The Startup Ideas Podcast - Predicting the Future of Web3

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Web 3.0 is the future, ready or not; are you? In today’s episode, we explain how Twitter increases earning & job potential, the ways Web 3 is revolutionizing the fitness and insurance industries, and why young people need to follow their interests and then double down. Hosts Sahil Bloom and Greg Isenberg are joined by guest Gaby Goldberg, who has become a pioneer in crypto, an expert in Web 3, and one of the earliest investors in The Chernin Group (TCG), all by the age of 23. Today Gaby shares the personal experiences that led her down the crypto rabbit hole, why young professionals are all in on Web 3, and shares the next generations biggest predictions for the future.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► This episode is brought to you by Lemon.io. Did you know that one of the top reasons startups fail is bad hiring decisions? People can be unpredictable. And developers can be unpredicted, as well. Let Lemon.io take care of hiring your software engineers. They have a hand-picked roster of engineers from Europe, and we recommend them to companies we work with.Sign up at lemon.io/room for 15% off for the first 4 weeks.►► This episode is also brought to you by LMNT (http://DrinkLMNT.com/HAPPENS). LMNT is a delicious electrolyte drink mix with all of the things you need and none of the junk. It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio: 1000 mg sodium, 200 mg potassium, 60 mg magnesium. LMNT can help prevent and eliminate headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, sleeplessness, and other common symptoms of electrolyte deficiency. It tastes amazing and is great after a workout or one too many drinks :)Right now LMNT is offering our listeners a free sample pack with any order. That’s 8 single serving packets FREE with any LMNT order. Get yours at http://drinklmnt.com/HAPPENS. And it’s so good they have a no questions asked refund policy but you won’t need it.THIS EPISODEGaby Goldberg: https://twitter.com/gaby_goldbergSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985

And someone I met on lunch club basically said, you know, all the stuff you do in your free time, like meeting people and writing online and stuff, like you would get paid to do that if you were in venture. And his advice to me was to get on Twitter. He basically said, like, you pick an industry and you follow people, all the smartest people in that given industry. And then very quickly you get like an IV into the brain of like what the smartest people are reading, writing, who they hang out with, how they spend their free time and all of this kind of stuff. And then you get a really good bird's eye view of like what the ecosystem. looks like. And very shortly after getting on Twitter is how I got my first job in venture. Gabby, thank you so much for taking the time. We're stoked to, stoked to have you here. It's super casual format. You know, you might have heard some of them in the

past. It's like the furthest thing from an interview. We're just going to kind of, you know, I sent over some topics obviously and some stuff that we want to jam through, but basically just like open format, talk about anything that, you know, you, we, et cetera, find interesting. feel free to call us idiots, push back on things, et cetera, more than open to being told we're wrong on any and everything. But have been really excited to have a chance to have you on and to have this discussion for a while now. So I'm glad we're finally getting to do it.

Yeah, I'm excited. I'm a long-time listener. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Yeah, thanks for having me. And you're a fellow Stanford grad, so I'm already, like, positively inclined towards you as a result of that. But can we just actually start with like very quickly how you wound your way into or found your way rather into the,

into the Web 3 worlds? Like had you kind of gone down the rabbit hole in college and then, you know, it was the natural place for you to jump into. Now you're obviously, you know, an investor at TCG, you know, the turning group, an amazing investment shop and doing a lot as a thought leader in the space on Twitter and everywhere else. but would love to just understand like what your kind of like idea maze or like your path into this all was. Also, how old are you?

I'm 22 for one more week. Okay. Oh, there we go. Happy birthday. Well, by the time this is released, you'll be 23 probably then. Okay. Amazing. It's my birthday present.

I have like a short answer and a long answer. So the short answer is through college and basically during COVID, all of my smartest friends were quitting their jobs to work in crypto. And that was kind of the diligence I needed to go down their office. habit hole myself and figure out what was going on. The long answer, and then I can kind of get to the shorter one, is I actually grew up selectively mute, which is, like, not many people know what it is, and it's also interesting because I can't shut up now. But basically, when I was a kid, for like five years, I didn't say anything. It's sort of like a manifestation of anxiety or something like that. I actually have like, how old? Like five to nine, basically. And I don't have a ton of memory of

like why it happened or what was going on. But the collateral, which is important to know, and it's why I bring it up is because of that, I spent a ton of my time online. So I think I was kind of like early to the internet, like spending a lot of time on Roonscape and Minecraft and Club Penguin. I had a Tumblr blog. I was actually talking to someone right before this and like was looking at the hits on my blog. People are like still looking at it, I think, which is crazy.

And then I had like a music blog where I was writing about music. And generally like from early on was always finding community and digital spaces because I think I couldn't find it otherwise. So then when I got to Stanford, I studied symbolic systems, which you know, Saw Hill. It sounds really cool. It's actually like one of the most popular majors,

so it's not that interesting. But it's kind of a combination of computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. And I was concentrating in human computer interaction, thinking about things like social computing, like how do you grow and moderate social computing systems anywhere from like Wikipedia to Facebook. I was working in the virtual reality lab,

doing stuff like that. So it all feels super similar to what I'm working on now. But at the time, like, still wasn't really down the rabbit hole. I first bought crypto in 2017 for something that I can't say in the podcast because I was still a kid. But honestly, didn't do the work to learn about it. Silk Road. Yeah. So I, I, like, wasn't doing the work to actually learn about, like, what was going on from a technical perspective.

It was purely financial. So then when it crashed, I like quite literally sold it all. So it wasn't until early 2021 that I actually fell into the space. By that time, I was working at Bessemer Venture Partners doing early stage consumer investing. And so basically like looking across consumer social, consumer marketplaces, a bunch of creator tools like the creator economy was alive and well. And I was looking at all these companies like the cameos and the kick starters and the

patrons of the world, et cetera, that basically all allowed us to build an operating. and fund the products and services and people that we engage with every day, but we didn't have any way to collectively own them. And so I kind of felt a disconnect that way. That paired with hanging out at the Bright Moments Gallery in L.A. When they had first launched and hanging out with a bunch of cool friends in crypto who I had met there, did kind of some soul searching and did some digging for a couple months.

And then I knew it was kind of time to dive in if I wanted to really catch up. I had to do it full time. Did you know that one of the top reasons startups fail is bad hiring decisions? People can be unpredictable, and developers can be unpredictable as well. Let lemon.io take care of hiring your software engineers. Why lemon.io? They test and interview every single specialist before offering them to clients. Unlike many other sites offering remote software developers,

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Element is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any order. That's eight single serving packets free with any element order. It's a great way to try all eight flavors or share Element with a salty friend. Get yours at DrinkElement.com slash happens. This deal is only available through my link. You must go to D-R-I-N-K-L-M-T-com slash happens to take advantage of this special offer. Try Element. You won't regret it. So you hit on both in the short version and the long version a few really interesting things that I want to double down on. One was just like this idea of following your smart friends. I've written about this in the past. I think it was Chris Dixon first talked about it, the weekend.

test, like figure out what are the weekend projects of your smartest friends and the smartest people in your circles? Because those are likely to be the things that everyone does in 10 years. And I feel that with crypto. Like, it was just, I don't know, in like 14 and 15, some of my smartest friends were starting to toy around with this stuff, like when I was at Stanford or just after Stanford. And then, you know, during the bear markets, like, after the crashes, a lot of my smart friends were starting to think about like and still working on projects in the space. And so if I had been smart, which I'm not, I'm an idiot, I didn't go down the rapid hole as much as I should have. And it was actually when I finally said and convinced myself, like,

after this most recent bull run, I was like, I'm never letting one of those opportunities pass me again where all of my smart friends are doing something or thinking about something, and I'm somehow ignoring it. And so now my new rule of thumb for what it's worth is if I have three smart friends tell me something, I automatically make a bet on it. Even if it's like a small bet. I just have a stock amount that I'll put into it so that I have some skin in the game that I can then go and like double down on if I want to learn more about it. The other one on top of it is just like invest in your friends. And I kind of got burned by not doing that multiple times this year, smart friends, either starting companies, but kind of more specifically because I saw the turnaround

of like my inaction starting NFT projects like kind of during the bull run. I wasn't sure how seriously I should take them. But knowing my friends and how hard they were. and how thoughtful they are, some of the coolest projects, and now I'm like shilling them on my Twitter and I have no bags in them and I can't afford them anymore. So I totally agree. Yeah. The one thing I want to add to that is, you know, a lot of people, I don't know why I say this. A lot of people don't have smart friends or don't have friends who are starting companies and stuff like that. We, you know, we were talking about that with Julian Smith. yesterday's Sahel.

I think the pod will be out by the time we, we publish this, which is, um, yeah, it's just, it's not uncommon that if you're not from a major city, you don't,

you don't have that. And I think the, the way to sort of cat or balance that is you don't even need to have friends. Like your, your friends, quote unquote, could be like people that you follow on Twitter, podcasts you listen to,

which is what I love about the world we live in, 2022, which is, you know, these are your, like, personal, Sahel and I have talked about, like, your personal board of advisors. Like, you don't need to be friends with Sahel and I, you know, if you think we're smart. And you can just, like, think about what would Sahel do? Like, what would, you know, what's a framework he would do to, to approach this problem? This is also like, sorry, it's also like how I got into venture. I was working abroad right before COVID. I just, like, candidly didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I was working out an HR SaaS startup in Israel. I just wanted to learn the language. I wanted to live on my own there. And I was using lunch club,

like that app to meet up with people who are like working in tech in your area. And someone I met on lunch club basically said, you know, all the stuff you do in your free time, like meeting people and writing online and stuff like you would get paid to do that if you were in venture. And his advice to me was to get on Twitter. He basically said like you pick an industry and you follow people, all the smartest people in that given industry. And then very quickly you get like an IV into the brain of like what the smartest people are reading, writing, who they hang out with, how they spend their free time and all of this kind of stuff.

And then you get a really good bird's eye view of like what the ecosystem looks like. And very shortly after getting on Twitter is how I got my first job in venture. Yeah. I mean, these opportunities have been decentralized. Like you no longer need to have gone to Stanford or be at Stanford in order to have smart friends. I mean, you even said it from earlier in your life. Like when you were dealing with that, you know, the adversity of what you mentioned when you were a kid,

you sought out online communities. And that was like before the boom in online communities, too. That was like the early days of it. But today, I mean, with the proliferation of the internet and cheap and free internet, a kid, you know, born on the streets in India, has the opportunity to do that and participate in those communities and be in discords and learning and being around those quote unquote smart friends, in a pretty similar way. And so there is like an evening of the opportunity playing field globally that is

simply amazing, I think, that has happened over the last five or so years. And we'll likely just continue to accelerate at an exponential pace, hopefully. So pretty exciting to hear that and walk through it. I do want to, I want to transition to just talking about some Web3 ideas and things that are happening in the space while we have you. because the timing of filming this is actually pretty phenomenal. Like, I'm glad we didn't film it two months ago or whenever we first started chatting about it because a lot has happened, you know, in the space over the last couple of months,

a huge crash, you know, being one of them. We've all seen the news on it. Every media, you know, mainstream media companies like dunking on crypto as though it's all, everything's a scam, you know, Web 3 versus Web 2 is like the new hot debate on Twitter and people are like fighting and doing podcasts. debating it, which is just like fun as a casual observer to just kind of like enjoy the, the roasts in both directions. But a lot's going on. And, you know, the reality is always that there are shades of gray. Nothing's ever black and white, at least in my opinion. And so I'd love to

just like pick a few ideas within Web 3, you know, trends, ideas, concepts, etc. And just, you know, have a have an open discussion around them if that works. Yeah, let's do it. So can we start on work to earn. I want to talk about, I want to talk about step-in. Is it called step-in or step-in? I don't know how you pronounce it. Okay, step-in. So for people who aren't aware of this, and I wasn't prior to, I don't know, maybe a week ago or so, this is kind of part of this whole, and you guys, by the way, are much closer to this. So please correct me if I say anything stupid. This is part of this whole trend within Web 3 called Work to Earn. So, you know, basic idea being you can like

provide some service or do some work or something and earn as a result of that. Sounds kind of funny as like a concept because that's what we've always done. Like I've gone to work and earned money. And so like that's that's a general idea that people should understand. But there have been several companies actually who have been extraordinarily successful in doing this. Like helium is probably the one that comes to mind for me that was an early player in this helium provides what is it like Wi-Fi connectivity effectively in a decentralized way which is a really cool use case actually and when I think about helium you know you could go in the early days of it buy a helium hot spot and basically you would pay some upfront you know capital to invest in one of these hotspots you'd put it somewhere

and people could leverage the Wi-Fi capacity you were creating with your hotspot in order to and pay you basically to use the bandwidth you were creating. And so you could kind of- Sorry to interrupt. The other super interesting thing there is like helium wasn't always like a token based or kind of like crypto-based company. Like they had this vision of a decentralized wireless network and they were doing it for a while. And then I think it was in 2017, they basically went bankrupt.

And I think it was an engineer at the company who said, hey, what if we use these cryptographic tokens to incentivize people to buy and run the hotspots? And they tried it out. And like, that's how helium became what it is today. That's really cool. I agree. It's like my favorite case study. I didn't know that. It's very cool.

And it's very cool because it's an industry. Like utilities are a massively stayed industry, right? It's like a monopoly. And it's like a sanctioned monopoly at the national level where there's just a few companies that are allowed to do this. and the capital intensity of starting a new one is too high so no one can do it. And so doing it in a decentralized way sort of makes sense. Helium has been extraordinarily successful. Greg, you and I talked about Anthony Lewandowski, the auto guy who got pardoned by Trump,

had started Pollan Mobile, which is another one that's doing mobile that I think is doing quite well, actually, and it's the same thing as helium basically, but they're doing mobile hotspots that you can buy. So there's this like general space that's been developing and growing. I think those are some really cool use cases. But now in comes this company step in, which is a sub segment of work to earn called, I don't know, move to earn or walk to earn. And the basic idea, I think, is you buy like an NFT of a sneaker.

And that's kind of like your ticket to ride, like your entry. cost. And then you digitally, you know, using wearables, et cetera, track your movement. And you get paid in the tokens of the game for moving, like for walking. And so people in the early days of it were literally like you'd go walk and you'd earn tokens. And as more and more people started to pick up on this, you know, on this game or on this community, the cost of the NFTs was going up. The minting cost for kind of getting a sneaker was going up. And the value of the tokens was going up because more and more people were participating and finding value in it. And so it was kind of driving it up. So the people that were in early made like pretty astronomical sums of money, I think,

by literally just walking and participating in this. So with that as a preface, I want to talk about this, both in a specific case and then in a more general case, but would love your guys's thoughts on this because I have very strong thoughts on it. I want to put it out first before I dive into mine. Yeah, I have, maybe I'll start off with like a general statement and then kind of explaining how the token economy works. And then I'll talk about the good parts of it. And then I'll, I'll get into the good stuff. If that sounds good. That sounds great. I think generally the financial gamification of stuff like fitness is super interesting. And it's sort of like how a lot of people in Web3 beg for a better Strava. There are a lot of

these companies that in Web 2 have a really strong online community. In Strava's case, there's like a fitness first ethos or like takes SoundCloud. It has a music first ethos, quote unquote, permissionless in the sense that anybody can post and create on the platform, right? Like anybody can use Strava and kind of like build their own social network there. But then like the most important part is the monetization model of these Web2 products is pretty weak. And so there's like a huge opportunity for disruption in Web 3. So generally I think it's really interesting. And I was really interested in step in when it first came out. I should have used it. I like have had the app for a while and I love to run and I just like never got around to like actually using it, which maybe is a good thing.

I probably like, who knows. But anyway, um, kind of how how the app's economy actually works is it's based on two tokens, GST and GMT. So GST is this unlimited token that you use inside the game. and then the GMT token is like the governance token, which is capped and it's deflationary. So in the app, you can get both. I'm pretty sure you get GST on day one just by like every minute of walking and depending on how fast you're walking or what sneakers you have, you'll get GST. And then GMT, I think you don't unlock until you reach a higher level. It's like level 30 or something like that.

And then you can spend your GST to like repair your sneakers and mint new sneakers and level up and stuff like that. I think because of how the token economy works, it's been pretty interesting. interesting because like you said, established players can make money, but it's still accessible and like price friendly for newer players. The other thing that I think is super smart that Stefan did that I wish I saw in more Web3 DAPs, especially in games, is they had their own wallet. Like when you think about it, think about all these Web3 daps that are actually pretty consumer friendly. Like let's say you love electronic music. Like you can go on to any of these Web3 music

sites and see like digital native web three native artists who are putting out amazing music and then the first step to get involved is connect wallet oh i don't have a wallet like immediate churn right why would i use it but with step in it's like you get on it's like oh interesting here's a financial incentive for me to try it out you don't have a wallet make one right here and i think it's a huge reason why it did so well um and i think it like really deserves props for that but i guess now the question everyone's asking is like how long until the music stops right like yeah how is this not a ponzi scheme that's like My question. So, I mean, like to cut to the chase, the in-game economy is not sustainable as it is.

Steppen has a lot of time to figure it out. So I'll kind of explain why it doesn't work. And by no means, am I like a game economy expert? So this is very high level. But also just kind of like sidebar. It's really funny. Literally yesterday, someone on my team texted our group chat, a picture of a literal NYC subway ad for a Step in competitor called Step, walk to earn.

Same thing. It's crazy. So it's already coming out. And like at the end of the day, like whichever one is the best token model is where consumers are going to go. Right. But basically, and credit to Amanda Young, she wrote this really amazing mirror piece about Step In and the in game economy. And like this was really helpful for me to understand. Yeah.

Basically, when we think about virtual game economies, there has to be a balance between the faucets and sinks. So it's a balance between the rate at which assets are issued into the game and the rate at which assets are consumed. So you have like stuff in equals stuff out, right? Like you have to have a balance. So the problem we're seeing with Steppen today is the current sinks are net inflationary. So the current sinks on Steppen today are like repairing your sneakers, leveling them up. And what it does is it leads to increasing or restoring the emission rate of GST and GMT. I also read another piece from Nat Eliasson.

I don't know if he's come on the podcast, but he should come on. Not yet. He's great though. He's like a Stepin maxi or like he was using it a ton. But he basically brought up that Stepin has. this runaway sneaker breeding problem because there's no burn mechanism in place for getting rid of all of the excess sneakers. Like people are minting and minting and minting and so eventually they're all going to become worthless or you're going to have way too many people getting top level

sneakers with the highest earnings, which would result in the token price falling. So you're kind of at this standstill now. And even if you go on to Dune Analytics and check out the step in dashboards, you'll see the amount people are minting new sneakers has slowed down and people have been withdrawing from the game for a few weeks now, I think, because they realize that, like, the music might stop. So what can they do? I think what they can do, like, I have this framework for a consumer that I actually created when I was mostly investing in Web 2, but I think it carries over. And it's four questions that I ask, why do people come? Why do people share? Why do people stay? And why do people pay? And two of the questions are kind of related here. I think when it comes to Web 3,

people can certainly come for a financial incentive, right? Like looks rare is another good example. They're air drop tokens and now you're incentivized to go check it out because you have a stake in the business. I made bank on that, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. We talked about that on the pot at one point.

That was like my last four end of like speculative web three stuff. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. It's super interesting. So people can come for a financial incentive. But if they're staying for a financial incentive, I think that's a problem. People should be staying, especially if it's a game, they should be staying for for the love of the game. So step in can make the user experience better, right? They can make it more social. They can make it feel less about money. And maybe also figure out a way to bring external

cash into the business, which I think is something they're trying to do. Maybe bring on like partnerships. Like they have the A six partnership. Bring on like local vendors, stuff like that. Yeah. That's, so first off, I love that framework. Why do people come? Why do people share? Why do people stay? Why do people pay? Just to reiterate it. I think that's like an amazingly, like beautiful, crisp, simple way to think about these things. So thank you for sharing that because I think that's awesome. And it's a great one for people to remember and take away from this. My whole thing with these models, and we talked about it with Gio from Axi Infinity when we had him on. And it was before they had kind of their crash in the token a little bit as well,

and the hack and all of that stuff. So I'd love to actually have him back on for more of a discussion. But my challenge with all of these models is like there has to be utility. net of the money you can make from these things in order for it to be, like, creating value long term. Like, I look at it and I just say, like, where is the money from? The money is from new people buying into it. And you're paying out rewards from new people buying in. That to me, I'm like, that's the definition of a Ponzi scheme when I look at it. I'm like, you know, I come in and I'm getting paid from the rewards of new people coming in. And so it's like a pyramid that you're just creating where new and new people need to keep growing. And so when you mentioned partnerships,

when I was thinking about it, like, how do you fix this problem and create a sustainable ecosystem? The two that I came to were like community value and partnerships. And so partnerships, I think is really interesting because they have sneakers, right? Like, how much would Nike pay to have you be able to pay extra to get like a Nike branded sneaker within this game? If this becomes this amazing thriving community and all of a sudden I can like pay more to have, I mean, it's basically like what Fortnite has with dope skins in the game, right? like how much would I pay to have dope, you know, Nike shoes in this game where now I'm like, it's a digital flex in the same way that people like to flex in Fortnite with their cool skins.

So now do you have like, it's not just money from new users coming in. Now I have a partnership where there's net new dollars coming into the system that can be used to, you know, invest in growth in it, build out new functionality, you know, track different activities, foster the community, host live events. Like there's all sorts of new things then. And I think that that net external money coming in and partnerships would allow you to kind of like build out real community value where now you have people that are deriving value from this, not just from the money they're earning from it, but also from the camaraderie and the feeling of connectivity to other people who are stepping users, which like that's a huge thing, right? I mean, like you'd pay to be a part of communities where you feel a sense of connection with, you know, the people around you. People pay for social clubs all the time. could this become like a social club feeling where you're actually generating utility and feeling positive irrespective of whether or not you made money on it you just want to be a part of this

community so that was where I was shaking out on it was like it looks like a Ponzi scheme to me I feel like it's going to come crashing down but is there a path where you can kind of play with some of these things and it continues to grow to the point of viability probably I think the the smartest thing that Step InD did was make it invite only, basically. You need an access code to, like Gabby, I don't even know if you'd be able to download it and use it today. I still think you need an access code. And, you know, there's this, I think Andy Warhol said, or one of the founders of Studio 54 said, this great quote, which I think applies to building social products and Web3 products, which is,

Studio 54 was a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy on the dance floor. It's so funny to say that. It's like my favorite quote ever. Yeah. I mean, it's a late checkout. Can you say it again, Greg? Yeah. So Studio 54, for those you don't know, by the way, like famous club in the 80s where like all the celebrities used to hang out is a, Studio 54 is a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy.

on the dance floor. I think that if step in were to win, they would need to basically, to your point, Sahel, be building that democracy on the dance floor, be building that community, be building that great experience,

or else there's nothing here. Yeah, that's a cool, I love that quote. That's really, really cool. I agree with you. It's like you create that feeling of exclusivity.

And like, it's sort of the same model that like zero bond it's important because it gives the product team at step in the product cycles to be to basically be building in the background so they basically have the invite only cohort as let's get key insights to actually how people want to use this product and then let's go spend two six nine 12 months product cycles be building in the background to actually build um like the core experience I I think the mistake that a lot of people make when they're building consumer products is they build something and they take ads out in the New York subway. Like, step, like, that's a bearish signal to me.

Because I think that, like, you know, having 10 million users on step on day one is actually more chaos than they really need. You really just need a small amount of chaos, enough chaos to learn. I love it. I think it's like super super interesting way to think about it. You've framed it up for me in a different way. So more to come on this one. We should definitely have Nat and do a follow up on this. I just pulled up his piece.

And also you mentioned Amanda Young. That's an awesome piece as well. I had read that one actually. That was a great piece on Mirror. So shout out to both of them. We should do a follow up on this. Gabby, we can have you back on it. We can do a round table on this stuff and a deeper dive on it.

Let's switch gears to. a few other ideas and things. So one other one that I wanted to talk about and then I can open it up, insurance in the Web3 space. So this is like admittedly half baked. But one of the things that I've perceived as a roadblock for the next billion users of crypto, everyone talks about that. Like how do we on ramp the next billion users?

Right now you have like this tiny percentage of people who are sort of crypto-native. or like digitally native that have kind of played or understand the space. And then you have, you know, my parents and like this next billion who, who have no idea and also are just like inherently skeptical, probably and a little bit scared because the media has, you know, created a narrative around all of this. One of the things that I think jumps out as a reason for that is like constantly brought up to me is, oh, yeah, but these accounts aren't like FDIC insured. or you don't have insurance in the way that you do if you put money with Bank of America. People are like, well, if I have money with Bank of America, I know, my money is not going to just disappear, which if you talk to a Bitcoin Maxi, you probably get a different answer.

They would tell you that your money might disappear and the government might just take it. Depending on what country you live in, maybe that is true, actually. But I've often wondered, like, whether there were opportunities and maybe people are already, you know, trying to go after this to just create more. like interesting insurance products that these platforms can leverage and acquire in order to provide more certainty or safety to on ramp, you know, more skeptical users to the space. Any thoughts on that in general? Yeah, I mean, I guess first to point to like, why don't we see that or see a ton of it yet? It's like pretty simple in the sense that insurance companies don't like insuring volatile

things, right? And so they're not going to move into the space. But I think the big question of like, how do we actually solve this problem is how do you assess the intrinsic value of a digital asset, which is an entirely new asset class, right? You could argue that you could like abstract it all away and say an asset is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. But clearly we've seen how that might fail, right? Like, is that really the case? Is the market price actually the price at which the asset should be insured. So I don't really. I don't think.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's not like a diamond where you're like, hey, I know that this two-karrant, you know, diamond with these properties is going to be worth roughly this. And so I can insure it at that level. I saw a good TikTok last night, Warren Buffett's first TV interview. Have you seen this? No. I haven't.

He basically, he's like, he's like, I don't look at the prices of stocks. Like, just because someone is willing to pay $70 a share, doesn't mean I believe it's worth $70 a share. It could be worth $20 a share or could be worth $150 a share. Like that's basically the idea. If he's saying that for like Coca-Cola, then, you know, Do-Quas staple coin. Like, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, the counterpoint to this Gabby in my mind is like, insurance companies don't want to move into it. The flip side of that is there's a price for every risk. And so I imagine if you went to an insurance company and we're like, hey, I want to insure every account that we have at this entire place. And the reason it's super risky is because hacks happen and they have historically happened and, you know, shit happens, right?

And within crypto, just given it's all pretty new, we're in the like earliest days of something that is a broader, you know, secular movement, shit's going to happen. And so the risk is much higher than like Bank of America getting hacked and you're losing all your money, probably. And so the price of that risk is really high. And so the platform would have to pay absurd premiums, probably and deductibles, in order to acquire that insurance. What I wonder is whether someone should make the bet, like a new platform should come along, making the bet that boomers or older consumers who are skeptical will really value knowing that they are 100% or 110% covered by like, you know, FDIC 2.0 insurance on, X platform. So like Sahil's platform, you know, it's like Coinbase, but it's Sawhil's Coinbase is 100% FDIC 2.0 insured. And I just happened to pay this like massive rate to an insurance company that will fully cover any losses that ever happen. And so consumers that come to my platform know that they are 100% covered ironclad guarantee by like Geico or whoever the insurance company is on my back end. And I would have to figure out a way to make the economics work so that I could cover that.

you know, I'd have like a lower margin than Coinbase would because I'd be paying those insane premiums, but do you make the bet that you can go and acquire a bunch of volume of deposits and a lot of trades from a massive new generation of people that are skeptical on this? Today's episode is brought to you by Element, a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt with no sugar. It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio, a thousand milligram sodium, 200 milligrams potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. But none of the junk. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers, no BS. I absolutely love it and how it's fit into my lifestyle. Whether your keto, low carb, paleo,

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and clients. So hire high quality, verified, vetted engineers from Europe with lemon.io and be stronger than 90% of startups on the market. Go to lemon.io slash room and get 15% off for the first four weeks. Get there before your competitors will. Check out lemon.io today. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I mean, I think generally the thesis that I like to follow, and I don't think it's foolproof, but you should build for Web3 natives first, and then when the mainstream comes into Web3, you're going to have the product there, as opposed to trying to build for these outside consumers

who are already very kind of like risk off. So there are a couple companies doing interesting things in insurance or like tangentially related to insurance. And they're very like admittedly Web3 Native now, but I think it's because they kind of have to be to serve the user base that's actually ready for those products. So Cozy.com, finance provides insurance against smart contract risk. And then the other two,

are specifically in regards to NFTs, and I think they're both super interesting. Disclaimer, I haven't used either of them. But the first is called Upshot, and it uses machine learning and crowdsourced appraisals to value NFTs. I'm pretty sure the founder, Nick Emmons, worked in insurance before. I'm not totally sure. But yeah, it basically uses these models to kind of like value NFTs continuously, and they have these massive data sets to do it almost immediately. And then Abacus does something similar, but it's fully decentralized. So it's, it's like a Web 3 native version of Upshot. And I guess generally they're both interesting because they help you find value in over or undervalued assets and then figure out where you want to make your bet.

That's really cool. These are all, I mean, I'm just looking at Abacus.wtf and cozy. And then upshot. Upshot. Or dot XYZ. I think it's I. Oh, they're both. It's the same thing.

Only in crypto and Web 3. Could you have an insurance company with a top of the level? domain as WTF. Literally. Yeah. The NFT opportunity is really interesting. Like I think about like point of sale insurance for NFTs would be really cool. I imagine OpenC will work on this or will acquire a company that is going to do it.

The challenge of doing it internally at these platforms versus, you know, acquiring or partnering with a, you know, embedded finance API type company that will do it for you is like it's a massive new set of core competencies because the insurance side of this is like you have to go find reinsurers you have to have a panel you have to have like your commission rates like very complicated on the back end of making that work but it would be really cool if when you bought you know say I wanted to go buy a board ape on open sea and it's like okay I'm going to spend $200,000 on a you know on this ape I want to know that I'm insured in the event of it being stolen an event of a fishing attack and the event of a hack whatever something

Like it happened to Seth Green, right? Like, you know, he had that board ape. Yeah. He had all these plans to, you know, monetize the board ape via TV show, via all these things. It got stolen. He no longer owns the IP to the ape. And it's like kind of a hilarious situation, but he can't make the show anymore. And so, like, he lost a lot of money probably on the back of that.

So point of sale, like embedded insurance products for crypto purchases is kind of a cool idea. I imagine there are people working on this. It sounds like a pretty interesting space. I love that. I love the idea. I also just want to comment on the Seth Green thing. Like, if I was Seth Green, I would try to get my ape stolen. Because, like, if you mean, this is my, here's my hot take of the day. And, like, do you think it's better for him to have it stolen and be able to go talk about it? The Mona Lisa became popular when it was stolen and then it was brought back.

This is like the Banksy theory of art, right? Like, it's worth more when you go like, shriacry. in the gallery because it makes a story. Yeah, exactly. So let's see what happens with this ape. I also think, like, generally, it's pretty silly. I mean, I'm not a legal expert by any means, but how I feel or, like, what I've kind of read on the topic is digital assets give you system powers, but they don't give you legal rights, right?

Like, a thief is not a purchaser or an owner per these legal terms. And so I think it would be hard to argue that the thief actually has the rights to the stolen an asset. And then I also saw an interesting thread on Twitter about this. I'm trying to remember the name of maybe I can share it after, but basically if you actually read the board ape terms, it says, like I wrote down the quote, when you purchase an NFT, you own the underlying board ape, the art completely. And the terms essentially suggest that IP rights are licensed and not assigned. So kind of how like the legal experts interpreted this is you could argue that nowhere in the board ape terms does the license actually of a termination provision. And so maybe you could argue, like, once a licensee, always a licensee,

you can't have it taken away from you. But it's kind of cool because it's like cases like these that will set the standard. It's like totally open design space. Yeah, it's, I mean, that's what I find fascinating about the space, by the way. Like, I'm the furthest thing from a, you know, like fully red-pilled person in general. But I find it so fascinating intellectually to just see this like laboratory of ideas that's getting constantly like bashed by things from the outside broken you know remade figured out like i mean the doquan um situation we're by the way like a funny story that i just feel like we need to talk about i had dm'd with doquan like he had followed me on twitter we were dming i had like scheduled the time to have him on the show um it was going to be on like a thursday we were

going to have him on the show for an interview it was going to be like you know huge he was a pretty big it would have been a huge guest but then crypto and literally that monday was the Monday when Tara went to zero. You guys emailed him like maybe another time. Well, no, I didn't. So I didn't hear anything. We didn't hear anything like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And I was like, Greg, there's no way he's coming on the show, right?

Like, this dude just lost $60 billion of people's value. Like, there's no way he's coming on tomorrow. And we got an email from his assistant on like Wednesday night being like, Doquan will not be able to do this recording. Unfortunately at this time, we look forward to like discussing in the future. And I just replied and just said, yeah, I figured. Oh my God. But like, the timing of it, I mean, can you imagine?

I wish we had been able to record it because getting to release the episode ex post would have been so unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, that guy was like, he was, you know, he wasn't afraid. He didn't shy away from, you know, from words. Yeah, I do think, I mean, like, it's just been interesting to see the kind of the intellectual gauntlet around all of this stuff. And like the number of smart people that are around it, the number of smart people that

are detractors of it too and that are like kind of forcing people to um you know to push and level up around all of it i just find really interesting i think being in crypto and also being in venture it requires you to have like a real opinion on things you can't like you can't be successful in venture if you're disagreeable right like it's the contrarian bets that that have outsized returns and so i think it's helpful to be in a space where there's so much controversy all the time because it requires me like on a daily basis to figure out, like, what do I stand for? Why am I in this ecosystem? Like, what do I actually believe in? And what are the companies that I want to push forward? And it requires you to have an opinion on, like, where you see the future going. And I think it's a good thing.

Yeah. And one of the other cool features of this that I think people don't acknowledge enough is, like, it is uniquely enabling young people and also, you know, minorities, women,

et cetera, to rise through the ranks and like be at the pinnacle of an industry at a very young age. And I find that like, that is such a great thing for just breaking barriers that have always existed in these like,

you know, very white collar like Greenwich country club industries like VC, frankly. Like the fact that, you know, you know more about this stuff than anyone that's like a 40-year-old BC, just like point blank because you've been in it. You're like, you've been in the trenches. You've been working on all this stuff. And you can at a young age, you know, truly go shake

up an industry that has been pretty stagnant for a really long time. And that's cool because you're part of this like new class of people that are that are all going and doing that. Yeah, I mean, two things there. I mean, first of all, like, I have to give it all to my team. I think TCG Crypto is just one of the sickest teams ever. Definitely. coolest team that. Well, Jared's amazing. Yeah, Jared is amazing. John is amazing. My whole team's and like, I don't think we would be able to do this, especially as young people. Like, we're a relatively young team if we didn't have that kind of support. But then also if there's young people listening to the podcast, like selfishly when I was moving into this space, I was kind of thinking

about like, okay, I'm young. My years in my 20s compound so much. So I need to figure out like, what do I want to do now so that I can be an expert, you know, once I've put in my 10,000 hours. And I'm certainly like by no means an expert in crypto. I came into the space full time so I could catch up and hopefully get there. But kind of the way I thought about it is like I was in early stage consumer investing before just, you know, traditional web two consumer. And there are decades of history that I missed, right? Like I either wasn't alive or I was in elementary school or something like that. Like it would be incredibly hard for me to compete with people who backed these massive companies and had that type of experience. And crypto is so new. Like the reason that I decided to

actually entered the space. I remember the day. I had lunch with Brian Flynn, who's the founder of Rabbit Hole, which is very full circle because we ended up co-leading their series A with Greylock. But I literally told Brian, I was like, I'm going to buy you lunch every single day until I figure out like all these answers to my stupid questions. So I brought a notebook and we had lunch and we put together a timeline of like big events that had happened in crypto starting from the creation of Bitcoin to the ETH ICO to the ICO boom to DeFi Summer where everyone made a ton of money and then spent all that money during NFT summer and then everyone has a profile picture as their an NFT as their profile picture and like all of these interesting things along the way too.

But then you kind of zoom out and you realize that the interesting things on the timeline and like the real foundational aspects that allow you to build interesting things for consumers happened on the second half of the graph. So I saw that timeline and I was like, okay, we're actually way earlier than I thought and there's a massive sort of like arbitrage opportunity for young people to enter the space and actually become experts. And so it's sort of selfish, but like, That was another decision that I made. You hit on an amazing piece of an advice in there that I think, like, is worth, is worth reiterating for all young people that are listening.

I mean, honestly, not just young people, anyone listening who is looking to kind of do something new or make a change. And that's like this whole idea of playing games, you are uniquely well suited to win. Like, don't go play a game that you're just, you know, predisposed to lose for whatever reason. You talked about it in the context of like, within consumer investing, there's 30 years of history that you don't have the benefit of and you're never going to be able to come up the curve to like compete against someone that has done that. I talked to, there's this investor in the

mostly public equities, Gavin Baker, who's an amazing investor. And he's talked about it on a few podcasts of this idea that like he's one of the only people now that was around for like the dot com boom bust and 0809 and all the way through to the current tech trends. And so he's just just like, it's very hard to compete with me because I've read the 10Ks and 10 Qs of every single technology company over a period of like 30 years or, you know, 20 years. And you can't catch up to that. Like, you're not going to build up that embedded, you know, experience that I've been able to accumulate over this long period of time. And so when you think about crypto and you brought it up in, you know, in what you were saying there, it's like, that was a game you were uniquely

well suited to, you know, make an attempt to win at least. Because, you know, you can come up the curve and you can do those things and hustle in a way that gets you at least on the same playing field as anyone else that is possibly in it. And then, you know, lucky breaks, things happen, you know, your hustle, your energy gets created, etc. But at least you're on a playing field that you can win. So I want to, I want to comment on that. And first of all, I totally agree with you. And I just want to say a few things actually. So the first is like initially on this pot we started talking about how important Twitter is in terms of getting insight and stuff like that you know Twitter is where your best friends are it's also so it's helpful in

getting sort of inspiration but it's also very noisy and sometimes for all the builders listening like sometimes you just kind of have to tune it all out and just create something that's interesting you and to Sahel's point like you're the uniquely you know suitable for this particular thing and just create something that you think is going to be interesting to others. And on another pod, I'll talk about this, but I've been obsessed with Norm MacDonald recently, who's a comedian. And me and some friends have been just like sharing interviews.

And one of my friends said something interesting this morning where we were talking about this interview and he says, Norm figured out the secret to most things. thinking about what's interesting and then just making it funny. Certain people can have some amount of success thinking about business opportunities or careers or hobbies that seem quote unquote good and then making them work. But the people who really succeed figure out what's interesting to them and then make it interesting to other people. And I think that's the key to building.

You build something that you find interesting to you and some amount of people and you just evangelize it as much as possible. I totally agree. I mean, I'm not a builder, but I use that in my writing. I have the psychology of money from Morgan Housel on my bookshelf. It's like seriously such a good book. But I was listening, I think it was the Tim Ferriss podcast. And I was listening to his podcast and like Tim was asking about how he writes and how he

thinks about what to write about and all these things. And his advice was very similar. And he basically said, write about what is interesting to you. Like the audience should be one person and it's you. and you're not that special. There's a non-zero chance that other people out there in the world will also find those things interesting. And then what also happens is like you never really burn out because you're only writing about the things that are interesting to you and talking about topics that are new and innovative to you. And then you also find your community that way.

And it's like very authentic. I've heard Morgan say. So we had Morgan on the show of, I don't know, maybe like a month after on the, a month after the Tim show. And it was great. He's amazing. And we talked about something kind of directionally similar, but one of the challenges that we talked about that that arises as well is like social platforms are engineered to like force you to share the things that everyone wants to hear, not the things that you want to write about sometimes. And so you get this like vicious spiral. You know, and you see it on you, I like I see it on YouTube most clearly where like, you know, personal finance YouTubers.

it's basically like how I bought 10 Ferraris for $100 last weekend or whatever. You know, it's just like garbage nonsense over and over again. And it's not that the person has like bad intentions or that they want to share these things. It's that that's the video that gets the most clicks and makes them the most money. And so then they're like on this spiral of like crap, I need to make a video that does just as well or gets me more. And so you end up going back to the same stuff over and over again. Twitter's the same way. And so people that, I think it's more rare than not that people are able to actually step away from

like what works, what gets clicks, what gets shares, and just think about what they want to write about and talk about. And it's why someone like Morgan is a bit of a unicorn in my mind because he has done that for such a long period of time so consistently and so well. I find that with your writing, by the way, Gabby, I think like your writing is amazing and you do a great job with it. But it is something to watch out for for anybody as they continue to like, especially as you grow your presence and as you're like following continues to grow and be built, continue to write about things that you really care about and want to write about and share, not just the things that you think people want to hear. So I want to spend, we've got like five, five, ten minutes left.

Gabby, while we have you, you know, you're in the weed, you know, as an investor and as, you know, a participant in these communities, like you're just in the weeds on a ton of cool stuff that's happening in these spaces. Can you just share, like, what are the areas or things trends, whatever. Like, what's getting you most excited today? And what are some of your predictions for the future of where this stuff is going? Yeah, I have one kind of like oddly specific one that I really want to write about or like I just can't stop thinking about.

And I really want to see a powerful consumer block explorer. I think there's massive potential for a block explorer, like EtherScan, for example, is a popular block explorer to tell stories that aren't really leveraged by the existing ones today. So I guess the way that I'll preface it is like I'm a VC so like I think about this all the time, but like let's think about switching costs, right? Like motes and switching costs are always top of mind for me. In B2B SaaS, switching costs are pretty high.

Like if you're on a product, it's like relatively difficult for you to move to another one. Then think about web to consumer. Switching costs are like drastically lower, almost zero, right? Like you don't have to use Facebook, but, you know, if you stopped using it, it's like kind of annoying because you've signed in with Facebook all over the web, right, and all this kind of stuff. But the switching costs of, like, moving from one consumer application to the other are drastically lower. In Web 3, switching costs are effectively zero, right? Because you own your own data and you can port it over from one place to the next, right? Like an example is SMTP, the protocol for email.

So for an email front end, like I use Gmail, but if I wanted to use superhuman tomorrow or hotmail or proton mail or like self-hosted email, I could do all. all of that and like the emails are mine. Those are just front ends, right? And I could take my data with me really easily. So what's good about that is like these really low switching costs in Web3 and all these open protocols end up resulting in a lot of pressure on companies to build products that just like point blank serve consumers better. I think like from a venture perspective too, like I think the best consumer products will come out of permissionless protocols for that reason. So anyway, that's the preface. Back to Block Explorers. When we think about what a moat in a block explorer might look like,

basically like there's data on a public blockchain. And if you go to EtherScan or any other Block Explorer, if you want to index or even if you want to index it yourself, you can go and see what has been done on chain, right? Like the information is public. It's immutable. It's like the same on all of them. But from a consumer standpoint,

the data that you choose to leverage and like make more known on these consumer front ends is really interesting. So these are some things that technically you could find yourself on EtherScan, but most consumers don't. I think it would be interesting to like really contextual. and semantically tell the story of like your first day on chain, right? Like my on chain birthday. Like what was the thing that you did first?

When did you get your first wallet? When did you become crypto native? It's like Facebook memories for crypto. Yeah. Or like what wallets do you interact with the most? Right. Like I'm always sending like 0.0 to Eth to my friends because they're like, oh, like I don't have gas.

Can you send me something? Like that would be cool to know. Or like what do those relationships look like? Or like even these contextual things. Like let's say you sold your most expensive NFT. I want to know what you just did with that liquidity. Can I, can I, can I dumb it down for our... Please, yeah.

You know, for everyone, actually. For me. For me, Greg. Can I dumb it down for Zile? Yeah. Ether scan is the Craigslist of Block Explorers. So if you go to EtherScan, it's like super... I mean, I think it was launched in 2015.

when crypto was a lot smaller. I can see that comparison. It's like super ugly. It's like a white page. It's super ugly. There's like text everywhere. You know, the reason you use it is for like really important transactions because you're,

you know, I'll send Gabby, you know, some ETH and I want to make sure it gets there. But then all of a sudden I see like a hundred data points. And it's like, it's not like when you, when you,

you know, you go and you buy like a sandwich from a store and it costs like, $12. It's not like, and you get the receipt, it's not like you see like a million data points. You know what I mean? You see like, oh, it was $12 and it was approved. Like, that's all I need to see. So I think there's like two layers to this. It's the first layer is what do I need to see like from a trust standpoint? And then number two, what would be really cool to see, i.e. like what Gabby's suggesting, like nostalgia and stuff like that. And then number three, it's just how do you, package is all up in a non-cregsusty cool way.

Yeah, I think the general term for all of these companies working in this space is human readable web three, like making it make sense. There's actually a consumer block explorer that I'm super excited about. Like I have a friend building it, but I don't think I can say the name yet. But like another one that's sort of playing in a similar space is polyweave, which just launched recently.

And it's basically like an ether scan API. And I'm pretty sure what it does is it just like makes your transaction. more readable. So you can actually see like, oh, you minted an NFT on this date for this amount of money. Or you sent something to this ENS address and it just makes it easier to understand. You know, the funny thing about these names of all these companies. So I looked up Pollyweave because I wanted to find it. And I literally like the first thing I clicked. Well, it took me to like a protective fire retardant, uh, woven laminated sheeting website where I can like buy this for like building products. So I need to find like there needs to be a web three search.

engine where I only get Web 3 results. That's Twitter. Yeah, that's true. That's true. This is cool. I like the, I mean, the idea of, like, contextualizing and, like, giving me kind of curated, um, interesting insights from the blockchain on a given day, too, is just cool. Like, there have been Twitter accounts that have built massive followings off doing this, right? Like, even, like, whale activity or like NFT whale activity, that's kind of doing this, right? Like, they're just scanning the blockchain, finding interesting insights that they can pull from

it and delivering it in like a nice package that people want to consume and that like you can take those insights and use them for something like in the nfts space if you see a bunch of whales moving into some like lesser known project you might want to go and buy into that or have a bag there so that's that's a pretty cool idea um i like that quite a bit um so predictions for the future give us one like five years from now um where do you think we're going to be like do you think uh i don't know like What's the price of ETH five years from now? Oh, don't ask me that one. I don't know if I can do prices right.

I have a general, I have a general prediction. Well, we can all give a prediction. Well, I can say, I'm excited to buy and hold on to Eth for five years. Okay. So I think about for 20 years.

I think I'll be holding on to it. Okay. 20 years is a long time. It is a long time. You're 22 years old. I know, exactly. It's crazy to think about.

But like, you know, the reason I ask the question is just because I, I, and I've talked to Greg about this, like my investing strategy is buy and hold things forever. Like basically anything that I buy today, I never want to sell. And I want to borrow against it. I want to like be able to, you know, until like Bitcoin, Ethereum or I own some Solana, but like basically Bitcoin Ethereum, but mostly the only things I own. And like I expect to just hold these things forever.

I hope they become a huge part of the ecosystem and there's a big thing around it. And I want to borrow against it in the future in the same way that I can borrow against my, you know, S&P 500 stocks and my brokerage. count. And so like when I think about these things, I'm thinking generally like 10 plus year time horizons. It also makes me so much more purpose driven. Like when you see volatile price changes, it's like if you're on a decades plus long time horizon, it just doesn't matter. Yeah. And it's like the local or tourist thing. I've heard Sean, before we've talked about this before, like, are you a local or are you a tourist? And when it comes to getting things like, you know, seasons change.

locals know that tourists you know run for the hills when it gets cold or rainy and so um you know just like long time horizons tend to make you operate more like a local with these things you you know you tend to be uh more resilient and frankly you view things as on sale when prices drop rather than being like oh my god i just lost money yeah um so it's just an interesting framing okay well give us one before we jump off then what's like give us one prediction for the future if you've got one yeah it's online credentialism like i think my hot take is like when i have kids a couple decades out. I'm not sure if they're going to go to college. Back to Web 3. If there's an area of web 3 that's quite flawed, it's your online identity and the way that you kind of credential

identities online. Today it's very much about what you have. What's in your wallet? How much capital is there? How expensive is your PFP? And it's very little about what you do, even though people are doing really, really interesting things on chain. And so the problem is now it's putting this emphasis on exclusivity and capital. And it's not how the ecosystem is going to scale. And it's not how you're going to bring in high quality contributors. So I think if we can move towards credentialing based on on-chain actions, we're going to see a more equitable ecosystem. And it's going to have huge implications also for how people make money or learn online, which goes back to the college thing. So a bunch of companies doing tangentially related stuff in that space, like rabbit hole, station, layer three, et cetera.

And I think it's just going to have massive implications for, you know, how we value things online. And it relates to what we were talking about with, um, Sahel, what you were talking about. talking about it's work to earn. Like I think the bigger sort of parent to work to earn is X to earn. And then if it's basically like what actions are you going to do on the web to earn some sort of digital asset that could be used for an online identity. So for example, Rabbit Hole, which TCG is an investor, I'm also an angel or actually no, late checkout's an investor in Rabbit Hole as well. we you know what they do is like if you want to learn about uniswap like there's like education around that and you earn the uni token for learning about uniswap and all of a sudden like you're earning credentials

and tokens um so then it makes sense that like if i want to hire someone who understands uniswap i would go and work with rabbit hole for that super cool it's a great place to uh to wrap up that's it leaves me with a lot to think about and go read about now too with some of these companies that you just mentioned, Gabby. So thank you so, so much for taking the time to come on and jam with us. We'll have to do this in person again. Are you at New York at all this summer? I just moved to L.A. I'll be in New York for NFT, NYC, and probably in and out because I moved at a terrible time. Oh, yeah. Well, that's in a few weeks. Let's get together when you're out in New York. We'd love to get the gang together. And I know I'm overdue to catch up with Jared Dicker as well,

so we'll need to get the TCG gang together. together. Definitely. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Talk soon. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at high at t rw iH.com. Leave us a review at apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon. POTC never let the world we don't get in the borders and I'm a