My First Million - #155 - NFTs Explained: How Digital Art Is Being Sold For Millions and What the Opportunities Are

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) discuss: Negotiation as a Service (NaaS) - The guys talk about (and maybe invent) a new category of business: negotiations as a service. The idea here ...is that there are certain big ticket items where a professional can negotiate a better price for the end consumer. - Incentives matter, however. For a Realtor, getting a client a better deal isn’t always in their best interest. A better model: the negotiator gets a designated percentage if they are able to negotiate below a set price. - Idea: Applying a better incentive model to real estate or home financing. Paying a skilled negotiator a fee for reducing your interest rate can result in thousands being saved annually. - Idea: Salary negotiations for both employee and employer. NFTs - NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique crypto tokens. Unlike say, Bitcoin, they aren’t mutually interchangeable -- each token is unique. In other words, NFTs are collectible. - NFTs have exploded in recent months. One site, https://cryptoslam.io/ (also https://defipulse.com/), tracks the daily transactions of different NFT. The top NFT, NBA Top Shots, does $46m worth of digital art transactions daily. - Shaan 10xd his money on the following piece in a matter of days. https://niftygateway.com/itemdetail/secondary/0x8ae06a29a816580cbd069e460dd57c6c964bb3da/7500010105. - This piece alone https://cryptoslam.io/cryptopunks/mint/6487 sold for over $1m. - Artists like Eminem and shows like Rick and Morty are created pieces of content that’ll be sold as NFTs. - Logan Paul made $3.5m in one day selling nfts https://beincrypto.com/logan-paul-raises-3-5-million-in-one-day-from-nft-sales/. - Opportunity: When a goldrush is happening, sell shovels. Shaan and Sam think the shovels here are displays. People are buying NFTs, they are going to want to display them. The options at the moment are frames like https://infiniteobjects.com/ and https://www.netgear.com/home/digital-art-canvas/. On the pod Shaan estimates you can sell 300-400 frames and easily generate $5m in a month. - https://opensea.io/: Another marketplace for NFTs. This is the eBay of NFTs CoinMarketCap - CoinMarketCap is a displayed of crypto prices. It's a simple idea that has been working. - When they delisted South Korean cryptos without warning on Jan. 7th, the move wiped out $100 billion of total crypto asset market value. - They were acquired for a rumored $400 million. The company only had 36 employees. Check out today's sponsor: Ourcrowd. They make it easy to invest in early startups. Go to ourcrowd.com/thehustle to get started. Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan)  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Starting point is 00:00:05 I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. We're live. Sam, how's Cancun?
Starting point is 00:00:24 I don't know. What's up with your boy, Ted Cruz? Yeah, what an asshole, man. He bailed on us. Us Texans. Yeah. What a jerk. Whatever.
Starting point is 00:00:37 I am going to Hawaii next week, though. I'm going to be recording from Hawaii, so I'm bail on as well, but I'm not an elected official, so it's okay. Dude, the funniest picture was somebody posted this meme, and it goes, it's 10 Cruz, and it just says, like, I didn't go to Cancun, but he's got his hair, like, braided like every girl when they go to Cancun. I saw one that was a missing poster. Like, have you seen me? Last scene crossing the border. So we're back, and we've been talking big game about how acquisitions done.
Starting point is 00:01:07 that was both a busy time and a stressful time, and you were running a company that was doing 10 things, and now you're able to focus more of the podcast. And we've been talking big game about this podcast is going to level up. What do you want to tell the people? What's the plan? How are we going to deliver? Yeah, so I'm working with Karen, the guy that was on the podcast,
Starting point is 00:01:23 Sean and I, you're going to have to work with them together. But basically, we're going to do a few things. But our goal, I think Sean needs to become top 10 in the business category, which is like an official category. I think 100,000 listens per episode will, will get us there. So we need to do that. And so there's a few things
Starting point is 00:01:42 that HubSpot is going to do for us. The first is that we are going to have a dedicated researcher. So I'm going to just summarize. Going forward, we're going to level up the podcast in a couple different ways. We're trying to go top 10.
Starting point is 00:01:53 Sam says to get top 10, we got to have 100,000 listeners per episode, which is kind of a crazy number. Yeah, I think that's fair. You know, 100,000 people listening every episode. That's stadium, more than a football stadium,
Starting point is 00:02:05 which is pretty cool. Yeah, but like a good episode of ours gets about a third of that. Maybe, like, 34. Are we at 40? I don't know what it. I think we're at about 30 now. So we got a triple basically to get there, which we should be able to do.
Starting point is 00:02:17 So then, all right, how are we going to do it? HubSpot's hook us up with some resources. So we're having a researcher. We're going to do recaps, summaries, clips that we're going to post on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, so clips of different little segments we talk about. We're going to have a dedicated email like recap that you can sign up for. And then one other thing is we're going to try doing some live, live shows. where we go live on Twitter spaces or Clubhouse at the same time.
Starting point is 00:02:41 So I think that'll be pretty cool. I'm writing that down because I forgot to write that down. All right, let's get into some ideas. Let's get back into it. But first, did you see? I became a meme this week. Oh, yeah. Dude, what happened?
Starting point is 00:02:52 You started getting like, what I saw was Vinod Coastline, who was like a big dog of Silicon Valley, basically retweeting some guy who was retweeting your Twitter thread about what you learned from your friend Andrew about investing. But did you see that? Some people were taking shots. So the tweet reached about 2 million people, and if you search, I was trapped, like in the quotations, you'll see maybe 20, like, people saying I was trapped.
Starting point is 00:03:15 This weekend, I was trapped in L.A. with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Oh, is that what they were making fun of you for? Because you said I was trapped with, you know, these Silicon Valley people. So there's tons of them. Then there's another one that says, this weekend, I was trapped in the ocean with a dolphin. So if you go to my Twitter feed and I retweeted a few of them, some of them got like, like thousands of times or maybe hundreds of times, but I think a couple or a thousand. And it was interesting.
Starting point is 00:03:37 First of all, I want to say this. The whole I was trapped thing, it was kind of supposed to be like a joke. It was like supposed to be like, it was like, it was like I was teasing. And I said the most powerful person and something like that.
Starting point is 00:03:48 That's actually not wrong, I think. But like I was obviously being like hyperbolic like as a joke. I guess it wasn't obvious. And second of all, people were angry at me. And I'm like, guys, I didn't say any of this.
Starting point is 00:03:58 I'm just sharing one unique person's interesting perspective. People are like, dude, this guy, Sam is like such a bro about the Boys Club. I didn't say this. I didn't say I agree or disagree. I'm just saying this is like one person's opinion and it's really cool to share interesting ideas. So I got roasted pretty hard. Yeah, you deserved it. It's all good. I got roasted as well this week. We just get roasted. That's good. What did you get roasted for? I got roasted because of my opinion on the fucking Bachelor. You know last week when I was talking about this stuff? I don't even want to talk about it.
Starting point is 00:04:27 Yes. I saw that. I can't believe Sean said he agrees with everything this guy said. I was like, look, maybe I did say that. I don't know. But I get back and listen. Obviously, I don't agree with every word that somebody says. That's not my point. I agreed with the point the guy was trying to make. I tried to explain it. But in general, I think it's good. Like, if somebody was asking me, they were like, hey, like,
Starting point is 00:04:47 I've seen you've been growing your audience a lot lately because my Twitter kind of like exploded to over 100K. And they were like, what do you think I'm doing wrong? And I said, I looked at your feed and you say only reasonable, agreeable things. And I don't think reasonable and agreeable people is very notable to follow or share. And so I said, you've got to take some risks. It doesn't mean you have to be controversial, but you have to have some part of what you're saying that people love. And the way to test, do people love what I'm talking about is some people need to be hating your style or the content or your opinion that you're talking about?
Starting point is 00:05:21 If there's nobody who's strongly disagreeing or really dislikes your style, then you haven't really put forth anything that is new, unique, or bold. And so that's kind of like a back test. So the goal isn't go out there and get hated. No. The goal is put things forward in a like bold style and have like original opinions and like say original things, say things that aren't just stuff that everybody already knows and agrees with. And the way you'll know you're doing that is periodically you're going to get a bunch of people thinking you're an idiot or thinking you're a jerk or thinking you're too arrogant or whatever
Starting point is 00:05:57 it is. Those are natural consequences. We're both in the getting roasted club. So, congrats, fellow members. So today we have three ideas we want to discuss. The first one is NFT, which Sean actually talked about this maybe a month ago. And I thought it was so stupid. And we've got some follow-up that proves that you're actually right.
Starting point is 00:06:16 And I wasn't. The second one is this thing called inside car buying, which I would love to start with. And then follow by that, following up, we're going to do this thing called coin market cap. But can we talk about the one that I suggested first? Because it might be quick. But I'm trying to buy a car right now. Nothing like crazy fancy, maybe like a pickup truck. or something. I don't know yet. But I found this site called insidecarbying.com. My friend
Starting point is 00:06:38 Neville told me about it. And if you go to it, it looks very old school. The blog has not been updated since 2015, but I did some research on it. It has some good reviews. And it has one of the most interesting value props I've actually heard of in a long time. And so I don't know if it's just this one person, but go ahead, Sean. What do you see? No, I just wanted you to explain it. Like, give me the two sentences of what they do for you. So you pay $500. and it's a money back guarantee. And what this guy does is, I believe you tell him the type of car you want.
Starting point is 00:07:08 I don't know how specific, like in color, but like I imagine you tell him the year and model and like any options or anything. He scours the web, finds cars that mat that criteria, and then negotiates for you and says, all right, this is the cheapest one. And if he can't get you a good deal
Starting point is 00:07:24 or you can't save at least the $400 or $500 that you pay him, you get your money back. And it's so fascinating that this exists, because it actually doesn't sound that challenging. He's probably just going to like has like a whole bunch of canned emails. Right. But it's incredibly interesting because this business model makes a ton of sense. And I think of what all this can apply to.
Starting point is 00:07:42 Cars is an interesting one. And whenever I see something like this, this guy's site, I think, wow, this is amazing. It looks like a sole proprietor. So just one person. He's based on a White Plains, New York. And I'm like, if you go to this guy's website, it looks like it's from like 2008. Like it's really old. But what happens if you put a little lipstick on this, packaged it a little bit differently?
Starting point is 00:08:00 I think it's incredibly fascinating. This is a Sampar special, finding these little niche things that are great bootstrappable businesses that just make a lot of sense. Okay, so I like this idea a lot. And I've also, when I went through the process of buying a car, I mean, you spend hours just looking, researching, and then you have to like reach out. You have to go check them out. You have to negotiate. So when do you do they negotiate before you've actually seen or like test drive of the vehicle or after? I'm not sure yet.
Starting point is 00:08:27 I'm actually going to give them my money and sign up for this. The reason I hadn't so far was it looks so. old that I wasn't even sure it was still in service. But I'm going to sign up for it and give it a test because he claims money back guarantee. I don't know if that's true, but we'll find out. But it's $400 is a good shot. Like I'm going to as on average, our average customer saves $4,219. Maybe bullshit.
Starting point is 00:08:47 But I would believe it because there is like with cars. There's actually quite a bit of wiggle room around price. And it's about somebody who knows how to negotiate and is not going to get fatigued by the process and just be like, oh, whatever, I want it. I just want this process to be done. with. And so if this person, if they actually cared about how much they saved you, I would actually be even more excited that my problem with all brokers is that the broker's incentive is to tell you they're going to, you know, they're going to treat you great. And then they want you off their books
Starting point is 00:09:17 as fast as possible. So they want to match you with the thing you want to buy as fast as possible. So they can move on, they can get their commission and move on to the next client. And so that's the only thing I don't like about this is this person's incentive is to get you the first car that you're willing to buy rather than maybe the best car or negotiating a bit further and things like that that are totally aligned with you. Well, I'm not endorsing this particular brand, the service, but I think it's actually really interesting because I've seen a few of these things pop up recently. We're going to call them like what's SaaS stand for software as a service. Yeah, this is NASS. It's like NASS. Negotiator as a service. And I've seen a few of them. I think our good friend Andrews started one. I forget what they negotiate.
Starting point is 00:09:56 Do they negotiate? SAS. SaaS tools. So you're paying. You're paying. I don't know what the hustle is paying, but I would guess the hustle is paying a quarter million dollars, maybe more in just software licenses for different tools that you're using Slack and Zoom and whatever else. And what they do is they say, okay, great, hand us your bill. Like we just give us your monthly P&L. And then we're going to go call a bunch of people and we're going to save you money because we're going to go negotiate with these people. And it's called buyer.com. I think that's a great idea.
Starting point is 00:10:24 I don't know how it's so. We should ask Andrew next time he's on. And then there's a third one called Main Street, which is a, exactly the same, but a very similar premise, which is they, you upload your quickbooks or whatever you use, and they find ways that you can save money because the government gives, like, let's say, and we actually did this manually because my, this woman who works from EDI is good at this, but it was like, all right, you can actually save 25% of your taxes because you have this many people on research and development. Or if you have someone in Canada, you can get a rebate here.
Starting point is 00:10:54 And Main Street automates, and I believe from what I've heard, I have no insider information other than rumors is that they're crushing it. They're doing really well. They're doing extremely well. And I regret passing on investing in them now very much. All right. So where else could you do NAS? What are the other than nasty businesses that we could do?
Starting point is 00:11:09 I have a couple of mine. I think cars is, I don't think cars is being touched. Right. So you're saying you could do this better and you could do this and market it better. Great. I don't know how it would work. But I bet you if I spent a month researching it, I could totally figure it out and figure out the opportunity and build something here.
Starting point is 00:11:24 So software is a good thing because we were a very small company, but we spent seven figures probably on software. A lot of people are doing it for, I think you could do it for, what else? You could do it. I mean, I bet a lot of companies already do do this for what you owe in taxes. So you kind of hear these scammy commercials on the radio of like, we negotiate for you with the IRS.
Starting point is 00:11:44 That's a huge business. But for some reason, those are, I actually don't know if those are scammy or not, but they certainly appear that way. What else is there? There's a few. So I would say also a business that we've talked about before, do not pay falls into this category,
Starting point is 00:11:56 where they basically say, hey, you got a parking ticket, we will just hand it over. We will go and contest this. We will try to get you off the hook of this or we're going to negotiate it down. So I think they do a good job of this. There's some others that I think are interesting. So one is venture investing. When you go and you want to raise around, most founders, what makes a great founder?
Starting point is 00:12:15 Somebody who could build a great product, somebody who's great at selling customers, somebody who really knows a certain niche market. Guess what they're not good at? They're not good at this like fundraising dance. And then they're going up against expert negotiators, which are venture capitalists, who are seeing hundreds of founders every, you know, every month and negotiating term sheets with them. And so maybe there's an opportunity in the tech world to be able to just hand it over and say,
Starting point is 00:12:39 okay, cool, I will do the pitch with you, right? I will go and I'll explain my business to you. I'll tell you why it's so great. I'll answer all your questions about the business. But in terms of the round, talk to my agent, right? Talk to, you know, inside fundraising. and inside fundraising is going to do the actual negotiation on terms, valuations, and handle all 10 firms I'm talking to, they'll all talk to that guy.
Starting point is 00:13:02 And then he'll come to me and basically say, hey, here's what I think the best thing is. So I think you can do it there. I think apartment searching or house searching is something you could do here where it's not the same as like a listing agent or like a listing broker. I think there's something else if you talked about, if you framed it as a negotiation service specifically. And so you can say, cool, you're going to use a broker anyways to go house hunting or go apartment hunting for where you want to rent.
Starting point is 00:13:24 But when you get there, you call me and I'm going to save you money. And I'm going to basically, I'll make $500 a pop, but I'm going to save you $300 a month on your payments. Another version of this could also be refinancing a house. I refinance my house and it was like the most painful, tedious process. And I regretted ever agreeing to do it, even though I knew I was going to save, I think, $600 a month. I think there's like a refi, you know, a refi pal who could refinance your house.
Starting point is 00:13:49 Go through the whole refinance process and shield you from like, 89% of the bullshit, and now you're only dealing with 11% of the leftover bullshit that only you can do. And I have three more examples. The first is for high-paying jobs. So I've hired, I don't know the exact number, between 15, 100 people. And I would actually say I'm a horrible negotiator. I'm really bad at it.
Starting point is 00:14:10 But I've noticed that the average person, there's a huge difference between people who are good at it and people who are not good at it. So I've had people take a lot of money from me and get a salary way higher than what I was willing to pay because they, they were such good negotiators. I think there's a, by the way, is my gain too high, Abrae? I mean, if you want to turn it down just a little, but it's not, it's nothing horrible. I've noticed a lot of people are really bad at negotiating jobs. And I have a friend who's an executive recruiter, and he helps people negotiate higher-end jobs, which that probably pay half a million or more. But I do think there's a world where you can get this for a $100,000 job. You can turn $100,000,000 job into $10,000 or $110,000. I think that actually could exist. The second one is I used to
Starting point is 00:14:51 have this app that got shut down by the city of San Francisco, but if you got a parking ticket, it would automatically fight it for you. What was that called? Do you remember that? Do not pay. That's what I was talking about. No, it was before that. It was even before that.
Starting point is 00:15:02 I know the one you were talking about. Yeah, it got shut down, right? It was the most effective thing I'd ever seen. Like, it told me before I even knew, if I was inside somewhere like my, like my house, it said, boom, you just got a parking ticket. We're fighting it for you. And it was awesome. And the city of San Francisco shut it down, but it was so good.
Starting point is 00:15:17 And then the third thing that I could bring to you about this, which I don't know, what I can say that incriminates me or not. So I'm going to say, I have a friend who got a speeding ticket recently, and you know how a lot of the court, like this was in Kansas. This person wasn't in Kansas anymore. They were in Texas where they moved.
Starting point is 00:15:35 And they had to fight the ticket because they thought that it was unjust. Like it wasn't really happening. Do you know how a lot of these, so you got to go to court. And a lot of times they're in Zoom. You know that? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:46 Now they're all in Zoom. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this person's sister is a lawyer. and they were on a speaker phone chatting with, quote, me, and telling, quote, me what to say while, like, they were listening. And like, it was awesome. And it was fantastic. So you had like a lawyer in your ear, like Secret Service style.
Starting point is 00:16:06 You know, say this. Don't say that. And granted, I didn't get away with it. But, and I had to pay a $2 ticket. It was nice having this lawyer in my ear. On your side, right. Yeah. And so I think that that's interesting.
Starting point is 00:16:17 And I'm like, that should exist for negotiating a salary. that's kind of intriguing thing. So I think there's a lot of this this whole category is actually really, really cool. And the reason why it's cool is if you do a good job, it's a no-brainer to pay you money. Just like Main Street or just like a salary negotiator, it's like, I'm only taking what I get you above what they offered you, right? I'm only taking from the savings of your parking ticket. And so it's a very like non-scary, sort of a toothless pricing structure where the person doesn't have to feel like they're going to overpay and not get something. You only pay if you get it.
Starting point is 00:16:51 Incentives are aligned. All right, I like that. This is a cool one. And I think there's also something cool about it. You know, if you do this on the internet, if you are the best car negotiator, you know, this guy's in New York, he's going to service clients. You're in Texas.
Starting point is 00:17:04 He's going to service clients all across the country. And you can become kind of like the domain authority of doing this. And I think that's kind of cool as like a solopreneur style business. And we'll move on. But as a reminder, it's insidecarbying.com. I have not connected to this person. My friend showed it to me. I just thought it was nifty.
Starting point is 00:17:19 For all I know, this is a really common thing. I don't know too much, but it's pretty neat. All right, you want to move on to the NFT? Yeah, you said Nifty. So here we are. NFTs. All right. So where do you want me to start with this?
Starting point is 00:17:28 Because this is like a big topic. I can start wherever you are. Well, let's give the background. Sean brought up digital trading cards a month ago. And both me and Jack, I think it was, and a few other people were like, Sean, this is really stupid. What are you talking about? Why would you ever do this?
Starting point is 00:17:44 There's a company called Topshot is what I was telling you guys about, I think, on the podcast. And now I want you to go to this following link. I'm going to put it in here, crypto slam.io. I just want you to go to crypto slam.io and tell me what you see. Wow. Oh, wow. Okay. Cryptoslam.
Starting point is 00:18:02 io is collectible ratings by sales volumes. And NBA Topshot in the last 24 hours has sold $45 million worth of stuff and is up in only 24 hours, 165%. In the last 30 days, which is around the time that we discuss this, they've sold $164 million for the volume, and they're up 1,200 percent. And it's been about 5,600 buyers. 56,000 buys, the last 30 days. Just yesterday or last 24 hours, 32,000 buyers is what it says, which is an insane number.
Starting point is 00:18:34 And I got to say the numbers for TopShot are so insane that I am personally a little bit skeptical. There might be something called wash trading going on where people are just buying and selling back and forth between either them and their friends or them and a bot or, a bunch of bots to drive up the value of the portfolio to make it look like, oh, wow, there's a lot of activity here. And it's really just, you know, I'll pay you $10. You pay me back $10. I'll pay you $10. I'll pay you $10.
Starting point is 00:18:59 Like, that's a thing in crypto that has happened for a long time. And I suspect it's what's going on here. But that's a conspiracy theory. What everybody else sees is that NBA Top Shot, this idea that we were talking about, that I was like, hey, this is kind of interesting, but kind of weird. And you guys are like, what the fuck is that? It makes no sense. $45 million last 24 hours of gross market,
Starting point is 00:19:18 GMV in the marketplace, and they just raised money at a $2 billion valuation. So there's definitely some legit people that believe in this thing. So I'm going to explain NFTs as best as I can. And I'm no expert, but I'll do my best here. Okay, so cryptocurrencies came out and people were like, wow, this is amazing. There's kind of like a digital money. There's a little digital coin. And for the most part, every coin is the same.
Starting point is 00:19:40 If I have Bitcoin and you have Bitcoin and we swap, they're all identical. It's like dollar bills, right? but what an NFT is, is NFT is more like beanie babies. So an NFT stands for non-fungible token, meaning one of them is not the same as the other one, right? Just like I was saying, Bitcoin is fungible. What's the same?
Starting point is 00:19:57 Does fungible mean like bleeds it? What does that mean? Fungible means like one can be swapped for the other and there's no difference. Got it. One Bitcoin is the same as all other Bitcoins in theory, right? And non-fungible means when I own this LeBron trading card or I own this LeBron video, there may be only 200 of those, and it will be different. than a different one of Steph Curry doing the thing, right?
Starting point is 00:20:17 They're not the same. They can't be swapped like all for each other. So anyways, that's what NFT stands for. So this started, you know, a while back with Crypto Kitties. Do you remember that? Did you ever hear about Crypto Kitties? I heard about it at the Dojo when I worked there because they loved it, but I didn't know what it meant. All right.
Starting point is 00:20:32 So actually, I'll take it about it. I'll make it more approachable. So there's been, you know, different types of collectibles, whether it's Pokemon cards, baseball cards, beanie babies. There's a whole bunch of different collectibles out there, coins, different shit like that. and they have value because people enjoy collecting them and there's some rarity to them, right?
Starting point is 00:20:49 Like a Charzard is like the rare Pokemon card so it's more valuable than like a squirrel, which is just like, you know, kind of the common card. And so all of a sudden a bunch of people give a shit about a thing. And within that set of things, there's like a scarcity. There's only a limited number of them
Starting point is 00:21:05 so that makes some of the valuable. And so you'll see Pokemon card sets going for like $40,000 nowadays or a LeBron James rookie card of which there are only, I don't know, a thousand or 10,000 of them or whatever, will be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the one that's in mint condition, the most expensive one sold for $1.8 million, right? So people spent a lot of money on these collectibles.
Starting point is 00:21:28 And, you know, back in the day with Beanie Babies, there was like, I don't even know what they're, you know, Princess the Bear and Claude the Crab and like, whatever. Beanie babies made these things and people started going nuts for them. I started collecting them and they were all of a sudden selling on eBay for thousands of And it was sort of a craze. It didn't last forever, but some things last longer than other. Sports cards have lasted for a long time. They still remain valuable.
Starting point is 00:21:50 Beanie babies, not so much. That's what's going on now in the crypto world. On Ethereum, which is the second biggest cryptocurrency, you can now create your own set of things like Beanie Babies. So I can go and I can make up a set of things that I'll call Beanie Babies. And I can make it on using Ethereum and I can say, hey, guys, come buy it. And that's what a bunch of people are doing. and they're doing it with stuff like CryptoKitties, which was the first big one.
Starting point is 00:22:15 They basically created a bunch of little animated cats, and you could buy this cat for, like, initially, like a dollar, and then the price went up to $10, and some were selling for thousands of dollars, and people were getting really excited. And then the hype faded away, and CryptoKitties like went to zero. According to your, this thing you just brought up, CryptoKitties in the last 30 days has sold $730 million in stuff. Last 24 hours, CryptoKitties is $61,000 of volume. So not dead, but the same team that built CryptoKitties, they're the ones who built
Starting point is 00:22:40 top shot. So they basically pivoted the company to doing top shot. What they did with Top Shot was they went and partnered with the NBA and they were like, hey, NBA, we want to create, you know, you already make money on digital like trading cards, which are, sorry, just trading cards, which are like a piece of cardboard with, you know, just a picture on it. But like, hey, with the internet, we can actually take LeBron James Dunking. We can take that highlight clip and we can turn it into like a collectible item. That's just that clip, that highlight moment. And so that's what Topshot is. It's a bunch of these little moments and you open up a pack
Starting point is 00:23:11 and you'll get like five different highlights and you're hoping to get like a really famous player's highlight and like most of the time you get like some average player doing some average thing. But nonetheless, that's what people are collecting. And so there's a whole bunch of these. I'll show you one that I did. Where do you show this off at?
Starting point is 00:23:25 So like if you had a card collection, you would mostly hide it away, but everyone that's wrong maybe frame it or something. Right. What do you do it? So with these, there's basically like digital displays. So like on their website itself, you'll have a collection.
Starting point is 00:23:35 You can kind of share it. It's like an Instagram account. You basically share it and people can go browse your stuff. What I did is yesterday I bought a $600 display that I'm putting on my wall behind me that will rotate through all my digital art. And that's by the way, that's one of the what's that called? So I bought this one called mural. It's made by net gear of all companies. It's like, so this is one of the business opportunities. There is so much volume going on in this NFT space that people will want to display it on their desk, on their walls at home. And there's no simple way to do it.
Starting point is 00:24:08 Like right now you could use kind of like a TV, but that's pretty clunky and it's like it's a TV. It's kind of like overkill. And then there's this other thing. I want you to check out called Infinite Objects. I need to get art from my house. Should I just only? This is pretty neat. It is pretty cool.
Starting point is 00:24:22 I don't want to send a hundred grand though on a on a LeBron dunk. So let me explain slowly. Because I feel like I'm a little all over the place. So let me explain it a little bit slowly. So I want you to go to this length. I'm going to send you right now. This is the first NFTI I ever bought. It looks pretty sweet.
Starting point is 00:24:35 Tell me when you have it open. it was a Kobe Bryant NFT made by this artist called Boss Logic. And I've been following this guy, Boss Logic. You've probably seen him because he makes a bunch of UFC art. And Joe Rogan reshairs his stuff all the time. So he's this kind of just famous Instagram artist. And he would sell some posters sometimes. And he would get like some rich people would slide into his DMs to like commission some artwork.
Starting point is 00:24:56 It's just like a neat, I guess a video is what it is. But it's yeah, it looks sick. Yeah, it's like a looping video. So he created a piece of digital art, which is an animated picture of Kobe Bryant shooting a fade away. and he's kind of like fading away and becoming an angel because he passed away, right? So it's called Forever Mamba. He goes to a website called Nifty Gateway. Nifty Gateway is basically like eBay for all these collectibles for like the crypto collectibles, right?
Starting point is 00:25:17 eBay made its name on- What does this have to do with crypto? It has to do crypto because I just make it. Scroll down. I'll show you why. So if you scroll down on that page, you're going to see at the bottom all this data, market stats, right? It'll say that the average resale price of this item is $4,000.
Starting point is 00:25:32 But how is there an average resale if this is one of a kind? I bought this and I sold it. So I bought this for $824. That was, when it was released, all of them cost $824. And there was five minutes where you could buy as many of these as you wanted. So it dropped for five minutes. A bunch of us bought him. So there were, I think, 429 people bought this thing for $800.
Starting point is 00:25:53 So if you just look at the same piece of art. Yeah. So I got like number 200. Somebody else got like number one, you know, that sort of thing. So this guy did $400,000 worth of art sales in five minutes, this artist. and Nifty Gateway takes like a 15% cut. So then now look at like click global history down there and then click only sales and go to page.
Starting point is 00:26:13 So global history only sales and go to page four and the second to the bottom one. It says that Curious Goods bought the Forever Mama number 236 from Sean Puri for $8,100. So I basically went from $800 to $8,000. In 20 days, I 10xed my money. I bought it for $800 and I sold it for $8,000. And I actually sold too early.
Starting point is 00:26:32 Now these are selling for $15,000 currently $20,000. thousand dollars because a lot of people are really into this and there's only 429 of them that will ever exist because that's how many were initially minted when he dropped it now anybody who sells it we're selling not copies we're selling the original i no longer own this this other guy owns this i couldn't just rip this off and put this in my frame you can so you can and it would look as good it would just be like i would be a poser if you'd be a poser you would know just like if you go by a mona lisa poster right now from you know amazon that's not the mona lisa you'll know that's a picture of the on Elisa. Dude, they're selling for 20,000. Exactly. So the one I sold, I think, is on sale for
Starting point is 00:27:07 $45,000 for now. You pick your price. As the owner of the art, you can pick your price whatever you want. So yesterday, for example, there was another drop that, me and Ben, we woke up early in the morning and we went in and we, because we've seen these things when they dropped, they're just like appreciating like crazy right now, right? I 10xed my money in 20 days. So I was like, all right, let's see, let me just take those winnings and let me parlay this. Let me see if I can turn my initial $800 of capital into $100,000. So I'll show you this other one that I bought yesterday. I'm looking at all these.
Starting point is 00:27:34 Some of them are great. There was this artist who was a former baseball player. He became an artist named Micah Johnson. He created this character called Aku, and he makes this video. I just sent you the link. By the way, this is all owned by Gemini. Is that the Winklevosses? Yeah, actually, what's funny is the Winklevoss twins,
Starting point is 00:27:51 they started Gemini, which is like Coinbase. It's a place to go buy cryptocurrency. You can go buy Bitcoin there. And they bought Nifty Gateway from these other twins. So the Winklevite twins bought these other twins bought these other twins, the Cockfoster Twins, they made this little eBay for selling digital collectibles, and they own it. And now this thing is taking off. Like I talked to Griffin, the founder, and he was sharing some of the stories about how it started slow, and then now it's just doubling like every month.
Starting point is 00:28:16 I'm looking at the traffic. And it looked like in August, they had 11,000 people. In October, they had, these are all estimates, 38,000, then 48,000, then 150,000, and now close to 400,000. Yeah, I think they're doing 20 million in sales every month, right now. I believe they will get to, by the end of this year, I believe they will get to $100 million in art sales per month. I don't know what like Christie's and Sotheby's and those guys do. I don't think this is that far behind. And so what they're doing is they're going in pop, they find a popular artist. Well, I don't know how big there. What I'm saying is like this is not like just some super fringe thing anymore. The Forever Mamba one that you got is the best one.
Starting point is 00:28:54 Yeah, it's sick. But there's some other good ones. Like I've told you, Biple, when he did his drop, he has really cool art. He did four million dollars of art sales. You know, on his like five minute drop. And then the cool thing is for the artist, every time I resell it, the artist gets a cut of the resale too. So this artist, the boss logic guy, yeah, he put his initial ones up for $800 and now they're selling for way more.
Starting point is 00:29:14 But I think there's been $200 million of total sales and resales of that piece of art. Actually, that sounds high. Maybe it's 20 million. I think I might have got the number wrong. But he's getting a cut of all the resales too. As an artist, you don't just get sort of like exploited by making something great and then rich people start trading it with each other and making a bunch of money.
Starting point is 00:29:31 the artist always, because it's linked again, because it's all done on the blockchain, it's all perfectly kept records. There's no way to sell it kind of just for cash on your own and some art gallery with five rich old white people. This thing is all done in public on the internet. Everything is recorded. And because of that, there's a perfect way to pay royalties to the artist. So can you have this?
Starting point is 00:29:53 Oh my God. Some of these are really neat. Can you have this at your house in a frame and then just, you know what? I'm just going to sell this right now. Boom, sold. And then I'm going to buy another one. and now it's uploaded into my frame. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:30:04 That's exactly what I'm going to do. I bought me in Ben frames, and we're going to put them up next week, and we've been collecting these. So in yesterday's drop, I bought five. Each one was $1,000 in the drop. I bought five of them.
Starting point is 00:30:13 And already each one of those is selling on average for $2,500. So in one day, I could go sell it. A thing I bought for $1,000, I could sell for $2,500 right now if I wanted to. I think it might appreciate some more, so I'm going to hold on to it. I will say- Why would you ever sell any of them?
Starting point is 00:30:27 When I saw, hey, the thing I bought for $800, I can get $8,000 for that video right now? I sold it. And I kind of had sellers remorse as soon as I sold it. But it's hard to say no to 10 extra money in 20 days. It's pretty good. I know it's good. But what I'll say is NFTs let you do a lot of things, one of which is this idea of digital art.
Starting point is 00:30:44 Are you using the word NFT correctly? Would an MF, would like a Beanie baby be an NFT? Well, if a Beanie baby was was created or registered on the blockchain, then yes. Got it. Okay. So NFT only doesn't refer to a one-off rear car. It only refers to something that uses. It is a digital collectible.
Starting point is 00:31:01 It is a unique digital collectible. Now you can have, let's say, 500 of these, but each one is like a serial number, right? Like I owned number 206 out of 429. So I owned that one and 206 is unique. It's not the same as 205 and it's not the same as 207, right? They're all serial numbered, basically. Logan Paul, which I can't believe I'm quoting,
Starting point is 00:31:21 but he left his podcast and moved to Puerto Rico to focus. And he was like, I want to dedicate my next little bit of career to NFTs. Yeah. So him and Gary V have like gone. on all in on this whole like Logan Paul, this whole NFT thing, because they've made a killing in like sports cards and Pokemon cards recently.
Starting point is 00:31:40 So they're like, oh, dude, this just makes money. There's no like downsides to this. But Logan Paul did a NFT drop, I think yesterday. He did $3.5 million of sales of, I'll show you the thing he sold,
Starting point is 00:31:51 which is basically like it's just like a picture of him. It's like a little card. And you go look this up. So basically it was one Ethereum per thing. So you bought it for one ether. And this was his thing. What's five, link newsletter. Is that yours? Yeah, this is my new thing. Every Friday, I'm going to send out a bunch
Starting point is 00:32:05 of links I think are cool. One of the links this week is about Logan Paul's thing and the details behind it. So anyway, so he did a million dollars of sales in the first 30 minutes. He ended up doing $3.5 million in the day. And that's it. That's how many there are. And now whatever, you can trade these. Now, so let me be clear. A lot of this stuff, it's going to do what Cryptos Kitty did. It's going to go way up and then it's going to go crashing down because there may not be people who want to collect these things, right? And especially with NFTs, it's like, it's not even like Beanie Babies. With Beanie babies, you had to go create a toy. With NFTs, it's like, I can literally go in Microsoft Paint right now. I can create 40 files and then I can print them.
Starting point is 00:32:39 I can basically tokenize them. I can say, great, here's my rare art. Right. So there's like, there's going to be a lot of supply. So I would say there's a very good chance that this is a hype bubble right now. It is a very cool mechanism for artists to get paid. It doesn't seem like that big of a hype bubble. I mean, not that. I mean, if Logan Paul did it, then yeah, it's probably close to mainstream, but it doesn't seem that mainstream. Yeah, I don't say it's mainstream. what I'm saying is like, I'm not saying that all this stuff is going to hold its value. I think that right now, this is like just kind of a frenzy and everybody's piling in and everybody's trying to make a buck.
Starting point is 00:33:10 I don't think most people want to like own the art and display the art. I think a lot of people are just buying stuff to flip it. At my home, we don't have any art and that's what we're doing now. I would 100% invest $10,000 to $20,000 in the total of frames and cool shit like this. So that's why I started with the art example, because the art example is the least, it's the familiar and it's the least hateable because you're like wow this like this is a real unique piece of art that somebody did it looks beautiful i could put this up on my wall i've seen people buy art before that makes sense now let me show you something else that's done with uh nfts and you're
Starting point is 00:33:45 by the way can you name all where's all the places people can go to buy this stuff so nifty gateway dot com what else nifty gateway dot com is where the best art drops are happening and it's the easiest to use you can go buy it with a credit card you don't have to have like um you know you don't have to have like a big crypto wallet to be able to do it. You can just go and be like, cool, put this on my visa. I'm going to buy this thing. So that's why Dificay Gateway is smart. And they're partnering only with like high profile artists.
Starting point is 00:34:07 So there's not a bunch of trash there. But if you want the opposite, if you want like, what's everything, here's what's trying to be eBay for the crypto world is OpenC. So go to openc.io, like open like ocean. So OpenC. And this is where anybody can list any NFT. There's no like kind of curation filter. And you can just sell and resell anything here.
Starting point is 00:34:28 And so you'll go there. and you're going to be like, this is like a little picture of a plant. This is like a picture of like this is literally just like a pixelated image of a hamburger. And it's selling for $3. And so this is just like, it's just like eBay. This is everything. If you want to buy it, you can buy it. Look at the link I put into.
Starting point is 00:34:45 Put it in Slack. Okay, I'm put it slack. But I don't understand. They have like domain names too. What? This is so interesting. I'm going to tell you a little bit more of a hateable one now. And you tell me what you think of this one.
Starting point is 00:34:56 So this is Cryptopunks. Cryptopunks, same ideas. Beanie Babies. They made a bunch of little characters, and the character looks like a little eight-bit thing from an old school video game. It's just like a head of a little video game character. Oh my God. And they're selling for 150K. You know, there's like 10,000 of these. So right now, Cryptopunk number 2013 just sold for $92,000. Now when you see that, you're going to not feel the same way about, oh, yeah, like this. I'll put this up on my wall in my house and I'll, like, I'd pay for digital art. I don't think you would go by these Cryptopunk little collectible
Starting point is 00:35:28 figurines any more than you would go buy a Funko doll for $700 on eBay right now. You know what I mean? You don't own any crypto by buying this, correct? No, you actually spend crypto to buy one of these. Because they have... This sounds nuts. You pay in Ethereum, you pay
Starting point is 00:35:44 an ether, right, to go buy one of these things. And so yesterday somebody dropped half a million dollars on Cryptopunks in about a 30 minute time span. And so a lot of people think it was Chamath because he's talked about, he said, I'm building a very big NFT portfolio right now. I'll reveal the details of it later. There's only so many whales who are going to go
Starting point is 00:36:02 buy half a million dollars of NFTs in like a 30-minute span. And so some people think it's maybe it's some other random crypto millionaire or 100 millionaire or something like that. But there are many, many different types of these. So I'll give you another example. Music, there are artists that can just release a 10-second sound sample. I think is going to release a track on Nifty Gateway, I believe. I hope I'm not breaking any news there. But there are artists who are going to release songs or clips of songs as tokens that you can own. So you can own that song or you can own that clip of that song.
Starting point is 00:36:34 They're going to release it as like a piece of art, basically, that you can go buy and bid on. So the opportunity, obviously, here is displaying all these things. I think so. So I'll tell you the three. I mean, the biggest opportunity is these marketplaces. I believe if somebody was to make a very cool, simple frame, that's like kind of marketed and branded towards NFT collectors,
Starting point is 00:36:54 right now there's so much money being splashed around here. I think that you could sell $300 frames, $400 frames, and I think you could sell probably $5 million of them in a month, $5 million of sales in a month right now, easily, because of people need a way to display these. How do I get this thing literally in the frame? So there's two ways. One is you download your, you right-click this thing,
Starting point is 00:37:15 you save video as, and then you just, like, most of the frames can accept, like a video file, so you just upload it that way. The frames are attached to Wi-Fi? Yeah, the frames are Internet and Smart Frame, right? It's like a digital picture frame. And so the other way to do it. do it. The better way, I think, is if you're going to make this and market it towards those people, you would just say, cool, link your Nifty Gateway account, just like, log in. And once you log in,
Starting point is 00:37:34 cool, your whole collection is there. What's your Ethereum wallet? Just connect it, and then, boom, we'll display whatever you want here. And there's just a little companion app that will let you do this. Now, check this out. Our friend Ryan Hoover invested in this company called Infinite Objects. Have you seen this before? I dismissed all this. I think it's cool. I don't know if people are going to like this because, A, a bunch of this is visual. And if you're listening to this. I'm not sure if you're going to get it. And B, I think I'm talking a little bit fast and all over the place because I'm excited and I think you get it pretty quickly. But for a newcomer, I don't know if any of what I said is going to make sense. So let me know. You can tweet
Starting point is 00:38:07 I mean, be like, that made no sense. Can you do it simpler? But look at this site I just sent to you. So infinite objects. A first glance, you're just like, oh, this is like, it's just one of those digital picture frames, right? It is and it is. First, it's like kind of well designed. It looks pretty slick. It looks like something like, I don't know, like Apple would make or something. but the cool thing is it's an infinite object meaning whatever you put inside that's it forever it is a forever looping video of whatever you put in there so i think these are great gifts by the way really cool gift for like valentine's day or whatever like to get somebody mother's day that sort of thing but it's a printed video so it can't change in the same way that like a you know a poster can't
Starting point is 00:38:42 change so they basically just imprint this video in and then it's sealed and then nobody can ever change what's inside this so the first just like that harry potter shit This is what I always reminds me of. Exactly. It looks like a portrait that's like moving like in Harry Potter. Exactly. That's I think that's like very much what they went for, like the magic of that. The very first big drop that I was talking about, the biggest NFT drop, that one that artist Beeple did. And by the way, this guy, people were like, oh my God, this guy made like $4 million
Starting point is 00:39:08 in one day doing an NFT drop. This guy is a monster. For eight years, he made a different digital art every day. And he posted on Instagram and they're all like amazing. And he would do one a day every single day for, like eight or nine years. And then he like cashed in all that like fan love through an NFT drop. And that's, you know, he's the, he's the kind of highest selling artist on this thing. His things are now going for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Christie's invited him to do a
Starting point is 00:39:36 official, do like a traditional art show and sale. And they're going to accept cryptocurrency for the buyers of the art when he does it there. But when he did his, he offered one of these with every buyer, which I thought was really smart. So he said, if you buy this thing for whatever, you will get the digital thing and it'll be recorded on the blockchain but I'm also going to send you an infinite object with the piece of art in it so you'll have it in your house I think that's where this all goes I think artists are just going to include a physical token with the digital thing you bought I love this is so cool I do have a little bit of a nitpick with infinite objects which it looks like all their stuff is really small it is small yeah it looks like a book size thing like the thing you have behind you the thing I have behind me that's what I want and this also has a big problem right? So like I think their product is slick, but this is a big problem because you can only ever display one thing in this. Once you do it, it's forever. You can't use it to display your collection. You'd need to, if you bought 30 pieces of digital art, you need to buy 30 of these to display them. And so I think that's the big flaw of this, that somebody can still do as an
Starting point is 00:40:37 opportunity in the NFT space is to actually make a frame that will rotate your latest buys. And if you sell something, it'll leave, you know, that sort of thing. This guy, Darren Reveld tweeted, he's this kind of sports journalist type dude. He tweeted this thing out. He goes, look at these two images and tell me which one you would want. On the left is an autograph signed, there's a trading card with Michael Jordan and Kobe Ryan on it, and it was signed by both guys, signed by Michael Jordan,
Starting point is 00:41:00 signed by Kobe Bryant. And on the right was that Kobe Bryant NFT that I showed you. He goes, both of these right now are selling for $20,000, which one would you rather buy? And the Twitter replies are very interesting because some people are like, are you crazy?
Starting point is 00:41:12 That's a dude, I could just save that little image as my wallpaper right now. Boom, I got it for free. And then other people are like, so what? That other thing is just a piece of cardboard with some ink on it. If you break it down, like believing in autographs, believing in trading cards, like pieces of cardboard with somebody scribble on it, like, why is that valuable either? And it's all valuable because it's rare.
Starting point is 00:41:34 And it's all valuable because other people believe it's valuable. And so the big question is, that's what money is and that's what all of this is. So the question people have right now is, all right, with this NFT thing, you know, is this the next Bitcoin? I kind of feel, well, this is what a lot of people feel. It's like, shit, I kind of missed out on that Bitcoin thing. is this NFT that? Should I just be piling into this? Or is it more like ICOs three years ago where boom, everyone's doing ICOs, everybody's getting rich, crowdfunding through ICOs. And now ICOs are seen, and people at that time were saying, dude, this is like kind of a money grab.
Starting point is 00:42:04 These projects are not legit. This thing is not worth that. It's just a frenzy right now. My personal opinion is that NFTs are nowhere near as valuable as Bitcoin could be. Because if you just look at the collectibles market, like trading card market, there might be like the trading card market might be somewhere between $5 billion and $20 billion a year. Bitcoin, which is like a financial asset, financial system, like things in the financial system are worth trillions. Like, you know, like if Bitcoin's digital gold, gold's market cap is $10 trillion. So they're just operating on different scales.
Starting point is 00:42:33 So I would definitely not think of NFTs as like the next Bitcoin. I would think of it as a really cool way now for us to make things on the internet scarce because you can just copy, paste anything. And I can just, I can send you a file and then I have it and you have it. Everything was super, super abundant. So there was no way to have real scarcity on the internet. All digital stuff was like, could just be cloned and replicated infinitely. Do you remember watching videos and it's like rare video of Eminem backstage talking to Dr. Dre?
Starting point is 00:43:02 It's like, well, no, there's no such thing as rare on the internet. Well, in that case, like, it might be rare because that's the, you usually don't see Eminem backstage. But like, there's definitely any gif, any picture, any video, any song. You could just like infinitely share it and send it. We can all have one for free. There was no scarcity. The internet was amazing because it made everything so abundant so everybody could have it.
Starting point is 00:43:24 But what you lose is then what's the point of creating the art if it's just going to get cloned everywhere and I don't get any piece of the action? And so what I think is cool here is that crypto is kind of unlocked a way for artists to make things scarce that are digital. And some of it's going to be bullshit in the sense of, yeah, it's scarce,
Starting point is 00:43:41 but no one cares about it. So therefore it has no value. But some things that people care about, now you have a way to make them valuable through scarcity. I think that's really cool. All right, let's talk about this last thing. I think that this episode is going to be good, but we'll talk about this last thing.
Starting point is 00:43:56 It is crypto-related, but not in the same way. So Sean brought up this thing that I actually looked into is pretty interesting coin market cap. Is that for a coin market? I'll tell you how this got put on my radar. Somebody said, coin market cap, sorry, not coin. Somebody said this question.
Starting point is 00:44:10 I was going to quiz you with this, but I put it up here, so you had a chance to research it. but I was going to say, hey, guess which website is bigger? Coinmarketcap.com or Wall Streetjournal.com. And like, you know, any rational person who's just like kind of from the outside, you would think Wall Street Journal, of course, that's an institution. It's been around for years. Everybody knows about the Wall Street Journal.
Starting point is 00:44:27 What the hell is Coin Market Cap? Well, it turns out Coin Market Cap gets more traffic every month than the Wall Street Journal. And all Coin Market Camp was a guy that, well, it's been around for seven years. It's been growing. It passed it up years ago. It was his guy in his apartment, and all he did was he just displayed some price information about cryptocurrencies. That's how it got popular.
Starting point is 00:44:44 And now it's turned into like a full-fledged thing where they like do journalism. They write some articles about the latest news and whatnot. But like fundamentally it was just a display of kind of price information about crypto. And it is amazing to me that this thing was getting 100 million monthly visitors when the Wall Street Journal was only getting, you know, like 80. It had passed the Wall Street Journal. That blew my mind and I had to know some more. So that's how this got on my radar. What did you think was cool about this?
Starting point is 00:45:07 So I looked it up. It was started about one guy named Brendan Chess. I think it is C-H-E-E-Z. start about seven years ago. What's interesting is that he's, this story is always a good story. Very secretive. So I'm almost positive.
Starting point is 00:45:20 You can't find a picture of him. I couldn't find anything. I tried to find this motherfucker's picture. Couldn't find it. Yes. He's only done one or two interviews and it's always a stock like, outline of a black like head like a like a like a, like a,
Starting point is 00:45:31 with the shadow on you. And he, it's so powerful that he delisted the South Korean exchanges for some reason. I don't understand why. I guess the story is that he delisted some South Korean exchanges. I'm a total new, but basically like the equivalent of something off his site. Yeah. Yeah. He basically, it was like the coin base of South Korea. He said, no, we're no longer going to deal with you anymore. And by the by the way, delisting, it's not like they lost any power.
Starting point is 00:45:54 He just like stopped. It's like if the Wall Street Journal stopped talking about my company, that doesn't actually hurt my company, but it did in this case. And in this case, it wiped out $100 billion in market value of crypto asset market value. So very powerful. And I looked at on LinkedIn. The company only has 36 employees. And because, Because of its secrecy, a lot of the employees actually looked like legitimate, just like normal, like tech worker employees, although there is a lot of secrecy about it. So who knows what the truth is. But the company sold to Binance. Binance, Sean, is it Binance like pretty much a Coinbase competitor?
Starting point is 00:46:27 It's Coinbase in Asia. It's a little bit bigger than Coinbase. But it's the biggest exchange, which is like, it's the biggest place to buy and sell cryptocurrencies in the world. And Binance bought it for a rumored $400 million. And there's potential that it was like five or ten employees when they bought. it and Binance bought it kind of for the similar reason they HubSpot bought us not exactly the same but similar which is like wow you're setting a lot of traffic to all these places that are competition what if we just owned you and they promised not to like completely ruin it but I do think
Starting point is 00:46:57 they like promote themselves I don't know that I don't know the reality there's a reason they bought it let's put it that way yeah they can promote so they can say oh you're going to check out the price of Bitcoin all day by the way if you sign up right now for Binance you can get a $50 yeah come buy Bitcoin here yeah that's all they want they come buy it here don't buy it over there. Crazy fascinating because this idea of just like, I'm sure it's this product is, it's pretty slick. And on the surface, it looks dead simple. Like, oh, all he's doing is like pulling in data, like any dumb idiot can do this. I remember this thing, like this looked so simple back in the, like now it looks like a proper website, it's got articles, got journalists, like it's well designed.
Starting point is 00:47:29 This thing started as just like a plain white and black display of a bunch of numbers. And like, that's all it was. And it was popular because it was the easiest, fastest way to go at a glance, see what was going on in the crypto world with the price and the market caps and the change over, like change in the last 24 hours and stuff like that. So it's amazing. This is a great example of why Combinator calls picks and shovels businesses, which is something our friend Andrew Wilkinson likes a lot, which is whenever there's a big gold rush, don't try to be one of the people in the gold rush, go sell shovels to the people who want to go get gold.
Starting point is 00:48:02 And so examples of this would be, you know, Andrew's company, Wecommerce, which is basically, okay, Shopify is getting big, ecommerce is getting big. don't try to be a big e-commerce site, sell tools to people who want to start their own, who want to go in the gold rush of e-commerce and go try to build their stores. And now, e-commerce is a public company worth like, I don't know, $800 million or something.
Starting point is 00:48:20 This is that same idea, which is instead of trying to become a crypto fund or buy a bunch of Bitcoin or speculate on the price or do anything, they're like, we'll just report like the price in the news. We'll just be like a display of information. And that picks into all's business. Like they, you know, sold $400 million. I think it's kind of amazing. This is wild.
Starting point is 00:48:37 I think that this episode is, I don't know, if people are going to absolutely love this or think that it was too, too much. But this is a fascinating thing. I'm kind of amped up, to be honest. I'm leaving this amped up. And by the way, that website told you about CryptoSlam or, you know, whatever. There's a whole bunch of these now, DeFi Pulse. They're building the coin market cap. They're trying to build the same thing, coin market cap for NFTs.
Starting point is 00:49:00 They're like, oh, we'll display a bunch of information. Like that thing I sent you that showed you how much money Top Shot had made in the last 24 hours. that's what coin market cap is, but they're just doing it specifically for an NFTs and they're trying to become the coin market cap for NFTs. And I think you could take that same principle to really any space that's hot, right? Like you could do it with crunch base
Starting point is 00:49:17 or whatever did it with startup funding news. Every time there's funding, cool, we're going to write it down here and it's a searchable database of that. And you can just do this in any industry where there's a lot of interest, you could just become the like info display sites for that thing. Chartable does this with podcast, for example.
Starting point is 00:49:32 Not well. What's this one you're sending me? You guys got to fix this. What is that you? I sent you a world meters. info, and I think they blew up just because they showed the daily count of coronavirus. Yeah, I remember this. So it was a kid. He might have been not even 20. He was a young kid, and he did the same exact chart, but for COVID cases. And it blew up. And I think the New York Times did an article about how he refused to sell it and he refused to put advertising on it. And they estimated that he could be making $4 or $5 million a year off just display ads. Brue just sent the traffic.
Starting point is 00:50:05 It's 220 million visits this last month. Oh, then he would have made way more. This was like right when COVID started a year ago. You could just sell masks on this one link to a mask. Yeah. When I saw that, I was like, dude, make money off of it. You're working hard. Get paid.
Starting point is 00:50:22 Like, how are you going to keep doing this if you can't make any money? 200 million people come to your website a month. How on earth do you afford unless they're going to give you that, that's going to cost you. Surely that would cost tens or six figures a month maybe. Yeah. I don't know how much to cost, maybe ABS gives him. Has ads on it. This guy is making some good money.
Starting point is 00:50:38 And all it's doing, it's what you guys said, he's just pulling data for corona cases in different countries and 200 million hits a month. Yeah, now I see, I turned off my eye block. I see like Squarespace ads all over it now. So whatever that guy was saying where he wasn't going to do it, at the bottom, you can, you know, lending tree refinance calculator. Well, this is good.
Starting point is 00:50:56 I think we should wrap up here. This is pretty sick. We're going to break this heat, hopefully, every time. And this is sick. Well, thank you for listening. us the feedback on this. I want to know what people want and if they dug it. All right. We're out of here.

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