Why The Trillion Dollar Opportunity Is Social

Transcript

That's all the wrong way to think about it because if you're trying to learn how to do something, let's say basketball. You don't go watch, you know, LeBron James tapes and listen to like books on how to take a b how to take a jump shot. You go and do the thing and you're going to be really bad. It's going to be really ugly. It's going to be very painful. But at the end of the day, you're going to be so much further ahead than anybody else who is doing the other thing, which is like not actioning. >> Just like the streets of Manhattan, I'm going to keep this quick. Over 70% of our viewers are not subscribers. Yes, you. Every week we interview some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in the financial industry. The easiest way to support our channel is to hit the like

and smash the subscribe button. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy today's show. >> You say >> I think uh you joined my uh my co-host Andy here in our studio in the Empire State, if I remember correctly. I wasn't there for that one. So >> that was before Robin Hood changed. >> That was before a lot of >> a lot of stuff has changed, man. What what what's the last I mean it must have been 6 8 weeks ago. What's the last couple months been like? >> Man, it's been insane. Uh it's been a tremendous growth period for us. We've had the fortune of just you know continue to grow through many different occurrences, many different chain launches and ARC included and it's a blessing. We get to to bring crypto and hopefully other assets to the real world and bunch of consumers and yeah very

fortunate to be in the situation. >> So one of the things that we've been talking about is that the market conditions are different. Sure. But also the energy is different. And the way that we put that, people call it animal spirits. They call it a lot of things. >> We're saying we're having fun again. >> This is no longer apathy. We're having fun on chain again. FOMO is a big part of that. What does it mean to bring fun back >> to the trenches? >> It's an incredible privilege, right? Cuz as uh as a trader myself, it's something where in the bare markets, there's really nothing to do. And I think our thought was there's always a bull market somewhere. So we get the opportunity to bring that to people. I think markets are picking up now. So it's even more fun. And winning is fun, right? I think

like when people make money, when they find good positions, when they find good narratives, it's something that's joyful not for them, but for everybody else on the platform as well. So I think it's it's amazing and hopefully we can keep the uptrend going. >> Yeah, man. I mean, look, we have seen now 8 figure unrealized P&Ls from the likes of Dumb Crayon Eater as well as uh Quarty as well as Point Farm Cap. I mean these guys are out there with massive positions in ponds, massive positions in other assets. Um, social trading as a concept. The awareness of the concept has drastically increased. Um, I guess the question here is what next? Like I think we're in the beginning phase of

this bull market. So my take is that this just gets even crazier and bigger. I'm sure you'll probably somewhat agree, but it feels like the concept has been validated by the market, right? What's next for FOMO? What's next for you? How do you take this to the next level? >> Yeah, I mean, since day one, our goal has been to try to become the social graph of finance, right? So, that means that we need to be dominant in every asset category, onchain, majors, perks, prediction markets, stocks, IWAS, yield, anything that really occurs. So, for us, it's going to be how do we take the next step? How do we take the jump from whatever assets are available today to slightly more mature assets and to other asset classes broadly? So that's something that's incredibly exciting. I think it's kind of like the trillion

dollar question of do you get to this place where you can actually translate this social graph to others uh whether it's different asset classes, different consumers. So really excited about it. Honestly, I think in the next 6 to 12 months we'll see a lot more tokenized equity volume come on chain. I think you'll start to start to see you know stock volume start to materially become a a bigger percentage of just onchain market volume. And I think that's just the start of hopefully a very long uh and fruitful transition to what is going to be onchain for everything. >> Yeah, man. I mean I I see the vision. I mean it starts with memes. It starts with memes paired to stocks and then all of a sudden you're now live on Arc Chain and they are going to have a whole swath of tokenized equities. Obviously Robin

Hood chain does as well. And it's just so funny like scrolling down people's promo profiles and seeing swaths of meme coins. and you scroll down to like the dust tokenized AMC tokenized Nvidia and you're like wow this could really be something a lot bigger than just a trading platform for crypto assets it may have caught people by surprise to launch on ARC arc is known by the circle foundation as institutional dominated brand this very professional cloud but with that as proven by Robin Hood there also comes a lot of opportunity what's your take on the arc launch what is unique for FOMO here Why launch it?

>> Yeah. I mean, for us, we're we're constantly evaluating what are the most exciting chains that are to launch and what are the things that users are going to be excited to trade on, to use, to experience. And I think it was very evident from us very early on that ARC was one of those chains, right, where, you know, there's fatigue in the markets a little bit this week with some of the onchain assets going up and down and seeing some of the momentum go out the window a little bit. But I think all in all like new things are good, competition is great and I think that you know ARC has a really good team that really wants to capitalize on on on its chain, right? And I think that comes in a lot of different form factors. I think you try a lot of different things and

I'm personally excited to see what you know AI and the AI narrative might look like on on a chain that's you know institutional focused >> and and it does feel like ARC has sort of defined itself as one of the leaders in AI commerce agentic economy as AI and crypto intersect. say the question that I have and I'm not a hater just for what it's worth. No worries. >> But I'm I'm curious. >> You can handle the haters though. >> It's really just one word. I'm curious how you think about churn >> cuz I feel like you've probably thought a lot about this. It feels like this is something very relevant and you're I can tell by the way that you've gone and approached this industry. You're building for the long term, but you know churn is a very serious thing as it

pertains to these users. How do you think about this and and maintain user longevity? Yeah, I think there's a number of things that are very important to us and I think churn is part of this conversation but you know education diversification of asset classes experience with you know users teaching others with the social graph and I think that the the exciting thing for us is like we have about 2.5 million lifetime users today we might see 600,000 of them today on the app and in any given month we're seeing about 75% of users roughly uh visit the app on a monthly basis right so what that means is opportunity to reactivate to re-engage to learn to come back stronger. And one of the core principles that is important for people out there to know is we don't own any of the layers. We don't own the launchpad.

We don't own the AMM. We don't own any of the vehicles that actually contribute to getting money with more volume or more user losses. So if you think about it that way, our best incentive here is actually for you to have longevity as a user, for you to come back, try different products, and ultimately mature into what we think could be very valuable user to social graph itself. >> Why why is that a feature, not a bug? I think that's a feature because it it fundamentally aligns incentives here where you know for us we're thinking how do you how do you make sure that the longevity of the user is is is something that you can see through not just like their first day trading memes or trading asset classes but how do you get them to look upstream? How do you start trading tokenized equities? How do you start

thinking about yield? How do you start thinking about you know whatever it is is interesting to you as a financial speculation instrument. And I think that that's something that not a lot of people are trying to break into. Everybody has decided there's this one thing that I'm very good at. This is the one thing that makes me money. So, I'm gonna stay here because I'm I'm scared to lose my footing. But, I think for us, if we fail to make this jump, it's not something that is sustainable from the industry, and it's not something that's interesting to us. >> Yeah. I guess on this note of kind of like turning the the app from a place from like a brand perspective, from a a user perspective, of like a lottery ticket into a portfolio, right? So, when I've onboarded friends, and what keeps bringing me back to FOMO is the

referrals. is I just keep onboarding friends and they they use this a cut of trading fees. It's kind of, you know, it's very basic stuff here, but it it's what kind of works. And so I'm trying to get them to to not think about what runner they can get today or what trade they can hit today that's going to 10x their portfolio, but that it's a multi-week, multimonth, years long game. And that's a a transition for a lot of people that is hard to rationalize with when you're used to sports gambling or uh effectively think about these things like lottery tickets. How how can you position your messaging, your personal brand, your entire ecosystem around longevity versus these kind of quick hits?

>> I think we do that by enabling people who are, let's say, the top traders or the top educators to be able to share more of their opinions to go back and forth to engage in a two-way conversation. Right. Right now, the only way you can engage with somebody is you write a thesis and other people can view your thesis, they can like your thesis, they can share it, but there's no meaningful discourse happening, right? So, what is the next step there? Well, you need to allow them to have conversations, right? If I'm a new user and I see UNPCS is up $10 million and has sold a single dollar, I want to know why. Yeah. Right. >> I want to understand like what is the thing you're so bullish on? What is the outcome you're expecting? And I'd love a response and to just like learn by doing

cuz I think one of the fundamental misconceptions about trading and investing is that people think I need to go read six books. I need to go read Warren Buffett's newsletter. I need to go figure out what howard Marx has said in his, you know, most important thing. And that's all the wrong way to think about it because if you're trying to learn how to do something, let's say basketball, you don't go watch, you know, LeBron James tapes and listen to like books on how to take a b how to take a jump shot. You go and do the thing and you're going to be really bad. It's going to be really ugly. It's going to be very painful, but at the end of the day, you're going to be so much further ahead than anybody else who is doing the other thing, which is like not

actioning. >> Yeah. Talk to us about that reactivation journey because I'm sure people are taking their lumps especially if they're investing or trading on FOMO for the first time, right? Maybe they do get churned but you made a really good point earlier >> blown out on a couple on a couple >> which is the reactivation journey and you have the opportunity even after it's ugly and it's painful to come back. Tell us how the psychology of a user may adapt as they try the platform not once not twice but a third time and ultimately stick. Yeah, I think it's uh you know there's a lot of analogies here, but like you get on a bicycle, you fall, you get up, you get on a bicycle, you fall. Maybe you don't try for three months, you come back, you see from a very different perspective. And I think

honestly with investing, with trading, with just about anything that has upside or downside, you need to be somewhat lucky, right? You need to have favorable tailwinds. You need to have the right people around you. And I think that our job is to make sure that we can control the things we can control. How do we educate you more? How do we give you more tooling? How do we make you communicate better with other people? how to create a social graph that is tailored for you and your interests and not all of this other stuff that might not be pertinent to you. So, one of the cool things is we've now been live for about a year and a half and we're starting to see our retention graph smile and that's a funny turn because like you literally start to see it come back up this way where you know month

four, month five, month six goes down, goes down, goes down but month seven, month eight, month nine and a lot of that is market tailwind dependent. We've learned a lot of lessons from, you know, Robin Hood, Coinbase, a lot of these like really big trading apps where you can do everything in the world to try to retain users, but really the best thing to do is build a better product so when they come back, they're ready and they can actually utilize it better. >> Yeah, man. I mean, you guys, and I know that you hear this all the time, are one of the best teams at receiving product feedback and implementing. I'm going to keep pushing for NFTTS. I think FOMO listing NFTs would quite literally bring the NFT bull market back, especially given where I think we are in the bull cycle. I will leave that to your

engineering team and to your product team and to you, the CEO. Um, man, I got to ask, man, we're early to this app. It's a year and a half in. People are trading millions of dollars on on this thing. There has been no crypto app uh that has been super super successful outside of a handful of wallets that have not launched a token for a variety of reasons. Whether it be you guys are making a ton of money, buybacks, whether it be the team wants to uh hit an exit, if you will, but still do things the right way. There's a lot of incentives. You have venture capitalists, but obviously not the traditional crypto venture capitalist who might be expecting an early token or an early exit. I get the feeling you're in this game to win. And I know that you're not thinking about this in a two or three

year game. I get the feeling that you're not exactly looking for 100k under your mattress, right? You've done well on chain. You've traded, but just what can you tell us here? I mean, what what can you tell us about the future plans of FOMO and the community and how you think about rewarding these adopters who have contributed to your bottom line day in and day out? >> Yeah, I think the best way to think about this is like how do you do this at a micro level as opposed to a macro level, right? I think everybody thinks about big grand prize at the end, airdrop this, you know, I want to make six, seven, eight figures, but really like everything that we do in our product is meant to incentivize and reward the people who provide value to the social graph. So, we launched Creator Rewards about a month ago. In

one month, maybe not even a month, in three weeks, we've done about $11 million in payouts, right? That's on top of another six million in referrals. So, we're trying to give away money to people who are providing value, by onboarding people, by writing educational content, by discovering things early, by doing all these things that we think contribute to a very healthy social graph behavior. So, it's very easy to think, all right, what is the really big prize at the end? But I actually think like the very small prizes along the journey is going to be the thing that actually keeps people very happy, secure, you know, afloat and really willing to contribute to what we think is a very, you know, active and cultivating and growing social grad.

>> I can't lie. I say I come I go on the app every day and I get my my payout on the referral and I just keep allocating to a single token that's not going to be named because it's professional show here today and I just love it. I just come on every single day and I'm like, "Oh, thanks Se. Thanks Se." te tell us what it takes to build a social graph like like what are some of the things that you've taken inspiration from because I take it you know people launch a chain or a crypto app and they look at other successful crypto apps or other successful blockchains you launch a social graph you look at some of the most you know successful and prolific social networks out there Facebook Instagram Tik Tok WhatsApp are those the kinds of

applications that you take inspiration from or is there some other industry segment that you're learning? >> I think all of the the previous giants both successful and failed social media platforms have paved the way for how we think about social. So I think my my biggest or our biggest way uh to grab inspiration is from like who is the one that has done it through multiple eras. So Facebook is the prime example of that where they went from social graph invention right of like you connect to people you know it's about the person it's about your relationship and then they also dominated the next era Instagram which is an interest graph era which is it's no longer about is this person your friend but it's more about what is the content so now the thing precedes the person and that was an

incredible shift in social media one to social media 2 and now social media 3 in our minds is going to be the very next thing which is you know in a world of AI commodization content is easy it's very easy to go viral it's very easy to build a following by doing things that are related to generation of you know content or media. So what is real? Well, risk is real. Speculation is real. And one of the interesting conversations I had recently was like you think about social media psychology and a lot of it is feedback loops, right? Dopamine feedback loops of I put out a tweet, >> I get likes, I learn that it's good and I do it again. Same with photos, right?

But the core difference with FOMO in any of these platforms is on Twitter, if I go post a banger tweet, I have to try to guess and it's very subjective of why this went viral or why it's good. On FOMO, you go viral because you made a lot of money. And that's objective. Market cap goes up, you make money. You know, you don't sell and it goes up, it makes you make money. So, I think having the first ever objective feedback loop ever in social media is very, very powerful. And yeah, Facebook is honestly the inspiration for all the social media platforms that I've ever heard. Just say I got to ask one thing on that on that note, Robin. I know what you fired away. But it what we saw the last month and a half say was a lot of these, you know,

uh big traders that have large X accounts, whether anon or not, uh run up an unrealized P&L to the moon, right? And then I saw a Raspberry who's I think affiliated with you guys or a partner, great show. He's hilarious. Um and he's like, damn, like I I should have sold like I I was up so much. I had my rules. Flood always told me always be selling. Always be selling. But because I think he it was like, you know, it was public and so I didn't really know what to do. I didn't want to dump it. I didn't know how. And so what is the ramifications of the public nature of being up a gazillion and being like, I don't want to sell because I don't want to be seen as like, you know, uh the you know, you know, weak hands or I I don't want to

dump on people. Like what are the ramifications of being up a ton and being public in your mind? I think there's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The right way is you follow your own book, you follow your own rules, and you do it in a way where you know people are not hurt by your actions, right? But I think that this is something that is going to be widely criticized by a lot of people maybe, but I like to think of this as like when you're doing something right and you're doing at the highest level, you have both good and bad. So think about LeBron James, right? He has haters, he has fans, but the haters are the loudest, right? the people are that are going to give you the most issues are the ones who are coming at it from a

negative angle because it's better engagement. But I think that as we transcend this like trading e echo chamber of like just people on CT or people in small groups to like the world, there's going to be more and more opinions. There's always going to be somebody out there that thinks you did the wrong thing. Sure. Right, wrong, profit, loss, no matter what. So a lot of this is like, you know, when you become a celebrity for the first time or an athlete for the first time, you have an understanding of how do I do things the right way? How do I portray myself? How do I do things in a way that doesn't take every opinion into account, but just the ones that matter? And I want to say the same thing for the top traders where you're going to have haters. You could do everything by the book and

people will still dislike things that you do. So do it in a way that's grateful, that preserves your reputation, and that ultimately helps others. >> I love it. Say, thanks for your time, man. I think we're about wraps here, Rob. >> I got one last one. And it's so funny how, you know, based on your response, Andy and I go two completely divergent directions. >> That's always the case. I I I was going to ask because you know on ARC this is sort of the agentic chain as it seems like it's coming to be and I take it you're gonna have this agentic flavor of FOMO on Arc and you sort of answer my question already. I was going to ask you what is different about building a social graph for agents but I take it there is no difference. You already defined the prerequisite for what it

takes to go viral on FOMO. It takes making money. It's objective. And so as long as your agent is going and making money, the same thing that goes viral on FOMO socially with humans is the same thing that goes virally among agents. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> 100%. I think that at the end of the day, the P&L and the riskreward is one of the most objective metrics you can have. And whether you are 20, whether you're 50, 80, whether you're 1,000 or an agent or whatever it is, I think that this objective metric that'll stand true in this new graph that we want to call like the speculation graph era. And yeah, I'm quite excited to see how things uh advance from here.

>> Hey, thanks so much. >> Thanks, buddy. Best of luck, man. Cheers. Yeah, man.