Digital Social Hour - Luca Netz Discusses the Future of Pudgy Penguins | Digital Social Hour #116

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

On today's episode of The Digital social Hour, Luca Netz reveals how he shifted his mindset from short term to long term, the downfall of the public education system and how he plans on taking Pudgy P...enguins to a billion dollar brand. BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: Jenna@DigitalSocialHour.com APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh - Use code "50dsh" for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months! LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I was super frugal. I think I had a million, I had probably half a million bucks before I spent anything. Wow. And the only reason why I spent that is because I was with Patti, and we go to Ben Simmons' house, and the Kardashians are there, and they completely just ignore me. And I'm like, why are they ignoring me? And I spent like the whole day thinking about it.
Starting point is 00:00:18 The next day, and it was because my swag was just like, dude, I was wearing Dickies with like holes in my thrasher hoodies. And I'm like, that was the only thing I came to as to why no one paid attention to me and why I was a wallflower that whole night. Doesn't it look dope at least? I'm a high school dropout, dude. I believe I can go toe-to-toe
Starting point is 00:00:34 with any Wharton business kid. Any Wharton Harvard. You would reckon? Yeah, any Harvard business kid. I could go toe-to-toe with any of them. Welcome back to the Digital Social Hour. On this episode, I have someone taller than me. I have Luca Netz with us today.
Starting point is 00:01:04 How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you doing? Dude, I'm good. I can't believe than me. I have Luca Nets with us today. How you doing? I'm doing great. How you doing? Dude, I'm good. I can't believe you're 6'8 now. I can't believe it either after standing next to you. Man. You've been taller than me for years. For years, man. Apparently I keep growing. 25 is not supposed to... Man, I used to be able to post you up. I don't know if I can now.
Starting point is 00:01:19 Yeah, you definitely won't be able to. You weren't able to post me up before. Come on now. You know what happened last time we played. You just had a good pick and roll your partner was good man what you been up to working man pudgy penguins talk to us about it what a business what a business what an endeavor i think for a long time i was like yearning to wanting to build great things i just didn't know where to go with that ultimately we came around to gel blaster and then ultimately to pudgy penguins but this is i think what i always wanted to experience just an unbelievable challenge right an unbelievable challenge with so many variables that ultimately i think is testing me to be you know drake has a line because you know it's real when you are who
Starting point is 00:02:12 you think you are in my mind i think i'm a great entrepreneur right in my mind i want to be one of the best and i want that's where i want to write my history like how mj is the best basketball player and lebron and you have the mount rushmore of basketball like i want to be on the mount rushmore of entrepreneurship i feel that and this was uh at the beginning i didn't know what i signed up for and i'm really thankful that i did because i just excelled so much as an entrepreneur and as a leader and i have so much more to excel and so much more to grow. I mean, even how much I've grown over the last 12 months versus how much more I will grow over the next 5, 10, 15 years. I'm just looking forward to it.
Starting point is 00:02:54 But to say that it is easy is to lie. It's definitely not easy. And I'm just excited for the challenge. I'm excited for the journey. And more importantly, I'm excited just to make products and content and experiences that people love. Right. You know, for so long, I think when you're younger, and I know you and I grew up in like
Starting point is 00:03:12 similar backgrounds, your like intention is like to make money. And then once you make the money, you realize how unfulfilling it is. And then the next chapter comes to like, okay, well, what's fulfilling? There's a lot of things that are fulfilling and depending on your preference, it can sway in either which direction. But like a huge purpose of mine is,
Starting point is 00:03:33 you know, making products and experiences that people love. And when people, you know, watch a piece of our content and say, wow, this helped me so much. It's made me smile. It's made my day better. Or when I see, you know, somebody with a punchy penguin plush and they got it for a
Starting point is 00:03:49 niece or a nephew and they're jumping for joy or when we you know throw an event or create you know a digital experience that gets people really excited like these are the things that are fulfilling to me and it's such an interesting moment of maturity that i yearned for in my mind but i couldn't find a way to kind of get there right and i think just the universe gave me pudgy penguins and gave me that opportunity i mean even buying it was like a brainless decision it was almost like my fingers did the buying and I wasn't even thinking about the purchase really until it was really coming close to closing. But super grateful and thankful to be in this situation and just to really push myself to a limit that I've been really wanting
Starting point is 00:04:36 to push myself to for a long time. Would you say buying it was the biggest risk you ever took? Because you spent two and a half million on it. So yeah, it's actually funny you brought that up because, you know, you and I are kings of consuming content from you know people that are doing better than us and a common denominator among successful people is taking risks and i had looked at my you know my 18 to 23 year old sprint and i was super successful but i actually didn't really take that many big risks you You know, Jail Blaster at the time was a $600,000 investment. $600,000 and 2.5 or two different things. And I knew Jail Blaster like instantly.
Starting point is 00:05:14 I was like, oh yeah, this is a nerve. But this was one that when I was making the decision, I was thinking to myself, is this a decision that, you know, like why am I doing this? And I well the risk reward is here and the best entrepreneurs and the most successful guys and not make it not taking risks and I'm 23 24 at the time and I thought to myself well if you're ever going to do it you're going to do it now because I can take a two and a half million dollar hit now when I'm 45 50 maybe things are different and I have less time to learn and take those risks. I just did the math in my head and I was like,
Starting point is 00:05:51 if I'm going to do this, now's the time to do it. So I did it, but easily my biggest risk. And it's paid off in just the knowledge and the people that I've met. If it went to zero today, it would have been worth it. But I'm really confident on paper we can build a billion dollar business out of Pudgy Penguins. I believe it, man. You guys are crushing it. You just raised money.
Starting point is 00:06:14 I mean, business is already worth 10 times more than what you paid. I want to touch up on Gel Blaster. That was one of the most viral products I've ever seen. You were behind that. Walk me through what happened when you first discovered the product. Or did you create it? No, no, I didn't create it. I was on a road trip with Jesse from NELC.
Starting point is 00:06:33 We were going around Sedona and I think we were in Big Bear. And his assistant at the time, Courtney, pulled out these little toy blasters. And you know me, we're in the business of winning products, right? Or we're in the business of winning products right or we were in the business of winning products and so understanding that the second i used it i thought to myself well nerf was always such a big disappointment this is a banger of a product like this was everything you wish nerf was nerf was a letdown as a kid complete letdown the commercials were so banging what i realized was it was the nerf commercials that got you the nerf was a letdown as a kid complete letdown the commercials were so banging what i realized was it was the nerf commercials that got you the nerf commercials were so banging the product packaging was so banging and then when you actually went around to shoot it it was just like a massive
Starting point is 00:07:13 letdown no matter how many new skews you thought every new like gatling gun m16 and it would make would just be better and it just was actually just the same thing just repackaged in a different shell and so immediately after playing with those gel blasters for an hour i make an instagram story i'm like who owns this and within a day the power of instagram and having a network i get in touch with the founder and the ceo and i say i want to own this amount of the business what is it going to cost? And we kind of come to the deal that we invested about $600,000. I became the CMO and just brought in my whole team of brand builders. And we just redid basically everything except for the actual toy gun itself.
Starting point is 00:07:59 I mean, we redid the colors and the skins and stuff, but took it over and they were kind of just getting started and we were the jet fuel to kind of bring that thing um to every social network tiktok feed instagram feed yeah feed across the country you guys got in like walmart too right every we're in every walmart costco best buy insane um target nationwide That's insane, man. Yeah, that ad I used to get every day for months. Man, good job on that one. So let's talk before that. I mean, you were doing e-commerce for a while.
Starting point is 00:08:33 You used to run Supreme Patty's store. Walk me through what you were like during those days. Yeah, I think I was dropped out of high school, got my first job at Ring, left Ring, sold solar and did a couple underground rap shows in between. And then I got hit with a course. I bought the course and it kind of taught me about dropshipping. And having no money and being relatively broke, dropshipping is a great mechanism to kind of find success. Once we found success pretty early in terms of product market fit on the first store,
Starting point is 00:09:09 started building brands, inventurizing, you know, my whole business that you and I got to know each other around was, my whole thing was monetizing social influence. Influencers had millions of followers, but they didn't have millions of dollars. So I thought to myself,
Starting point is 00:09:22 well, you know, they have the eyeballs and they can bring the clicks and the traffic and they were the people that I was paying anyway. How about you remove the ad costs, just split on that and scale that way. That was the business that made me hundreds of millions of dollars in gross over the course of four years and a lot of interesting trials and tribulations since. But that business, again, not that challenging. I was actually really disappointed in myself
Starting point is 00:09:54 looking back at it for that little sprint around that company specifically. I'm seeing what Mr. Beast is doing now and the Knight Media guys, Danny Duncan, his business development team, Super Savvy, Jeffrey Jeffrey Starr and I was before all of that right but I was just thinking so transactionally that I wasn't thinking about like the huge enormous potential I was just thinking I was like complacent with okay a hundred thousand dollars a day two hundred fifty thousand dollars a day even some days half a million dollars, a million dollars a day.
Starting point is 00:10:27 And then just in my mind, figuring out the net and what my take-home was and treating it like a cash cow business and not like a brand equity enterprise business. And what I found over the course of just meeting people over the last couple of years, you can make $ million dollars a year that take you what 20 30 years and make a couple hundred million dollars when if you like commit to making something that has brand equity and it has enterprise value you know you can build that
Starting point is 00:10:55 for four or five years and make the same amount of money if not more in a shorter time frame and so me being young you know almost in a stupor for being like how successful i was from basically as poor as poor can get to you know multi-millionaire in my teenage years i was looking at business very transactionally very naively like how much money can i make to get a new car or to get a new house or to get a new watch or to buy new clothes or to save. Not necessarily how can I build products and companies that can stand on their own, grow on their own, create products that people love and die for and nurturing community and
Starting point is 00:11:41 ultimately enterprise value that can be acquired and that's actually the game that though in the short term doesn't give you the same gratification in the long term will give you a more joyous life right and that's the epiphany that i came to about two years ago and i think gel blaster really gave me that epiphany because we was really von dutch when i had that von dutch sprint and i brought them back in 2020 right i saw basically my talent and my network in full effect and i had never really leveraged that before i had always been super transactional and deals that i was making with people and you know kind of just leveraging them as the marketing engine. And then when I saw what I did at Von Dutch and I saw how much money they made, I was like, oh, dude, if I owned Von Dutch, I'd be set for life.
Starting point is 00:12:32 I literally was thinking that because when I walked into Von Dutch, Ed was like, yeah, we're doing $20,000 a month. I was like, $20,000 a month? By the time I left, it was printing millions. Yeah. It was everywhere, bro. it was everywhere and and i was just like if this was mine if i owned this this was my business i mean this would be it right i'd be done i'd be this this would i would go sell this to some fashion house and it'd be done now
Starting point is 00:12:57 granted von dutch had a lot of the ingredients that i didn't create right i just put the jet fuel on things but ultimately you know von dutch also gave me the confidence to buy pudgy penguins because this might be my thing we'll see where my career goes and again for the foreseeable future the only thing in front of me is pudgy penguins and it's actually the first thing i've ever done that i've accepted that i would do this for the next 20 years which i've never said before about anything else wow but i actually think my thing is going to be going into companies and like reviving them for some reason a new chapter turns in pudgy penguins which i doubt would happen but if it was i thought about it i was like
Starting point is 00:13:37 tumblr would probably be my next buy or something like that you'd be good at that man you already proved it with von dutch yeah and pudgy peng that's true. Pudgy was dead when you bought it. It was on the way. It was below one ETH, right? Yeah, 0.5, 0.8. Yeah. Talk to me about the mental journey because you grew up financially poor
Starting point is 00:13:53 most of your child life. You became a millionaire soon after that. What was that like mentally? Because for a lot of people, I feel like that would kind of destroy them. Yeah, I think the part that I'm blessed about was before, I didn't just go from high school to starting my first business to crushing it. I went from 10th grade, high school, dropout, two years of just absolute workhorsing it.
Starting point is 00:14:21 I was the first or second person in the opposite ring every day. So I would get up at 5.30, take the 6 a.m. bus from Wilshire and Fairfax to Santa Monica, which is an hour bus ride on the 720. I would get to Santa Monica at 7. And then from 7 to 4, I'd be at ring. And I did that for like a year and a half, two years. And long story short, I knew what a dollar was. Like when I was budgeting my meals working at Ring, it was $5 and it was three sausage McGriddles at McDonald's and that's what I ate for two years straight. And so the value of a dollar has never been foreign to me. It's always been very clear.
Starting point is 00:15:05 And so I'm very thankful for that. It doesn't mean I didn't make the mistakes that a lot of us make when you come into money. I was able to be a little more grounded because I had struggled so much. I had actually been in the workforce. It didn't come easy. The whole time I was at Ring, the reason why a lot of the guys at Ring got to know me because I was packing boxes, RMAing and QAing products, was because I was getting my college education at Ring via YouTube, dude.
Starting point is 00:15:34 And all the top guys, because I was one of their very early employees, all the top guys would see me on my YouTube watching me watch Stanford and Harvard and Berkeley alums speak. And they're like, what are you doing? I'm like, dude, I'm a college drop. I'm a high school dropout. I got to get my college education somehow. And so I was fortunate enough to just get nurtured and to be put into a high-end work environment. But I guess when I first started making money, it wasn't until I was super frugal. I think I had a million, I had probably a half a million bucks before I spent anything. Wow. And the only reason why I
Starting point is 00:16:11 spent that is because I was with Patty and we go to Ben Simmons's house and the Kardashians are there and they completely just ignore me. And I'm like, why are they ignoring me? And I spent like the whole day thinking about it the next day. and it was because my swag was just like, dude, I was wearing dickies with holes in my thrasher hoodies. And I'm like, dude, I got too much money to be still not dressing appropriately.
Starting point is 00:16:34 And that was the only thing I came to as to why no one paid attention to me and why I was a wallflower that whole night was because I just wasn't dope. I just didn't look dope at least. And so once I kind of bought the swag and then saw everybody change how they interacted with me based on the swag, which is like so shallow,
Starting point is 00:16:51 but you know the game. You're in LA. You know what I mean? I'm in the business of monetizing social influence. Who's going to want to work with me if I got holes in my Thrasher hoodie from when I was 16? And so that changed everything. And then I started becoming a little more spendy.
Starting point is 00:17:15 But I think all in all, I didn't go down the same path that most did just because I think the way that I grew up and my experience after high school and really working my tail off for $1,800 a month kind of showed me that, hey, like, be grateful for what you have and don't be a fool. Now, I still made foolish decisions, but I was always managing money appropriately and made sure that I diversified and bought the right things. Like, I bought my first house when I was 19, you know, pretty much paid it off. That's early, man. Yeah. And so in that respect, I was pretty wise. Now, you mentioned when you made millions,
Starting point is 00:17:48 you felt unfulfilled. Yeah. Why do you think you felt that way? Because you were putting in the work, and, you know, you don't feel like you earned it, or was it something else? Dude, you just grow up, you know, for those of you who grew up in tough situations,
Starting point is 00:18:02 a lot of us, at least for me and myself and some of my peers that I've spoke to, you just think that money's that North Star. And my mom's having a nervous breakdown every month. I can't do any of the things I want to do because I don't have money. And I'm just like, if I have money, everything will be fulfilled. And the second you have it, you realize you're like, okay, well, the misconception I think is I don't think money will bring you happiness. But not having money, depending on your personality type, but I think a majority of personality types, living your life surviving is not living. find it hard to believe that a person who spends eight hours a day working a job they don't like or doing something they don't like and is doing it for money and is surviving i have a hard time
Starting point is 00:18:54 believing that they can be happy now when you are living doesn't mean you can be happy now i think you cross that cataclysm and then you can start exploring like what really brings you joy and purpose and fulfillment but i for myself when i was growing up i thought well money was this north star money would change everything for me and though it's better you know not being able to worry about paying the bills or your mom there's some natural foundation of joy there right but it is not the parabolic curve of happiness that everybody expects but it does create a foundation like i'm not going to say that being a millionaire and being dirt poor is the same right being a millionaire is a lot better than being dirt poor i'll tell you that much
Starting point is 00:19:39 agreed but it is not that exponential growth of happiness that i think everybody expects it to be but it does create a little bit of a moat so that when you do have those really bad days today today was i woke up grumpy today i turned 25 yesterday just in a bad mood i was like be grateful luca every time i'm in a bad mood i'm just like be grateful because you know how bad life could have been i mean life could have shook out so many ways for me yeah I mean really you know and I'm just thinking to myself I'm like be happy man because if you told yourself seven years ago that you'd be where you were you'd say no way Jose right and even if you did believe it which I probably would because I'm a confident person I probably wouldn't have like truly been able to digest it and feel it And so I'm grateful for the fact that I'm able to wake up in a home every morning
Starting point is 00:20:28 that I wish I had when I was growing up. I'm able to drive a car that was always a car that I've always wanted to have and be able to take care of my family. And my mom travels the world now. She's been doing it for the last year, year and a half. And I live through her. And so these things make me happy. And so that I'm grateful for,
Starting point is 00:20:45 but it's not the end goal to happiness. You still have to figure that out, but I don't believe you can figure that out while you're still struggling every single day and spending your time surviving. 100%, it's definitely tough because if that's your main priority, then you can't really focus on being happy
Starting point is 00:21:03 if making money is like what you think about all day. Yeah. I want to go back to school because you dropped out of 10th grade. I like to ask my guests about what are their thoughts on the public education system? Because I wasn't a fan of it. But what was your experience with it? Yeah, totally not a fan. And it's so heartbreaking. I mean, the get older i used to like listen to all these conspiracy theorists and i think there's a lot of a lot of nonsense out there but wow is the system so broken and school specifically is one of those systems what a broken system and if for some reason there was another chapter in my life uh outside of pudgy i think that would be one of the problems i would want to go solve because i'm a high school dropout dude i believe i can go to toe-to-toe with any
Starting point is 00:21:59 wharton business kid any wharton harvard you would wreck them oh yeah any any harvard business kid i could go toe-to-toe with any of them yeah i promise you i could i really believe in that you put me in a room with an objective 30 days to build a company who makes the most money i will take any of them to school i'm a high school dropout right like how can i go and sit there and galvanize and lead and do all the things that i know how to do well i, I just learned off of YouTube, and I learned from experience and trials and tribulations and mistakes. But a lot of the things that I learned, at least in the early stages, I remember making my first huge year of success, I think 19, I made like $2.1 million was on my tax return.
Starting point is 00:22:42 And I was freaking out. I was like, dude, taxes, legal, what do I do? I had no clue. And nobody really around me had a clue. Everyone was saying, go to LLC on LegalZoom. And all of a sudden, I was like, dude, LLC on LegalZoom. I overpaid $1,500 for that LLC, that worthless thing. No strategy, no understanding.
Starting point is 00:23:04 And even the ability to like just speak well now the interesting thing about school is there's a couple things that i do agree with like school teaches you how to do things you don't want to do i like the eight class system right a lot of kids complain and think themselves well i don't want to be a historian or i don't want to be a biologist why am i taking science or why am i taking history right it's a lot of things i wake up and do every morning that i don't want to do and i think school helps program you in that direction i think there's some benefits to school i think the concept of school is good and healthy but how it's executed it's a disaster right i mean this country is is falling apart for the first time i've never even
Starting point is 00:23:41 gotten into politics but they're from the education system to the integrity of how we're decision-making, it's really tough right now. But the school system needs to be fixed. Huge advocate for fixing that system. Somebody needs to come in and do it. Maybe if nobody does it before me and I turn a new chapter, maybe it will be me. But it is easily the biggest crux to this country today.
Starting point is 00:24:09 And I'm so thankful that I left. I am so thankful. I'm glad I dropped out of college. We didn't even talk about college, but they charge so much. It's like insane. The reason why I ended up leaving is because I wanted to be a businessman. And I was going to get a business degree. And I said, well, nobody can afford it in my family.
Starting point is 00:24:29 So what type of businessman would I be if I went into debt to get a business degree? Doesn't sound like something a good businessman would do. And that's ultimately why I came to the decision to leave. Because I said, well, might as well just start making money. A lot of people look at me and my age and my success and they're like, wow, this kid's so young and so successful. If you actually actually do the math i've been doing this for about 10 years now dropped out when i was 16 so nine a lot of people are successful after doing nine years of something that's true you know look at it that way yeah yeah just that's that's why i
Starting point is 00:24:59 think some some kids you know if you're a young kid listening to this obviously trust your own path and trust your gut and trust your instinct. But if you want to go make money, are you still in school? School's not going to help you teach you how to make money and be successful. It's not. I got a person in the Pudgy Penguins team. One of the most important people in the Pudgy Penguins team took a leap year on college. And he's deciding if he wants to go back or not he doesn't
Starting point is 00:25:26 want to go back but his parents want him to and he'll tell you unbiasedly unequivocally he's learned more and let's just call it the first month of him taking his gap year than he had in his whole semester of college well i promise you unequivocally and he would sit here on this podcast and tell you the same thing and if we weren't in a podcast and nobody was watching this he'd tell you behind closed doors unequivocally because it's just you don't learn in there no you just learn i mean obviously there's things that you learn but nothing you can't learn off of a youtube video right and uh somebody actually told me they're like the best thing that i learned from college is really two things the networking and the socializing, which you can never argue.
Starting point is 00:26:05 Totally agree with that, but you're a testament to the other side of it. You're the king of networking and building relationships and no college background. And then the stories of the alum coming and giving, like their stories, whether that may be. But that stuff is recorded and posted on YouTube. So half of the value of college and the person who told me this is a billionaire i won't say his name but he was uh one of the few people i had access to that was like a high net worth individual when i was growing up just a family
Starting point is 00:26:34 friend through a godfather or whatever and uh it's like dude well that's what college is gonna get me i can go i can go network i'm in the best city in the world i was in los angeles and uh i can go watch these youtube videos and learn the best parts of college absolutely youtube university baby yep i want to talk about how you choose your business partners do you go into business with friends is that an option for you or do you like to keep it separate oh man i just got my my heart broke on one of this on one of these recently too uh i don't learn my i grew up in such a small family that friends to me are family and i a few of them and the ones i'm really close with i have a great relationship with i enjoy working with friends because it makes the business more fun to get up and do every single day. It almost feels like a sport game.
Starting point is 00:27:31 Like playing some basketball with your friends. Yeah, like teammate. Yeah. The problem and the lesson that I learned a while ago, but I truly haven't learned because I've made the same mistake, is you got to really try not to do that hmm now there's there's two friends of mine that have been able to delineate professional and personal and they've been my best business partners one of them Peter who I've known since I was 13 I mean we can get in a screaming match in business and then that night go and eat sushi mmm 99% of people I can't do that way right right and so there's a very unique relationship because in a screaming match in business and then that night go and eat sushi.
Starting point is 00:28:06 99% of people I can't do that with. There's a very unique relationship because he's a childhood best friend and we work almost in tandem like a duo really well like King and Yang. But in general, I've made the mistake of having and working with friends when you can hire them and become their friend and that's okay but being their friend prior to working professionally and then working together professionally is really tough because most people don't have the maturity to take accountability and most of people most people do not have the maturity to separate business and personal
Starting point is 00:28:43 including myself so i'm not pointing. I have a hard time delineating between the two. And the tough conversations are really hard to have. And building a business that's meaningful, that is going to make a lot of money, is going to require many, many, many tough conversations. And so I learned this the hard way. You can't have the tough conversations with people who are not ready to have them and that have this existing underlying friendship
Starting point is 00:29:17 because they take it personally. When in reality, my company is a team and our objective is to win. My company is not a family. Pudgy Penguin's team is not a family we're a sports team and we're here to and if you can't perform then you're going to be put on the bench and if you can't perform on the bench you're going to be drafted somewhere else wow and that is the only way that i see companies winning. This is not a place where we sing Kumbaya. This is not a place where we want to just kick back and relax.
Starting point is 00:29:54 We have an objective and an obligation not only to ourselves, but this business in specific, Punchy Penguins in specific, has the responsibility of over 10,000 holders who have put their hard-earned money into my business to buy my collectibles. And it is a business that you want your collectible to be the highest price possible because that's what you want for the people who collect your product, at least for myself. And the digital collectibles kind of enhance that metric and that functionality. And I'm not going to let them down because you decided you don't want to perform and that you want to go and do something or be lazy or act lackadaisical or not treat this with the same urgency that everybody else so we very much at pudgy penguins have to win it is it may be with other businesses you can be a little more chill
Starting point is 00:30:53 and lax i'm sure there's some d2c and some e-commerce companies that are very super you know emotionally driven and friendship oriented i could think of some products that that might bode well with but not when i have people putting their hard-earned money into my digital collectibles with the expectation that they'll be worth more one day. I don't take that expectation lightly. And we have to perform and provide value to our business, to our fans, to our consumers,
Starting point is 00:31:24 and most importantly to our collectors and our first believers and it's brand building on steroids it can either really boost you up in a meaningful way or it can tear you down and this one specifically you have to adopt this mindset and has been really tough because the stress and the conversations and the tough decisions and the macro fighting against you. I mean, there's so many things that make this business hard. This one specifically has required a really deep understanding of people, you know, not of having being in that mindset. And unfortunately, there's been some people who have left us along the way
Starting point is 00:32:07 because they just simply haven't been cut from that cloth. Right. Not everyone you start with is the people you finish with in business. It's very rare where the original team is the full exit team, you know? Yeah. Luca, it's been a pleasure, man.
Starting point is 00:32:21 What's next for you? Where can people learn more about what you're up to? Just give us a follow. Luca Nett's on Twitter and Instagram. Pudgy Penguin's on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. What's next for us is, I'll tell you this, Sean, I tell it to a lot of people, but I'm going to be the number one. I'm going to be the number one.
Starting point is 00:32:38 I'm going to lead Web3 into uncharted territory. I'm going to lead Web3 where it needs to be. And they're all going to follow. And we're going to create the case study and the roadmap for this to succeed. And so that's where I'm going. I want to build Web3's first-grade IP company. We're going to build the world's next-grade IP business. And we are going to democratize IP in a way that nobody building ip even knows where
Starting point is 00:33:07 we're going or how we're going to do it but we're going to do it we know where we're going so love that man i'll be rooting for you i know you're going to do it but i'll be watching appreciate all right guys thanks for tuning in to the digital social hour i'll see you guys next time

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