On The Brink with Castle Island - Sohrob Farudi on Fan Controlled Football (EP.294)

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Sohrob Farudi, the founder and CEO of Fan Controlled Football joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Sohrob's entrepreneurial journey and the insights that led to him founding Fan Controlled Football. How FCF works and how fans engage with the league, all the way to calling the plays. How Sohrob came to be interested in cryptocurrency and how NFTs have crossed into FCF. Longer term opportunities for cryptocurrencies and tokenized securities in the context of FCF. The upcoming season and what fans can expect. To learn more visit FCF.IO and follow the league on Twitter Sponsor notes Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware, hosting, and ASIC reselling. Start mining your own bitcoin by visiting compassmining.io

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Sorab for Rudy, the founder and CEO of fan-controlled football. Fan-controlled football is an indoor football league that is leaned in heavily on public blockchains and NFTs. I wanted to have Sorab on the show to discuss two of my favorite things, which are cryptocurrency and football. This one was a lot of fun, so without further ado, here's my conversation with Sorab for Rudy of fan-controlled football. 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 as 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 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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. So Rob, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having that. I'm excited to talk about the intersection of crypto and football. Those are like two of my favorite things. So thank you for starting a company in that space.

Mine too. Yeah. So maybe for the listeners, why don't you just give a little bit of the listeners, why don't you just give a little bit of background on yourself and what led you to start fan control of football. Yeah, I've been entrepreneur for a while. Started a company in 2005 in the mobile space, venture backed in 08 and had exit in 2011, was dabbling in a bunch of different things. Huge sports fan myself, massive fantasy football player, played a bunch of Madden growing up and I always wanted to get into sports. I got a chance to become a minority owner of an arena football team all the way back in 2014, really fell in love with,

the sport and the game, terrible investment. And there's a reason why the league doesn't exist anymore because the economics were all wrong, but the product was great. And so, you know, I got really into the weeds on this new franchise and how it was working and how the league worked and felt like there was something missing in terms of fan engagement and technology and really kind of changing the game and started thinking about how all of the sports that we know and love were invented before technology existed. Right.

And so with this format of football or fans are on top of it and it's fast-paced and, you know, shorter games, was there something that we could do to merge the worlds of technology and video games and traditional sports in a way that made sense and let fans participate? And so, you know, this is an idea that has evolved for, you know, seven, eight years now to get where it is. But, you know, the beginnings were back in 2014 in the arena football league when I started laying the foundation. So talk a little bit about just how it works and kind of the original concept. And curious, it makes total sense that you came from looking at this from the video game space. You probably just saw, hey, why can't we do this in the analog world? So for those of the listeners that aren't familiar, just talk a little bit about how everything works. Yeah.

So this is the hardest hurdle to get over is that no one believes that it's real football. So this is real football on the field. We play seven on seven tackle football, helmets and shoulder pads. That's a 50-yard field, a one-hour game. So we created an interesting version of indoor football, if you're familiar with indoor or arena game. Our first season, we had Johnny Mansell and Josh Gordon play in the league, and legit NFL caliber players.

So it's really high quality, you know, pro guys on the field. But the idea was to create a short form, interactive version of the sport. When I say interactive, I mean, fans literally play it as if they were playing Madd. So the way that we've set this up, fans do everything from the branding of the new franchises. We started the league last year with four teams. We didn't have any names. We didn't have any logos. We just introduced some team owners into the mix, celebrity team owners,

Marshaun Lynch, Richard Sherman, Cuevo from Migos, Austin Eckler, you know, René Montgomery. So guys and girls from sports and entertainment and gaming. And then we let fans, we crowdsourced names. We let fans vote on their favorite. Then we crowdsourced logos. We let fans vote on their favorite. And then when we got into the season, we brought about 100 guys in the camp, which we did tryouts for and scouted and all sorts of things and we signed them and brought them in.

And then we held a fan, literally a live fan run draft where fans drafted the players that they wanted onto their teams. And then during the game, games are one hour long. We integrated the technology or play calling technology into Twitch. So you can watch the games live on Twitch and there's a pop-up that comes over the video player in between plays. It's two diagram runs and four diagram passes. And you have 15 seconds to pick which one you won as a fan. We aggregate all the votes in the back end. And you can do this through our mobile app as well.

And then literally our guys on the field get the winning play. And they have to run the play that the fans decided to run. So this is the ideas that the fans are dictating what happens on the field and the outcome on the field is based on the decisions that fans make throughout the game. So it really does turn the power over to the fans in terms of accountability and all sorts of things that make it for a much more exciting and fun game for a fan to play. Calling the plays is so cool. I don't know if I would feel equipped to call the plays for like the New England Patriots.

I think, you know, historically they've been pretty good at that. So how does that work if the team on the field just decides, hey, that's not going to work right now? So a couple of things. To your point on being able to call the plays, we say we want to put fans in a position to be successful, right? I mean, no fan wants to be a fan of a team and watch the team lose. So the plays that are surfaced for fans to choose from are no different than the coach looking at his call sheet. Call sheets are set up for situations, right? And so our back-in system is feeding fans, the plays that the coach would look in these situations,

but down-distance time on the clock and score. So you get a real sense of calling a good play, right? That's the idea. If the guys on the field, especially it's the quarterback, right, who can make an audible. If he decides he wants to audible, nothing you can do about it. He'll audible. They tend not to. and the reason why is the fans were the ones that drafted him to be on the team,

but they also drafted his backup. And so a quarterback audibles too many times, and they're just going to put the backup in, right? So they want a quarterback, and they want players that are going to execute the game plan the way the fans want to see it go. So we didn't have first season. We had almost no issues with that. We had very little audibles by the quarterbacks.

And in fact, our championship game, this is unscripted football. But if I had scripted the championship game, this is how I would have wanted it to end. It was 40 to 40, 3 seconds left. The ball was on the two-yard line. We have thousands of fans that literally called the game-winning walk-off touchdown, which was a quarterback read option. Quarterback picked a handoff, took it around the left end,

scored the walk-off touchdown in the championship game for the Wild Aces. And there's fans around the world that can actually say, I called the play that won the championship, which is pretty fun. That's really cool. Obviously, blockchain technology is just one of the technologies that you need in order to make this work. So maybe talk a little bit about what this looked like when you got started just on the tech stack and how to make this like a reality.

Yeah, I mean, you know, this is something back in actually in 2015. We bought a new franchise in the indoor football league and tested out a lot of the play calling and real-time play calling and fan engagement mechanics. So we built the mobile app, refined the play-calling technology and a lot of that pieces between 2015 and 2017 in the indoor football league with the team. called the Salt Lake Screaming Eagles, which was the first fan run team. So we literally let fans make all the decisions for this team in an existing league and really cut our teeth there and felt really good about the technology platform and

stack that we built for the real-time engagement. And then, you know, fast forwarding to now is kind of layering in the blockchain, Web 3, NFT, you know, governance mechanics that I think are really powerful and exciting from a blockchain standpoint. And then headed into season three, which will be in the fall. we're going to be introducing tokenization and a token economy into the mix as well. So a lot of those components are being worked on behind the scenes. But for right now, the path hasn't been short, right?

It's been four years of building the platform and the technology and feeling really good about being able to implement. And we did basically a pilot season last year, right? We raised around the capital from Lightspeed Ventures and Verizon Ventures in June of 2020, put on the first season, which was only six weeks in February and March of last year. Honestly, we made a lot of real-time changes. I mean, we changed things between games on game days, right? We had two games a week.

We would take feedback from fans and tweak things here and there and really hone in on what was working and make sure that we had a good product. So by the end of those six weeks, we felt really great about the engagement and the platform and what it could handle. And now we're, you know, now we're an 18 league and we're going to do a nine-week season. And it all happens April 16th is the first game in Atlanta. That's really cool. How do you think about just before we get to the blockchain?

space, just some of the Web 2 technologies that aggregate eyeballs here. Twitch is obviously very powerful platform for you guys. How do you think about the emergence of Twitch? Are there going to be alternatives? How do you guys think about your roadmap for how you want to engage with the fans? So Twitch has been a great partner. Amazon is on the cap table. We've got the first two years, two seasons for us. We're Twitch exclusive. So the first season in this coming season, our Twitch exclusive come from a streaming standpoint. But we've got to deal with NBC now. We've got to deal with the zone internationally. So we've got a lot more eyeballs coming from a Web 2 standpoint. Part of what we're doing is entertainment, right? And this is about creating engaging content.

You know, we want shareable clips. Some of the stuff that we do to take advantage of, you know, highlights on Twitter and YouTube and things like that. We pay bonuses for the best touchdown celebrations as voted on by the fans. You know, we look, you know, these guys, you know, they do interviews all the time. We pay the players for the best interview based on, you know, fans voting. And we're asking for them to show their personality, right? This isn't about like staying in a box. Like this is about our average age of our fan was 25 and they're gamers and their content creators. And they love social media and they love influencers and fun content. And so, you know, if you think about a player coming out of college that's playing his first pro ball and fan control football,

it's a 22 year old kid, right, that is living in that world and understands that dynamic. And so we're giving them that opportunity to kind of take off the health. element and be themselves and be comfortable and build an audience. And so Web 2 not going anywhere and it helps us really grow audience and give the players themselves a platform to create their brand and connect with fans in a different way. And so we think, yeah, it's going to be a massive piece and a powerful piece for how we build community. You know, Discord is another one that we're really active in, helping build community.

If you think about, you know, all of our games are in one location. We don't travel. We play in basically a studio. And so our goal was to create. the digital fan experience and create digital communities. And so that's why, you know, things like Discord become really powerful. Twitter becomes really powerful. And that's why, you know, Web 3 becomes really powerful because it's all about community.

And, you know, NFTs in particular have created these really unique ways of bringing people together. And, you know, I hear these words all the time. I feel like I belong and we're all going to make it. And, you know, there's this shared belief. And if you add sports to that, right, and we're all working together to go win a championship and we're all going to make it, it becomes really a lot of fun. So I think that's how we're kind of taking advantage in leveraging the Web 2, you know, opportunities and especially from a content standpoint, which, you know, Web 3 just isn't there

yet from bringing those those types of platforms and experiences to the mainstream. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the Web 3 platforms emerge. Obviously, there's such a need here for fan engagement and community building. And, you know, frankly, a lot of these Web 2 platforms just aren't moving fast enough and engaging with NFT owners and things like that. So it's probably an opportunity. And maybe if we're talking a few years, there'll be more Web3 platforms that are actually aggregating

eyeballs and directing them your way, if I had to guess. Yeah, I would say the same thing. I mean, the Web 2 stuff and even cable, I mean, it's not going away tomorrow. We all know it's dying, but it's dying a very slow desk. So we're going to take advantage of those platforms and where the eyeballs are. And again, it's not, you know, it's a different demo, right? It's a different audience. It's an older, you know, 45 to 70-year-old, you know, eyeball over there.

But they love football. I mean, what we saw in our first season, we have an incredibly fun, compelling brand of just football. You don't have to call plays. You don't have to draft players to enjoy the product. It's just fun football to watch as a fan. And so, you know, we got a lot of people riding us after the season. It's actually moms and dads saying, hey, thanks for making fan control football. He let me go get my kid out from in front of the video game and put them next to me.

And I got to watch and enjoy the football. And they got to call the plays. And we talked about it and it became this kind of activity that families could do together. We're going to really lean into that a bit in the next couple of seasons. I think that's why NBC is excited about what we're building because it lets people sit back together as a family and watch and enjoy content and entertainment. So, yeah, we're excited about that possibility. Yeah, certainly live events is something that all the platforms are looking for right now.

So I'm curious, just what was your crypto journey? You know, when did you start to see that this would be something that you could integrate into the platform, that NFTs were going to be. be the conduit really for building this. What was the story there? Yeah, I got really interested in blockchain back in 2017. I think a lot of us kind of went down the rabbit hole back then, spent a lot of time talking to people and thinking through. To me, there was a lot of, obviously, in hindsight, it's pretty obvious, there was a lot of fluff and just a lot of crap in the token market, right? All these ICOs coming with kind of meaningless use cases.

I felt like we had a really interesting use case. If you think about the way video games, mobile gaming, work, you're always collecting gold or gems or tokens or something as you play. And that becomes that digital currency that you use throughout the game. And so to me, our analogy was that we are building a real-life video game, right? Fan-controlled football, fan-controlled sports, you know, our holding company is the publisher of these real-life video games, right? And we want to really lean into that as much as possible. And so from my standpoint, it was always about how we could basically get closer and closer to gaming. And I saw blockchain as a really interesting use case there, also on the voting standpoint, right? Transparency in voting, you know, it's not nearly as fast

enough as it needs to be for us to do real-time voting on the blockchain right now. But we absolutely, you know, believe in that and that's another use case for us. So this goes all the way back to 2017 as we were looking at it. We were actually, a lot of people don't know the first and last ICO that Indiegogo ever did. So Indiegogo made this big splash. They were going to, you know, be a two. token platform, they were going to do ICOs, we actually raised $5 million in 10 days for our token. And then as they were doing their back office compliance stuff, all the money was in escrow. The SEC came out in very early 2018 and said, hey, we think ICOs might be securities. And Indigo did literally a 180, never did another ICU in their platform and refunded all the investors.

So, you know, we had to go to the more traditional venture route, you know, raise, raise capital, like I said, from light speed and Verizon. But I never lost the passion for blockchain and never lost the idea that this was really a powerful technology and a great use case for what it was we were building. So go back to early 2021, NFTs started getting hot. You've got NBA top shots, you know, pop in and lots of people really getting excited about this new space. So I started diving in. I think what struck me was community. More than anything, it was, you know, seeing people with these shared experience. And like I said, you know, the words I kept seeing was like, I feel like I belong.

I found some of my friends. People never met these people before in your life, right? Everybody's got this digital personality. But you all feel like you've got these shared goals and experiences. And you're spending, I mean, the amount of time some of these people spend in Discord together or on Twitter together, it's crazy. And so what struck me was that's exactly what we saw in our first season from our fans of the first four teams. We're, you know, this incredible passion around the team.

and the logo and the brand and, you know, calling plays together and drafting the players together and then, you know, going to win that championship. And so it just struck me as like a really unique use case. You know, everybody was talking about utility and NFTs and what's next. How many more PFP projects can we really have? And so I felt like we could again, you know, introduce NFT and then leverage blockchain in a really unique way and create some really incredible utility in an NFT, not just digital utility, but also IRL utility. And that's what, you know, So that's where my passion is right now is really thinking about how you link physical and digital, right, and how you blend those worlds and basically build in the middle of those worlds, right? We're creating this ecosystem that's as much physical as it is digital, right?

We have literally a real football league with real players on the field, but everybody is experiencing it from the digital standpoint. And so, you know, for us, NFTs for these next four teams that we're introducing, which they all just got their names, they are token gated with an NFT. So we have something called the baller. That's the ballers collective, and it's a digital avatar, football player, it's got all his gear, you know, shoes and helmets and shoulder pads and jerseys and, you know, all sorts of cool gear items. And the gear items contain the utility. So it's enhanced voting power when you're calling plays or drafting players.

It's access. And then it's all this IRL stuff. So we're building in, you know, some of the ballers will have VIP access to our venue in Atlanta. Some will have the ability to work with coach to draw up a play that will go in the playbook, right? Right. Some will get game used jersey drops, right, after the games. Like all these things that you can weave in, you know, to the NFT because we have something physical and real. And we know sports and collectibles all go together. So we're really pushing on how much we can embed into the NFT into the gear to really change the way people think about, you know, NFT use cases in general. That's really cool. So you could imagine this being a kind of a turbocharged loyalty system that's like interoperable. Do you imagine a world where people will be trade? these NFTs like off platform and trying to hoover up all of the, you know, rare NFTs that allow you just sign certain plays and things like that. Yeah. So this first drop that we did is ERC 721. So it's a single NFT. But we are already, I mean, I think by the end of the

month, we're going to choose our platform to do what we call Ballers 2.0. And Ballers 2.0 will take your NFT and explode it into all of the different components. Right. So you have your base kind of player and you'll have all the gear that will be separate NFTs. And with that, we'll come a marketplace to buy, sell, trade. But we also want you to be able to upgrade this and fuse them. And a lot of game mechanics, again, that are, you know, people are familiar with. And other games, we're going to build that. And then on top of that, we're actually, we've already released some screenshots and things that we're working on.

We're doing a baller's video game. And so the idea is that you're going to be able to take your baller, play in the real league, right? And also play in the video game and earn, you know, the token that we're bringing, as well as upgrade your gear and some will be aesthetics, some will have utility and some will have both. And then you'll be able to kind of construct your baller the way you want to. We are very cognizant of this idea of like, you know, pay to win. And so no matter how powerful your baller is, you don't immediately go to the top of the voting leaderboard and control all the voting power. You still have to work your way up.

It basically allows you to move up the board faster, which kind of every game does out there if you're, you're willing to pay a little bit of money, you can get a little bit of an advantage. So that's what the kind of in-game utility will be for the ballers. But you could effectively go out and buy up all of the collectible and IRL utility. So you can have the VIP guy that gets the game used merch drop and, you know, it gets to design a play. And if you want to spend money, go do that, you can. But again, that's stuff that you usually go buy in the real world anyways, right? So I think it's a good parallel there.

Yeah. So that was going to be my follow up is could you imagine fans just going really aggressively in trying to do nefarious things against other teams. I would just be buying up like the Jets butt fumble play. I'd just have them on that like every single time. As a Pats fan, that would be my move. It's so great. Yeah, look, I mean, there's talk already.

I mean, look, I think what the beauty is we don't know how this is going to shake out, right? So this entire league is a big experiment. We learn something every time we put something new out there. There's only 8,888 of these ballers per team, and they don't cross team. So at most for this next season, we can have 8,000. 888 play callers, right? Now, we know that's not going to happen, right? The distribution, I mean, my guess is by the time we get to the first game, we'll probably have 3 to 5,000 holders per team, which means there's only 3 to 5. And we had tens of thousands of people

calling plays per game in our first season. We're expecting a lot more than that in the next season for the original four teams. So it's a much smaller base of people. And yeah, there's talk about, hey, I'm running a gutter cat shirt to one of our partner teams is the gutter cats. So gutter cats could go buy up all the board eight ballers and then effectively, you know, minimize the vote and maybe even capitalize on the voting. So there are some weird, you know, mechanics out there and game theory. And, you know, again, we don't know how it's going to play out. So far, the communities have all been strong. And it seems like the majority of the holders in the communities are of fans of that community.

But we'll see how that other piece plays into it here. We'll get into game time. There'll be some emergent behavior that's pretty interesting. One of the interesting things is just around ownership. So if you look at like the Green Bay Packers are owned in large part, you know, publicly. And so I've always thought that Daos would be a great opportunity to have some sort of ownership over something like a sports team. So talk a little bit about how you see that space unfolding. Do you imagine that Daos will become a kind of a critical piece of this going forward? Yeah.

So very familiar, you know, I've talked at length with a bunch of the guys that, you know, Kraus House and Wagney's. United and Link's Dow. There's all sorts of different models out there. I think it's too early. The reason, probably the biggest reason we started Arlen League was none of these other leagues will move fast enough or allow anybody to get anywhere close to what I think is the ultimate goal, right, which is a Dow owning and running franchise. They're just not going to allow it.

I mean, even, you know, look at Wagney United, even there, you know, second or third division, whatever it is. EPL, even there, the leagues already come out and said, you can't really do all of these things you want to do. Like, they've literally told them that. So there's just a lot of barriers and red tape in these kind of old world leagues that are not going to allow people to get where they want to go. I do think it's an incredible technology and use of blockchain. And eventually, I think that it will happen. I think we could do it tomorrow, right?

If we wanted a Dow to run a team, we could let a Dow run a team. I think part of the mechanic that we're thinking about, and I worry about is, is on the security side. I don't think it's that exciting to be part of a Dow that manages a team if you don't own it, right? And I mean, unless you're an accredited investor and we go through all this fucking regulatory, excuse my friend, crap, you're never going to be able to let fans do that, at least in the short term. And so where we've focused is, and again, through this, you know, the ballers NFT, we put governance, mechanics into an NFT versus doing it through a Dow. And then what we've done, we did in the first season and we'll bring before season two, we let people buy equity, let fans buy equity via

equity crowdfunding campaigns on Republic. So these are regulated by the SEC. They're, you know, they're on a regulated platform. We have, you know, thousands of fans that are true equity owners of our first four teams. We're going to let fans do that again for season two for all eight teams. we're going to let anybody that owns a baller have the first opportunity to do that and participate in that campaign. So there's some interesting steps to get there, but it's a double mechanic. You got to buy a baller and you got to write a check to be a team owner. And they're not linked and we can't link them at the current moment. But I think we'll get there eventually.

And so, you know, I want to have a Dow own a team and run a team and manage everything. So, you know, we're having lots of discussions and it's someplace we want to get. eventually. I just don't think regulations are there yet to allow it to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. Yeah, that seems right. So we'll probably have to get to the point where there are ATS venues that allow for some of these security tokens to move back and forth and maybe that expands it. But maybe that honestly takes away from the excitement that some people have. Well, yeah, because it kind of removes decentralization, right? I mean, now it's kind of like centralized in the hands of the people that are willing to do KYC and be on the platform. It's just like, that's not what

blockchain's about, right? So, So to me, I mean, there's a tradeoff. I mean, that maybe is the next step, right? It's like, okay, let's go there and everyone understands that's not really where we want to be, but maybe we do that next. And then we go to full kind of decentralization and have a true Dow that owns and manages a team. We're in the U.S.

I like my freedom. So I'm not willing to push the envelope too far in that direction. I think there's maybe some other people in other countries with a lot more lax regulations. That could potentially try something. But again, they'd have to start their own league. and they'd have to build their own platform. So I think that's the real challenge. It's chicken and egg.

Who do you see as competition right now? Is it other leagues or is it just other sources of entertainment? The latter. Yeah, I mean, we're competing for eyeballs, right? I mean, our target is a young, you know, gamer, basically, which they have a million choices, you know, that are being thrown at them all day every day. And even when they're playing one thing, they're also, you know, checking Twitter and, you know, creating content and, you know, streaming all at the same time.

So, yeah, we're competing in the air of eyeballs and attention. And our goal, our hope is that we've created a really compelling community. Because I think that's where you win, right? It's like if we can have people really feel like they're part of something and they're active in the community and they want to be active in that community, then they will participate in the things that you give them to do, which is why we're really leaning really hard into the community aspect of this. That makes total sense. I guess the last question just on the technology side. So you're probably out there evaluating all sorts of other blockchain platforms to launch these NFTs. And I'm curious just what the experience has been as an entrepreneur and what the gap is between what you want to build and then where these platforms are today and like what's possible.

So what's that been like? Well, I mean, I think for everybody, a lot of the challenges speed, right? I mean, it's just transactions and volume. I mean, we had millions and millions of real-time transactions in our first beta season. There's just not a platform that can scale and allow us to do what we need to do right now, which is why we've kind of broken out the governance component onto the blockchain, while we're still centralized with our real-time play calling and things like that. There's a lot of great stuff out there.

I think the other challenge is everything is separate, right? Ethereum is winning, and so staying in and around the Ethereum ecosystem is probably the right play for anybody looking at this stuff. It blows an interesting blockchain, and they've got a lot of, of IP and they're building a lot of cool stuff. There is no way to basically get back over efficiently to Ethereum. They don't do tokens on flow, right? So you can't have your own token. They're bringing it, they're building it, but there's challenges for everybody and no matter what you choose, if you choose Ethereum, then it's expensive as hell and gas is crazy sometimes

and you know, transactions don't make sense. So we're evaluating things like Polygon, Flair is an interesting blockchain that we spent a lot of time with. And then there's, you know, the, the scaling solutions. There's scale and arbitrum and others like that. So there's lots of really cool tech being built. There will be multiple winners in the space. I mean, we're not, we're not thinking like we've got to bet on the right horse. There's five horses that are going to win, but we're taking our time to make sure that we're making the right decision. And then I think, honestly, a lot of it has to do with the support that you get. I mean, you know, there's blockchains that have great technology that have no support. And there's others that are willing to support you

and help you build and partner with you. And so we're in this for the long term. This isn't a short-term cash grab for us. You know, I want to build a league that I've got two little girls. Like, I want them to grow up with fan control football, right? I want to build a league that, you know, that's here for, you know, 25 years when they get older, they can watch it with their kids. So to me, that's the long-term goal.

So we just want to partner with the right people that share that vision and build together. Sounds like a great plan. So you mentioned the start of the next season coming up. So talk a little bit about what's in store for the next few weeks here. So we got a lot of exciting things. So we're building this kind of new state-of-the-art venue. It's a studio, right? So it's a big production.

It's in Atlanta. So we're really excited about that. It's at Pullman Yards in East Atlanta and this old train station. So it's got like this urban feel, but technology and just, you know, it looks like a nightclub. I mean, if you see it on my Twitter, I've posted some of the mock-ups. So it's being built now. So I'm really excited about that. We've got our last tryout.

We got like 450 guys registered to come to our last trial in Atlanta, which is at the end of the And then guys go into camp. So March, we'll have players in camp and we'll be headed to first game in mid-April. So lots of things happening now. The four expansion teams actually just announced team names. And we're now in logo voting. So actually logo submission. So again, it's all crowdsourced. We have fans on a daily basis that are sending logos in. Those will all go into this basically upvoting process where fans will get to select their favorites. And then we'll narrow it down to a top three and fans will go vote on the final logo. So in those four teams right now, The names were the Board 8 football club, so B-A-F-C, the Knights of D-Gen, which is actually the name of the project that we partner with, the Knights of D-Gen. The Guttercat team is called The Kingpins, which I think is a super cool name, and I can't wait to see a lot of the logos coming for that. And then the fourth one is a partnership between Steve Aoki and 8-8-8-8. And so that team is called 8-Oki, so the 8-Oki Football Club. So, you know, we got some really cool logos and designs coming, and I think the, you know, merch is going to be cool as hell. we'll be introducing a bunch of players and content starts.

So we're already creating content. And I think as we get closer and closer to the season, we saw this last year, people are like, well, what is this? Is this real? And then all of a sudden, all the players get the cam, and then all this content coming out and people are like, oh, damn, football is here. So it becomes really, really fun, really fast.

That's awesome. Well, where can we send people to find out more and to make sure that they don't miss the start of the season? Yeah, FCF.io is the website. It's got all the information there. if you want, you're, you know, interested in NFTs and our unique take on the use case, just click on the ballers collective link on FCF.io. You can also follow us on Twitter. It's FCFIO on Twitter and I'm Sorobf on Twitter as well. And I'm known to leak stuff. So that's my MO.

As a CEO, I leak, I leak things. So follow me and I'll leak a bunch of stuff before I'm supposed to. Well, that sounds awesome. And I can't wait to get on there and start voting for some plays. So I think it's great what you built. Thanks a lot for coming on today in the podcast. Absolutely, Matt. Thanks for having me. It's been fun. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island.vc. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.