On The Brink with Castle Island - Adam Jackson (Braintrust) on Building a Web3 Talent Network (EP.310)

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Adam Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Braintrust, a web3 talent network joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Marketplace business models and how web3 models will improve on web2 dynamics How Adam came to the insight to launch Braintrust and how the platform works The regulatory environment in the United States and how Adam sees web3 evolving over time Other marketplace categories where Adam sees opportunities for community owned networks Adam's view on the venture landscape and how that has evolved over time. To learn more about Braintrust visit usebraintrust.com and follow Adam on Twitter @AdamJacksonSF    

Today in the podcast, I sat down with Adam Jackson, the co-founder and CEO of Brain Trust, a user-owned talent network. Adam's a dynamic founder, and I enjoyed chatting with him about a variety of topics, including incentive models of Web3 platforms, some of the differences between Web 2 and Web 3 marketplace business models, and the current state of Web 3 regulation in the U.S. and elsewhere. I think you'll enjoy this one, so without further ado, here's my conversation with Adam Jackson. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of money. market and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of concentrated easy. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this

worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Adam, well, thanks so much for joining today on the podcast. Excited to talk about Web 3 talent networks. Thanks for having me on, Matt. So great place to start I think would just be to hear a little bit about your background and what was the insight behind starting brand trust. I'm a software engineer by training, studying computer science at Bannerbelt and then after school moved out here to the Bay Area. I'm sort of a lousy engineer turned entrepreneur and then was a lousy entrepreneur for a really long time as well. And finally kind of found my stride with marketplace businesses. Web enabled what we'd call now Web2. Started a bunch of them and some hit, some less successful. But over the course of my career,

learned and realized that the dirty little secret of Web 2 marketplaces is that they're very capital intensive. So you've got to raise a ton of money to build liquidity in the marketplace. Basically, you're using venture money to subsidize one or both sides of the marketplace. And if you're lucky enough to break orbit, most don't. But if you are, you sort of come out the other end with a majority investor-owned network. And those investors very rightfully so need a return on their capital. And that return comes from sort of this ever-increasing rake, like a higher and higher take rate, usually as a percentage of the transactions happening on the network. And with the higher the rake, we've all sort of observed and this plays

out over and over in Web 2 is the higher the rake, the more misaligned incentives there are between the folks who make their living on that marketplace and the investors, owners, operators of the marketplace. And so I've started three of these Web 2 venture-backed marketplaces and invested in countless more. When I came across blockchain tech in really got into it full time in 2016, I started thinking like, there's got to be a better way to do this. There's got to be a way to get the users of the marketplace, the folks who make their

living on it, to get them involved more meaningfully early on as owners and builders and and let them do a lot of the work that you would have maybe normally raised billions and ventured and then hired tens of thousands employees to do. Instead, have the community do it and reward them with ownership in the network in exchange for that work. And so I wrote a paper in 2018 called the ownership economy that basically just created what I think we call now kind of the Web 3 playbook, which is don't raise a ton of money, right?

There's still obviously like a huge important role for investors in this space and the work you do at Cass Island and a lot of the investors we have in Brain Trust, critical for bootstrapping the network. But instead of raising billions and hiring lots of employees, raise less and have your community do the building, inviting supply, curating supply, demand, et cetera. And so this in 2018 was, I thought an investment thesis. I was actually a GP at a fund I helped start called Cambrian at the time and was looking to deploy capital into this thesis, there just wasn't any opportunities. And I decided it would be amazing to just stand up a project and prove the big idea of being user-owned networks will grow faster and become more valuable than investor-owned

networks. And so that's where brain trust came from. We actually spun it out of the fund. And I stepped aside as GP and now I help grow a brain trust full-time. It's a fascinating story. I want to double-click a little bit into some of the Web 2 learnings. I mean, you're a student of the game on marketplace businesses. What was the fundamental reason why Web 2 marketplaces couldn't give this ownership to their users?

And were there any folks that tried it? And were there any lessons to learn there? A lot of the smart operators in this space understood this problem and really did try to solve it. And I think you saw Uber and Airbnb both try to give equity to their hosts or drivers or whatever. And there were kind of two problems with this. One, to give, call it, 10 million people in 45 countries' shares of a Delaware Sea is actually just like legally and logistically almost impossible. It just doesn't work. They have to have brokerage accounts. They have to be within the U.S. brokerage system. And it's expensive to custody,

to transfer. There's lawyers involved with tokens. That's completely trivial. Sending a token is as easy is sending a text message and custodying it was getting better and safer and easier. And so that was one and two, the SEC actually had a problem with it. There was some rules that came down about how many shareholders you can have, your private company and blah, blah, blah. So it just never took off because this user-owned economy idea, I think, is a new business model, a new network model enabled by a new technology, which is blockchain. That makes total sense.

Talk a little bit just around how brain trust works today. maybe give folks that haven't used the product a sense of what it looks like to be on both sides of the trade. Rain Trust is a decentralized talent network. It's a network that connects supply, which in our case is tech talent, programmers, engineers, designers, product managers, with demand clients, clients that need their services. This could be anybody. Brent Trust focuses on the enterprise.

So it's Nike, Nestle, Porsche, Goldman Sachs, big banks, big FinTech, big fintech, big insurance companies, big CPG companies. And as you know, these companies have insatiable demand for technical talent. And so BrainTrust serves as the marketplace that connects them. But instead of being a for-profit corporate entity that runs the marketplace, BrainTrust is actually just a set of smart contracts and open source software. You can almost think of it like Uniswap is a set of smart contracts that connects demand, people who want to buy tokens with supply, people who want to sell tokens. And it facilitates those trades in a decentralized, permissionless way. Brain trust is very similar.

Brain trust, the marketplace connects buyer and seller. They transact, they hire, Goldman Sachs will hire a Java developer and pay them in U.S. dollars. So the token is not a payment. It's not meant to be a payment substrate. Dollars are still kind of what people want to spend and what people want to receive, at least in this world. But where the token comes in, the brain trust token, is.

it's an incentive mechanism. You earn it by referring talent, screening talent, referring clients, building the business, building the network. You earn tokens that way. And then you use the tokens to control the network. Propose new changes to the network, vote on new changes, control the product roadmap. There's a bunch of other new features being experimented with like bid staking and other things that help freelancers build their businesses faster on brain trust.

So because brain trust is not a for-profit corporate entity, and it's owned by its users, it can have a very disruptive fee structure. So the fees that brain trust collects from talent, zero. So if your talent, you think you're worth 150 bucks an hour, if you put on your talent profile or your bid at 150 bucks an hour, and when Goldman hires you, you get $150 an hour, no take. Clients pay a flat 10% fee. That fee is paid in cash by the client, but then is sent to a smart contract called the fee converter, and those dollars are used by the smart contract to buy brain trust tokens out of the open market and send those tokens back to our Dow.

And the brain trust Dow, it's the pool, the capital pool that incentivizes folks to keep building the protocol. It kind of recycles capital that way. And so the brain trust network does not need to turn a profit. It just takes that 10% fee to sustain itself and sustain the community. That's really interesting. I assume when you first started looking at public blockchains, it probably was not technically possible to build what you've built today. And this is sort of an industry that evolved from the monetary use case into decentralized financial services now into

Web 3. And so maybe talk a little bit just to be around the tech stack and how you've evolved your thinking around just how to build this. We started building this in 2018 when there was only one smart contract platform and it was very slow and expensive. And it still is, very slow and expensive. We're built on Ethereum. Pre-Trust is an ERC-20 token. And so what we were forced to do was build a lot of the marketplace logic, including off-chain wallets, off-chain referral engines. A lot of the protocol logic just lives off-chain. Today, it's in a Python jango stack. It's being migrated to a layer two called Scale, S-K-A-L-E network, which is basically a charting solution for Ethereum. It'll work on any WASM layer one. And then as more functionality gets built

out by the community, I think we'll see a lot more of this possibly touch other chains like Terra and other Turing complete chains. But it forced us to build a lot of the high volume stuff just off-chain. And I guess what is the impact to the user? You mentioned the fact that you have one side of this marketplace just engaging with US dollars. And so have you obfuscated a lot of the complexity of the blockchain piece to your customers? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we built this. It feels like a Web 2 application when you first come on. We don't force you to go through the Metamask process. Clients in particular just want nothing to do with the blockchain. One of the reasons we've been able to grow really quickly on the client side is not forcing them

into a blockchain world, an on-chain world using those tools. When they submit their 10% fee on every invoice in dollars, we actually, automate the process of moving that money onto the blockchain and buying B-Trust tokens. It's all done completely automated, no human intervention by a smart contract. So that's obfuscated away from the client. Talent can earn tokens via the off-chain wallet the brain trust software provides. And then if they ever want to withdraw those, it becomes an on-chain transaction for them. And then they can take those tokens and do whatever they want.

But not insisting on using on-chain wallets and that kind of stuff. up front, I think really helped us grow quickly. Yeah, you could see him. The downside is like, it's hard to see on chain how well the network's doing. We built a dashboard, info.com, where you see all the network KPIs. But it's like you can't just like plug into Dune because so much of the activities not happening on chain. Yeah, it's sort of like Coinbase having an Omnibus account.

You're not exactly sure what each individual user is doing. You just know there's a lot of activity going on there. Exactly right. I'd imagine one of the big challenges that you've had as an entrepreneur is, just articulating to customers and to investors where value accrues here. So you're obviously building a business that looks like it's going to be very valuable. You're also building or you're part of building a protocol that's going to be very valuable as well. How do you think about just where value accrues and how have investors thought about which bucket they want exposure to?

We try to make the two kind of the same. It's not a traditional kind of EBIT of multiple cash flow business. The revenue that comes in through the network goes and buys tokens on the open market and pumps them into the Dow for future investment by the community to build new stuff and expand the protocol. So Treasury doesn't get depleted by just funding the referral engine, et cetera. So we've never sold equity. It's always been, you know, the private rounds were on SAFs. The round we just did was Tiger and KOTU buying tokens. And so the token is the interesting. part of this. That's fascinating. There's another way to have built this where you have the equity package and the token package, and you can see how they would compete. So it seems like just

picking one for value accrual. It's probably the most logical. It feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen when you have those two competing. Well, you do see a lot of these models in Web 3. And I'd be curious your take on this where you have like an operating entity that's also shepherding an open source protocol and maybe running more of like a Red Hat model versus Linux. What do you think the prospects of those models on Web3? What does that look like? I think we're seeing a lot of very interesting experiments being run. I think if you look at like compound ink, the compound protocol or compound labs ink or whatever

it is, that's a valuable company. Robert sold preferred shares to A16 and others. And they're doing other interesting things besides just developing the compound protocol. And then the comp token was distributed to pro rata over the cap table, pro rata over the user base. I thought that was one of the most interesting and probably most fair ways of doing that. And so compound labs, Inc. may be valuable enterprise. I think that model can work and will work in certain unique areas. To me, it was too complicated.

I just think our goal, when I say our, I mean like freelance labs, Inc, one of the nodes I run and the other six or seven nodes that have dedicated a lot of resources to building brain trust, we're in it for the protocol. We think becoming the protocol for work is building something incredibly valuable. And if there's a token associated with it, that could be interesting. Imagine being able to own an SMTP token that email gets built on. So we've optimized for simplicity. I'm not interested in making money on marking up preferred shares of a company I own.

It's like walking and chewing gum. I'd rather just pick one. Just pick one. Yeah. One of the most fascinating threads here, I think, in the future, probably hasn't happened at scale yet is just going to be around how governance happens at the Dow level. And you could imagine a world where there's like a decentralized Uber that has a Dow governance attack, kind of like a hostile takeover or even. How do you imagine this will play out? And I'm curious just

what you're seeing in your community around factions emerging and how you see this landscape unfolding. If you look at the brain trust snapshot, there's quite a few proposals. And if you look at the discord, the Braintrust Discord, it's linked to the bottom of Braintrust.com. There's a good, healthy debate going in there. Some of the votes are like, hey, this is obvious and they pass unanimously. Others of the votes are contentious. And I think we're going to see more sort of attack vectors play out. I mean, I'll give an example of one that was, I think, close and contentious. We mostly don't know who these people are. Part of being decentralized is we don't actually control it anymore. Somebody proposed this idea of allowing

brain trust token holders to deposit tokens into like a account and then earn staking rewards. And the staking reward thing, I think it makes sense for layer ones that are secured through proof of stake methodology, like a Terra or an Ethereum. But I'm not sure it makes sense for a layer three, for a DAP like brain trust. And so the thing passed. I don't know if it's being implemented or not, but it's like, I don't know that that's like great for the token economics of the protocol. Anyway, just one example of like, we'll see what happens. It's a cool experiment. On the more kind of serious attack factor side, like we've entertained this idea of what

if someone buys up enough tokens to propose like a serious change to the protocol, like the fee structure. So the zero and 10 fee structure I just mentioned, that's written into smart contract. The application reads it every day. And that's how it decides what fees to charge. It's completely automated. And so what if someone bought up a bunch of tokens and said, hey, we're going to change the fee structure to 10 and 40.

Oh, and all those fees are going to go to this address. Basically, a hostile takeover of the economics of the network, which is entirely doable. What I think would happen in that case, and it just kind of proves this thesis that, like, the software of a network is not the valuable part. It's the counterparties. It's the knowledge and reputation of the supply and the demand. And so, like, back to your Uber example, the value of Uber is not its. pretty black and white app or its ability to charge a credit card. It is the knowledge and reputation

of its riders and drivers. If that community picked up and forked, in BrainTrust case, the 48,000 talent members and however many clients we have now, a thousand clients or whatever, we're like, hey, this is open source. We'll just fork, go to BrainTrust 2. We'll take the token with us and we'll go back to zero intent. And then whoever bought up all those tokens and screwed up the economics are sort of left holding the bag. So that's a cool thing. You can fork your way out of those attacks. I guess this is the case for all public botchains. You could fork Bitcoin and you could create your own thing. But if you don't have the network effect there and if you don't have the talented developers that can stay up with it, then there's probably not going to be a lot of folks that want to hop over

to your forked network. The interesting thing is that you could imagine a world where a bunch of different front ends start to build on top of this. Are you seeing that yet? And how do you think that'll unfold? I haven't seen anything go live yet. But we've been approached by lawyers, who think there should be a brain trust for paralegals, because it doesn't make sense that paralegals on staff or CPA firms that want to be able to have a brain trust type model to have elastic workforce for tax compliance professionals. I know that this is coming to brain trust.

I'm not sure if it'll happen on the existing brain trust interface or if someone will create their own interface to interact with the protocol. But we know that stuff's coming. And it's probably just in Web 3 you can move so much faster because the code is public. And so just the modularity of these things. I mean, you can innovate in new and exciting ways and the time to market is pretty rapid out, imagine. 100%. On the forking issue, like, imagine a lot of people hear this and they're like, who gives a shit? Like, who would ever do this? I'll give you like an interesting example. Do you remember this has happened countless times in Web 2, but like it always seems to screw restaurants for some reason? So like, do you remember Yelp used to basically just strangle the businesses? They owned SEO for the businesses and they owned the business's front door and reputation. ability to control its image online, and then it would just extort. Their business model was extortion, pay our fee, our monthly fee, and we'll let you have your reputation online. Imagine if the restaurants

were like, yeah, we're just going to fork this thing. If Yelp were open source and they could just pick it up and go to Yelp 2, and here we are. Now Yelp 1 doesn't have any participation from restaurants anymore. Same for DoorDash, same for most gig economy companies. And so, like, I think once the Web3 networks get large enough. It just hands the value back to the network participants. That makes a ton of sense. What was it that made you want to start with talent? Obviously, this is an enormous market, and you guys probably can run in this market for years and years to come. But what made this segment the most attractive to you? Well, I really wanted to start with last mile. I really wanted to start with folks who deliver people packages food. I think the most innovative thing the GIC

economy did was lower minimum wage, like to all-time lows. The fact that they can extract that much money out of working class people was the only real innovative thing they did. And so DoorDash forces restaurants into negative gross margins most of the time. It's bad for a small business. It's bad for working class. And so when I wrote this paper back in 2018 called the user-owned economy, I had drivers in restaurants in mind. Now, to use a token as an incentive mechanism to build users and to really take liquidity from existing marketplaces to bring it to years, it's tough. So I figured, well, first, like, doing this in the real world is just going to be too hard. One, two, explaining a token is going to be easier to technical people than non-technical.

And so that's actually what landed us in, let's get information workers, specifically IT, on board and then bring clients that need them. On the demand side, there's literally unlimited demand. Brain trust now only solves for talent because there's billions and billions of annual demand just sitting on brain trust right now. We just can't onboard the talent fast enough. It was a choice of convenience. And it was the right one. I'm glad we did it. The only sort of like downside is like, well, and the fair criticism of brain trust is like, you're sort of helping people who don't need help economically. And so the part of me that like wants to help society and like wants to like help fix income inequality, I'm not achieving that right now. But hopefully this will be

used as a playbook for the gig economy someday. Do you imagine that there will be other kind of versions of brain trust in the future that would extend to the gig economy? Is it extensible right now? I hope so. I hope someone forks us, copies us. I hope I get to invest. I hope I get to be involved however I can. I'll be running, helping run brain trusts for the foreseeable future in its current incarnation. But yeah, that's my goal is that we can create an extensible playbook for the gig economy. I guess the counter to what you just said is just that if you want to build a business, you want to build a protocol here, the people that are actually going to use it are those web three developers. And that's clearly the pressing need for just so many companies.

So what does that landscape look like right now? From where I said, it just appears to be really hard to find Web 3 native talent. We just got to train them faster. Going from a Web 2 professional to Web 3 is not that hard. These languages aren't that different. The gap is much smaller than people think, but the demand is insatiable for this. And so Web 3 talent is actually a relatively small category on Brain Trust. Most of the brain trust talent are Web 2 folks serving enterprise clients that have nothing to do with the blockchain. Java developers working for banks or product managers working for CPG goods companies like Nestle and Nike. We just announced yesterday actually like there's a bunch of blockchain protocol

or blockchain ecosystems are actually moving their grants programs onto the brand trust platform so they could just get talent faster. That's interesting. I'd imagine the addressable market for Dow's that are just looking to run those programs pretty large growing by the day. 100%. I'd imagine you think a lot about just the regulatory landscape and listeners of this podcast, we'll hear us talk and complain about the SEC a lot. So what kind of went into building the protocol? What is the state of play in the U.S.? Are we losing our competitive edge? What's your outlook here? People say, like, from a project standpoint, there's all this regulatory ambiguity and blah, blah, blah. There just isn't. The rules are actually really clear. If you're a token

powering an ecosystem, you're going to be tested against the Howie Test. And the Howie Test has four prongs. You need to not pass the four prongs to not be considered security. So if you pass the four prongs, your security, you should be regulated as one. You might get into investigation with them. I think Braintrust failed three of the four prongs. So we got a legal opinion. It's not a security. Move on.

It was never designed to be security. It doesn't capture profits and return them as dividends, as you see with a lot of tokens, was never meant to be security. It's basically a membership pass into the network. and then it's a governance mechanism. It allows you to control the network. And its cash value has no bearing on its utility in the network. It was always designed that way.

So we were never really like in the red zone there. Now look, that said, to part two of your question, is it making us lose our edge? 100% it is. I think rules written in the 1930s don't make a lot of sense today in some cases. And I think the financial system is just evolving so quickly that if we don't open the tent up in the U.S. for this kind of stuff, it will go offshore and we will miss out. That part I do worry about. I guess the hard thing from a regulator's perspective is that these things look very different.

Some of these public blockchain assets are clearly commodities. Some of them are clearly unregistered securities. Some of them are clearly like membership oriented badges. Some of them are collectibles. It's just not entirely clear that there's an overarching bucket to force this into. It's almost like you have to have a taxonomy of what the asset is in order to understand who the regulator of that spot market ought to be. We're not there yet, unfortunately, as an industry. Yeah, 100%. I think the regulars, the SEC in particular, have done it particularly good job of going after the frauds, the fraudsters, which is just net positive for all of us. Get these folks, put them in jail, get them out of our ecosystem. But then I see, like, the way Binance was able to just lap

Coinbase over and over and over. And that kind of sucks. Coinbase plays a clean game. and they're just like as blue chip as it can be, but it sucks to see this like mystery corp that has no domicile just lapping in American exchange. And you know, Tara is another good example. I mean, Doe Kwan's one of the brilliant minds in this space. And he's like, fuck the SEC. I'll do what I want. And he operates basically with impunity. Whereas if he were an American, that'd be tough. And bank SBF, he had to leave to do all of his things. And so if it keeps up like this, you're just telling people leave first. Go somewhere else. Yeah, and I guess it's a little bit different from the web two world. I mean, the founders of Uber didn't really have the opportunity to just go leave.

They did in the United States. This is a completely global, digitally native economy we're talking about. And so you can build these things from anywhere is the truth. There is no geographic arbitrage when you have to bust a taxi union in New York or Las Vegas. Travis ran through walls to get that done. Sadly, they're shitting all over him with this new TV show, which I think is intensely unfair. And they're making Bill Gurley look like the hero. But anyway, sorry for the digression. But now, you're right. With blockchain, you can do it from anywhere. You do it from Singapore, do it from Malta, and reach everybody. And IP blocking Americans will only last so long. Yeah, I want to get you so far. One of the things I wanted to get your

take on was just the monopolistic tendencies of Web 2 versus Web 3 and how you think about that on a category basis. I mean, if you look at something like search, there's kind of one dominant player there. If you look at ride sharing, there's a couple, but it's not like there's 10. How do you think about that in the context of Web 3 categories? And obviously, want to get your view on brain trust category, but just other categories within Web 3. Is it winner take all, winner take most, oligopoly? How do you see this playing out from a market structure perspective? So I'll start on layer one if I could. Like I deeply believe in a multi-chain world. Bitcoin's always going to be Bitcoin. And I don't see people building smart contracts on there, but it'll always be digital gold. I don't think

Ethereum goes away. It could be this grand settlement layer for larger things. Shalana obviously has this massive foothold. Terra, I think, is one of the new compelling defy chains. And then all these the wormholes and all these things that connect them, like all super compelling. And there's clearly no monopoly there. We live in a multi-chain world on layer three. I think there's still the potential for winner take-all economics, just based on the power of network effects. But it's going to look a lot different, I think, than Web 2. It's basically like a complete new jump ball game. In Web 2, you get this lock-in and it's very, very hard to compete because nothing's public. Everything's hidden away and obfuscated. In Web 3, a lot of the data is

on chain. The users aren't necessarily the moat. The software is all open source and totally meaningless, so you have the fork. I think the less extraneous value that's being skimmed off a network, the more likely it can become a monopoly. I'll put another way, hopefully more succinctly. Like on the spectrum of networks that give as much value or more as they extract, or on the other end of the spectrum, networks that extract way more value than they give back, This end, the more extractive end, is completely vulnerable to disruption. So the closer you get to providing more value than you take, your network effects actually expand and strengthen instead of eroding.

With brain trust, the model is extract minimal value. And the value we do extract actually gets pumped back into the Dow so the community can be funded to build and expand more things. It's literally a nonprofit. It's a public good. And so I think if you have those models, like who's going to disintermediate that? You're sort of at zero there. And then your community is sort of the governor on how much rent you can extract on a given

unit economic basis, I suppose. And what to do with that rent? That makes sense. One of the things that you said there that really resonated with me was just the fact that a lot of this innovation is happening in public. We kind of talked about it earlier. But I mean, look at something like compound when they introduced their liquidity mining scheme. Look how fast the industry copied that and look at,

all of the projects that immediately hopped on that. That would be the equivalent of Uber's growth team having their plans just laid out bare in public and then having the competitors say, okay, here's how they're targeting or here's how they're running their Instagram ads. We need to just copy that. So it's fascinating that some of these big strategic things are just happening in the public domain. It's all forcible. It's the penultimate version of competitive, market-driven innovation. One thing I've always admired about China, I don't admire many things about them. But one thing I was admired is they basically have no intellectual property system. And they don't enforce most of the civil code. So it's always been cutthroat competitive over there

because they're not suing people on patent infringement in this kind of shit we see in the U.S. That's the blockchain space. There is no intellectual property. I guess with the NFTs, they're buying commercial rights and giving them to people. But that's like, that's a dumb American construct. In the real world of blockchain, the examples you gave are great. Like, you just got to be faster, think smarter, be more creative. There's nothing to protect you. Yeah, and it's a 24-7 market and it's a talent war out there. You better be fast. That's why this is happening so fast. I mean, if you had told me a few years ago that you'd have community-owned networks that are raising from crossover funds, I'd have been really surprised, frankly.

But I think a lot of this is because all of this innovation is happening in public. It's a double-edged sword. We were thrilled like this last round we did, came together almost without us doing anything. It was Koto Tiger and others, just really excited to participate and join the community. The other side of the coin is you're just bloodied every day by the competition and the rate of it is a global playing field with such low barrier to entry. So as an operator, you better be ready for the fight. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, it's been really exciting to have you on. Where can we send people to learn more about brain trust and anything on the horizon that we should direct people towards? BrainTrust.com or on Twitter,

it's at use brain trust at Adam Jackson SF on Twitter. Lots more. stuff always coming. Like, we're just rolling out health care benefits on Brain Trust right now. So one of the big blockers for people in the U.S., at least leaving their W-2 jobs and going out to freelance are, well, two things. One, they don't want to, like, start an agency and have to pitch clients and demand gen. And two is health insurance. And so Brain Trust has been working for years to eliminate both of those barriers. One, we have unlimited demand now on the marketplace. So no need to advertise yourself. Just pick one of the jobs that apply for it. And you've, probably won't be competing with a lot of other people. And two is healthcare. So we've integrated

two different health benefits providers. So folks coming on in the U.S. can sign up for brain trust and select the health care they want. So that's kind of a new thing coming here in the next few weeks. That's really exciting. Well, congratulations on what you've built. Thanks for joining. We'll have to have you on next year. I'm sure there'll be a lot more on the horizon for you guys. So thanks for joining the podcast. Thanks for having me, Matt. Good to see you. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.V.C. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink-Podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.