This Week in Startups - Uber travel, OpenAI illustrator, Edit button, CNN+ review + Dune Analytics CEO Fredrik Haga | E1428

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

We kick off our crypto series with Dune Analytics CEO and Founder Frederik Haga about crypto on-chain analytics (37:23). But first, Jason covers Uber’s piloting long-distance travel bookings in the ...UK, Twitter’s edit button announcement, Open AI’s new Dall-E 2 product, and does a quick CNN Plus review! (00:00) Jason intros the show (01:44) Uber testing long distance travel (07:34) Twitter adding edit button (14:30) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (15:34) WLiTF: OpenAI releases DALL-E (22:31) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (23:47) Starups creating swag before product market fit / Gary Darna of Fast looking for work (26:30) CNN plus review (35:00) Rocket - Go to http://getrocket.com/twist and use promo code TWIST for 20% off your first placement. (36:14) Toss to Jason and Molly’s interview with Fredrik Haga (37:23) Interview with Dune Analytics CEO Fredrik Haga Check out Dune: https://www.dune.xyz FOLLOW Fredrik: https://twitter.com/hagaetc FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Okay, we're kicking off our crypto series with June Analytics CEO and founder Frederick Haga. But first, I'm going to do the Solo Dolo news program. Molly's out for spring break. I'm hoping she's enjoying some well-deserved rest. I'm going to go rapid fire today. Uber's making a super app and piloting long distance travel options in the UK. Twitter is debating the edit button again. It looks like it's coming.
Starting point is 00:00:23 And Open AI has launched a new product called Dolly 2. It allows you to give a caption. And then it builds you. illustration. It's next level and super interesting. Plus, I do a quick review of CNN plus, the $3 a month, $6 a month, depending on when you bought it, over-the-air service, over-the-top service, OTT. That is ad-free. Stick with us. It's going to be a great program. This week in Startups is brought to you by Odu. Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business.
Starting point is 00:01:00 Your first app is free forever, and right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's ODOO.com slash twist. Coda. Cota is the all-in-one dock for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docks and spreadsheets, Cota's the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. and Rocket.
Starting point is 00:01:30 To hire in today's competitive market, you need outstanding recruiting. Rocket's expert recruiters paired with ML candidate matching, set them apart from the rest. Get 20% off your first placement at getrocket.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of this week in startups, my housekeeping up front. Shout out to my friend, Mark Pesci for launching this week in startups, Australia's 10th season. I kid you not, we've been doing it for 10 seasons. thanks to all the sponsors for supporting the show over these 10 seasons.
Starting point is 00:02:02 And I, as is the tradition, was his first guest. So you can go check out TWI Startups AUS. So we're at TWI Startups and then we add an AUS to the feed. Or he adds that to his Twitter handle. Or you can search for this week in Startups Australia across all your podcast feeds and subscribe. Mark is just an incredible futurist. Or you can go to TWI Startups AUS.com. He's got his own web.
Starting point is 00:02:28 website set up for it. And it's like my own little franchising business here. We let Mark do it. He takes the advertising revenue. I trust him. And he's built this great little franchise over there in Australia. And we love the ecosystem there. We like to invest there. So it's just been absolutely great. And in fact, I'll just ask my team, let's publish that first episode on Saturday. We'll do a little Saturday episode and publish it to our feed. And I can do a little preamble to set the stage that we're cross-posting. Shout out to Rulof Bofa, my friend, and for a long-time collaborator,
Starting point is 00:03:04 for being officially named Doug Leone's successor at Sequoia. We had an amazing interview with Doug Leone, one of the five best, I think, in the history of the program. If you want to check out that episode, it's episode 1403, 1403 in your podcast player, or you can type Doug Leone this week in startups into YouTube and find it instantly if YouTube is your jam.
Starting point is 00:03:24 Okay, onto the news, Uber's planning to pilot long-distance travel bookings in the UK. So what this means is you'll open up the app and instead of just being able to get food or order your groceries, get an UberX, get a Lincoln Town car or Uber Black, you'll be able to book your train tickets, buses, which are popular in Europe, obviously, and even flights, according to a report from the Financial Times. This is no newsflash to anybody who's paying attention. Travis had this vision from the beginning at Uber, and they've been piloting this for a while. Now, the UK is going to be the pilot market. You may have read that they were just able to get their license renewed there. There was some controversy around Uber, you know, being able to operate actually in the UK,
Starting point is 00:04:12 and they seem to have cleaned that up and made peace with whatever the issues were. So what is this going to look like? well, you know, you're, you take an Uber to a train station on the way to the train station, you book your ticket, all in the same app. And these super apps, as they're called, are popular in Asia. And you can do many things in one app because you have your preferences in there. It has your location. You trust the app.
Starting point is 00:04:38 It's got your credit card information. Maybe you have a premium, you know, like there's an Uber one, I think subscription is what it's called. So that is the concept here. Pre-COVID, 15% of Uber rides were to airports, according to the Financial Times report. And Jamie Hayward, the Uber Regional General Manager for Northern East and Europe, gave a quote. You have been able to book rides by exposed services and scooters on Uber app, on the Uber app for a number of years. So adding trains and coaches is an after progression, and I think that's absolutely correct. What this does show is, Dara is really just taking the time to fill out Travis.
Starting point is 00:05:20 original vision. But remember, Dara was at Expedia. And so this is something that's very much in his wheelhouse. Expedia obviously was great for booking tickets and hotels. If I could open the Uber app and, you know, go down to the Tesla Austin event going on tomorrow night and I could book my flight on Southwest or, you know, Virgin JetBlue, I guess, book my JetBlue flight, go to Austin and on the way to the airport, book a hotel, man, that would be so easy. Or if it said, hey, we see here going to the airport, what's your destination? I put in my destination is Austin. And then it preloads Austin for me, right?
Starting point is 00:06:00 So this could be really clever. I put in that I'm going to Austin. And it's like, okay, here's the restaurants in Austin. Would you like a reservation over the next three nights? When are you coming back from Austin? Okay, we'll have a driver at, would you like to reserve a driver at your hotel? Do you have a hotel? All of those things would be done pretty seamlessly, and you could even see them doing packages.
Starting point is 00:06:20 And this is very popular amongst young people. It was very popular in the UK, in fact, where people would have these last minute. There was a literal service called less minute.com. I don't know if it still operates. And what they would do is people would say on a Thursday with their friends, they would be at a bar and a pub and, hey, what do you want to do this weekend? I don't know. Let's go to Spain. And they would just open up last minute or another travel app and it would say, here's a package.
Starting point is 00:06:45 Flight plus two nights hotel plus breakfast included, you know, $199 person, $299 person, boom, book here. So I think that's kind of going to be an amazing experience. And experiences also launched in the Uber app recently. Uber stock is down a little bit today. It's been sideways since they IPOed. It's gone up as high as 60, down to 15 or 16th during the pandemic. And I am still long the company.
Starting point is 00:07:11 I did take some chips off the table over time, you know, sold some chips Tomasiosi son, I was very public about that, but still holding a very large portion of my position to this day. I think the stock could go 10x from here. You should do your own research, but that's why I'm holding it. The same reason I'm holding Robin Hood, I think the best is yet for both of those companies that I was an early investor in. All right, in other news, Twitter is adding an edit button. They've been talking about this forever. This should not be difficult. It's very simple to have an edit button. Why don't they have an edit button is what you have to ask yourself. Well, there are a ton of people publishing to Twitter all the time.
Starting point is 00:07:50 And if somebody were to say, I love Joe Biden. And then everybody starts retweeting it and da-da-da-da-da, some really partisan thing. I love Trump. And then they take the word love and make it loathe. And now you've retweeted it, you favored it. Somebody takes a screenshot. Oh, you retweeted this. Ha-ha.
Starting point is 00:08:10 You retweet. Or, you know, something even got. forbid something super inappropriate. They use hate speech. So everybody's like, should we let people edit it or not? Those are the big issues around an edit button. They are easily, easily solved with doing what I believe Facebook did. If you edit a post, it says edited and it says the time. And then you can click and see the edit history. And if you get reported for doing the bait and switch kind of thing,
Starting point is 00:08:40 trying to trick people into retweeting something that they would be absolutely terrified or regret retweeting. Well, that is easily reported and then you just don't trust that person. You don't follow them. You never retweet them again. So I think a five-minute window is probably reasonable
Starting point is 00:08:59 and having the history there and showing the history. It just says in big letters under the tweet, this has been edited, and then it says, click here, and when you click it, it opens up, a little catty opens up, and says here's the actual original tweet. And it just puts in red, something called redlining in legal.
Starting point is 00:09:17 Take two different documents. You redline them. So opposing counsel sends you a document back with their changes. They can tell you what the changes are, but you want to trust but verify. So you verify that with redlining, you do the red line, boom,
Starting point is 00:09:28 you can see it there. So in January 2020, during a Q&A session on Wired's YouTube channel, Jack Dorsey explained why Twitter didn't have an edit button. Here's 68 seconds. I'll see you on the other side. Yes, I owe Twitter. Can we get that edit button in 2020?
Starting point is 00:09:45 The answer is no. The reason there's no edit button, there hasn't been an edit button traditionally, is we started as a SMS text messaging service. So as you all know, when you send a text, you can't really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.
Starting point is 00:10:01 But now, you know, we have an app and a lot of people are using us on the web. And there's some issues with edit that we can solve. One is you might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that and then an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet and that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different. So that's something to watch out for. A lot of people want it because they want to fix a quick spelling error or a broken link or whatnot and that's great. We've considered a one-minute window or a 30-second window to correct something, but that also means that we have to delay sending that tweet out because once it's out, people see it. So these are all the considerations. It's just work, but we'll probably never do it.
Starting point is 00:10:49 Okay. So 75% or so people want it. Obviously, Elon did a poll and the new Twitter CEO said that's happening. And so here is actually an exchange where somebody talks about everyday astronaut actually talks about it under two conditions. he says, it's available for a few minutes. Yep, I average 10 minutes. I put it at five. And when edit maids, there's a small link that shows the edit,
Starting point is 00:11:16 exactly what I just described. It's pretty obvious stuff. It's been done a million times. But I think what we're seeing is with Twitter's new shareholder, who likes to do customer support. I think Elon's really good at building products, obviously. But he's also good at talking to customers. And you saw that all the time where somebody would have a problem with their test site.
Starting point is 00:11:36 He would do frontline customer support. And this is not. something new since the early days of Tesla, you know, anytime I would be driving the roadster, Elon would say, what should we fix? What should we change? Like, this is the first thing he would say to me when, you know, enter the first 100 car owners. And he'd write it down, he texted it, he BlackBerry it to everybody in the team. And he takes that stuff seriously. And I think product velocity is something that has been a little bit challenged at Twitter. Because Twitter had, a series of CEOs, you did have Evan Williams, who is a very thoughtful person and
Starting point is 00:12:11 methodical. If you look at Medium, if you look at blogger, his other products, he was very methodical. Another way of saying, consider it. Another way of saying, candidly, slower. And then you had DeCostolo. DeCostolo was the adult, let's build this into a business. He did not have, I would say, DeCoselot, incredible product shops. He's not a product-driven CEO. he is a people-driven CEO, an operations-driven CEO, and a business-driven CEO. He really built the business. So you had back-to-back CEOs, neither one who was making bold decisions. They had Jack, who is, I would say, a product genius, perhaps even, you know, a product
Starting point is 00:12:49 genius who maybe wasn't as interested in these mundane simple things and had a very strong opinion and also was working on the product, you know, half the time while he was running square. So you didn't have product velocity there. We'll see with the new CEO if product velocity comes back. It does seem towards the end of Jack's tenure, the product velocity did increase dramatically, where you had Twitter blue and they tried their own like stories product. They got Twitter spaces, a clubhouse competitor out instantly. So the product velocity is up.
Starting point is 00:13:19 Now let's see if they listen to customers. And really, the big thing I think is getting rid of bots and making the overall experience more pleasant. And that's where I think they should just take my advice. which I wrote a couple of years ago on my blog about letting anybody, anybody become verified. That is the killer feature. Just let people take their credit card out. When they pay for Twitter Blue, whatever name is on the credit card you have is your name,
Starting point is 00:13:45 and it's written into your account. I know you can spoof a credit card, of course. But it puts a light blue check mark there. We have some indication that this is the name from the credit card. Therefore, you know, we have an idea of who this person is. And you can pay it one time where if you have a subscribe, they go through the process of generally verifying you a little bit. Then you as a user could pick.
Starting point is 00:14:07 I want to see only verified accounts, where I want to see verified accounts first and up top and then give me 20% unverified accounts. And you could kind of move the service to having more real names and less noise, less aggressiveness, let's say, from anonymous accounts, which I think is what drives away a lot of people. And why Facebook and other places maybe are a little more delightful. Listen, when you start scaling quickly, your company needs to be run professionally.
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Starting point is 00:15:09 Again, Odu helps you streamline by running all your business apps on one platform. That means no more issues transferring data back and forth, and you'll have one customer support contact across all your apps, not 20. And the best part, well, here's your call to action. Your first app is free forever. And Odo is offering a thousand dollar credit on your first, implementation pack, go to Odu.com slash twist for $1,000 off. That's ODOO.com slash twist. Okay, in the We Live in the Future section, which we love doing this segment every week. OpenAI, the nonprofit organization that Sam Altman founded, just announced a new product
Starting point is 00:15:45 called Dall-E-D-A-L-E-E-D-A-L-E-D-A-L-E, I guess like Wally, and it's Dolly, and it's Dali 2, in fact, and it creates realistic images from text. You've seen this before. It's a bit of a parlor trick in some people's minds. But in other people's minds, this is becoming more sophisticated. And what it's basically showing is the relationship between words, text in a box, and an image. And over time, AI is starting to figure this out. Not just, hey, can we tell what's in this photo? That was mind-blowing decades ago.
Starting point is 00:16:17 Hey, we take a photo and we just put the tags on it automatically. That's a baseball. That's an orange. The difference between a baseball and an orange are these factors, right? You train the data set. Well, now you can just give a caption and it builds a photo or an illustration from it. So Sam Maltman, the founder or co-founder of OpenAI, asked people for suggestions at Flexport CEO and Bestie Guestie, Ryan Peterson, replied asking for something pretty unique.
Starting point is 00:16:45 Ryan Peterson, who is deep in the shipping game, says, I would like to see a shipping container with solar panels on top and a propeller on one end that can drive through the ocean by itself, the self-driving shipping container is driving under the Golden Gate Bridge during a beautiful sunset with dolphins jumping around, to which we all see the following image. Oh, my Lord. You know, and this is but a, you know, a couple of minutes later. I don't actually, I didn't actually look at the timestamps, but it was, you know, just very quick. And it is actually a very gorgeous photo. And what a great vision. But no dolphins. So I, you know, I was going to give this an A plus, but going to give it a B-minus, sorry, the AI forgot the dolphins.
Starting point is 00:17:29 And here is a quick 30-second video of the Dolly 2 service. To is a system from open AI that can take text like a koala dunking a basketball and turn it into an image that never existed before. It can also create new variations of pre-existing images. Through deep learning, Dolly understands the relationship between text and images. Dolly can edit this image of a monkey doing something new, like paying its taxes while wearing a funny hat. Dolly shows how imaginative humans and clever systems can work together to make new things,
Starting point is 00:18:03 amplifying our creative potential. Yeah, I mean, so what's the point of all of this? Well, this kind of passes, you know, the uncanny valley test of like, did a human do this or was it done by a machine, right? You're always trying to figure that out, you know, who did this work? When I saw that solar image, I immediately thought an illustrator was given this assignment to make this for Ryan, who had this idea and just wanted a visual and he paid somebody 500 bucks to make it. So in that way, it did work. What else could you use this for?
Starting point is 00:18:39 Well, obviously, if you were making a screenplay or a comic book, now somebody with absolutely no artistic talent could say, I would like to have a comic book in which Batman is fighting. Wolverine. And it's like, well, those are two different Marvel universes. Yeah, that's the whole point. Like, Marvel's not going to be able to do that. DC is not going to be able to do that. So you think about fan fiction, which is an entirely interesting category out there. Twilight, the movie series was actually fan fiction. I forgot what it was based on. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I think 50 Shades of Grey was fan fiction based on Twilight. Somebody fact checked me on that. But all these crazy fan fiction people, they kind of cut their teeth with other people's characters in IP. And then they obviously don't publish that because it would be illegal to do that.
Starting point is 00:19:25 But here, a young person could be like, I want to see Batman fight Wolverine. It's kind of actually a dope concept. I wonder if they ever did that crossover. Now you got this whole series, it's made by somebody. And then instead of writing a script and hiring an artist and taking six months,
Starting point is 00:19:40 they can do this in six hours, six days, whatever it is. And that's a bright, interesting new future. So creative tools that allow people to be superhuman, dare I say, like the email client that we're in, investors in, shout out to superhuman.com and Raul. Those tools just move humanity forward.
Starting point is 00:19:57 So what's really great about this is that image of the shipping container, that could raise a seed round. Now, many founders don't have the $500 or $1,000 to get that image made, but I can tell you if you sat there and just iterated on this one concept, okay, well, we have a solar paneled one and it says, okay, how about if these, I would like to have 17 of these, two abroad and then one at the front and the one at the front is the cabin for people to sit in
Starting point is 00:20:26 to monitor it and they're able, I want to make a video of this because eventually able to do this in video, I would like to have the shipping containers break apart when they get 500 miles off of the California coast and two of them are going to go to San Diego, three of them are going to go to Long Beach, two of them are going to go to the Central Coast and the rest are going to go up to Long Beach.
Starting point is 00:20:47 Wow, what an amazing video that would be because then you would be adding to this creative concept that it's not just a solar powered shipping container flying to see, that they're able to connect to each other to get efficiencies and they're able to separate to go to different ports, which a ship obviously can't do. Just lots of creative ideas. And you could imagine, you know, when we say a picture is worth a thousand words, well, a video is worth a million. And that'll be the next card to drop is. We obviously have deep fakes, but you could literally say, I want to see Wolverine as played by Russell Crow. And I would
Starting point is 00:21:19 see like to see the Batman played by Ethan Hawke. You know, like these are two people who were rumored to play those parts. Wow, how great would that be? Or, hey, show me the, I want to watch the entire Nolan series of Batman films, but I want them to be with Ethan Hawkins Batman or somebody else, right? You pick the character. That's a pretty crazy idea.
Starting point is 00:21:43 Or I'd like to see Daniel Craig in Moonraker, the original James Bond film. These things are all going to happen in our lifetime. Like literally, Amazon is going to be able to take the entire James Bond series, and you'll be able to pick the James Bond movie and then pick the actor in it. So we're having this whole debate. Should, you know, does James Bond need to be a white English guy? You know, could it be a woman? Could it be a person of color?
Starting point is 00:22:08 Yeah, sure, you pick. You start the movie and you say, I want Idris Alba. I want a woman to play it. I want who played G.I. Jane. what's the actress's name who was awesome in G.I.J. And I hate to make a reference to G.I.J. It was the first one that came to my mind.
Starting point is 00:22:24 Demi Moore. Demi Morris, James Bond. Sure. Let's go. So really exciting stuff. We certainly do live in the future. Efficiency is one of the main components in startup success. Everybody knows this. You've got to be efficient.
Starting point is 00:22:38 That's what Coda is all about. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. Your text and tables live together in the same document. And this helps any team collaborate more efficiently, especially remote ones. They've got thousands of templates to work with at Coda, or you can repurpose templates published by some of the best innovators out there for yourself.
Starting point is 00:22:57 Coda works out of the box, and it's completely customizable, so you can create a wiki or a knowledge hub for your team, you can onboard new hires quickly, and adapt fast to any major or minor changes in your business. Here's how we use it at This Week in Startus. My Guy Presh made an upvoting system on Coda so that you, the audience of this week in startups, can ask questions and request top of you.
Starting point is 00:23:18 to be covered on this very program. You can see this at this week in startups.com slash questions. And if you go there, you can submit a question or a topic, and our producers might include you in the show. You can vote things up and down. How amazing and awesome is that? Coda has an amazing program for startups I want to tell you about.
Starting point is 00:23:34 They're here to optimize and support your docs, and they're going to give you $1,000 credit right now. Yeah, you heard that right. $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist, Codda. I.io slash TWIST. All right. Moving right along
Starting point is 00:23:49 as we do the solo dolo. A former fast employee Gary Darner ran swag at fast. And he tweeted today about fast shutting down I'm sadded by the
Starting point is 00:23:57 outcome at fast. If you don't know, they spent over $100 million to make $600,000 in revenue. It was a complete debacle. And, you know,
Starting point is 00:24:06 what made it particularly easy to dunk on is the founder who's Dom, who's been on the show, was more than willing to give everybody advice. and, you know, was a super marketer, maybe too much marketing. And he said, you know, he was this person, Gary, obviously ran the swag there.
Starting point is 00:24:24 And he said, if you've heard of us, it may have been through our 60,000 hoodies sold. I ran our store and need to find what's next. Who wants me to make their company swag? And I quote tweeted him. And I just said, they had a dedicated swag person at best before product market fit. That's like signing autographs for people before you're famous. So a little mini dung for me, but I did it for a reason. I'm making the point about startups, like, you really need to focus.
Starting point is 00:24:50 If you're making the swag before you've actually become a brand, that's a problem. Like, it shows a lack of focus or it shows maybe a little delusion. But that does seem like a very good idea for larger brands. In fact, Elon has sold surfboards and flame throwers and other things, and Apple, obviously. You know, people would buy, you know, a napkin. People would literally buy napkins with the Apple logo on them. And they would pay five times as much. Literally, if I made napkins, just a napkin, if I made that with the Apple logo,
Starting point is 00:25:25 you could sell it with a 90% margin, as opposed to the two percent margin. It's paper towels from Apple. Literally, we go for 50 bucks. And in fact, they do, right? They actually sell a polishing kit, right? But somebody hired this kid, because if you don't know the history of this, they sold a $5 hoodie, and they sold tens of thousands of these,
Starting point is 00:25:47 and everybody is running around with fast hoodies and socks and other apparel who have no idea what the company does. But they were able to tap into something. So congratulations to him on actually doing something interesting. And if you've got a company at scale, like, I don't know if you're, I don't know, Stripe, maybe Stripe should hire this kid or, yeah, if you're Ryan Breslow from Bolt, the ultimate troll would be to hire Gary. have him make your swag for Bolt.
Starting point is 00:26:14 So let me just get a shout out one more time. His Twitter handle is Gary, G-A-R-Y, obviously, D-A-R-N-A. Somebody go higher Gary Darna. Seems like a smart kid. He might be 50 years old, but he seems like a smart kid to me. A little quick CNN Plus review. I was able to subscribe to it. I thought, hey, this is an interesting idea.
Starting point is 00:26:37 You know, people subscribing to a news program. And I watched a couple of shows, Jake Tapper's book club. You know, it was a magazine-style show. I love Jake Tapper, but it was way over-produced. And it would have been much better if it was less edited and glossy. I don't think people are going to pay for magazine-style shows. It's like CNN is kind of generic enough. And then this is, I would say, weaker content than the other book clubs in podcasting.
Starting point is 00:27:03 So it feels like they took the magazine-style show. Whoever did the art direction for CNN Plus probably should be. you know, sunset. I don't want to say fired. I'm going to get anybody fired here. But it was the wrong editorial direction to go for magazine-style shows because magazine style shows are what you watch when you have over-the-air television and you don't want to go deep.
Starting point is 00:27:24 They're just generic, made for the lowest common denominator. And I would rather see Jake Taper, who I like a lot. I love J-T. I would much rather see him go deeper and do 90 minutes on a book. And, you know, as opposed to this very short, magazine-style show. You know, a magazine-style show like Anthony Bourdain's is one in a million of those shows
Starting point is 00:27:49 because he's so fascinating himself. And he did the artistic direction for that show. He was the one who really made it interesting, and they did something different in that show. And his ability to write his own monologues was just second to none. And I think they looked at Bordain's show and just said, how do we make 10 more of those
Starting point is 00:28:08 and none of them are good? they're all just overproduced and very lightweight, and it feels like the hosts are kind of going through the motions, and they're not putting enough work into them. So that show was kind of weak. And then they have a live component, which they've obviously copied, you know, YouTube like we're doing here, and you kind of queue up and ask questions.
Starting point is 00:28:27 And it was interesting, this interview club, and I'll pull up the interface here, but it wasn't live chat. So you lost the, I don't know, dare I say, the riskiness of having a live chat. for having a filtered chat. Now, I understand it's CNN, and they don't want somebody to screen grab,
Starting point is 00:28:43 somebody saying something racist or insane or insulting and shaking up the host. But if you want to make it interactive, then you have to take the good with the bad. And if you're going to make interactive, but you put a queue where some person has to screen the tweets or the questions coming in, you failed. So this shows that they don't understand how to do life.
Starting point is 00:29:04 But it's easily fixed. They should just be, the questions should come up, and then the mod should be able to take them down afterwards. Let's just copy what YouTube does. YouTube has mods. You can designate people as mods. And if somebody says something inappropriate, people don't see it by default. It's just like put in a smaller font.
Starting point is 00:29:19 And then you have to click to show it to everybody. And the mods kind of watch things that have certain keywords in them. You know, if you put the F word in there or something. I watch Professor Galloway show. Again, it's a magazine-style show. I know people think I have an axe to grind with them. I don't. I just think his predictions are hilarious.
Starting point is 00:29:35 And I honestly thought his predictions were kind of a put-on. and that it was kind of an act, you know, like a little over the top, but apparently he's pretty sensitive to this stuff. But it's not good because it's overproduced. The one thing he did do this good is actually because he can think on his feet, his man on the street work where he's like interviewing people at South by Southwest was interesting. But it's not as good as when he's with Carra Swisher Arm Pivot. So again, CNN Plus is like we're going to make a magazine-style show
Starting point is 00:30:04 that is nowhere near as interesting as the free podcast you're getting. and it's quicker and faster and, you know, kind of cheesily produced, and then they expect people to pay for it. That's just not going to happen. What they need to do is if you're going to have interesting choices like Professor Galloway or somebody like, you know, Jake Taper doing something interesting, you want to let them go for it. You want to let them go for 90 minutes, 120 minutes, 75 minutes.
Starting point is 00:30:32 Did you learn nothing from Joe Rogan or podcasting or interactive shows on Twitter? The best part about it, which I didn't think I would enjoy so much in a news app was that there were no commercials. So you know what the actual best move here is? Instead of CNN Plus being like a bunch of new shows that are just not as good as Anthony O'Burdane's magazine style show and no magazine shows that we're going to touch that. And very few will be that interesting. I mean, I haven't watched the Stanley Tucci stuff yet, but I have a feeling that's going to be very good. Again, some transcendent talent going to foreign places. Pretty interesting for people.
Starting point is 00:31:07 not having ads is the big win. So why don't they make CNN Plus CNN without ads? So it's CNN minus the ads. That's really the name of this. It's CNN minus. When you don't have ads, your consumption goes up. That's why I pay for YouTube. And it's absolutely fantastic.
Starting point is 00:31:26 If you don't pay for YouTube's ad-free service, it's awesome. I pay for Hulu's ad-free service. They pay for the NBA. Still, they try to insert some ads once in a while. I love Chris Wallace. And I was watching him long. but his show doesn't use interactive interface. So I have a feeling Chris Wallace doesn't want to deal with the Michugina and craziness of a
Starting point is 00:31:43 live audience, therefore they gave him a pass so he doesn't have to take any interactivity. And then Anderson Cooper did something on parenting, and it was very 101. He was kind of talking about basic parenting techniques, which again, is just not worth paying for. But Anderson Cooper talking to people about his children is incredibly compelling because you can see it's authentic and he cares deeply. So that was kind of hitting a note, I think, for the producers there, well done. Anderson Cooper showing something personal, really compelling because you see him in a different
Starting point is 00:32:17 context. What I would say is this is closer to Quibi and we'll probably go away than it is to YouTube or, you know, HBO Max, but it's easily fixable. I don't know if it's easily fixable, but it's fixable. You need to make shows that are more authentic, go a little bit longer. You don't need to fit into this magazine format. It's goofy and it's not worth paying for it. What people want is something more authentic akin to what you're seeing on podcasting.
Starting point is 00:32:46 The roadmap is there. Look at the live shows on YouTube. Look at podcasting and do that. That would be much more interesting to people. It's what we do here at The Speaking Startups is what we do at All In. It's what Joe Rogan does. Authenticity, not Polish. And I'll just say this about Polish.
Starting point is 00:33:02 I'm watching the Anderson Cooper show. and they're recording this in a park. And I'm like, these people, idiots, like, this is freaking CNN. And I'm hearing wind noise. I'm hearing kids screaming in the background. I'm hearing horns going off because it's obviously somewhere in New York. And so I'm like, these people are, and then I was like, wait a second, that's actually kind of cool. I actually enjoyed it more because I was like, oh, they really went to a park and they really had to deal with this stuff.
Starting point is 00:33:28 So authenticity is what sells. And I think maybe letting the oddball, characters in the CNN family kind of go even a little bit more authentic and a little bit more raw is more interesting. That's why I'm giving Professor Galloway a pat on the back. He's really good with the man on the street stuff. And that's an actual skill. You need to be able to think on your feet. You need to be a little bit fearless. And when he's interacting with the public, it's kind of like his predictions are horrible. Obviously, we all make fun of them because they're so stupid and they're wrong 90% of the time and the anti-portfolio of that. But he's actually very good
Starting point is 00:34:02 with people. So I would just take Prof. G., have him do everything, man on the streets, you know, Vox Pop, I think they call that. And then Anderson, maybe interacting with his kids and maybe even a little more raw and a little more deep about these issues, talking to people about challenges with parenting. And then Jake Taper, have him go deeper into the books. Like, if you're going to do a book review, do a book and make it three hours and go through every chapter of the book and really go deep. So you're competing with something, you know, you're really servicing an audience that's a niche audience that's willing to pay you money. So I give it like a C plus maybe.
Starting point is 00:34:38 I think if they, you know, really evolve this quickly, that it maybe could be worth paying for, but I don't know if any news product has a ad-free subscription service is going to work, but it's kind of bold of them to try, to be honest. I would just take CNN and just take the ads off and let me watch CNN with no ads. That would be a magical experience. Hiring well is one of the most. important things a startup can do to increase their chances of having outlier success. So if your current hiring strategies aren't working, well, Rocket can help you.
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Starting point is 00:36:14 Okay, everybody, we've got a great interview coming up. Dune Analytics CEO and founder Frederick Haga is with us. Dune is a crypto analytics company that lets users analyze blockchain-based activity. Why is that important? Well, if you want to see if fraud is going on or you want to see a trend, And you can look at all of the trades, because trades are put on the blockchain typically, and you can make your own dashboard. You can do it for free with their tool, and then other people can see the dashboard you made.
Starting point is 00:36:40 Now, if you want to do private dashboards where you're analyzing all this stuff, you've got to pay them a fee. So, Frederick joined Molly and I from Norway, and we spoke about the entire space, what metrics he uses, to evaluate different projects, and which two projects in crypto have actually released a product that has impressed Frederick based on their usage. It's a really interesting interview, and you know I'm a crypto-sceptic, and this is a tool that lets you be an informed crypto-speculator and cynic and, you know, skeptic because you can actually find the fraud, and then if you can find the fraud and eliminate that,
Starting point is 00:37:16 well, you're probably going to be able to find the real projects, which exist, but they're sadly one out of 50. Hey, everybody. This is the first episode of a 10-part series that we're doing on crypto because I don't know if you've noticed, but in the past few years or so, the Web 3 space has been on an insane ride. After COVID hit, crypto saw a major boom. Obviously, all these investors had, in the words of Jason,
Starting point is 00:37:42 Stimmy checks and nowhere else to spend money except on stonks in crypto. And also, to be fair, it was a democratized investment play that people felt like they could get in on in a different kind of way. This continued into 2021, where according to Pitchbook VCs, then invested over $32 billion in crypto companies. That number, by the way, was 4.7x higher than 2020
Starting point is 00:38:04 and more than 3x higher, the previous record of $9.8 billion in 2018. So, yeah, it's a thing. Tons of money being poured into the space. And what we're going to try to do in this series is find out, is anybody actually shipping a product and actually doing,
Starting point is 00:38:25 uh, you know, a product or service that consumers or somebody can buy and use. And so today, we've got actually a pretty good person to have on to kick off the series. Frederick Haga, did I pronounce your last name? Correct, Frederick. Yeah, that's approved. Approved.
Starting point is 00:38:42 Fantastic. So, Frederick is the founder of a crypto analytics company. What a great person to kick off the series with because we can get our bearings, Molly. And that company is called Dune Analytics. and people will pay them hundreds of dollars a month, in fact, $390 a month for their pro service, almost $5,000 a year. Customers include Uniswap, Avey, Misari, Consensus.
Starting point is 00:39:06 I know some of these names. And let me ask you just welcome to the program, Frederick. Why do people pay for your product to analyze the blockchain and to analyze wallets, et cetera? Why are they paying for it? And what does it do for them? Yeah, so actually, actually, I think it makes more sense to start with the free version of our product, which is way bigger and more exciting right now. So we essentially allow anyone to analyze blockchain data.
Starting point is 00:39:38 So if you think about it, a blockchain is a shared computer backend where people run nodes, and those nodes are made for verifying transactions. and that's basically a piece of software trying to do that as efficiently as possible. But when people put code on the blockchain and people start using it, it produces a lot of data. And this data is public. However, it's pretty hard to work with and extract because these nodes are not made for actually serving that data. So essentially what we do is that we take all of the data that happens on the blockchain, all the activity, we put it in a nice human readable format, and we put it up on our web, website so anyone can write SQL queries and get results and visualize the results.
Starting point is 00:40:27 So basically we allow anyone to analyze any activity on the chain. And then this is all done in an open public manner. So anyone can also see what other people are doing. So you have this compounding open nature, which is kind of the same ethos as the actual blockchains with people building commercial smart contracts. If I was to do a query and say, hey, who are the first 10,000 people who bought Solana and what are the wallets and where did it go? Who's hodeling?
Starting point is 00:40:59 Who's selling? Who's got paper hands? Who's got diamond hands? Who lets go with stuff quickly? Who holds on forever? Yada yada. I could use your tool to do that. But by using your free tool, do my queries automatically get posted to the blockchain
Starting point is 00:41:13 and I don't have the choice to do them covertly, i.e., I wanted to make trades on this data. So I didn't want to tip my cards. Is that what you're saying? The free product works? Yeah, so it's kind of a little bit similar to GitHub in terms of business model. So essentially, everything is free and open. But if you want to keep it private, you want to export it or like, you know,
Starting point is 00:41:35 keep it to yourself. That's when you pay us. So basically, if you contribute to the open sort of knowledge around what's happening on the chain, it's all for free. And that's like a very, very powerful product and experience. But if you do want to keep it private, that's when you can pay us. Yeah. What's the most interesting public query that you've ever seen somebody do that had downstream impact on the ecosystem?
Starting point is 00:42:02 Yeah. So we have, we can talk about this chart right here that's up here now, which is the open C volume. This one has been extremely popular in one of our top dashboards. OpenC of course is the NFT marketplace where people buy. I and sell NFTs. Right. And what you can see here, since this is all trading on public smart contracts that you can see on June,
Starting point is 00:42:27 you can see here their trading volume. And what's interesting is when they recently did like a $13 billion round, you can actually see what product metrics they're doing that round on. You can see real time on the blockchain what they're actually trading volumes are, what fees they're picking up. And so as you can see here, you know, what does the NFT hype actually look like in numbers, you can see that in January, they reached almost $5 billion in volume, and in January 2021, a year earlier, it was $8 million.
Starting point is 00:43:00 So they did a 625x year over year on their training volume, you know? And what's really cool here is that anyone can look into this stuff. It's not just like, you know, investors that see some kind of deck. There's, you know, thousands and thousands of these dashbacks. looking into different product metrics and engagement in these products. So when, especially then when there's a token, you know, you can actually do investment. So if you, I can show you, so this is my screen. So there's a product called MakerDAO, which is essentially a bank on the blockchain.
Starting point is 00:43:38 And here you can look at, you know, the balance that they have. So they have like $9 billion in assets in that bank. You can also look at their revenues, so you can see, okay, they're doing $75 million in annualized revenues. And then you can look at the asset price, the MKR token that gives you a ownership stake in that system. And what you essentially get then is that you get a real-time PE measure. And this is all feeding life from the blockchain. So if you're wondering where this revenue is coming from, you can click and look at the query and you can take it all the way back into the blockchain data. So you have this insane thing where I have this saying that the revolution will not be reported quarterly.
Starting point is 00:44:25 And that's because, you know, these things used to go in like a quarterly PDF. And that's how a product or a business reports what they're up to. But here you actually don't need anyone's permission or any PDFs because it's all feeding real time live from the blockchain. and you can see the actual traction in these products feeding real time. I mean, what's so remarkable about this is that the trading, the fundamentals, unlike many, many markets are right there in the open, available to people for free. Who is paying for this?
Starting point is 00:44:58 Is it investors? Is it people who want to use this data to get a jump? And also, like Jason said, want to make sure their queries themselves are not manipulating the fundamentals? Yeah. So the stuff we're looking at right here is, is public and free. Like, anyone in the world can use this.
Starting point is 00:45:15 And this is made by a guy called Seb that works with the maker team. And he builds this sort of internally, but also for the public and for their community. And basically, yeah, all the investors that's active in the space, they use June to, you know, look at the traction of the things they're looking at. But what's exciting here is that an even broader audience get access to this stuff. And I think, you know, when there's questions around sort of reporting or like how dodgy is crypto or not, this stuff is extremely powerful, but also 100% public. So, you know, anyone can, you know, this is essentially a bank's balance sheet we're looking at here and it's real time. And probably that means that anyone in the world with an internet connection has more granular understanding of this system if they want to than like Jamie Diamond has over JP Morgan's actual balance.
Starting point is 00:46:08 sheet from day to day. Right? Back in the day, we saw all these incredible news stories where people had figured out that the unregulated exchanges were essentially faking how much transaction volume there was. And they would say, oh, we have billions of dollars a day. They didn't really have it. And then, of course, you have the next level of what they call painting the tape, you know, creating fake trades to prop up a market.
Starting point is 00:46:37 And so would your software or does your software give the ability to look back into those early days of Bitcoin and find those moments where people were creating false volume? And is there a discussion about this very acute issue of painting the tape? Because we see it in NFTs as well where people self-deal and self-trade in order to create the appearance of volume, which then pulls suckers into the game who say, oh, there's 100 people who've traded this NFT. I'll be the 100 first. I have all that downside protection of those other participants who, if this dips, well, they're going to jump back in and buy it. And other people have bought it, therefore, it's a safe bet. Yeah, so, I mean, partly this comes down to sort of civil resistance, which means,
Starting point is 00:47:22 like, can you identify the participants, right? It's kind of impossible to know exactly which address, maps to which person. But what happens on chain, which is a bit different from sort of an exchange reporting on itself, is that it actually costs you fees, right? So if you do a trade, you pay a network fee to the system. So in that sense, you have an actual cost for doing these trades because what we record here is actually happening on chain and someone paid a fee to do that transaction, right? But there's like an interesting related situation recently where there was this attack on
Starting point is 00:47:59 OpenC, a new product called Looks Rare that forked a lot of what OpenC had and they put a token in the system and they created this new NFT marketplace that was competing with OpenC. And the interesting thing is that they incentivized the activity. So, again, if we look at a chart here, you can see how this volume stack up against each other, and the green one is, looks rare, this new system. And you can see that in the beginning here, it was actually higher than OpenC, which was, you know, a massive piece of news, given that open. C was a de facto standard.
Starting point is 00:48:39 But then if you actually look at, for instance, user numbers, you see that the blue one is OpenC, which is at like 60,000 daily-ish. And then you look at this other one looks rare, and they're down at 2,000 users daily. And so there's been a lot of analysis on like how much of this is watch trading because you're incentivized with a token if you trade on the system. And what's been found is that so much of the volume of this new system looks rare is just wash training, right? So you have this way, way more granular way of understanding these things. And what you realized was everything that was incentivized, you know, was like heavily washed traded,
Starting point is 00:49:23 but there's only like 2,000 users versus 60,000, for instance. So it sounds like what you're saying is you have created a product that can differentiate ideally. data that can be faked because it is more centralized, or data that can at least be manipulated because it's more centralized, from real on-chain transactions to maybe cut through the hype, like ultimately give people more confidence that the things that are happening are real. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so in general, we just make what's on the blockchain accessible,
Starting point is 00:49:59 and then we have a community of thousands of people, like these dashboards where this is a guy called Hildobi and he's extremely prolific and looks into everything that's happening, right? And then he serves up these ways of analyzing the data and trying to figure out, like in this specific case, is this real? And then, you know, there's this portion of knowledge out there in the world. And I think in the previous financial system, you know, everything is very siloed and there you're sitting within a bank
Starting point is 00:50:30 or within some company and you're serving your client or company. But in this crypto space, everything is very open and it's all like internet communities. So instead of producing siloed analysis, you know, people just put their stuff out there, build a name for themselves, get like a CV as an analyst, and then serve the community with interesting insights. Given that you are, you know, just trying to spread the truth, I would assume, and that the platform's open like this and, and, and, you're giving people the tools to find out reality. I would assume many regulators are subscribers to your product, yes? There are some that's using it. So the idea that you could as a crypto trader who was involved in wash trading
Starting point is 00:51:16 or maybe in some kind of market manipulation get away with it, this is a clear shot across their boughs that not only are we publishing this stuff and people are analyzing when you're doing something to manipulate the markets, there are regulators who are using tools like this. I happen to know they are, because I've talked to people who told me they were who are deep in the crypto space and say, you know, listen, the people who are cheating right now
Starting point is 00:51:39 and who are like this, you know, we don't know with this, you know, open-sea competitor if they're actually cheating, but it sure doesn't look good when you show 2,000 accounts having twice as much volume as 60,000, unless those are 2,000 whales, something's fishy. There are regulators using these tools as we speak, and they're, you know,
Starting point is 00:51:58 probably building cases against the people who are doing this. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's fair to assume that regulators in general are some of the most, you know, a tentative or focused observers of what's happening on chain. Yeah, that's fascinating. And the fact that, yeah, you know that speaks volumes. Since you're making the tools, maybe they put in a couple requests.
Starting point is 00:52:22 Hey, let me ask you a question about wallets. because Molly, I think the core here is, if you were to open a bank account in the real world, trading account, there's friction. You have to K.C. Know your customer. You might have to get signatures. Sometimes you have to get what's called a wet signature.
Starting point is 00:52:39 Literally, a notary has to do something where you have to sign a piece of paper. And even the people who can open accounts quickly still have to retroactively get your information, social security numbers, etc. If you want to take your money out and there's a certain, you know, friction there. In crypto, there's no friction. If people want to, correct me if I'm wrong, create 10,000 accounts right now and trade 100,000 NFTs between them using software. There's nothing to stop somebody from doing that today, correct?
Starting point is 00:53:07 There's zero friction there. Correct, except that you do pay fees if you do any transaction on the blockchain, right? Right. So if you did trade every time you trade that NFT, it's going to cost you whatever, a dollar, $10, something in that range, depending on how busy the network you've chosen to traded it there. So is there any way or any path, because we're seeing regulation now in a major way,
Starting point is 00:53:33 towards you being able to say this group of wallets are, let's call them Tier 1, for lack of a better term. They're known. They're on Coinbase. They're on Robin Hood. I guess Robin Hood is launching their own wallet system. So these are known actors on Tier 1. They are in Western Dubebush.
Starting point is 00:53:52 democracies with Western regulation or, you know, real world, modern advanced society regulation. These ones are tier three. They're in non-regulated, dark pools of money. And then these ones are kind of tier two. And then do analysis based on real wallets versus Fugazi wallets. Fugazi is a term for fake. If, yeah. Yeah, no, that's certainly, certainly possible.
Starting point is 00:54:18 And, you know, it's as simple as, you know, seeing. who's put in, you know, the Coinbase wallets are known. So you can see who sends money to a Coinbase wallet and these things and probably get a pretty good proxy of who's interacting. Has anybody done that? Like, what is the most like unregulated large? What's the most unregulated or less regulated large exchange? Like what exchange has millions of people, but is less regulated offshore?
Starting point is 00:54:46 You know, it's a bit of a patchwork on the different jurisdictions and which, which exchanges are regulated, where and how, and these things. So I'm not sure I can comment credibly on those things specifically. But I think in general, there's a lot of ways to figure out what these addresses are. And there's also even a trend towards people more self-reporting, you know, tying it to their Twitter account. When it comes to NFTs, it's a lot about social signaling. And it's like your dart on your internet wall, right? So you really do want to be public and more and more people have these Ethereum names that are also in their Twitter profiles and all about, right?
Starting point is 00:55:28 So there's like a myriad of ways in which this activity has more context, really. Wouldn't that be interesting, Molly, if you could take the Coinbase ones and then some offshore account and then just compare the Salana holdings, the NF, you know, board apes, you know, pick a major project, just Bitcoin trades for people who. for people who are legit and then people maybe who are hiding. So what are the people who don't want to be known doing with their Bitcoin versus the people who are, don't care if they're known and are regulated and do pay taxes. It'd be really fascinating. I'd love to see some of those reports.
Starting point is 00:56:03 I mean, one of the things we've been talking about so much on this show is this question of sort of like where we are in this technology cycle, right? A new technology comes along. The people who understand it better than anyone else are in a position to make a lot of money, whether that is, you know, legit or not. but on the road to legitimacy and mass adoption are services like Dune, or at least something that tries to quantify the realness, the fundamental realness of an economy, right?
Starting point is 00:56:29 And on that note, I want to ask you about tokens because obviously it feels like not all of them serve a real purpose. From your tweets, it seems that you agree. And so I wonder how you distinguish like a useful governance token, a real token from, from a cash grab by somebody who's sort of slapping a veneer on it to make it sexier?
Starting point is 00:56:53 Yeah, no, great question. I think there's a lot of learnings to be had from just traditional web startups and in many ways where, for instance, you know, if something is Lindy, how long has it existed? A lot of things in crypto pop up, get extremely hyped, prices pump, right? And then it ends up going away in three months. thing is just like, how long is this thing existed, right? And how time tested is this idea? And then I think another thing is simply, you know, does this product have traction? Are people actually using it? And part of that is what we looked into earlier, where it's you have
Starting point is 00:57:31 open sea and you have looks rare and looks rare as, yeah, so this is one of my tweets. So I think right now a lot of these systems are like labeled as governance, but actually people want, what people want is a stock and they want to get the financial upside. And I think partly we're here because of the regulatory stuff where it's like you can't label a token of stock because then SEC will come after you, right? So that's partly why people say it's governance and those things. Another thing you can do is like actually look at product traction. So again, if I share the dashboard here's dashboard with the category of decent
Starting point is 00:58:17 centralized exchanges. So exchanges running on top of Ethereum, and you can see their trading volumes, and you can see, okay, there was $17 billion in volume last seven days. And then you can break it down by market share, and you can see, oh, Uniswap has 80% of market share in terms of trading volume in decentralized exchanges. And most of these have a token, right? So then you can think about, okay, how do I want to invest? And you can see, okay, so Uniswap market share is increasing over time, right? It's going downward here,
Starting point is 00:58:52 and the pink part is becoming bigger and bigger. So basically you can do the same types of assessments that you do if you invest in a traditional startup or technology company. Like who's using it? How are they doing in the marketplace in their category, right? And then you can look at the whole category. So here's all trading volume
Starting point is 00:59:13 on Ethereum. And you can see it exploded throughout 2020 and then kept growing and then it's plateaued a bit. And now it's at around, I think, 60, 70 billion a month. And you can see it's still that Unispop is dominating, right? So a lot of the same ways of thinking as in Web 2 can be used in Web 3, I think, even though, of course, some of the assets are a bit more experimental, but you still want to probably own a piece of something that has users and engagement rather than something that does not. And the people who are buying and selling the tokens in most cases, like you're saying, are looking for upside in them.
Starting point is 00:59:55 They're not buying them for the utility of it. Have people figured out a way to look at people using a token of some type and say, these people are speculators? They're buying it just to see if the price goes up versus these people are using it in the same. some way, you know, to play the game, was it Axe Infinity or something? You know, are they using it to buy and sell songs or the rights to songs in a music token? Have people figured out how to parse speculators from people using the utility of the token? Yeah, no, that's a great question.
Starting point is 01:00:32 And it depends a lot on each ecosystem. And of course, these are programmable assets, right? So you can indeed make it part of the product's experience or in some way you need to stake it or some other way put it into the product to use it. And so you can of course track these things. And I think again, these success rates are wildly different and how people build these communities and seeing also participation in governance is kind of a big one where you see, okay, we have 100,000 people holding this token, but is it like a thousand or 10,000, or, you know,
Starting point is 01:01:13 however many are actually engaging with the governance, which is, in many cases, they intended use of the token. And very often that engagement level is really low, right? And I think that, again, your question around like where in the cycle or where in the sort of evolution is crypto, I think still quite early because many of these things, are not figured out, right? You distribute an asset. There are some reasons why that asset is interesting for people to hold,
Starting point is 01:01:43 but there are also a lot of ways in which that asset is intended to work, where the engagement for that property is actually pretty minimal, and it's too cumbersome and so forth. Which two projects in the entire corpus of crypto, which two, are you most impressed with the data of utilization? coming out of those projects. Which one's number one? Which one's number two for you?
Starting point is 01:02:09 Coke and Pepsi. That people are actually using the most. Yeah, good question. I think actually the maker one we looked at. It's essentially a bank on the blockchain and you can actually read their financial statement as you could have in the traditional bank, you know, in the real-time dashboard feeding life off the blockchain.
Starting point is 01:02:31 I think that is really amazing and really cool that they, you know, did the effort to to present that. So I think that one is up there. It's a really, really cool example. And then frankly, I think... Is Maker a stable coin or something?
Starting point is 01:02:45 That's the MakerDAO? Yeah. MakerDAO, so they have dollar-paying stable coin. Got it. And so that's like a, as opposed to using Tether or USDC controlled by Circle, Maker is like a Dow controlled stable coin where people vote on the governance of it.
Starting point is 01:03:05 Yeah. So it's essentially over collateralized. So you put in like $1,500 worth of eat into a smart contract, and then you can get the $1,000 worth of dye out. So it's like an on-chain credit facility. Very, very, you know, and again, back to like Lindy effect, these have been around for a long time. And the system has withstood like ups and downs and dramatics ups and downs in crypto.
Starting point is 01:03:33 And it's still like a working on-chain. system. Okay, so makers, your number one, most impressive participation-wise. And what's number two? Yeah, I think I'd say Uniswap as well that we have looked at. Like, their volumes are absolutely insane. You saw the market share, right? It's an extremely complex. Explain to the audience what Uniswap does for somebody who is not a crypto expert. Yeah. So it's a pool of capital that you can trade against. So say, again, I have, you know, a thousand dollars worth of eat. I have thousands dollars in USDC, I put that into a pool of capital, and then anyone can do a trade between those assets and say, I will supply a little bit of it, and I will take out a little bit of
Starting point is 01:04:17 USDC. And the fantastic thing about the system is that anyone can be a market maker, and you don't have to be there at the moment. So it's just a pool of capital that lives in a smart contract, and anyone can show up to that smart contract, supply a little bit of capital, and or trade against the pool that's currently there. So it's a novel new way of thinking about creating liquidity. And basically, I think, I can't remember the exact number, but there are hundreds of thousands of pairs on Unispop. And this is a type of product that is uniquely enabled by crypto.
Starting point is 01:04:56 Because a traditional exchange, you need some amount of volume to actually get someone to bother to be a market maker and create some liquidity and actually get some trading going, right, in some asset. But with a system like this, this is all self-serve and can be done in a sort of grassroots scalable manner where, you know, the three of us can bootstrap liquidity from some system that we create. Which is the equivalent of somebody who owned a bunch of shares of Google
Starting point is 01:05:26 being able to put them out. So if people wanted to create derivatives on it, short, it'll go long it. They would be doing it against those shares. person would get some upside in it is the way to think about it. Yeah, you could say so. Yeah. You know, like a lot of these things that happen in crypto are just like new venues for
Starting point is 01:05:46 doing finance and you sort of, it's a new design space in the sense that anyone can write, write a piece of code, right, and figure out some way they want people to interact financially or enable people to interact financially. What was your goal in creating dude? Like, what is the mission? Are you trying to de-complexify? Are you trying to make this more accessible? Are you trying to weed out, you know, signal from noise?
Starting point is 01:06:12 What's the mission? Yeah. No, the mission is to make crypto data accessible. And as I alluded to initially, I think previously, historically, all data has basically been B2B or within companies or within a team. It's all like very silent, you know, it's produced in-house and sort of analyze in-house or you buy some data set from someone. And what we have here for your first time is a public data set that's created by the
Starting point is 01:06:43 blockchain that has a lot of interesting things going on in it, right? And I think that's a unique opportunity to build a different kind of data product and experience than what we've seen before because you get this sort of bottoms of grassroots dynamic where Uniswap can't tell anyone to not look into their data. Like, this is all on chain. Same with OpenC, same with any product that built, right? And I think this is
Starting point is 01:07:12 extremely liberating in the sense that you don't have to be a VC and get a deck to see what's happening here. You know, you use these products, you can look at the actual traction, the actual users, you can see how much money is this contract holding? Do I think it's safe or do I think, you know, it might be hacked because there's not enough money or it hasn't been enough money in it for a long enough time, right?
Starting point is 01:07:34 These type of things. And I think that what's also exciting is that crypto is very evolutionary and it's an infrastructure that anyone can build on, right? But as I've shown you, you can also see what products are getting what traction. And I think that's also an extremely strong revolutionary force, evolutionary force because in sort of the traditional world, I might start a startup that someone did. a year ago and it didn't work out and I wouldn't know. But in
Starting point is 01:08:05 this world, I can actually go and see on chain, okay, someone deployed this smart contract and I can see they got this many users and then it died. Or, you know, here's the category of lenders or exchanges or NFT products. And I can actually see, okay, how many users,
Starting point is 01:08:21 who's winning, how are they doing every single block and I can go and build a product that I think has better properties, right? And so I think it's creating an insane velocity and evolutionary force that's just spinning so, so fast. And it's extremely exciting for people building. And it's extremely exciting for people wanting to participate, invest, engage in this world
Starting point is 01:08:45 because it's so radically open and compounding. Like, anyone can, you know, we have 100 plus thousand charts on Dune already. You can go look at all that and you can build on top of it and you can, you know, engage with it without paying a single cent because it's the shared knowledge of anyone that ever looked into this. And your business model will be premium subscriptions. There's no other model here, just premium subscriptions. People pay for the tool, extra tools.
Starting point is 01:09:14 Yeah, essentially. If you don't want to build something open, if you don't want to share it. And also like, of course, over time, like performance, if you want very frequent, refreshing of the data, things like that. Very cool. All right. Listen, continued success with it. brilliant. And when you find a good report, tip us off. Like if there's an interesting report that
Starting point is 01:09:35 kind of informs a business story, we'd love to hear about it. I think it's absolutely fantastic what you're doing. And more transparency and more insights is obviously better for an ecosystem that, let's face it, you know, has challenges in that regard. And I think you can help clean it up. So, great job. Frederick Haga, keeping it real and crypto. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having Will. Hey everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate.
Starting point is 01:10:04 If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team. here at launch, even if you don't know the founder. If you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey everybody, producer Rachel here.
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