ep 13 – Age of Wonders: NFTs, Art, AI, Cycles of Computing

Transcript

[Music] welcome to web3 with Asics and z a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at Asics and Z crypto that includes me your host sonal and also our occasional co-host Chris Dixon this week we are both in Los Angeles where we recorded some more episodes coming your way including this all new episode which is a hallway style tour through Hot Topics involving yet also going Beyond crypto such as art AI the evolution of mediums including blockchains Quantum Computing other areas our guests also do a deep dive on nfts communities debates around CCO and Licensing and copyrights on the internet

and artists royalties and more plus discuss the role of brands they also discuss Computing cycles and Technology recent past Tech History and the transition from building in web 2 to web 3 as both of today's guests were observers and Builders through both movements so we have Chris Dixon founding General partner at Asics crypto and former entrepreneur in conversation with Kevin Rose who among many other things co-founded the social news site dig in the early 2000s and is now co-founder of proof Collective which launched moonbird's pfps in udao recently and more as a reminder none of the following is investment business legal or tax advice nor is it directed at any investors or potential investors

in any Asics and Z fund also please note that any Asics and Z investments in portfolio companies mentioned are not representative of all Asics and Z Investments you can see 86cc.com disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments so with that the conversation Begins for the first 10 minutes with how come and got to web 3 as well as the setting of Los Angeles since we recorded this in our LA office great welcome to this week's edition of web3 with a16z thanks for being here yeah it's great to be here I'm glad we're doing this in person too nice I know it's nice it's good and you just moved here recently yeah just a couple weeks ago there's just so much going on in LA right now yeah it's crazy how many Founders I hear and talk to that are

actually leaving the Bay Area or when they're starting something new they're like I'm gonna do it in LA first which is really sad to kind of see that happening but I I get the reasons why I mean Bay Area was my home you know you were you were there for decade plus 2 000 to 2013. yeah so it was it was over there I used to visit a lot from New York but then I moved in 2013 and now I'm pretty much mostly like New York and L.A I find that those have kind of a more diverse creative set of people I think I don't know my kind of pet theory on it I guess is that the bay went from kind of the Pirates to becoming the Navy like it won and there's sort of Google and and Facebook

and I just find it I think the web 3 thing is a great example where I find a much more positive energy towards it in LA and New York than I do in the Bay Area yeah it seems like um with such a tech geeky like focal point for the Bay Area once that was won it was like okay what other Industries are going to be reinvented and a lot of them aren't there right so it makes sense that media and everything is down to sort of as the tech gets deployed more deeply in the world it spreads I also think and I I never spent much time in LA before but the sense I get is it used to be a very kind of monoculture you know Hollywood and at least anecdotally like as you said a lot of tech people I know who

moved here it just seems like it's just much more kind of diverse similar to New York I think New York also my theory in New York is it used to be so dominated by Wall Street and it kind of decline if it just has like a more you know just many different interesting Industries including Tech it's gotten pretty good in New York yeah I mean I love that about La I remember do you remember when it was like okay snapped oh no it was Myspace Myspace is down there like okay well it's that one little rogue like tech company that's down there and there was like a few little and then Facebook crushed them which was sort of the that would be the Silicon Valley narrative right like once the real tech people came right exactly and then we had the same thing with Snapchat being down here

and then but for some reason I just um nfts and media and a bunch of startups are deciding that you know the Bay Area the high rent prices a lot of the politics that are out there and all that like they want a little bit more room to breathe and places to raise a family and La has a lot of that yeah I used to always think of La like 10 years ago La startups were kind of like Myspace like maybe they they understood culture but they didn't build a great product they didn't build a great tack a lot of like influencer you'd always hear these influencer pitches a celebrity involved but then the product would be really janky or something yeah it's right because I remember when I think it was Myspace it was built on like ASP like Microsoft ASP or whatever I remember

just being like of course it is yeah so it's definitely changed I think it's also as you said the tech has just matured like it's almost you can just off the shelf build a good one website now so it just doesn't matter like it doesn't differentiate you the way it did a decade ago cool so you and I I think are some of the few web two people that are also web3 and crypto I'd love to hear just more about how you got into that yeah well you know I was dabbling in crypto way back in the day like everyone else you know the same classic story of I found my quality things yeah exactly you go look back at those old tweets and you were like uh how you were buying it you know sub 100 and of course they hit 300 and everyone

sells and yeah it's the same story so that was a lot of fun you know that led me to like meme coins like Dogecoin which I was a pretty active participant in what was going on there from the beginning close to the beginning so I became friends with the team over there and I really loved what was going on socially like the Tipping aspect of it the the kind of um charity side of things like it was just a fun experiment all the Bots that were created to facilitate tipping it was performant at the time there was a lot to love with that culture that was being built so I always paid attention uh when I was at Google Ventures I led some of our crypto deals but you know I always stayed close to what was going on I saw with my web 2

hat on I'm like there's no way this is gonna become Mass adopted by consumers in terms of does it pass the my mom can send me crypto easily test so the user experience wasn't there the user experience was not there yeah I mean to have to like copy and paste these massive long wallet addresses and you know a lot of the kind of rough edges that need to be sanded down and quite frankly a lot of those still exist today so just curious but then this web 3 thing started to kind of take root and I would say the defy that was really brought me in so just rewriting the entire Financial stack was really interesting to make it more efficient so that was the first use case where I was like aha okay it's more than just speculation there's actually real

products that are being built here so this is kind of like the D5 summer period it's like 2020 exactly exactly so I just started playing around with all of those and trying out a lot of the crazy dgen stuff that was out there and losing some money and you know just just kicking the tires on a bunch of different things and then you know I was lucky in that I had minted some of the early crypto punks and it was just like my buddy was like hey these are things called crypto bunks they're nfts or I don't even know if they were calling them nfts at that point but it was like these little things you can mount on the blockchains okay cool like let me get 10 of them or whatever right and so I did that immediately forgot about it it was in a wallet called

parody which was not using the standard mnemonic phrases for ReStore so I lost them eventually it was able to reclaim them it was a nightmare again back but but that was my first kind of introduction to nfts started doing a podcast about crypto during defy summer because that's the way I learned you know having great Founders on I just can pick their brain it gives me an excuse to sit down one-on-one and really have on you know all these great people that were building a whole slew of the top projects at the time then nfts I had heard about art blocks you know a couple years back and I was like well this is interesting because it's capturing a new form of art like this this idea idea of generative art being captured for the first time and I always been kind of like a fan of Art in general and I'd

seen some gender of art displays before the blockchain and that you go in you see a computer hooked up you see something cool on a screen some people would buy them they'd break down the artists would have to come out and do some repairs or whatever it may be to make these things work long term so general of art I believe has really found its home on the blockchain largely because traditionally this was something that required just a ton of Maintenance and setup and they were beautiful like you see this great interactive displays and all kinds of fun things could be done with them but it was we had one in the office once but it's like a really expensive setup really expensive it breaks down then you're like okay how much is it worth like azard is still alive I'm gonna come repair it like

what's gonna happen and there's two levers here that's one it's anyone can create so it's a universal you know p5.js what they're using for the majority of it it's a language that anyone can pick up literally in like a half hour I was creating some really fun stuff with P5 and then the standardized platform for publishing it and I was like whoa this is being captured and kind of solidified into the blockchain for the first time it's not resource dependent like you don't need to have a special set of Hardware external hardware to make this happen you can just display them on your computer and then lastly it's this awesome little like it or not it's a pull of the slot machine so people love that idea that when I pull the slot machine handle and

I click mint does that surprise and Delight that comes with the reveal so all those things coming together great art along with the little surprise and delight and then also just some old school generative artists that have been doing this forever finally came on board and said I'm going to start producing you know really interesting artists that you can look back and say they've had amazing generative careers for the last 20 plus years and now they're doing this cemented in The blockchain Proven provenance and and scarcity around this drop and all the things that you want out of an nft and now it's collectible and it was clear to me that you see a bunch of other great platforms that emerge where they were doing really creative things that just were creating a new medium for art you know artwork

can be manipulated based on time of day stock price external oracles like it was clear that this was going to be a real durable thing over the long term right and so in seeing that I was like okay well let's do another podcast about that and have a lot of these great Founders on so I had all my favorite artists on those first few episodes that started collecting and just saying okay I'm just gonna start buying some of this stuff built up a pretty decent portfolio there and at the time I was at true Ventures and so I was like we need to start you know backing some of these companies and so that led us to you know I led the rounded art blocks and Quantum art and we probably did another five or six nft specific Investments some that were fractionalizing art just some really

interesting things there and then I was like well gosh I'm watching all these people doing really creative things I'm an entrepreneur there's a lot of blue ocean here which you know you can't say the same for anything else that was going on prior to that let's go build let's just let's just go and spend a little bit of time and so my partners are true we're like okay yeah I mean this is you like why don't you go and spend a little bit of time building and so that led me to the creation of the proof Collective pass and then that exploded uh we sold out immediately it was a Dutch auction and that led to eventually Moon birds and and kind of where we are today nice just curious when you personally Buy nft you know I kind of think of it buying an

ft is a sort of a mixture of different motives so there's there's the collecting motive there may be a financial like you think it's going to go up there's a social aspect to it you're joining a community maybe you're interacting with the artists themselves maybe there's a patronage aspect to it it's funny because I hear these Skeptics like you're not really buying the copyright of course and that's the same with physical art you don't get the copyright when you buy it you're buying a physical thing and I'll just say for myself I never was interested in physical art nfts seemed obviously much more interesting and I feel like an emotional connection to them so we're investors in Foundation which is our artsy kind of nft site and um I early on a couple years ago bought a bunch of nfts there

and what I found it was sort of the patronage aspect was interesting I was dming with the artists I work in venture capital I don't normally talk to artists you and I went to a uh nft event a few months ago and there were all these nft artists again like the different you know experience for me yeah it's really refreshing actually and it's a way to be supportive in an organic way that doesn't feel transactional right like I'm buying your art I'm not making a donation I'm supporting you the way you want me to so anyways that's a long-winded way of saying like I'm curious what was your kind of feeling when you started collecting and buying these yeah well I think there's a handful of check boxes that I look for when I want to collect a piece first is am I visually attracted

to it because there are a lot of friends and flippers and people that just get in just for a quick return and they're just sort of like the meme is trending or yeah the meme is trending I'm gonna jump in and in 48 hours whatever basically leads to matters or something whereas you're sort of buying it for the decades to come yeah and and the reason I have to be attracted to is because in a down Market if that thing's chopped in half or by three quarters I'll still hold on to it because I think it's beautiful right and so that that's an easy one I'm drawn into the art I love it the second piece is who is the artist behind it in that I want them to have like one of two spectrums they either have to be a great promoter and that they have to have the

right Twitter presence and carry themselves well on Twitter or they have to be just weird as and just be on the other end of the spectrum like an x copy that doesn't talk to anybody often a myth around them or something based on their yeah exactly security the x copy thing is funny because if you DM with them you know and you're a collector he'll get back and chat with you a little bit and then sometimes you'll ask him a question and he won't get back to me for like you know three or four weeks and I'm like oh I love that like he's he's setting the hook even deeperious super mysterious you know there's something there's something cool about that the other piece is how often are they releasing New pieces are they a machine that's just going to flood the market or do they have a great

paced Cadence about them to where they're they're thinking about this over the long term they're not just in it for the quick buck and they're not just doing anything and everything for anyone so that's another big piece or a couple more pieces I look at what other prominent kind of taste makers in the space are collecting that artist so you know is there the cosmos of the world is there you know there's probably I'd say a dozen or so really well respected collectors I look at their wallets and say are they also collecting this artist and then I'll have conversations if they're not and saying hey what do you think this artist you know and then the last piece of it is are they doing something new and exciting and novel or is it just iterative type work and so you know x copy was really interesting

because what I did is I used the Wayback machine and I went to his Tumblr account and he was doing this genre of glitchard 10 years ago and like that was way prior to any of this being on the blockchain and there's so many people that have come in and copied that style but they have no back catalog they just they're doing it because it's a hot Trend to be a glitch artist right now right and so that was something I was really drawn into another great example would be Tyler Hobbs with this qql drop that he did recently so Tyler Hobbs is probably best known for the fidenza series fantastic entrepreneur great coder decided to do a new drop where you could as The Collector use the algorithm to generate as many pieces as you want and he would give you visual tooling like an

interface to tweak some of the parameters of the algorithm so the way I like to describe it is it's it's that classic like bowling alley with the little kid stoppers on the side so the ball is still going to hit some pins and it's not going to go in the gutter but it's going to produce a decent output right and so you as the collector pick that final one and say okay I'm ready to Mint this one yeah and then you spin the token you burn it and you actually get that outplay it's really cool because you're picking the output but then there's the extra additional aspect where if you get someone that is also well known that is creating the output that has additional value on top of that so other collectors or other artists have joining said this is the one that I'm minting now you get a combo yeah

Tyler Hobbs plus another additional artist that picked that piece so it's a really fun project I think one interesting thing is that you know historically new technology tends to enable New Media right and I think one of the mistakes people make is kind of skimorphism so YouTube comes along and there's sort of two there's CBS coming and putting whatever TV show they have on YouTube and then there's the new native YouTubers right which is the new genre a new form of media and fast forward it was the YouTube Native stuff that became kind of the most significant and most important right I was seeing the other day that dude perfect it's like three guys who mess around they have more YouTube followers than all the major sports leagues combined that's great so like who would have thought

that in 2005 right everyone just sort of had this qmorphic oh it's going to be football amazing no it's going to be three people dunking each other that's been watching video games and all these other kinds of new things and so I wonder with nfts if a similar thing will happen in things like generative art and whatever else I'm sure there'll be a million things that I can't think of right right that people will come up with that are native to the internet and Native probably to nfts as well right to the fact that nfts have scarcity you know are on a blockchain to have Smart contracts involved proven problems yes and then the business model right I mean because like you had sort of native internet things like memes or sort of an Internet native media form but you never had a real business model which should

really add a lot of energy and then kind of momentum behind those are like now you can make a living this way it's a lot of side projects right and if you can lean into it what do you do right like you could imagine this really interesting kind of creative Renaissance oh absolutely especially because now the artists are kind of going out and deputizing other artists it's like this cyclical thing where you're seeing the artist Pour money right back into the ecosystem oh that's great yeah I think I saw that in some of the stats and some of these sites but I think they were talking about that there's some high percentage of collectors are also artists right which seems like a really healthy kind of phenomenon absolutely that's interesting so so let's talk about Moon Birds then so you decide you're going to go fully in like why you

know what was sort of the vision yeah so the idea there was that you know we we created this 1000 member pass with the proof Collective pass it was sort of a membership in this exact artist Collective Collector Club was like if you join this Collector Club if you hold one of these passes you get access to the Discord all the events private smaller collaborations that we do with artists so we're leveraging a lot of our artist relationships and we have our own products around that too with Grails and some of the other things that we created I mean we do about a drop a month to the members so they get some type of interesting new artist or new artwork almost every month so that that was a real success in attaching utility to you know membership this idea of a token gated community right and we wanted to

do that at scale a larger scale with a different mandate to kind of go in and create our own pfp because frankly the proof Collective is a picture of almost like a credit card turned sideways it says proof Collective on it nobody wants to rep that as their Twitter icon so we were like okay let's just start with an experiment let's see what would happen if we created we would pick an owls because Moon birds are owls and they're these wise all seeing all knowing animals and we went in there and you know launched this and to our surprise it blew our expectations in secondary volume and it just went went absolutely nuts and I think it was largely because we had already delivered a lot of product on the proof Collective side and so people knew if we were going to launch this new thing it wasn't just

going to be someone that puts up a road map but where things don't get hit but we're actually product builders in the space and we had a much bigger vision in mind for what this could be for those who haven't seen it's easy to find but it's kind of pixelated retro looking yeah more of the 8-Bit style front facing and like how do you think about that and the owls and is there kind of a you know a lore around it yeah a lot of thought went into it in that we wanted to you know do a classic 10 000 collection that you know kind of was pioneered by the crypto punks so the attributes that we designed were specifically built with utility in mind so different types of attributes will unlock different types of things over time and one of the things that I wanted

to figure out is how you can reward dedication and commitment to a community and you know I'd seen a lot of this being done in a whole slew of different ways one were kind of blanket drops to the entire community and we know that's just a very expensive thing to do so we introduced another mechanic called nesting so like specifically what is nesting yeah so once you purchase a moon bird off the secondary Market you have it in your wallet and it's just sitting there like any other nft asset if you go to our website the moon Birds website there's an area that's called nesting and if you go in there it shows you once you connect your wall at the Moon bird sitting there you highlight it you choose I'd like to Nest it that disables the transfer function

still stays in your wallet you can do a call to the contract to disable it anytime you want even if our website wasn't up so this is different than web 2 and web 3 the transfer function you're referring to is a smart contract so the moon bird is actually a you know it's a database record but also a piece of code that exists on the ethereum blockchain and so you're actually changing it within the moon bird itself this is different like kind of conceptually than in web 2 where you just have like the website and the server you don't have this third thing the ethereum blockchain so right exactly so now we have on record when that started and we can do the math and figure out how long it's been nested for we can watch for unnesting and re-nesting events we can watch for it being transferred to

different wallets if we want to there is a transfer function on our website that allows you to transfer from one wallet to another without unnesting it just so people want to keep their streak but they're moving to a hardware wallet things like that but essentially a way to say I'm committed to the community I'm locking this thing up I'm nested and now it allows us to enable different nesting tiers and rewards that come with the benefits of locking it up so it removes a lot of the supply out of the ecosystem if you look at just all the top projects you know they'll be in the pretty high single digit amount of available inventory for sale ours is you know two percent or something like that so it's quite a bit lower than everyone else nesting was a way to say and signal to the world that you're committed to

this project over the long term and so we count down to the second how long it's been nested for and then you hit different tiers of upgradedness over time and then you get different rewards and access based on the tiers that you hit and so you know as you graduate to these other Nest levels more and more things unlock yes you're fortunate to your kind of time commitment exactly so that's that's kind of what we're trying to do with the nesting piece of it and it's worked out quite well I mean we threw an event at nft NYC and if you had one of the uh Wizard or witch hats on top of your moon bird you've got a private magic show with David Blaine which was amazing we had him come and there's like you know 75 people there and and he just blew everyone's Minds

nice nice so with respect to nfts obviously you're deep in the kind of art space and pfp space like what do you think more broadly like next five years like gaming nfts you know uh redeemable things for physical objects kind of more traditional collecting like I'm just curious what else gets you excited about nfts yeah I think when Instagram drops their minting of nfts which is coming soon that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out I don't know how they're doing it but I just worry whenever you graft new things on the old yeah you get weird Behavior no agreed but I wonder if there's any depth there you almost have to forget it's an nft for a second and think it's a celebrity collectible they'll saw it in two seconds especially if there's Apple pay enabled I mean Apple's gonna take their

30 cut which they came out and announced and I think that's on purpose because they know Instagram's dropping something soon would I do Instagram nfts absolutely not but I think it unlocks a different generation and a different group of people to nfts which I'm excited about because like it on boards more users and they sets them up with a wallet for the very first time so that is interesting to me just because it's expanding the pie so back to the next five years I think there's going to be a little bit of a battle around secondary royalties some people are starting to sidestep them this is like the pseudo swap debating exactly yeah like there's new kind of marketplaces where you can pay zero or pay 25 fees just for those who don't know like um marketplaces like open C if you do a secondary transaction

you buy a tea for somebody to typically five percent of that sale price will go to the original artist right exactly so there's new marketplaces that kind of get rid of that feature yeah and so there's a couple ways to approach that one is that artists are going to fight back definitely and they'll be tooling that says yes you can sidestep us because it's smart contracts and there's ways around it you could put Rapids although you can't in theory do it in the smart like this is an interesting thing too and there's reasons people haven't put the royalty in the smart contract right so that you can transfer to your own wallet and like you can transfer to a Smart contract system but I wonder if I don't know I I feel like it's TBD as to whether there are there may be Technical Solutions to some of

this one that I thought was pretty interesting is that especially for pre-existing collections that have already been minted is that there's this idea of tracking if things are moving through these networks of no royalties and if they are you really can't do anything except for the artist can choose not to reward those collections in the future I think that will start to happen also I believe that with larger mints additions things like that if you're doing if you're an artist and you're doing a piece of 500 or a larger collection you'll hold back 20 for yourself or 100 for yourself and you may have not done that before but now you have a way to go out and sell those directly on the secondary Market interesting let's talk about cc0 so just to explain it there's a common source of confusion around nfts of people who don't

understand them think you're creating additional scarcity or you're adding a copyright onto something that's not the case the mental model I would use is that copyright is sort of a different layer an independent decision selling nft you're selling a blockchain record you're selling a proof of ownership in the same way that when you buy a physical painting you're buying a physical painting completely separate as to whether you own that physical painting that that physical good is a question of copyrights totally separate questions right they don't overlap anyways and so there's something called cc0 which is Creative Commons is a organization that standardized a lot of different copyrights and one thing I want to mention is that we believe that like any artist should be able to pick whatever copyright they want so this is

all about choice but cc0 is one choice which says essentially there are no restrictions that anyone can reproduce this media create derivative works sell those derivative Works do anything they want the image is public domain I think so I forgot what license you started in Birds on but you switched it to cc0 a few months ago yeah it was still a restricted license we could revoke it at any time but it gave users the commercial rights to go out and monetize and it was kind of similar to the board Apes exactly yeah and then and then you went and switched it to cc0 that's right the cc-0 summer really kicked off with a bunch of projects that launched under cc0 I think the hard thing for us is that we kind of stepped on a little bit of a rake in that we

announced it without having a conversation with the community first so I think we could have done a better job on the communication front certainly if I had to redo a re-over when we did this announcement I would have changed a few things there and the thinking there which got me pretty excited was that there's two ways as a project especially as a pfp project it's all about the game of relevance right it's like one part of it is serving your community other is kind of furthering the meme to increase relevance through a whole slew of different things and these can be like these cultural moments that you have whether you're the board apes and you put Eminem on stage for something they can be through product driven releases that wow the community a bunch of different ways you can stay relevant one of the the things that we are we have

finite resources you know we have 28 people and of which there are just a handful of them that are going out to support ongoing efforts with the community working on Partnerships and all kinds of fun things but the idea with cc0 is you're saying okay if we free up this IP and we allow anyone to do anything they want with it hopefully it will create a lot of derivative type projects that have value that bring more eyeballs on the project and point to that true north that original project as being like the most important thing right the original asset from that project sometimes people cite the Mona Lisa as an example here right like you can reproduce the image all you want and

in fact reproducing it makes it more iconic make right and if anything increases the value of the original I mean this is true of all kind of art right exactly well I mean you can go out and buy a very first edition you know an early edition first print of Sherlock Holmes yeah and you know Major Movie Studio took it we made it into a movie because it was public domain yeah and it increased the value of that original work right it's pointing back to that original piece and so this is generally how things work in the physical world and you and people like you and I and nft folks assume that will you know we believe that's a similar logic in the digital world I think it's important to note that this isn't something that everyone should adopt like there are going to be a lot of artists that say I

want to retain the rights to my work and I had a great chat with Eric from art blocks about this the founder and he was like you know crummy squiggles like I don't want to see that being used as a hate symbol or anything else and I want to you know I want to hold on to this and actually I really got to say I do like a lot of what you all did it and reason around those new licenses that you released because I thought that was something we were thinking about I is there a license that says okay go do very creative things with this but guess what no hate speech no you know and carve out two or three things that you certainly no one wants as part of their project and launch it under that license I wish you had had that license a few

weeks before I went out with CC zero yeah just for people that don't know we put out a thing we called Camp evil license we can link to it and it's just an idea it's on GitHub the license itself is public domain so we encourage people to Fork it and change it but we went out in kind of a standardized set of licenses the that would give the Creator a choice of different sort of menu options you could be cc0 you could reserve all the rights but the goal of the really license to make it simple and standardized and permanent so like one thing concerned people have had is what if I go and build a business on the moon bird and what if you then pull the rug under me by saying I can't do it right so we wanted to come up with a license

that would survive M A and other kinds of things right and then one thing we put in as an option was the revocability over hate speech again it's an option all these things are options just to be clear yeah that you know the Creator should have more options and I think it's always good to have standardization and Clarity yeah both the creators and the collectors I mean obviously we're all anti-hate speech but could you have unintentional consequences of these Clauses and we'll see how it plays out yeah I like the little Matrix you put up there showing all the pros and cons of each one they were really thoughtfully done it was funny x copy did a tweet where he said something along the lines of I'm paraphrasing but he said you know all those hate groups out there looking for those ccs projects like like how

many hate groups are out there but it would be funny to think that like some extremist group out there in the middle of nowhere is like okay let's check the license okay this one's cc0 yeah we're gonna go with that one that's fair while I'm in the middle of doing all these awful things nuclear weapon on the side here let's check to make sure we're compliant fair enough fair enough well like in like what is hates you know that that would be an extreme case maybe there's something you know right I don't know more disorganization is not great and they're using this especially on the book cover you know jurisdiction yeah I don't know so but it's a good point that's a good point yeah but yeah the cc0 front it's a Choose Your Own Adventure you really have to pick it and I think a lot of the stuff that is just

straight duplicate you know just straight clones like we've seen this we've seen Moon birds that are turned the other direction instead of facing the right way they're facing left and they're Moon birds with a couple zeros in them or whatever and it's like those are just like what was the big crypto Punk thing where they were flipped oh yeah there's another crypto Funk one and those are just you know we laugh at them and we know that long term you know Bitcoin right right so like you got if you Fork it you've got to add something it's either technical or cultural right like Doge added Dogecoin added the cultural that's twist right otherwise it's just Spam and it falls away but I actually don't hate them if it creates another little mini press cycle and a few people pick it up like oh God Bless

but it's cooler if they do more than just flip it and they actually have their own kind of new set of memes right well those are the ones that are going to be durable and lead to bigger and better things which I think we're really excited about there was this great blog post about how low Fidelity nfts allow for more kind of derivative creativity and I think of it like what if you had like a moon bird that quote interoperated between two different can you seeing that happen yeah and so 3D movement and I think and one of the cool things was because you're low Fidelity because it's pixelated you can imagine one game embodying it in their art style it's sort of unopinionated about the art style yes someone else embodies it in a you know in a Cell shaded rendering or something and someone else in some hyper

realistic rendering and by making it cc0 you're just sort of saying hey like again I go back to the games industry you know remixing modding I always think about if you read masters of Doom oh it's a great book so it's Carmack and Romero and they created doom and often you know there was sort of the first big 3D video game and then they also invent this amazing what they did in one game they invented multiplayer gaming but I would actually argue the even cooler thing they did is two other things shareware gaming so like that was that was mind-blowing at the time there was like a few other small companies but giving away apogee before them yeah that's right that's right that's right apogee and they were friends they were all like in this little cluster of companies and then modding so that he

actually included like a c compiler in there to mod it was like mod me right that was revolutionary too right and I think of modding if I go to places like steam where it's like the Wild West it's creative it's cool people are modding and I think it will be a similar thing here with meteor that's what you're encouraging right you're saying cc0 mod me make games Fork it right make parodies like let the internet do its thing right exactly and if you're doing it right and most of the mods are yeah they want to always respect the original yeah and what they do like we saw with 3D Moon birds and and some other projects that are creating a more higher Fidelity versions of what we have they say hey if you own the original come and prove it off your wallet and you can get

this meant and you can get it for free or next to nothing because why wouldn't you want that Community happy if you're doing something that's based off of that Community you want to make sure that Community is happy so you always do right by them which is what we're seeing a lot of it's really accelerating the inevitable everything's going cc01 we like it or not it's only a matter of time machine it's going to copy stuff right and you can either build a business model that's aligned with that or you can fight it and eventually probably lose like in my mind video games are at the front too they're the one former media that gets this so as an example streaming if you know this but Nintendo fought it for a long time because they're like it's copyrighted you can't just stream my stuff and eventually they

realize like everyone in gaming has realized that the benefit of the increased attention outweighs the quote copyright information exactly right and I think it's going to be the same logic for all visual media and probably for music and all forms of media maybe outside of you know long-forn movies or something but all the other kinds of Internet native media forms I would expect to follow the same logic right you're fighting for attention exactly you're fighting for attention and there's two alternatives to this model then really one is to say we're going to hold all the rights back for us and we're going to go and build our own character in The Company the company we're going to go and build our own characters our own worlds our own everything we'll hold that and that's how value will accrue to these nfts that's like very much and Gary will be

the first to admit this that's a Gary vaynerchuk V Friends Model where he holds it back all the IP but just you know today he announced that some of his plushy toys are going to be in Toys R Us right and so that's one path to go down it and that's not in our core DNA we're not going to go out and build video games that's just not who we are right and so the other path is to say okay the users own that but they then have to figure out how to monetize it on their own right and how to like further that and this idea I believe it's a flawed one to think that there's going to be these licensing deals that happen to the individual the reality is that most people are never going unless you have an ultra rare board ape or something

else like you're not really ever going to get any licensing deals because if you're a big brand and you want to play well with this ecosystem you go out and you buy an nft because you have the budget right and it's what we've seen today when you see Tiffany's or Budweiser or any of these big brands that play in the world of nfts they don't actually license anyone else's IP they go out and buy one of the nfts because why would they spend marketing dollars on something that they don't own right so this is a chance for them to go out and we've already seen and are talking to brands that are okay with it being cc0 and they want to go out and they still see the value in buying and holding one of the nfts because it's theirs and it's provable by the

blockchain so the beautiful thing about this is it's actually very web 3 native because it says the source of Truth is not you know the Trademark Office it's not a centralized organization the source of truth of actually who owns this is looking on the blockchain and saying where does this point to so that's a pretty powerful thing to think about Embrace I find with the web 3 concepts for a lot of the behaviors you have to kind of invert things and this is what throws people off and so like same with copyright the copyright's the right to sue it's just sort of scarcity mentality and the internet really kind of is much more about the sort of abundance mentality of like my ownership is not the right to sue I'm not stopping something but I am receiving additional things right like air drops like invitations I think we're just at the

very beginning stages of that so to give you an example like I think a very common thing that will happen in the future is unrelated parties a brand a restaurant or whatever my sports team will do air drops to existing nft communities because at some point that Community the fact that you own that thing is partly you own it and that's important in of itself but partly it's this incredible opt-in kind of data source right like it says all these things about you a lot of things and you know hey if I'm not related to Moon Birds but I'm having an event for early Tech adopters in La wouldn't I want to give a free pass to the Moon Birds commute as an example or some other interesting Community but you know I also think it's the way the internet

should have done kind of AD targeting right like the wrong way to do ad targeting which is where we are today is all of this surveillance you know tracking my phone I just you know all the settings and Google and Facebook have today the right way to do advertising is let people choose what to make public and then you know give them offers Rewards or whatever it might be yeah accordingly you can choose your audience right you can say hey I'm really trying to Target women here so let me go to the world of women project and there's a bunch of these different projects that collect and have really passionate communities behind them and if that Community is about health we have one subset of moon Birds that's all from Japan from Tokyo you can go and find out exactly which holders are part

of that what we call the sub Parliament and parliaments are like this also Gathering of birds oddly enough and so they've like started to like create these sub parliaments and you can Target them in a non-evil way and provide value back to them in some sense that's cool there's a lot of talk in the nft world of creating the next quote Disney like do you think at some point there will be like a significant sort of media activity around Min Birds a lot of it's up to the community and you know we're definitely not video game producers or filmmakers but we have a lot of community members that dabble in that world and that's the beauty of the cc0 models we're saying hey take these assets let us support you and that can be via grants from the actual Dao and go

out and build on our behalf because a lot of you are probably better at this than we are there's another piece where this Dow will be equipped with a nft treasury as well so they kicked off with 2 million USD worth of eth and then we're transferring some of the Moon birds that we have from our company wallet so they can use those for collaborations they can use those for any way they see fit it's also a piece of art that if the art increases over time they could choose to sell it for more eth if they wanted to to roll funds back into the Dow as well we have 35 percent of ongoing royalties going back into the down so there's continued support and a secondary sales secondary sales that's very cool so you want to make sure it's sort of a bottom-up exactly that comes from the community

maybe you support them with money or the scaffolding or the structure for it we're going to continue building the tooling and everything but we're going to let them do the heavy lifting on that side now that's not to say we're going to do a ton of things on the BD side so we can go do Partnerships with sneaker companies and different big Brands and do that all day long but again we're leveraging a third party for that albeit a Big Brand I think it's really smart I think that there's things that are well done by a crowd and things that aren't right like BD maybe someday BD we've done well by a crowd but today it is most of these Partners expect a more traditional interface of legal contracts right lunches all that right exactly whereas like demand signal seems like a no-brainer that it should come from the

crowd and today very much if it doesn't creative things feel like they should come from the crowd and especially linking up creative a big job of ours is we will have someone raise their hand and say you know I'm a 3D animator that does X Y and Z and I work on you know and they put in some very big brands that they work on but I lack this skill I can't do this and so it's connecting those dots bringing them together in the community and say okay now that you're connected you've brainstormed you put together a template of what you want to do let's go fund you at the Dow level so yesterday you had an announcement can you tell us about that yeah so the Dow announcement it's something we we let people know what's coming but Dao's are always really tricky in that people

either have no idea what they are but they may have heard of them or they've interacted in the Dow and that has been a really poor experience for them and it hasn't worked or they have interacted with some of the best Styles out there and sing their praises and so it's interesting that you kind of have to do a little bit of education and bring people up to speed on what it's for and so we want to when we launch this Dao it's not just about here take the keys it's about here here's a new seat at the table for you as a community here's some funds to go do amazing things but let us throw on some professional rigor on top of this in terms of project management in terms of helping you vet the ideas when we launch our Dow you'll see if

something a proposal that's come through has the green light from us it's not to say if it would give something a yellow light or red light it can't get approved because ultimately that'll be up to the Dow but it's at least it lets them know we've taken a look at it we've had a conversation directly with the founding team we think this is a solid idea we think it has a high likelihood of completion and you know it's kind of like the kickstarter mode and that we've all backed some stuff that hasn't worked and we've backed some stuff that's been amazing I had this amazing pepper grinder by the way from Kickstarter do you know which one I'm talking about I don't oh it's I'm going to send you one it is the coolest thing I've ever I got a good day I was a personal angel

investor in Kickstarter I was into that from sort of early on and still am mostly back books you'd like this if you haven't seen it it's this European designers who have taken like all of like Newton and Euclid and all these like classic books and done them in like a cool modern way and it's just that kind of stuff that would just never exist right what publisher would publish that right but it just turns out there's a thousand people on the internet are willing to fund it and then the other Kickstarter story is we invested in Oculus and what the community was good at was the demand signal like I wouldn't have known that in 2013 you know there was that many people excited about VR but it's very hard for a community because they don't have the resources to do the tech diligence exactly it's just not

they're not positioned to do it like you have to have a bunch of phds or whatever and like probably get in person and do a bunch of stuff so anyway so as an aside I always thought it would be cool to figure out a model to combine those things right because it's ridiculous to me you did Venture Capital that we're sitting there trying to predict what the community wants right when you could just go out and ask them right right but on the flip side we're pretty good at diligenting the supply side of things anyways it sounds like you're kind of developing a dow model that tries to get the best of both worlds what you're doing is combining the best of what the sort of the centralized part can do and what the decentralized part can do yeah I like what you said though I've always

been interested in things like the prediction markets I think it's ridiculous the idea and actually a lot of our investments now and web3 stuff is around like media and movie we've got a few in the movie area and the idea sort of harness the wisdom of the crowds I think there's so many areas in the world like I do think there's a role for expertise like as I was mentioning like diligencing technology like there are people that know more about computer science than other people than the crowd right but anything that's demand signal right I think it should not be done demand signal and then also creative I I believe a lot of creative stuff is just it's like like my theory for example on and this maybe relates to Moon Birds right storytelling are there people that are great at coming up with stories you

know of course right there's great writers but I also bet you that there's a million people who have one great story in them right and maybe they don't have 100 but maybe they have one and right now they're not their stories are not I think AI is very exciting I mean technology typically democratizes things right like so crypto and web3 are doing it through new incentive systems and AI through new capabilities like you could make a movie maybe I think they're really close to having text to video now not just texting image since I think AI is going to completely change the nft game by the way yeah really interesting well I feel that there are a lot of people out there that are wildly creative but cannot put you know pen to paper or Mouse to pixel or however you

want to create it but their brains work in that creative way so now they're prompt Engineers prompt Engineers it's not just prompt engineers in that if I say give me a horse with a red hat that's not art but if I it's going to be it's almost like you'll track the amount of prompt interaction like you'll say this person spent this was a piece of art that was created with you know 1500 different prompts that went into it where there'll be refinement that's done I think the refinement piece is going to be really interesting yeah I so probably like you I had Dolly access or have that access and I mean it's an amazing amazing the technology is mind-blowing what they've done Dolly and the other kind of you know stable diffusion and all this but I found myself personally after a few days kind of running out of

things and it's probably just because I assume it's because of my own lack of creativity I think it's the limitations of the tool maybe but maybe you need something that's sort of helping you refine the prompts and suggest things and again I was saying that not that it's not I mean I think it's an amazing Tech but more just to your point that you need it's not the end of it right like there's a whole ton more you can do on the prompt side yeah it's early days there I'm thinking out you know five ten years from now it's just gonna be it's gonna be a killer app and for me as a collector you know speaking to our earlier conversation about what you collect I've gone back and bought early AI nfts they look horrible but that's you'll look at that and you'll be like

look how bad that AI was have you seen like if you go back on YouTube this is really cool is uh I think it was 1975 the first computer Graphics was a hand oh interesting this it was like yeah you should go check it out you'd like it but it was like you know uh was it called Battle Zone you know it's like these green like lines like vector graphics and it's the same kind of thing so you think that you know these will be kind of interesting iconic kind of early Collectibles yeah I mean Robbie brought with some of the early Gan stuff that they were doing out of Nvidia on super rare it's really cool with the image since this stuff you know I actually started an AI company whatever it was 15 years ago and had followed the space for a long time I don't think anyone you

talked to in the past would have had generating artistic images at the top of their list of things that I mean you would have thought we're gonna automate well mostly analysis right like that's how people thought of computing medicine for sure yeah medicine or you break down some you analyze a computer program turns out like I think they're farther ahead in generating images and movies in there and analyzing computer programs like it's just kind of it's not what you would have expected right do you think there's going to be a Tipping Point here really soon I feel like things are accelerating is that just me because I'm getting excited about art or are we seeing that in the AI specifically I think it's accelerating and by the way a separate thing like which I believe which is so if you go back and look as

you were there as I was to the last kind of major computer cycle mobile social Cloud right you had these three Trends you had the same kind of thing where people you were there early people thought it was buzzwords and this and that you know like it was sort of overblown it turned out to be underrated I think just the impact and the three Trends reinforced each other right so the fact that you know social networks were the killer app of mobile phones but mobile phones allowed them to go from the desktop from 100 million people to 5 billion people and cloud is what enabled the systems to run because we have a billion people interacting with that cloud so I think what happened like my mental model is you had three maybe sort of probably exponential processes in and of themselves but then they combined and

you created this kind of hyper exponential process right and I would argue it's crypto which is going to create a new architecture for creating these systems and incentive systems Ai and then I think the third is usually an interface and you could say AR VR maybe it's iot kind of like embedded devices and cars whatever you know kind of that takes you from 5 billion to 200 billion right and then I would also argue within each of these areas you have like AI alone is probably going at an exponential rate and that's because the algorithms are getting better you have got just all the smartest people people a lot of the smartest people you know Google Etc are working on this stuff the distributed systems are getting better they're just simply like you can count how many neurons are in these neural networks and it's just going up and

probably will continue to hit some point but like it's not there it's like a Moore's Law type thing and specific chips right like the tensors exactly purpose-built shifts but I think my understanding about an expert is a lot of it is also just how do you kind of Shard the problem across multiple machines but there's a whole you know there's just a ton of smart people doing that and that's what these models are they're just sort of a lot like gpt4 I keep hearing about it's already like right they've just taken it and added another 10 000 machines or something you know right yeah I'm still at 30 transactions a second how to catch up well the other thing I'll just throw out there because this is a favorite topic of mine is that if you go back since World War II and you look at Computing Cycles they tend to

happen every 10 to 15 years so you know Advent of computing 1945-ish and then mainframes mini computers PCS internet mobile you know the iPhone's 2007. so we're 15 years into this one so and you've seen all of these like kind of early eruptions like even the AI stuff it's amazing but you haven't seen it deployed for the most part that broadly like it's still kind of in the you know these demos and things I think we're like just from a Time perspective and just sort of like I feel like they're just kind of like building Crescendo of all of the stuff is getting better and better and a lot of people potentially are underestimating it and it's all going to just kind of come together and reinforce and we could be entering like and then

you add in stuff I don't really understand but like the stuff going on in biology and you know Quantum Computing I mean it seems like it's an amazing experiment but very little practical application yeah is that a tip or so it's not an area I spend focused on personally but I have you know friends who do and I talk to them and my understanding is it's following kind of a you know kind of a Moore's laws thing where you can predict it and I see it more from the cryptography side so some of the people on our team work on post Quantum cryptography so essentially right all cryptography on the internet everywhere both in you know crypto but it's just you're talking to your bank that cryptography is based on the fact on an old principle which essentially goes back to Euclid is that

it is very computationally fast to multiply some prime numbers together and it takes a really really long time to go the other way to go from the composite to the pieces and that's just based on you know this kind of core math principles and one of the things Quantum Computing does is it essentially these architectures you can now go back really quickly and so all that stuff falls apart and so people like Dan Bene who are supposed to Professor Stanford have developed new forms of cryptography that are resistant to Quantum Computing yeah because it all depends on which curves you use and you have to really diligence it and things like that the smart people that I know that do this think that quantum computers are coming well they exist and they're getting better but it's about 20 years away is what they tell me and like the plan is essentially

to do kind of an upgrade kind of like a Y2K type thing if I just remember that I don't know what the modern equivalent is has there been a big computer upgrade since that I don't know but essentially it'll be like yeah we're like hey you got hey we got to get together there'll be a bunch of Consultants I guess in this case it'll be like our den mowers but like we should have enough visibility into it now the Wild Card of course is maybe somebody who has this stuff maybe the NSA or China or who who knows and I don't know anyway so it's an interesting topic so I just think that there's you know there's sort of two ways to look at the world today like one is sometimes what you see on Twitter which is like everything you know it's the end

of History Computing is mature you know there's a lot of negative Tech stuff the other one is possibly we live in like the Age of Wonders when like Computing is finally like getting over its toddler phase and like all this like incredible shit's about to happen I feel like the next 10 or 15 years like that's gonna happen I'm pretty excited about it what year was what year did you start doing 2004. oh so you were in the very beginning pretty much yeah because I think that to me that phase was really cool the kind of the Primitive development sure Ajax happened and we're allowed to update websites without leaving the page that was like a crazy Innovation people have no idea you literally before that were hitting reload and it's just a static thing and yeah and like I remember originally was called the port 80 trick or something it

was like you had to keep out you know you keep HTTP Port 80 open and then Ajax and now people don't even know what that is I guess it's all just baked into the react and everything else I call it primitive development I remember the beginning of the web 2 thing when the whole idea of tagging was a new idea I don't know if you guys care whether Flickr or delicious delicious yeah yeah but that was a new idea I mean it sounds crazy now but like a lot of these there were hints of it like social networking and things like this default the public like all the design patterns right and then you kind of had I think of it as you had that phase which was to me the best phase because it's really creative and then you had the second phase which

is more the execution phase and you have the zuckerbergs ETC but then you have the cloning phase which is everyone taking someone else's idea and just copying it finally for the first time I'm so grateful this happened the community pushed back number one instagram yeah they were rolling out all these new features that were just clones of tick tocks yeah and the commute was like wait a second no we don't want you to change anything I was like yes for the first time they finally squashing some of this straight copping you know but yeah you had that kind of primitive development and actually it was nice about that era that's what I was asking about the year is that at that point it was still the internet was still very much out of fashion as a business and therefore itself filtered for people that actually liked it right and that

created this culture around it you were on the west coast then that's right I was on the East Coast I kind of regret it just because I didn't get to see the West Coast side of it the East Coast there were like literally like 20 people it was a small you go to these meetups same thing was happening it was bigger but it was like you know when we would get together there's many a parties at his house Crunch and it was like it was like this thing that exactly what you're describing you get together your friend you talk about it and it was like this cool it felt like this new movement and then someone actually wrote it down and it was like this different wow someone who's like clearly an Enthusiast because I'm writing in this excited voice about this new stuff yeah so I remember the

first time I heard I 100 remember the first time I heard the words web 2 is when I was building dig we were a few months in and Jason calacanus called me up and he's like hey I run web blogs Inc you know we haven't Gadget all this stuff like we noticed you're sending us some traffic like would you want to come join the Engadget thing and I was like we're kind of building this thing it's not really we're not and and he goes well you're very web too and I was like is that a software upgrade that I haven't applied like I literally thought I hadn't applied a patch to one of my servers or something because we were hard racking our own servers back then because there was no classes oh I got the I haven't upgraded them yeah exactly that's funny ridiculous that was

I think it was like O'Reilly like there were these conferences it kind of started that way John Patel yeah well and then you had all these I think what anything ended up being head fakes like which I think web3 could potentially actually make real things like mashups remember this so this was essentially composability we call it now you know which is what if web services were like Lego bricks and you could recombine them and do cool stuff that was happening a little bit prior to that too though remember dog pile I don't think uh dog Pals when uh it was the first search engine to combine search results for like four different search engines so I have like Alta Vista and Yahoo and like a few yeah there's all in one people were more they were more well back then I think so I think of it as

like technically of course they could have done all kept doing this stuff it just at some point the business model pushed people to Silo right and to say no you have to stay on my site so I can put ads on there and do all these other things but anyways you're one of as I mentioned before you and I heard some of the few people that have been sort of web 2 and web3 how do you think about web3 product development it's definitely changed a bunch in that web 3 maybe it's because I'm getting older at the same time but I just feel like web2 was all about coming up with the best formula for locking in eyeballs for as long as possible all right somewhat in a very evil way yeah that is what it is and web 3 is very much about setting

the stage for the meme like how do you further the meme how do you how do you and by the meme I don't just mean something that is a flash in the pan and is funny for 24 hours and goes away it's like it's building these cultural moments that have lasting impact that if you can become big enough yeah and and if you've established yourself enough as being unique and novel and something that others duplicate what will happen is you flip from a project that requires constant maintenance and feeding to something that requires no external dependencies and so cryptopunks is in that genre Dogecoin Dogecoin is in that genre like crypto punks they were known

for something and they were they in an industry first right they started an entire you know hundreds or thousands of collections that were spawned off of that original idea so when you think about building you know I think all of us are looking for that thing that what is that thing where we will be our front and center Wikipedia entry about our collection that solidifies Us in this place where we flip to not needing any external dependencies not to say that we wouldn't still continue to build for the community but it's it's a special thing when you can cross that Chasm and back to product development back in web 2 you could kind of like launch something go away for six months or eight months come back with another iteration or version and that was okay this space is so wide open and there's so much blue ocean that

you're rewarded for being a little bit crazy and a little bit chaotic and some of the best projects they solidify themselves as bigger players by being a first in something and that means not just copying someone else's Playbook like what made crypto punks what it is today or Apes what they are today is not going to make moon bird it's a household name in a household brand we can't just copy their playbook we have to go about it in a different way I mean the the cool thing is that there is so much that can be done with the programmable nature of the blockchain and what is possible and there are very few people that are competent in doing it well that it's that's why I got back in I'm like well now's the time to take a lot of these learnings and bring them into web 3A so

going back another question about the difference between now and then is just as you're sort of building your company and I don't know to what I sent this is web three or just the fact that you have more experience now like how is it different than before yeah I would say a lot is the same in that well I mean a lot has changed in terms of just the infrastructure that you need on the back end it is more challenging as it's always been to hire grade engineers and especially around the security required for smart contracts you think it's more challenging than Web Two yeah yeah 100 I mean we have two there's fewer people into it it was just something where you know once rails hit and a few other Frameworks like Django and a few others like really took off it became really

easy to hire Engineers like those boot camps just like cranked them out right yeah so sort of pre-web framework yeah engineer hiring we have to actually build the whole thing well it was just it was hard to scale things I remember uh who was it that wrote memcache I can't remember but it was all the early caching stuff and we were like on the bleeding edge of that stuff because we needed to cash our Pages weren't cached initially like there was like there was a lot my sequel wouldn't do too many rights at once like especially with Diggs they dig was a right so there's a right to a database and it was it was just a nightmare but a lot of those problems have been solved the the problems today that exist are largely around you know Finding competent smart contract Engineers thankfully we

acquired the Divergence team who's been awesome on that front but yeah I would say it feels like there's just more flexibility in what is accepted and what could be done and in creativity that is there so it's a very exciting time for entrepreneurs to get involved in the space because it's not like the app world where you know to build an app these days it's just so crowded yeah and there's so many broken pieces of web3 that it requires a lot of people to come in and really figure out these problems you know like the wallet hacks and just like the UI ux issues of so many different products that expect you to be almost an engineer to understand how to use these things what about just in terms of like team building and things like how how are you doing it differently this time

well we've grown fast but at the same time just when we hire in this world it's a little bit of combination of pedigree and background but also this built-in kind of inherent love for web3 I don't want an engineer just because they're a senior engineer at Google like that's not interesting to me now if they have that and on nights and weekends for the last six months they've been running smart contracts that's really exciting so you know our team is composed of just a slew of different I have you know Engineers that are art blocks artists that have done drops on Art blocks Divergence team has done multiple art related drops it's just product managers are not you know I hired one from coinbase he was frustrated because all

they were doing was hiring ex- Instagram folks to build the coinbase nft product and they just had no experience in web 3 and he's like I own a moon bird like that was part of the interview process he's like you don't understand I'm really deep in this and like I'm like that's the type of person I want to hire and I think the mistake a lot of companies are making is they're just throwing web 2 talent at web 3 problems and unless you're really in there kicking the tires and playing with the stuff you're just gonna try and shoehorn something in and do what you've always done in web 2 and it's just not going to work for this crowd interesting we used to have a rule on our crypto fund that you had to have lived through crypto winter which was our kind of proxy for

saying you actually believe right because the theory was if you lived through a winter because it made no Financial sense right you know so you must have done it because you believe at some point we decided we had to relax that because some people were some of them were too young and then also we just thought like there's many paths to kind of get into something we didn't want to be overly uh rule bound on that but it is I do think that an important strength in good web3 companies funds Etc is this kind of True Believers people deep in the space people who I think fundamentally like do you see you know you have these critics out there who lists the various issues like do you see that as a opportunity it has some kind of core deficiency or something and

you want to hire people that are attracted to the fact that there's a lot of design space and they want to be creative and they want to have impact I mean for me it's just a chance to re-examine and reboot the entire incentive model around the web which is just very exciting because I think it rightly aligns it puts way more power back in the hands of the consumer yeah and gives them a way to participate in some of these networks in a way that's meaningful where value accrues to them versus to a Fortune 500 and I think that is a radically new model and one that I want to play a part in nice nice thanks for having me on I appreciate it thanks thanks for being here [Music] thank you for listening to web 3 with A6 and Z you can find show notes with links

to resources books or papers discussed transcripts and more at asicsncccrypto.com this episode was produced and edited by sonal choxi that's me the episode was technically edited by our audio editor Justin golden with seven Morris credit also to moonshot design for the art and all thanks to support from Asics and Z crypto to follow more of our work and get updates resources from us and from others be sure to subscribe to our web 3 Weekly Newsletter you can find it on our website at asicsnzcrypto.com thank you for listening and for subscribing let's go [Music]