This Week in Startups - GameStop poaches Amazon execs, Streaming stalls + Genies CEO Akash Nigam on Avatars & NFTs | E1233

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

Jason kicks off the episode with the news: an update on the Tether (02:02), how Gamestop poached Amazon talent (06:17), and the first-ever decline in the average number of streaming accounts per household (19:04). Then, Akash Nigam joins to discuss his company Genies, why everyone will have an avatar, the metaverse, NTFs & more (25:10).

Hey everybody. Hey everybody. We have a great interview today with Akash Niggum. He is the founder and CEO of genies.com. This is a digital avatar startup. That is launching their marketplace on Dapper Labs, which you know has a blockchain and NFTs and was responsible for the NBA's top shot. And it's a fascinating discussion of the history of avatars virtual spaces and what the next generation of avatars and monetization options will be. in the Metaverse. It's really science fiction and you're going to really enjoy that discussion. And they've raised a ton of money like a lot of people in the NFT, digital goods and Metaverse space. But let's get into some news first. We like to start the show now with news. So if you haven't noticed, we're going to start with news every day and then go into the interviews. This means the episodes will be about 75 minutes, I think. And we have three new stories to cover today. GameStop is hiring a bunch of Amazon executives. And they've raised a ton of money. We're going to go into the quick tether update for our tether investigation.

And streaming is seeing its first decline in the number of subscriptions that each person has. That is fascinating subscription overload. So let's do the work. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Rippling helps thousands of fast-growing startups automate their HR and IT, from their team's payroll and benefits to devices and apps. See how at rippling.com slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial.

When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Linode is the leading independent public cloud provider. Create an account and receive a $100 credit at linode.com slash twist. All right, before we get into the interview and some of the news items today, I want to do a few housekeeping items on Tether. If you don't know, Tether is a stable coin. And in the last episode, we talked about all of the red flags. I can tell you that personally, and I'm going to say this in a very framed way, so I don't get sued by Tether. Tether has all the red flags I look for when I'm trying to determine if a company is a fraud.

I'm not saying Tether is a fraud. I'm saying the red flags, the warning signs, are going off like crazy. Now, when a company has all of these red flags and they go dark, that is a red flag in and it of itself. If Tether wanted to, they could stop Jim Kramer, CoffeeZilla, and this podcast, and many other crypto enthusiasts who are concerned about Tether. And the crypto enthusiasts are the ones who are most concerned about the lack of disclosure. So, listen to episode 1232, and you'll hear my first salvo in the hashtag Tether Investigation. And we're using that specific hashtag on Twitter, Tether Investigation. So you can search for that hashtag.

You can follow me. You can follow this weekend startups. And we're trying to get all the people who are concerned with this issue and who are joining this investigation to put pressure on Tether to show us the facts and to eliminate this massive risk factor, which could be a $60 billion crater. That could cause, in my estimation and others, some type of contagion in crypto. And a contagion in crypto could cause a contagion in the overall economy. And we've known there could be a black swan here because the space.

is highly unregulated and has global participants who have varying degrees of trust, ethics, morals, and criminality. And that's what happens when you have a new technology that's unregulated. You could have bad actors. And so we don't know that Tether is a bad actor, but we do know their behavior is the same behavior as bad actors. My friend, CoffeeZilla, who joined me to expose the clubhouse coaching scammers on episode 1178, did a great video yesterday.

the same day I came out with my video, and that is called Exposing Tether Bitcoin's Biggest Secret. So go ahead and do a search on YouTube for Coffee, Zella, C-O-F-F-F-E-E, Coffee, Z-I-L-L-A. He is awesome. And we crowdsourced some facts since we did our recording yesterday. Tether had an official audit set up with New York City-based accounting firm Friedman L-L-L-P, but they bailed in 2018 because the auditor was asking for too much information. and according to their terms of service,

they don't actually have to redeem your tokens for dollars immediately or at all. And yesterday, Twitter user Tofor Penderson reported that you can only exchange your tetheres for real dollars if you have over $100,000 to redeem. We should check all those facts. Use the hashtag tether investigation. And let's keep the tether investigation going. One thing I would ask is that if you are a large holder of tethers that you stress test, tethers. You may have seen that Tesla sold, I think, a hundred million of their position in Bitcoin, and they said they just wanted to prove that it was liquid. So, this seems like a very reasonable

strategy. I would love to see, I don't know, a dozen users who have, let's say, a million or $10 million or $100 million in tethers, cash them in. Let's see. Cache them in and let's see what happens. I'm not saying create a run on tethers. We wouldn't want to create a run on tethers. Of course, if everybody cashed in their tethers, they're backed by cash according to tether, so there should be no problem. But let's go ahead and let's test the system. Let's stress test it.

Go ahead. If you own tethers, let's sell some tethers, post your receipts. Let's see the receipts on Twitter. Use the hashtag tether investigation. And we're going to stay on this story and we're going to have some other folks on the podcast

who have done much more work than us. And we're going to stand on their shoulders, obviously, but we want this to be a group effort. Now, GameStop and Me, Gamestocks have been an incredible story over the last year. GameStop, as you know, is a store that sells games and consoles. But that's a very challenged business, but it had a lot of strong, a strong short interest. And the stonks folks over at Reddit decided they would try to put on the short squeeze and it worked.

And it looks like Gamesop is riding this momentum to take down a bunch of capital and fuel this Reddit, fueled run for all its worth, which seems to be the logical thing to do. If people are rewarding you with a higher stock price and all of these shorts are getting squeezed in this crazy battle, well, the logical thing to do for AMC or GameStop or anybody caught up in this is to do a secondary or primary offering and get some more cash into the company. So let's catch up on the Wall Street Bet saga, which we covered in January episode 1167 and the all-in episode. 19. GameStop, ticker symbol GME. So if you're on Twitter, you put the dollar sign GME and you can find the whole discussion of this is a video game retail that was popular in the 2000s. But in February 2020, pre-pandemic, they were operating, say, 5,500 retail stores throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe. And it initially peaked at $56 a share back in 2013. And, you know, you just had this slow decline. The stock declined actually for seven years, and it bottomed out under $3 a share in April of 2020.

In fact, $2.80. Then this Reddit-fueled run started in January of 2021, and GameStop peaked at $347 a share, a $24 billion market cap. And that gave retail investors national attention for doing the short-cent. squeeze. And what happens in a short squeeze, as you know, is people are betting the stock is going to go down and then they have to buy shares to cover that. And if the stock keeps going up, at some point they get nervous because they admit the bet that it's going to go down and they cover their position and that is painful. So over a hundred seventy million shares changed hands between January 25th and 27th, according to CNBC. And then game stock plummeted back down to

$40 a share in mid-February. So everybody said, okay, sure, Short squeeze didn't work, or it worked marginally. Still, you know, from $2.80 to $40's an incredible jump. It's not to $350, but it's still extraordinary. But then something happened in April and March and April, and it started going back up again. So GameStop has been on a steady climb. It's now sitting at $213 to share a $15 billion market cap. So doubling down on their good fortune, GameStop recently hired five former Amazon executives.

They hired a new C-O-Oens, who was GM of distribution at Amazon, and ran a team of 200 on the supply chain side. She spent four years at Amazon, a new CTO, Matt Francis, who was an engineering lead at AWS for one year, a new chief growth officer, Elliot Wilkie, previously director of Amazon Fresh and Prime Pantry for eight years. And they also hired Chooey co-founder Ryan Cohen as a head of e-commerce and named him chairman of the board.

And just last week, GameStop hired two more Amazon execs as their CEO and CFO, the CEO Matt Furlong, who previously ran Amazon Australia and their North American Consumer Division for nine years. A new CFO as well, who spent 17 years as CFO of Amazon's North American Consumer Division. In total, GameStop's recent hires have 40 years of combined Amazon experience. How can they afford to do all this on April 26? GameStop raised $550 million by issuing $3.5 million shares $3.5 million. of common stock, and this is via their Q1 2020 earnings report. With all these recent hires, what's the plan? Well, according to CNBC, GameStop is attempting to shift from a brick and mortar focus

to become more of an online player in gaming e-commerce. So they also announced their Q1-2020 earnings last week on June 9th. They had a 25 increase in sales, a year of a year from $1 billion to $1.27 billion, $330 million in gross profit, but with a net loss of $60 million, puts about a $5 billion run rate. So they grew revenue 25% year-over-year despite a 12% decline in the global store base due to strategic cost cutting. In other words, they're shutting down stores

that don't work. And they also broke an eight-quarter streak of negative year-over-year growth as they were slow to shift their focus from brick-and-word to e-commerce. And they've declined to give their yearly forecast, but they stated it has seen a steady increase in sales in Q2. So maybe things are turning around

and they have no long-term debt and $770 million in cash. The new world of remote work is here to stay. So are all of the HR and IT headaches that come with it. Like how do you register your startup with dozens of state tax agencies? Or how do you comply with all those different local labor laws? Rippling, which I use for my team at Inside, can answer those questions easily for you. They make it easy to manage both local and remote employees and contractors,

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of executives, a bunch of cash, and a bunch of enthusiastic shareholders. Is this the type of company you want to short? Perhaps not. And all of those executives know how to sell stuff. So even if 100% of video game sales became digital and you only bought from digital sources, there are other things that video game buyers buy, like computers and mouse pads and mice and headsets and all speakers, you name it, right? There is by merch, et cetera.

So there might be now because GameStop has such a recognizable brand, which is a very hard thing to create in the world. When you have that recognizable brand, you can build brand extensions. And shareholders, these activist retail shareholders are also the customers. Millennials, Gen Z, they love video games. They prefer video games to television and to movies. And they would much rather spend their time. in video games than in theaters.

Therefore, they can go spend their money at a company that they own shares in. This is the singularity that could make GameStop actually worth the amount of money that it became worth because of the short squeeze. I'm not a fan of shorting stocks. I don't play in that game. I find that crazy and gambling. That being said, a real brand has emerged with incredibly high. name recognition with an army of super fans. And I see this at the early stage when I invest

through my syndicate because the accredited investors and my syndicate become superfans, promoters, supporters, consultants, advisors to those founders. Now, we're talking about 100, 200 people in a syndicate who are accredited investors and they're putting in $5,000 to $500,000. When we talk about retail investors, you could be talking about 50,000, 500,000, eventually $5,000. Eventually, $5,000. million retail investors holding onto a share. Well, what are they going to do? If they, people who own Starbucks are more likely to go to Starbucks. People who owed AMC are going to go to the movies to support their investment. This is something that hedge funds betting against is going to be really, really dangerous. It's the same impact that you saw with people who own Tesla cars wanting to buy the stock and being in love with the brand and buying a second and third Tesla. They're, they're, financially incentivized, and they love the product, massive danger for people playing financial games or shenanigans like shorting and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, the classic FUD. So market research firm, IMark Group estimated that the global gaming market was

$167 billion in 2020 and would go to $287 billion. Now, that's just a TAM number that includes the selling of the video games and the consoles. That doesn't mean that that is, in fact, GameStop's actual opportunity, but it does show you the scale of the business. And you really can't say, what if they got one percent of that? But you could say, you know, there's enough money swashing around in there for them to build a reasonable business. They face massive competition from Amazon plus Microsoft and Google. Now, could they become like a pure play in gaming, like Netflix is to streaming? Not so sure about that. It sounds to me, if they're hiring all those Amazon execs, that maybe digital isn't the strategy. Maybe.

it's the strategy is to sell goods and services, which is really easy. Maybe they'll come out with a GameStop PC, a branded GameStop PC. Maybe they buy some game studios and actually make some games. There's a world of possibilities when you're sitting on a ton of cash and you've got a brand. Maybe they start buying small app companies, right, for $100 million, $250 million each. It's a GameStop Studios game, right, for your iPad or for your desktop. This could be very interesting. What if GameStop created a crowdfunding site?

And they said to all these crazy investors, we're going to spin up an equity crowdfunding for a game title. And we want you all to pre-buy the game. How crazy would that be? Anything that taps into hundreds of thousands of rabid fans and shareholders, perhaps even millions,

could be the playbook here. And this could be a new playbook that's happening. somebody becomes a meme stock, which translation means they're very popular amongst retail investors. They issue more shares to raise money, and then they hire incredibly talented management teams and say, here's an incredible brand with incredible shareholders and a pile of cash. Go. Doesn't mean that it's going to work, but it does mean that these retail investors have now become venture capitalists in a way. They're putting money into a company.

They're getting attention for it. And then they're recruiting massive talent. Sounds like what a venture capitalist does. So we'll see if this becomes sustainable. It is insane. It's crazy. Nobody ever thought about this. But GameStop recently launched NFT.gamesop.com.

Unclear what the purpose of this yet, but it seems like they're getting into NFT, non-fundurable tokens. And retail investors are becoming more like sports fans, aren't they? They're kind of rooting for their positions, just like I do for the Knicks. like a maniac and flat in New York to go watch two incredible playoff games and lose my voice.

But instead of buying Knicks tickets, they're buying shares in GameStop, and they're rooting for the home team. They would buy, if GameStop people just bought GameStop t-shirts, it could be $100 million a year business. Just like when Elon sold the flamethrower, they sold out immediately,

or the boring company, I think, sold $10 million in merch. many hands makes for light works and do not underestimate the power of a collective community. We have seen this overthrow governments through revolutions. We have seen it in pop culture, send obscure people to the top of the charts, and now we're seeing it in stocks. The power of many people acting in unison using social media can create revolutions, and this is a revolution. Okay, and very quickly, the average number of streaming services per U.S. user has declined

for the first time. The number declined from 7.23 in November to 7.06 in April, according to a report from the research firm, Omdia. The number includes both free and paid services, which is a little Fugazi, to be totally honest. But after the 2020 explosion in VOD, video on demand, growth, I guess we're seeing a cooling of the market partially driven by viewing habits, normalizing, and industry consolidation said, Omdia. And so pretty interesting to me, I've always thought that six, seven, would be the ones you could keep in your memory. I'm just thinking about it out loud here. I have Netflix, Disney, Hulu, HBO Max, NBA, Spotify. I don't know if they include that here. And I might have one or two others. In other words, I can't even remember. And oh yeah, I want to get the criteria

collection. The reason this is amazing is because each of these services cost 10 bucks, 678 services times 10, $60, $78. Sounds a lot like the average cable bill. So if you add the cable bill into it, which now is in a cable bill, it's just for your internet service at home. What do people pay for internet service room? 30, 40, 50 bucks on average. So 70 bucks in services, 30, 40 bucks in the plumbing equals 100 bucks, equals what people were paying previously in a bundle. So we had the great unbundling, and now we're just ordering all our cart. And what's great about ordering all our cart is it keeps each of these services at the top of their game, because competition results in greater and better outcomes.

HBO and Netflix and Amazon Prime, oh, that's the other one I have, and Disney are on it. They are on it trying to make incredible content, and that is good for consumers on a global basis. This is why things like bundling and monopolies are the worst things you can do in society. Whether it's in education, housing,

healthcare or entertainment, we want to see vibrant competition. And if you look at the things that have gotten more expensive and have disappointed us in society, it's the ones with the least competition, also known as the ones that are run by governments or monopolies. What's run by governance monopolies here in the United States? Healthcare, education, and housing. Where are we suffering in America? Healthcare, education, and housing. These are the things we need to solve, and the way to solve them is through competition. And who is responsible for the lack of competition in those? Unions, politicians, and nimbie people, people with a vested interest.

We need to crack those non-competitive spaces and make them competitive again if we truly want growth. The amazing thing about these subscription services is just how many subscribers they already have. I told you Disney would catch up to Netflix. They're well on their way. Netflix has 208 million subscribers. Disney's halfway there, 103. Disney's going to blow past Netflix. I believe Disney will always have about 50% more than Netflix

because Disney appeals to families, kids, and adults. So if you're into Marvel and Star Wars, you get everybody. Netflix, you know, Netflix just got into kids. I don't think they're very good at it. They don't have any proprietary IP. I really am concerned about Netflix long term. I don't think they're going away, but I do think that this is going to be a challenging environment for them with Disney having run the table and bought Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel.

So HBO Max didn't see this one coming, 64 million. They grouped their HBO and HBO Max subscriptions together, but HBO Max has been wonderful. I'm really loving the content there. And so it's going to be an incredible future. Obviously, Amazon we talked about recently acquired MGM, which means they have Robocop, Rocky, James Bond, all that good stuff. and Amazon is going to spend something like their Lord of the Rings series is going to be $465 million for the first season, the most expensive ever. Game of Thrones cost $100 million a season.

So Amazon spent $250 million for the rights to the token, uh, J.R. token property in 2017 and they plan on doing five seasons, which would cost over $2 billion. And two nerds everywhere from the 80s and 90s. Congratulations. This is your Nirvana. Okay. So next up is an.

amazing show. Let's get to it. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Blog or publish content, promote your business, announce upcoming events or special projects, and sell products and services of all kinds and more. No matter the problem, Squarespace is the answer. They have beautiful templates by world-class designers, but that's not it. They also have powerful e-commerce functionality and everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. So no matter what you're using, an iPad, a Surface, an iPhone, an Android phone. It doesn't matter. All these beautiful templates just work. And of course, it's got built in SEO, free and secure hosting,

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When you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And congratulations for the team going public by direct listing on May 19th. What an amazing journey it's been. Just super congratulations. I know you all worked really hard over there to get the product. to scale and to delight customers, and it's just delightful for us.

And we'll look forward to having you on the pod, Anthony, to take a little victory lap. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Okay, next on the program, we've got a founder of a company that just raised a ton of money to help you build your avatar and to help celebrities build their avatars.

What are avatars you ask? Well, if you haven't been paying attention for the last 20 or 30 years, avatars are your virtual representation in a digital space. So if you're on an Oculus or previously in Second Life or in a video game, World Warcraft, you can decorate your avatar.

But something interesting has happened over the last decade or so. Many different platforms have started to create avatar, creating tools. You probably have seen this on your iPhone where you can create basically, what do they call it, emojis or something? Memoji. What do they call it?

Memoji. Memojis. Yeah. Memojis. terrible name. But these have now crashed into another movement, which is creators online and NFTs and digital goods being bought and traded and sold as collectibles, not just some sword or hat of magic you could buy in World Warcraft, but another use case. One that is quite speculative, but also quite inspiring and interesting. So welcome to the program, Akash Niggum.

How are you, sir? Good. How you doing? Thanks for having me. A pleasure, a pleasure. So how long have you been working on Genies? Oh, my God. Maybe the most loaded question of all time. There was a predecessor to Genies called Blend, which is what I dropped out of school for. This is what, like maybe 2015 at this point. And so it's been a long, long, long journey. But we only pivoted into Genies December 8th, 2017. So I know the exact date. So what? Like maybe three and a half, four years.

got it. So you've been at this for about six years. What is the, what was the goal of, you know, the first two projects in terms of your North Star, what you were trying to accomplish? And then how is that changed? Because I know that you have gotten an investment now from Dapper Labs and Coinbase Ventures. And obviously, NFTs have become a thing, which I'm assuming you didn't anticipate. And there might have been a different North Star or goal for the company. So I, you know, it's funny is that we've been talking. about NFTs for I think around whatever since we got into virtual identity and genies three and a half years ago without even knowing when an NFT was like the reason why he even came about was you know we've talked about genies or avatars being able to sell digital goods collectibles and skins but we would always compare that to places like fortnight or roblox and that's how we drew the comparison and I was posting on social media all of last year and talking about you know what genies and our celebrity genius would be able to do in the future whenever they

announced a song album, they could release digital goods and collectibles in association with that event. And then Roham, CEO of Dapper, ended up reaching out. He was like, dude, like, you know, everything that you're saying on social media is an NFT. You know that, right? And I was like, no, it's an NFT. So I think like, you know, so like I think like, you know, we've been talking about, like, the concept of what an NFT can provide to humans and I think users in general for a very, very long time. But I think the actual definition of an NFT or like the, you know, as it pertains to crypto, we didn't really, we didn't really plan on. But I think the through line for sure. The business North Star has always been how to you, how do you allow humans to get back to

their authentic self? So we think that, you know, the founding philosophy of the internet was really a place to really be exactly who you want to be and exactly who you are authentically inside in places like Instagram or Twitter where you're trying to posture and flex two notches above yourself, get away from that. So, you know, you've seen probably the movie Ready Player 1 or read the book. You'll see how they take a amazing. So you see how they take on a completely different form than they are in the real world, which people think is like a different side of themselves is more so the true side of themselves. And so we think that avatars over time will be able to extract that ability from people and allow them to get back to their authentic self.

So Snapchat has Bitmoji built into the platform and they have other reasons to obviously use Snapchat, sharing stories, ephemeral mess. messaging. Apple has meme OG and they have, I got to hate that name. Apple's usually really good at naming. That's a terrible name. I know they're going on with I. Yeah, Imoji. It probably was that somebody owned it or had the trademark on and they couldn't get it. But the meme moji, obviously, there's a reason for that. You're already in your natural environment of chatting with somebody on I message. And then you look at something like Fortnite, which they took in 1.8 billion in digital sales in 2019, you're in a game. There's a reason to be there. So I guess what I'm wondering is

with your service, what is the reason to be there? I understand that you're creating the ability for people to make these. But unlike Minecraft where people are building worlds, you seem more like an avatar as a service. Is that a good way for me to think about it? Is that you're making a toolkit to make avatars? Or is that you're making a toolkit to make avatars so that you can sell things like NFTs? Yeah. So I think that's a good question. I think like the best way to think about Genies is that we're extrapolating avatars and digital goods that have been prevalent in gaming for decades and we're trying to bring it to social circles and social communities for the very first time. So our goal is to really allow you to evangelize your

avatar as your identity in places like Instagram, like TikTok, like Snapchat, like Role. You can go everywhere. Any place that you exist, any place that you have friends, you can use Genies as a virtual portable identity. So instead of being stuck within one ecosystem, you travels with you. And if we allow people to start having avatar affiliation with a genie and they care about it in this step one of a long step 10 journey for our company,

then over time we can start to introduce a lot of dynamic capabilities. And look, like, MiMoji and, you know, MiMoji's amazing, but Moji's great too. But I think the word avatar has evolved over time. Like, I think maybe in 2014 and 15 and 16, what Avatar meant was just a caricature of yourself that could render in 20 different ways and you can use it as a sticker pack and that was an avatar. And I think in today's world, especially after this cleanse of the pandemic and this metaverse thinking, an avatar is more akin to like a virtual being. It's like, what has dynamic capability in this virtual world besides just a sticker pack? It's like, I want to be able to control this thing.

I want it to have machine learning capabilities. I want it to be able to interact in a brand new way. So that's kind of like the way that we're kind of moved. So you see it not just as a visual representation of yourself, but as an entity unto itself that could be a version of myself or almost like a partner of myself. I could have this character that I create. The cyber surfer was my original avatar on the, you know, bulletin boards in the 80s and into the 90s. But the idea here is that you could have your avatar that is built on Genies, then be portable

and go to other places. Right now, to do that, you would just be exporting a video clip or maybe an image. But have you made any partnership with the platforms where they say, you know what, we want to let you show up in Fortnite with your genies or show up into Oculus? Or are those platforms just way too threatened by this concept of a, you know, portable avatar? So I would say this. So for the past two and a half years, as long as we've been doing genies, we've been exclusively available to celebrities and tastemakers. And it's not like we jumped into this business saying we want to build avatars for that community. In fact, we were four people in San Francisco, no entertainment background, no L.A. background, no ties at all. And when we released it,

December 8, 2017, all the first adopters were celebrities. And we're like, why? So we came down to LA. And the reason why, and like we started to like see the, the psychology around it was because they're the most scrutinized lifestyle and group. They aren't able to be themselves in the real world, right? Like, they're always having to put on this different posture and so forth. And so they started to build out this second identity. And this. second narrative through their genie because it allowed them to have the safe haven to therapeutically become themselves. So we've been catering to that audience, perpetuating that over time, but we wanted to always deliver that to also consumers. And so the best way to allow consumers

to leverage their genies and be able to participate in some of these celebrity moments with their avatars as well and buying their digital goods and so forth is coming out with our API. So our API will integrate our genie creator into third-party platforms. and your genie basically takes on a different superpower depending on the environment that it's on. And by superpower, I mean the use case, right? So one of the partners that we've already announced has been Giffy, owned by Facebook or like, you know, I think it's going to be owned by Facebook. They're in the phase of that, whatever. But, you know, 700 million daily active users, they have integration and distribution network within TikTok, within Snapchat, within Twitter. You kind of name it. They have the distribution network there.

It's an expected use case. I would say, you know, like it isn't like the crazy virtual being type use case quite yet. but our goal is to roll out hundreds of partners like this over this year. So we just announced. What's going to happen there? I would be able to make gifts out of my avatar and then attach them to a tweet or something like that. Yeah. So like, you know, you can create a genie.

The genie can then, and you know, we'll talk about this here probably in a second, but you can go to the genie's marketplace. You can go buy different digital goods and collectibles from all of your favorite icons and tastemakers and IP that's out there. And then you can leverage those digital goods on your app. avatar and then use it as a GIF. It'll render X, Y, and Z different GIFs throughout the network and use it throughout the distribution network.

Now, the difference is that you'll be able to then, between us and other, you know, avatar platforms like you named, like Memoji or Bitmoji, so you can take the Genie avatar and then you can go log in to another platform. And we have a few, we probably have a few dozen that we're working with that are very, you know, I would say influential within the social space where you have a completely different use case on that platform. whether it becomes your dancing partner or you're, you know,

you're creating skits with it or things like that. Or in another platform, it may become your mannequin that you dress up from head to toe and you choose which accessories you want to buy. Depending on the platform and the way that they want to integrate genies, it assumes this different use case. And so your genie, depending on where you are, almost becomes this like ultimate Facebook login button, right?

It's like it doesn't, it comes with kind of like the visual identity. It comes with all the goods and collections. Imagine Facebook Connect. And having, when you Facebook connect, in the Facebook example or the Google example, it would take your, not your avatar, but your profile photo and bring it with you. Or take your bio, bring it with you, take your email, bring it with you. Here, the next generation of social services, you might be able to have a unified login with Genies. I make my avatar once. And if I bought something from Prada or I bought a Madonna T-shirt, I could then wear it on these other platforms and take it with me.

Yeah, I mean, depending on the collectible, right? It's like an avatar becomes a vehicle to showcase your digital good NFTs wherever you go. And then also, of course, like different use cases depending on the capabilities that they implore. Ah, so that gets very interesting. If I heard correctly in that sentence was embedded, hey, if you bought some NFTs, if you bought marshmallow the DJ's helmet or you bought this, you know, boxing gloves from Floyd Mayweather versus whatever, Jake or Logan Paul, which I said that was on the site. You could actually have those with you and you could flex when you're in a digital space

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L-I-N-O-D-E-com slash twist. Go ahead and create account and receive a $100 credit right now. Do you have your own virtual space where Jeannies can walk around and meet each other and interact? So like I said, we have step one of a long step 10 journey. I think the winner ultimately is going to be the one that takes a very long-term thoughtful approach about how one builds affiliation and loyalty with their avatar. So step one is just affiliation. And we have this Jeannie's flywheel.

The flywheel is basically all the talent that we worked with over the past two and a half years, which is a few thousand at this point. We have 99% celebrity avatar market share. We announce our partnership. What are the celebrities get out of it? I mean, aside from the touchy-feely stuff you talked about, like, oh, my God, it lets them solve all their psychological celebrity problems, which I'm not sure if that actually makes sense because celebrities are kind of constructs already. And so if you make a virtual version of it is a construct of who Madonna is at their heart or who is actually Cardi B or is it the character that is Cardi B that, that, you know, she started to manufacture. But putting that aside, what do they get out of it?

Are you just paying them to do this? Are they doing it because they get to sell stuff? I'm talking about today. Is Cardi B making money from this? Is Madonna making money from this? Yeah. So I think celebrities have been leveraging their avatars because it does allow them to showcase a different side of their personality, but they use it to memorialize any key life-defining

moment. So a song release, an album release where they're looking to connect with different audiences, this has been one of the predominant ways to connect with Gen Z. Gen Z that's right now already- What does it mean? Like, give me an example. So, Gen Z, for example, they think that right now we live in a game simulation, right? Like, that's probably one of their number one lines that they say.

It's like, oh, that's a glitch in the simulation. If they, like, spill like a Coke or something like that. They, um, there's a reason why anime is at an all time high. Like, I think people love living in this virtual world. People believe in, like, you know, the kids are, they believe that we were put on this earth for some abstract reason. They're looking at crystals and moon rocks 24-7. So this, their mindset is completely warped and different than a lot of the other generations.

And so I think when they see an avidavit, It's a really cool new story for them to be able to follow. In some ways, you can kind of imagine almost becoming, Genie's becoming the decentralized Disney, right? Meaning that Disney has set characters, set script, whatever, and then you go make a movie and then people go watch that movie. Well, what if I gave the tools to Justin Bieber or Cardi B, and we said, hey, listen, you go make your own movie,

and people can go follow this narrative, and people can go fall in love with that IP. Ah, okay, so now it gets interesting. You get everybody in phase one to make their characters. Now you're in phase two, and I saw you had Justin. Bieber used his genie to create a music video with Chance the Rapper. He does.

Yeah. So now if you actually had a world builder, you could have people going and buying stuff in NFTs and making short videos like some of the memes people made, et cetera. And that could be a way to express yourself. And now instead of just living in a simulation, you're making a simulation and then you can control that world or participate in a simulation within the simulation that you and I are running right now. And I would say that's very, you know, that is what celebrities today already do with Genies. You were asking about the monetization angle with it. Justin Bieber or Sean Mendez, for example,

is not like it's like a one and done. Justin Bieber has been using his genie in, I would say, 50% of his key life-defining moments over the past two years, a song release and album release or so forth. They kind of sit there as a team. And he was Justin is a bunch of different artists that are like, what's our PR plan? What's our Instagram plan? What's our genie plan? And the genie starts to build IP and value over time so that, you know, the marketplace we just announced the Dapper Labs, which is debuted. That's the next big thing. After NBA Top Shot, they just announced this four weeks ago. Justin Bieber can now sell, you know, like if he comes out with the Christmas album, he can now sell a thousand limited edition Santa Claus hats for his fans to be

able to go try scurry and go by and use on their own avatar. So it becomes very valuable IP over time. But I think the use case and utility in the context in which you use your avatar is super important. And so that's where the API comes into play. And so, that's where the API comes into play and the way that consumers can use their genie ultimately over time. So Giffy is a good start, but we want hundreds of partners so that they have a virtual portable identity. But the genie's world would be something that would come in right after we hook consumers where they currently exist. So like we want to hook them through behaviors that they're currently already do. So whether it's TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, let's allow them to play with their genie avatars

amongst those communities that were already created so that when we do roll out our own world, and this could be years down the line, you know, it almost comes out as a new, just another place or another environment where they can leverage their avatar. And you did start with a social network blend before you pivoted into this. So you obviously have an affinity for social networks. And obviously something like Second Life, which actually did really well, made millions of dollars. I don't know if you, did you grow up on Second Life and some of those other services? I didn't grow up on. Here's your thoughts of the arc of second life. So avatars are not a new thing, right? It's a, you know, they've been around for forever.

And I would say Second Life was ahead of its time in so many ways. I would say that avatars back then were kind of for like an underground niche kind of community, at least that's how it was perceived. If you had an avatar back then, it was like, you know, you were not, you were probably not considered part of like the cool, trendy, like, whatever crowd. It was for nerds. For sure. Now you have in this world where we just talked about Gen Zia and their mentality where they've

grown up, forget growing up on the internet. They grew up on Instagram, right? And Instagram soon going to become outdated. So they've grown up on all of these type of social. platforms, avatar is not weird at all. Like, I think they're looking to swing the pendulum back to a place where they can actually therapeutically be yourself. You go to the, like, I can't imagine what it's like to be a 14 year old in high school today and the different type of social pressures each person has to posture themselves online in a way that's going to be acceptable. Well,

what if you can have an avatar that allows you to really be yourself? You can live in a synonymous environment as well and allow your avatar to build its own personality and still express yourself in ways that, you know, photo, video, and text and the normal platforms currently just don't justify. Yeah, I mean, if you, every generation has become more open-minded about how they represent themselves in the world and who they are, whether it's, you know, your gender or your sexuality or your style. I mean, you used to have to fall into like one of five groups. You have to be a jock, a goth, a punk, a rocker, etc., a nerd. And now, my God, people can be part of any of these categories. So with the NFTs, have you started selling those yet?

And how is that going? Yeah. So we did a few different drops, right, digital goods releases. We done one with Sean Mendez. We did one with Mesot-Ozal. He was a top 10 international soccer player. We did one with Pac-Man. And we just kind of wanted to test to see who would react, who would be the buyers and how they would do. Sean Mendez decided in a pre-sell opportunity to sell different digital goods to memorialize his last album. So he sold the guitar, he sold a vest with a bunch of design from the album art, things like that. And he did around $600,000 in around 10 minutes completely sold out. The interesting portion about this, which I think is different than most NFTs, is that most of the buyers were non-crypto community. So a lot of his fans were galvanized around that.

And the big reason, like, you know, that's kind of the bet with genies is that we're able to bridge the chasm between the crypto and the non-crypto community. Like, you know, people always talk about these days, NFTs are blowing up, right? Like everyone, I mean, these days, you know, it's ebbs and flows, but like when it was blowing up, everybody's screaming that. But if you jump into a clubhouse tonight and people are talking about NFTs, I guarantee you there's no teenagers there. It's probably all business executives, business executives, music executives. There's no, like, actual, you know, kids of culture. Reason why is if I go to a 13-year-old today and I'm like, hey, listen, you can go buy this NFT is going to accrue in value over the next four months.

And you get to flip it and you get to make, like, you know, whatever, two extra money. they don't get f*** like they don't care at all right they're sitting there like you know if i got a Pokemon card when i was a kid i wasn't looking at the financial return i was just excited that i had one so um you know from our perspective we see kids that interact with nfts at that level but they max out their parents credit cards to buy fortnight skins all day long so we think that through this we're speaking a language and a mechanism that they understand where they can we don't have to scream the word the acronym nfts we don't need to tell them about blockchain or crypto we just say look go buy dope, digital, good or wearable from some of these icons that you already look up to and

you're infatuated with, you get to own that moment in time, that album in time, that song release in time, but you get to use it and wear it and use it in front of all the different fan communities out there that would relish that forever. Yeah, I mean, it's super interesting. This is now maybe the fourth or fifth time I've seen somebody try to make this work. Back in 2002, I don't know, how old do you? 28. 28. So 2002, you were seven years old? I was born in 92. 10.

93. You were 10 years old. There was a very cool service that started like in the early 2000s called WeWorld and it let you create like a South Park like avatar and actually they had a bunch of promoted artists and in fact Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, a bunch of other people had kind of done stuff there and it was just for communicating. It was a very interesting, very similar, but we didn't have the... the technology or NFTs or crypto or any of these kind of things. It's super interesting when you take two technologies, avatars and virtual worlds, and then combine it with a new business model. So is that why the company now, I'm assuming you just started making money this year? Or when did you first

turn on revenue for the company? We've been making revenue here and there in the past, but it'd be more of like brand endorsement deals. Like somebody would be like, hey, listen. Yeah. Yeah. This year, you know, with everything. We've been planning for digital goods, but not as NFTs. Like, technically we weren't planning them to be NFTs. We're just like, look, like, you're going to sell digital goods. People are going to buy them. They're going to be non-tradable assets, but it's very akin to what you see in

Fortnite when people are buying skins and are not tradable, right? We only technically made them NFTs after we engage with Roham and Dapper Labs. So smart. And they have an API and a platform for that so you can just adopt their technology and be part of their standard? Well, it actually, this is a, yeah, I mean, like after NBA Top Shot, we actually are now working with for the past, I guess, eight months now. We've been working with them hands on and taking the NBA Topshot economy design team

and everybody that builds NBA Topshot, and they're actually the ones building the Genies Marketplace. So this is, yeah, so Dapper Labs announced this four weeks ago. The next thing that they were announcing after NBA Top Shot is the Genies Marketplace. This will be the next one that's going to be debuted. So hopefully over the next two to three months, you know, we've been working with their team and so forth. So it's a custom, it's kind of a custom integration.

But I would assume that over time. Is all their stuff on an open standard? I seem to remember when I had Roham on the podcast. He was talking about everything being open standards. Eventually, look, I mean, like the way I at least pitched Apple Labs on his behalf, so I don't know how he, I mean, I obviously know and I see what he does on Twitter. And so far I talk to him often. But like, I view them as trying to become basically the Apple operating system of blockchain, right? So it's like they've so far shown two rocket ship hits, CryptoKitties and then NBA Top Shot.

But they're the makers of both of those, both those entities, right? So this will be the first time where I think they're trying to showcase that somebody that's not a Dapper Labs company can come to flow and then launch a product with them and it can do really, really well. And I think this is a really important case study for them because if it does go well, then all of a sudden, yes, of course, they should. I mean, they will. And that's kind of the vision is make it open source. They're probably going to take a lot of the learning from our use case plus tandem with the NBA Top Shot. And they're going to start to develop an API open source platforms that anybody can come build on flow. And I think they already have started to do that in a very nascent manner, but it's not really like at, you know,

know, high complexity at all. Yeah, his, his pitch was, listen, it's all open standards. If NBA Topshop wants to leave and not do the partner with us, they can go do it on their own eventually. And obviously, all those NFTs are out there in the wild on an open standard. And we don't control them afterwards. And, you know, it's all up to the license people put on to each NFT. And we had like some crazy examples of like a Gucci bag on Roblox selling for $4,000. Non-tradable. Non-tradable, really. That's the thing. That's like. That's why, that's why, you know, let's say, and why is that important? If NFTs, like, if NFTs didn't exist, this is, we would be doing the exact same thing, right?

Like, this is, this is literally what we've been planning for years. I would say that everything's been accelerated probably by three years. Like, we probably were planning on this being, you know, our 2024 game plan. But, like, I would say that, you know, it's cool to see, not cool, but it's a, you know, this conviction at least on our side, we buy is that a non-tradable asset, the utilitarian value to a non-crypto user of being able to own a Gucci bag just for the sake of being able to say, I own this one, is that valuable to them psychologically is really, really cool. And I think most people obviously have become so obsessed and infatuated with NFTs because they've taken every single headline. But a lot of the

people that are buying NFTs in different projects, whether there's NBA TopShod and a few others, I think NBA TopShod is like way better than most projects. They're doing it for a financial return, right? Like, you know, I sit there and I'm like the cryptos are like, Yeah, well, it's not like the crypto community is sitting there and probably being like the biggest basketball fans on Earth, right? It's like, you know, they see the model, they see how they want to be able to make returns and they buy accordingly and they sell accordingly. NBA TopShow has gone away, you know, they've obviously escaped that velocity and they've gotten a lot of non-crypto members within the community that are buying and selling and trading now. But it's cool to see that outside of the NFT world, just the value of owning a digital asset and showing it off to your friends without anything having to verify that is just gives almost more. or conviction to just the value of what digital goods economy can become if immersed in culture.

Yeah. And yours, do you see people buying the digital goods on genies primarily as, you know, decorative and low cost, a couple of dollars? Do you see them primarily as tradable assets? Or do you think it'll be a combination of those two things? We're going to make them all tradable. But to foster a healthy economy, it actually is suggested that you don't have a secondary market out of the gates because then you get a, bunch of people looking to just flip it immediately. And that's it doesn't stabilize for a long-term healthy economy, right? Like, we do want people here that are just obsessed with owning the Gucci bag and just being able to show off to their friends because they see utilitarian value just in that.

We're looking to specialize in affordable costing, right? So they are going to be low cost. The economy will dictate exactly how that increases in prices. So like, you know, a $4,000 a Gucci bag in Roblox doesn't surprise me at all. I think there will be situations where is going to be one of ones where people are just going nuts for it. But we hope to cater to, you know, I think the crypto community is amazing. And I think, you know, we talk about the crypto community being completely separate from the rest of the world today. But over time, everybody's going to be the crypto community, right?

Like, everybody's going to have. Well, this seems like a great onboarding for it. I mean, I saw that you did something with Bandai, which for people who don't know, I think the owners and creators of Pac-Man, which is 41 years old, which is impossible because I remember playing it for the first time in an arched. I guess I'm getting old. But explain to me how that partnership works. Yeah, it's what we expect.

These are just test cases for us to show and give a glimpse into what's going to be a daily occurrence within the genie's marketplace, right? So like we had Sean Mendez do a digital goods drop. We had Pac-Man celebrate an iconic key life-defining moment in an anniversary and do a digital goods drop as well. And that came about. We opened up our Asia offices last year, one of the big investors that we brought on board in the region was Bondi Namco.

Bondi Namco actually engaged our genie's Asia entity to do this entire activation and sell these unique Pac-Man wearables that different people could buy, depending on the flavor that they liked, and then use on their own avatar. Now, the consumer genies have not yet rolled out to the masses. We've just done a test flight. We've maxed that on test flight. And our pre-order is actually going to be available over the next two days so that people over the next three months until the marketplace is live will be able to sign up.

so that when we do roll out the marketplace, they can also access their genie and then all the different pre-sell wearables that they've garnered over the last three activations. But at this point, we're just stockpiling all of our talent and all different IP that we think is going to resonate with the community for all the different types of moments

that are coming up in the fall and then also in the winter and then allowing them to release them throughout the week when the marketplace debuts. And there's going to be around maybe, you know, at first, maybe like two drops or so a week, but eventually it's going to be a daily occurrence. And then our goal is to make it to that,

It's not just celebrities or valuable IP partners that are selling their wearables, but that we're going to make the tools that we have internally consumer facing. So that the 16-year-old in high school that wants to just create a wearable because there's an inside joke amongst her friends can just release it on the marketplace. So anybody, it'll be like Etsy, anybody can just release anything. It'll be a total free-for-all. That's why, you know, there's like, you know, step one of the vision, but step two, UGC anything, right?

So the ability for me to just randomly be able to create, It's very similar to what Snapchat did with lenses, which I thought was brilliant, right? It's like in the very beginning, they controlled all the different lenses that they sold and they displayed within Snapchat. Then eventually they took it to the second step where you had to be a designer, but designers all of a sudden could participate and create their own lenses and then deploy it within different regions. And then finally, they've made it so that anybody, you don't have to be technical or anything like that can create your own lens and then deploy it.

And it's been beautiful. And so we see something very similar happening with our wearables. We're already giving out documentation where designers, can already start to create their own wearables. We're already giving out to select members within the NFT community, within just a design community in general. But to be able to tap into the creativity of Gen Z and allow them to come up with their own wearables

that will be reflective of micro trends within high schools and colleges and so forth is very, very interesting. And that's just on digital goods. Eventually, we're going to have that for animations as well. And what do you make money with, you know, like an Apple 30% store fee? How do you make money currently?

Right now we have a split with the IP partner. So, you know, the IP partner, you know, we just signed with WMG. That's one of them. You know, we're announcing. Is it a public split or is it a standard split like an app store or? Not a public split, but I would say it's just, you know, the only thing I can say is a fair split. And, you know, we have similar to app stores, I would guess. I have no.

Yeah. I mean. Or YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would say probably a little bit higher than that. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, I think when it becomes UGC, right?

So it's like UGC for anything. Digital goods, animations. You can sell your quintessential sound. Like if Sean Mendes was wanted to record. himself in the studio. And he wanted to say, like, this is the one sound of the first line of the verse that I recorded. And I want to sell, like, you know, 15 of these to my fans. So then everybody can then use it on their own avatar and with face tracking. If I entered a room or I entered a space on TikTok, all of a sudden, I said, like, you know, the one line from Sean

Mendez or things like that. There's so many different things you can do with UGC. But that's kind of for step two, step three of the journey. And how does AR factor into your plans, if at all? No fact. I mean, it's a it's a prerequisite if you want to be an avatar in this world. Look, there's a lot of different things. I would say there's three things that we're focusing on this year to be able to perpetuate what we've already created with Genies. One is UGC for digital goods. So, you know, we already have the pipeline and everything set for all of our celebrities and IP to be able to sell. But we just talked about that. UGC for animation, which means that you do have to have face tracking. You do have to have body tracking. You need to be able to interpret data so that it can, mitigate the gap between how you face-tracking body track and what a mocap soup does, right?

See, that's super cool. So if I was, uh, you know, a 50-year-old boomer, Gen X-R and I wanted to do TikTok dances, I could make an avatar, uh, with genies and then just do my TikTok dancing and publish it as such. So without revealing too much, um, at the very beginning of this, of this discussion when I was saying like, oh yeah, AR dancing, like making skits, you know, But that is, you know, that you can kind of imagine you're in the right ballpark of kind of, uh, of kind of what we're contemplating. Yeah. I mean, it's there, the idea that computer generated films like Pixar and then capturing,

what do they call the motion capturing when the guy played Gallum? Mocap. Mocap is the, is the, yeah. So motion capture is now completely doable with an iPad, obviously the last iPad with the M1, they were actually showing motion capture software and stuff. that. So being able to do motion capture and then put it onto your emoji and then do it with your friends in a virtual world means you could recreate Star Wars or some movie Goodfellas, whatever. You can make your own version of that and then publish scenes. And think about it like this,

how vulnerable do you have to be as a person to go and participate in a TikTok trend using your physical self? Like I don't have the confidence. I'll tell you right now to just put my video over there and then just like do a dance and then throw it up online for all my friends. Do you want to do the Busted challenge with me right now? We can do it right now. I don't think anybody wants to see that. If, I mean, look, like, if you all of a sudden, and I guarantee you, look, like, and again, without revealing too much, but, like, it's very public knowledge that the contributors of

TikTok are the upper, there's like, you know, there's a power user audience that's contributing, right? And the reason why is because you have to be very vulnerable to participate in TikTok. Well, what if I can just do my, you know, face tracking, body tracking, my avatar can simulate it for me. I can remove my physical self from it and my avatar just participates in the trend. Gives you permission to be goofy and not embarrass yourself. Be yourself. Exactly. Be yourself and have fun.

Everybody can be an actor. Everybody can be a dancer in this crazy world. And if, and the more that you use it on TikTok in front of all your friends, the higher propensity you have to go buy it for it from all the people that you care about on TikTok. And then all this, you know, that's kind of the creator economy. Think about this. If you had a Star Wars pack and you and I could play different Star Wars characters, we could subscribe to a Star Wars pack.

You could be Princess Leia. I could be Luke Skywalker. You could be the Mandalorian. I could be Boba Fett. And we could come up with our own stories. And I mean, I don't know if people are ready for this on an IP basis, but we did have video games as this bridge moment, right? We got to play Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader in a video game.

Well, now, what if you could create your own stories and live in a world and do these kind of things is super, super crazy and exciting. Do you want to join our product team? Yeah, you're nailing it. Well, I mean, the thing that's really amazing to me is I think a lot of times, you know, you have these very creative ideas, but they don't hit sustainability. And just like WeeMe and Second Life and other ones, you know, they kind of fade over time because the founders can't keep at it because they can't keep getting funding and there's

no sustainable business model. But NFTs are so clearly the business model of the metaverse of this virtual reality. you know, future. And it's going to be AR2, which makes it even crazier when you think about it. You know, if you're wearing Apple's new AR glasses, which will come out eventually, the idea that you could see Justin Bieber's avatar walking down the street and Justin Bieber could be, you know, wherever he is. He could be in Nashville, but he's got his avatar in Los Angeles walking around talking to people. It's kind of cool. It's epic. Or he could be intensities at once. No, it's, look, like the, I talk about avatars the same way. that I view cars in the current world, right? Like there's different car makers, there's Toyota, this four, this Ferrari, and each car maker comes out with a new model every single year. And each model has different features that fit a certain personality.

And you use your car depending on the environment you're going to, right? If I'm going to a party in Beverly Hills, maybe I take my nice car. If I'm just going for a long drive, maybe I take my Tesla or a hybrid, whatever. So in the Metaverse, there's going to be different avatar makers. And each year, they're going to come out with a different avatar model that has different amenities and different features that you want to be. able to utilize. But, you know, it's definitely, it's inevitable that everybody is going to, you know, everybody outside of the gaming community is going to represent themselves as an avatar.

Yeah, I mean, for people who haven't read William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy, All Tomorrow's, parties, Adoru, I don't know what the third one was, but I remember reading them back in the day and one of the, oh, Virtual Light was the last one. It was a very cool, did you read that series by chance? This is a good one for you to read because it was kind of like San Francisco cyberpunk. and essentially people were going to important meetings because they were working on projects together like, you know, cyber hacking projects, whatever, but they were doing it all in virtual space

in the metaverse and they were sweating, what am I going to wear to this meeting? And it was like, you're in a digital meeting, it doesn't matter. It was like, no, I need to buy a new kimono. And this woman always bought new kimonos before she went to different things. And it might have turned out it was a guy or whatever.

but wow, what an incredible vision. Congratulations on everything. Thank you so much. Now, if people want to participate in this now, it's still closed, but you're doing a beta with a test flight app. Our pre-order is going to be available in the next couple of days, so you can get in the pre-order line to get your genie. What does the genie cost?

Are you going to charge 100 bucks a year or 10 bucks a month? There's nothing to create a genie. Oh, wow, free forever? To create a genie. Yeah, you'll basically get everybody gets a starter genie. So you get like this very basic, you know, avatar that has all like the basic features. But in order to evolve it over time, you need to go collect different digital collectibles and wearables. And then eventually you'll have your, you know, we believe that everybody in the, in the metaverse should have their own individualized closet and animations and so forth.

So that's where UGC comes into play. But in order to evolve your avatar, you purchase and buy different collectibles. Perfect. So you can go to genies.com and in the next couple of days from this episode coming out, create your basic genie. and then start going shopping for your virtual genius. 100%. Listen, continue success with this. It's a tremendous vision.

I'm going to be watching closely. And congratulations on a business model showing up and a fabulous pivot. I think it's awesome that you are still in the game and figuring it out. It's really not easy to be on the bleeding edge. But if you survive as an entrepreneur, sometimes a business model will appear

that you didn't anticipate and then all of a sudden your vision gets catalyzed And NFT is what, like, as you said, three years of acceleration in just one year. That's crazy. That's just a, when you're in the game, good things can happen. This is why you always want to be building or creating. You're either creating or waiting. And if you're creating stuff, man, all of a sudden a wave can come that you can ride.

So it's pretty cool. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right. Sounds good. Talk to you soon. And we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.