What is the Creator Economy? Jesse Walden, Li Jin, Cooper Turley

Transcript

hey bankless nation we are back it is panel time panel time david are you excited about panel time dude our last panel went absolutely fantastically was a current state of defy and everyone really liked it people liked the energy people like the speed and people like having three different takes all at once and so we are doing the same thing with a subject matter that i really want to learn a lot about which is the creator economy and so we are bringing on the three biggest experts in my opinion uh as to what the career economy is and what it's going to do for creators like us ryan and also create creative consumers like the bankless listeners it's cool because because this is so early david i feel like these experts are probably the like biggest experts in the world on this subject

like as of now but like everything in crypto i mean this is also we're all still learning so again it's another case of three-year-olds teaching two-year-olds uh this subject um but what would you how would you define the creator economy i know that's gonna be subject number one that we ask our panelists but what's kind of your working definition of it david yeah so the creator economy i think uh to some degree uh it starts really with the creation of uh maybe the internet itself and web two platforms like where a lot of content came alive youtube is a content platform spotify is a content platform uh twitch is a content platform there's all these creators that are creating value and they're on these platforms um yet the web 2 world has its flaws that we know about and so there is

a growing demand for more creative outlets more equitable platforms perhaps that really enable perhaps not just the top one percent of creators to really maximize revenue but really the long tail of creators that these web 2 platforms have really left on the sidelines i think that's i think that's the the gist of the creator economy but i really want to get to uh these panelists because i think they have a much more complex and nuanced uh ideas about what the creator economy really is yeah we are going to find out exactly what it is and i think jesse walden has called this the ownership economy before and i'm curious to hear his take on the distinction but it feels like nfts are part of this movement dao's are part of

this movement defy is certainly part of this movement the reason we're talking about it guys is because economy is the key word here and with economies there are new economic opportunities for you a crypto native to get involved whether you're a creator an entrepreneur an investor or just a fan uh there are tons of new ways to get involved so you can tune in on uh youtube if you're doing that now we'll also publish this on the podcast make sure you like and subscribe you can also throw in some comments in the chat box we may get to them if we have time but with that we are going to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible and then get right into the panel balancer is defy's most powerful automated market maker typical amms just

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then deposit them back into ave ave does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them check out the power of ave at ave dot com that's aave.com all right guys we are back with this panel exciting panel on the creator economy i want to find out more about it here are the guests we have for you today the first is cooper turley cooper is actively shaping the creator economy through projects like adios he also runs friends with benefits he's part of that doubt and pleaser doubt as well he's an operator investor man i feel like

there's nothing that cooper is not involved in in crypto and d5 see his name everywhere token launches as well governance through fire eyes dao cooper it's great to have you man how are you doing doing wonderful been a big fan of the podcast for a long time so it's a blessing to be here well we've been a big fan of you too we also have jesse walden who is a bagless podcast alumni jesse is the founder of variant um his first check venture firm investing in the ownership economy that is his focus he was previously at a16z and oh my god those guys just raised another massive round i think they're pretty excited about blockchain 2. he led blockchain r d there at spotify 2 he co-founded media chain has a ton of experience i consider him

the go-to expert on topics like the ownership economy and the creator economy jesse it's great to have you how are you doing great good to be back and we also have lee jin it's her first time on the bankless podcast super excited about lee she works at a venture fund that's focused on the passion economy and the future of work she's an expert on this space she was previously consumer partner andreessen horowitz as well where she was a board advisor for companies like sub stack imager and more and she also hosts a podcast called means of creation which i'm absolutely going to check out it's all about the creator economy as well and lee won't you pronounce the name of your your

venture company for us too because i don't want to butcher that yes i'm the founder of a vc firm called atelier ventures atelier ventures on the passion economy awesome panelists it is fantastic to have you are you ready to dive into the creator economy it's porn ready baby let's get it all right you guys were born ready so let's start with some definitions because uh it's always good to start with definitions why don't we start with you cooper creator economy those two words together what does that mean yeah i mean i think david killed in the intro for a long time we've seen creators creating a ton of value for their communities and ecosystem as a whole there's never really been a way to share that directly with their fans and community members so community the creator economy to me is basically a relationship between creators and

community to share value with one another jesse what would you add to that i just add that um like we're all creators on the internet everyone is um you know creating some some kind of value whether images like there's billions of images that get shared on social media every day um you know there's there's different degrees of creativity online um but we're all making stuff and sharing stuff that is the nature of the medium and to you know points raised by both david and cooper the you know to date there hasn't been um sort of a ton of reciprocation for that value that's that's created by each of us as individuals um and i think crypto's gonna change that in a meaningful way so we

build onto this too and i'm kind of curious after what cooper and jesse and david all said about this this definition um seemed like jesse is in introducing uh crypto into the mix here so is the creator economy is it bigger than crypto is it broader than crypto jesse said we're all creators on the internet uh what's the relationship between the creator economy and this new crypto web 3 thing that has come about more recently yeah i think um the creator economy has existed ever since the internet existed basically um any whenever interactive content and user generated content was introduced to the internet i i consider that to be the start of the

creator economy because that was the moment when people began actually creating content and creating value and accruing a reputation and influence online and the creator economy is the process and system by which like those people are able to actually be able to monetize and accrue value financially for the content that they're producing online um and i think recently what i have seen as the shift one of the major shifts in the greater economy is that these creators are being recognized for the value that they're contributing to all of the platforms that they're actively using um there's a new range of different monetization

mechanisms that they're exploring it used to be really about ads ad revenue share branded content and sponsored content recently we've seen a lot more exploration around subscriptions direct user payments tipping patronage um and now i think what crypto introduces is um like one is like ownership like it introduces the concept of digital scarcity and the ability to actually own digital media on the internet which i think hadn't really existed before different platforms were trying to get to that element of digital scarcity but they existed only within walled garden ecosystems and that unlocks a lot of potential for

monetization and then b i think um the other intersection point i really see is around economic coordination and how to reward contributors and align economic incentives beyond just having fans be altruistically engaged with the creator so is this kind of like a an act two would you say lee of um the creator economy that kind of crypto brings so when we talk about the internet we really think of the internet as sort of a you know communication protocol sort of an act one but its business model the business model the internet is really heavily advertising based does this add another business model for creators which is like things like we can sell

our assets we can organize capital in new ways what is crypto exactly adding and is this a whole new chapter for the creator economy do you think i think we're actually entering chapter four not chapter two so i've i think there's a few chapters in the history of the creator economy over the last decade um i would say creator economy the first era was just the rise of social networking and ugc platforms and when those first began um creators didn't really exist everyone was a creator everyone was a user they they use these platforms just to communicate with each other and in this 1.0 era of the creator economy we saw the rise of more

influential users who other people started gravitating to who they didn't know from the irl world so you had the rise of this creator class on the internet i think creative economy 2.0 era was the era in which these people who started to amass influence and fame online started to monetize that primarily through advertising and then so basically these creators became influential but they were always the conduit for some other business to achieve its goals so brands would use them as a channel for advertising and then i think creator economy 3.0 era was creators realizing actually i can become the business i don't have to just shell someone else's

product and become the face of some other brand i can be the brand i can be the product and i can be a business in and of myself and then i think now we're entering creator economy 4.0 era which is that the creators aren't just trying to um create a business in and of themselves and like sell a product and like have this transactional relationship with their audience i think they're actually blending the line between the audience and the creator and they're creating micro economies and richer ecosystems beyond just a one-dimensional monetization model so lee do you have examples in all four of those acts so when you were talking about those my mind was calling to

examples i'm not sure these are accurate but like act one felt sort of myspace ish and the act ii is maybe more social media instagram and then act three is maybe something a bit more like a sub stack platform and then act four is now where we are with with crypto are those good examples or what would you say yeah i i think that was really apt like act one is like the rise of ugc platforms like myspace live journal xanga facebook in its early days act two was instagram youtube like all of the platforms on which people are following in like a one directional manner it's not bi-directional follows and mutual friendships it's i want to follow someone they might not know that i exist um third era is like all of the current

creator monetization products that exist in web 2 patreon sub stack etc and then four is all of the crypto creator platforms that are arising so i would imagine all of these uh different phases of the creator economy and technology at large goes to these adoption cycles right like it's adopted it's great and then it hits maturity and then we start to see some problems right so with our the the phase of the creator economy that we are in theory leaving behind what are the problems that it's presenting creators and their fans that we are trying to solve in uh what lee is calling the the 4.0 version of the creator economy what what does these crypto platforms web 3 platforms uh solve for the uh problems

that have been plaguing the current creators of the world and jesse i'll turn that one to you sure yeah so so i'm going to riff off lee here so earlier we talked about the ownership economy we did a whole podcast on it um in short that's the lens through which i view what's what's happening in crypto and dovetails with my definition of the creator economy in the sense that you know my definition is we're all creators right and the ownership economy is about giving everyone ownership over the value that they create that's something that didn't happen in web 2 because you know many of the platforms while they gave creators new tools um they also extracted value at the platform level um value that was built on the back of the

creators who who drove the value of those platforms right so in web 3 the opportunity is to build platforms build networks that are built operated and actually owned by their users um and you know i would defer people to the ownership economy podcast for like a much fuller exploration of that um but that's the specific problem that crypto solves and it does so uniquely because it's now possible to move the value of ownership or move that economic value at this you know the same scale and the same speed that we move information and you know we know from silicon valley's history that ownership is this really powerful

incentive to get talented people to come and like contribute to your thing that's how you get the best like engineers to come work at your startup um but it's not been possible to like you know distribute that to everyone in the world um anyone with an internet connection who is a creator crypto enables exactly that because you can literally send value tokens are like packets for value to anyone within with an internet connection regardless of where they are so that that's the big new opportunity that crypto adds to the creator economy and if you read my initial post on on the ownership economy outlaying this thesis i actually referenced lee's posts on the passion economy and of course we overlapped in andreessen so we were talking about this back then but i see that the sort of ownership economy and

which i would you know sort of say it is synonymous with um the creator economy and web three um as a the next logical step or or sort of like you know 4.0 as lee puts it cooper you have an interesting place in this world because you are i and from from my perspective both somebody who plays attention to the investment side of of this uh industry but also uh you participate in it as a creator uh and so maybe maybe you could help illuminate us as to what what is the re what's the reasoning for the the migration right like we what are the real incentives that this new ownership economy is really pulling people away uh from phase 3.0 like like uh like lee said

into phase 4.0 well as a as a user and a creator what's in it for you and as a content consumer what's in it for you yeah i think it's shared upside in relationships you know as someone who interacts a lot of creators right now it's very difficult to build a strong relationship with them what the creator economy enables is a way to show your fandom in a much deeper level you know either financially by buying a stake in that project or socially by working for it in a very deep level and so for me as an active contributor to many d5 projects you know this notion that there's no line between team and community the notion that everything's shared with the community those are things that we take for granted and crypto but for many creators you know they don't really engage with their fans on a deep level

and so what i really like about this movement is you're really challenging creators to go deeper with the audience that they're building and give them shared stake in their projects and i think once we see that happen on a meaningful level we're going to start to see all these creator brands be 100x more valuable than they are today and the biggest benefit there is that the fans are going to capture that upside along them instead of just the creator themselves as uh the content of that cooper it seems to be the case and this really hit me when uh dave and i had our conversation with justin blau um who's an artist a creator uh in the in the music arena and he really said like he doesn't so much of what an artist does at least a music artist and i think many artists

and creators feel the same is through centralized intermediaries these like massive aggregators of information that control them so like his example is kind of like spotify and record labels and some of these are web 2 companies but some of these are kind of legacy analog companies and what he really liked about crypto and nft is he could go directly to fans is that sort of what we've seen with the internet up to this point in kind of you know lee's acts one through three what we've gotten is a lot of centralization a lot of aggregation does this movement the creator economy kind of disaggregate and remove these large aggregators um

disempower them and give power back to the creators yeah i think that um as lee highlighted as the creator you recognize you hold the keys and the power here so you can go from platform to platform and bring your audience with you you know in web 2 i think that there's a lot of notion that you're following existed on that platform if you were to leave instagram let's say you would leave all those followers behind you but with something like discord and these new creator economies you're mobilizing across all these different platforms so tick tock discord twitch patreon only fans whatever you want to call it people are following you around the internet and i think when you recognize that you are your own digital nation state you start to see the value being created there would be a lot more powerful people go to bat for you a lot more it's not about

where you're releasing content they're going to support you anywhere and you can now become a weapon across any new platform you come into because you have this large force behind you that all of these brands and companies want to empower and partner with you because you have such a more loyal audience behind you that's going to use your product and help bring value to the systems that you're using yourself so you can port your community in reputation in ways you couldn't previously that's exactly right yeah just just to like tack onto that technically like web3 enables this in a unique way which is that you all your identity your your data and the way you monetize or is tied to one id so rather than having like 10 different ideas across 10 different platforms like instagram ryan you have one address on chain where all the stuff

that you do as a creator can be aggregated and critically it's not the platform that's aggregating it's you as an individual cooper you said the individual operating as their own nation state and that just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up we have a section in this agenda to talk about how it changes the personality and psychology of a person but we're not there yet first i want to bring up a tweet that uh that uh uh lee said uh that um you recently tweeted out if you are a creator first company your cap table should reflect that what does that mean um lee what what did you mean by that can you just elaborate on that tweet for us sure um i think that creator empowerment exists

on a spectrum and right now the notion of empowering creators and the language of creator empowerment is very popular and ubiquitous and i think it's being co-opted by a lot of platforms that are arguably not that creator friendly and so if we look at you know creator empowerment on a spectrum from like helping them to build an audience to like sharing advertising revenue with them to allowing them to build subscription revenue to allowing them to like create their own product offering to like actually having them be part owners in the platform themselves like i think

the ownership element is like the furthest you can go and be becoming a creator friendly platform and actually empowering creators because that means that they're not subject to like you know their interests are fundamentally aligned with that of the platforms whereas in all of the other centralized web 2 models there's still this inherent tension of the platform needing to extract some value that the creator is contributing in order to be valuable as a company and so this tweet if your creator first company your cap table should reflect that that was getting to like how do we make creators owners of the platforms themselves how do we have them not just build their own revenue streams and businesses on these

platforms but how can they actually benefit from the work that they're contributing to make that platform successful um and help them get upside from that equity value appreciation and i followed this up with a larger tweet storm about creator ownership of platforms and how creators need to go from just workers to worker owners um which is really related to this point but i i think that is like the north star for me in terms of what i see coming next for the creator economy this is so interesting that you talk about um centralized platforms kind of co-opting the self-sovereign movement of the creator economy because like a lens that dave and i often see through is is um we have like a lot of fake defy out

there right and so like the bankless movement is all about hey you have freedom you have self-sovereignty over your your private keys you can move your crypto assets wherever you want you're not trusting a third-party custodian and we want to maximize that even while knowing it's a spectrum but like i'm curious what this actually looks like for a creator like what would be an example of a a platform that completely locks you in like almost like in our world like a bank right versus that's pretending to be d5 versus a platform that is completely empowering the individual creator do you have any examples of that where like that

uh falls somewhere along that spectrum i mean i think the examples are all around us they're the apps that we use every day on our phones um any sort of centralized social networking platform i think falls within that camp and it's complicated because i think in one sense they are enabling these creators to build a following and reach audiences and they're enabling them to create content that would otherwise be really hard to create but in another sense like they are locking them in if if you're banned from twitter if you're banned from tick tock like you don't have access to reach your followers anymore um and like

if the platforms want to they can monetize your content and not share or share an arbitrary amount with you like that decision is made by the platform unilaterally um and so i think yeah all of the current centralized creator platforms have this tension of both empowering as well as disenfranchising the creator um i recently said i think a lot of these creator funds that the social media companies are coming out with to pay creators are are bred in circuses meaning they're kind of like a distraction to make them make the creators feel happy and appeased and feel like they're being enfranchised and heard and valued but at the end of the day like they're building

their [Music] creators are building their businesses on rented land when they're building on these web to do platforms how can you how can you even tell like how can you tell that you're not building it on rented land so i think your tweet is super instructive it's basically like um a creator first company will give tokens equity ownership to its community right so maybe that's a signal um but are there any other signals like in a creator first uh platform should i have the ability to just like port my entire profile everything i create and like own it should i have the ability to realize upside on everything that i create are there some fundamentals that you would say lee that that exists in

creator first platforms because i think sometimes creators don't even know where they are like because of the marketing and um i guess the you know almost like the psyops around uh some of these these platforms that purport to be creator friendly yeah i think that economic ownership is a huge element and i think on top of that i think transparency around decision making is another one like how our decisions made how our policy is created i think twitter is kind of an example of like what transparency starts to look like because they recently revamped their blue check mark program and as part of that revamping they solicited

um a lot of ideas and proposals from the community as to what the verification program should actually be like and what the process should be like i think like today creators think of them themselves as passive recipients of platform decisions like you know the youtube adsense split rate is 45 55 and that's just what it is and they're the passive recipient of that decision i think going forward i think people are going to start thinking of it as not just the platform made this decision and i have to accept it but like actually how do i how do i change it how do i affect change in this system how was this decision arrived at and

could i be included as part of that process i want to turn the conversation to uh a little bit more about the economics behind the creator economy and the uh the mental model of the american dream comes to mind but if you talk to the average zoomer or millennial about the american dream you get rolled eyes like no one really takes that seriously anymore and i think part of the creator economy is trying to reinvigorate something like that back into the minds of people everywhere and so uh cooper as somebody who is a participant again on both sides of the creator economy as a consumer and a contributor tell us how you think that the creator

economy might be able to reinvigorate just the average person to help kind of establish a name for themselves or some revenue for themselves and how is it different than than you know the the classic american dream meme that we know from the 50s and 60s yeah i think the most obvious answer is buying tokens you know you've seen very clearly over the past six months that millennials in particular love buying meme tokens dogecoin being an obvious example of this it's my belief that the creator economy is an advanced version of meme investing where you're buying based on the back of a community rather than on the back of a financial statement you know i think that's a far ways away from becoming mainstream but when that happens you're going to see opportunities to earn financial capital and the brands that you support the most and i think the biggest change here is

that it's no longer about where you work being your paychecks that you can take that and go hang out with your friends on the weekend it's a merge between the two with what you're working on on a day-to-day basis is where you want to be spending your time and there's now financial opportunities you don't have to sacrifice your time for money anymore the two things can be intertwined to build community and kind of better empower the things that you know and love and so making it like quote unquote making it seems to be largely like out of reach for the average the average person these days there's just generally a pessimism in the air when it comes to just establishing a long-term career a lot of people just kind of feel confined to like a nine to five and renting an apartment for the rest of their lives is

this something that the creator economy can fix definitely think so i mean you talk to people outside of their jobs and they're really excited about things like sports betting and about like you know what's happening on tick tock and staying up with like the logan paul floyd mayweather fight you know all these events have financial markets around them but i think the ways in which you participate in them has been very degenerate and speculative in nature and what i hope to see is a more advanced evolution of that movement where if you have value to contribute to that conversation you can bring it to a discord a governance forum you can make a proposal to a community and get paid from the value that i have to offer so in my mind making it i think is less about the financial capital that you earn and the number in

your bank account and more about how free and sovereign you feel with the way that you spend your time and if we can get to a point where you wake up every morning and you hop on your computer and you're stoked to go to work i don't care how much money you have in your bank account that's making it to me jesse uh so can i can i add something or please please i was gonna give it to you anyways okay i'm gonna i'm gonna t lead up to so sorry i'm going to make this like this this is going to be a two-part thing but like american dream i think is like goes goes hand in hand with there being sort of a vibrant middle class and i think the reason you're saying like you know people feel disenfranchised the american dream is dead is like the middle class

has kind of been shrinking over time and you're seeing a lot more income inequality and i would argue that's like one of the biggest um challenges our generation faces because it's really hard to get anything else done if people are just trying to figure out like how they're going to make ends meet so um so it's this fundamental issue and i think in web 3.0 um or sorry creator comedy 3.0 in in lease framing which is web 2.0 um the the pro the problem there is there's also a lot of income inequality where like the very very top percent of creators the ones like making all the money and then there's this very long tail of people who are like barely making ends meet and we can speak a little bit more to that but i think the the big opportunity for um like you know creator economy 4.0 or

what i call the ownership economy is that creators actually participate in the upside of the platforms that they contribute to building and that helps them build wealth so it's not just about like what they're earning day to day as creators but you know participating in the collective value that the platforms create and that could be the difference between you know making ends meet and being in the middle class so so i i i said that was a tip for lee because she's written a lot more extensively about the creator middle class and probably has something to add there yeah i think economic inequality is the most pressing issue of our time full stop like it's only being

exacerbated the wealth gap is growing um like the returns on capital the returns to owning capital are much greater than the returns to being a worker like you can make more money through having money then you can make money by just using your time at a job and that means people who have money are going to just become wealthier and like that gap is going to widen i think this is such a huge problem and not enough people are talking about it and it's something that i want to like devote my life to solving because i i just don't think a world in which like people who already have a lot just accrue more is fundamentally fair and the notion of the american dream yeah i think it's eroding because a lot

of people feel like the american dream is out of reach now and when i initially wrote my blog post a couple of years ago the passion economy and the future of work it was very top of mind for me how it intersected with the american dream and the notion of making financial stability accessible to more people and i thought to myself like if we can make being a capital owner a business owner being an entrepreneur more accessible to weigh more people and lower the barriers such that people can set up their own businesses and own something of value i think that's one possible mechanism to reverse the growing inequality that we have in this country and when i started investing against

this thesis of the passion economy um what i realized was that there was still rampant inequality in the creator economy as jesse said like on the web 2 passion economy platforms a very small sliver of creators are actually able to make a full-time living salary and everyone else is just like cobbling together a little side income that you know supplements their day job but they can't go full time on being a content creator and and there's a lot of reasons for that it's like how their algorithms are designed the preferential attachment models that the algorithms use um the fact that discovery is controlled by a very small handful of platforms that are centralized and so

for me a lot of my interest in crypto comes from how how do we tackle income inequality how do we tackle societal problems how do we make it more possible for people not just to earn a little bit of income here and there and pieces together and try to make ends meet but how do we actually have them appreciate like benefit from the appreciation of the value that's currently accruing to the platforms themselves like to me it's it's fundamentally broken that if you're a ceo of one of these creator platforms you're making like thousands of times more money than the most successful creator is on the platform because arguably like the platform would be nothing without those craters whereas the internal employees are somewhat

commodities um and so i think that that kind of value division is broken and i think of yeah the ownership economy as a path forward for how we can make it a lot more equitable so with the creative creator economy kind of reinvigorating the middle class and and i love using that frame of reference rather than just the american dream because the creator economy is something global right has nothing to do with america the american dream is just a mental model that people understand uh we have a lot of these platforms like youtube twitch that you know there's are perhaps there's hundreds of thousands of streamers on twitch that have between at any given moment between zero and three viewers and we have hundreds of

thousands of youtubers that just make content because they enjoy making content so we know that there's like this energy of creative desire around it's just it's just that the the problem that i'm hearing you guys state is that these uh platforms aren't conducive towards the long tail how do you envision these these new creator economy platforms to be more conducive to the middle class how do you get how do we bolster that that middle of the bell curve rather than just the top one percent of of creators and content producers what's the core fundamental through line that these creator economy platforms are going to offer the middle class and uh jesse i'll start with you i think i think defy has has um sort of like some some instructive lessons for

like founders building um this new sort of phase of the career economy so like take take up something like uni swap for example right which is you know one of the biggest d5 platforms out there it's a it's an exchange it's it's not unlike coinbase right in that they both are place places to trade crypto but unisoft is obviously different in one very important way which is it's completely decentralized and it's owned by its users so the the the users of diva who or uni swap who trade on the platform have gotten uni tokens which are claim on fees generated in the unity swap exchange so the users own the platform and if you were a user of uni swap before that distribution was made you got this airdrop of tokens commensurate with sort of how much you

use the platform and for a lot of users that was a meaningful amount of money like i think you guys may know better than me but i think that thousands of dollars like ten tens of thousands even um and and so like imagine you know you're living in india or something like that that's that can be like you know an annual salary for a lot of people that they made just from using a product very actively being a power user so i think that's like a pretty destructive lesson for you know how this new creator economy might play out and it may be the difference between again like making cobbling together scraps of income to supplement your day job and actually joining the middle class cooper what would you add to that yeah double click on ownership i think that's the most important piece of it

you know earlier we talked about um creator cap tables and if you're a creative first company you need to get them involved what we've seen in the past is companies pick and choose the top creators to put on their cap table they maybe allow them to invest in the company they give them an advisor grant but with crypto products you see that ownership can be earned at any level of the stack it doesn't matter if you're the smallest user on the chain or the biggest if i put my money into compound or ave i'm earning governance tokens as a result of that action and i think what we need in creator platforms is more passive examples where ownership is earned through very small actions rather than it being given through investments or advisory positions or more hard profile um to that that peer-to-peer payments i

think are the biggest you know missing link here that we're really starting to build out now so to me something like only fans is an exam a great example of how this is actually panning out where you can connect across all of your followers around the globe in an instant way and we're now starting to see payment channels where it doesn't rely on a black box to go and sit there for six months to collect your income you can have that happen in real time and so i think the more that we see payment channels that enable direct to fan relationships the more that's going to be coupled with one another you're going to earn ownership going to earn equity you're going to earn tokens then you're going to have so much more opportunity to build that up that you know the least point it's not about getting a couple

dollars that you're scrapping here and there you have an income that's far beyond what you could ever earn bartending or doing these day jobs that a lot of creators are doing just to be able to create in the first place this is great guys it's been such an exciting panel i think a lot of bankless listeners are out there and just like wanting to get involved in this because they're tired of their nine to five i don't know how many people uh i've talked to recently who are like oh my god i wish i could just quit my day job and work for a dow and maybe this is what makes that possible we are going to talk about dows we're going to talk about some of the challenges to the creator economy and hopefully get some advice from the panelists in how you can be a creator

entrepreneur participant in the creator economy right after we hear from our sponsors bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans unit swap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and

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of your purchases but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset when i get my gemini credit card i'm going to make sure that i get my cash back in eth so whenever i buy something i get a little bit of eth bonus back to me at the same time you can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemiini.com go bank list and if you trade more than a hundred dollars within the first 30 days after sign up you'll be gifted a free 15 bitcoin bonus check them out at gemini.com go bankless all right guys we are back with our creator economy panel and this first question i want to turn to koopa with who uh already dropped a line that's already stuck in my head about how the crater economy allows you to be your own

nation-state and a nation-state is importantly called its own sovereign nation your own its own sovereign a sovereign sovereignty um and the cool thing about crypto and the through line about crypto is that you know you get to be your own bank you get to hold your own assets you get to be self-empowered and so cooper as a producer in the creator economy world how does one's relationship with themselves change if you are now the the person that owns your own equity in yourself and you are the person that is empowered to create without being extracted how does that change the person that is the creator yeah i love that question i mean i think the obvious answer is that you become in charge of the way they use social media social media is now your weapon you know

for the history of social media people feel like they're getting taken advantage of they don't like the emotions they're feeling from it they don't like the way they interact with it but you know with this new evolution the creator economy you're mobilizing audiences you're mobilizing messages you're earning income from it and that's switching your mind where social media is a tool to be taken advantage of actually becomes extremely powerful and so likening this to crypto we see things like on-chain governance where if you have valuable skills to bring to the table you can present that to a project and get paid to bring that idea into the world i think historically we've only seen this be done with d5 protocols and highly sophisticated financial products but moving forward the creator economy if i have an improvement or a way that you as a brand can further your likeness

in the wider social media landscape i think there's a very real world where you're getting a monthly budget to run podcasts for a creator to do content campaigns to do media campaigns and sponsorships and um when you start to identify what your skills are as a fan of any artist i think you're going to start to see that that relationship with the person you idolize so much becomes very very close in tune and you're now speaking with your favorite artists on a day-to-day basis because you guys are growing together and creating a [ __ ] ton of value together it does require like a different kind of thinking though cooper like um there's you know people are using their day jobs just asking for permission for everything right like my instructions come from my higher-ups and the boss and that's all determined by the ceo and the

company this is very permissionless like you have to take no one's going to tell you what to do necessarily when you're partaking the creator economy or part of a dow can can you reflect on that like what skills do people really need to have to succeed in the creator economy i would say social skills are probably the most important and this is actually why i've loved working in the creator economy is those human skills are favored far more than your financial capabilities so going into a discord being able to moderate a discussion being able to organize 10 people for a zoom call across five different time zones you know these very weird skills that you never really think of they're very minute in what they do but you end up becoming a very core piece of the puzzle so even if you're a passive participant who's not actively engaged

in talking publicly all the time you can serve a very important role behind the scenes and i think what we need to challenge ourselves to do as dowsing creator economies is be able to list those actions very granularly so instead of having general creator economy come and get involved you know do whatever you want having different teams and organizations where you can get involved and having clear on-ramps i think it makes it a lot easier for people that are confused how to get started to have clear direction of saying oh i'm really into product i'm really into writing i'm really into marketing and then having a direction to go and do those things and eventually earn from those actions i just want to underline what cooper said because i was not expecting you to say social skills as the skill you need in the creator economy and there are a lot

of people who who feel like kind of outside crypto because they don't know the cryptography they don't know the like the technical side of things they're not engineers they're not programmers but guys that's not necessarily what the core need is in the creator economy it's social skills right um and so there's lots of opportunities to plug in here anyway just wanted to underline that for folks love that jessie lee you guys want to build off of that before we move on to a different subject no okay all right so uh the creator economy we've established is both outside the world of crypto but also inside the world of crypto so i actually want to talk about where the creator economy and crypto overlap uh and there's a lot of conversations to be had

about digital organizations which we call daos how do daos fit into the world of the creator economy how do dows make the creator economy better um jesse let's start with you cool so so maybe before i answer that directly i'm going to just back up and and take take stock and sort of like where the creator economy has intersected with with crypto today and like obviously nfts were on snl like that was a really sort of important inflection point for the intersection of like the creator economy in the 3.0 version we discussed versus the 4.0 first time like you know creative people were making money in crypto you know selling nfts for eth um so that happened earlier this year and since then we start to see a lot of other crazy things happen so like

notably like now you know there's this concept of dowser or you know people coming together and pooling crypto assets crypto resources um to do cool [ __ ] so there's you know pleaser dao um collected edward snowden's nft and and people pleaser another crypto artist and you know what's interesting is this this collector this buyer of the nfts is is not a single person it's a group of people on the internet who use you know ethereum smart contracts to pool capital in order to beat all the other individuals um you know competing to win those auctions so that's an example of you know of a dow that's now sort of empowering the creator of you know this digital art um and and we're starting to see sort of

like even crazier iterations of the same idea where some of those dows in addition to pulling resources to collect nfts are now starting to like build entire products so there's like um there's this dao called partydao that's building a product to do what pleaser dow did which is pool resources and then go bid on an nft it their product will enable this um to happen sort of like automatically in an instant versus all the like manual work that that that please or die had to spin up so now like if you if you keep pulling on this thread where does it go right um i think it goes as big as you know creators of value on the internet building something as big and valuable arguably bigger and more

valuable than facebook it's not just these like you know individual sort of one-off collections um of nfts or or like one-off products like like party bit but something as sophisticated as as facebook and and like a lot of people kind of scoff at me when i when i say that right they're like how could how could a bunch of random people on the internet like build something as sophisticated as facebook which has like thousands of employees you know is led by this brilliant visionary ceo mark zuckerberg or whatever um but i i like to remind people that you know the internet built wikipedia right which at you know in the 90s if you told a bunch of people that um a bunch of randoms on the internet were going to build the biggest encyclopedia the most thorough like you know the the

the best encyclopedia ever they would have told you you're completely insane um but nevertheless they did it and so i would never bet against the internet hive mind out competing um you know a single centralized organization with with one ceo at home and we're just very early in that process but that's that's the potential of doubts in my view i'm hearing a prediction here which is super interesting jesse so if i'm i'm hearing what you're saying correctly you're saying that there is going to be a dow that is bigger and more significant and has even greater sophistication than current facebook at some point yeah and just to like qualify that a little bit because i know it sounds kind of crazy right like um again you're a lot of your listeners are deep on d5 so

i think there's lessons we can learn there in in in the d5 ecosystem i'm going to keep running with the uni swap example uni swap is a dow now right like there's this big treasury um and it's governed by its users the token holders uni swap governance appointed a grants committee to go and like fund interesting new projects to grow the ecosystem and what you get from um from from that grants program is a bunch of you know upstarts building cool products and so rather than having like one ceo um you know call the shots on all the different products that need to be built to grow a platform you have internal competition within the ecosystem you know to get these grants and sometimes

you have multiple applicants bidding for the same sort of you know request for proposals so you you have 10 different people building the same feature the same the same product idea so that that may be one way in which um you know dows these decentralized organizations actually outcompete their their sort of centralized counterparts um there's just more talent in the pool competing um to build the best thing the most talented people probably don't work for you i forget who said it but that quote comes to mind lee what's your take on daos i've been watching all of the activity with a lot of interest um yeah everything that jesse said was

super fascinating and i i buy that vision i i don't think people should bet against the internet hive mind and maybe just to sort of intersect that vision with the creator economy and creators in particular i would just say like i think historically up till now it's been viewed as kind of a bad investment to invest in a single individual creator because like it was thought that you know they can only get to a certain level of scale before their popularity tops out and they you know there's no more people who are going to like their content um they can only monetize in certain kind of like pretty restricted ways mostly through advertising and brand sponsorships

um but i think if we if we really delve deep into like why that has been the case and why creators have been limited from becoming bigger i think a lot of it has to come down to like the economic value was not properly distributed and people didn't feel aligned and incentive aligned with their success at scale um so when today when social media creators get really large they typically get signed to talent agency that talent agency takes you know a 10 20 cut of all of the earnings from the projects that they bring to them well that economic equation it works well to incentivize the agents to bring them a lot of opportunities but

it doesn't include the people at the end of the day who are probably going to be the most pivotal in the creator's success which are the fans like the end consumers of the creators content so i i think in the future creators can actually build much bigger businesses than they are doing so today because dows and crypto give them the tool set to economically align so many more participants and to give them um a stake both economically as well as politically um in their operations very cool now now cooper i know you're bullish on dallas and you even put a timeline on this i'm going to read out a tweet you just tweeted it before this

panel began shortly which was uh dows today are where nfts were a year ago brace yourself you say so what that what that says to me cooper is we're in for like a massive inflection up we're about to get snl maybe a year from now we'll see an snl skit on daos is that what you're talking about here why should we why are you bullish on daos i think daos are just the new llc you know i think you look five years into the future and there's no difference between llc today and a dow tomorrow you know the core difference there is there's no longer equity in companies there's tokens and networks when you start to think about all the positives that come with that it seems obvious that everyone's going to be forming dows and i think our challenge as an industry

is to really advance and solidify what those are so that people can build them in a meaningful way beyond kind of the cool experiments that we're seeing today guys this has been a fantastic panel and we are coming down to the end of our time so i want to do a quick breathe through of some of your guys's favorite creator economy platforms what do you guys where do you guys spend your time when you are trying to spend your time in the creator economy and and maybe these can be leads for the listeners and viewers as to where they should go if they also want to get a taste for the creator economy cooper let's start with you what's what are your favorite creator economy applications absolutely i'm going to kind of go rapid fire here because i'm involved with so many of them audios is a project that i

work very deeply with i think this embodies exactly what a creator economy platform looks like in music friends with benefits this is a dial that i've worked with for a long time great culture crypto community if you're new to crypto but want to get deeper involved with the creator economy pleaser dow which jesse mentioned for nft collections there's going to be some really exciting stuff there i want to give a big shout out to the bank list out i think what you guys did on the media side of things democratizing ownership there has been fantastic so d5 nft social tokens dows there's a dow for all of those that are involved in the creator economy take a little bit of luck on my twitter and i think you'll find something you like jesse what are your uh platforms of choice yeah so first i'm just going to co-sign

everything cooper said but then i'll add a few so um foundation and zora for nfts um i think foundation if you're an nft artist zora if you if you're more a developer wanting to build um sort of your own platform that's nft native and then um mirror i think is is another one that's that's really interesting and it looks like a blogging platform so if you're a writer i think it's definitely for you but um if you squint a little bit further it's a lot more than just a blogging platform in that they have all these widgets for crowdfunding and sort of splitting revenue and so like no matter what kind of creator you are you know any kind of like crowdfunding any any kind of like initiative you want to take with your audience it probably starts as a blog post we're

communicating the idea and so i would sort of view mirror more as just sort of a a way to connect with your fans and sort of monetize in web three native ways it's tool kit for that um so so that's that's another one um and yeah i'll leave it there i'm sure lee has more lee same question what are your favorite platforms plus one to mirror i think they're right race um which is the process by which new writers get on board to the platform is like the social event of the week with people actively campaigning to get more votes which is fascinating to watch um also plus one to foundation that's where i made my nft debut so

it will always hold a special place in my heart and then lastly i would say i've been spending a lot of time playing axe infinity which has been an interesting adventure um and it's like if you look into the numbers around the usage of axi it's pretty staggering there's 250 000 daily active users on axi and by being a user by being a player you are earning income through collecting these in-game nfts called small love potions and you can sell those small love potions on any exchange for income and so axi has become the source of income that rivals a lot of in real life jobs um especially for people in developing countries where

they're earning like 500 a month through playing oxy infinity um and that kind of scale puts it on the scale of some of the largest employers in the world in terms of people who are earning income through this particular mechanism so um yeah i think that's really interesting and i think the future of work is increasingly going to look something like it where there's no formal employer relationship but you're earning income through doing things that feel as fun as playing a game guys your parents will never believe that you're earning a full-time income by playing axey infinity and uh selling small love potions but that is a possible future um panel this has been a

lot of fun i want to end with maybe some advice that you would provide for people who want to get into the creator economies or entrepreneur investor a participant in some way jesse what advice do you have for people who want to get involved what should they do yeah so i think the my my high level advice is like um don't be discouraged by the rough edges crypto is still in a sort of like nascent nascent stage and um you know right now there's a lot of craft you need to figure out i think your listeners have largely figured it out because you've done a great job educating them on you know wallets and paying for gas and stuff like that um but a lot of people a lot of participants in the you know 3.0 incarnation of the creator economy

haven't got there yet so you know if we're reaching that audience my advice is like you know don't be discouraged the rough edges are going to get smoothed out and then all the benefits that we talked about on the panel today are going to you know become a lot more apparent to a lot more people so this thing is going to grow quickly um and the opportunity today is to just like get in on the ground floor cooper how about you my advice would be join a community don't start one i think there's a lot of excitement and doubts right now to spin up the dial out of left field and think it's going to be the next big thing there are now enough um high profile dolls being formed that your most valuable contribution can be joining that group and working for it

you know all these dows are still in such an early stage that the upside to be gained from working from them is exponential so if you're looking to get involved i think it's less about what token do i buy to get exposure to on a secondary market it's more about going into that discord server finding a way to slot in and earning some ownership because i think that you'll find the social capital gained from that work is far more valuable than anything else you're going to earn from the financial side you're buying it on an exchange okay so two good bits of advice there don't be scared away by the croft uh learn to dow first before you start your own leave finish this off what's your parting advice here i would encourage people to learn by doing

which is how i've always approached the creator economy i learned most about creators just by being a creator myself and talking to other creators and so if people are interested in investing studying analyzing creating like just do it and and try your hand at being a creator so if you want to learn about nfts just mention nft sell it um if you want to learn more about social tokens like buy some social tokens i think just participating and and being a part of the ecosystem is a great way to learn fantastic advice to end on something we often say you you learn by doing on the bankless journey it's no different in

the creator economy panelists thank you so much for teaching us about this important subject we'd love to have you back sometime thank you guys this is fantastic so much thank you for having us david does not want me to forget to remind you if you're watching on youtube make sure you like and subscribe this so we propagate this to more people uh risks and disclaimers none of this of course was financial advice you'll never find financial advice on bank list never ever uh ethereum is risky crypto is risky defy is risky you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but thanks for joining us on the bankless journey hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now

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