This Week in Startups - The greatest CNBC hit of all time, YouTube hides dislikes + Ready Games CEO David Bennahum | E1325

Episode Date: November 13, 2021

First up, Jason showcases what he calls the greatest CNBC hit of all time (01:46). Then he covers YouTube hiding the downvote counter (18:49). In the interview segment, Ready Games CEO David Bennahum about his new fashion Icon NFT marketplace game (27:31) and the transition from walled gardens to open source. We wrap with another edition of "OK Boomer" (01:07:00) where Rachel is reporting on Emily Herrera, a 22 year old who started her own Angel syndicate while still in college (01:20:24).

Okay, we've got a lot to cover today. First up, I'm going to show you the greatest CNBC hit of all time and what is destined to become a top five video, perhaps even Mount Rushmore, top four video in the history of live television. It's the greatest CNBC hit of all time. And I got a nice shout out from Tech Check John Fort. And finally, I'll talk about YouTube and how they're hiding the downvote counter. Very interesting. And then David Benahom is on the program. He's from Ready Games and he's talking about his new fashion.

an NFT marketplace game called Icon and how we're going to transition from a closed or semi-closed wall garden, hedge garden, and web two to a distributed Web3 open source world. It's a really interesting conversation about the future of NFTs, mobile, and the metaverse. And it's Friday, so we're going to wrap with another edition of OK boomer. Rachel is reporting on Emily Herrera, a 22-year-old who started her own Angel Syndicate while still in college. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every higher matters.

Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Masterworks, the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the 30,000 person wait list by going to masterworks. dot I. I. And, using promo code, Twist, and Lemon.

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for the first four weeks. Okay, in our first story, I can't believe I missed this, but in a clip from mid-October

that resurfaced in my feed today, investor Mark Vinervini, whiffed on describing what the startup Upstart does. This is the greatest CNBC hit of all time. It is one of the great all-time pandemic Zoom videos I've ever seen. Or just, this has got to be in the running for top 10, maybe top five, live TV moments,

like the one with the guy who was reporting on CNN, the two kids came running in, or his daughter came running in and stomping her feet, which is just, I think that's number one for live forever. Or maybe the kid with the turtles. That was the other one. I like turtles. That's definitely in the top five. So this is going to run.

It's in that, I like totos. Oh my God. I like turtles. I mean, it's crazy. But this is, I believe,

you know, in virality and internet legends, this could be a Mount Rushmore. I know I'm sound like I'm getting ahead of myself, like saying Kevin Durant's not going to be Mount Rushmore. I know. But I am, I'm getting excited.

I'm going there. I'm jumping the fence. That's it. Okay. I'm just absolutely losing my mind on this clip. So I think that's as much of a buildup. You've got to watch the whole one minute clip. You're going to show this to 10 friends.

Let's roll the tape. Money in right now include Upstart. That is one. Tesla, MGM, and AIG. Why those four, all of which you've bought within, well, basically this week, except Tesla, end of last month. Yeah. So, well, up starts up about 25% just in four days since we,

since we bought it. We bought it on about four days ago. So that's actually made a nice little move in the short term, probably a little extended right now, but longer term, that's a good-looking name. Very powerful, very strong earnings. These stocks are actually really well. What do they do? Excuse me? What does Upstart do? Well, I'm sorry. What kind of company is it? Yeah, you're breaking up. Well, I guess we've got an audio problem there, Mark. I'm sorry.

I do know MGM. I do know Tesla and I do know AIG, but a 25% move in a week is pretty good for the company I'll start. Thank you, Mark, for your time. We'll have you back soon. Appreciate it. They would not be having Mark back anytime soon. What you saw there was, you know, he's having a panic attack.

Obviously, he's recommending a stock on national television without even knowing what they do. I mean, this is the height of insanity. You literally could just visit their website. I didn't know what they do. Do you do any prep for coming on CNBC? When I first started doing CNBC hits, I would get up in the morning and two hours before I was going to be on. So 8 a.m. I'd be on. It's 6 a.m. I would start a thread on SMS with some of the inside team and some of the launch team. So maybe one or two analysts and then one or two people from launch. So three or four people. And then I would say, here are the topics they want to talk about. Give me facts.

and then give me what you think some of the early reactions are that are notable on Twitter. In other words, other people's hot takes. So I would come in hot. And then I just had a very easy strategy when I was on CNBC. I'd say, okay, I'm going to explain

in the most basic terms possible how, what's going on? In other words, just explain what the story is. So if it was Disney versus Netflix for streaming supremacy years ago, I explained, hey, this is what the benefit to Disney is going to be when they have a direct relationship

with customers as opposed to having it mitigated by Netflix and cable companies. And then I would make a prediction, right? So I was like, explain, you know, frame the issue and then make a prediction. I never really thought about it that scientifically. But anyway, that was the system I came up with. This person did nothing. I mean, I don't know. Some people say in his events, he like trades, you know, based on momentum in charts,

but still you would want to know what the company does, of course. Like, I mean, nobody's just looking at a chart and making a bet. Maybe there are some computers or high frequency traders doing that, but that's not what he is. And what you can tell is he says, I don't know. And then he's like, oh, you know, I think, you know, there's a problem here. And all that pausing. And then I think the anchor is trying to figure it out. And then somebody said in the anchor, the producer said, he doesn't know he's having a panic attack.

We got to cut the video. There's no audio problem because the video is perfect. We all know the video goes first. Zoom will prioritize audio every time. So it's the Zoom that is the bit of the tell that, you know, and it's just obvious. So, I mean, in one way, I feel bad for the guy. and the other way, I feel like this guy is doing like serious damage in the world by giving people advice or talking about stuff and trying to be an expert when he doesn't know what the company does.

I mean, fairly obvious what happened here. I mean, I always try to give people the benefit of doubt. In this case, man, it's not a game, folks. It's just, it's not a game here. This is people's money. It could be their livelihood. It could be their future, their children's future. It's not a game when it comes to finance.

Like, be thoughtful. That's what I try to do here every day on the show. like if something is a scam, you know, if it's Nicola or if you think something is a scam like tether and they're starting to get fines and there's a lot of red flags, like, well, let's talk about that and let's be honest about it. But I mean, whoa, I mean, somebody might buy the stock based on this guy going on making 25% in four days and he doesn't know what the company does. I mean, it's just so deranged. He was previously the president of an institutional research firm in New York, but it does not say where he worked on his resume. And then he wrote two books. And this

from his bio on his website, in fact. And so he wrote two books, trade like a stock market wizard, and think and trade like a champion. So he's written two books. So he's literally giving advice. And interestingly, Minervini sells investment advice.

So he doesn't know what the company does. He lies about the AV in a panic. So, you know, I don't be too cruel here. I mean, I understand. It's a panic moment. Live TV's not easy. It's not for everybody. But he's selling his investment advice,

apparently for $1,000 a month or $6,000 a year on his website. And October 15th was Upstarts peak at $390 a share. The stock is full on 35% in 28 days since he made his

legendary appearance. For those unaware, Upstart is a phenomenally simple business. They're a lending platform. Lending money, and they use AI, apparently, to help people get better loan terms. And so like your education and cost of living, they basically try to project your creditworthiness, i.e. like a FICO score might. But they're using AI to do that. When public in December of 2020, stock has gone up 8.6 times that amount. Crazy. Trading a 254 share, $20 billion market cap. They did $228 million in revenue in Q3, which was up 3x, right? So those are, we've talked about this before on the program. You know, growth company 20, 30 percent year over year. When you start seeing two to three X,

You know, that usually means the company is in its, you know, highest growth phase in terms of percentage, but usually it's on a much smaller number. So growing 30% when you have 10 billion in revenue is a lot of money. Growing 30% when you have 10 billion would be $3 billion. That's a big, that's a lot of cash. Growing 30% when you have a billion in revenue, it's only $300 million, you get the idea. So you got to take this into account, like, you know, the scale of the revenue here. But still, it's very impressive, which means they're, you know, close to a billion dollars. a run rate. And so they charge an origination fee on the loan amount like anybody else. And they'll

charge a late fee and other nonsense. But if an investor can't describe what a company does on CNBC, it's a bit of a tell. I would say, like, I wouldn't blame CNBC for this person not being prepared. It's his job primarily. I will say whoever the booker was, you know, I might know the booker they might book me for shows. You do have to have a red flag out now for, for, he people or selling courses or make their money primarily from selling stuff rather than making bets. And what these folks do is they make it seem like their primary business is the training, but the real business is selling the courses.

And so I can understand a producer, you know, getting hoodwinked here or maybe being rightly confused because they tend to put out like, I make, you know, all this money from investing or real estate. And I make, I'm just printing money. But, you know, on the side, I do this thing where I ask. poor people or middle class people to give me $20,000 and manipulate them, you know, whatever it is. So it's gross, but hilarious in another way.

God, sometimes I wonder if I'm being too cruel in my estimation of what just happened in that video, but that was rough. It's rough. I mean, I mean, that guy has been taking else for a month on this thing. And I just found out about it today. So, I mean, I just think it's one of those memes that's just going to keep coming back. I mean, just to give you some insight in how I run this show, three full-time producers,

literally three full-time producers. Rachel, Justin, Nick, they do a great job producing the show. I mean, if they don't have last year's number, or they haven't done the percentage difference between the last two or three years' numbers, or they haven't taken the number of customers and divided into the valuation, like I expect them to not only get me all the correct numbers,

I expect them to do some back of the envelope math and maybe add a little bit on top of that to come up with some ideas or themes. Knowing what the company does, I mean, come on. It's just astounding to me. Before we get into the ad, I want you to go to LinkedIn.com slash twist and post your first job for free. Just do that right now.

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and you can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free terms and conditions. Of course, apply because they're giving you something for free. All right, also on CNBC today, just a thank you to my friend, John Ford. He gave me a shout out on my Disney. takes from years ago. So I didn't remember exactly what I said. But here's 26 seconds from John Fort this morning. And guys, I have to say, speaking of virtual worlds, today Disney also announcing a series of NFTs featuring its characters. Guys.

Julia, maybe I'm going to regret this, but I got to give Jason Kalakanis credit for this vision, right, which I think he laid out with us on Squawc Alley before it was tech check a couple years ago about how Disney Plus and subscriptions, you know, parks, tying that together with the digital world, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, thank you, John. I mean, it's very nice to me to even remember that. And I do remember the conversation now. I did say, if I remember correctly, listen.

And this is when I used to go into the studio. And this is when I was explaining early in the show, that I would prepare for an hour. So when I would be driving up to the show, I would either hit the conference call button and get all those people on the phone, you know, while I'm driving to the studio before getting here and me.

makeup, they did the best they could. And, you know, I'd be listening to them and I would riff. And I would even practice sometimes saying out loud the facts. And I would just try to keep three or four facts, you know, that I thought were the most relevant, but they would give me 20. And so it was just this great process, right? And so I think that was the result of why they kept asking me to come back, you know, and they were like, hey, you want to be an official contributor, you know, could have been a paid situation. I was like, I'll just, you don't need the money for me to come on like every couple of weeks. And, you know, I'll just come on like every couple of weeks and um but they started having me on once or twice a week at at the peak and uh yeah so let's play the

clip well we talked about this last year that it would be an incredible opportunity at some point for disney to be able to collect credit cards and email addresses and go direct to consumers they were of course selling their content to netflix and other services and that was a good model but if you look at what happens long term when you put an intermediary like Netflix in between you and the content and that intermediary decides, hey, we can make content too, and it turns out they're highly competent at it, and Amazon decides to make their own content. Then all of a sudden, you're losing that end consumer, you don't have a direct connection to them, and it's a major risk factor for the network. But ESPN owns the greatest IP in the world. It's the greatest

collection of IP in the world. And I think actually, when they start going direct, ESP, I'm sorry, Disney and ESPN have some of the best content in the world. And so Disney with ESPN, with Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and that whole collection, including the Disney assets, of course, the original movies, they have an incredible, incredible collection. And when they go direct, it will be very easy for them to get tens of millions of people to subscribe to that service. Will it be very easy, though? Jason, I'm wondering, you've got ESPN on the one hand, but then you've also got kind of Marvel and Lucasfilm, and then you've got like Disney Jr. type stuff. It doesn't seem like all of that fits under a single subscription. So do you have to sell them each separately?

And do you end up with subscription fatigue unless there's something like a cable bundle that authenticate for all of them at once? No, I think that Disney is the one company that could produce, you know, a top three offering. So they'll be right up there with Amazon and Netflix. Yeah, so listen, a couple of notes there. One, how much better do I look now, 20 pounds? I mean, my face looks so much fatter than, this was four years ago. I was, I think, in that,

I was probably 198 in that and I'm 179 now. So, wow. Yeah, everybody should try to lose 20 pounds. You'll look better on TV. That is actually really hard to look at yourself on TV when you're fat. That's very difficult for me. But at least I was, like, smart. It's pretty obvious to anybody.

I don't give myself too much credit here. I think people were just looking at Disney and thinking, like, how can Disney's business get any better? And it would be like, if they had 100 million people's credit cards and one-click purchasing and 50 million people using their app every day, that would be a lot better. In other words, they would have a massive distribution channel. They would have cable vision.

They would have direct TV. They would have like a pipe into everybody's home. Well, that was the magic of apps. Now, listen, four years ago, you know, the idea that Disney was going to challenge Netflix and even to be technically competent was kind of laughable. But, you know, the big folks, the big traditional companies, they kind of lumber. but man, they're kind of like these giant elephants. They might move very slow, but when they do, like, it's a big footprint, right?

It's a lot of weight coming down. So they'll move slow, but you don't want to be under them when they walk over you. And so just thanks for remembering the conversation, John. We don't give each other credit for this kind of stuff. Disney Plus worldwide users today, 118. And I still stand by my belief that we will soon live in a world where, you know, the Netflix's and the Disney's will have 250 to 500 million paid subscribers globally. You start thinking about that math and the budgets it creates for creating content, you know, at but $10 a month for each of those counts. And listen,

there might be some places in the emerging world where they'll get $2 a month in U.S. dollars or $4 a month, right? It may not sustain the $14 or $12 like you get here in the U.S. for these things. That's why I put it at $10. I mean, that's an awful lot of cash. If there were $500 million people paying a dollar each, you'd be making $500 million a month. And now you add a zero, you're at $5 billion a month. That'd be $60 billion. I don't think you could spend $60 billion on content. It'd be very hard. And that's why Disney Plus today had their like Star Wars Day. And they're announcing, you know, and I think they're doing some Marvel stuff too. But maybe it's an overall Disney Plus thing. They're Disney thing today.

I mean, they're announcing like 30 shows, 40 shows. It's unbelievable. And the Obi-Wan, I predict, is going to be some of the greatest Star Wars content ever created. I think it'll be, you know, like Mandelorian Empire Strikes Back, Clone Wars, like this is going to be some of the best content, Rogue One ever made in the Disney, I'm sorry, the Star Wars World. So congratulations to the team there. Okay, YouTube is changing how voting down works on videos.

Instead of you seeing a count of all the votes down, when you click the vote down button, only the creator is going to see that vote down. And they want to do this to make the platform more respectful and to support emerging founders who are getting hit with swarms of people, who will vote down their content, not just because they don't like it, but I guess there's some insinuation here that it's a bullying or a coordinated attack. Who knows, we live in very charged times.

This comes at the same time that Instagram and Facebook starting allowing users to hide the number of likes on their own posts. So I saw this myself on Instagram, it was like, hey, do you want to show likes or not show likes? Do you want to let only your friends comment? So I think this has to do with giving people more power and not making them feel as bad when they use services. So on Instagram, people feel bad about themselves and the number of likes they get and, you know, maybe that affects people in the body dysmorphia area according

to the research because it's a very visual medium on YouTube. You have people performing and talking like I am right now. And the votes down is, you know, for a performer, I guess, can make them feel very bad and maybe they will not want to produce more content, which is a problem for YouTube. So YouTube, I think, has a concern about people, you know, maybe not becoming creators. This is a difficult argument here. According to the verge, Instagram's Adam Mossari stated that hiding likes, quote, didn't actually change nearly as much about how people felt or how much they used the experience as we thought it would. But it did end up being pretty polarizing. Some people really liked it and some people really don't. In a blog post on Wednesday, YouTube announced they were

removing the dislike counter to quote, ensure that YouTube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators. The term of art apparently is brigading. So these are downvoting groups and so they will like on Twitter the ratio

and concept. Ration on concept is slightly different I'll expand in a second. You can hit the dislike button. Here's what it's going to look like if you're watching the show. So you'll see a number next to the votes up. So everybody gets a medal. Everybody gets a cookie. Everybody you know, participates, but you don't share with the public what the audience actually thought of your

video. I kind of like this. I do think that the brigading, that's an issue on the margins and people will brigade for other reasons. You know, it's kind of part of the price you pay for allowing people to say what they think. And, you know, the comments can be particularly difficult on people, especially if people are attacking other people about their appearance or whatever. And so they've removed some of those comments. And I noticed that commenting is getting better. on YouTube. I think they're making it harder to make burner accounts or easier to report or maybe they're pretty light trigger on removing a comment when it is reported and it has some negative sentiment. It doesn't come as much of a surprise. In March, YouTube announced a small experiment where

they hid dislike counts on select videos. And here is what YouTube's head creator liaison, Matt Koval, had to say on the dislike button. It's a 50 second clip and I will see you on the side. I've always thought seeing the number of dislikes on a video helps us know as viewers. if it's a good video or not, if it's a helpful tutorial or not, or if what a creator is saying in their video is generally agreed with or not. But unfortunately, research teams at YouTube have found there's this whole other use for disliking a video that I had never experienced as a creator, and you may not have either. Apparently, groups of viewers are targeting a video's dislike button to drive up the count, turning it into something like a game with a visible scoreboard.

And it's usually just because they don't like the creator or what they stand for. That's a big problem when half of YouTube's mission is to give everyone a voice. Okay, there you have it. Certainly good intent. There might be second order impacts here that are not good. I have to say, I like a little rough and tumble, I like the dislike button because I feel as content creators, you know, if you want to evolve, you do need to get some negative feedback in order to grow. And it's tough. But, you know, if you're a comedian, you have to go play comedy clubs

where nobody knows you and it's a different group of people and you're at a disadvantage. It's not your friends and your fans in the audience. And you're going to bomb. And that helps you sharpen your knife, right? If you bomb, you really get motivated to make better content. If you get booed off the stage, you know, like, that's what the thumbs down button is. It's kind of a way for the audience to boo you. I don't know, feel soft to me. I got to be honest, I don't like it. I like being able to vote something down if I disagree with it or I think the content is lame. I would have done this as you can opt into this. So if you have a political channel, you can turn off likes and dislikes on it, right, I guess, or turn off view counts. But YouTube makes these

decisions generally in what's in their best interest and what's in alignment with their mission. And their mission is to grow the creator base and, you know, allow people to express themselves. So I kind of think like this is the best decision for them. I don't think it's the best decision for the users. So if I was thinking about the users, I like the users having this ability to give like a massive vote of no confidence. I would like to see this on other platforms as well. I like the vote down. And apparently Twitter is doing vote downs.

The way you do this kind of voting down mechanism and you show your discontent with the content, is by ratioing it. So you don't star it. You don't retweet it, but you do comment. So what that means is people don't want to amplify this tweet. They're like, yeah, this is not worthy of me sharing with my audience or me hitting the like button or harding it. But I will respond to you and tell you how bad your tweet is.

And so I do have like David Sacks as like right wing folks will come to me and ratio me. And like they love ratioing, you know, the wacky all right people who hang on Peter Thiel and David Sacks is every word and not on the other side, like the AOC, liberal, you know, Chesa Boudain, people in San Francisco.

They're all like crazy socialist, like they love to ratio you. And it's just gross. But it's a good feedback mechanism, I think. And so I like it. But the world is soft. I mean,

somebody just said in the chat room. But I think it'd be good to have a vote down. I would love to see the vote downs on Twitter. I'd love to have a list of the most voted down. By the way, I think that if these are gangs doing these voting down rings, it's very easy for YouTube to figure that out. All they have to do is look at all the voting down rings. They look at the users who voted something down like in a gang kind of way. And then they could see that they have a pattern of also doing that to other videos.

And then you just take all their votes and you do what's called in the industry neutering them. Clip, clip, they have no impact. They don't count. They think that their votes are counting because when they go to the site and they click the downvote, it goes up for them. and it shows them their vote, but it doesn't actually register it. So you kind of, it's like the madman technique. You basically make people lose their minds because they're commenting and they're voting something up or down and they see it on their version of the website. So they actually see their toxic comment. They see the vote up and down, but the public doesn't see it. So they

would have to open another browser to see that their stuff isn't up there. And so they might go for a year, you know, harassing somebody on a blog or on YouTube or whatever. And they think that their message is getting through and nobody's seeing it. It's like, they're yelling into the void. It's like sending Zod into the forbidden whatever the glass was and should rent to. All right. Next up on the program, David Benahom, who is doing some really cool gaming and NFT and avatar work for the metaverse. Stick with us. If you've read business news over the past few weeks, the only thing you can say is, wow, craziness in the markets keeps things interesting, but when it comes to your finances, sometimes less is more. And diversification is important

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Ah, man, I should have wet my Vig on that one. Okay, so here's your call to action. You can skip the wait list and get access today by going to masterworks.io slash twist. That's masterworks.com slash twist. And I've bought some shares in paintings there. I think it's a very cool service. All right. Next up on the program, David Benehound, who is a good friend of mine coming back for his second appearance on this week in startups. He is the founder of Ready Games, which I am lucky to be an investor in. They were founded in 2016. And they've recently launched a fashion metaverse NFT platform. So I thought I would

bring him on to talk about that, I guess, mini pivot or evolution of his ready gaming platform. Welcome back to the program, David. Jason, it's great to see you. I see you survived the pandemic very well. We did. We did. And are you still north of the border? I'm still in Canada, up in Montreal.

How do you like it? You've been there for five years now? I think we moved from the states four years ago. In fact, the last time I was on the show, I think we talked about the economic benefits. of taking a U.S. startup and running operations out of another country like Canada. So I think to date now, we're up to 1.5 million of government support in Canada for what we're doing. That is unbelievable. Yeah.

So every year you are able to take your research projects and get a credit, you submit that to the government from what I understand. And then you wait and see. And then they will give you a reimburse a reimbursement for a developer or three. Exactly. Exactly. And the motivation, and of course, to qualify is you have to have Canadian-based engineers to qualify. So most of the team now is in Canada. So we can get that grant money. And you were ahead of the curve. You obviously were in New York and raised money in Silicon Valley got the best of both worlds.

But now everybody is remote anyway, so it doesn't matter. So you were ahead of the curve on that. Yeah, now we're just caught up. I'm just like everyone else working from my house. Well, is the pandemic, just before we get into the product, is the, what's the state of the pandemic up there?

I know Canada was behind, was on serious lockdown and way behind on vaccines. What's the situation been this past six months or so? I think now we would be around 10th in the world of countries over a million people to be fully vaccinated. I think above the age of 12 across the country, we're like at 85, 86% with two vaccinations. Wow.

Extraordinary. People believe in science. Yeah. The rates have come down significantly here. And where they do exist, it's like 6x unvaccinated people, the ratio to vaccinated, going into hospitals or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

I think makes sense. Makes total sense. Here we got to in California, you know, the high 60s, low 70s, depending on what region. And we are the, I think, tip of the spear in terms of. compliance, but yeah, to get above 80 is just so amazing. And then we, of course, have these pills you're going to be able to take from Pfizer. These antivirals should hopefully end the pandemic if we don't have another major variant. In the meantime, people play games on their phones.

So we're pretty sound. It's pretty great. It's interesting you say that. It's always to the audience, you have to catch up because we're all friends. But it is interesting. A lot of what I'm seeing inside of companies is the companies that were getting a massive of lift from the pandemic, Coinbase, Robin Hood, DoorDash, whatever. Now it's kind of reversing and the go back to the real world is starting to benefit a little bit.

But yeah, video games have obviously had a huge bump. So tell me about the new product you created and why you added this to the product line. Obviously, we've been covering NFTs and had Roham from Dapper Labs on, OpenCes, Devin came on. And, of course, we had Meta-Covin who bought people 69. million dollar NFT. So we've been all over this for the past year. But NFTs have been, you know, mainly limited to collectibles. Yeah. And people have talked a bit about games. So here we are. You're jumping into games. So tell us what did you build and why. Yeah. So I think just to set the stage at Ready Games, we've been building tools for creators to create game content for the last

four or five years. And so our core platform was letting people create simple hyper-casual games on mobile without knowing how to code. We have over two million creators on that platform. And I'd say about a year ago, within the company, we set to ourselves, things are moving, we need to be more 3D, more grounded around multiplayer social gaming as opposed to solo. And we want to bring in the whole avatar experience as the central unit of creation. So these are like principles that we had. And the reason we had those principles is we felt that the shift in gaming is increasingly just purely social.

You know, people are going into games, major ones like Fortnite, Roblox. It's obvious that the loop there is fundamentally a social loop around the game experience. And so what we want to do was unblock creators to build social gaming experiences on mobile. incredibly hard to do because it's very expensive computationally, engineering-wise, to build, like, true back-in services

to allow synchronous real-time gaming, let alone to do it in a low-code, no-code kind of way. So strategically, we thought really reinvesting deeply into our intellectual, technical intellectual property was important. And it all had to work on mobile.

You had to be able to create this content in mobile, not on a desktop. There's 2.3 billion people on phones. And we're super excited about that audience and super serving that audience. So over the course of that last year, we probably had 10 engineers working full time, really rebuilding out the creative experience. And it culminated in two things. One is called the Ready Games Network, which is a platform that allows independent developers

to take a casual mobile game, usually a solo title, and turn it into a multiplayer social game. And then in addition to that, we created an avatar system with all. all the cosmetics that you can purchase around what's called the meta game, meaning the parts of the game that don't affect the core gameplay. And that is really hard to achieve on mobile. Mostly very kind of advanced companies have this type of stuff. So, Fortnite, for instance, has huge industry around the meta game. That's all the skins and the stuff.

It doesn't give you any advantage when you play Fortnite. It's not going to be better. There's no pay to win, but you look different. And they do hundreds of millions of dollars, as you know, in sales on that stuff. So we wanted to bring that kind of capacity into like picture a team of two, three people, creating a casual game. That's amazing. So that's what we did with ICON.

That's what launched last week. Icon is the authoring tool in the Ready Games network that allows for the creation of all the avatar cosmetics to put it, put the addressable market into perspective. It's a $40 billion spend this year just on cosmetics across all gaming platforms. Got it. $40 billion. buying digital goods. And so as we on-ramped like the creator platform for the avatar system, the ability to design clothing and shoes and scarves and all the cosmetics that go around it,

it was kind of a no-brainer to bind all of that to NFTs. And that's a deeper thing to discuss, but just high-level philosophically, that's the jump that lets you see this as an asset that you can own, as opposed to sort of use as a consumable. And from there, you know, collect and use inside of ultimately multiple games, which we'll get into, how we support it across metaverses, across titles, because that's critical to the value of buying something like that. Here's a quick video for those of you're watching on YouTube.

We'll talk over it and sportscast it. It's just a 24-second video, but what are we seeing here? Well, this is the internal avatar system. We designed a modular system where the clothing can fit on all the points. And what you see here are the different types. of avatars you can create. And just now we're in the app itself, and you're able to now customize,

that's a tailoring event. People are now tailoring the items. You can do all kinds of interesting textures. Then you can bind it to NFTs. And from there, essentially have the rules set around how the product is sold. You get 5% of the sale if you own the underlying NFT. In addition to being the creator,

as the creator, you get even more on top of it. We'll get into that in more detail, all the economics, but we have the design system, everything. Yeah. That's the really interesting part of this is if they create their avatars here or if a game creates the avatars and I'm wearing that specific, you know, clothing, when I go to my next game, I could bring it with me. If that game were to shut down, you know, Fortnite shuts down or some, you know, there's a new version, all of your skins don't come with you. You'll lose them. Or if you decide you're going to go from Minecraft. to Roblox, you're basically whatever you did in Minecraft is gone,

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lemon.com slash twist. Concept here is your avatar would be your avatar, and NFTs means you actually own it. It's on a blockchain somewhere. It's proven. And not only do you own it, and have you're the custodian of it. In other words, you're the one storing it somewhere.

You actually could sell it to somebody else and make some money. And the original person who created it would get a kickback, a royalty of some type. Correct. And I think the innovation here is making this available to people on a mobile device from soup to nuts, meaning you can compose your avatar accessory on the mobile device using our design tool. you can then set the rules whether you want it to be bound to an NFT or whether you want it to just be an in-app purchase unrelated to an NFT. You can then set the rules on the scarcity like is limited in time, limited in quantity, unlimited in both, and the chain of custody is linked to the NFT. So to your point, Jason, if the person resells the item somewhere else, you can have the derivative right as the NFT holder, the original creator.

That's the 5% I was mentioning to like perpetually be. tapping ongoing sales of the same item. So if I make a shirt and Jason, you buy it, put it on your avatar, and then at some point you decide to sell that shirt to Charlie, I as David will get 5% of yourself Charlie. And then if Charlie decides to sell it to Jennifer, I will get 5% of Charlie's sale to Jennifer. And that will go on forever. So what we start to build now is really the notion of like a master recording in music where If you own the master, that's that NFT, right?

You essentially will get that revenue on all of the transactions. Now, it makes gaming so awesome with NFTs is by definition, game objects are smart objects. They only have value in time and space, unlike, you know, perhaps a static image, right? If you buy an NFT of a static image, it comes like someone bought the first tweet that went on Twitter, for example. That's not really a smart object. It's pretty cool that you potentially bought that thing. Maybe it's not pretty cool. It's pretty 2D.

It's just a screenshot. It's the same as a JPEG, except it's got providence, right? It's got some sort of provenance. It's got providence because the person who did the screen grab says it has providence. Let's be honest, right? Like somebody else could take Jack's first tweet and sell it as an NFT, and I don't know if Jack could even stop them. Exactly. So that's what I wanted to bring up.

So in a game environment, that sort of social contract around perceived value, around the NFT is really, really different because in a game, it's an object that renders. It moves. It walks. It jumps. All this stuff happens. And as a smart object within the context of the game, you can detect whether it's a rip-off or whether it's an original actual one.

And what you start to do at that point is create status and hierarchy. And so part of why we started with fashion and gaming as a point of entry for the consumer is fashion is so awesome at creating. status and hierarchy around perceived value. Like, why is this handbag worth 10x more than that handbag? It makes sense, right? Yeah. It makes sense.

Yes. But it's not just scarcity. It's also the brand equity behind it, you know. And so we believe that applying that kind of modality to digital and virtual goods makes a ton of sense, right? Why is this avatar scarf more precious if it's coming through the NFT process versus is someone tried to rip it off. Now, game developers, because now game developers can make money off these cosmetic cells,

become aligned with the NFT owners to signal to other game players whether someone's wearing a rare, collectible NFT item in the game. Smart object. You can do that. Why would the developer do that? Because they want people to retrade and sell in their metaverse. And the way they're going to create more incremental perceived value is by honoring and treasuring the real versions of things. And because again, games are smart. They're smart objects in everything in a game,

unlike, say, Twitter, you can generate that layer of intelligence. And everyone's interest is a line. The whole value chain agrees that we should do this. So it's very juicy. What is the chances that a major game would want to open up and support something like this? Or is this going to be something that'll be a ground up movement and take a couple of years? Because if Fortnite is making 100% of their skins, do they really want people retrading? them or do they want to control it? Is it realistic to get a Roblox or a, you know, um, Minecraft or a Fortnite to be involved in this? Or is this going to be like an indie movement that grows up? And is there an open standard here? So two questions. Is there an open standard here?

If so, who's defining it? Because that seems to be important as well. If I make it in your icon, you know, is it going to be compatible? And can I make a game not on the ready platform, but have the NFTs work? All those questions come to mind. So let's break that question. As you pointed out, it's two. Yeah. Let's start with the larger, like sort of the market adoption question. Yeah.

So our focus, so the things that you describe tend to be large console or PC games. So we intentionally focused on mobile. We intentionally focused on building a creator network on mobile. And now what's interesting with mobile is there's a huge long tail of dev teams building on mobile. And so part of our initial adoption curve is just getting these smaller dev teams to bring in the ready games platform. into their games to open up this monetization. At the same time, let's just bring in the creators. Let's get lots of creators creating. And we think that's actually how you get this flywheel really moving. And you solve a lot of these cross-game issues, which gets to the second question,

which is like, what's the open standard? How does this work? So by working with these smaller devs, you can quickly sort of hash through these really important questions, solve them, meaning we want it to be really open. We want it to be portable. At which point, I think the later and middle adopters are going to be those bigger companies that you just mentioned. In the end, it's about growing the gross domestic product of this ecosystem, Ritlark. Right. Right. And if you get a really big GDP, then why wouldn't a Roblox eventually cooperate?

Why wouldn't a Fortnite cooperate? You know, they can still have control potentially editorial standards, terms of service. Of course, nobody wants you wearing certain kinds of things that are offensive. Okay, fine. But within that limitation, let's grow this GDP from $40 billion a year, of cosmetic game sales worldwide. Have maybe $500 billion one day. Think about it. It could go there in the next

five or ten years. Silly question, but doing this inside of games is clearly such a huge win because there's actually a purpose to it. If you believe gaming has a purpose, I do. It's entertainment and it's social.

I wonder, though, if you're spending all the time building these tools, could you also not just make a tool that people use on mobile to design seekers and clothing that become NFTs that just sell for that reason. And then somebody who was a fashion student at FIT in New York who wanted to start selling their designs could start selling them and put them on opency and other platforms. Yes.

Yeah. The answer is yes. That's what we want to. That is what's happened. So we are releasing the next phase of the creator platform at the end of this month. And what we're starting to work towards is you can. You can go into ICON, you can design a line of clothing there, and then you can actually both sell that clothing outside of ICON.

So as you make clothes, there will be a kind of unique hyperlink for each digital virtual good you create. That unique hyperlink is embeddable in Twitter and Insta, anywhere that embeds a URL. And then the callback will have the buy process directly built into the pop-up, which means you can be on Insta. You can look at a cool pair of digital shoes. buy them on Insta, complete the transaction. We could theoretically even use like Shopify or something.

Yeah. Do it, right? But then on our back end, the NFT piece is done, which then brings you to like, well, where do you take these things? Right. And so let's talk about that for a minute. So the cool thing with gaming is there is a file format that actually is the file format, like the equivalent of a JPEG or a GIF that's a universal file format.

It's called .fbx. If you work in gaming, it's often what you're dealing with. It's essentially the file format that allows for 3D objects with potentially motion, et cetera, to all be encapsulated in an industry standard file format. So when you work on Blender, for example, you can export what you make as an FBX. So we can, of course, take all the metadata related to the object that you've created, encapsulate that around the object, and then if you have a translator, you can theoretically bring that object into another metaverse.

why the translator is important is that the proportions in one metaverse and another will be different. Literally, like, what is one meter? Because everything tends to be in the metric system. Like, what does one meter mean in Roblox versus one meter in Fortnite? They're not going to be exactly the same thing.

However, you can build like a Rosetta Stone translator where you know that like a meter in Fortnite is like this fraction of a meter in Roblox. And you can post-process the FBX file to then go from being a Roblox compatible file to say a Fortnite compatible. file. And then you want to create an open ecosystem where everyone's incentivized to contribute

to these translators. So if you want to bring a Metaverse in it to be compatible with this type of reality, you just need to build the translator. And let's just take the FBX file as the unit. So that FBX wouldn't be on a blockchain somewhere. Your NFT would be on there and then that would then go to your centralized server or something to translate it and you can provide that as a service. How do you make money on all of this?

Or is it just something to build the ecosystem in the hopes? that your people pay for dev tools. Yeah. So we make them in two ways. When we create our own content, obviously, we can bind them to NFTs and we are an NFT holder. We can also create NFT auctions, which we're going to start doing probably also late November, where essentially we're taking the hashtag that can correspond to a collection

of things, and we're going to be auctioning off those hashtags. those hashtags become storefronts essentially. So if you're looking for, you know, hashtag fall fashion, hypothetically, around Avatar Cosmetics, anyone who wants to affiliate their item to that hashtag, because there's presumably a large audience consuming that hashtag, that NFT owner behind hashtag fall fashion, we'll be getting 5% of any object that's sold through that hashtag. Got it. So now we're creating incentives to start putting...

objects into collections around hashtags. Those hashtags themselves are bound to NFTs. So we would be behind some of those hashtags to answer your question about the economics. What would, what impact will AR and VR have on all of this? And certainly these objects will be able to exist on, you know, or these NFT-based 3D objects will be able to exist in VR AR, I assume? Yeah, exactly, because we go back to that FBX file. You know, now you're mapping the content onto the, you know, the AR, the sort of data points that the AR camera is getting. And right now, just to be clear with the AR, it's mostly around the human face. It's not so great at the body.

So there's some real limitations with AR, which is why we're really happy that we're working just purely core on the phone, you know, not dealing right now with AR. Right? The phones aren't powerful enough to do body tracking and stuff like that. You need a motion capture suit for that. But your theoretical question, Jason, is correct. This stuff would be compatible with VR and AR. Because again, you're back to that Rosetta Stone. Like, just translate it.

Yeah. Translate it to wrap around this. So if you're using rec room or something like that, it's possible that, you know, this outfit that I bought in a ready game, I could just have it in my rec room, VR playing ping pong and I'm wearing that shirt. But in AR, from what you're saying, yeah, we saw, I think in Zucks, preview that they're working on getting your face a little bit better. Yes.

That's the name of their new VR headset. I don't know. There was a name to it. Like a $1,000 one. Anyway, they have a more expensive one coming out that is supposedly got a view of your face. I guess they have a camera on your face of some type. And they really want to get your smirk and your eyebrow raise perfect so that when you're at the poker table in Oculus, you're going to...

Project Cambria. That's what it was. Project Cambria. is it going to be their high-end one that does face reading and get your expression. So one thing that I guess that's a philosophical point of difference, right? You know, in Internet 1.0, meaning, you know, up until like 2005, the whole premise was you're anonymous, you can be anyone you want to be.

There was a famous cartoon of a dog at the computer and the punchline was like on the internet, nobody knows your dog, right? And then there was this innovation starting around 2005 with things like Facebook where everything became linked to personal identity. Everything had to be you, you, you, you, you. And the reason why is that an internet 2.0, it became about platforms and ad sales. And ad sales are enhanced by knowing it's really Jason Calacanus.

Yeah. Well, we're now moving into Web 3. And Web 3 is not going to be about personal identity. It's going to be a return back to, in some aspects, of Web 1, in that it's the restoration of you can be anybody you want to be in Web 3. You don't have to be yourself. So do your question about, like, oh, the eyebrow tracking is so, perfect in this metaverse.

Who gives shit? Right. Do you really want to be you? Isn't that so boring? Yeah. I don't want to be me all the time. I want to be something else. You can be a tiger or something, yeah.

I want to be a dragon, you know, and I'll be a dragon, by golly. And so this obsession, this mania with, you know, rendering the real you over and over again makes sense in an ad-supported business. Because, huh, you know, guess what? In this new world, we're removing from platforms to protocols in Web3. It's like these platform players, are terrified and they want to bring everything back

into the real identity. Look how picture perfect this thing is. No, thank you. No, thank you. I mean, there is a time for you to know who the actual real person is. LinkedIn. Perfect. Like, sure. You know, we're hiring somebody who's a developer or whatever. We kind of need to know who they are. I mean, it's

also arguable because I've heard stories in the pandemic of developers taking two or three jobs and working on them concurrently at three different computers, which I think is super brilliant and crazy. Yeah. But yeah, you know, it's interesting when I gave my commentary on the Metaverse, I said, listen, this is like any developer who puts one line of code into Zuckerberg's world is sealing their own fate.

This is our chance to crack the Facebook closed ecosystem. It should all be open standards. You should not support Oculus. You should not support anything meta related. And I hate the fact that he's using meta because now every time we use Metaverse. Yeah, I know. It accrues to him, which is what he does. he just steals everybody else's innovations and spends all his time growing them and locking them down.

But I'm curious your thoughts on when you saw him pivot the entire company to that, that is in one way a real recognition that this is serious because he's a serious, you know, smart guy with a lot of unlimited resources, basically. But it's also kind of in a way like heartbreaking that he wants to just steal the whole thing again. well, I just think the reality isn't in technology is that very, very large tech companies have a certain shelf life. And you can look at something like IBM, which was an amazing company from literally the 1920s into the 1990s, like an unbelievable amount of time, right? And so I think there is real fear at places like Facebook that, you know, they're very tied into a certain thing. and it's not unprecedented for their time to come.

Yeah. And so I think what he did with the meta change and all that is partly a real recognition, you know, that the time potentially is coming. Yeah, I mean, look at AOL and Yahoo. They were just such huge footprints in the industry. And then AOL and Yahoo essentially, you know, for all intents and purposes, don't exist to most consumers as actual brands. They still have a billion users between them, you know, going to their various sites. but... So just to be clear, Jason,

when we say that time is coming, it's because the blockchain and the way that we've taken that sort of intellectual property of the blockchain and now started to apply it to things like smart objects is allowing for a distributed internet

to appear that's two-way that doesn't require a platform to authenticate. So the reason these platforms exploded between 2005 and now is because the internet was essentially a one-way thing. Like internet 1.0

is you go fetch that web page but the person giving you that web page doesn't really get anything in return for that. It wasn't a two-way system. And the platform ecosystem, you're no longer really fetching a web page. You're fetching a Facebook post and it's in the Facebook ecosystem. It is two-way in the limited way that Facebook can make it two-way. And Facebook can then be like taking a toll on that whole two-way reality. Now, with the blockchain situation, it can become two-way and distributed.

And then you kind of wonder, well, once that happens, who wants to be locked into a platform? Right. it's awesome. Yeah, I mean, if all of the tweets in the world or photos on Instagram or just on a blockchain somewhere, you just kind of like dip your bucket into this flowing data on some network and you just take a big scoop of, you know, here's a bunch of photos about Hawaii and they're not on anybody's particular server, they're on all servers. Well, what you're getting at, I think Jason is like this other big strategic challenge

with NFTs in the blockchain, which is if what you say is true, then one of the big challenges is the user experience to kind of make sense of all this stuff for everyday people and have it appear in an easy digestible way. It's different than building the underlying infrastructure of wallets and the blockchain, da-da-da, like, okay, great, that's hard and it's being done. But now there's this other next layer of hardness. It's kind of like what Apple tried to solve with the personal computer, very similar, which is how do you take this underlying tech and make it approachable for everyday people?

That's what we're trying to do at Ready Games. That's what we're so interested in is to say, look, this is something anyone can use or do. And that's why the phone is such an important point of entry right now, because that is the most casual computing device that we have in our hands. Yeah, and it's quite possibly going to become the repository of your assets. Like, it's going to be your wallet. It already is to a certain extent. I started paying, you could sort of see it on your watch or on your, I don't know if you use Apple Pay on your watch. But at some point, I was like, oh, I have Apple Pay set up.

and I have an Apple credit card. I said yes to that. And, oh, I can just, I started using an Apple watch again. And I was like, oh, when I'm in Italy, I can just bang this against the little thing and get my gelato. Like, this was incredible.

I don't have to take my wallet out. And that's what this NFTs are going to do, right? You're going to just have these things stored on your wallet or on some provider app. There's another really cool thing they do for kids, which is totally overlooked, which is worth just unpacking for a minute. So I have two children. and you have a child.

Three. Three now. Sorry. And my oldest is 14. I think years are even younger than mine. And so we all face the same thing as parents, which is kids on social media. Yep. You know, yeah, they want to go on TikTok.

They want to go on Insta. And you're like, no way. And I'm like, no way. But why do we say no way? And the answer is because they have to be who they are. The financial model Zuck put on all of us was you have to be you. So you have to be you at the age of nine, at the age of 12? Right.

Well, that's super toxic. say to all those people don't do it. The Facebook files that the Wall Street Journal released had really scary information about how Facebook knows how bad this is for kids. But the core of why it's bad is that it's the kid's real identity. That's that internet 2.0 platform reality. So imagine for kids in Internet 3. You can create any identity you want. You can look like anything. If you're a boy, you can be a girl. If you're a girl, it can be a boy. If you can be non-binary, you can change the tone of your voice. You can actually create a persona. You can create a whole social wrap. You can be an object. You can be a hamburger. You can be an object.

Yeah. How, so you can start to participate in some of the most fun aspects of digital culture as a kid without getting necessarily the rejection that comes from literally like, how do you look at the age of 12? Oh, you look ugly. Do you look like a supermodel or not? Are you an Adonis or not? Yeah. Do you have a photo, it's demented. It's like, do you have like some Photoshop team taking your kids photos and airbrushing them before they put it online like the Kardashians do?

Exactly. So now in Internet 3, all that stuff can happen by building or forging your own identity. And then what's so cool is as you build your assets and create your identity, you own them. Like, you can actually own them as the creator. Now, they may not be worth anything down the road or they could be worth something. But at the end of the day, they can never be taken away from you the way Facebook could theoretically take away your profile. That's the thing I really like. I mean, if you think about it when we had blogs and RSS feeds and even podcasting to this day, everybody is trying to to steal podcasting and rip it out from under us and be like, oh, no, we'll host your files, we'll take your RSS feed. And people forget, like the blogging, which was the, you know, predated Twitter and Facebook, all of that blogging in RSS that Dave Weiner created and various people and the attachments to it, so much great content and companies were built on it.

Twitter was basically RSS. Facebook was RSS. Podcasting was RSS plus, and, you know, an embed attached file. All these things were based on open standards of the web. And then people basically used to be able to have an RSS feed of Twitter handles. I don't know if you could still get an RSS feed of a Twitter handle, but you used to be able to subscribe to my Twitter handle in your RSS reader.

It was pretty cool. And that's what I would love to see come back. It's this open platform where the data can just be reconstructed anywhere. And that's why everybody's like, oh, we'll put this pixel into your, let us serve up your files. We'll tag all your users. I don't want anybody who listens to my podcast to be tagged or resold or repackaged and advertised to and marketed to.

It's just gross. And it's so nice that this is the thing I love about the crypto space. I don't like the grifty nature of it and the market manipulation stuff. But I do like the open standards. And I like the fact that it's decentralized. But you do point out, man, this is going to be hard to make it easy to use. RSS was very hard to use. Yes.

And the reason Twitter became so great. Right, yeah. And that's why I love the constraint of the phone to make it easy to use on the phone. Because if you can achieve that with one hand on a smartphone, pretty cool, especially with a person who wouldn't self-affiliate as like an early adopter techno geek. I think just creating an, or maybe this is something that somebody in your ecosystem can just create based on what you've already built. But if somebody just made a sneaker designer that let you print them to NFTs and you could just design sneakers, because you know, their whole community. That would be such an amazing way to create NFTs,

and then you might inspire another million people to design sneakers. That person becomes famous, and then their sneakers make it to the real world, and somebody will actually make them. And, you know, Nike says, I want to make those actual sneakers. That's possible, but then put this in your pipe and smoke it for a second.

The nature of a virtual sneaker is actually different than a real sneaker. It can do different things. You can fly. And so this designer of the sneaker can do things you can never do in the real world. I can have the texture on the sneaker potentially be animated and move. Right. Awesome. Right? I can have that texture animate and move differently when I'm in proximity to someone else wearing a certain kind of sneaker. Yeah. Whoa. Maybe now when we dance together

in that metaverse wearing these sneakers that sense each other, they're going to start grooving and pulsating. And there's a designer that designed that and then thought about how when there's three people, it's different than two and four and this and that. And that. And all of a sudden, you're like, wait a minute, to own this virtual good is meaningful because these are not just like sneakers. These are virtual sneakers. Yeah, there's like elephant swords. It's like it's like stinging the sword from one of the rings that glows blue when their orcs are near and you're like. You know, it's like you have superpowers embedded into them.

They each do something unique. I would like to have sneakers that had screens on them. That's got to come too soon. You know, I could design a shirt in the Metaverse. That's like I'm wearing this black t-shirt right. I know one can see it who's not watching me, but I'm wearing this t-shirt. And I could certainly have the front of my t-shirt via billboard or a video feed or something. Incredible.

So now what's happening is you're composing a smart object as the creator. And so the value of that NFT behind that object can now extend in all kinds of other ways because you can then potentially remix that sneaker design. you could put in the NFT the right to remix it, meaning another secret designer could take some of that. Like the Yacht Club apes are doing where they do those mutations. So if you say, hey, you can take this and for $10, or whatever you sell it for, I get half, you can, the NFT creator could say, yeah, you can modify this if I get that.

How does the IP rights work? Who owns the IP in these objects? Because my understanding of the BoredApe Yacht Club is, when you buy that, you get the rights to the IP, And so if you wanted to make t-shirts with your board a-up on it or the mutation of it, but I think Cryptopunks, you don't get the right to it, which sounds dumb because those are selling for a lot of money. So those rights all go into the NFT. You can set those rules.

There's no mandatory thing. So in our context, you can basically set the rule whether is this remixable, which means you're kind of allowing someone to take it, remix it. But then you might still get a derivative revenue off of it. So where would that make sense? if I designed a pair of like reactive sneakers, and that took some real thought into designing that, how you do that, well, then someone else wants to make a pair of reactive sneakers,

but who's not into like designing that kind of intelligence, they'd have a huge incentive to remix that component. Start on second base. Yeah, you're halfway done. You don't need to restart, recreate the wheel, everybody. And you think about it, like Creative Commons. You have people who are putting their photography out there or video clips out there with Creative Commons,

and they just want to link back. Other people don't care. Other people say you can use it, but not for commercial. I mean, I think, I wonder if anybody's really taken what happens in Creative Commons and done an intellectual exercise for how that would work with NFTs and derivative rights and the smart contracts of, you know, what percentage gets kicked back and all those things. So we would support that because Creative Commons is a contract in its own right. Yeah.

And so you just encapsulate the Creative Commons rules into the NFT rules. And Presto Magico, you have an NFT that's essentially creative commons license. Yeah. People forget about Creative Commons and what a great movement that was. Really, a lot of what you see power today, when you see like beautiful images on the web and in different apps, it's happening because of this Creative Commons licensing that was established decades ago. Yeah. Well, the open source movement really is affiliated to that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it was the intellectual property version of open source. And now, you know, this serverless or decentralized NFTs and everything just is a really interesting. potential path for society. Listen, continue success with it. Where can people learn more or play with the stuff? So if you go to the app store and type in icon avatar fashion, you'll certainly

hit the app for icon. You can also go to the readygames.com. The readygames.com. Yeah, I have to put the the in. Or I search on my app, sir. Yeah, the Facebook. Or I search for icon avatar fashion.

You'll hit it. You'll hit it. Exactly. Beautiful. Yeah. And I would say to anyone out there who's a creator who's interested in potentially coming on the platform or doing some early creators coming on now, you can reach out to me. I'm not hard to find. Yeah, I'm guessing David at the games. Yeah, generally get the first thing. People will find me. It's all good. All right. Listen, great to see you, brother. And Jason, it's awesome, brother. Thank you. Be well. All right. Welcome to another edition of OK, Boomer. And by another edition, I mean the second.

Rachel reporting is with me again for our weekly Friday segment where she as a member of Gen Z explains to me as a member of Gen X and a representative of boomers everywhere. And we talk about how Gen Z looks at the world. Welcome back to the program. Rachel reporting. How are you, Rachel reporting. Hi, I'm good. Sorry if you hear my dogs in the background there.

It's quite right. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Everybody's working from home. and if you don't love dogs there's something wrong with you. Dogs rule. All right. So last week you had

this guy Ziod. He's a CEO of Jove Consulting. Talked about a lot of weird words. Episode 1320, if you want to look it up by number in your podcast player. Rachel, what was the feedback on social media

or from your guest or generally the fans of the show and the Slack and other places? Definitely in the Slack. I got some messages. It was kind of mixed between people asking me how I thought the interview was versus them giving me their own opinion. And I think some people were kind of surprised to hear his point of view because I don't necessarily think that Gen Z people are very open about how they would run a company. Because, to be quite frank, I don't think there are very many Gen Zs that are founders or CEOs that are that public yet.

Just because we are a little bit younger of a generation, I would consider like on Twitter, I normally see more like millennial founders. So I got a lot of people in my Slack that were older than me coming in and just being like, is this really, is this really what like all of Gen Z thinks? Like, is he a representation of like the whole generation? And I don't think he is a representation necessarily of the entire generation. But I do think he had interesting points to make about to consulting his own company. So what do what did you think of the interview when you look at it as a member of Gen Z? And he comes on.

And let's face it, he presented a version of Gen C that I think, that they need to be coddled. They're emotionally weak. They need to get credit for their emotional labor, whatever that is, and they need to partake in self-care and generally, you know, be really protected from getting bumped and bruised. What was your take on the interview and his take on Gen Z? Yeah.

So I definitely see where he's coming from. I think of bringing politics to work. that's just not something that I would do personally. I very much compartmentalize my work life versus like my life at home. And that doesn't mean like I'm making all my social media private. Like I still follow coworkers and things like that. But during the hours of nine to five or whatever hours we're working, the conversations that I'm having with my peers aren't really being about,

aren't really focused on what I'm doing like during my side of work. So that's, I think, where we differed the most. He specifically was like the anti-coin base, which is like you have to bring your politics. You have to bring your whole self to work. And when I hear you have to bring your whole self to work, I'm like, do you really? Like, does the person who works, you know, at the drive-through window at in and out or does your accountant, you know, when they're doing your taxes, have to bring their whole self to work? And by extension, impose that on the coworkers and the customers, right? and you could just be an accountant and do a pretty good job at that.

And like, if I'm an accountant and I'm in New York and I love the Red Sox, like, you don't need to put that in everybody's face. Or you live in Trump County and you're a Democrat and you got to bring like your go Hillary stuff to, you know, work every day. Like it's unnecessary. So I actually, I was thinking about it. And the amount of like hours you're working during your life are extremely high. So I do think, I don't necessarily think I'm bringing my entire self to work because obviously I just don't think I would be as productive during my day if I talk to my co-workers about how much, for example, like I love the new Taylor's Switch album that just dropped. Like that's not a productive work conversation. But at the same time, like, I'm spending so many hours a day trying to create quality work. I would hope those people that are also trying to create quality work are people that I could see as friends as well as co-workers. Obviously, that's a lot different than like my friends outside of work. But, I see what he means how you would want like the people you're working with to not just be people that are engaging in your life nine to five that like you just deal with. You want them to be people

that you can have a conversation with and like hang out with. And here's the right part. Like you can pick and choose that like very selectively like when I went to work in the 90s, you went to work because you needed money and you had a skill. So you traded a skill for and labor for money. And money. It had nothing to do with like my emotional state or my emotional labor or being validated. Like they needed to get done and I had the skill to do it. And we transferred money for the task, essentially. So maybe people, I don't know. When I hear this, I think people need to grow up a little bit and like your emotional labor. Like, what does this even mean emotional labor? What does that mean to you? And did that part of the, that's, I think that was the part that I kind of was just like,

enough. I don't know. It's like, I'm so not regretting starting this. It's like every week I'm going to get to have this moment, although not this week. But the emotional labor thing, speak to that. Like, is that something you believe in? And explain to the audience what that really means. So he explained it as emotional labor is kind of the feeling of, you know, when you break up with your significant other and you have that feeling like, oh my gosh, that was a lot of hard work, even though it wasn't really work at all. It was just emotionally very taxing and how feelings like that can occur in like the work setting and how it's your employer's job and kind of see over that.

I don't necessarily think it's my employer's job to dictate if I'm happy or not because for me that's just like a personal preference that I have. I feel very strong that I dictate my own happiness and I'm in control of how I react to things. But at the same time, I think being as a Gen Z, I know very well that we have so many options for work. So if you're not happy at your employers, you can quit. And there is a time.

of other opportunities out there, I think, especially with the internet and how savvy we are to make just as much money as you are in any job on your own. So I think it puts employers at a really weird place where it's kind of like, it's not your job to make me happy. But I think that employers need to know that if somebody, especially at Gen Z, isn't happy in their role, it is so much easier for them to quit because of the opportunities that are now around. I like the way you've explained that. Yeah. I mean, the, if it's not fun to come to work and you have other options, you are well within your right to take another option or the one I really respect is I'll see if I can make a go of this myself and be a consultant or something.

Or I'll make less money. I'll lower my burn rate and not have to work as much and I'll travel more. So I kind of respect that. The emotional labor, I see, I've heard it explained as what you're talking about is like the emotional toll going to work has on you. Okay. Got it. Like we don't want to be sad at work.

We don't necessarily need work to make us happy and, you know, joyful. We have other things in our life to make it joy. But it shouldn't make us bummed and hate our lives and be like, FML. And so I kind of get that too. And I agree with that. I think as long as you don't hate your job, I always thought, like, I've had jobs that I hated. And now at this point in life, I'm like, as long as I don't hate my job, I like it. I don't know if that's a low bar.

Popular opinion. But as long as I'm like content with my job, I feel like that's a really good situation. I think that's a good baseline. The thing you really should say is how much am I learning and how much? how much responsibility am I being given? I looked at every job as am I learning, is my network growing, and am I increasingly getting more responsibility from Mike Savino or Elliot Cook or whoever was managing me at the time?

I only had like two jobs, I think. Yeah. That's all I cared about. Can you give me more responsibly? Can you give me, am I learning? And look, you've been here for a couple of months. You're doing a great job. And learning.

I always thought of it. Actually, it's funny that you mentioned that because I, during the pandemic, like I think most 2020 grads I applied to grad school because everybody under the sun applied to grad school because they waived all the test requirements. So it was it was really easy and they waived fees to apply to grad school. So my thing was if I can get a job where I'd learn more than I would going to the grad program that I got accepted to, then I would skip on my grad program and I would take the job. And so far it's worked out. As opposed to going in debt. And so it depends if I got a scholarship or not.

So it's always like, you know, you got to think about it. But you have living expenses too, I guess. Oh, so. Yeah. So, but you have living expenses in both cases. So yeah, unless you live, you know, unless you get, yeah, unless you have an allowance or a trust fund. Yeah.

So the other interpretation of emotional labor is like the management of your own emotional state and the weight of managing the emotional, a group of people you're around, whether it's an organization, a family, you know, or a workplace. So the idea would be the fact that you kept everybody emotionally content at work and you contain your emotions and that was labor.

Like just the dealing with one's own emotion as a product of labor, I don't know that there is actually, I'm trying to think out loud here about a job where like you managing your emotion is the job, maybe acting. I don't know exactly what. A therapist. Yeah. Yeah. They've got to be empathetic and listen.

Yeah. But also they got to. So anyway, emotional labor, I think is like a weird word. But hey, listen, if there's a group of. Gen Z who are out like that. I think it is important for Founders Nunes. So I think great success on the first one. Today's is very good, by the way, because I think we're going in an opposite direction.

And I don't know if this is intentional in your reporting because you've been picking who you want to speak with. And I'm giving you that challenge of, hey, find us something interesting to talk about each week. But this is somebody who is doing the opposite of crying in their coffee and getting into their emotions and self-care and bringing their politics to work. This is somebody who's just taking action and putting points on the board in a very impressive way. Tell us about today's guest.

Yeah. So Emily Herrera, she is a 22-year-old Northeastern university student, and she is just super incredible. She is the founder of a Gen Z-focused syndicate and women-focused syndicate. It's called The Virus, and I was just blown away by her. I actually found her from reading a Business of Fashion article, which is not necessarily an article that I even read for work, I read it like on my free time. This woman was so well connected to any other Gen Z that had venture capital in their LinkedIn bio.

She was connected with them. Wow. And I have never been to Boston. She goes to Northeastern University. I don't even remember connecting with her. And I was like, okay, this is, this is crazy. And I got talking with her and I just had a really good conversation. I was absolutely blown away by her.

And I think she also explained how her syndicated syndicate operated very well. I was confused how somebody my age could be an accredited investor. And I think that was a really interesting part of the conversation that she covered for everybody. Yeah, I was really engaged in this one. And I was super impressed with the just relentless drive to get stuff done that she showed. And her fearlessness, the opposite of being, you know, a victim or passive in your life. This is a person who just takes action relentlessly. and I really was genuinely impressed with her passion and her performance.

So let's go to the tape and we'll talk about this interview next week. If you would like to reach out to our producers, producers at this weekinstartups.com. You can reach all three of our producers, including Rachel and she hangs out in the Slack room as well. This week in Startups.com slash Slack. And you can slide into her DMs over there appropriately. people are DMing you now and giving you story ideas. So that's great.

And this will take a little bit of pressure off me with the show because we're five days a week. Every Friday we get to have Rachel reporting on something millennial. Do you have an idea of what week three and four of this will be like? You got anything you want to preview or any, I do. I do. Okay. Would you have anything you want to also get feedback on? So tell us.

I would love to get feedback on the types of questions I'm asking because I'm not sure if this is the direction that people are interested in. So I think for both of them, I touched a lot on being a Gen Z and I also touched a lot on their own companies. Which one are people more interested in? Are they more interested in the companies in which they are founding? Or are they more interested in them operating just as a Gen Z?

So I think the discrepancy between those two things would be, that would be great feedback. But the two guests that were recommended to me are actually mentioned in the episode. So I'm going to wait for people to listen to the episode. Because Emily actually mentioned two people that I'd like to have out of the future. If you have something about, Gen Z that you find interesting. Just, yeah, email producers at or, you know, jump in the slack and you can give us a tip. All right, there you have it. Here's Rachel's interview and we'll see you next week. Hello, everybody. Rachel reporting here. Today I'm talking to Emily Herrera. She is a 22-year-old Northeastern University student and was previously an analyst at Contrary Capital and is currently an analyst at BBG Ventures. Outside of her positions in VC, she is ingrained in the Gen ZVC.

community, including her own recently launched investment community and syndicate called the WIRUS. The WIRUS is focused on Gen Z women, which I'm a part of, which is very cool. I myself am a part of a ton of different online communities and Slack channels for those interested or a part of venture capital, and many of them are exclusive to venture capital. In fact, Emily and I are part of the same one called Gen ZVC over on Slack, which was really cool. I noticed that in my research. And in being in these groups, this isn't really something special if these are pretty giant groups, especially the one that Emily and I are both a part of, as much as I would like to say that this is unique for our age. I've noticed that the general interest around VC has definitely started to increase. And a survey from Charles Schwab found that 16% of new retail investors during the pandemic were actually Gen Z. This year, growth of Gen Z coming into the investing world must be impacting what companies are receiving fundings for and how we, VCs are seeing these companies. So I would love to dive into that a little bit more with you, Emily. Thank you so much for being on. Yeah, thank you for having me. This is such an exciting

opportunity. I think it's like the new interest in investors in our age group has just been so wonderful. It's such like a warm acceptance of a group like this. And I think that this is such a good opportunity to just highlight a lot of those voices. So thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you for being on. I guess that is a great place to start. So how has Gen Z actually shifted the investing landscape? Yeah. So I think Gen Z's partially because, one, they're digitally native and they come from things at a digitally native landscape, they look at things on how they could be created rather than changed. So innovation is really coming from ground up rather than thinking about previous frameworks, looking at frameworks specifically for VC and how they could make it a lot more

equitable and a lot more accurate according to, especially if it's consumer, ways that they can really reach to consumers first and then get insights directly from communities, from the consumers, and then taking those insights and investing off of those. So I think it's a really different perspective. I find that similar to just looking at everything from a beginner's mindset, that's something that specifically in VC hasn't really been touched for a lot of years. So it's really, it's really refreshing. So I think partially, it's not just because they're young, but it's because they look at everything from beginner's mindset, even if they know someone in the industry or even if they think that they know something, I just think that that's a mindset

that's never really going to change as we get older. I completely agree with you. I think having a beginner mindset in any field is very important because you see problems that arise, that people that have maybe been in that space for quite a while. And this goes for, like I said, any field. But you see these issues that have been around for quite a long time start to become more on your radar. Like, I've noticed that sometimes new hires when they come into a workplace tend to notice like things wrong with the company a little bit quicker than the people that I've been there and were already established because it's just kind of getting like, like you said, like a fresh new pair of eyes. And do you think, I guess, like with all of Gen Z that we are necessarily investing in different

things than the generations that were previously ingrained in the venture capital community? Totally. So this is something that I go back and forth on a lot for just myself. There is a new idea of investing where it's investing based off of morals, investing off of principles, investing off of personal mission. And that puts a lot of responsibility on a consumer or a community member or just an individual to really get to know themselves and figure out what they're passionate about and what would be the success metrics that they would be comfortable with in investing or even putting their social capital towards or even just their visual attention on social media towards. So I think that Gen Z kind of has a head start because they're super aware

of their interest and they're used to the idea of them being curators. And I think that they know a lot of the value of just not just putting their dollar, but also putting their words and actions towards anything. So I think that that's something that's going to end up trickling up towards some older individuals. Like my mom is now like really excited to get passionate about a lot of different topics. And that's just something. And being vocal about that is something that's a little bit newer.

I think that the hardest thing in being, I think, of more of a younger investor right now is sticking to that moral principle rather than investing just for immediate profit. But I think that's really a long-term investor because what I'm finding from individuals in our age group who are investing is that they're going to put their whole heart into making sure that that founder or that team or that mission is going to succeed. And that could be tapping into their own personal networks, their mentors networks, getting their friends involved, going on to online communities, creating communities for something that they're passionate about. So I think that it's a long-term game that they really are not going to stop until those kind of. companies in their portfolio are successful, or at least their missions are brought to point. So that makes a lot of sense, especially considering what you said when you were on, in the Business of Fashion article that I read where I actually found you off that article to have

you on the show. Oh, thank you. But in that article, you said, quote, the Wires Herrera stated that the syndicate is aggressively focused on any DTC company to prove community retention, attention, and adoration before considering anything else. And adoration in this case, I'm assuming, kind of means respect. And from this, I have to ask you, like, do you only invest in companies that you respect and care for, or are you willing to go against your own ideologies if you see something worth investing in? Yeah, it's such a good question.

And I think as we're getting a lot more excited about Gen Z women as a focus, rather than being investors or being founders or being consumers, I've had to have a mental shift of just investing in Gen Z women versus investing in companies that are going to create an ideal Gen Z women experience. And I can solidly say for the rest of my investing career, I'm not going to put money or put human capital or attention behind any company or founder that I don't, I wouldn't sit down and have a chat with. That's, I think, one, just a lot of my personality, I just grew up like that. But two, I'm finding that that's a pretty common theme amongst other investors right now.

And also just individuals as consumers. It's the same thing as if you're going to repost something. People in our age group are more likely to go and check out their profiles and see who they're associated with. And that goes back to just a hyper awareness of someone's identity that I think our age group has. But I think right now I'm personally at a standstill for wires because I'm trying to figure out, you know, there are so many wonderful D to C companies that hit pain points. of different facets of being a Gen Z woman, but then there are also the facets of being a digitally native woman or a digitally native individual and really researching, like, what is

the actual difference? And so I'm finding that there are two interests that are pain points for a lot of digitally native women. One is a pre-professional to professional transition. So that's like really early future of work stuff. There are so many new jobs and there are so different communities. And how the heck would the majority? majority of people even know things like, you know, contrary dorm room, what the syndicate is,

Gen ZVC, like, how do we actually get everyone on the same page? The gig economy, like, you know, how do you showcase to a professional that you know how to do content or, you know, your passions in an appropriate way that can really match, even like an early manager to an early career individual. So you see trends like that with TikTok making their TikTok resumes. A lot of companies I'm looking at like home from college or pineapple or ladder. Those are companies that I'm really interested in. And then second part being alternatives to investment. So that could be things like how would someone who's super hyperconnected,

start a syndicate and create a thesis? Things like Republic, which is an investment platform where you can back a couple of dollars behind. You're totally where I know. I find like a lot of people in our age group are aware of things like Republic, which is something that my parents definitely didn't think about. you know, when they were 20, 23, and then also finally being like crypto, you know, like how do you, what even is that going to be? Like, how would I invest in a Dow? What does that

even mean? Is that actually going to give me any value? But these are all opportunities to really curate an individual's portfolio if it's about their passions or just monetarily. So those are my two personal interests on creating an ideal Gen Z women's experience. But apart from that, being in business and fashion, I'm also like very, very bullish on making sure that individuals who are creating companies that are going to take an individual's money really care about the people who are buying from them and can relate to them and are intentional about their influence now on a community who can skyrocket their career immediately. And that's the stuff that I'm really passionate about. And everyone in WIRIS loves. That's awesome. It's funny that you mentioned

home from college. I've actually made money from home from college. That is a great platform. Very big fan of them. I think I found them around my senior year of college, maybe post-pan, while I was in the pandemic, I think I found them. Anybody listening to the pod has to check them out. They have great little short-term projects that I've completed for different brands and received products for and stuff like that. That great, great shout out of a company on that part. And I'd love to talk to you more about your syndicate, the virus.

How did you actually find those first couple backers? Because I feel like that would have been incredibly difficult, just not only as like a woman, but also went Gen Z. and how did you go about that? Yeah, I'm in a really specific situation where WIRS mostly started as a newsletter for random opportunities to get involved in other women's side projects on campus. And long story short, I ended up joining a student fund and I realized a lot of the women didn't really know each other super personally.

They weren't super in touch in what they really wanted to invest in rather than the student fund that they were working for. And I just wanted to workshop with them one-on-one on it. And I found that a lot of women saw that theme where they're like, wait a minute, we're, there's not a lot of us. And we kind of like the way that each other work and think. And I was super blessed that my first couple of backers or introductions to their managers and their managers to back the syndicate were homegrown from WIRIS, which was incredible.

And I definitely was not intentional. But so my first few were managers of some of the women that were in the community. community who were working as interns and as analysts. And they were really crafting their, especially the analysts, they were really crafting their personal thesis and they would bring it to their managers. And their manager was like, oh, my God. Like, I never thought as an entreeable analyst that I would think about an investment thesis. And from that, I just got so many, I was so blessed to have so many intros and so many

people were really excited about the idea of just women taking ownership of what they want to put themselves towards. But I have a mixture. I have people who just graduated wires who want to put 1K, 2K checks into the kinds of stuff that we are interested in. And then also a lot of parents are super passionate about it. Previous founders, it really spans a lot. But I give my biggest shout out to the first core 20 individuals that brought their thesis to their managers. And my managers are like, what the heck?

Like, I never thought that someone in this age group would be that's interested. So that's the super long story short is it just started off mostly with WIRIS alumni and their managers. That's awesome. So these people that are backing are not just accredited investors. So they're all accredited. Okay. So one other thing that we do in WIRIS, so it's half community, half sitting it. So the community part is I'm so like, I wish I had this like a good year ago for myself.

And the community is not only the accredited investors, correct? Or is it all? It's all student women, mostly. Individuals 225 mostly, who are either working out of VC as an intern, as an analyst, as a venture partner, or our syndicate leads, and then individuals who are under 25 raising capital actively to already have their first check. And then just general good talent. So that's the community. We've workshopped a lot on how to get accredited. You know, when you work at a fund, is there some way that you can petition for yourself to get accredited?

You know, if you're syndicating on someone else's behalf, that's another way of getting credit. And then also, series 65. So we spent the whole summer trying to workshop, like, how do you chunk through? So I was never a finance major. And it was a huge feat for me to get accredited. It was, I had such a low attention span during COVID. I was so passionate about it. I was like, wow, I'm so intamedity by all these terms.

So I give credit to a good core 10 individuals who are just like, all right, if M just wants to teach us how to do this, like, let's just sit down and just all hold each other accountable and figure out the best way to come across this. So we went through study guides and flashcards and group hangouts based off of like college campuses, which was, I mean, I was beyond my wildest dreams. So that is so interesting. I didn't know that there was a community per se of accredited Gen Zs. I always thought that it was more of people kind of pooling money together to invest into a startup, not that they were accredited. Oh, yeah. So that is really cool. And do you teach them through workshops? Yeah.

So it's a combination of workshops, you know, workshops, flash, gosh, gosh, like studying kinds of things. We have like some acronyms and stuff that are really silly to wires. I think the most helpful thing was just meeting in person with other people that are on campus and just being. like, okay, what even is this? And I think that that's really fundamental to being a part of virus is like being so open to ground, like, the absolute lowest of low of question being like, okay, I just haven't read this in two weeks.

Someone want to give me to download, kind of similar to on TikTok if you saw like those presentations that people would go up and make like the silliest thing ever. We had a lot of those, a lot of wine nights, I'm going to be honest with you. So it was really a hodgepodge, but I think it really started with seeing. So how I saw that was some of the student funds I was working with,

and I used to work with them in recruiting for venture partners and having more diverse individuals in their recruitment. So I'd work with them, and I noticed that some of them had alumni syndicates, and I was like, oh, my God, these people are like 23. How are they already investing in, like, companies on now, like, series, you know, quadrillion. Like, it's something that was fascinating to me. So I was chatting up a couple of the guys there that were doing that, and they were like, oh, it's not that hard.

You just have to work. You know, if you work at an investment bank, you are probably taking a lot of different exams already. And why not take the 65? You probably know majority of the answers. So I hit the girls that were a little bit older first, the investment banking girls were thinking about transitioning to VC. And they were really the ones that were hosting a lot of the workshops. We had a lot of community kind of individuals.

We had some marketing design individuals who were. like, you know what, I could make a pretty study guide for this. So it's really everyone coming to the plate. So otherwise, I would have no idea what to do. Yeah, that's awesome. So I'm actually looking now, and it says accreditation laws have changed. So now if you're an employee in an investing role at a firm or you pass a series seven, you can be accredited. I guess that also is the series 65 as well.

So that is really cool to know. And I think that's going to open up a lot more Gen Zs in the investing field. So that is really awesome that you're creating a community around that. I find that doing anything honestly with community. makes it so much easier. I'm with you. I wasn't a, like a finance major. I honestly found out about venture capital by accident. I was handing out flyers at an event that was a shark tank event at school for volunteer hours. And the people hosting the shark tank event were in venture capital. And I was like, you know what? That sounds like kind of cool. I'm in, I, my major was more on the

tech side of things. I was like, there's a bunch of other like techy people here. I guess I'll join. And that's how I found it. And it was definitely at me. stumbling my way through Ventral Capital ever since until I graduated and I found out all about Slack communities. And those are the communities that have really, really just opened up a whole new world of education for me that I wouldn't have necessarily gotten even in the classroom. Because honestly, even if I was a finance major, I'm not sure that I would have even heard about things like being an accredited investor by taking, you know, like the Series 65. Don't necessarily know if that's something that would have come on my radar. So I think

it's incredibly important, especially as women and especially as young women to have these communities and to seek them out because they're not just going to fall in your lap. They're obviously few and far between. So it's really awesome that the virus is doing this. And do you know you're investing in like the craziest fastest venture market ever? Yeah. This is so interesting to join. How has that been? You know, I think because I'm young, I wouldn't say because I'm Gen Z, because I'm young, I don't mind the pace. And I also have no expectation of pace. So I hear from mentors day and night about how it's so hard to keep up.

And for me, it's like, I mean, I live on Twitter like all day, which is not good, right? But I'm just, I've been introduced to it in this kind of pace and I don't care about sleep, which is not good. And I, you know, my trade is mostly in journalism. So I don't mind staying up, you know, all night. and I don't mind the good update and changing the story from one day or the next. That's just like my nature. But I think, again, like I think joining a community is such a great experience in starting your investment career because there are so many more people who know way more than I do

about everything, even if it's, you know, D to C like food or beauty or future of work or clean tech, health tech. There are just so many more people that just know more than I do. Even if they're entry level, they're more than happy to go. and dive and come back and we can chat on it. I think that's really what's been holding me afloat. And I think that's when I talked a lot of my mentors, I think that's honestly what they're missing,

is just being able to share and admit that we don't always know everything about things that we think that we do. And I think that that's inherently very Gen Z, but also it's very young because it's like, we're only going to come up together. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's only going to get better with time. And it's funny that you mentioned that you're a journal as a major

because I don't know if you know this, but Jason was actually a journalist. And even though I was really heavily into the tech scene in college, but while I was in college, I actually had my own podcast. I've always loved researching. I loved writing things. The research side of any project I did was always, always the most fun for me. And it's funny how I never thought that researching and writing would necessarily turn out to be a huge part of my career now as I'm helping produce a podcast.

podcast that's all about tech, all about investing. And it's a really cool place to be in. And I think that Jason has said this before, but he mentions that journalists should really consider moving into investing or should consider ending even as venture capitalists if at the end of their career or even while they are still journalists. I think that would be awesome. Because who better be an investor than somebody who has done all that thorough research that is incredibly well spoken, that obviously has a great way of talking to other people because in journalism like producing, I'm sure that is an incredibly important, an incredibly important factor.

And on the topic of writing, do you actually write the deal memos for your syndicate members then? Yeah. Wow, that is awesome. Yeah, for sure. I think like memos, so on research, I fully agree. Like, I have so many friends, I'm going to give a shout out to, I don't know if I get,

Rachel Cantor on Twitter. She's a phenomenal writer. She did Morning Brews. Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yes. You should chat with her. She's a great person to chat with. Rachel Cantor? Yes, yes, yes. She did sidekick Morning Group. Great. I mean, she just started out her own newsletter and the morning group team reached out to her and she just like started basically within the next few weeks.

And that was her glory story. She's just a god tier of a writer. So she and I have been chatting on this a lot because she is so amazing at DEC and she doesn't even know it yet, right? Like that's the nature of being journalists. You're like, I know nothing. And I'm just going to ask everyone else with questions, and I'll just create a package and deliver the information. And that's so not an investor. It's so not a VC thing to do. Like, that's the polar opposite. So, you know, double-edged sword. Sometimes you feel a little imposterous sometimes you feel a little imposterous sometimes because you're like, I don't think I know anything. But also you, you know, in the right environments, you can go on and about anything and know the most people. But I fully

agree on that. I've noticed that like a lot of, and I can send you later, like so many old newsletter writers, just not necessarily even just like, you know, bloggers or journalists. There's a pipeline between a newsletter writer and becoming a syndicate lead. I love it. I love that. It's bad. It's because you're so well connected, you know? I know. And you know what your audience wants. Like I was, that was originally what I was was newsletter. Yeah. You know what your audience wants. You know what will click. You, you just gain insight from there. And again, like, it's a beginner's mindset. And anyways, you can go on updates on that.

No, it totally makes sense. I think the best skill that a lot of people that are interested in research and writing in general and journalism, I'm very open about what I don't know. Like, I'm very open. I go and I ask people questions. And sometimes I actually, I prefer to do my own research by asking others, not by making my own mistakes. I always tell people that venture capital is so interesting to be in, in the tech community

and to watch because you get to see other people's mistakes in real time. and that is such an interesting place to learn from. And it's also great just as the nature of my job now, and I'm sure being with the syndicate, you're connected to so many smart individuals that instead of Googling something, you can go right to the store. So if you have a question about Morning Brew,

you don't have to go Google how Morning Brew operates. You can go ask Rachel. And I think that is a really awesome place to be in. And I hope that any other Gen Zs that are curious or really enjoy doing their own research, hop on to the early stage investing space because I feel like I know a lot of my peers were very interested in things like investment banking, but I didn't meet a lot of people in college. And maybe this was specific to my college. I don't want to make a broad generalization here.

But I didn't meet a lot of people that were necessarily interested in doing that really hard, heavy research on early stage companies that didn't hit the market yet. And slowly but surely, I think they're like, you know, more gen Csies are, coming to the table. Oh yeah, especially because it's a lot of just networking. I got this from from BBG actually. Nishan and Susan are super open about just like you have to just be there. Yeah. And I think as you get a little older, like you don't, you get busier, right? And then you also have more insight and you're like, I don't think I need to know this. And I don't think I need. You know, like it's like anything. Like you get a little older and you're like, yeah, I don't really think

I need. That's not really going to be an interest about when you're a kid, like, that's a It's always a come-up story. So you're always going to be an underdog. And regardless of any background, like, I focus on women and bipop individuals. But, like, regardless of anyone younger, like, you always have a come-up story. So it's just grittier. And it's a good place to be when, especially because we have Twitter. Like, we're just native to things like Twitter.

Like, Twitter. That's so true. And we're never getting off it. We're never going to get off Twitter as much as everyone wants to, like, delete all their notification. You just never going to do that. There's just so much information there. Everyone is so accessible. Yeah.

And everyone's on the same page. I slide into literally everybody's DMs. It's so funny that you mention that. Because whenever the producers reach out to guess, I, we normally, I know some of the other producers prefer to email. And I am always, the first thing I do is I slide in to their Twitter DMs or I slide into their LinkedIn depending on if they're into like tech stuff, if they're not. Because I've noticed that like anybody that's interested in like the tech community and their

Twitter DMs are open, like they know exactly what they're doing. And they're asking for people to reach out to them. But if they're not interested in the tech community, then those LinkedIn, those LinkedIn DMs are definitely, definitely up for ground. And what I'm finding is like Twitter is just, there's so much on there that I'm finding a lot of specifically virus members. So I created a list on the virus of Twitter. Oh, I love it. It's like it's on little person. Yeah.

So I created little lists. Some of them are private to people who are in the same school because I find that that's like smart. a good gateway in, but then I also have a general list of just like MVP's, I think, are really good thought leaders that are in our age group. Yeah. And a lot, I, every single person and virus I've spoken to one on one. And like, granted, is my schoolwork going down the dream? Absolutely. But I meet like really cool people. And I think, you know, we're all in the same mindset where everyone on that list, if you go and you follow that list and you follow the individuals, they know to follow you back. Like that's, right? That's always like every month's worth nightmare.

Like, what if no one falls me back? And like, I don't have any content, blah, but if they can see that you're only following wireless people like they know. And I always encourage every single woman, every time that I go to an event or I get a DM, I'm always like, just go follow the virus list and go follow them there. If you talk to five people in anything that you're going to do, in any kind of industry, you're going to feel way more comfortable to go and explore it on your own.

So that list has been so fundamental. And I'm going to give a huge shout out to all the girls on that list because they know, like if someone's going to follow you, like they're like, all right, someone's new. Let's let's bring her in, figure out what she likes to do. Oh, I love that. Catch in with me. I have a Notion doc every time they meet someone that comes in.

I'm like, this is what she likes. Go ham. And I just think that like, I, Twitter is just like, it's such a little gateway because you're like, I could get on it, but I'm going to be sucked in for probably the rest of my career. Yeah, that's so true. That is so true. It's the best community. It's one of the best community making tools, though.

I've realized because there's something about being able to share your ideas versus on Instagram where I feel like it's much more of a visual platform. Yeah. And I find that much more people or many more people are aged, tend to be focused on Twitter and TikTok, which are amazing platforms. But for community building, I feel like Twitter has more of a focus on your thoughts. And I think that's a better way to build community rather than what you're putting out on Instagram. In most cases, obviously, there are definitely, I'm a part of a book club, for example, which started off on Instagram. But for the most part, I've noticed that the communities that I've been in and been invited to and have really prospered in have started,

on Twitter and then made their way over to a Discord or Slack or some way where I can message others. And well, thank you so much for being on. I do have a final question for you. I want to know what's your advice for young people looking to break into VC because I know you have a very non-traditional route. It sounds like, would you recommend doing more of a non-traditional route or would you recommend people going about it in the more traditional application sense? I think it depends on the interest of an individual. So if someone's looking to go into something like deeper tech, I would say, you know, maybe go into the deeper tech become what you feel comfortable

in and then just shoot right in. But I would say the majority, I could talk specifically to women. 80% of consumer choices come from women. I think it's easier to connect and understand a consumer focusing, and that could be future work. It could be health tech. It could be anything. but if you focus on consumer, to me also equals community. So figure out what kind of consumer-facing industry you like.

Go do a deep dive. I would recommend looking at Republic, the investment platform, they have had to create a thesis. I think that they have a really, so I have private materials and I'm welcome to anyone to talk to, but they have a really good couple of videos on that. And just talk to anyone that is of your age group that looks like they have anything figured out. Because we're so open to peer-to-peer mentorship. it's crazy. And so I would say, join something consumer facing.

It's going to be the easiest way to get to a community. Look at things like Republic and think about how to make a thesis. And it's just research. It sounds a lot harder than it actually is. Go on things like Republic. I'm going to give a shout out to Paige Daughtry. She just came up. That is so funny.

Another producer was like, yo, have you ever heard of Paige? I was like, wait a minute. Yeah, yeah. Page is definitely chat with Paige. Paige, Gabby. You were mentioning the best, you were mentioning the best people and best communities. so far. I like this. This is good. I'm so happy. So yeah, shout out to Paige. She gave us some insights when I was a Republic fellow a few months back. She started off investing on Republic

little by little just to get in, get the quarterly update memos. And she just started her own email and gave out those updates and said, you know, this is, I have a thesis. I put a little bit of money into these things. This is how they're doing. And this is what I think about it. Wow. VC is a apprenticeship-based entry-level market in terms of getting a job. So, you know, find people on Twitter say, hey, look, I'm giving quarterly updates. This is what my memo looks like. Here is how my companies are doing. And, you know, obviously not really your companies.

But, you know, people are going to see that initiative and that kind of organization. The work isn't too crazy. It just requires a lot of, like, dedication. And I think in this age group, like a lot of passion for it. So someone's bounds pick you up. and get on Twitter, like 100% get on Twitter. So that's my advice there. Actually, my final note is I do think that investing based off of like passion and interest

long term does pay off. And I'm, you know, my own portfolio, I have yet to see how it comes out. But from how I've spoken to a lot of mentors, I think that the long term game and the like, I mean, VC is such a new job relative, right? 30-ish years ago started. And it's changed so much since. It's only going to change more and more. So get into as many things as possible. Investment DAWs, syndicates, talk to community managers, do platform jobs. There are just so many opportunities. Just do everything. Yeah. That's my advice there. That is such good advice. I love the advice you had on mentorship. Nobody's mentioned that yet. And I actually

definitely got in to VC and into the community via a mentor as well, like a different Penn State grad. that was a partner, is a partner at a venture capital firm that so very nicely allowed me to be a fellow at his firm before coming over to the speaking startup. So I think mentorship is something that is very overlooked in any position because nobody sees apprenticeship kind of work anymore. They more see the MBA or like that college degree. And I think venture capital doesn't value those necessarily as much as other fields

and very much values, and you'll see greater outcomes with apprenticeship style learning. So that is a great, great note. And again, thank you so much for being on. I'm definitely going to check out the WIRIS. I think this is an amazing platform. I'm really, really happy that we got to speak. Yeah, thank you for having me. And thank you, everybody for listening.

If anybody else has any recommendations on who we should have on, I'm going to start reaching out to Rachel Cantor and Paige. Definitely for sure. They seem great, like, great people. Again, thank you so much, Emily. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Rachel.