity is there any way to quantify authenticity like any kpis or metrics that you look to to measure authenticity no and um we're really bad at kpi's um where I am and why he is like we're both writers and I was a poet and like

it's just doesn't work for my brain that much um it was more just about like does this feel phony is this fake am I like mimicking what somebody else would do um and some of our most successful moments were coming from like okay how do we remind ourselves and other people that like about something that makes us unique you know like the leading up to like the mutants drop it was like the Tweet was like [ __ ] at mutant Saturday or whatever but it was important in that moment for us to be like yeah we have to we're just four idiots in a room trying our best here like non-stop like we're not a big corporate thing we shouldn't treat it that way um and so

trying to be yeah like intentional around how we uh um interact with our community I guess and be authentic cool thank you all right thank you one more time for Greg [Applause] [Music] foreign