Bankless - 110 - The Internet Reset | Alexis Ohanian

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Alexis Ohanian is the Co-Founder of Reddit, as well as the Founder of venture capital firm SevenSevenSix. As a builder-turned-technology entrepreneur, Alexis is focused on making the world a better place through novel projects and initiatives like Coinbase, Axie Infinity, Opensea, and Riverside (which we used to record this episode!) We explore how Alexis would rebuild Reddit for Web3, and how many emergent behaviors in the early days of Reddit and the internet are surfacing again—this time, on steroids with crypto-enabled communities. Alexis is concerned with empowering the good parts about internet culture, doubling down on the importance of community and culture. Tune in for sage advice on investment insights and investor cheat codes—where are the next opportunities? Wherever they are, Alexis is sure to be found there. ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  👀 POLYGON | LAYER  2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon   ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across   🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask   💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger   🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix   🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:00 Alexis Ohanian is Having Fun 8:57 Getting Into Crypto 16:40 Reddit and Web3 24:52 Emergent Behaviors 34:00 Rebuilding a Web3 Reddit 39:38 Internet Reputation 45:00 Permissionless Web3 53:52 What’s on the Horizon? 1:00:26 Seven Seven Six 1:04:10 The Case for Optimism 1:07:24 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Alexis on Twitter https://twitter.com/alexisohanian?s=20&t=YFn8AnfCSkaWdAxctt9QXw  SevenSevenSix https://twitter.com/sevensevensix?s=20&t=YFn8AnfCSkaWdAxctt9QXw  Alexis’ Art https://opensea.io/assets/0xb6329bd2741c4e5e91e26c4e653db643e74b2b19/696  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Great episode for you guys today. The internet reset. Can we just pull out the power cord and restart this whole thing? That's the idea we get into this discussion with Alexis O'Hanian, who has been recently

crypto-pilled. A few things to take away from this episode. Number one, hear his story. How did Alexis actually get crypto pill? The founder of Reddit, co-founder of Reddit, he fell down the rabbit hole. What does that look like? Number two, how he'd actually rebuild Reddit if it was on Web 3. What does that look like?

And number three, his investor cheat codes. Where are the next opportunities in crypto? Be on the lookout for some of those that are mentioned as well. David, what were your thoughts in this conversation with Alexis? Yeah, I very clearly remembered the moment I got into Reddit. and started to understand what was really going on there. And the thing that captivated me about that platform was just the emergent behaviors that the platform enabled the communities.

And it was just one of these things where all these weird, quirky internet culture things all seemed to be born out of Reddit, so like the rage comics, some of the early memes. And like memes and Reddit, I discovered these things around the same time. And it's really all about emergent behaviors. And so we take this conversation to Alexis about what, he sees in the early days of Reddit and the parallels that he's seeing now in Web 3. And that was a very important story for him and how he was able to wrap his mind around Web 3. It was using a lot of these early concept, these early principles that Reddit really leaned into that are now like

on steroids in the world of Web 3, in the world of online internet, crypto-enabled communities. And so we unpack all these parallels and connect them to the Internet at large and how this internet culture was definitely existent in Web 1, kind of lost in Web 2, but is now, as you said, getting reset and reborn in Web 3, which is what Alexis apparently makes him optimistic about the future of where this whole Internet experiment is going. It's a super cool conversation. In Reddit, I think, is one of the most organic internet native social media platforms, certainly today.

It's where I kind of got my start learning about crypto as well. and I think probably many of the bankless audience did too. So fantastic conversation, really fascinating. I think there's some insights here you can carry with you into the investing world as well about what's coming next in Web3 and what's coming next in crypto. Alexis has been on our bankless podcast wish list for quite some time. So we are super excited to get right into the conversation with Alexis O'Hanian. But first, we want to tell you about these awesome tools that will help you go bankless.

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to check out their fantastic documentation. And if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy, you can bridge over your eth or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest, Alexis O'Hanian. He's a technology entrepreneur, now a VC, now an investor. He's focused on making the world a better place as VC firm 776. He's an early investor in lots of products that we know and love. Coinbase, Axi Infinity, OpenC in the Web 3 space.

Even the software we're actually using to record this. Shut out, Riverside. He's invested in that, too. You may also know him as one of the co-founders of Reddit. He's really an expert in the internet. I think specifically internet communities. So he's got a lot to teach us today. Alexis, welcome with Bankless.

How you doing, man? Oh, thank you for having me, Ryan. I'm just happy to be here. I enjoyed chatting with you and David before the show began. I'm happy we hit record so we can save all this gold for your listeners. Do you know what? You always look like you are having fun. Oh, good.

With the internet. Like, whatever you do, it always looks like you're having fun. And everything you do also feels like, Very human. Like, it feels just very authentically human. Is that a through line? Is that something you've striven for? Is that just part of your nature?

I think it's the latter. I think it's a part of my nature. I guess you got to dig up the old content from, like, 05 and 06, you know, grinding it out, founding Reddit to see if I still have the same vibes. But I think so. I don't know. The advice I find myself giving CEOs more often than not is to be, to think of communication on the internet, just as you would communicate.

communication offline. And, and, you know, this really comes up in community building. Because people for 16 years, especially in the last couple years, I've been asking, like, how do you build community, blah, blah, blah. And, and a lot of it comes back to the same way you would do it offline. If you were inviting people over to your house or bringing folks over to, you know, a convention hall. Like, you think about community building online, the same way you do offline. You bring good people together. You give them opportunities to, you know, have great experiences. is you're, you know, it's sort of like the ideal party host is someone who's not there talking about themselves, but helping connect good people and starting good conversations in good times.

And that's, that's so much of it. And I think I've been fortunate because creating Reddit was probably, was not just a great outcome for me professionally, but it also set the stage for getting the reps in for all the things that are most valuable now in Web 3 16 years later. And, and it's, it's just about that authenticity and I guess that's I don't know that's my vibe is that what brought you into web three is that what brought you into crypto it's like we talked to so many people on bankless and they all have a story of how they came into crypto and crypto has all of this surface area right some people are uh you know it's appealing the finance side of it the economic side of it the like sovereign money side of it the individual expression side what brought you into crypto what was your hook so there's what brought me into crypto and then there's what crypto pilled me which are two different questions talk about both for the first, I, 2011, 2012, I was a partner Y Combinator and I meet this, this bright young man who had just left Airbnb, a great job at Airbnb. I think it had just become a billion dollar company. It was a clear winner in Silicon Valley. And he had been doing fraud detection and prevention there. His name was Brian Armstrong. And he'd entered that batch of YC.

And he said, you know what? I think Bitcoin is going to be a big deal. And right now it's a pain in the ass to buy and sell and I want to make it really easy. I want to make it so simple for anyone to buy some Bitcoin and participate in this. And candidly, the only reason I did that seed investment was because the R slash Bitcoin community on Reddit at the time was so engaged. And as an investor, I'll tell you my cheat code, and I've been a pretty public, it's not that secret. But I visit the nascent Reddit communities, if there are them, if they exist, for the things. For the I'm investing in because that's a great barometer. You can't really fake community on Reddit. If it's there, it's there. If it's not, like, it requires such a Herculean effort to make work that

you're not going to fake that one easily. And I don't know, I just saw something there that was pretty wild. It was really emphatic. I had been to enough, at this point, I still think I've been to more Reddit meetups than any person on the planet, like literally all over the world. And at more and more Reddit meetups, I was hearing from more and more redderers. I mean, think of the folks who came out to a Reddit meetup in like 2011, 2012, 2013. These are hard-dict. These are hard users. I mean, I'd go to some meetups.

Yeah, I'd go to like Riga in Latvia or I went to a Reddit meetup in Halifax up there in Canada, Nova Scotia. Like, I mean, not just L.A., New York, SF, but like everywhere. And I went to one in Bangalore, India. So, okay, one of the interesting through lines was like, for these, really hardcore Reditors, I started hearing more and more about Bitcoin and about crypto and about these ideas of decentralization. And I thought, okay, well, the R-slash Bitcoin community is super hyped about this. If you can get that many Redditors that excited about a new technology, you're probably, there's probably something worth paying attention to, but the government

will definitely shut it down. So I'm not going to get my hopes up too high. But still, and those were the pretences through which I got excited about doing this investment. And it was years that went by is I started to see more and more talented people, you know, wanted to go all in on it. And I thought, okay, this is interesting. You know, I still don't think it's going to like survive. Because if it works, this will, this is going to assail so many institutions, right? It will upend, so many parts of our lives and reimagined them. And there's no way that that's going to actually work because it just, candidly, just seems so far-fetched. And, uh, and, uh, And then when I got crypto-pilled properly, was at the start of COVID.

Because I started looking around and seeing, you know, and at this point, right, Coinbase is on its way to IPO. It had been making a number of investments over the years around the space and been lucky to be a part of some early pre-sales. And I'd done well, but the whole time I'm just like kind of holding my breath because I'm like, this is too good to be true. Like when when you're a kid reading about major historical events and technological shifts. At least when I was a kid doing those things, I just never could have imagined myself

being a part of it, let alone living during that time, let alone being party to it, just seemed pretty far-fetched. And so with every passing year, I'm like, holy shit, this thing is actually, like, it keeps growing, it's growing. There's more and more talented, bright, driven people building on it, which is a great sign. And then I started seeing things, you know, as we're all locked inside, we're all feeling all kinds of existential dread and anxiety about the world. You started seeing people looking for ways to commune digitally. And all of a sudden, Twitter, where I was already spending a ton of my time, started having more and more conversations around all things crypto. NFTs were certainly one, one popular one, but more broadly, just more and more people talking

about building, creating together. And I started to see things that reminded me of early Reddit. And that's when I got fully crypto-pilled because I realized, like, okay, we've reached a point of no return. This is from a like regulation standpoint. And we'll see what this executive order that's coming out. But, you know, we've essentially reached a point where, I mean, you know, country, Ukraine was taking donations over Bitcoin and Ethereum. Like we've reached a point now where it's a part of the culture. There's enough people who are bought in, literally and figuratively to it. and and and and it's here to stay and so now you started thinking okay what can we do with this and

and over the last few years i just started seeing so much of this really interesting energy that just like i said reminded me the early days of reddit except now people who were early and right could benefit from the upside and and i mean that both financially but also sort of spiritually Right. We are, I don't know, even back when we were just collecting like seashells on the beach, our species really likes private property. And we like this idea. And look, the ability to have private property also incidentally makes it even more interesting to then have shared property because that shared property is only special if you have a concept of personal and private property. But at its core, like there is something special about that. And seeing, that switch flip among so many people who now found a new gateway into why this should matter, because now they could reimagine how gaming could be different. And they started seeing versions of that, obviously, an investor. And actually, like you said, so rare, another one. And seeing this resonate as a kid who grew up playing tons of video games and spent tons and tons of

money that I'll never get back. And yet also a kid who, you know, bought a ton of trading cards and magic cards, even spellfire, which was like the D&D knockoff of Magic the Gathering, you know, We took for granted the fact that we owned all of our in-game assets because, you know, you bought the card and then you got to keep them. And if you wanted to, you can give them to your kid sister, you could sell them, you could do whatever with them. They were yours. And the metaphor seemed so obvious to me. It's obviously still pretty contentious in some communities. But I think in hindsight, well, again, just feel very, very, very clear. And so as I sat here watching all of these people get so excited, creating together and hoping together. And that, I guess, it was that communing of people tied into a sense of ownership and a potential for creating something bigger. I mean, even looking at failures like Constitution Dow, you still see the same kind of energy that just reminded me of 15 years ago on Reddit as people pooled money together to help for a fundraiser just to do some good work, right? But now you have something that's not limited to one platform. It is truly global. It is it is boundaryless. And man, I mean, we're in the earliest days of it.

So anyway, that's, when I got crypto-pilled was the wedge informing was seeing this community behavior that reminded me of early days of Reddit, except now it's so much more potential and so much more upside because it's not singular. It's not centralized. It is truly global. And that's definitely where I want to go down the rabbit hole of just to get this conversation started off, which is just the parallels. Because there's so many parallels between Reddit and Web 3, as you've alluded to. And I think a lot of the parallels between these two things are also very foundational to the Internet itself. There's a lot of. of things about Reddit that captivated my attention when I first got into it, that also captivated my attention about Web 3. I kind of want to unpack these things with you because I think it'll give listeners premonitions of things to come in the rest of this decade. The things that captivated my attention about Reddit when I first logged on was that like it gave the user so much control and it gave the community so much control. So like a subreddit was basically like a blank slate of a down of sorts. It had, it was just up to the

the community to etch in the story of what the subreddit was. And everyone on Reddit would start with like a blank account. And it kind of feels like it felt like when you made your Reddit account, like you spun up your brand new Ethereum address for the first time. These felt like the same things. And like learning how to Reddit and learning what Reddit was was something that you had to experience for yourself. You can't you could. There was no onboard. There was no onboarding. You had to just go do it. And then the same thing of Web 3. Like you can't really just like listen to bankless and understand Web3, you have to go and actually experience it for yourself. And like this is also true for like kind of the Web 1.0 days.

Like you couldn't just go read about it. You had to go experience it. It was all community driven. And now that we have this Web 3 data point and this Reddit data point and this web one data point, it kind of all seems that there's some amount of just like individual first, community first, user self-sovereignty, emergent behavior platforms that the internet is trying to produce. And I'm wondering using your history and experience at Reddit how you see this all unfolding in the world of Web 3 and beyond. So I think we inadvertently got a lot of things right in a process that really was rooted in an experience growing up on forums. I mean, I ran a PHPBB forum in college. You know, open source software, ran this was called eyeswide.org,

had maybe 600, 700 community members active. And we just talked about politics. We talked about philosophy. I just loved doing it in college. And my friends at the time thought I was pretty weird for doing it. But it was, it just felt good to be a community manager. And I just really enjoyed the conversations there. And I felt like it was satisfying, this was right after 9-11.

It was satisfying a part of me that wasn't getting fed with traditional media. and you know, starting Reddit right after that, really in a lot of ways, right, this is just repackaging message boards and forums that have been around since the earliest days of the internet. But creating it in a sort of singular network with a slightly better interface, slightly. I still, I got a few things right with the up votes

and down votes and comment sorting, but some of the other things are a little too Spartan. But designing all that was really just a sort of remix of Web 1. And then, you know, the whole innovation of quote unquote Web 2. And look, I know people can roll their eyes at the branding of Web 3. This is sort of a necessary evil. We're going to just at the same time, I swear, in 2005, starting Reddit, everyone was rolling their eyes the same way around Web 2.

And they were just like, oh, this is just some fun JavaScript that lets you load things on the page in real time. Like, why are we calling this a movement and user-generated content, whatever? Yes. It's all just branding. But I think it's an important shorthand because it is identifying a major transition now. And this isn't my quote. But the idea that, you know, Web 2 was read and write. And now we've moved to Web 3, which is read and write and own, is really meaningful.

Because we inadvertently got some things right. And I remember even designing the karma system was just, look, name taken from slash dot. The upvotes minus downvotes equals karma score was the laziest implementation I could come up with. simply because it worked to encourage good content and discourage bad content. And, you know, it turned out it was very motivating for people because they liked seeing their name on a leaderboard. And I borrowed all kinds of elements from video games for things like awards and 10-year club badges and all these other things, which now people identify with.

They'll introduce themselves, not with their government name or their Reddit username. They'll just say I'm a five-year Redditor, a 10-year Redditor, or 12-15-year Redditor, right? But those are just pings that live on our server. But now all of a sudden, if you talk about pings that live on a chain, you now have real receipts, right? And my very naive take on this is if it worked without ownership, it will work really well with ownership because there is value in having those receipts. And so I really believe in, you know, speaking broadly around web two, so this, you know, social media as we know it, I know you all are younger than me, so as you all grew up with, it's probably going to look like a weird transition. I think in the grand scheme of the internet is actually going to look

like a blip because it becomes an intelligence test once you provide ownership as to why you would ever want to participate in a scheme where you don't actually own the things that you produce. The user experiences today are still so janky. And I actually don't, I mean, yeah, like, we still could have done a better job. I take full responsibility. It could have done a better job onboarding new users to Reddit. For sure.

I think it would have helped us grow a lot faster. I think don't take, don't have the lesson B make a terrible new user onboarding experience. Make the lesson from this. In spite of a terrible new user onboarding experience, there was something here that people still wanted to dive into because the content in the community was so good and so strong. But even if we had had a better new user onboarding experience, you still would have needed, one still would have needed to like take time to actually understand the community before diving in. And why? Because these online communities are the same as offline communities.

You move to a new town. If all of a sudden, I don't know where you all are in the world, but all of a sudden you move the next day to Bangalore. Shout out the Redditors who I met at that meetup. you you you you show up the first day and want to make some friends you don't just barge into the first I don't know meetup you can find a first restaurant you can find and just start saying hi to people and start pitching whatever you're into right that's just not we as a human as a species we're going to spend a little bit of time understanding a new community we're going to spend a little time observing and watching and listening to start to learn etiquette and culture and all these other things that we can have a good experience online community should work the exact same way and

That's the part that is, on the one hand, it creates friction, but on the other hand, that friction creates the culture and the community and the reason why there are in jokes and there are out jokes. And so that's always a tension that we as a species have to figure out and navigate, but it's what defines communities. And what's wild now is we know it worked. Social media proved it worked at scale with billions of people all across the world in spite of the fact that the, the, the, the ownership equation wasn't there. The user experience was all things considered actually pretty bad, right? Because at the end of the day, the way that you kept the lights on was by harvesting people's private information for advertising or some other version of that, which was not

really rewarding the content creators or the community builders at the end of the day. So I don't know. I think it's going to be a blip. And I know I just monologued at you, but hopefully that's a few lessons that are valuable for the builders of today. Well, we are definitely here to hear your monologue. And so the next monologue I want to hear is unpacking the topic of just like emergence. When you don't ascribe too much top-down design structures as I think, as I claim that like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram have done in their designs telling the users, well, this is the way that this app is structured.

Reddit and a lot of the web one days. And I think what we're seeing a lot in the web three days is like just like a basic. Here's a fundamental primitive platform for your community to exist. now go create you go do something and like this natural the creativity that that a lot of these platforms bestow upon their users gives them a lot of room to have their own emergent behaviors and what is really emergent behavior other than like the culture that we all agree on that we decide that we have value how do you see this like role of emergent behaviors in online communities like how do you see this trajectory moving forward beyond platforms like reddit and

into the world of web three so we are in the earliest days of this year, right? And we're going to see emergent behaviors come up. And they're going to define a lot of what we love and enjoy. The wild dynamic here is I actually think at some point, you know, on the tech adoption curve, you get to that fat part in the middle. And the average user there actually doesn't want to tinker, doesn't want to create, does not want a blank canvas. The person there, and they're a necessary component, right, to become mainstream, you, by definition, have to grab those folks in the middle. Maybe you don't want to become mainstream.

But if you want an idea to truly become mainstream, you need a lot of people who actually are never going to care about that stuff. And as a product designer and as an investor now, I think a ton about user experience because the user experience for those earliest adopters is different from the user experience of the mainstream. And it's an interesting intention because, yes, by its nature, everything on chain is very like, good luck, sovereign individual. wish you all the best.

Figure out for yourself. And look, I consider myself a pretty early adopter. I still, however, I want to be coddled in certain parts of my like crypto and Web3 experience because I just like there are things I want to invest my time in and then there are other things that I don't. There are things I want to invest my anxiety in. And then there are other things I don't. And so every user is going to fall somewhere on that sort of tech adoption curve across

different technologies and different needs. All that said, the emergent behavior period that we're in right now is fascinating because I'll give you a specific example. Some of the most famous things about Reddit did not come from us. It came from our users. So for instance, even the notion of self posts. So originally Reddit started, we just let people link out. That was it.

And we had a not very good SEO strategy, which meant that our, comments pages were just sequentially numbered. So when you posted a new link, it would just, it would be appended with, you know, 3,465. And then if you posted one, it would be 3,466. And one of our users realized this and guessed what the link would be when they hit publish and made a self-referring post, which created the first self-post. We thought that was clever. Okay, let's just productize that. And so we did. And then it wasn't long thereafter that one of them showed up and said, hey, I'm a dental hygienist, asked me anything. I forget what the original one was. And it was this interesting meme. And people loved asking questions of some random person.

It wasn't a celebrity. You just had an interesting life, or maybe not even that interesting ostensibly, but you get to ask some fun questions and actually becomes really interesting. And, you know, AMAs are now ingrained in internet culture. I don't even know how many people actually even know those came from Reddit. But we have a show called AMA, Ask Me Anything. And it's all from Reddit, right? That's where it originated in AMA. Well, I'm glad, see, and I'm glad that it has flourished. It is totally invented by some random person on the internet. Some pseudonymous person will never know.

And it's probably one of the most famous things that Reddit has done, right? And so that gives us a lens into like how you can benefit from emerge behavior, even when you have a top-down centralized company like we did, which is just, you know, still shipping the things we want to ship, but doing so that's pretty well informed and reactive to. interesting stuff we see happen. And that is the very nature of everything that is getting built right now. And the problem at the end of the day, any centralized organization still has to make, I mean, it's a gift and a curse. They still have to make hard decisions about what to focus on and what not to. Because if you focus on the right thing, like I don't think SpaceX can happen in a truly decentralized fashion. Maybe someone wants to get out there and get it started, prove me wrong.

SpaceX Dow. But I really believe, right, something that complex, something that, you know, the average person actually can't contribute to helping SpaceX in a lot of ways. Like you actually knew rocket scientists

to do a lot of that work kind of thing. There are some projects where you really need centralization. And you could still take lessons from this world. Fine. But like, I don't know. We'll see if the rocket doubt proves me wrong. But there are plenty of things, though,

where a, a properly incentivized and connected, decentralized community will outperform any centralized group a million times out of a million. And content creation is a really great example of that, right? As evidence, you can look at, I mean, even TikTok, which is still one of those web two manifestations, crushing Quibi, didn't matter how many dollars you had, how many A-listers you had, you're never going to compete with millions of teenagers with smartphones, able to produce content endlessly, that is on trend, that is inventing trends, that's, you know, what people want. Okay. But This, I'm excited to see now because we get the web one energy of, hey, holy shit, I just made a website

on GeoCities. Like, what can I do next? And I was that kid, right? That's how I got into programming was, was, was I got a book on HTML 4 and started building a website on GeoCities and like, this is the coolest thing ever. And I misread the page counter at the bottom. And so I thought, because I, every time I'd reload to check, you know, I was updating an image or whatever. I assumed it was a random person actually coming to see the websites. It's like,

oh my God, there's like 10,000 people on my site. This is amazing. It was just 10,000 page views and it was all me. But right, that changed my life. Now, that in, gosh, I was in, let's see, graduate 2000. So 1997, maybe. That's when it was 96, 97. I was 13, 14 years old. I had no idea. I could not have even conceived that 10 years later, I'd be done. designing these up votes and downvotes and a real-time commenting system and a platform like Reddit, just not even 10 years later. And because my brain was still so naive and so just awestruck with like, oh, shit, I can put an image on the website that on a website that anyone in the world can see. And so we're in a similar stage now where everyone's just kind of like, oh shit, we can

put things on the internet that anyone can see. Like, what can we do next? The difference is when all of us were doing it back then, you know, aside, except for some forums and message boards, we were pretty siloed, right? This was a sub-sub culture of people building. Today, thanks to the Web 2 blip, it is now mainstream culture. Internet culture is culture. Everyone is online and spending most of their lives there, right? You can even argue the Metaverse has been here, not just with obvious examples like World Warcraft and Fortnite, but even Instagram. There are people already buying assets, they're buying the Louis Vuitton purse to take a photo of, to impress a bunch of digital people with their digital asset, which just happens to be a photo of them wearing the

purse that 99.999% of people will never actually see them with. So the Metaverse is here. It's just not evenly distributed. And we're still in this interesting tinker phase of creation, except we have an audience that is global and ready and excited by what we're building. And so instead of it taking the next Alexis 10 years to be like, oh, I can make a website on GeoCities to, hey, I'm launching this thing called Reddit, it's going to take them 10 weeks, 10 months. I don't know, but the rate of innovation is going to happen so much faster. And I'm, this is why I'm so excited by this. This is why, like, I don't have to be working right now.

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I'm curious about this, because I think there are a lot of probably 14-15-year-olds listening, you know, to bank lists and exploring the web three space in the same way you were when you were that age, like building stuff on GeoCities, right? And I'm curious if you could like, I guess put yourself in the shoes of, let's say you, only rather than you in 2005 when you started Reddit, you're in like the year 2022. And you've got these new Web3 primitives that are, basically, we have the Web 1, Web 2 communication protocol primitives. And that's great. But now we have this ownership protocol primitive. Now, how would you rebuild a Reddit or how would you build the next

big thing? Like, put these ingredients together for us because you've got this expertise around communities, this experience with Reddit, now you've seen the potential of all of these new ownership primitives that are coming in Web 3. What would it look like? You know, a new Reddit, for example? I would think of Reddit a little bit like Craigslist. a little bit like entrepreneurs 15 years ago thought about Craigslist and not just because of the aesthetic similarities. But if you'll recall, you know, there were a couple of plucky founders in YC who we had backed who were going after a section of Craigslist called rentals. And they said, look, like people can rent, you know, a bedroom for a couple days on Craigslist, but user experience is terrible, right? It doesn't feel safe at all.

And we're going to build something called Airbnb, which will make it beautiful. for people to feel safe renting out or renting someone's spare bedroom. Someone made this great mock-up of how all of these businesses basically carved up parts of Craigslist to offer verticalized sections of that platform. And so the way I would think about it is, you know, there are all these emergent community behaviors that we saw across Reddit over almost two decades, across all kinds of different things, from raising hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in a fundraiser to trying to coordinate dollars to like name a bowl game off of our slash CFB of the college football

subreddit to you know even just creating artwork have giving creators like shitty watercolor a platform where they could just make great content and and so you started thinking about this and you're like okay well uh i commented somewhere i think i was on i was on another pod and i got asked about Dow's or I guess there's ambitious predictions the next five years. I think everyone or a material number of people are going to participate in a Dow over the next five years. They won't know it. They don't need to know what it's called. Remember, the average person doesn't know what a hypertext transfer protocol is. They don't need to. They just need to know that they want to go on the internet and visit a website. And we should be thinking about NFTs the same way. We should be thinking about Dow's the same way. These are underlying protocols. We are so damn down in the weeds. The average person only care. is about user experience. The average person only talks about user experience. That's the thing they tell their friends when they use something delightful, right? They're not talking about the protocol layer to make it happen. They're talking about, oh, I did this dope thing. You should come do it with me. And so that's, if I'm building here, I'm thinking about this stuff. And I'm thinking

about how do we abstract away so much of the crappy parts of the user interface to make it seamless for people to get value out of this new technology. And so maybe it is pooling money together so that you can buy the Constitution. And there's there's there's a there's a dozen companies now trying to do some version of the easy Dow. But thinking along those lines is what is going to get this all to the next level. And and again, it's exciting. I wake up every morning like a kid on Christmas Day because I'm like frantically on Twitter and catching up on some discords, just trying to see what I missed, just trying to see what else shipped and what else is happening. And so I would spend a lot of time actively engaged in the communities of builders

who impress you the most, right? Follow them on Twitter, be a part of telegram groups that you feel are high signal. Discord community is like, this is where the learning is happening in public. There are so many charlatans. It breaks my heart, all the charlatans in this space. I don't, Ty Lopez just didn't have teacher. I'm like, they suck. I hate, hate, hate, hate that part of it. It's a, it is a, unfortunately, you know, it is a reality, right? When you, you create, when you have a system like this, especially one that involves money and value creation like this, right, it's going to attract grifters, it's going to attract charlatans. And, you know, I cannot ever endorse any of them. But I realize they're a part of the process. So the best

thing we can do is just shun them and hopefully encourage them to build real things. And, but I would say stay away from the, stay away from quick cash grabs. I, I, being long term, greedy in this environment is going to be so much more selfish and such a smarter move financially than being short-term greedy. And so that's one of my mantras. Because if you're really creating something of long-term value for as many people as possible, like that actually in this system is going to create a lot of outsized value for you in the long run, but also do the thing that we need, which is building things that people actually want and actually sort of moves the needle on progress, not just another lazy cash grab. I do think people forget that the best asset they have

in the Web 1, Web 2, Web 3 space is the reputation. Reputation. That remains so, for sure. Dude, I had, you know, I was fundraising from a pretty well-known, I could say it's Peter Thiel. And this was, we were, they passed incidentally. And, but he asked, he asked me, this was a long time ago, but he asked me, he's like, what's one thing about the world that you realize other people don't or whatever? The canonical Peter Till question. And I was like, well, it's that people will care more about their Reddit username than their government name. And I think I got it half right. I do know that that is true now. It's five years later, six years later. And there are so many writers who care more about their identity, even though it's totally contrived, it's fluffy bunny

16, because that's where they have relationships. That's where they have fame. That's where they have whatever, a history of things that they've created. They have something, right? They have meaning. They have community. Whereas they could show up for. for work at the office, I mean, for an office, but you can show up for work at the office every day, see the same people every day and not have any kind of connection with them. And that is special. And so I say I got it half right because I will now apply that argument to what is being created in Web 3. I believe wholeheartedly, the online identity, the digital identity, which will more often than not be pseudonymous, is going to be more valuable to more people than their government name.

And incidentally, as a species, this is not totally new. And I learned this at, we sponsored a drag con. Gosh, this was like 2014, 2015. And I remember talking to a couple of folks during the AMAs and a couple of these queens said, like, we were talking on the subject. And they were like, don't you understand? Our entire culture is around a community of people who have decided we want to create an identity for ourselves, right? This is the truest expression of ourselves and doesn't usually align with what's on the government issued ID. But it's who we are.

And I'm sitting here like, like, okay, here. is now a very clear offline precedent for this. The internet now enables it at a much greater scale, but still preserves this level of intimacy. And now that you add ownership to it, I mean, get out of the way. This is going to keep growing and steamrolling. And like I said, you might be sitting here listening to this podcast thinking, well, like, I don't actually want to spend all my time online. I never could imagine getting excited about a digital asset. And I just remind you of, I remind you that Instagram photo you took of that great outfit because you're actually already participating in this in a way because you're you've created a digital self. You have a digital

identity that you probably care of just as much, if not more about than your offline one. That's why that's why these apps are so popular. And that part for the generation coming up, it's already hardwired. For this generation of true, true digital natives now, there's no turning that clock back because it's such an empowering thing to have it that I don't see it going back. Do you know, the last concept I think we want to talk about is conceptually because I think you're making a great case for Web 3 throughout this. And to me, Web 3 more resembles Web 1 than it does like Web 2, right? And that everything is. So I read the book that you wrote, I don't know, it was back in 2013, 2014 without their permission. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Deep cut. I went on the deep cut.

But I think the concept of without their permission is like with Web 1, anybody could create a website, launch an app, start a community, build a company, no permission required, no intermediary, right? And I feel like between Web 1 and Web 2, we sort of lost a piece of that. Chris Dixon calls it a little bit like the internet became Disneyland. We've got like a few centralized companies that kind of control all the property. It didn't feel like New York City, didn't feel like Brooklyn. There's nothing organic about it. Now I feel like Web 3 is starting to recapture that element.

I'm wondering if you could talk about this maybe last concept of permissionlessness. Why is that so fundamental? Why is that so necessary? So I believe it is fundamental and necessary for tremendous creativity. I do look at this stuff as cycles. And I do think we're at the start of a new, excuse me, to your point, I think similar to Web 1, where the start of a new cycle, where it is sort of inherently, well, it is inherently decentralized

and where now we have a bunch of people just figuring out what we can do and they don't have to ask for permission to go do it. Ultimately, as you work your way up that tech adoption curve, we talked about earlier, you're going to get to folks who want a certain amount of, not necessarily centralization, although in some cases, yes, but they just want a different user experience because they don't want to do all that work, right? Like, at a certain point, MySpace just touched on potentially what people wanted as a social network, but Facebook really nailed the simplicity of, and the timing, frankly, of being able to share photos really at the core of it, right? I was at this thing. I took a photo of you. You get an email

notification that says, hey, I took a photo of you and you want to go see it. And that was the viral loop that spun up. And it was a perfect storm of timing more than anything else that just got a bunch people to be like, okay, my space felt a little, I don't know, but now that the timing was right. And okay. But for everything that's coming now, you have an underlying permissionlessness in the very technology that is going to stay, even as we see it centralized more and more, because you're going to, what's a good, a simple example of this is even like, let's just take custody at a very basic level, right? There are still plenty of, I mean, there's good reasons to also maintain your own storage and have cold wallets and all that stuff.

But on a simple human level, there are a bunch of people who would just rather know Coinbase is holding their Bitcoin because they don't want to think about it. They don't want to worry about it. They don't want to think, oh, she's my seed phrase, my ledger, whatever. They're optimizing for user experience. And they're willing to trade some of that decentralization that's inherent in the technology for some centralization. And so the good news is the underlying technology is itself unruinable.

And so even as we watch this develop over the next 10, 20 years, we won't see another Disney landification because the atomic units of money and identity are still owned by individuals. And so I, look, I'm not a hardcore crypto anarchist. I actually, again, my North Star here, and this is, I think just as a product builder, still always comes back to user experience. What ends up winning a thousand times out of a thousand is along those lines of a user experience and making something people want. That is the motto of Y Combinator for a reason.

And so what heartens me, though, is because this underlying technology is decentralized, even as we start to see people, and as it goes more and more mainstream, being willing to make the tradeoffs and saying, like, actually, no, I don't want total permissionlessness for I don't want permissionlessness is not a feature for me. It's a bug. Like, I just, I'm fine with that. You still have a fundamental structure that is itself permissionless. And the builders can always keep building.

And that, in the same way that markets and you're seeing, you know, meme stocks are just a reflection of what's already, what's, it's the, it's an old system being, uh, sort of radically affected by new tools. but the new system has this sort of, you know, baked into it, right? Whether it was all the things with defy, whether it's been here now with NFTs, um, markets, I mean, even just looking at tokens as compensation, right? We're seeing more and more employees, even working fiat jobs, looking for tokens as a signing bonus. We're going to see more and more people taking multiple gigs, getting paid in tokens. What happens when, you know, traditionally a startup founder, you know, we compensated every one of our employees at Reddit, with Reddit stock or options specifically and eventually RSUs.

These things are not liquid at all, right? There's an inevitable future here where those employees are going to get paid in tokens. What does that do to a world where now there's a market available? You could wake up one morning and realize, hey, look at that. Elon Musk just tweeted about my company. My tokens have 10xed. I'm going to sell a few of them and put a down payment on a house. That will be a reality, right?

And so this notion of liquidity is having a tremendous effect on shaping markets, on shaping behaviors, and we're seeing it, right? Whether it's game stop getting memified, whether it's, you know, different tokens popping off, whether it's all this stuff with NFTs, you're now going to see a scenario where we play us out five years, 10 years for anyone who's building, where your users are actually just as sort of liquid. because now you don't actually own all the keys to the kingdom because it's not like, yeah, Google lets you download all of your data and Facebook ostensibly lets you download all of your data. But the process is cumbersome.

It's a pain in the ass. Like it's not really a feature of it, right? They're deliberately doing that. But now users have all the authority. And you saw this a little bit with OpenC, like very, very ingenious approach. Because it all lives in a public database, right? You can now overnight reward a user base that you don't actually have and potentially bring them over to care about your platform. Right.

The market of companies, of startups, still has not fully processed this new world because it hasn't really, it's still in its infancy, right? But in the same way that financial markets are rapidly going to have to do and are adapting to this liquidity, it's going to happen across every front, even users. And that's rooted in the fact that you will actually own. your identity online. You will actually own those photos you uploaded. You'll actually have the receipts of the time you spent. And so to put it specifically, right, you've got now, the bar is going to be so much higher for platform creators and builders in Web3 to maintain and earn attention and time. And I think that's a good thing. I think it means you really have to earn your users every day. And that's a thing. Like, we would say this, I'd walk around the office

be like, we got to earn our users today, right? We have to be shipping features that they want. We have to be creating a great user experience. We have to be, you know, creating community events. We have to be doing things to earn our users every day. But it was kind of a metaphor because people couldn't, I mean, they could leave, but now, tomorrow, it will be literal. And, and that's a very exciting new world to be living in because it gives, I think it much more fairly gives the value back to the people who have been creating all of it for so long. And that's a whole other, I mean, we've barely even started to see it happen yet, but we will. And it's going to be pretty exhilarating to watch.

Yeah, the way I've explained this concept is that everyone on Ethereum or everyone in crypto is always just one transaction away from being somewhere completely different. Yeah. I hear you're so close to everything else as being built. And so the ability to migrate is so low that it almost incentivizes it at times. Yes. I'm going to ask you the impossible question. I know no one can actually predict a future, but I'm going to ask you to do it anyways.

There are so many things in Web3. We got Dow's, we got NFTs, we got permissions, we got permissionless communities. And you're a veteran of much of the internet. And so I'm wondering what you really see as like, what's on the horizon, what are these primitives that we're talking about and not only just with like tokens,

but also the properties, like the permissionlessness and the community first aspect of Web 3. What are you seeing on the horizon as like colliding with Web3? Like where is Web 3 really going to, where the rubber is going to meet the pavement that you're seeing, that you're hopeful that we build out in the short term? One thing that really clearly dawned on me over the last couple of years was, so if I give someone the chance to sell 10th or N-Eth, whatever, one-Eth, or an NFT worth one-Eth, or an NFT worth one-Eth, they will be more likely to sell the one-eath or whatever the amount is. And non-fungibility is actually for our species a lot more valuable than we realize. And is it rational?

No. But humans are not rational creatures. And when I think about how we start to build utility into NFTs, an underlying technology. I mean, we're still in the, again, these are the simplest, stupidest days of it, right? We're still at GeoCities here. And as we start to understand more and more utility,

whether it is, you know, getting, I mean, we've seen examples of this, right? Restaurants using it as exclusive membership or, you know, hopefully maybe one day at a golf course to get in or you get on the list of different utility that is offline. But then you start thinking about what we can do

even if it's just allowing people access to online communities, allowing them access to coordinate and even just have spontaneous meetings. Like there's just, we know that communities already, and Reddit is a great precedent for this, where there is no incentive other than we have a community, we have a culture, you're part of it.

We know that those work at scale massively well, and they'll do amazing things together, from raising money for total strangers to getting together off, line. We know all this. There's a precedent for that. Seeing the infrastructure gets built up around enabling communities in Web 3 is one of the things I'm most excited about over the next year or two, because we're going to start to see more and more people doing more and more clever things that pushes everyone to be like, oh, that was clever. Okay, I'm going to do something better now. And that rate of innovation can happen so much faster now, thanks to the internet, social media, all that stuff.

We're all watching. We're all building in public. And that's going to increase the rate of innovation. The things I'm betting on are the things that are creating this kind of infrastructure around community or these communities themselves. I'm a pretty out and well-known ape holder from pretty early on. I'm very excited to see what happens in the coming months around all things board apia club. And even that, actually, you know, the reason I aped in in like May or June or whenever last year was because they launched with a board, like the only, the only quote-unquote utility, but it was novel at the time, was that you could visit a part of the website, right,

to be able to mess around on the bathroom wall, which was a total homage to R-slash place, which was a Reddit April Fool's Day thing we did with pixels that was collaborative. And the Yuga Labs team admitted, said as much. And I saw this and I'm like, oh, cool, this is like Reddit, but now I'm in, and again, I'm not the, I don't need to be the smartest guy in the room.

I just need to be looking for things that I know worked 10 years ago when there was no real ownership involved. And as I'm seeing this stuff start to progress, I just can't help but feel like we will see real utility evolve. We'll see technologies that will make it even more valuable to either own NFTs with robust communities or maybe find ways to access and get in and to further democratize it. It doesn't, it doesn't help if you just create a bunch of exclusive communities that only a few people can be a part of when there's, you know, millions and millions and millions of people on this planet. And so that's obviously going to have to find ways to scale. I'm excited to see the stuff that does that because this connective tissue is, it's so strong. It's so incredibly strong. And again, if we know it works without real ownership, then by actually,

adding that really important element, it should grow even faster and even stronger. And then you start imagining ways for more and more on ramps to exist. This is probably another big area whether, I mean, I back to Lolly because I was excited to see more people get into Bitcoin just from shopping online. You just passively, just like with honey, except in Bitcoin, you save money on buying things you normally buy online. And for folks who would never even consider ever opening an investment account on Coinbase, you're now a Bitcoin holder. And you're now creating wallets for a whole hell of a lot of people who will probably, they're at the other end of that adoption curve when it comes to investing in crypto.

They're now crypto holders. They're now wallet holders. And the on ramps are the other really exciting area for me because crypto is still a very male dominated industry. We have, again, long term greedy incentive. to bring more women in to Web 3, because if we just look at the data from Web 2, women outperform on social media. They out consume it.

They out create it, right? The engagement numbers, the things that we need in order to get Web 3 into the mainstream will only happen with women. And so I'm particularly excited about that as another on-rap in terms of things I'll be investing in things that we'll be spending our time

with 776 because it's, it has to happen. And the sooner it happens, the better it is. for all of us. So Alexis with 776, I know it's over $350 million or something and assets under management $750,000, but you know. 750, but you know. 750. Yes, now 750. It's been a busy year. Wow. And is this, so is this all going to be deployed in like, actually that was probably. Yeah. That's funny. I'm sure that was what it was up until a few weeks ago. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. It's just, it keeps going up. Are you mainly focusing this towards crypto or is like crypto and Web 3? Is that just a portion of

the portfolio, notice you led around in a rainbow wallet, which is absolutely fantastic. A delightful Ethereum wallet. It's an NFT wallet that I think is everything you've talked about, which is like making the user experience in Web3 actually good. But how much of the fund is allocated towards Web3 versus other areas? It's not specific. I mean, it's not like redlined in, but a majority of the companies we're going to invest in our Web 3. We still, you know, we invested in a reusable rocket company called Stoke. So we're doing Space Tech. We're doing climate tech. We're doing food tech.

We're doing some boring, you know, traditional software businesses, SaaS businesses too. But a little over a majority is going to be crypto. That's awesome. What else you up to on Shane? I noticed you just launched a proof project on Grails. What is this about? I loved seeing your community ask about that. Yeah, my old arch nemesis CEO, Kevin Rose, we've become pals over the last couple of years.

And he's been so, so spot on with NFT art culture. and he launched this project called Proof. It's a community of some artists, but also curators and went out. And he asked me to be a part of this drop where they, it was brilliant. Like they brought 20 artists, well, 19 amazing artists and me together didn't tell anyone who made the art and simply gave the opportunity for all these proof members to mint, I think was one or two, depending on how many passes they had. So they can mint artwork for themselves, but not know who the artist is. And a lot of the artists were encouraged to sort of hide their identity in the art so that people were buying the art based solely on the vibes.

Like, did they like the art? And then there was a big reveal. And this was amazing. I mean, you had the really the who's who. That one, that protograph from Larva Labs is like the original punk. It's like the OG punk code. So it's a bunch of amazing stuff. And so I did my first ever NFTR work for it.

It was a pretty amazing opportunity. And I was like, all right, I can dust off the old illustrator. That's a photo that my wife took at me in Olympia. And I'm really in a low poly art for the last year or so. And so I just decided to make, it's my first. I did a lot of snoo doodles over the years, our Reddit mascot. I've done hundreds of those. This was my first time doing low poly art, but it was fun.

And yeah, I was happy your community was asking about it. I might have to put out some more artwork. They are excited about it. had Kevin on the podcast before so people are familiar with what's going on there. It's really cool. You guys are, you know, teaming up on some of this stuff. I guess as we draw to a close, Alexis, and this has been super insightful for us. Thank you very much. Kind of the final question for me is there's been an increasing amount of pessimism, I think, about the internet. Some people say the internet's best years are behind us, right? We have like social media, toxicity, this feeling

of being preyed upon by large tech companies, all of these things. But I think you're optimistic about the future of the internet. Give us the case for why we should be optimistic about the future of the internet. Because we have to be. Because if we're pessimistic, we can't possibly build the better internet that we want. I think the criticisms about social media are very valid, very valid i think we we have an opportunity now to remove to reimagine that like we basically saw one version we saw one timeline and so we've learned how to build a lot of stuff we have a blueprint for how things can work and now we get to build another timeline taking those lessons and reimagining a lot of those technologies

now with ownership and with decentralization at its core and I think the point, you know, for me personally, and folks know how I resigned from the Reddit board in protest last, or a little over a year ago now, I think we, we get a chance now to not have a centralized platform making decisions that provide reach to specific ideas and not others. And I think this is an important distinction because, first off, freedom of reach is nowhere in our constitution. And when you have a centralized platform putting something out to millions and millions of people, it's a tacit endorsement. Right. Having looking, scrolling through a feed and seeing, you know, oh, look, my uncle just got a new job and oh, look how cute my niece is. And oh, like,

this vaccine is putting a microchip into my brain. Like that context matters because that context is normalizing stuff and providing reach, tremendous reach, weaponized reach. That is not something that's a founding principle of our democracy and is creating really harmful impacts on our society. And so what I like about this, I hope, I really hope it'll be a renaissance with Web 3. is I know those toxic parts of our society are still going to be there. They're always going to be there. They have always been there. They will continue to be there.

But we will not be reliant or victim to a handful of platforms making decisions or not making decisions about what belongs and what doesn't. And I actually think we're all going to be better off for it because it's going to be a chance to reset. And I don't know. We'll see. We obviously got a lot of work to do in this country to help normalize things. But from a technological standpoint, but from an internet standpoint, I do think the internet's best years are ahead of it. And I really do believe that in 50 years, we will look back on Web 2 as being a blip, as being a sort of an errant thread in the timeline where, you know, we made some mistakes.

And now we got to spend the next few decades, hopefully writing them. Well said. Opportunity reset. The best years of the internet are still ahead. Sohanian, thank you so much for joining us on bankless. This is a pleasure, my friend. Thanks, Ryan and David. Thank you guys. This is cool. Action items for you guys, Bankless Nation. A couple of them for you. First, learn more about 776. That is Alexis VC firm that you could check out. Number two, check out Alexis's art on proof collective. We'll include a link to the tweet thread where that was launched. Pretty cool. Yeah, let me know what you think. Yeah. And the third thing is, go download the rainbow wallet. We just

talked about it and it is really a must have if you're into NFT is absolutely fantastic. Of course, guys, risks and disclaimers. None of this has been financial advice. It never is. Nope. Bitcoin is risky. So is ETH. So is DFI. All this stuff is risky. You can lose what you put in. There's still rough edges as we talked about, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.