The Pomp Podcast - 319: Bradley Miles Explains Social Money

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Bradley Miles is the Co-founder and CEO of Roll, a platform that helps individuals create unique and branded fan-based digital currency or what they call social money. In this conversation, we discuss social money, how content is currency, what the bull case for fan-based currencies are, and how big of an opportunity this could end up being.  =============================== Our second sponsor is choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Bradley Miles is the co-founder and CEO of Roll, a platform that helps individuals create unique and branded fan-based digital currency, or what they call social money. In this conversation, we discuss social money, how content is currency, what the bull case for fan-based currencies are, and how big of an opportunity this could end up being. I really enjoyed this conversation with Bradley, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

The first is BlockFi. I'm an investor and a super happy user. They currently have three products. You can buy and sell crypto. You can deposit crypto and get a US dollar loan. Or you can deposit crypto or digital dollars and earn up to 8.6% APY in their new interest-bearing accounts. No-brainer if you're looking for any sort of interest.

It beats every single interest rate in the legacy world. They're also running a special through the end of the month that if you go ahead and take one of the US dollar loans using crypto as collateral, they'll give you a little boost of extra free loans with no interest. So go check it out at BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Our second sponsor is Choice. super excited about these guys. They're a new self-directed IRA product. If you're listening

to this, you're likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too. So now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax advantage dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. A new self-directed IRA product that allows you to use tax advantage dollars to buy real Bitcoin where you hold the private keys in that IRA product. RetireWithChoice.com slash Pomp. Again, RetireWithChoice.com slash Pomp. And lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while

sharing my opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. If you want to click on any of the links rather than type them in, you can also go in the description and they're all there for you to click. That's it. So let's get into this episode with Bradley. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Bradley here. Super excited to talk. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, super excited. Thanks for having me. For sure. For those that don't know you, let's start with background. Where were you born? Where'd you grow up? And what'd you do before roll? Yeah, so I was born in New York City. Grew up just outside of the city in a small suburb called Westchester. For those familiar, it's a small one square mile town there called Ardsley. Went to Columbia. Became pretty fascinated with venture capital. Wrote a book that a lot of people read actually called Break into VC. It's funny, a lot of Gen Z people read it now and ping me and it's kind of how they get

their associate analyst jobs. From there, worked as an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars and was one of the founding researchers at Coindesk. And my job was really putting together these huge reports called the State of Blockchain Reports after Mary Meeker's State of the Internet Reports. This was around the time that around, you know, maybe five researchers in this space, 2015, 2016. Ethereum blew up, did a huge report on that and really kind of never looked back. Got it. And so first I got to ask about writing the book. Did you self-publish it or did you go with like a publishing house? Yeah, it was a crazy story. So I won't name names, but I had a publishing deal in Canada. It's a small publishing company. And they were like,

oh, this is great. A soft skills book. This fits with, you know, this other guy who's also writing a book yeah we'll publish it in like 2021 and this was in like uh 2017 and um i had slowly realized that um i guess writing a book and getting a deal was very similar to like signing to a major label or something like this where uh you really don't have any rights or decisions so read literally 12 books on self-publishing had a mini launch party on on facebook at the time and um just launched it man and it's just uh it just becomes something that a bunch of people are reading that i'm pretty excited about yeah that's awesome and then uh how'd you get the job at a coin desk yeah it's a really good story so i was working um at a uh a sort of an analyst associate at a firm and uh this

was around 2014 and uh we had we were we were all assigned sectors to sort of choose and everyone was terrified of Bitcoin. Uh, so I just dove right in and basically chose Bitcoin as the sector I'd look, uh, uh, I'd look into. And at that time, so sort of 2014, um, there really wasn't any news sources. There were a few blogs and, uh, really just Coindesk. Uh, so all roads really led to Coindesk. Um, at that time in the team, there was about four people on the team. This was a Ryan selkis pete rizzo um and a few guys running off so literally pinged them uh had a beer uh jumped on and the rest was sort of history from there that's awesome and had you heard of bitcoin before you decided to cover it or you just were intrigued the first time you heard it yeah um was pretty

familiar sort of started hearing about it in like 2012 2013 uh but but didn't was really trying to find an excuse to uh to get involved and uh just being the guy at a firm has always been i kind of talk about that as an author like a lot of folks still ping me i'm like how do you get in the vc and you literally just need to become the person uh that kind of knows topics so uh becoming that person for a topic was was really interesting i loved how uh it wouldn't really shied away from the idea of uh digital currency in 2014 2015 so just saw an opportunity to dive in so made a lot more sense for you to do it. That's awesome. And so as you get to CoinDesk, you start writing these big reports, Ether and Ethereum come out. What was the general sense? Like there's a lot

of people who know that the ICO was relatively popular in terms of the buildup to it, but maybe kind of from your seat at the time, like what was the things that you remember going into the ICO and then kind of the first couple of months afterwards? Yeah, it was an insane time. I mean, people were, man, I can't name names, but people were coming to the office that had just raised like tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars. At that time, they were all just really curious about how to get covered in Coindesk. They wanted to be in sort of our reports. And my job also at the time was really looking into these things, things like waves and sort of other blockchains that were sort of coming out and sort of seeing what's going on.

it was it was i was pretty much the wild west um you know just kind of like watching a john wayne movie or something and just seeing all this this sort of action happen you really couldn't necessarily tell the difference between sort of an ethereum or waves at the time it was kind of it's kind of pretty difficult uh but but eventually you know all the smoke cleared i started diving a little deeper after the ethereum hard fork i had to write a piece on like ethereum classic and the differences and was just pretty fascinated about that. The DAO came out and yeah, formally decided to start building on top of Ethereum around 2017. Got it. And did you always know that you wanted to go and build a company or was it something that as you just learned more about the technology,

you eventually said, hey, this is something that I should go do? Yeah. So that's another insane story. So basically I was at Coindesk, wrote the book and uh effectively uh the book did so well uh that i um basically went on uh needed to go on a book tour and i spoke at around 20 colleges and because of the nature of the book uh breaking into venture capital a lot of investors just started pinging me i'm like who the fuck are you like how did you write this book what's going on um and i got invited to a lot of panels uh that i probably shouldn't have been on, but jumped on them anyway. So one of those panels was with Alex Iskold, who's a former manager of Techstars New York. He now runs a firm called 2048 VC.

Had dinner with him and basically made me an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars. It was the first check into me as the only kind of person at the company and then sort of grew roll from there. Got it. And so what, when you walk in day one, entrepreneur in residence at tech or tech stars like what did you want to build did you have any idea uh and they kind of how did you get from there to here yeah uh so i'll uh basically phrase that by saying i i um there was this one guy at goldman sachs that um oh yeah there's this one guy at a bank that kind of came into coindesk and um we're just really talking about sort of uh the advisory market and just sort of what was going on in crypto.

And I was really just a fly on the wall in the room and really just thought, man, I could eat this guy's lunch. I know most of the people in the space, I know how to raise and all these things. So the very first idea, so sort of like the first few months was pretty fascinated by the idea of starting an advisory group

and really wanted to start this sort of consulting firm that could sort of separate sort of the tier one companies from the tier two companies that were kind of raising. So that was the initial impetus when I jumped into Techstars and then raised a sort of a small round off that and pivoted to Roll. Got it. And so what is Roll today? Yeah, so if I were to tell you in 2010 that the next 10 years would basically generate

hundreds of billions of dollars in value for user-generated content, you know, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera, that would have been unfathomable. So our thesis is that's going to repeat itself in a new way. So user-generated content is going to jump into the next phase, user-generated currency, or what Roll calls social money. So Roll is really a blockchain-based network that allows anyone to create, distribute, now invest in trade, their own social money. So these are branded Ethereum tokens. We've made it literally as simple as clicking a button to sort of sign up. There's close to 200 communities on the network now. It's around 10,000 people that hold social money. And yeah, we're just super excited about where things are going and

the opportunity. All right. So let's start at the core of the conversation, which is what the hell is social money? Yeah. So take you back again here. So the concept of social currency, let's say, is around 120 years old, right? Or social capital. This idea that every kind of individual has this network around them and that network has this sort of almost intangible value. We sort of carry this in like a philosophical sense. So what Ethereum uniquely allows you to do is turn this cultural primitive now into a digital and financial primitive. So the network value that let's say you have starting a podcast and sort of, you know, a sub stack and having this presence, the idea is you could effectively make that fungible and tradable and sendable through

Ethereum. And then for us, we see this really as a mass adoption primitive. In the future, we see many people having their own currencies. So we wanted to create a term that was super friendly, almost as friendly as ice cream, two words that people just like next to each other. And this effectively became social money. So social money are branded Ethereum tokens, named after individuals and communities and yeah. And so would it be fair to say that this is analogous to like Amazon gift cards, right? Where it's a branded currency that can be used within that network or is that something that would be a little bit inaccurate? Yeah, so we adopt a lot of language on roles. If you go to role right now, social money can be earned, it can be redeemed,

But Ethereum adds these amazing benefits. I mean, first of all, social money now becomes interoperable across systems, right? And so there's social money on blockchain platforms like Uniswap. So social money is traded every day. People exchange it for different NFTs or collectibles. So it's sent all the time on OpenSea. there's folks that use it on Patreon and Twitch and Instagram and Twitter. So the idea of creating this interoperable, auditable system, where the value could be integrated into different platforms is really special, because all of a sudden, you're not just on the network, you become the network. And philosophically, that's why people we think are coming to roll, they never really have their own money. And that's just the lead in. But philosophically, the sell is once you have your own money you can create your own rules and become the network and that's a very new value prop that we think is unique for the uh this decade so help me understand like why do i let's say if i'm x

person running a community right let's just say it's um i don't know whatever community uh why do i need my own currency versus just use whether it's fiat currency or one of the existing cryptocurrencies? Yeah, so fiat currency is great. For social money, we really see this as complimentary. So a lot of people that have an online community, effectively, a lot of them really have their own culture with fan behavior. They may even have their own language with GIFs and memes. What social money literally does is bring economics to that digital community or nation. The community now has its own money and its own sense of belonging. And what happens here is social money really opens up new feature sets, right? The community itself can be traded. It

could exist on many platforms while being sort of independent of all platforms as well. And it's an amazing tool to really start incentivizing your community, right? So if there's something you want to do, whether it's sort of more subscriptions on YouTube or more comments on Substack. You can literally, like a new web superpower, generate that type of activity directly towards those actions with your social money. Got it. And so I guess part of this is it's less about the money and it's more about the social component, the branding, et cetera. The monetary policy, if you will, is not the focus. It's much more around how do you use this new exchange of value in a community to get people to kind of stay locked in, be much more engaged to participate, earn things,

all of that type of stuff. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah. So we're onboarding entirely new communities in this sort of completely new way. And we've made the economics as simple as Twitter has made you know character counts right so twitter has a 280 character max roll has a 10 million uh unit of social money uh maximum supply and so every person that comes on roll doesn't need to do any mental math or anything like this they'll come on and know that they have a 10 million supply they get 2 million on day one and so the rest will be released over time but yeah absolutely you're able to now sort of send your social money across platforms have it be spent on different products and create different ways for it to be earned.

So if I wanted to create, let's say, a pomp coin, right, and there's 10 million pomp coins that exist in the world, do they all hold whatever value I ascribe to them? Is there an open market that determines that value? Do kind of the users in my community or network ascribe that value? How does that work? Yeah, so first, if you create a pomp, I think everyone would freak out in a really good way. You wouldn't be alone. There's a lot of people with massive communities that have just joined Roll. Fred Wilson's testing it out with ABC. We just talked to Ja Rule. We'll sort of be doing something with him later on. And folks like Kami Russo and sort of others that have built sizable communities are on Roll as well. What's very interesting is we basically clone

the Uniswap protocol. So we have our own Uniswap front end, which allows any sort of social money to be traded easily. And what we would do effectively, if you wanted to, is start market making POM. So we've done this enough that we could ascertain the value of any social money in the ballpark of an order of magnitude. So there's social money now that's worth half a million dollars as a market cap, or some that's worth a few hundred thousand. So once we sort of do that, the market is really going to tell us the value of POM at that point. And it sort of stays there. And what we've seen is as more utility is driven towards social money, the demand for the network goes up and that sort of increases the value of social money. So it's this idea of sort

of the community is almost a form of cash flow. And if there's more demand for the community, there's more demand for your social money. What's like the best way you've seen it used within a community? Any examples that you can talk about in terms of just, obviously, when people hear money, they think, okay, you're paying for something, or you're receiving value for something. But how have you seen this specifically used in communities you think is pretty cool? Yeah, so there's several examples. So I think one of the most popular ones that Barstool Sports wrote about this, a few others. So there's someone on role who's a young entrepreneur and sort of a community manager named Alex Masmesh. And sort of Alex raised $20,000 with his social money

named Alex. So he effectively built all of his rewards on role, built a network and did a formal Kickstarter style crowdfund and used Alex as a crowdfunding mechanism. Another engineer named Kerman did this as well. So Kerman raised around $25,000. That's an extremely interesting use case just kind of building your own network and monetizing in this new way um aside for the people the people who bought the the alex token or or the other one what did they get in return like why why would they buy alex for example yeah so buying alex or kerman um effectively gives you a stake in that person's network. And so what that means is you now own basically a percentage of this community. And if you believe in sort of the success of this community over time,

what that could effectively lead to is sort of an overwhelming growth of what the community means. And the interesting thing is, this isn't just tied to Alex or Kerman, it's tied to the currency. And what we've seen over time is the most successful social money, its utility actually becomes democratized. So the biggest users of Alex and Kerman aren't exactly those individuals. or people in the community using it in a peer-to-peer way, which is sort of fascinating. So you own a piece of this community that can exist over time and effectively increase as the demand for the network increases. Yeah, it's super interesting. And then I guess you were going on about other use cases. So you have those two folks who raised money essentially when they sold this. What are some of the other use cases that you've seen? Yeah, so there's a lady who was the very first person to issue on Roll. Her name's Laurel. I met her at VidCon. And Laurel is an influencer

with over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, has never touched Bitcoin, has never touched Ether, is crazy about her social money called Tingles. And there's around a thousand Tingle holders in the world. Tingles is traded every day on Uniswap. And Laurel uses tingles to incentivize the KPIs that matter to her. Laurel has an OnlyFans. She has a Patreon. She has a TikTok. She has an Instagram. She has her own app. I'm a patron on her Patreon, so I'm on the $5 a month tier. Every month, I get a certain amount of tingles for being a Patreon subscriber. I get a few thousand. If I were to increase my tier to $10 or $20, I'm going to get more tingles from laurel for this and so what she's effectively doing is creating a network

on top of her network with tingles so that we've seen this with streamers we've seen this with uh sort of creators so streamers are sort of whether it's twitch or mixer or d live or any platform the kpis that matter to them are basically donations and subscriptions so if you want want to enhance those, an amazing way to do it is giving social money cash back. So streamers invented this on Roll. They literally stop the stream and just start streaming Roll and give some Pygos or Forrester or whoever the streamer is, give some social money back for those donations and subscriptions. So at large, we're really seeing social money act as a way to incentivize the KPIs that really matter to you. Very cool. And I guess as part of this,

is it all individuals so far, or have you seen what I'll call organizations and companies start to be interested as well? Yeah. So we're at a fascinating turning point. So some interesting things that started happening a little while ago, groups started approaching us. And it was the first interesting thing. So there's a group called DeFi Italy. So they're a group in Italy, a meetup group, and they talk about DeFi. And so they minted Italia with us. And so, you know, if you want to be an Italian, you could hold some Italia and gets you access to sort of all these different things. Since then, we're about to make a few announcements. So Ja Rule's been a friend of the company for a while. We're pretty excited about that. And there's a few other platforms

that effectively want to be the role of their industry. So there's people that have reached out to us from top streaming platforms. There's people that have reached out to us that are connected to festivals like South by Southwest and Coachella. There's people that have reached out to us that are connected to esports teams and people that are connected to sort of DJs, et cetera. And they want to utilize the role infrastructure, the role protocol to allow their platform to issue social money on behalf of their users. So if I run a popular DJ platform and Fat Boy Slim's on there or DJ Jazzy Jeff or someone like that, you'll have a really simple interface already on that platform where those DJs can plug in, utilize the role protocol and issue social

money on behalf of the user on other platforms. And so this is the future of role we really see where everything touched social in the past 20 years. We think everything's going to touch social money in the next 20 years. Yeah, it's really interesting when you start to look at kind of the comparison. So take a South by Southwest, they don't necessarily have money, but they have everything from wristbands to passes and kind of all of these things that essentially give you access to events and things like that. But I can't necessarily take my wristband and exchange it in any way with either other attendees or people who aren't there. I'm sure there's people who go, you know, when they're done with the event and they go sell it to somebody outside

so they can get into the event or whatever. But it sounds like really what you guys are attempting to do here is create a digital item that has both monetary value and kind of the economics behind it, but also has the utility that could be used, for example, getting access to an event or attending something or getting a piece of content or a meet and greet or something like that? Absolutely. Yeah. And the opportunity is massive. I mean, just to give you sort of a sense here, by default, we've kind of become the PayPal of this concept, right? So this idea that this type of social money can be moved, can be created and moved anywhere, anytime to anyone all over the web, the same sort of value prop is PayPal, but for social money. And that's allowed

substantial platforms to now reach out to us and create a V2 of role where we just become this social money web infrastructure, these massive platforms. And that's huge. And there's huge incentive for entrepreneurs to do this, to become the role of esports, the role of events, the role of um uh you know fitness etc and so entrepreneurs are reaching out to us they're ready to do this and the most exciting thing is you know we won't necessarily onboard like a south by southwest or tribeca film festival or uh sort of a hundred thieves or or um you know fat boy slim uh entrepreneurs will do that uh through their platforms will literally just be the infrastructure that allows it to exist on the network yeah it's super interesting um you mentioned a couple of

people who are using it uh who are the biggest people using it and then give me an example of somebody you don't have to name them uh who's tried this it hasn't worked uh and explain why they found it didn't work yeah so some of my favorite people using roll uh it's a bit niche but it's sort of the the digital artist category um so there's people there's these people making you know the whole crypto kitties uh nft framework uh there's people making you know uh provably scarce digital art through that um and they're creating social money on a roll so my favorite is probably uh this guy jeff uh goes by skinny he's from madrid he uh tattoos skulls on people's arms and backs and he uh approached us and created skull and he makes skull based art

and what happened next was pretty fascinating um so he offered his skull based art on on open sea in skull and what happened next is uh different games and uh exchanges and artists also started accepting skull and skull just became this peer-to-peer thing that all of a sudden nothing to do with this guy who created it um we started to market make skull people now sort of trade it every day. But you're seeing that as sort of this inevitable path, this democratization of utility. One person starts it, all of a sudden it's used for many different cases. That's been pretty fascinating. I love what's happening in sort of the newsletter community. So a lot of folks on Substack, Tiny Letter, different sort of email subscription services, they're just dropping

their social money at the end of a newsletter. And they're dropping like 10 or 15 different links. And, you know, only the first few people can claim it. It's just sort of like Pavlovian training for people to sort of jump in and sort of collect, open the newsletter quickly and sort of collect social money. One category we're really thinking through, we just onboarded our first one, is athletes. I think athletes are interesting. So we have a lot of like founders, we have a lot of engineers, a lot of community members, a lot of artistic creatives. I think there's a wide opening spot for athletes. I think what would naturally happen, and we're seeing this happen right now, is people will start building platforms that are for specific groups using social money. And the idea's role would be that infrastructure. So we think there does exist a specific role-based platform for streamers, for artists, for rappers, for athletes. And those are things I think we'll kind of see built in the next few years, hopefully, on world's infrastructure.

So elaborate on that a little bit, right? Like, where does all this go? Because I think a lot of people look and they say, okay, so you basically have infrastructure built. There's a couple of people who have created, a couple being, you know, 200 or so people who have created these social money currencies. They're using it in a various number of formats, but they're, you know, relatively small compared to the, you know, the world, right? it's not like Kanye West or, or, um, you know, an NBA player or anybody yet. Uh, I think that that's kind of where you guys aspire to get to. And there's a, um, a strong argument as to being able to get there, but where do you see this? Let's call it, you know, 10 years from now,

right? You, you started out earlier talking about kind of user generated content, creating all this value that a lot of people wouldn't have expected. What does that look like kind of the bull case for social money? Yeah. So at scale, what you'll see is content becoming currency. And so we've created this simple framework where people, you know, kind of for the first time can now come to a platform and create their own currency. What happens next is role just opening up its smart contracts, right? So let's say we onboard Coachella or South by Southwest, and we have such significant mindshare

in the idea of minting a social money for an event, then you wanna mint some social money for your birthday party, or let's say a Zoom call. It may not make sense to have the same monetary policy that Coachella has or that we currently have on role. You may just wanna create five and maybe an exclusive party. not only create 15 or a thousand you know whatever um you'll actively be able uh to decide

all of these economic parameters through other platforms we'll sort of integrate roles you'll see like role parties right sort of log in and kind of do it um so this is sort of the long tail right a bunch of nannies are getting together for some wine and you know the hamptons they'll create a sort of uh simple token for their party to kind of uh engage and sort of that'll be the end of it. At scale, I think what you'll see is the most interesting people creating completely new economies because it philosophically makes sense for them to own the value of their network. You could redefine influencer marketing in this way. Brands will effectively now want a piece of someone's currency because that's the network that the individual is saying matters the most.

That's what hundreds of thousands of people are now holding. And that's what exists across, let's say, TikTok or Twitter, next generation platforms. So not only will the next generation of social natively integrate this type of currency, but how brands communicate with people can be changed if this network shifts. right? And the paradigm becomes about the currency over the content. And that's sort of the world which we see and the infrastructure we're kind of building for. So in that world, like how big is that, right? Is that a $100 billion type economy that gets built there? Is that a trillion dollars? Is it $10 million? Like, just how do you think about scale here? And understanding that I'm basically asking you to hit a moving target 10 years out is almost an impossible task. But just kind of like today, how do you think about how big this can get from an addressable market standpoint? Yeah, so there's two things that

role is really. So role is one, it's web infrastructure. It's this idea that, you know, we could send Pomp back and forth. And you could use role web infrastructure to send Pomp from Twitch to Twitter to Shopify to Pizza Hut to the mall. And there's the underlying role protocol really which anyone could sort of plug gmail could plug into your writing create a role plug-in start sending etc um so as everything has sort of wrapped around social uh if optimistically everything then wraps around social money we're seeing this as a potentially trillion dollar opportunity with multiple players um and the opportunity there is owning concepts right what journalists tokens look like how are they different from dj tokens or event tokens

that these types of categories are going to be enormous we're sort of the first significant players seeing that vision i don't think we'll be the last but we are bringing this to market in a way that the masses are reaching out so at a protocol infrastructure level creating a a Coachella token or a South by Southwest or sort of these different brands or communities, it's in a multi-trillion dollar category. Got it. And I guess as part of creating that, you mentioned multiple players. Do you feel like there will be specialization around different use cases? Or do you feel like you guys can build kind of the foundational layer? And then as you described, you'll get kind of vertical building by entrepreneurs around, you know, role parties

or journalist tokens or whatever there. Yeah, so I think what we're seeing right now is we have such significant mindshare that the different players are reaching out. But you can really unbundle a lot of things that are going to happen, right? So like right now, there's like roles like a was like a one stop shop, right? So you're minting a particularly different type of currency right now um but you know in the next year people may want this you know chipotle style minting process in a fast casual way i may want may want a minute token for my birthday party on saturday or you know my relationship or is it anything anything like this so uh you'll see different minting products uh you'll see this as you said sort of break into categories um i think those

will be owned by people in those communities. So what will happen is someone that knows a lot of people and events will contact a blockchain first company like Roll, integrate it, and then sort of onboard those types of people. So yeah, you will see segmentation. I think Roll's position in that to sort of mass audience is really how it moves from one platform to another, right? So if you onboard Fatboy Slim on this DJ platform. You may also be interested in streaming on Twitch. We may create a time-released bot that releases, let's say, Fatboy based on sort of how long the streams are. You may also want to send it on Twitter, integrate it into a Shopify. These are all part of the world that role exists in moving social money from one place to another.

So we've talked a lot about people who all consider the edge cases in terms of general society, right? So these are people with smaller communities, things like that. Obviously, the largest networks in the world are the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world. What is your thought process around? We've seen Facebook try to create a currency that doesn't really kind of correlate here that they went more after what I'd consider like a nation state type currency. Twitter has obviously a CEO and founder who is very bullish on Bitcoin as a currency. Do you feel like this type of social money is targeted at a different type of audience than, let's say, the Facebooks and Twitters? Or do you see a world where maybe, whether it's them or other large

networks, maybe Twitch or whoever says, hey, look, we actually want to create a Twitch coin, a Twitter coin, and can use what you guys are building to do that? Yeah, I think the real premise or sort of why we're personally fascinated by a role is it flips the entire thesis of social on its head, right? Chris Dixon from Andreessen writes a little bit about this, like as a platform develops, it just ends up competing with its users and sort of cannibalizing a lot of the activity that happens. And you saw that with sort of Instagram getting word of likes and sort of a sort of a few other things like that and um flipping that thesis on its head and allowing individuals to be the network um on top of these platforms is a completely new

idea so we've seen like they've seen like the seem like can and props and sort of different platforms create tokens and if that continues to happen right if there is a facebook coin and a snapchat coin um one isn't going to adopt the other right so facebook isn't going to want to use snapchat coin and uh twitter isn't going to want to use um you know facebook coin um but everyone's going to want to use uh kim's coin um instagram's going to want to use it snapchat's going to want to use it so imagine the top 1000 influential people on the web having their own currency, this just becomes the way of operating and sort of filters down. So I think that's the real play here, instead of sort of a platform creating their own currency. And yeah, I think

that's sort of what we're after right now. What does that user experience look like, right? So if pretty much every network, I'm a part of every community, I'm a part of every person that I kind of subscribe to, if everyone has their own currency, like, how do I as a user manage all of that? How do I kind of think through that? Does it become overwhelming to me? What's kind of the thoughts there? Yeah, so right now, you can kind of think about it as, you know, thesis like, everyone that, you know, can create a YouTube channel will create a YouTube channel. So everyone that, you know, wants to create a currency will, and it'll be somewhat similar to that, it'll be somewhat similar to the people that you follow, the YouTube channels that you go to,

you may hold, you know, 400 different currencies, but you may only actively engage in, you know, let's say 20. What's become fascinating is people see social money as a primitive. So this is starting to grow in a sense. And the question becomes, like, what do you build on top of the social money primitive? And a lot of people are really excited about the concept of curation. How can you reimagine Twitter in this version where the sort of boards are different people's currencies? And so once you start playing around, you know, reinventing social with this new type of money, you get these really unique ideas of sort of how to play and engage in value. And I think that kind of changes who wins and sort of how they win. But generally, yeah, the process and how you associate with these currencies will be very

similar to how you associate with the content around that individual. Yeah, it's super interesting. And I guess if let's say five to 10 years from now, this is unsuccessful, meaning social money does not become a thing. What would you say is the number one reason today that you could see that happening? What's the biggest risk in terms of this being unsuccessful moving forward as just an overall industry trend of social money? Yeah, so I would say right now, I'd say in the next few years, I think what we're going to see is overwhelming developer interest. I think one knack people have on this space is sort of blockchain in general is it's almost the same.

It's almost a knitting circle of the same like 20,000 people talking to each other about the same topics. you're not really seeing a lot of new energy come in almost the same protocols are kind of using each other in sort of different ways um if they're if developers support if developer demand sort of increases in this category and massive platforms are starting to utilize this primitive of social money uh i think everyone wins right more people are using compound more people are using uniswap et cetera. You're bringing in sort of new people, new tokens, new ideas. Um, so I think one thing that would stop that is sort of this, um, um, latent developer demand, uh, over time. Luckily we're seeing that now. Um, but if the people who run massive platforms for some reason, don't want

to integrate these sorts of ideas or be able to have their communities mint tokens. Um, yeah, you could see sort of a stagnation and, um, yeah, we're not seeing that now, but I think if we do see that in the future, probably shift, figure out why and, and, um, to reassess how to get people excited. And then talk to me about the technology stack in terms of all of this right now is being built on top of Ethereum, uh, from what I understand. Uh, do you see that being the long-term strategy? Do you think that, uh, there's the possibility other things will pop up that, uh, can kind of replace, um, that foundational, uh, blockchain, um, kind of how do you think about technology stack and ethereum versus other things yeah so ethereum has a really special place

in in people's hearts right now it's sort of the largest largest developer community i think it may have surpassed bitcoin i'm not sure about that um but you know we're we're gonna go where basically the developer excitement is um so we're sort of at heart we're sort of blockchain agnostic but you know we we do love ethereum as sort of our uh kind of introduction to sort of these types of applications. But it's, you know, it's somewhat plausible that another blockchain sort of comes in and does this. But the idea of role sort of porting that value from one blockchain to another becomes feasible, right? There's nothing that effectively like ties role forever to Ethereum. But yeah, we're just going to continue to build because they have the most primitives. No one

needs to rebuild a Uniswap or a compound or sort of any of these things. And we're really excited about, you know, how things are going. I think there's going to be some interesting things with sort of ETH2 and Layer 2 scaling. And, you know, we may adopt some of those in the future. I got to ask, does ETH2 ever happen? Well, you know, that's a really good question. Luckily, how Roll works, Roll works in a semi-custodial fashion. So there's thousands of people that are sending money back and forth every day using Roll on sort of internally. and they use these links to blast them out to masses amounts of people um all of those things are sort of off chain uh so sort of um sort of go back to sort of rolls a semi-custodial wallet

there um so for us we really don't necessarily need eth2 to come out we would love it to come out um to sort of enhance what's going on with us um but yeah i think it's feasible that it comes out in the next uh sort of maybe two or four years awesome what's the one thing that has surprised you since you started roll oh hip-hop culture is trying to embrace uh blockchain in interesting ways so uh we just did this podcast with uh with jaw rule uh which was was fascinating he's an awesome guy learned about his background from def jam but the conversation really turned into something really special because we saw a lot of commonalities between blockchain and hip hop right they both started in these this one place right hip hop in the bronx 1973 and you

know um bitcoin blockchain with the bitcoin white paper and um you know somewhat centralized and they both sort of spread out sort of became decentralized over time to where anyone could sort of utilize the technology and so the idea the thesis of that like interview is like is blockchain the next hip hop and if so like what is the def jam moment where you know the beastie boys of blockchain comes and they run dmc where all of a sudden hundreds of millions of people are using it and so you're seeing a lot of cultural figures uh that are you really wouldn't suspect it but i kind of talked to them behind the scenes and they're they're in this category where they're super excited about blockchain they just haven't found a reason to dive in

And we're seeing if you literally brand a token after their presence, it's something that they're excited about. So those conversations are super exciting. I wouldn't expect an audience like that to embrace role. look it's uh it's a thing i think i said this to a ben baller once uh when he came on podcast i told him that uh he's a disruptor he's an entrepreneur right he doesn't think of himself that way but that's what he's done his whole life is he's built things right and he's been innovative and so i think that uh a lot of folks especially you know kind of the people that you and i probably look up to is like the hip-hop legends uh kind of from the 80s and 90s like that's really what they did right they had no other choice they had to uh innovate and build and so it's kind of cool to see that they have an interest in more technology-driven stuff.

We've seen it from professional athletes and all that, but seeing it from kind of the music side is surprising. Yeah, another thing I'm excited about is just our investor base is pretty diverse in terms of where they come from. So there's folks that were their first blockchain bet. There's folks who their only other bet is Coinbase. So this is Gary Vaynerchuk and his brother AJ. they've been super supportive seeing a long-term vision there uh spencer dinwiddie's great another

investor um been on your show a few times arthur hayes you know sort of uh name synonymous with sort of bitcoin derivatives built a massive business uh thinks this can be a massive uh business as well um all the way to just you know traditional investors as well um um silicon valley vc firms so having that sort of um having that sort of varied investor base is pretty helpful as well. That makes sense. Shout out to Spencer. He's always got a, he's always got a spot in my heart. Great guy. Awesome. Before, uh, before I wrap up, I asked the same two questions. Uh, first one is, uh, what is the most important book that you've ever read? Ooh, you know what? I knew you were going to ask that. Um, I have several answers,

but I guess I'll go with the top of mind answer. Um, it's really hard to fire people. It's really hard to have serious conversations with people, whether it's at a founder level, or a company level, or sort of anything, anything sort of concrete or difficult like that. And there's a massively successful book. And just saying this, because I imagine people have rattled off the same sort of top entrepreneur books, I'm going to name a more obscure one. So this book is called Crucial Conversations. You can look it up on Amazon. It literally tells you how to start, go through the messy middle and end of all these very serious conversations that you need to have in a business context. After you read that, you just feel like you have the armor to deal with

any of the crazy nonsense. Let's say your company or firm scales to 50, 75 people. there's a lot of nonsense going on at all times um reading that book you'll just feel prepared for all these instances so crucial conversations would be my bet i love it uh a less serious question aliens believer or non-believer oh my god i've never been on record here um yeah elon uh joe rogan did a pretty interesting podcast with a few uh few believers and um i do have to say that uh it is it is probably likely um that uh extraterrestrial life is out there uh it's also probably likely that um you know perhaps we're uh in a simulation these are all theories that people talk about um probabilistically yes would you believe that

aliens are real or the simulation is real which one do you believe more we're getting a wacky territory here but if if i have to answer i would say um that um it could be possible that extraterrestrial life is is running a simulation and uh we are the reality tv of other areas and um maybe some of the sightings that people have um or sort of like the repair guys kind of coming in and kind of just like fixing the simulation and going back but um yeah maybe maybe maybe that's the case the aliens are just jealous that uh they don't have social money that's fine yeah yeah you could ask me one question to finish up what you got for me um under what circumstances would you mint pump i for whatever reason i knew that's what

you were going to ask me. I want to see it. There's two things that I'm waiting for. One, I want to see it used at scale in a way that gives me the confidence. It's a good investment of time, right? So the time investment is the most important thing to me. And time I use as a proxy, the more that I sink time into it, that means the more that I'm asking the community and audience to trust me that this is real, this is going to work, it's going to be sustainable, etc. And in this case, when it comes to investing, I'm like, guns blazing love to be, you know, the first or very early to do things. When it comes to the content stuff, I'm actually like very late to the game on a lot of things. So like, I don't even have a tick tock, for example,

right. And some of it's by design of like, I really got to be convinced something's worth it, because I know that once I decide to do something like it is a multi-year thing. So like that, one of the things I tell everyone who wants to create content is like, Hey, when you start, are you signing up for five years or 10 years? And a lot of people are like, Oh, I didn't realize that. I thought I was just going to do it for a week. It's like, nah, you like, this is a, this is a multi-year thing. So I think that's one. And the second thing is I don't think that I understand yet what I would do with it. And that's on me of like, I just haven't critically thought enough about like, Hey, if I had this, like, what would I do with it? Uh, frankly,

I probably would like joke around on Twitter, right. Which maybe, maybe that is a good use case. I just don't know. But, um, I would have to think really deeply about like, if I'm going to do it, how do you do it? And I think part of, I always go back to this one principle. Uh, when I worked at Facebook, um, there's a saying internally that was always, uh, deliver more value than you extract or deliver more value than you deliver or than you take. And in this case, a lot of the use cases that I see, it's probably an equal value transfer, right? It's like, I'm getting as much value as I'm giving. And so I would have to just think more critically about how do you actually use this in a way where the community people or the users get more value than I'm actually getting?

you will be helpful to me help thinking through that but but also i think i just gotta sit and critically think about it and then once i know that and i see kind of you know one or two examples of it being used at scale um you'll get me got it yeah okay makes sense just uh i see i i see your uh wheel spinning you're trying to think of how you could sell me as soon as we get off the call well no just yeah hypothetically i think you were on our you were on our list you're in our our top 10 of people we wanted to grab, but yeah. Listen, never say never. No, of course. All right, man. Listen, Brian, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Where do you want people to go? Where can we send them to check out you and Roll on the internet?

Yeah, yeah. So check us out at www.tryroll.com. There's 10,000 people using social money right now. You can sign up for our beta. We're going to open that up to the general public soon. You can follow us on Twitter at TryRollHQ. Shoot us a DM or just say hi. I'm at Bradley underscore Miles underscore if you want to say hi as well. And yeah, that's about it. Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this and we'll have to do it again in the future. Cool, man. Yeah, this was great. Thanks for your time. Thank you.