Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Stonks & Startups With @nmasc_ @Katie_Roof and @ChristineMHall

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

The great Katie Roof, Natasha Mascarenhas and Christine Hall come on to talk more about the craziness in the stock market and what it might mean for tech startups. Then Chris and I debate The Great Debate surrounding Web3. Shoutout to @randras_ for giving us context, even in the podcast space! Sponsors: Wix.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Thursday, January 27th. We are joined today by three amazing reporters in this space. People who cover the tech world, startups, investments, and know a lot more than Brian or I do about some of these things, especially given last week's episode.

We are joined by Natasha from TechCrunch. We're joined by Katie Roof from Bloomberg. And also a special guest, Christine Hall, from Tech. crunch has also joined us today. So with that, Brian, I will let you set this up and get us going. Well, yes, before I do, Chris, how are you feeling? I know you COVIDed yourself last weekend. So last Friday afternoon or so, I started to feel a little like, you know, tickle in my throat. And by that evening, it was like full-blown, like, okay, I have something and I tested the next day and turns out, yes, indeed. I, Omicron got to me.

I was so good for all of the pandemic. And I thought for sure I was going to skate scoffrey, but no. And the first two days sucked. Actually, what was most interesting to me being, of course, a tech person, was that my aura ring, like, caught it. It knew exactly. Like, my sleep was shit. My readiness was shit.

And it basically told me what I already knew. So I've been on the mend. And as of today, my aura ring is reporting that I'm in much better health than I was before. So there you go. Yeah, that screenshot you sent me of the report from your aura ring has pretty much convinced me to get one because I was like, oh, wow, that really does tell you a lot. I can literally see it. And I will say for those who don't have this ring, you know, which is a wearable, it did a good job of just measuring my overall heart rate and body temperature while I was sleeping. And those two things were both elevated and way outside the norm. And so that's, that was the

big clue. So yeah. I have an aura ring as well. And after I got the vaccine and the booster, it was like, are you okay? Yes. So for two days, you know, each time it thought I wasn't doing well, but then I recovered. But it was kind of nice for me because it validated, you know, that something was happening, right? Yes. So, but I'm sorry to hear you had COVID, but glad you're on the mend. Thank you. And I will say I was triple backed. So, You know, the vaccines work, and I'm very, very glad that I had them, and I'm not, I'm very much alive still. Well, good to hear that. I am going to seg right into it. We just heard from Katie, so I'm going to start with you, Katie.

And basically, we're going to talk about sort of what we talked about last week, but what has continued to be sort of the big story this last week, which is, I mean, In general, the stock market has been up and down, but that's not really the story because it's sort of been a slow-motion bloodbath for about two months for sort of the tech companies and sort of the recent IPO vintage companies, companies that we follow on the show all the time. So I especially specifically in light of that, Katie, do we have any overriding theory? for why over the last two months, all of the leaders, not just the SaaS companies, but a lot of the SaaS companies,

but also the Spotify's, the Pinterest, you name it, have all the sudden been basically a lot of them cut in half and things like that. Do we have any overriding theories for why this is happening right now? Well, I think it's a multitude of factors, but I think one of them you look at the performance of tech stocks last year, particularly newly public tech stocks. You know, a lot of times the IPOs are where the money is to be made. But last year, that was not the case. IPOs and especially SPACs, most of the SPACs traded down. So you have that kind of effect that, you know, probably spooked

some investors who had been the most excited about tech. But you also have broader problems with the stock market, be partly due to, you know, this. ongoing COVID situation, inflation, other conflicts in the world, there's just a lot happening that, you know, just has people feeling a little bit more negative. And then, of course, you know, there have been concerns with some of the valuations and market caps getting really high relative to revenue. And that has scared some investors as well. So it's a combination of things. certainly it feels very, very different than, you know, a year ago did. Or even two months ago.

Natasha, M.G. Siegler wrote a piece, I think it was this weekend, arguing that it's a reversion to the mean, sort of, where it's just like, okay, things got ahead of themselves. So even though this is a very tough pullback, it's not necessarily. Because, you know, sometimes when these things happen in the stock market, it's because, oh, one company had really bad earnings or something like that. And I don't feel like that's necessarily happened. But you guys have been writing at TechCrunch a lot about this recently. What's your take in terms of, is this just sort of probably natural and healthy

that things are slightly coming back to Earth for some of these companies? Yeah, I read that essay, and I liked that he didn't say, like, the bubble was bursting. I think he used a metaphor that was something like the balloon is, slowly deflating, which I think works. Like, I think from what I've heard from investors, we're seeing checks take a little longer to write. Due diligence is changing from maybe a day to one week or two weeks. And so I think it's kind of in line to believe that we're seeing more of like a correction and like a sane moment in startups finally that I've personally been waiting for than like a really sad moment. Like it's not going to feel like March 2020

anymore. I think that's probably because there's so much capital in the markets that, at least on the private side, I don't think we're going to see startups disappear or have those back-to-back layoffs that really define the early endings of the pandemic. Well, and Christina, Chris and I talked about this a lot last week, but I guess that's sort of the big question is, what is this due to start evaluations, to the VC startup ecosystem? If essentially it was party all the time for the last 18 months in terms of, you know, you could take a SaaS company public at Decacorn valuations and stuff like that. Now maybe you have to pull back what your expectations are.

It's not necessarily the moon. Maybe you just have to expect going to orbit. Are we starting to get a sense from the VC community or from from founders, that some of the early stage, especially valuations of startups, are sort of coming back to earth as well. Yeah, I would definitely say that. I just spoke with an investor, I think it was yesterday, the day before, who said the exact same thing, that he was just like, you know, this is something that we're looking at. And I kind of asked that same question.

I was like, well, what is that going to look like with, you know, the valuations? Is it going to be bad? Is it going to be that, you know, what's it going to be like for a startup looking for capital? And it's kind of like what Natasha talked about, where it's taking, it's going to take a little bit more time. And the check sizes, you know, I think there was a race for, you know, over the past 18 months or two years, you know, for the VCs to like raise more and more and more because the check sizes were getting larger and they were having to keep up with that. And so now I'm, you know, I kind of wonder if they are like this a little bit where maybe the check sizes don't have to be so big or won't have to be so big, but it'll be okay because it'll all kind of work out together. Like it won't be such a shock to the system that it kind of slows down. You know what?

I hope we don't forget. I do want to get to, you know, VCs raising gigantic funds and things like that later on. But I'm curious, I feel like, because remember there was even a few. few months ago, some chatter in the VC Twitter sphere and medium and places like that where folks are like, these valuations are insane. Who's going to be the first one to say the emperor has new clothes? This is for anybody who wants to answer that. Do you think that maybe this is an opportunity that VCs have been waiting for to be like, okay, okay, settle down. You're asking for too much. Your valuation is too. Like,

Do you think this is going to give them an excuse to pull back the reins a little bit, like they've maybe probably been wanting to do for a while now? Yeah, I actually think that a lot of VCs don't want to write expensive checks. I mean, they want to get in at the lowest price possible. So while from the exit perspective, they benefited from investments they made 10 years ago, you know, now going public and being worth a lot of money for making new investors. They want to pay the lowest possible price. So a lot of VCs have been complaining about that for a while

that they had to pay so much to get access to the hot deals. So they were actually hoping for pricing to reset in some respects. But again, they also want their prior investments to do well, so it goes both ways. But yeah, we are starting to see lower prices trickle down. I mean, it starts with the growth stage. A lot of the crossover investors are starting to change their mind on what they think is a fair price for deals. The information had a good story on some allegations about Tiger Global, allegedly changing their mind on some deals.

You know, it starts with the growth stage, but it will trickle down to earlier and earlier stages as well. to what degree, and again, all these questions now are for anybody who wants to take them. To what degree is the SPAC window seemingly closed now playing a role in this? Because as I said on the show many times, when SPACs were hot about a year ago, it was giving the opportunity for companies to reach public markets that probably were not ready for it and probably could have used another couple years baking. So is that one of the things that's happening right now is that sort of that really easy trapdoor being shut is making people pull back a little bit as well? Yeah, I mean, I would say that.

I talked to Mary DeNofrio on Equity this week. She's the co-founder of the growth practice at Bessemer Venture Partners. And she essentially said the IPO window is closed. And we all know it's kind of hard to avoid talking about the mega funds every. answer. But, you know, if you think about being a late-state startup right now, you have so much access to capital, why go to the public markets and why rush to the public markets even more so? So I think, unfortunately, for tech reporters, we're going to have to wait a little longer to see financials than before. Because we've had, we've had a couple of IPOs now pooled.

I think there was even one today in the Netherlands or something like that, right? The IPO calendar, which was seemingly every other day for a while, is kind of, uh, barren right now, right? That and also just like a lot of the regulation, a lot of regulations and the antitrust conversation is popping back up again. I think Nvidia and arm fell through this week, which feels like it's a separate, it's a little bit separate, but like I think it's just like another example of like why I try and exit right now. And it seems like not the friendliest market to do that. How much is what's going on with just either government regulation, the threat of government regulation around monopolies and antitrust and rolling back mergers and acquisitions and things

like that, also affecting the calculus on how these companies should move forward or how to raise money, et cetera. So, you know, just on the IPO window, I actually am hearing that there are a bunch of high-profile companies that are going to go public this year. We've reported on Reddit and GoPuff and StockX. So I don't think the IPO window is completely shut, but certainly some that were on the fence are thinking twice. I think it's SPACs that people are getting more concerned about because SPACs, you know, which are technically acquisitions, a lot of them just really haven't traded well. And some people feel like it's not the best format, although there will still be more companies doing a DSPAC. But in terms of M&A, I think that, yeah, regulation is definitely weighing on the minds of

the big tech buyers, you know, any deal they do, they know it could come under scrutiny. So if they think there's a chance that it's going to be, you know, big, you know, it might not be completed, then they're less likely to bother going down that path. But as valuations come down and some companies that were on the fence that are less likely to go public, a bird in the hand from, you know, an acquisition offer might be more attractive. I mean, I was, thinking back to early last year, and I reported on, you know, Clubhouse turning down $4 billion from Twitter and Discord, you know, turning down $12 billion from Microsoft.

Discord may end up being worth more when they go public. But, you know, there were a lot of deals that were like, you know, people were turning down big offers. And so I do wonder in this environment if that's going to feel riskier. Well, and that was going to be my next question would be that if you have a lot of these high flyers down, we've already seen Microsoft snap up Activision because the stock was down. It was down for other reasons in theory. But you've got things like Robin Hood down 68%, Pinterest down 47% from its highs, Peloton down 74%.

That's maybe a slightly other story too. But do you think that maybe that'll be the story for the next few months that there are enough walking wounded right now that there's going to be people that are going to be, I don't know, fishing for M&A right now? I think that right now there are going to be companies that, you know, are going to, you know, as I was saying, they're going to be more inclined to take the offer that they have and had. I mean, certainly, if a tech stock trades down and doesn't do well, then they also are more inclined to be overtaken by a buyer. I mean, public companies in particular, they have a fiduciary duty to do it's in the best interest of their shareholders. So if they get a really attractive offer, it becomes hard to turn that down. So that, you know, this trading environment does open up the door to more M&A because obviously, if you were more optimistic in the bold times and you thought that your stock was going to keep going up and up,

or your valuation were going to keep going up and up, then you wouldn't want to just kind of throw in the towel the way some people think about M&A. Just to add to, like, I think in the ed tech world, especially more in the private markets, a phrase I've heard from startups so often is like this is a offensive capital. not defensive capital. And I don't think they'll ever stop saying that necessarily, but I do think we might see some newer unicorns not use all the capital that they have in their bank

from VCs for M&A. Just yet, we might start to see the words like runway start to pop up. Can you actually unpack those two terms, offensive and defensive capital? Yeah, I mean, so offensive capital would definitely be more about M&A, like adding companies to your list. I mean, so many companies became platform plays.

So that if you raise a $400 million round, you would maybe, you would have a couple months ago gone out and bought a competitor for $100 million or something like that. Whereas now you might use that to make sure you don't go bankrupt in 18 months. Exactly. It's kind of like when Brex bought that coffee shop. That was such a moment in tech. And I think we're not going to see any coffee shops being bought by venture-backed startups in the next year. But, I mean, the kind of end point there would be, like, I do think we'll see some of them start to think about their money in a more conservation sort of mindset, which I think we're already seeing VCs start to recommend. So that feels.

Scarcerity versus abundance, basically. Exactly. Got it. Cool. I think one thing people have to keep in mind is the reason this is different than the dot-com bubble bursting is because when things are public, you know, there can be an overnight crash. But when things are private, it can take a lot longer, especially because these companies raised, you know, as Natasha was saying, a lot of them have extra money on their balance sheets. And there's money that hasn't been spent. So they, you know, if they may find right now they're talking to investors and they can't get the valuation they want, then they just won't raise around.

And so it's going to take, you know, several years for many of these startups to, you know, really get to the point. of desperation where they have to do down rounds or layoffs and all that. I mean, you know, it may come sooner for some, but these companies aren't just going to evaporate unless they're very capital-intensive businesses that were really, you know, counting on raising every six months or whatever the pace was. Can I go ahead and take it to the other side of the coin, which is, you know, all of the money that has been raised by funds, by the investors. Because we're talking about, from the startup side,

people have been raising large rounds. So in theory, they've got a lot of money to spend. They bought themselves a lot of runway. But at the same time, especially in the last year, we've seen just ginormous funds raised billions and billions of dollars, bigger fund raises than we've seen before in a lot of different sectors. And that money is going to have to be deployed, right? So I'm curious what you're hearing from the VC side, which is, I don't get the sense that they're not, they might not want to write as big a check, but they're not going to stop writing checks anytime soon, right? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, if you don't invest the money, you don't get any returns, right? So that's part of the

of what was driving up the prices to begin with. There's just so much capital in the ecosystem right now, and it just has to be spent. And so maybe venture firms were saying, oh, this doesn't feel right. I'm paying too much for this deal, but, you know, they have to do something with the money. So that's part of the problem. And so really it comes from the LPs until the LPs scale back, which, you know, I did report in a story in Bloomberg this week. We're starting to see a little bit. But until the LPs scale back on a broader scale, we're going to still see a lot of money go into startups. And we're not getting any sense that that money spigot is going away. You hear things like, well, the reason the stock market is doing what it's doing is because people are expecting interest rates to rise.

And so suddenly there are other places for the big pools of money to go and earn returns. Is anybody getting any sense that VCs are worried that they're not going to be able to keep raising these monster rounds? I think the top VCs are going to continue to be able to raise large funds because, you know, even though past performance isn't technically predictive of future performance, if you, you know, the top venture funds that have returned, that have made LPs very rich, they usually have. of no problem getting what they want in any market environment. But I think right now what you're seeing is a lot of smaller funds that kind of sprung up because it was boom times. And maybe some of those are going to have trouble raising more funds. Yeah, I would agree with that.

I think beyond how rolling funds, I think, captured a moment in time where there was so much interest in the emerging fund manager class, I feel like VCs have spoken to. recently are saying that it's now even harder to go from the $10 million fund to the $50 million fund. And so like one idea or conversation I'm having more and more is like what happens if you don't increase your fund size from fund one, two, and three. And we have a few early stage VCs who do that and I think they're interesting. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see more VCs taking a, I guess not like a step away, but like maybe a more rational step on what next funds look like. But, I mean, the Form D filings are still popping off.

So, Brian, to your question, I don't think we're going to see anyone stop trying to raise. They just might be a little surprised or a little bit more conservative on those initial targets. What's anyone's take on the mega raises? You know, Andresen is basically raising every other day and hiring basically everyone that they can find. we've already got the tigers and the soft banks and stuff like that. But this, do you have a sense that VC is going through generational change like we haven't seen maybe in the last decade or so where at the top it's getting really, really professionalized? And then, you know, Natasha, you were just talking about the solo solo funds and things like that at the bottom, especially at the top end with these mega funds. Are things becoming more professionalized?

I keep using that word. I don't know if it's the right one. Yeah, I guess my immediate thought is like, so like the Greylocks and the Andresens and the Sequoias raising seed funds, hopefully this answers your question, but this is like my first reaction. Them raising seed funds, I think, helps like a very specific kind of founder succeed and do well.

And by do well and succeed, I mean raise money. Like I think those funds are set up, obviously, mega funds set up to have mega exits. But I think we're still seeing like the pre-seed investing universe, like the Charles Hudson's of the world. They're not raising $200 million seat funds. They're raising, you know, pretty normal, healthy sized funds. And I think that will, I guess, will help the startups that don't fit the profile of like an X, a firm or an X stripe kind of raise money. So that's kind of my take right now. And that's kind of my take right now. is like what is the impact of these bigger funds raising and our startup's going to be more successful.

I think a certain kind of startup will have more access to capital. But the ones that don't fit a certain kind of DNA will have maybe lesser options, but still lucrative options. We're going to keep going, but I did offer everybody the chance to dip out at a half hour. And it is a half hour now. So if anybody wants to dip out, please take this opportunity. And we'll thank you. Yes, this is so fun. Thanks for having me, guys. I'll love to be back. Thank you as well. Appreciate it.

Awesome. Thank you. Chris, I've got a couple things for you. Sort of related to this. I want to get into the idea, we almost got into this last week, but the idea of Web 3 as sort of a reason for VCs to have a thesis to invest, for people to get excited. And this is one of those things where I don't have an opinion on either side. I mean, there's people that are cynically talking about, you know,

if Web 3 hadn't come around, someone would have had to invent it. And the most cynical take is people did invent it. But then as we've talked about, there's so much energy around Web 3, relating to crypto, relating to Metaverse and things like that. You would know better than me being closer to the ground in terms of founders. And you see all the time

there was that joke on Twitter earlier in the week when the stock market was having convulsions that the inverse of the usual Twitter post where you say, I'm leaving my job to join Web 3. The joke was, I'm

leaving Web 3 to go work at McDonald's or something like that. That was the crypto crash, but yeah. Right, right, right. But so what is your take in terms? I'm thinking especially of people that are leaving fangs, that are starting Web 3 startups and crypto startups and things like that. Do you feel that this is something that is an organic movement

or something that was partially dreamed up by these megafuns that need somewhere to deploy their money. I don't like to put too much stock in conspiracy theories because it's hard enough to get ideas and products off the ground that, I mean, conspiracy theories have their own sort of aspects as products that people want. And, you know, so I'm not going to go down that path. But one thing that I am curious about and that we didn't really hear much about in terms of our guest today, like, is in a way, like how people in the,

the crypto Web3 world who are used to volatility in the market, in their portfolios, you know, like the whole kind of meme about like, you know, holding and just riding these waves, whether that has actually created a different psychological profile of people who are building Web3 startups to weather this period and this sort of macro downturn. Like if it's not actually that strange or that uncomfortable, whereas I think for people who are more used to conventional markets. Like this is like, oh my God, it's like a big sell out. Like, you know, like the market's like obviously going through like a big post-pandemic correction. So I guess I'm wondering about that on the one hand. Then on the, on the flip side,

I guess I also wonder about what I'm seeing in terms of different types of fundraising vehicles, coordination, collaboration, and stuff that is like just novel when it comes to either raising money or raising resources or deploying them. And I, I, thinking specifically about, I think, like, YC just started some sort of Dow or something along those lines. And then you're bringing in actually a lot more analytics and just, you know, hard data crunching and much more sophisticated financial instrumentation where, you know, you can also raise money, for example, on your startup's actual, like, revenue. And so it's much closer to, I guess, modeling the reality of how much you're actually worth than, you know, before, where we're, was all kind of smoke and mirrors and just kind of a really good pitch deck. And if you went through YC and you had your, you know, 30 second pitch, you could raise, you know, X millions of dollars.

So you're, there's, there's two things there. First of all, on the one hand, I'm hearing you talk about Dow's and things like that, which by the way, there's been a couple of interesting Dow's recently that I need to talk about on the show, some pretty big ones or whatever. But the other thing I hear you talking about are things like, uh, what pipe does. where, especially if you're a SaaS company and you have annual recurring revenue and things like that, that instead of raising rounds, you can basically sell your revenue sort of like it's a bond. It's sort of like raising is doing this. Right, right, right, right.

It's sort of like raising a convertible note or whatever where it's like, all right, we'll front you this money because we believe that these subscriptions, and this ARR is going to come in, and then that way you don't necessarily even have to play in the VC. I think that's what I'm saying. There are just so many new financial instruments for pulling in money that in some ways, like VCs or these megafunds dangle just an enormous, you know, like that of cash in front of you and says, here you go, like have this relative to those other things, which might be actually more prudent, but are just less sexy because there's not enough zeros behind them.

So I'm just wondering what the dynamics are at work here where either, you know, some startup founders might be savvy and be like, well, when the money is easy to get, get the money. whereas for other, like, less experienced folks or folks who are actually working in the crypto space are so much closer to financialization that their level of either savvy or sophistication might be higher than your conventional sort of web two startup that really, and I'll speak for myself, I was not, you know, a person in the money world. Like I didn't think about money. Money wasn't relevant to me. It was all about growth. It was all about adoption. It was just about getting people to use technology for the very first time. And we're beyond that. You know, people grow up with cell phones now. You don't have to convince them to, like, download an app. They know what it is. They, you know, some people have a password manager. Like, you know, they're used to a number of the behaviors that were huge barriers to adoption for previous areas of technology.

So in some ways, I think startup starting now get to start so much further down the road and get closer to actually running a business than, you know, when we were just fuzzling around before and trying to establish like, oh, like, you know, what is. a like button or something, you know, when the primitives just weren't as obvious and as, I don't know, I guess, like widely sort of understood, right? So it feels like the things that are going to get funded to go big have to have some sort of traction, have to have some sort of like demonstrable business model where they actually have customers, especially in like the SaaS space, or at least you'd hope so. So I'm trying to just think about or, you know, discount those things or I'd rather include those things into how we're thinking about what's going on in the markets. Can I, I'm going to admit my, my,

please do, there's a lack of, safe space. Lack of knowledge. I need to educate myself more in terms of DAOs, but isn't one of the promises of a DAO, the idea, and this is basically, this is the bread and butter of the Web 3 idea, which is that you can raise money, from a community of users. And so that in a sense, if you had a product of any kind,

but even if it was a SaaS or a software product of some kind, something that we'd charge a subscription for, that you could go, it's sort of not putting the cart before the horse, but when you're talking about you can be so much further down the road, is part of the promise of Dow's that idea that if you have a community, If you have people really enthused about your project, you can just raise the money from the people that are also potentially your end users and customers. Let me separate some things in terms of how I'm thinking about this. It's a good question, and it's easy to see how a lot of these acronyms and jargon can quickly kind of run away from you in terms of what they actually mean and what they, where the state of the technology and behavior actually is.

So I think in some ways what you're talking about might be raising either a community round or something like a party round. This could be, you know, previously a party round was actually kind of like a pejorative thing. Like you couldn't find one VC to lead your round and to get all the other people to sort of like go in line and close the deal and make it happen. So you'd have a party round. You would ask a bunch of people and they'd put in small checks. And it was super annoying because you'd have this exploding cap table, which meant that every subsequent round that you wanted to raise, you needed to go back to each of those. investors, you know, who honestly have very little skin in the game and get them to agree to whatever happens next. Now, ironically, that's actually kind of what a Dow sort of is built upon,

the idea that people have a bunch of tokens in your startup, whatever it is that you've, you know, minted as tokens or NFTs, and they can, you know, stake those, that collateral, more or less, on the decisions that you make as an organization. You're voting. You're voting. You have a say. That's right. Okay. So, I mean, it's similar, like, if you were on the cap table of someone and you have a very small percentage or whatever, but everybody on the cap table has a very small percentage of the company, then everybody has kind of votes that need to go along with subsequent funding rounds and possible dilution and things like that. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I'm trying to get at is that in theory, a Dow structure

is supposed to be on chain in that the decisions that are sort of made by the organism, the organization whatever you want to think about it, is more transparent. It's able to be scrutinized by, you know, outside people, and things are put to a vote. And you can write the rules such that, you know, maybe it requires like two-thirds majority or something like that. So not everybody has to agree. But it's some sort of almost like parliamentary system for moving forward based on the people that actually have an interest in what it is that you're doing. And those could be your customers. They could be your investors.

they could be just random people that hold crypto and, you know, wanted to go along for the ride, things like that. Right, because you wouldn't even have to be there at the beginning if you bought a whole bunch of coins in some projects. Right. I mean, that's the other thing too, right? And again, like, I want to be very careful because the regulations are very unclear and they don't really exist yet. But in some cases, you know, you can have people come in later buy the coins or NFTs from the early backers. of projects and sort of, you know, gather your stakes and then end up with more voting rights,

like over time. And that doesn't necessarily have to go through some, you know, reconfiguration of your SACE or whatever it is that your funding documents might be. So it creates a little bit more flexibility and a more, a bit more dynamism, actually, in terms of how these startups can move and who they can bring in as, you know, investors and so on and so forth. I'm going to shift your question, by the way. Yeah, it does. Because, like I said, I still need to do more research. One quick thing on that. I'm thinking of the ancient history of ICOs and things like that of, what, four or five years ago.

That idea of governance was not involved in that early ICU period. You were just... Well, we didn't really have the concept of, like, the Dow, you know, as an organizing concept and as something that you could sort of demand or ask for. So I think there was this implicit idea that when you were part of an initial coin offering, that these would be your stake in the organization of the company. And if you were there for an air drop of coins, then, you know, you could, well, people would speculate on them.

And your, you know, share of value might go up because, you know, ideally there was some pool of liquidity behind that, whether it was a startup or, I'm sorry, a VC or someone else putting in money into the company itself. But I think where that kind of went wrong was that a lot of people wrote a lot of white papers, but not a lot of code. And so trying to do what they said that they were going to do really wasn't that feasible. And the work may or may not have happened. I think there were a lot more rug pulls back then because it was just a wild time. And people were still getting their heads around how this stuff works, so it should work.

And a lot of the capabilities I think that the DAOs now are relying on may not have been immature. Certainly the tools were not as mature as they're becoming. Like I said, I want to move slightly to the side from that to talk about NFTs. I just sent you a link to a Twitter thread, which you can put on. And I'm going to really try hard to remember to put this in the show notes when we publish this. But this is also a bit of housekeeping that I've been meaning to get to that you can help me with, which is, I think we talked about it in the show. I know I mentioned it a little bit that I got a lot of crap for listeners when I was.

on aware that gamers were against NFTs a month or six weeks ago, whenever it was when I first did a story about that. Obviously, now I've seen tons of examples. It's mind-blown. I think I've even really is. Yeah. Right. So what I was accused of is, which I'll cop to, oh, you're in a bubble. How do you not know that people hate the idea of crypto and hate the idea of NFTs? Okay, fine. If you're not in a bubble, you're probably not actually consuming any news. So we're all in our own lives. But again, right, right. And one of the things that I try hard to do is to try to be a straight shooter to everybody. So like people, it's continued where people are like enough with the

NFT stuff, enough with the crypto stuff, except for the fact that I'm trying to do a show about technology. And that's been a lot of the news lately. Right. So, but okay. So I'm not pro-NFT crypto. I'm not anti- NFT crypto, but I will cop to being taken aback by the vitriol and people's antithopy. Did I say that right? Yeah. To some of this stuff. And I saw a thread over the weekend that I'm going to read the first four tweets from

because it's the first one that I was like, oh, okay, I kind of, I can, I see where you're coming from on this. This is from a Twitter user called EVEEEVEE. I believe he or she. She is a game developer, an artist, hacker, etc. So she says that, like I said, I'm going to read the first four tweets verbatim here. NFT people absolutely cannot comprehend where I'm coming from. Fundamentally do not understand that the very phrase digital asset fills me with revulsion.

I do not want this on a very basic level. I do not want what you are selling. I do not want it to exist. I think the internet has too much ownership as it is. I don't want it carved up into a billion cubes, each engraved with a serial number and locked into someone's account. Because ownership is a fake idea. We invented it because there's only one of a thing.

Someone has it and it's theirs. But then we invented computers and digital abundance. And now so much stuff is just there. You can go make your own copy. and now you have it too. This is true freedom, the dream of the web. Everything is bountiful. Everything is for everyone.

You want to carve it up and add locks and permissions and sales and transfers because in your wildest dreams you cannot even imagine a world not designed like a trading card game. So that spoke to me a bit because I'm of the generation of, you know, the web was this freedom and the web was. was sticking it to the man by being against this idea of ownership, right? I remember. Yes. And I feel like you also are someone that has believed in that, too.

And I'm not asking you to answer or argue the NFT case or something like that. But like I said, that really spoke to me. It's like, oh, yeah, I have believed in that, too, that one of the good things about the Internet Revolution was the abundance. And the whole premise of some of this Web 3 stuff is explicitly to pull back that abundance, right? Yep, yep. So what are your thoughts on that in terms of why? It makes sense to me from that perspective that I can see why people feel like this is a betrayal

of something that is good of the dream of the Internet. You know, I wonder if part of the reason why this is like a hard conversation is just because of the relative experience that, I guess, people who benefit from the internet use the internet in different ways. Let me try to explain what that means. Like if you're a gamer, of course, there are like free to play games and then you see ads that pop up, you know, every so often. And maybe you're rich enough to like, you know, turn off the in-app ads. But if you were someone who never pays for anything, I suppose that. and all that abundance is great. And certainly, you know, the abundance that we had back in 2005 to 2010,

like mostly was really great. You know, there weren't that many ads. Page load speeds were, you know, was something that you really wanted to optimize. And bandwidth wasn't as freely available. So although there were loads of text ads and things like that, in fact, Google's business was built around text ads because they were so much faster to download. eventually, like, free and all that abundance meant that advertisers could just blow up the entire experience for everybody. I mean, like, the other day I went to, I'm just going to say it, Entrepreneur.com, and I turned off my content blocker, and I swear to God, I could not find the content.

I was on an article page. I'm quite sure. I looked at the URL. It was an article. And I could not only tell the difference between what was content and what was an ad, but I looked at, you know, literally couldn't discern what was paid for content versus content that theoretically some human had written that was supposed to be educational or useful. And entrepreneur used to be not like a not terrible magazine, you know, with content. So we now fast forward to a world where, you know, if you're rich or you know enough or you can install Chrome extensions or browser extensions, you can turn off that tax on poor people and your experience isn't that bad.

But I think what this person is alluding to or sort of like is missing is how bad that's gotten relative to perhaps the experience of being inside of a game or whether it's a 3D environment or something else where the economics and the mechanics of gameplay kind of take place at a different level. Like either through, you know, DLC or in-app unlockables or, you know, paying for the game outright, right? The idea of subscribing to access a website or a web magazine or things like that is still pretty uncomfortable. and the vast majority of people don't want to do it. So that feels like something that's very different, where we have these pressures that are coming together, where the economics of funding the web

are somewhat antithetical to building fun and interesting games. But then on the flip side, you know, I guess I'm not sure how the art world factors in here, but that abundance that essentially left artists to not be compensated for their work, in the Web 2 model, suddenly found a way to be compensated because you could bring scarcity

back to something that became infinitely copyable and therefore valueless. Right. By the way, I do want to, if anyone wants to, this is the time when if anyone wants to raise their hands. If you'd like to come up and dispute anything, feel free. But see, but what you just said

is exactly sort of what struck with me, because one of the key things of Web 2 was the Napster era was the Limewire era. But think about what we were fighting against, right? Like we were fighting against, you know, 12 to 16 to $18 CDs

that you, once you got a computer with like a CD burner, you could actually rip those as MB3s and you could trade them with your friends for free. And so there was this sort of abundance, abundance. But yes, artists got hurt by that. I think it's confusing. and it's confusing in some ways because I remember that I was in the opposite side of Metallica.

And so I find it very difficult now to be on the side of Lars Ulrich saying that Napster should be shut down and these guys are pirates and thieves like stealing our music. I have some sympathy now, but it feels like the middlemen, you know, specifically men in the middle were, you know, who were the labels. while at some point maybe in the 60s and 70s, and I was watching the David Geffen documentary on Netflix, like we're adding value by doing the curation. Increasingly, they were just taking rents, you know, and we talk about rents a lot. So the cost of the music went up,

the amount of money that the artists themselves were getting directly didn't seem to be going up all that much. And so we as fans were like, well, fuck it. Like, you know, you guys make enough money, you're millionaires, like, we're poor students. We can't afford this. Some of us couldn't. And so we're just going to, you know, figure this out for ourselves because we're ahead of the curve. And I don't know, it's privileged feeding itself, I suppose. Anyways, I brought up Randy because Randy, I think has a hopefully,

well, I expect she does, has a different perspective or generational perspective on some of the things that we're talking about. And so Randy, if you want to give us, you know, feel free to introduce yourself. We'd love to get your perspective on some of this, the stuff around ownership and yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everyone. This is Randy. I am a designer and I'm building

UCAS. I'm also a podcaster. But Chris and I have had multiple conversations about decentralization and how GENZ is very pro-decentralization and that's why the Web3 movement is something that we all immediately adopted,

almost without a second thought. And in my opinion, from my perspective, as someone who's not only 22, but basically does not own any assets, there's power in ownership where before I can never imagine, you know, creating content and owning it myself. It was always towards, you know, different conglomerates where they own my content, they decide my fate, they decide how much it's worth, they decide its value. And then there's a certain kind of empowerment where not just, again, as a 22-year-old who has student death, but also as someone who comes from an immigrant family where none of my family owns assets, something as simple as like my PFP of Alpha Girl, I know it doesn't mean a lot, but that piece of ownership and the fact that, you know, that that is mine, that gives me some sort of value and that gives you some sort of hope for, you know, ownership does not necessarily

have to be a, you know, $3 million home in Toronto that we cannot afford, but it can be simple, small assets here and there on the internet, on the internet that we can, you know, potentially build up as generational wealth. Or at least that's like the, you know, the hope or the dream. And that's the value for, I feel like people like myself. Let me, let me, let me stress again that I'm bringing up Evie's thread, not because, oh, it won me over, and now I'm against Web3. Because I agree with that. Look, the whole idea that if it's free, then you're the customer,

that the big platforms, we don't own anything, we're being sold by the big platforms, right? And Chris is using examples of the advertising model, which Web 3 proponents are saying, we're going to fix the fact that advertising, which I've made that point in my book, the fact that most of the web to this day is all advertising when you stop and think about that,

oh, it's completely transformed our lives, but it's all just in aid of the attention economy and stuff like that. It kind of blows your mind that we've gotten this far and it's all just based on stupid ads and stuff like that. Okay, the point I wanted to make is, why does it seem like that people that are the most committed to Web 3 are like burn it all fucking down and everything is terrible and we're going to write all these wrongs? Why does it feel so absolutist?

And I think this is some of the discourse that's been going on online about Web 3. I agree that Web 3 has good ideas that I hope get adopted and things like that. But do we have to burn everything down to do that? Can't we take a little from Web 2 and Web 1 and Web 3 and put it all together? I have thoughts. I was talking to my friend, my good friend, Scott Kavitin the other night. And we were actually, there's this great two and a half. hour video about called the problem with NFTs. And I was watching this, I think, on Saturday

when like my COVID was like, you know, full blown and I was definitely like on another planet. And also watching it at 2X. So you can only imagine like how this thing sort of freight trained my brain. But nonetheless, I don't know if I recommend that form of ingestion of this content. But, you know, like, in some ways, you have to have that level of arrogance and of self-assurance and of ignorance about the things that have come before you. Because once you start to slow down and take into consideration all the ways in which these ideas have previously been tried and these other ideas that, you know, tried and it didn't work and so therefore your thing's not going to work. Or, you know, if you think about this community or that community, like, how do you make this all come together? And it sort of, I don't want to say waters down, but it becomes infinitely more complex. And I certainly found, you know, what I was working on, a lot of these standards back in the day that are now broad industry adopted standards, like OAuth, part of the problem of what, like, my job, not being a developer or engineer in those communities was just to keep, like, bringing us back to the core thing that we were trying to solve and be like, that's out of scope.

Like, we're not trying to solve that. Like, this is what we need to focus on. This is what we're doing. and you had to kind of really put on blinders to, I don't know, solve problems at the level that we were trying to solve them. Now, were we right? Were we wrong? Like, I don't know. We were very myopic.

I think many of us who worked on these things weren't aware of our own privilege. We were in our own filter bubble, you know, specifically Scott and I worked on digital identity. And as two white guys, like, we were not building in protections for a lot of people that would ultimately end up using these. platforms or systems because it was just trying to get them to work. So it feels like we're in a similar era where you have this people with an enormous amount of privilege and access being like, we can see how to solve and fix the world because they're above so many of the sort of endemic challenges that a lot of other cultures and communities face.

So to answer your question, like, why are they so like, let's burn it all down and start over, I think it sort of comes from an urge. of being like, well, the people that came before must not have been that smart because they didn't solve these things in these ways. But really, it just means that they're going to end up experiencing the exact same problems that we ran into, but sort of a new, you know, rev or revolution of the technology. And so a number of factors in the environment will have changed that maybe actually means it'll actually work that time. But if you do take that kind of conciliatory approach, it's really, really hard to make progress. and people lose interest and they move on

before you even have a chance to kind of make your case. So you see that dynamic, that tension? Yeah. I want to come at this a different way. Randy, are you still there? Yeah, I am. Okay, let me, and please, please, please understand.

I'm not asking you to answer for this or whatever, but okay, okay, there's another meme going around where it's a picture where it's like, this is Web 1.0, and it's like, login and password. This is Web 2.0, and it's login with either Google or Facebook or Twitter or whatever, right? And then Web 3 is connect your wallet. So I completely understand this idea of owning something, of controlling your own destiny. I'm with you. That's incredibly powerful. But when someone like EV is complaining that, Everything in Web 3 seems to be transactional.

Like, that's the joke of saying, connect your wallet is Web 3. Can you understand where people are coming from where that feels? Are you asking about the value systems? I'm saying the idea that everything is connected to it's transactional. Whereas, you know, part of what I think EV is, and this is what you were saying, Chris, where the abundance was free,

and that's a level of privilege or whatever. But in the same way that gamers are like, listen, I just want to play my game. I don't want to have to like, you know, pay for this and nothing and the other thing. They have a great. Right. Like they don't read or want the changes. They've been well served by the economy as it is. And I think the challenge is that there are a lot of people who are seeing, you know,

blockchain technologies, NFTs changing some of those dynamics and those power dynamics and giving a new generation the opportunity to build, as opposed to sort of like asking permission from a stodgy bunch of old, you know, people now. Right. Right. You know, right. Built the Web 2 stuff. They're like, ah, that's not going to work. Right. Go ahead, Randy. We, we, yes, cut you off. Yeah. So I think, I think, Brian, you have a very good point, which it's a conversation I've had today with a bunch of people about what integration of Web 2 and Web 3 could look like together, right? Because essentially, I don't want, and there's the whole calendarly joke going on.

around today in the last two days. And I don't want to web three calendar, right? I don't want to change all my products from chain availability. Right. The joke, the joke for that is, is that, oh, yes, to get on my calendar, you're going to have to pay gas fees, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I don't want everything to change from Web 2 to Web 3. And I don't think anybody wants to see that because, you know, it's just, it's inefficient to just leave all the Web 2 products that have essentially amazing functionality and say, okay, connect your wallet to access everything. But then there are, there is, the way I see it is Web2 gave us access to a lot of resources and information and gave us access to, like you said, a lot of abundance, right? But unfortunately, not everybody had access to, I would say good information and good resources and did not have access to good communities and did not have access to, you know, good assets from, from Web2.

Can you say a little bit more about that? Why, why was that? And where, like, how was, how were, how were things? segregated perhaps? It was simply just people did not know where to find good information right and then there's propaganda, there's media, there's for example, I'll tell you the simplest things that the information that I was exposed to in the Middle East

as a woman was vastly different than the information I was exposed to as a woman here in Canada. And before coming to Canada, I didn't have any resources available to me. We had very strong censorship I didn't have access to a lot of things on the internet, whether it's developer tools, whether it's designer tools, whatever it was, right?

And so coming here, I had suddenly an abundance of information that I didn't even know where to begin to explore and what to do with it. And that was overwhelming. That was confusing. And not all the information I was exploring was good information or good resources or good assets that I was buying, right? And so I feel like Web 2 gave us access to that abundance, but abundance does not necessarily bring value, in my opinion.

Abundance just feels overwhelming sometimes. So what Web 3 I feel like provided me with is the ability to seek value and the ability to understand where value is on the Internet and buy into that, right? So it's not just taking everything on the Internet and try to flip it for a profit, but it's actually understanding where people are finding values, whether it's in community, whether it's in utility, whether it's in a digital art, whether it's in a game. Yes, sometimes, you know, it's bullshit,

how communities are blowing off and have virality and all of that. Well, or that a lot of communities are exclusive by nature. That's part of the thing of certain communities where it's like, okay, if you're, if you buy into this cool club, then you're behind the Velvet rope, right? But I think, sorry. It is exclusive by nature, but also everybody had a, had the chance for that exclusivity. It's not like it excluded based on any, based on financial ability, based on race, based on color, based on information access. Everybody had the leveled opportunity to go into it. And it was like, okay, whoever put in most efforts, you know, got it.

And to me, that just gives a plain field, you know, a leveled plainfield, if that makes sounds. You're talking specifically about like minting NFTs with different communities and participation in the discords and things like that? Is that what you mean? Yeah. Okay. So Brian, I think the idea that I think is being brought up here is that hold hold I can't even say the word, whether it's holding or hodeling different, I guess digital assets, let's say NFTs and deploying some of your capital is actually an attention allocation strategy. So in the previous era, your attention was being assaulted constantly and you had no interest in the sources of those assaults. Now, by buying or obtaining these assets and not really thinking about

speculation, but actually creating value in a localized economy, your interests actually are aligned with holding that asset for as long as possible and creating as much sort of community value around it. And the fact that you have that token and you can hold it and that it's yours and it can't be taken away from you because it's literally registered in an immutable ledger means that now you have something to sort of show or prove that you've been around. And that thing actually, which, you know, gets you access into this community where there is value is something that you could then sell or trade at a later point once you decide you want to move on or otherwise.

Right? Right. The interoperability, I think, is one of the best ideas, like, baking that in fundamentally. Because we've been talking about that for years. You know, one of the things that I've been thinking about is, like, the fact that, you know, Facebook has been ostensibly working on, like, data portability. And I suppose there is some way to sync your, you know, Facebook photos to Google Drive or whatever, hasn't made any difference in the world meaningfully whatsoever in people's

ability to choose which social platforms they want to be on. Because the underlying data itself has nothing to do with where the people are or where the people network or where they expect to find each other. Like, we'll just, like, move off or move on to other places. The idea that I would, you know, import 20 years of photos onto the blockchain to, like, you know, set up my new profile is laughable. Because that isn't the way that people, I think, you know, relate to their digital media. It isn't that you don't want copies or backups for yourself. But I think data portability in some ways, like, misses the point. And where interoperability...

It's more powerful. It's more, it's blowing up the competitive moat that all of these platforms have been built on, which is sort of platform lock-in, right? Which again, the exclusivity of the underlying data assets. Now that data is actually available on sort of a public database, and anybody who has your address can look up what you have and then represent to you in a way that is hopefully compelling or interesting or useful. Well, again, I'm saying I'm preaching to the choir because this is something that you've spent your whole career working on. Sure.

But to that, when you're participating in these projects and communities, to what degree are you fearful of history repeating itself? Because, again, look, we were there, man. Blogs were a Wild West. We were sticking it to the man, all that stuff. like sharing your photos on Flickr and stuff like that. Were we really? Okay, but hold on, but hold on. That was the idealism.

That is the same idealism in these ideas. And all that happened is, listen, you can make the argument that what Facebook did was take all of the good ideas of Web 2 and just put them under a big blue umbrella and sort of obviously commoditize them and make them easier for Normies to do blogging and posting and sharing your photos and things like that, but also platform them. So to what degree when you're participating in these communities and these projects, are you feeling deja vu? Are you fearful?

Like, oh, no, guys, we can't have history repeat itself again. And we're just going to end up a decade from now with new platforms, new bus, same as the old bus, kind of thing. Yeah, well, obviously, in some respects, I'm like, you know, we've had all these conversations and nobody goes and reads the, you know, mailing list archives where we actually talked about all these things, talked about all the threat models, you know, we were there, you know, we went through a lot of this stuff already. It is the way it is for a reason. And what I find is, I don't know, just part of the process is you kind of sometimes have to go through the reinvention process to arrive at the same place that other people have already gotten to who came before you in order to understand. how they balanced all of the restrictions, you know, and considerations and concerns to arrive at what could be an elegant outcome, you know, like, and I think about this a lot, you know, obviously given the hashtag. Like, the hashtag is an invention of its time, a time where the iPhone had just come out. It was literally eight months old. So the iPhone was not the

behemoth that is now. If it were now, like the hashtag would not have worked. It would not off. But because of the limitations of bandwidth, because of the maturity or immaturity of the network, because of Twitter being mostly an SMS-based service, there was a window where combining all those limitations forced that one kind of Gemini of an idea to sort of come out. Going back, people would be like, oh, it would be way better if it did this or did this to this, but you'd miss the considerations that were part of the calculus that landed with that outcome. So I think in a similar way, like in a different kind of abundance, people now in sort of like the Web3 crypto space don't have to make a lot of the same tradeoffs. You know, the fact that you can just assume that a lot of people have internet connectivity, that a lot of people have, I don't know, Chrome extensions and they know how to operate them.

The fact that, you know, bandwidth is much better than it was before. Like, one of the stories that you had recently was about whether or not we even have the compute power to run the metaverse the way that it's been articulated. Right. Right. And yet we sort of assume that in five to ten years, these problems will be solved. We'll have five or six-gee technology. You know, we'll have amazing battery power. You know, we'll be switched off of coal and onto nuclear energy or something or renewables. So there's this kind of tacit assumption that, you know, some things can be kicked down the road, but that we will solve problems for ourselves today that are the most interesting and the most perhaps generative. So am I worried about us, you know, being the we're repeating a lot of the same mistakes as before and we're just going to have a, you know, a new guard replace the old guard. That's kind of just how human societies sort of fall over over time. The question is, can you bring up, you know, sort of very important, valuable cultural considerations such that you can change the nature of how people include one another or treat one another

as they're building these systems? And I think that is the most positive sign that I see in a lot of the, at least the NFT web three world. There's plenty of crypto bros and there's plenty of assholes and grifters. And I just take for granted that some percentage of all of this is going to go to shit. But there is. And I think, you know, Randy is an example of this. There's a lot more, at least what seems to be, support and inclusivity and concern for mental health and things like that in these communities that just weren't there in our era of building this stuff. Randy, are you still able to talk?

I don't mean to keep you on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because I had an idea. I pulled up your profile, and you're saying that you're exploring podcasting in Web3. So obviously, look, this is my Ballywick podcasting. So, like, tell me some of the things that the ideas in podcasting that excite you in a Web3 way. What can Web3 do, even if you don't have a specific project, but what are the broad strokes of what we could do if we blew up podcasting as it exists

and remake it in a Web 3 way? Yeah, so some of the ideas that we've been exploring. Well, the first one was how can you transition podcasts out of the RSS feed? I think that's the question of the century for us. We hate the RSS feed. A lot of podcasters hate the RSS feed. It's outdated. It's not providing enough analytics.

It's not providing, in our opinion, enough distribution to any new development that's happening in, you know, whether it's, you know, Web 3 or crypto or Metaversus. And so the first question is how can we make, how can we transition podcast from an RSS feed into, onto the blockchain or onto a DNS, something like that represents like a registry almost for podcasts, where you're able to track, first of all, analytics a lot more accurately. You're able to track purchasing power behavior based on, you know, let's say you release a host for that on your podcast. And you want to see the purchasing power of your audience based on their wallet. That's something that you can easily collect, right? And you're able to understand what potential cost of customer acquisition for your podcast could look like. And now suddenly you have some kind of negotiating power for, you know, for your podcast. And it's not just, hey, I have this many listeners or this many downloads per month.

And suddenly you have distribution across, you know, potential games. potential metaverses, potential NFT communities. There's so much integration that can happen. And a lot of schools of thoughts are saying that audio is going to be the main form of content in Web3. Blogging was Web 1, photos and videos was Web 1, and audio is going to be Web 2. So how can we transition audio from Web 2 to Web 3 and how can we disperse that content across different platforms? This is the last time I'm going to play devil's advocate because you know, as a podcaster, that sounds great to me. I make my living from podcasting, so better analytics, better accountability, monetization, and things like that.

But to bring it back to EV's thread, what would you say to someone who is like, well, the reason I like podcasting is as a consumer of podcasting, it's somewhere I can go where I'm not being tracked. where I know there are ads on it, and like that gets back to what Chris and I were talking about in terms of like the ads being everywhere and ads as a business model and things like that. But what would you say to someone that is like, I like the fact that I can hide as a consumer in podcasting, and I don't want the monetization that maybe Brian as a podcaster would want. And that's fair, but are you really hiding when you have like major conglomerate sex? Spotify and Apple tracking you? I mean, you're going to get tracked, right? But it's either one or the other. So I guess, at least for me, it's which one do you prefer to be tracked by? Do you prefer to be tracked silently by big conglomerates? Or do you prefer to be tracked openly and transparently, I guess? See, like, I think this is the thing that's so different and so

interesting. It's like putting something on the blockchain is you're like, well, fuck it. I'm already out there anyways. Like, I actually had this attitude. Dude, where did I call it? It was back in the day, back in the day, you know, we had this idea that we wanted a certain type of privacy to be anonymous or pseudonymous or to have some delineation between our offline lives and our online lives. And I think a generation now grows up, one, with the assumption of being tracked always, just as a matter of practicality and we may not like it. But that's kind of what's happening. and then two, to take almost like as an act of defiance, the idea of actually just putting even more out there

and being more explicit with what you put on the network or you put on the blockchain that represents you. You make it even more accessible. And so you're like, fuck it. Like if you want to track me, then here are the things that I want you to know about me and I'll just make the things that are more like private, like quieter.

Maybe you'll still detect them or something, but like I'm not going to broadcast them. They're not going to be my wallet, my public wallet, and so forth. So that's the very different approach. Technically anonymous. Even tracking is stuck. anonymous because I can have a wallet that is very completely anonymized and you can track it,

but you have no idea that it's traced back to me, right? Right. It may be doxed. Yeah, yeah, but it's still not traceable back to me as a person. Versus if you're listening or using really, you know, any form of data on Web 2, it is traceable back to me as a person, right, as rent, to my IP to my information. And that's also another beauty of Web 3 is my information can be tracked, but 100% anonymized. right? Well, or you have a greater level of control over it, right, right. Well, and listen, that's the, that's the sort of punk ethos that I do love about Web3, which it is, it's almost like reclaiming

words, the words of oppression, you know, and, and claiming them to use them for yourselves. Like, that spirit I completely, I completely buy into as well. Yeah, I don't know. I, it does become one of those things where, like, you know, like Chris, you and I have been talking about, like, you know, how everything becomes, like, causes and people, like Randy is very passionate and very idealistic from her perspective about Web3,

and EV is completely passionate and completely idealistic from the exact opposite side. And it's like, you know, it's not that it's frustrating. It's just that it's like, it's fascinating to me that we live in a time where that's everything. There's literally nothing that can happen where it's not, it's not just that people have different opinions about it. It's that people have opinions that are so strongly held on either side of it, you know, which is what I was saying when I'm talking about how Web3 people, why do you have? have to burn it all down? Can't we take a little good from this and a little good from that and stuff like that?

But, you know, I don't know. I still have the cynical view of Web3 though. I still understand that there's a lot that can go wrong. And I understand that Web 3 and having public wallets can create a bigger wealth disparity than we already have. And even with what's happening right now, because we're so involved in it on Twitter, on these spaces, we forget that there's more than 95% of the world that still does not know about Web3, that still don't understand what NFTs are, right? That never heard of digital assets or cannot wrap their brain around the concept of blockchain.

And that can create not only an information disparity, but also a very big wealth gap. And that is something that I'm very well. And that's the only thing, I guess, that I'm not the only thing, but another few things that I'm cynical about, like extremely cynical about when it comes to Webster. three. Because I look, again, I look at my cousins in Syria and they have no idea what this stuff is, right? And they probably never will interact with it, not at least for a couple of years. And that now already creates, puts them at a very large disadvantage, right? So those are like some, examples that also scare me in terms of how fast we are growing this technology.

I'm on the one hand, like, that's a really big thought to like end this on. And on the other hand, really big thought to end this on because like in some ways some of the ethos that are that's going into web three and like again like I think why why I love like hearing from Randy and why Randy's perspective is so valuable here is you know she brings a perspective like as as an immigrant as a person in tech you know as a woman as you know Canadian as a founder like so many different advantages coming together and then just the cultural background and that context. And again, I'm going to just reflect back to, I saw Kavidon is now in the audience, about the white guys that were building this stuff, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And it just, it feels like there's a sort of an energy

or momentum, at least in parts of the Web3 world where it's like, look, there are a lot of institutions that will fail and we don't want to be beholden or relying upon them. Like, even if the things we stand up fail, we want to at least have some agency in how they come apart. And so, you know, if I'm thinking about Syria or I'm thinking about like Belarus or I'm thinking about people who are all over the world like trying to figure out and make sense, you know, where their governments are not actually working for them, where there is graft in the government itself, where there is not the rule of law as there is in the United States or where there is a huge amount of unbanked people, these technologies, or at least the benefits,

of the web and Web 2.0, which were, I think, well felt within the sort of, you know, Western world, the United States, Europe, and so forth, needs to reach out and sort of come into the rest of the world with all of the different challenges, you know, cultural, governmental, you know, institutional. And so, like, the building blocks of Web 3, I think, are trying to solve for some of those issues that are just not felt by people in, you know, the quote-unquote, like, developed world. So I think we have to start to sort of expand our frame of reference when evaluating these ideas and these technologies. Who is being enfranchised? Who is being disenfranchised? How inclusive is it? How exclusive is it? Like, how does it deal with wealth and distribution? Or does it? Is it even trying to solve for that?

Again, I'm not trying to like go down that path again, even though, you know, you brought it up. Because I think it's so important to sort of understand or to get into, and I have no idea, what Evie's values are or what her experience is. But I don't know to what degree she's also considering that broader frame and that broader context when it comes to this question of ownership that is not dictated by conglomerates or by big tech companies, but is just determined by, you know, entries in a public ledger, you know, which is this blockchain. You know, the last thought that I'll leave you with, I guess, is I was thinking about how one of the big,

Okay, so I will sort of speak to what Kavid and I were talking about. Because Kavidin was asking, like, what is the Netscape moment for Web3? You know, what is the thing that's really going to help people understand, you know, why this is so cool and interesting and to make it accessible? And he and I, I think, have a different, or at least, you know, in our conversation, had a different idea of, and Brian, I'm curious about your thoughts about that's, like, what the value of Netscape was. To me, the value of Netscape actually was that it was a read-write, browser that it allowed for anybody anywhere that had an internet connection to contribute to the

web, that the authorship part of Netscape was the significant aspect, not the fact that it created this consumer web that anybody could access and look up information. And so Web 3, I think, comes from a similar vein. And my thought, my question, you know, and a lot of people complain about gas, but if you could write on an unerasable chalkboard in a way that the world would not be able to erase your message and everyone would be able to see it as long as they had the tools and the know-how, how much would you pay to put that message out there? And suddenly gas fees make a lot more sense. Yes, we trivialize it and we're like, oh, you know, I'm buying these JPEGs for, you know, tens or hundreds of dollars or whatever. But that's not actually the thing that's the most interesting

about it. So we're starting with something very basic, very primitive. NAPSter started with something basic, you know, pirating music. But that was a relatable thing. So I guess that's the thought that I have about why this technology is so interesting is if we get outside of our own perspective of what the Internet is and we think more broadly, does that change the calculus of how we're evaluating NFTs, Web 3, and all of these different technologies that we're able to sort of scoff at now. I'm not plugging my book because I'm not going to name it. In my book, I said that what Netscape did, what the first browsers did was it wasn't just like people go in front of a computer and see a web page for the first time and are like, oh my God, I want to see more of this. It was also they went back and made their own web pages.

So like that was the sort of flywheel of the early internet was it wasn't just that people were seeing cool things and had access. the data and information they didn't have before. It was also, I'm going to go out and contribute to this. And one way to put this in a boat to bring back to how we transition to this, where I suggested to you the cynical take is that Web 3 was an invention of VCs. Which seems to be Jack's suggestion, perhaps. Right. In the same way that the energy of the early web was so obvious that even though it became

this big, you know, money, land grab money thing. The energy and excitement that someone like Randy has is not something that Chris Dixon just dreamed up as a way to have an excuse for another multi-billion dollar fund. It really is out there. And so, you know, whether that's being channeled by big money or not is another question. Well, big money has also gotten a lot more savvy, and they pulled the Facebook, which is to follow, you know, what people are doing. Like, where is the behavior?

And how can we invest in what's already working, right? Right. So everyone has gotten someone more savvy about how and where to place their bets. But I do think that folks in the Web3 crowd, like there is a kernel of something that resists that type of, you know, creation of oligarchs. I'm not saying it's resistant to it, but it feels like the fact that everything is visible and on chain, presuming you have the tools and the tools get better for inspecting. the chain, that is an enabling technology that we just, I don't think we fully understand what its ramifications will be. You know, like, it's funny, as I've been doing some, I guess, you know, research trying to go back to even, you know, five, ten years ago, there was so much

link rot out there. It's so hard to find old articles, old websites that refer to apps or businesses or things that, you know, I would want people to learn from. If those things were on-chain, granted, sort of our version of on-chain is in the way back machine, but to be able to have that stored someplace where you can't remove it does create an immutable archive of where we've been, what we've talked about, what we've learned, et cetera. So again, there's just, there's something in it. I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, but I think of these things as like a complexity balloon. You squeeze one end and complexity goes someplace else. But, you know, for a little while, like the balloon is sort of like reshaped itself into something new.

And it's, and it's early. So we don't have to have all the answers yet. Right. Yeah. I think we should wrap it there. I do want to, before we go, the guests we had on at the beginning, Natasha Mascaranis from TechCrunch. She also is the co-host of the Great Equity Podcast. If you want a podcast that keeps you up to date on VC and fundraising stuff, I listen to Equity every week. Also, Katie Roof covers VC startups, all that stuff for Bloomberg. I didn't write down our third guest. Christine Hall.

Christine Hall. And she's from TechCrunch as well. She is. Yep. So I want to thank everyone that came on, Randy. I want to thank you for coming on as well. And Chris, I'm glad you're feeling better. Me too.

Me too. And now I probably need to go nap for three hours. There you go. All right. Thank you, everybody. Amazing. Thanks, everybody. I'll talk to you soon.

A pleasure, as always. As always. Thanks, Randy. Thank you. Bye.