SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the next unicorn series. Yes, this is the series we do every year at This Week in Startups, where we pick 10 companies, we think will be the unicorns of tomorrow companies that will go public, and that will change the world. Today, we have Devin Finzer on the program. He's the co founder and CEO of OpenSea. It's an NFT marketplace. And you know, you've heard me have a lot of concerns about crypto. NFTs is actually a place people collecting things and the provenance of art or collectibles being available and anybody being able to trade them on an open platform. This seems to me like one of the most brilliant executions of a real idea in the crypto space. And imagine if they weren't just trading cards. What if you could take a character from one video game or a sword or a weapon from Fortnite and bring it to Call of Duty? That's the incredible vision and future of NFTs that Devin and I talked about today on the show. And we've had three great seasons of the next unicorns, you can go to this week in startups.com slash unicorns to see all 23 companies we've done now. Yeah, including today's we had Divi homes on the program. In the first of this series, brilliant idea, you can rent a home in order to buy it, you go buy the home with Divi as your partner, and you pay rent, but some of it goes towards goes towards buying it. And if the home increases in value, you still get to keep it. It's a great idea. Flock safety, controversial idea license plate readers for civilians to put on their street outside their home, or for

SPEAKER_01: towns. And it makes crime go down dramatically because a lot of the people who are committing crimes, especially robberies are doing it as part of organized crime and gangs. It's not overwhelmingly an issue of, you know, inequity or wealth disparity. These are gangs who are doing coordinated attacks. And it's the same license plates over and over. So we had an

SPEAKER_00: incredible discussion on episode 1249. But first, we're going to talk about Google's exceptional quarter, they printed money and YouTube, I believe in and of itself is a trillion dollar company sitting inside Google, I'm going to explain today, and we'll debate would you rather own YouTube or Netflix, which is the better business and why based on competition, growth, and the quality of their revenues. Stay tuned for tomorrow's show, I'm going to break down Microsoft's

SPEAKER_04: earnings. Stick with us. Season three of the next unicorns is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as

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SPEAKER_00: In our first story, Google had a massive earnings beat for q2 2021 yesterday. And YouTube grew revenue almost 100% year over year 80% year over year growth is just extraordinary for a large business. Let's break down how YouTube compares to Netflix to seemingly very different businesses, but who line up kind of interestingly. So just to give you some background, you know, that alphabet is the parent company of Google, they named it alphabet. So that every letter of the alphabet could be a different unit. Cynically, what most people think is they created alphabet, so that there would be no way for Larry and Sergey to get dragged to Washington DC or to the EU and face all kinds of different regulatory organizations, they wanted it to be a conglomerate, a holding company, and put somebody in charge of it. And so now poor Sundar has to contract in front of Congress. That's a cynical take. That everybody kind of knows is the truth is that the founders wanted to be lower profile and mission accomplished. You see Zuck getting dragged all over the world. And you see Bezos is no longer in the top spot. This is now the new technique for founders to put somebody else in the driver's seat. And maybe they get to not take as many arrows or be annoyed by being dragged around the world like Zuckerberg has been to face the music. So total q2 revenue 61.8 billion up 62% year over year. Now just let that sink in. You know, we've talked a lot about how in startups, we're looking for startups that grow 20% a month, and that are growing 3x year over year, that's kind of when these things are starting out what you're looking for. When you hit scale, and you've got 10s of billions of dollars in revenue, understand that 62% growth on 10s of billions of dollars is a ton of revenue. So much so the first half revenue is 117 billion. And if you just double that, you know, you're getting to over 230 billion. And obviously, it's going to keep growing. So this is a footprint of revenue, unlike anything we've seen, you know, prior to with the exception of Apple and Microsoft, and Amazon, the net income was $18.5 billion. That's the profit. That's what they put in their bank account. And that's up 2.6x year over year. In other words, they were massively profitable. So at this pace, they will put $73 billion into their bank account this year, that is a lot of cash with that money, they could buy Coinbase just with one year's profits, they could buy Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, any number of assets, right. But in this country now, we have been putting the kibosh on M&A and looking at these companies that are getting so big with a little bit of a tighter amount of scrutiny. And this is in the face of China, ankling their own companies, reversing them going public, pulling their apps out of the App Store, forcing high profile founders not to maybe give up their seat voluntarily, but maybe putting a gun to their head, who knows quite literally, perhaps to get them to neuter their own companies. It's crazy when you think about it. So YouTube is a major driver here. But Google search business and their third party ad network is what Google is Google is an ad business at its core. That's how they make their money and their ad revenue was 50 of that $61 billion. Now remember, q2 of 2020 was really hard hit by COVID. And advertising dollars did dry up for a little bit, people pause their ad buys. Everybody, if you remember, just a year ago, in a couple of months, people were in a full scale panic, what would happen to the economy, a lot got frozen during that time. So the year over year growth could be a little inflated here. But retail was by far the largest contributor to the company's ad growth, according to their chief business officer, Philip Schindler on Tuesday's earning call. Google's cloud is becoming, you know, almost 10% of their revenue 4.6 billion. That's really interesting. So Google's cloud computing platform, which goes up against Amazon Web Services, and they've also cut their losses for Google Cloud by 840 million year over year, they lost 1.4 billion in q2 of last year. And this quarter, they only lost 591 million. When you say losses, another way to frame that in your mind is investment. So they've been investing trying to catch up to Amazon Web Services and compete in cloud computing, also with Microsoft's Azure, those are the top three players. And so you see them investing in that business. And it's apparently paying off. Despite all this, the most impressive business in q2 was YouTube, their ad revenue was 7 billion up 83% year over year. And this doesn't include subscription revenue, which alphabet doesn't disclose for YouTube for some reason, but they are disclosing YouTube's revenue separately, which they didn't do for a long time. And when you look at it, it's pretty close to the 7 billion is pretty close to Netflix's q2 revenue, which was 7.3 billion. I think it's great for us to look at these two businesses, Netflix has 10 times less users than YouTube, they only have 210 million subscribers, compared to YouTube's 2 billion plus users who use the service every month. So one is 10% of the size of the other. They both have the same revenue. And the revenue comes from different places. So if you look at where the content comes from, what what is the product will net fit Netflix spends billions on premium content every year, we know that, and they have to develop their own IP now because other IP holders are pulling their content off the platform. Remember, Netflix had all those Marvel deals for Daredevil and Punisher and all that kind of stuff that all got pulled right. And all those series are now on Disney plus, Netflix spent close to 12 billion on content in 2020. And they're going to spend 17 billion in 2021. According to variety, YouTube has billions of users, obviously, and it's generally user generated content or professional generate content. But it's an open platform. YouTube is not a gatekeeper. Anybody can upload anything they want to YouTube and they do write podcasts, YouTube creators how to articles, but YouTube paid $30 billion to creators from 2018 through 2020. And that was from the 2021 yearly priority letter from Susan Wojiecki, who I'd love to have on the program. By the way, we should we should invite Susan to come on the program again. So if you look at the content business, one person has to spend a god awful amount of money, the other one just gives a percentage. It's kind of a jump ball there. It's two different things. I wouldn't give the edge to either company, you know, one of them owns 100% of the IP. In most cases, that's Netflix. And in YouTube's case, they don't own this IP. You know, anybody can take their content off or stop publishing it there. Like we saw Joe Rogan do. So you might even give the edge to Netflix if they happen to figure out how to create a franchise like Star Wars or Marvel in the future, which they might, they might be able to do that. Orange is the New Black is probably not it. But there might be others. So if you look at the strength of the revenue, and the quality of that revenue, well, Netflix has subscription revenue. And that is usually more predictable than ad based revenue. However, Netflix did have a number of users unsubscribe or not renew in the last quarter, they lost about 400,000 folks. So YouTube's revenue could be fickle because advertising, you know, does go up and down based on the economy. However, when you hit scale, you have to ask yourself, who's the competitor here? Right? Who's the competitor to YouTube, a massively global business that has never existed before. And I would actually even though subscription revenue is delightful and predictable, I'd actually give the edge to YouTube here, because I don't think they have a contemporary, there is no business out there that can reach as many people as quickly with video than YouTube. So if you're a TV advertiser, and you want to reach 100 million people 500 million people, is there a network that can do that today? Can NBC do that? No. Can Disney do that? No, there is not a network who can do that, except for YouTube, you know, even the Super Bowl is, you know, maybe 100 million people might see your ad, you know, it's like once a year, that's kind of peak television by the peak by for YouTube could be global and a billion people 2 million people. I don't know if anybody's ever done an ad buy. But that would be something I would love to see is what's the largest single ad by in the history of YouTube versus television. And I'm sure the largest ad buys would be for a season of some hit show on TV, maybe somebody buys out, you know, the Olympics and the Super Bowl from NBC or whoever. If anybody knows that the largest ad buys, I would love to hear about that. You can add mention us and we'll do it in another new show.

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SPEAKER_00: look at YouTube's ad revenue growth at 83% year over year, and they have 2 billion people worldwide. Hmm. And there's four or 5 billion people who are online. That number is going to double and then triple. So they'll be you know, you can be sure everybody on the planet will have access to YouTube very quickly. Not only will everybody have access to it, everybody with the exception of authoritarian communist countries is pretty close to having access to it. And when Starlink and other low Earth orbit satellites come out from SpaceX and other places, you're going to see dramatically the number of broadband subscribers over a decade is just going to boom, we'll have another billion broadband subscribers. And that's going to be a wave that none of us anticipated. And that wave is going to be super, super impactful. Because these are folks who maybe haven't even had, you know, stable electricity running water, and all of a sudden, they're going to have high speed internet, and then they can be able to see YouTube videos. I know this sounds really quaint or optimistic, but I'm an optimist. And imagine you're in a village, you know, in Africa, or in South America, or just somewhere on the globe where the internet hasn't gotten to yet could even be Middle America could be rural Australia. And now you have access to all this education material, and you can work from home. And you learn how to do design and you put your ads up on Fiverr, and you get some customers in the developed world. And the developing world is now transacting with the developed world through a broadband internet, and they're acquiring skills. I mean, this is extraordinary. Netflix obviously has to localize content for each market. And if they do a series, you know, it's a series that comes out of Israel going to play in Japan as a Japanese series going to series going to play for Irish, you know, audience here, sometimes you have those moments, but it's not that often, a lot of times you have to localize the shows and you have your own version of Homeland, you know, which was a show from Israel then plays in the United States, it's it's not efficient in the way YouTube is if YouTube if there's a video, from Gordon Ramsey on how to make the perfect omelet that plays globally. So I give again, YouTube the edge. And if you look at competition. Well, you know, you have maybe Twitch owned by Amazon taking a piece of YouTube, but nobody has put proper competitor to YouTube. And that is really an opportunity. I don't understand why Facebook hasn't been able to, you know, buy Vimeo or any other video platform and really try to make a competitor, it's really kind of sad that nobody's been able to go up against YouTube, I guess, tick tock to a certain extent is getting a lot of crater videos. And I'm seeing how to videos tick tock feels like the only real viable, you know, global video competitor to YouTube. And we'll see if we're allowed to even have that in the United States, because there's a possibility that China might say, You know what, we're not letting these companies get

SPEAKER_01: so big anymore. Maybe we won't even let tick tock in the United States forget about us banning them. At this point, it might be more likely that China bans tick tock in the United States. Disney Plus has

SPEAKER_00: been a massive competitor massive headwind to Netflix. And you have Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max is getting really good. I'm watching two new shows over there, White Lotus, and I just did the first episode of and I've been watching hacks. And I have to say, you know, on top of I May Destroy You, I think was the other series from last year, that was fantastic. HBO Max is putting up some good content, like really good content. I don't know about Peacock or Paramount Plus, I think that's not for me. But between HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus, Netflix has a massive amount of competitors not not even thinking of Apple TV, which once in a while comes up with a good show like Ted Lasso. So again, the edge to YouTube, there is nothing like it out there. And you have to wonder if YouTube will spin out, I think if you if YouTube was its own independent company, doing 7 billion a quarter, you know, doing $30 billion a year, I think it would go for 30 to 50 times top line revenue. I know that sounds crazy. But at that growth rate, as an independent company, people would make that bet 30 times 30 900 billion dollars. I think YouTube is a trillion dollar company as a standalone company. I know that sounds crazy. I know people are going to say I'm nuts. But just think about if YouTube was its own business, and they could go after gaming and programming, and they already have YouTube music. I mean, there is no limit to what they could do with that franchise when you have 2 billion people using your product every month. Just think about

SPEAKER_17: the businesses you can start right off of it. It is incredible to think about that they could, if they

SPEAKER_00: did a crowdfunding, they could go to a director like Quentin Tarantino, who, by the way, has been on a roadshow. He was on Brett Easton Ellis podcast. He was just on Brian compliments. I haven't listened to that yet. And he was on Joe Rogan's. And I listened to two of those, Brett Easton Ellis conversation, which is behind a paywall, but was phenomenal. And Joe Rogan's, which is phenomenal. But you know, Quentin Tarantino kind of a hard director to back, right, you needed to have somebody to back that kind of director. Imagine YouTube just said to their users, Quentin Tarantino is coming out with a new film, we want to put up $250 million to back his next film. And they go to their 2 billion users and say, would you like to buy for 20 bucks, the right to be a producer on this film, and you know, you can have your name in the credits or something, or just, hey, you know, we're going to crowdfund it, you can pre buy it for $20. I think they would get $100 million out of the gate, out of the gate. And YouTube hasn't even been doing those experiments because our ad business is so strong. So congratulations to YouTube, we got to get Susan Wojcicki on the program. I mean, I've talked to her before I've met her. Come on the

SPEAKER_17: program. I mean, let's talk about how amazing all this is. In our continuing coverage about tech coming

SPEAKER_01: back to work, and the pandemic eventually ending, which we're all hoping for I am so frustrated about this delta variant. My god, we could have had everybody back to work, we could have been opening up society and some percentage of you have opted out of getting the vaccine and have opted to

SPEAKER_00: get the delta variant. There's new information out there for you. The delta variant is massively more, massively, massively more contagious. You're not going to avoid getting COVID if you're not vaccinated in all likelihood, you're either going to get vaccinated and maybe get a light case of the delta variant, or you're definitely going to get delta variant. That seems to be the case here, please, please, if you're hearing my voice, just think about do you want to have this argument about lockdowns and arguments about masks for the next year, or the next six months, all we have to do is get another 10% of the people hearing my voice, maybe 20%, depending on the neighborhood or the town you live in, if just another 10 20% of y'all who have been holding out, get the vaccine, this is

SPEAKER_32: going to end and we can have parties and go to Vegas and go to concerts again and go to sporting

SPEAKER_17: arenas. Who the heck wants to be in a perpetual state of arguing over lockdowns and masks and

SPEAKER_00: Karen's fighting about masks or no mess. I don't care if you didn't take the vaccine before I'm just asking you right now if you're an anti vaxxer or you've been avoiding it, just look at the new data and just take some fresh eyes and investigate it because now there's a billion people on the planet who've gotten these vaccines. If there was a problem with them, I think we would know by now, don't you think? And do you think the risk of the delta variant which is highly contagious and

SPEAKER_23: spreading like wildfire? What if that was spreading like wildfire and it was three times as lethal? Well, that's a possibility, right? These things mutate. So take this as a public service

SPEAKER_00: announcement. And let's talk about going back to work because this now the delta variant has given everybody who doesn't want to go back to work, or anybody who doesn't want to go back and be a teacher. The ability to say, you know what, I don't feel safe. I don't want to go back to work. Well, you know what, now this is escalating. People are going to be asked to wear vaccine buttons to prove they're vaccinated. They're going to start asking for vaccine cards when you go to restaurants and movie theaters and sporting events like they did at the Knicks game when I watched my Knicks go to the first round of playoffs for the first decade. They're going to be you're basically by not getting the vaccine. And by extending this, we're just going to create even more chaos in society. And here we go. Sundar Pichai told employees in a note Wednesday that the Mountain View California based company would begin requiring anyone on its US campuses to be vaccinated in the coming weeks. He said Google will expand that requirement to other countries in future months. Google is planning on returning to work in mid October, they were going to do September. And he mentioned on Twitter, and Google expects employees back in the office three days a week on average. So you're going to be required if you're working in certain jobs, if you're going to certain sporting events, you're going to be required to get this vaccine. And so I think maybe take a look into it, take a deep look. And these companies I think are benefiting from work from home. So I don't think work from home is going away, I think it's going to be a very flexible environment for the next couple of years. And Google has joined Morgan Stanley, United Airlines, BlackRock and other companies who have either banned unvaccinated employees from their offices or required them to be vaccinated. And that's by course at work. We spoke about vaccine passports and private companies requiring vaccines in order to return back to work on all in episode 40 and 41. And people were complaining about those two episodes, hey, we're talking about this too much. Well, you know, if you're in business, or you're covering the markets, and or you're in politics, like, we need to end this pandemic and get it down to under 100 deaths a day, under 10,000 cases a day. And guess what, we were at that level a month ago, in the beginning of July, we were below, you know, I think we're 11,000 cases

SPEAKER_17: on average 30 days ago, now we're back up to 50. We were at like, some days 150 people dying in the

SPEAKER_00: United States, who knows how many of them are dying with COVID as opposed to dying from COVID. Who knows how many of them were, you know, end of life. So they weren't dying with the majority of their life ahead of them, they might have died a couple of years earlier, obviously still tragic. But we had this thing beat folks. And now we're going to have to get into a war with our employees and getting on planes and with each other. Are you masked? Are you vaxxed? Let's stop this annoying thing and move back to solving bigger problems in the world like global warming, and making sure everybody has a great education and healthcare for everybody, please reconsider if you have put off getting a vaccine or the second shot because the second shot I understand is critical. What's going to happen to unvaccinated employees? Well, in tech, we need employees. And if you're unvaccinated, you're going to be working from home. If you're an exceptional employee, that's great. But if you don't come to the office in a company that's a hybrid company, I do think if you're not in the office with the locus of power and the top executives, you're probably going to be throttling your career advancement. And not intentionally, it's just going to be harder to advance. It doesn't mean you won't advance. But you can imagine if you're sitting next to Zuckerberg, or you're sitting next to Bezos or whoever the new CEO of Amazon is, you know, you're going to go further, if you're on the campus, you're just going to go further faster. And with less effort, it's going to just be easier to go further in your career, because you'll have built those relationships. And when a new opportunity comes up, is the new opportunity think about a manager, or a CEO of a big company, new opportunity comes out, we're going to do AR glasses, VR glasses, we're starting a car division in Apple, are they going to give it to somebody who's working from, you know, some lake, Lake Cuomo or something, you know, this person's on the Amalfi Coast on a different time zone, you're not putting that person in charge of it. Great, that person gets to live on the Amalfi Coast. Amazing. But they're not going to get to advance their career and have the most interesting work. So if you care about the most interesting work in the world, and you want to be near the locus power, and you don't want to have to get COVID, and you want to stop arguing with people, and you want to go to sporting events, and have musicians go on tour again, and we get to go to concerts, oh my Lord, or a Broadway show. Let's just all get vaccinated. Not all of us, just 10% more. Please do it. Please reconsider.

SPEAKER_20: Okay, let's get on to the interview. Too many small business owners are busier than ever. It is crazy out there. Things are growing like gangbusters. But since they're focused on managing and growing their businesses, they can't always spend the time they need to on recruiting the most important part of running your company. That's why LinkedIn jobs has made it easier to find and hire the best candidates for free. You can get started by posting your job for free to reach LinkedIn's network of 740 million professionals. Fill out targeted screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified candidates with the experience, skills, and motivation you need. Then it's easy to filter and prioritize the top candidates you'd like to interview. So easy using LinkedIn's software. We love LinkedIn jobs here at launch. And in 2021, we've hired a second producer, a curriculum designer, and a few more researchers, all through LinkedIn jobs. We love it. It's easy. Your job is going to get in front of the right person. And you might find that game changer, that unicorn that will change everything at your company. And boy, is it amazing. You know, in that feeling when you find somebody who's a really great contributor, well, you can have that feeling right now. Because every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn, post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash unicorn. That's right. Your first job is free linkedin.com slash unicorn. U N I C O R I You know how to spell unicorn. That's linkedin.com slash unicorn to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free. Okay, everybody, as you know, I've been critical of cryptocurrency. Over the years, I've been enthralled by Bitcoin and some projects. But I've also been

SPEAKER_01: concerned about ICOs and speculation, manipulation. But there was one area that I always thought was after a store of value and money transfer, the most compelling use case for cryptocurrencies. The one case where I thought a blockchain and immutable blockchain was more than just buzzwords. And that was NFTs non fungible tokens, the ability to craft something digitally, and own it and have it be one of one or one of 100 or, you know, whatever denomination you're going to create is a brilliant idea. And that idea has captured people's imagination. And we've been talking about a lot on the program. And we're very lucky today to have Devin Finzer on the program. He is with OpenSea. If you're in the NFT space, you know it because it's a

SPEAKER_20: marketplace for NFTs. Welcome to the program, Devin.

SPEAKER_41: Thank you so much for having me. Long time fan.

SPEAKER_43: Oh, thanks, pal. Appreciate that. I get that a lot. Now had somebody tell me, a founder I invested in, in fact, was like, this is a dream come true for me to have you as an investor. I was like, Oh, that's great. And he's like,

SPEAKER_17: I've been watching you since high school. I was like, what? Like, yeah, high school, we would watch this week in

SPEAKER_49: startups. And then in college. I'm like, Oh, wow. You've been watching for seven or eight years. I get it. You're 24 years old.

SPEAKER_51: The show has been around for 11 years. It's turning into the press. But thank you.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah, for me, it's been, I think, right after college, I started listening to it.

SPEAKER_43: Oh, that's great. Were you an entrepreneur back then?

SPEAKER_56: Well, I worked at Pinterest as my first job after college. And then I did just as a software engineer on the growth team. And then after that, I started a company that was acquired by Credit Karma. So through that time, while I was kind of thinking of different ideas and ideating as listening to you

SPEAKER_58: regularly. So thanks for that. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting, because I have these conversations with people on the show, and then I meet them in person. And they act incredibly friendly to me. And because I already feel like we have a rapport. And we're talking a little bit and shooting the shit before the show started. And I realized what it is, is I've been in people's ears for a decade or five years on 2x. And then you meet me in person, and we start having this conversation. It's like, Oh, yeah, for for some people, this is their 200th hour of having a conversation with me, or being in a conversation because you're hearing me and another founder. And now it's a chance for people in high school to hear you program and be inspired. When did you first

SPEAKER_64: hear about non fungible tokens, and this concept and what happened in your brain, when you saw it?

SPEAKER_65: So 20 late 2017, which is really when this whole space began, I was deep into crypto, I was pretty

SPEAKER_56: set on doing something in the crypto space, it was just a matter of what, whether that was joining a company starting a company, but I was going to all the meetups back when you could actually go to physical meetups, learning as much as I could about it. And then this project crypto kitties, which I'd believe you had on the show Dapper Labs, yeah, hit sort of the mainstream tech scene, and really, you know, kind of showed the world that there was other stuff to do in crypto outside of sort of pure financial or pure tech plays, but this could be a more consumer, mainstream audience type of technology. So that's when I that I mean, that's when kind of the world heard of heard of non fungible tokens. And that's when I got interested in it. Um, yeah, a while back now.

SPEAKER_64: And what was your idea? You saw it happening? You see crypto kitties. And you see this happening

SPEAKER_01: in a very open way, you must have had some aha moment to create your platform was your original idea to create non fungible tokens or to create a marketplace? What was your original idea?

SPEAKER_56: Pretty much the original idea was to create a marketplace. There was a moment when we were doing a completely different idea in crypto around sharing Wi Fi using cryptocurrency, but we quickly pivoted from that. And then there was a small moment where we just wanted to build a game on top of crypto kitties. So one of the cool things about crypto kitties was because kind of owned them on the blockchain, you could go and build developers could build experiences that use your crypto kitties, but in different creative ways. So someone built like a kitty hats application where you could accessorize your crypto kitties. And then this other team built a kitty racing thing. And they were all very early experiments. But that kind of led us to this idea of, well, you know, you can have these things outside of the original application that they were born in. And so that maybe you could build a marketplace that allows you to trade all this stuff that exists outside of the game or the project, right. And that was kind of the aha moment where we're like, Okay, that's kind of a cool new novel concept. And then let's go and try and see if we can take it to market. And of course, it was such an early market that we had to, you know, kind of patiently grow with the space as new NFT started coming online.

David Friedberg: So it feels to me very much like the early days of the World Wide Web, where you got your internet connection, and then maybe you had your email, or you were in Usenet news groups, and you had a

SPEAKER_01: newsreader. And then RSS came and you had web browsers, all these like, disparate pieces in the experience. It feels that way a little bit right now in crypto, you have people who let you mint NFTs to create one. And then you have marketplaces like yours. And then you have, I guess, Roham's platform and what he's doing a dapper and then also Topshop. How does this all fit together? Do all the tokens allow you to be traded anywhere? So nobody has a lock on the

SPEAKER_17: assets.

SPEAKER_56: That's right. I would say that inventory of the assets, the beautiful thing about it is that the inventory is shared, right? So you can, you know, create an item on some art platform, but then you can actually go and, you know, it's in your wallet and you own it. So you can go and take it to open C and resell it, right? So some of our some of the marketplaces that are more oriented towards art, people will actually go and, you know, flip those on open C or something like that, right? And, and then gaming, it's similar, right? We haven't seen, you know, as you said, it's early days, but there's this cool idea where you could take an item from one game and actually bring it into another game pretty seamlessly, right? Because again, it's like, it's all sort of connected to your wallet. And so users have the freedom to kind of do whatever they want with these things. And developers can really easily, you know, once they kind of get over the hump of learning how blockchains work, which is, of course, an area of development, they can, like, integrate these things. So yeah, there's, there's less of a sort of data moat around the NFTs themselves. It's not like, you know, the, the NFTs that are minted through our platform, for example, aren't proprietary

SPEAKER_78: to open C, they just happen to be created there. So it's a very, yeah,

SPEAKER_01: this was a very interesting concept, because in fact, cryptocurrency, people forget, the the sort of dry run of cryptocurrency was mana and gold in games, specifically, massively multiplayer online games. And people forget this. But Brock Pierce, who was, you know, big into cryptocurrency now, he had started a company called the internet gaming company, or internet gaming entertainment with Steve Bannon, I believe, the Trump's organizer, and what their concept was, hey, people are playing World of Warcraft, or whatever. We'll go into the game itself, as a character, take your plus 27 sword, that's worth $800 that you spent a year, you know, building up your character or your sword or whatever you found. And then we'll go give it to somebody else. But we'll make sure on our website, you have bought that item, which was completely against everybody's terms of service, etc. And, but I think they did it out of China, if I remember correctly, it was some way they were getting around this currency selling. And it was kind of explained that those were like, miles for they weren't currency, because they were like, airline miles, they didn't really have an equivalent. And then of course, Mark Pincus did Zynga, and he had, you know, Zynga coins, etc. So that was all this kind of interesting dry run. But is anybody doing that yet? Where in a in one game, Fortnite, you could take an asset, put it on the blockchain and trade it? Has that even come to pass yet?

SPEAKER_56: A little bit. So I would say that the most promising experiences there are so there's all this digital art out there, right? There's like people minting this expensive crypto art, there's, you know, even some traditional artists starting to mint just pure digital art. And there's these virtual world projects, one is called Decentraland, another one is called Cryptovoxels. And these virtual world projects, let you bring that digital art in and make museums of it. So that's sort of this first instance, right, where you can, you know, you sort of have this equivalent of a physical environment to display your digital stuff. And suddenly, it's like, that digital stuff starts feeling a lot more real, because you can kind of, you know, take it with you to these different places. So gaming, there's been a few experiments of like, you know, I think you could bring your crypto kitties into like this trading card game, like early stuff. But I think the there's this really kind of interesting symbiosis with the digital art world, and these virtual worlds that's going on. And that's where a lot of the kind of early activity is happening. It's not happening from like the, the more mainstream

SPEAKER_96: established games, it's more early startups that are more experimental. How much time and money do

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SPEAKER_01: This was all kind of underground and wasn't really capturing many people's imagination. It was kind of on the fringes, but I think somewhere during the pandemic or slightly before the pandemic started, Top Shot, the NBA's way in which people could buy NFTs of specific players and their specific plays and games, if I'm correct, started trading. And, you know, CryptoKitties had kind of, I believe, deprecated a little bit, but this exploded over the last 18 months, I think what's happened in the last 18 months and then what's happening today with the sort of most recent crypto Bitcoin crash

SPEAKER_56: in terms of interest. Yeah. Well, I would say, um, when the, the time period that I would point to where it's really exploded from a volume and sort of mainstream awareness standpoint has really been

SPEAKER_78: from December to today. Um, yeah, that was when some of these really giant sales happened. And if you saw the SNL, uh, skit on NFTs and so suddenly like I would talk to, you know, people outside of

SPEAKER_56: tech and they would actually know what an NFT is at some high level. Right. So I'd say that's sort of the period where things started blowing up. But to your point, I think things have been building up

SPEAKER_78: for the last four years, essentially. So, um, a lot of work has gone into the wallets that support NFTs,

SPEAKER_56: the marketplace like ourselves, uh, that allow you to trade them, the experiences of these virtual world projects, artists starting to experiment art platforms. So really it's been the accumulation of a lot of things. And then really like January or February was when, um, all of those things kind of came to culmination. Um, and so, for example, for, for our marketplace, you know, if you look back to August of 2020, the transaction volume on our marketplace was about a million dollars per month. And if you look to today, so far in July, we've done around $170 million.

SPEAKER_102: Wow. 170X year over year. That's growth I can get behind.

SPEAKER_56: Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's just, uh, this month in February, in, in July. Right.

SPEAKER_74: So, but a year over year, you're saying 12 months later, a hundred. Yeah. Yeah. About 12 months

SPEAKER_01: later. Yeah, exactly. That is mind blowing. And what are, what are the projects people are buying

SPEAKER_65: and how do you make money? Yeah. So, uh, well, to answer the second question,

SPEAKER_56: so we make money on a transaction fee. So every time something's, uh, sells, we'll take a, uh,

SPEAKER_107: percentage, um, the project is a variable. Do you do it by category? Two and a half percent. Yeah. Two and a half percent. So it's like a credit card fee.

SPEAKER_56: Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. Um, and, and the things that are, are, you know, we, we serve, we're, we're sort of the most horizontal marketplace. So we serve everything from art to game items. Um, there's even some experiments with event tickets, domain names. Um, so it's sort of across the board, the, the categories that are most popular right now are for sure art and collectibles are really interesting. So you mentioned NBA top shot, um, but also, you know, just trading cards from famous athletes, um, or even sort of more experimental, like crypto art type projects. Um, and then games are really big too. So trading card games where you can imagine like a magic, the gathering or Pokemon cards can actually trade, uh, digitally. Um, and then these virtual world projects are really interesting. Um, but we're excited about kind of the diversity of projects

SPEAKER_78: increasing over time as more and more developers kind of come into the space and start experimenting

SPEAKER_01: with this. Tell me about domain names. What is that about? Are people taking actual.com domain names like inside.com and then selling fractional ownership in them? Or is this a new domain? Uh, you know, space that has been created just for this area?

SPEAKER_65: So it's, it's both, but it's for the most part, it's the, it's the second one. So you imagine you,

SPEAKER_56: I don't know if you've, uh, set up your Ethereum wallet and have a little bit of crypto, but if you've ever sent crypto to someone, you typically have to copy and paste the big giant hexadecimal address, kind of like where, you know, when you had to enter an IP address to get to a website. And so these domain names allow you to send crypto or send NFTs to like devon.eth or jason.eth.

SPEAKER_64: Ah, right. I haven't set that up. Right. So if somebody had a really good one, they could sell it on the marketplace. So somebody has jason.eth and they could sell that to me.

SPEAKER_56: Probably. Yeah. Yeah. So like amazon.eth was auctioned for like 50eth way back when. Um, so, you know, there's this

SPEAKER_43: All right. Whoever's got jason.eth come shake me down. I'll take it. I guess. I passed on jason.com because I was like, I got calacanis.com. Like, do I really need jason.com? And they wanted like

SPEAKER_01: a half million dollars. I was like, I would give you a hundred thousand dollars for it as a goof, but I don't think I need jason.com, but thanks. Yeah. And some developer board. Uh, so congratulations to that developer. Um, talk to me about what's happened in the art world in relation to this, because when people decided to sell his every days for $69 million. And we had met a COVID on this podcast, episode 1200. If you want to go listen to that, I think that was back in March. Um, who handled that transaction? And then for people who are interested, um, how does the how what happens to that NFT if it were to get lost or the password is lost? How does the provenance of that NFT get managed because it was bought for $69 million? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know the full details of

SPEAKER_56: exactly how the transaction was handled. I think it was done through Christie's. Right. And so yeah, I imagine they just sort of like, I think they, I think it was in crypto, but correct me if I'm wrong, but, uh, and then I assume they sort of transferred it to the winner afterwards. It is an interesting question around like, what if your wallet gets lost, right? This is a problem that Bitcoin has where we always hear stories of that. Yeah. Yeah. All these wallets hanging out there with, with tons of Bitcoin in them. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if, if it would be very interesting if an extremely high value NFT kind of got sent to a wallet and then those private keys were lost and, you know, essentially it'd be the equivalent of kind of losing a piece of artwork, except that everyone can still kind of see that the artwork is out there. So it's a little bit of a weird

David Friedberg: dynamic. Can anybody open up an NFT that somebody else has bought and put in their wallet? Is it

SPEAKER_65: freely viewable everywhere? Typically? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the blockchain is fully, uh,

SPEAKER_56: at least at the moment, the, the main blockchain is that power NFTs are fully public and transparent.

SPEAKER_01: Got it. So it's not like the person can buy this. If let's say, I don't know, are people trading songs or that kind of stuff yet? A little bit of music, but it is all it's yeah, it's more around

SPEAKER_56: sort of the collectible use case where you're like, okay, I own this, you know, kind of imagery

SPEAKER_78: and video associated with this sample of the song, um, versus like, no one else can listen to it or

SPEAKER_01: something like that. Right. Cause that would be interesting, you know, cause I remember, I don't remember that pharma bro had bought an album by Wu Tang and he's like, I'm gonna just burn it or nobody can listen to it. Nobody's ever heard it. And it's so dope. Interesting. Paid millions of dollars for it. I was wondering if the business model Shkreli, I think he's in jail. Um, um, yeah, I'm pretty sure he's in jail for a long time. Um, so you could then say, I want to turn on the ability to see this experiences, et cetera. It's just interesting as a business model. Has anybody done anything with downstream business models where let's say I bought this Beeple and then Beeple gave me the right, or I bought this Picasso or I bought this certain piece of art, but I got the right to then use it commercially or with some sort of smart contract. This is something I've always wondered about because, you know, owning an NFT, but having no additional licensing rights to it is like, okay, I can't, it's not really an investment other than the core asset appreciating. But if you could make t-shirts out of it, or if it was a song and you could license it to people in the real world, well, then you'd have essentially what music licensing is. If people wanted to use this song

SPEAKER_58: in a, you know, this Rolling Stones song in a commercial, they could just buy a right to it and use it. Has that started happening yet? Or is it, is anybody doing that?

SPEAKER_85: I haven't seen that yet, but there's no reason that you couldn't, right? You could just basically

SPEAKER_56: put in the contract, the stipulation that the purchase of this NFT, you know, gives you the right

SPEAKER_69: to do these things, right? There's, so it's, it's totally feasible. And I think it's only a

SPEAKER_147: matter of time, to be honest. Yeah, that to me seems like that would create something beyond just

SPEAKER_01: the speculation on, hey, the price might increase. Now cameos become a really popular service. Has anybody started doing cameos in NFT form? Because that I was also thinking about that. I was like, wouldn't that be kind of interesting? If you had this famous person, LeBron James, you know, wish somebody happy birthday, and then it was, you know, on the on an NFT, as opposed to just, you know, on your hard drive and could be lost or on a website or whatever.

SPEAKER_56: I haven't seen the exact cameo use case, but but but similar things. So for example,

SPEAKER_78: Rob Gronkowski released sort of these trading cards with his image on them, right? Where,

SPEAKER_56: you know, basically, it was like the equivalent of baseball cards or something like that. But it was, you know, just him doing it independently, and then releasing it to the world. So I think people are being like, you know, there are probably been a few experiments where, you know, celebrities just kind of upload some, you know, gif of them doing something and then sell it. But I think people are trying to be a little more, you know, I guess, a little more creative and a little more kind of ensuring that there's proper distribution and that like people can participate at different levels of contribution. And it's not just, you know, I think the sort of days of really high value NFT sales have kind of passed to some extent. And now people are like, can we can we bring fundamentals

SPEAKER_96: to this and ensure that the projects are doing something unique? And maybe there's kind of utility

SPEAKER_74: associated to owning the NFT as well. Yeah, that's what I was getting at is the utility of it. Is there some purpose to doing it? I like the idea of being in games.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Now, I'm curious, you have you have an idea of everybody who's on your platform? Or do you just know the wallets? Because the transactions occurring, you have to settle money. So I would assume you have to know the customer or you don't? How does all that work? Because I think what we're seeing right now is this great cleaning up of the crypto ecosystem? Or what would the word be legitimization of it and regulation and just a general trust being maturing would be a great word, I think. Yeah. And we're seeing that with like tether, maybe leading people to go, wow, this is really questionable. But then you have Jeremy Allaire doing circle and, you know, maybe a different level of regulation, Coinbase being public. And what's the one out of China or no location? Binance. Binance. Binance is like, you know, the crypto exchange with no home. And then you have Coinbase, which is regulated, you know,

SPEAKER_58: as a public company with, you know, a lot of regulation. So how is how do you deal with that? Because people are trading assets. So do you have to know who they are? Or is it just a wild west out

SPEAKER_56: there? Yeah. So for us, we're a marketplace, not an exchange, right? And we're peer to peer and non custodial. So that kind of separates us from the world of finance and Coinbase, where they're literally holding people's assets and allowing them to trade on a on a cent with a centralized model. For us, we actually it's actually a pretty interesting world that we're in where we facilitate transactions through a decentralized smart contract, as opposed to OpenSea ever taking hold of the asset itself. And so that allows us to, you know, let users interact with the site with their own wallet without having to like, sign up for OpenSea or anything like that. Now, of course, we do things like we geo block certain countries. And and we also allow people to enter their information if they want to. But it, you know, it puts us in a nice place where we're not trading

SPEAKER_78: things like cryptocurrencies, we're mainly trading this kind of collectible use cases, if we expand, you know, beyond that, then, you know, there's sort of things.

SPEAKER_01: So if I find an NFT, I want to buy on the site, it's a top shop one, I say, I'm going to send, I want that I have a wallet, you have a wallet, or I have a wallet and Jane has a wallet, she own Jane owns the LeBron James top shot NFT. We decide how we want to transact fiat, PayPal.

SPEAKER_56: It's actually all done through crypto. Yeah. And actually, interestingly enough, we don't support top shot yet, because they're on a different blockchain than Ethereum. We got it. We currently

SPEAKER_78: support Ethereum and a few other sort of Ethereum layer two chains. But so how exactly work? I have

SPEAKER_01: an idea in my mind. But for people who are neophytes listening, explain how the smart contract works

SPEAKER_74: and the transaction actually occurs without you being the custodian of the NFT for some period of

SPEAKER_56: time, or the custodian of the crypto. Yeah, so essentially, the way it works is, so you have this wallet. Most people use MetaMask, which is this Chrome extension wallet where you can hold Ethereum inside of it. But it's, you know, it's just completely separate from OpenSea. It's not, it's not, you know, hosted by OpenSea or part of OpenSea. And then OpenSea is sort of a portal into your wallet. So you connect your wallet to OpenSea, and then you can suddenly see all of your NFTs if you own any. If you want to list an NFT, you go to, you know, you go to that item, you press sell, and then you do a, you actually do a transaction on the blockchain. So what a lot of people are starting to learn is that Ethereum is not just a place where you can like, send Ethereum around is actually a place where you can execute code in this trusted environment. And so there's literally this, it's pretty crazy. There's literally this smart contract out there, uh, that, that the code that's written for that smart contract, you know, allows the user to give permission to trade an arbitrary NFT. And then in a blockchain transaction, suddenly the if there, if a buyer comes along and buys that NFT, the Ethereum is swapped to the seller, and then the um, asset is swapped to the buyer, and it never gets sort of held by anyone else. It's all just

SPEAKER_126: through this code. It's just very, it's insane.

SPEAKER_169: And this is for people who don't understand, this is really revolutionary because there would usually

SPEAKER_01: be an escrow agent selling a home, selling art, the escrow agent would take on this responsibility for clearing a transaction. They would get ownership of the asset, the piece of art, they'd verify it maybe, then they would verify the money was in the bank account, and then they would

SPEAKER_112: release it to the other parties here. The this, this is the decentralized nature of the technology decentralized would be the best way to describe this.

SPEAKER_56: Yeah, it's essentially like a decentralized program that can interact with users, assets and funds, right, natively on on the blockchain.

SPEAKER_01: But since I don't have the NFT in my wallet, I can't post to this Ethereum smart contract to this

SPEAKER_74: blockchain that or with this code that I am willing to sell it. So there's no way to spoof it.

SPEAKER_56: Yeah, and and the code, the code of the smart contract is open source and audited into sort of

SPEAKER_182: all the different exploits that you'd imagine have been relatively battle tested over time.

SPEAKER_102: Pretty amazing when you think about what is happening here. It's crazy. So what will this look like

SPEAKER_01: in five or 10 years if you're successful? Obviously, you've raised a ton of money. Congratulations. Revenue is gone bonkers. You're making two and a half percent of almost $200 million with a company

SPEAKER_185: with I'm guessing you have 50 or 150 people in the company at the scale.

SPEAKER_188: We're we're still actually 30. So but we're, we're scaling up rapidly. Yeah,

SPEAKER_185: doing $60 million a year in fees or something to that effect. It's unbelievable. $2 million in employee or something. Very rare to see that kind of revenue. What does this look like in 10 years, five or 10 years, if you succeed and you hit all your milestones?

SPEAKER_56: Yeah, I think it's, you know, to us, it's always been sort of the birth of a brand new kind of consumer internet, right? If you look at the last couple decades, it's been the trend has been consolidation. So Google, Facebook, these larger companies have really kind of become at the center of our online lives and the Wild West webpages, all those things kind of dried up. And I think some people in tech and consumer tech, and there's been a lot of excitement in, in SaaS and other areas, but consumer tech has felt like it, like there's some, there's got to be something beyond that. And I think this is really is the beginning of it. And it's really sort of intertwining economics and economies into sort of consumer creator focused applications. So, you know, imagine sort of, instead of an Instagram where you upload photos, and primarily it's Instagram monetizing that the, that user behavior users can directly sell an NFT to people who want to support them. And it's a much more participatory economy versus kind of what we have today on the, the sort of ads based social networks. So it's, it's unclear exactly what it's going to look like, right? Like, I think

SPEAKER_191: You sound like me talking about the internet in 96 or 97. I was literally on trolley rows trying to

David Friedberg: explain to people that it would be this kind of community thing. And I was describing social media, but it didn't exist yet. And you're like, well, people are going to be able to be online. And like these communities, people are going to be hanging out in them and talking about stuff and

SPEAKER_01: sharing, but you know, it's not going to be in the real world. And people are like, what are you talking about? But I mean, essentially, you're building all this infrastructure. Now it's not built yet. It's super confusing. And it's, it's, you know, not for civilians, let's say, yeah, it's not for laggards, obviously. But at some point, when this infrastructure is built up enough, you'll be able to take out your wallet or your phone will have a wallet built into it. And you'll pull up some equivalent to Instagram. And it will find every photo, you know, on every blockchain and serve it up to you. And there'll be some algorithm that will be written, you know, in some smart way that you'll be able to pay for. And the algorithm will not exist from a company, it'll just be some code out there on a decentralized network. And it will put together magically with some algorithm that

SPEAKER_58: reads the entire blockchain and finds every photo and builds an Instagram for you. It's pretty crazy. You'd be following wallets. I mean, you think about it, like, you could

SPEAKER_01: actually build an Instagram and just say, here are the most popular wallets that own NFTs images, whatever we call these objects, NFTs, obviously, and then presents them to you. Yeah, it's really unbelievable. And this is like the exciting part of crypto, right? Like, that gets lost in all the greed and the FUD and the toxicity of what's exciting to see is that,

SPEAKER_56: like, a lot of the kind of jobs of the future are starting to emerge. So for example, these virtual worlds that I was talking about, where you sort of have virtual land, and you can build museums and things on top of it, you know, now there's sort of like the virtual real estate agent who go, we were actually looking to buy some land for OpenSea and like, talk to someone and they're like, yeah, I can, I can, you know, find you some, some good spots, like in this district. And, you know, I'll take this cut. Does that sound good? Like, it was really in, you know, that guy is like doing that as part of his full time thing now. And, and similarly, we're seeing like, people, you know, be able to pay back their student loans using the money that they've made selling crypto art to collectors, right? So people are becoming full time, pure digital artists. So it's like,

SPEAKER_204: yeah, it's, it's, it's gonna be weird, weird, weird world. I don't know exactly, like what it will look like, but you can sort of see the semblance of things.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah, I mean, William Gibson took a pretty good swing on it. I don't know if you've ever

SPEAKER_01: read Edoru and that whole Bridge series. Have you ever read that William Gibson series? No. You'll get a treat out of this. He's a really good writer. He wrote Edoru, All Tomorrow's Parties. And he wrote this stuff like in the, you know, late 90s, the early 2000s. And it was basically about dystopia in San Francisco 30 years later, and everybody's living in VR headsets and virtual worlds. But they're going and buying digital kimonos to go to meetings and playing different avatars. You know, it's kind of like the Johnny mnemonic era of cyberpunk. And that cyberpunk stuff is starting to me a lot of what I'm seeing is the good stuff I'm seeing feels like the cyberpunk era. While I have you and you're in the crypto space, how do the people who are building legitimate businesses in crypto look at, you know, China, you know, cracking down on crypto, and then maybe tether not having the assets they say they have, or maybe having them, and this sort of seedy underbelly, you know, that you're distinctly not part of and trying to work against to get consumers into this. While there's a bunch of grifters and anonymous people doing all kinds of

SPEAKER_185: chaotic stuff. How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, every time there's money

SPEAKER_56: to be made in a new industry, that's kind of a natural piece of it, right. And we saw that most saliently in 2017 with ICOs, and you know, people raising tons of money, you know, through these that, you know, really no kind of legitimate project at the end of the tunnel. But you know, I think

SPEAKER_60: on the other hand, Was there literally any legitimate one that emerged with a product in

SPEAKER_65: the real world? Filecoin? A few, yeah, Filecoin, you know, Tezos, 0x. So some of the, you know, some of the really big ones did emerge with products, but it was a very interesting dynamic where,

SPEAKER_56: you know, they had so much money, and yet they were sort of these early stage products that maybe didn't have product market fit with like, they had a white paper, they haven't written a code,

SPEAKER_213: it had a billion dollars. I mean, EOS had billions of dollars, right? Tezos had hundreds of millions,

SPEAKER_187: then billions of dollars. It was crazy. So what I think was, I think what we've seen as sort of the most successful projects are the ones that started like right after that, right? So right

SPEAKER_56: after it was really easy to raise money, you know, tooting our own horn, but we started like, you know, right at that first bull market, Dapper Labs, you know, there was a good amount of money back then, but it was less than the ICOs. And just a lot of real entrepreneurs kind of came into the space and started building things. And now, you know, three or four years later, those are the projects that really found product market fit and are doing well. You know, there are definitely some that raise tons of money in ICOs that are starting to do interesting things. But I think it's a sort of testament to, you know, being sort of resource constrained actually can be a useful thing if you're trying to if you're actually an early stage project. Yeah, because you are based on you're

SPEAKER_01: doing milestone based funding. So you have 18 months to produce enough that investors new ones or your existing or some combination want to fund the next stage of the company or you were so successful in that 18 months in our milestone based funding, you know, innovation here in Silicon Valley and then tech that you don't need any more money or you need a modest amount. And that's a really beautiful thing. You give somebody all 20 rounds of funding that they would get before, you know, up until going public. What's going to happen to those founders are just going to be, you know,

SPEAKER_58: totally spinning out of control. They're not going to be able to stay focused. Stupid standard VC

SPEAKER_01: question. How does OpenSea differentiate when this is all built on open standards platforms, and anybody can build these, you know, how do you think about I mean, obviously brand is definitely important. Trust is important. But yeah, is that is the answer as simple as that is that we're going

SPEAKER_02: to build a really trusted brand and that will win the day. I think it's a combination of things. So I

SPEAKER_56: mean, inventory is certainly shared across all applications. The liquidity of the marketplace is not necessarily shared, right? So building up sort of the best, the best place for buyers and the best place for sellers is kind of the traditional marketplace mode. Of course, there's a little bit less friction to moving between marketplaces than there is for like, something like eBay or something like that. But I do think I think trust is really important. So we put a lot of effort into ensuring that we remove fraudulent NFTs or legal NFTs or anything that that our users wouldn't want to discover on OpenSea. And brand for sure, ensuring that we're sort of supportive of our community. And also sort of discovery, right? So ensuring that you can kind of come to OpenSea and always find what you're looking for. So I think there's these sort of soft factors that kind of add up to, you know, pretty strong moat against folks that are going to do the exact same thing.

SPEAKER_222: I agree with that. I mean, we had StockX on the program and like, you know, they're selling sneakers that

SPEAKER_01: are worth 10s of 1000s of dollars, in some cases, six figures. And it's like, well, okay, how is this defensible? It's like, they verify that these are actually really, you know, those special Jordan retros that, you know, yeah, that whatever Providence, right. And then you have the eBay has seller ratings. Are there is there an equivalent of seller ratings here? Is it unnecessary?

SPEAKER_227: Um, not not really not yet. It could become necessary because so so now you can anyone can

SPEAKER_65: create an NFT, right? So that means that I can go and find, you know, some cool looking photo that

SPEAKER_78: someone else made and upload it and sort of, you know, try to sell it as my own. And so there's that

SPEAKER_56: kind of activity that might be might mean that it makes sense to have some sort of rating or reputation

SPEAKER_64: system. Somebody could basically create an a Beeple account with a entry and then take his content and

SPEAKER_74: make fake people's and then people think they're buying people's that are buying. This is what we

SPEAKER_230: see every day. Yeah. Oh, you do people selling? Really? That makes sense. If this person has never

SPEAKER_01: sold one before you've got to do it. Or listen, continued success. Congratulations. We're going to

SPEAKER_74: be watching it. And really interested to see what happens with that video games and being able to take

SPEAKER_01: a weapon from Fortnite and bring it into, you know, the new Call of Duty to me seems like a mind blowing, absolutely awesome concept. So continued success. Random fact, Devin had co founded a course scheduling

SPEAKER_185: app at Brown in 2011 with Figma CEO called course kick. I just got this random, uh, note. Tell me

SPEAKER_193: about that. Oh yeah. So, so Dylan and I are really good friends from college. Um, and the first, I mean,

SPEAKER_56: honestly, the thing that inspired me to kind of at least do software engineering and maybe, and maybe, uh, do engineer, do entrepreneurship further down the road, uh, was this project that we did in college, which was a, um, yeah, social course scheduling software where you could share your classes with your friends. Uh, and it was a lot of fun working with Dylan on it. And now Dylan's actually an

SPEAKER_246: investor in OpenSea and one of the, you know, one of my favorite people. Oh, you got the brown mafia

SPEAKER_174: going right now. You got the brown. I had always dreamed of going to Brown because I had heard in an

SPEAKER_47: interview with some celebrity who went there in the eighties, um, that you made your own degree. You would pick, you can, yeah, your own degree. And I was like, well, I want to do a degree in like online, like cyber or whatever. And then I went to my counselor and he's like, there's no way you would ever get into Brown. I was like, well, should I try? He's like, you're going to get into

SPEAKER_49: Brooklyn college or be a cop. Like, get them out of my office. Literally college counselor, just like,

SPEAKER_51: get out of my office. You're crazy. You're, you're going to be a cop or go to Brooklyn college. You'll be lucky if you finished that you're getting your associates. Calacanis.

SPEAKER_193: Well, now you've, uh, this is what happened. So yeah, this is what happens. Yeah. It worked

SPEAKER_241: out. Okay. All right, brother. Have a good one. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups.