SPEAKER_00: okay we got a lot to cover today first up i'm going to show you the greatest cnbc hit of all time and what is destined to become a top five video uh perhaps even mount rushmore top four video in the history of live television it's the greatest cnbc hit of all time and i got a nice shout out from tech check john fort and finally i'll talk about youtube and how they're hiding SPEAKER_01: the downvote counter very interesting and then david benneham is on the program he's from ready games and he's talking about his new fashion nft marketplace game called icon and how we're going SPEAKER_00: to transition from a closed or semi-closed wall garden hedge garden and web 2 to a distributed SPEAKER_01: web 3 open source world it's a really interesting conversation about the future of nfts mobile and the metaverse and it's friday so we're going to wrap with another edition of ok boomer rachel is reporting on emily herrera a 22 year old who started her own angel syndicate while still in college stick SPEAKER_07: with us this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com twist masterworks the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class twist listeners can skip the 30 000 person waitlist by going to masterworks.io and using promo code twist and lemon io need to speed up your product development without draining your budget hire vetted engineers from europe at lemon.io go to lemon.io twist to get 15 off for the first four weeks okay in our first story i can't SPEAKER_09: believe i missed this but in a clip from mid-october that resurfaced in my feed today uh investor mark SPEAKER_00: minervini whiffed on describing what the startup upstart does this is the greatest cnbc hit of all time it is one of the great all-time pandemic zoom videos uh i've ever seen and uh or just i this has got to be in the running for top 10 maybe top five live tv moments like the one with the guy was reporting on cnn and the two kids came running in or his daughter came running in and stomping her feet which is just i think that's number one for for live uh forever uh or maybe the kid with the turtles SPEAKER_12: that was the other one uh i like turtles that's definitely in the top five so this is getting the running it's it's in that i like totosh oh my god i like turtles i mean it's crazy but this is i believe you know in virality and internet legends i this could be a mount rushmore i i know i sound like i'm getting ahead of myself like saying kevin durant's mount gonna be mount rushmore i know David Friedberg: um but i am i'm getting excited i'm going there i'm jumping the fence that's it okay uh i'm just SPEAKER_12: absolutely losing my mind on this clip so i i think that's as much of a build-up you got to watch SPEAKER_14: the whole one-minute clip you're going to show this to 10 friends let's roll the tape money in SPEAKER_16: right now include upstart that is one uh tesla mgm and aig why those four all of which you've bought within well basically this week except tesla uh end of last month yeah so well upstart's SPEAKER_18: up about 25 percent just in four days since we since we bought we bought it on uh about four days ago uh so that's actually made a nice little move in the uh short term probably a little extended right now but longer term uh that that's a that's a good looking uh name uh very powerful very strong earnings these stocks are they do i don't even know what do they do uh excuse me what does upstart do SPEAKER_24: uh well i'm i'm i'm sorry what kind of company is it yeah i'm not you're you're breaking up oh uh well SPEAKER_16: i guess we've got an audio problem there mark i'm sorry i do know mgm i do know tesla and i do know aig but a 25 move in a week is pretty good for the company upstart uh thank you mark for your time SPEAKER_29: we'll have you back soon appreciate it uh you and they would not be having back anytime soon what you saw there was you know he's having a panic attack obviously he he's recommending a stock on national SPEAKER_31: television without even knowing what they do i mean this is the height of insanity but you literally could just visit their website and know what they do do you do any prep for coming on cnbc when i first SPEAKER_00: started doing cnbc hits i would get up in the morning uh and two hours before i was going to be on so 8 a.m i'd be on at 6 a.m i would start a thread uh on uh sms with uh some of the inside team and some of the launch team so maybe one or two analysts and then uh one or two people from launch so three or four people and then i would say here are the topics i want to talk about give me facts and then give me what you think some of the react early reactions are that are notable on twitter in other words other people's hot takes so i would come in hot and then i just had a very easy strategy when i was on cnbc i'd say okay i'm going to explain in the most basic terms possible SPEAKER_12: how uh what's going on in other words just explain what the story is so if it was you know disney versus netflix for streaming supremacy years ago i explained hey this is what the benefit to disney is going to be when they have a direct relationship with customers as opposed to having it mitigated by netflix and cable companies uh and then i would make a prediction right so i was like explain um you know frame the issue and then make a prediction i never really thought about it that scientifically but anyway that was the system i came up with this person did nothing i mean i don't i don't know i'm now in some people say in his events he's like trades you know based on momentum and charts but still you would want to know what the company does of course like i mean nobody's just looking at a chart making a bet maybe there's some computers or high frequency traders doing that but that's not what he is and what you can tell is he says i i don't know and then he's like oh uh you know i think you know there's a there's a problem here and all that pausing and then i think the anchor is trying to figure it out and then somebody said in the anchor the producer said he doesn't know he's having a panic attack we got to cut the video he's there's no audio problem because the video is perfect we all know the video goes first zoom will prioritize audio every time so it's the zoom that is the bit of the tell that you know and it's just obvious so i mean in one way i feel bad for the guy in the other way i feel like this guy is doing like serious damage in the world by giving people advice or talking about stuff and trying to be an expert when he doesn't know what the company does i mean fairly obvious what happened here i mean i try i always try to give people the benefit of the doubt in this case man it's not a game folks it's just it's not a game here this is people's money it could be their livelihood it could be their future their children's future it's not a game when it comes to finance like be thoughtful that's what i try to do here every day on the show like if something is a scam you know if it's nicola or if you think something is a scam like tether and they're starting to get fines and and there's a lot of red flags like well let's talk about that and let's be honest about it but i mean whoa i mean somebody might buy the stock based on this guy going on making 25 in four days and he doesn't know what the company does i mean it's just so deranged he was previously the president of an SPEAKER_00: institutional research firm in new york but it does not say where he worked on his resume and then he wrote two books and this is from his bio on his website in fact and so he wrote two books trade like a stock market wizard and think and trade like a champion so he's written two books so he's literally giving advice and interestingly uh minervini sells investment advice so he doesn't know what the SPEAKER_01: company does he lies about the av in a panic so you know i don't want to be too cruel here i mean SPEAKER_38: i understand it's a panic moment live tv is not easy it's not for everybody um but he's selling his SPEAKER_00: investment advice apparently for a thousand dollars a month or six thousand a year on his website and uh october 15th was upstart's peak at 390 a share the stock has fallen 35 percent in 28 days uh since he made his legendary appearance um for those unaware upstart is a phenomenally simple business their lending platform right lending money and they use ai apparently to uh help people get better loan terms and so like your education and cost of living they basically try to project your credit worthiness ie like a fico swarm might but they're using ai to do that went public in december of 2020 stock has gone SPEAKER_01: up 8.6 times that amount crazy trading at 254 a share 20 billion dollar market cap they did 228 million in revenue in q3 which was up 3x right so those are we've talked about this before on the program you know growth company 20 30 percent year over year when you start seeing two to three x you know that usually means the company is in its you know highest growth phase in terms of percentage but usually it's on a much smaller number so growing 30 when you have 10 billion in revenue is a lot of money uh growing SPEAKER_00: 30 when you have 10 billion would be three billion dollars that's a big that's a lot of cash growing SPEAKER_31: 30 when you have a billion in revenue it's only 300 million you get the idea so you got to take SPEAKER_00: this into account like um you know the scale of the revenue here but still it's very impressive uh which means they're all you know on close to a billion dollar run rate and so they charge an origination fee on the loan amount like anybody else and they'll charge a late fee and other nonsense SPEAKER_48: but uh if an investor can't describe what a company does on cnbc it's a bit of a tell i would say like SPEAKER_01: i wouldn't blame cnbc for this person not being prepared it's his job primarily i will say whoever the SPEAKER_00: booker was uh you know i might know the book or they might book me for shows uh you do have to uh have a red flag out now for people who are selling courses or make their money primarily from selling SPEAKER_01: stuff rather than making bets right so and i what these folks do is they make it seem like their primary business is the trading but the real business is selling the courses and so i can SPEAKER_00: understand a producer you know getting hoodwinked here or maybe being rightly confused because they tend to put out like i'm i make you know all this money from investing or real estate and i make i'm just printing money but you know on the side i do this thing where i ask poor people or middle class SPEAKER_53: people to give me 20 000 and manipulate them you know whatever it is so it's gross but hilarious in SPEAKER_55: another way god sometimes i wonder if i'm being too cruel uh in my estimation of what just happened in that video but that was rough it's rough i mean i mean that guy's been taking else for a month on this SPEAKER_29: thing and i just found out about it today so i mean i just think it's one of those memes that's just going to keep coming back i mean just to give you some insight on how i run this show with three SPEAKER_00: full-time producers literally three full-time producers rachel justin nick they do a great job David Friedberg: producing the show um i mean if they don't have last year's number or they haven't done the percentage difference between the last two or three years numbers or they haven't taken the number of customers and divided into the valuation like i expect them to not only get me all the correct numbers i expect them to do some back of the envelope math and maybe add a little bit on top of that come up with some ideas or themes knowing what the company does SPEAKER_60: i mean come on it's just astounding to me before we get into the ad i want you to go to linkedin.com slash twist and post your first job for free just do that right now first job posting free linkedin.com slash twist okay now on to the every today many small business owners are busier than ever time spent searching for and interviewing the wrong candidates takes away from growing your business that's why linkedin jobs has made it easier to get the candidates worth interviewing and you're going to get those candidates past you and your first job posting is free in just minutes you can SPEAKER_64: post a job on linkedin and reach the world's largest professional network which is now over 770 million people wow they're going to hit a billion soon you can use screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people then you can quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire we love linkedin jobs at launch and in 2021 we hired a third producer a curriculum designer and a couple more researchers and we're still hiring and linkedin jobs gets it done for us i love the product so linkedin jobs helps find you the right candidates worth interviewing faster every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit linkedin and you can post your job for free at linkedin.com twist that's linkedin.com twist to post your first job for free terms and conditions SPEAKER_66: of course apply because they're giving you something for free all right also on cnbc today just a SPEAKER_00: thank you to my friend john fort he gave me a shout out on my disney takes from years ago so i i didn't remember exactly what i said uh but here's 26 seconds from john fort uh this morning and guys SPEAKER_68: i have to say speaking of virtual worlds today disney also announcing a series of nfts featuring its SPEAKER_71: characters guys julia i maybe i'm going to regret this but i got to give jason calacanis credit for this vision right which i think he laid out with us on squawk alley before it was tech check a couple years ago about how disney plus and subscriptions you know parks tying that together with the digital SPEAKER_73: world etc etc so you know thank you john i mean um it's very nice of you to even remember that and i SPEAKER_00: do remember the conversation now um i did say if i remember correctly listen and this is when i used to go into the studio and this is when i was explaining earlier in the show that i would prepare for an hour so when i would be driving up to the show i would either hit the conference call button and get all those people on the phone you know while i'm driving to the studio before getting hair and makeup uh they did the best they could and um you know i'd be uh listening to them and i i would riff and i would even practice sometimes saying out loud the facts and i would just try to keep three or four facts you know that i thought were the most relevant but they would give me 20. and so it's just this great process right and so i think that was the result of why they kept asking me to come back you know and they were like hey you want to be an official contributor you know could have been a you know paid situation i was like i'll just you don't need the money for money on my own pockets but i'll just SPEAKER_73: come on like every couple of weeks and um but they started having me on once or twice a week at the peak SPEAKER_76: and uh yeah so let's play the clip well we talked about this last year that it would be an incredible opportunity at some point for disney to be able to collect credit cards and email addresses and go direct to consumers they were of course selling their content to netflix and other services and that was a good model but if you look at what happens long term when you put an intermediary like netflix in between you and the content and that intermediary decides hey we can make content too and it turns out they're highly competent at it and amazon decides to make their own content then all of a sudden you're losing that end consumer you don't have a direct connection to them and it's a major risk factor for the network but espn owns the greatest ip in the world it's the greatest collection of ip in the world and i think actually yes when they start going direct esp i'm sorry disney and espn have some of the best content in the world and so disney with espn with uh marvel star wars pixar and that whole collection including the disney assets of course the original movies they have an incredible incredible collection and when they go direct it will be very easy for them to get tens of millions of people to subscribe uh to that service jason i'm wondering SPEAKER_71: you've got espn on the one hand but then you've also got kind of marvel and lucasfilm and then you've got like disney junior type stuff it doesn't seem like all of that fits under a single subscription so do you have to sell them each separately and do you end up with subscription fatigue unless there's something like a cable bundle that authenticates for all of them at once no i think that disney is SPEAKER_76: the one company that could produce uh you know a top three offering so they'll be right up there with SPEAKER_73: amazon and uh netflix yeah so listen um a couple of notes there one how much better do i look now 20 SPEAKER_55: pounds i mean my face looks so much fatter than um just four years ago i was i think in that i was probably 198 in that and i'm 179 now so uh wow yeah everybody should try to lose 20 pounds uh you'll look better SPEAKER_89: on tv that is actually really hard to look at yourself on tv when you're fed it's that's very SPEAKER_00: difficult for me but uh at least i was like smart um it's pretty obvious to anybody i don't give myself too much credit here i think people were just looking at disney and thinking like how how could disney's business get any better and it'd be like if they had a hundred million people's credit cards and one click purchasing and 50 million people using their app every day that would be a lot better in other words they would have a massive distribution channel they would have cable vision they would SPEAKER_31: have direct tv they would have like a pipe into everybody's home well that was the magic of apps now listen four years ago you know the idea that disney was going to challenge netflix and even to be technically competent was kind of laughable but um you know the big folks uh the big traditional companies they kind of lumber but man they're they're kind of like these giant elephants like very they SPEAKER_73: might move very slow but when they do like it's a big footprint right it's a lot of weight coming down uh so they they'll move slow but you don't want to be under them when they walk over you and so SPEAKER_00: just thanks for remembering the conversation john we don't give each other credit for this kind of stuff and disney plus worldwide users today 118 um and i still stand by uh my belief that we will soon live in a world where you know the netflix's and the disney's uh will have 250 to 500 million paid subscribers globally you know you start thinking about that math and the budgets it creates for creating content you know at but ten dollars a month for each of those accounts and listen there might be some places in the emerging world uh where they'll get two dollars a month in u.s dollars or four dollars a month right it may not sustain the fourteen dollars or twelve dollars like you get here in the u.s for these things that's why i put it at ten i mean that's an awful lot of cash if there were 500 million people paying a dollar each you'd be making 500 million a month and now you add a zero you're at five billion a month that'd be 60 billion dollars i don't think you could spend 60 billion dollars on content it'd be very hard and that's why uh disney plus today had their like star wars day and they're announcing you know uh and i think they're doing some marvel stuff too or maybe it's an overall disney plus thing their disney thing SPEAKER_53: today i mean they're announcing like 30 shows 40 shows it's unbelievable and the obi-wan kenobi one i predict is going to be some of the greatest star wars content ever created i think it'll be you know like mandalorian empire strikes back clone wars like this is going to be some of the best content rogue one ever made in the disney uh i'm sorry the star wars world so congratulations to the SPEAKER_09: team there okay youtube is changing how voting down works on videos instead of you seeing a count of SPEAKER_00: all the votes down when you click the vote down button only the creator is going to see that vote down and they want to do this to make the platform more respectful and to support emerging founders who are getting hit with swarms of people who will vote down their content not just because they don't like it but i guess there's some insinuation here that it's a bullying or a coordinated attack who knows we live in very charged times this comes at the same time that instagram and facebook starting allowing users to hide the number of likes on their uh own posts so i saw this myself on instagram was like hey do you want to show likes or not show likes do you want to let your only your friends comment so i think this has to do with giving people more power uh and not making them feel as bad when they use services so on instagram people feel bad about themselves and the number of likes they get and you know maybe that affects people in the body dysmorphia area according to the research because it's a very visual medium on youtube you have people performing and talking like i am right now and the votes down is um you know for a performer i guess uh can make them feel very bad and maybe they will not want to produce more content which is a problem for youtube so youtube i think has a concern about uh people you know maybe not becoming creators this is a this is a difficult argument here according to the verge instagram's adam mossari stated that hiding likes quote didn't actually change nearly as much about how people felt or how much they use the experience as we thought SPEAKER_01: it would but it did end up being pretty polarizing some people really liked it and some people really don't in a blog post on wednesday youtube announced they were removing the dislike counter to quote ensure that youtube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators the term of art apparently SPEAKER_00: is brigading so these are down voting groups and so they will like on twitter the ratio and concept ratio and concept slightly different i'll explain in a second um you can hit uh the dislike button here's what it's going to look like if you're watching the show uh so you'll see a number next to the votes up so everybody gets a medal everybody gets a cookie everybody you know participates but you don't share with the public what the audience actually thought of your video i kind of like this um i do think that the uh brigading that's an issue on the margins and people will brigade for other reasons you know it's kind of part of the price you pay for allowing people to say what they think and you know the comments can be particularly difficult on people especially if people are attacking other people about their appearance or whatever and so they've removed some of those comments and i noticed that commenting is getting better on youtube i think they're making it harder to make burner accounts or easier to report or maybe they're pretty light trigger on removing a comment when it is reported and it has some negative sentiment doesn't come as much of a surprise in march youtube announced a small experiment where they hit dislike counts on select videos and uh here is what youtube's head creator SPEAKER_73: liaison matt koval had to say on the dislike button it's a 50 second clip and i will see you on the side SPEAKER_107: i've always thought seeing the number of dislikes on a video helps us know as viewers if it's a good video or not if it's a helpful tutorial or not or if what a creator is is saying in their video is generally agreed with or not but unfortunately research teams at youtube have found there's this whole other use for disliking a video that i had never experienced as a creator and you may not have either apparently groups of viewers are targeting a video's dislike button to drive up the count turning it into something like a a game with a visible scoreboard and it's usually just because they don't like the creator or what they stand for that's a big problem when half of youtube's mission is to SPEAKER_00: give everyone a voice okay there you have it certainly good intent uh there might be second order impacts here that are not good i i have to say i like a little rough and tumble i like the dislike button because i feel as content creators you know if you want to evolve you do need to get some negative feedback in order to grow and it's tough but you know if you're a comedian you have to go play comedy clubs where nobody knows you and it's a different group of people and you're at a disadvantage it's not your friends and your fans in the audience and you're gonna bomb and uh that helps you sharpen your knife right uh if you bomb you you really get motivated to make better content if you get booed off the stage you know like that's what this the bums down button is it's kind of a way for the audience to boo you i don't know it feels soft to me i gotta be honest i don't like it i like being able to vote something down if i disagree with it or i think the content is lame i would have done this as you can opt into this so if you have a political channel you can turn off uh likes and dislikes on it right i guess or turn off view counts um but youtube makes these decisions generally in what's in their best interest and what's you know in alignment with their mission and their mission is uh to grow the creator base and and you know allow people to express themselves so i kind of think like this is the best decision for them i don't think it's the best decision for the users so if i was thinking about the users i like the users having this ability to give like a massive vote of no confidence i would like to see this on other platforms as well i like the vote down and apparently twitter is uh doing vote SPEAKER_01: downs the way you do uh this kind of voting down mechanism and you show your discontent with the SPEAKER_00: content is by ratioing it so you don't thumb you don't star it you don't retweet it but you do comment so what that means is people don't want to amplify this tweet they're like yeah this is not worthy of me sharing with my audience or me hitting the like button or hearting it but i will respond to you and tell you how bad your tweet is and so i do have like david sax's like right-wing folks will come to me and ratio me and like they love ratioing you know the the wacky alt-right people who hang on peter thiel and david sax's every word and on the other side like the aoc liberal you know chesa boudin people in san francisco they're all like crazy socialists like they love to ratio you and SPEAKER_73: it's it's just gross um but but it's a good feedback mechanism uh i think and so i like it but the world is soft i mean somebody just said in the chat room but i think it'd be good to have a SPEAKER_01: vote down i would love to see the vote downs on twitter i'd love to have a list of the most voted SPEAKER_00: down by the way i think that if these are gangs doing these voting down rings it's very easy for youtube to figure that out all they have to do is look at all the voting down rings they look at the users who voted something down like in a gang kind of way and then they could see that they have a pattern of also doing that to other videos and then you just take all their votes and you do what's called in the industry neutering them clip clip they have no impact they don't count they think that their votes are counting because when they go to the site and they click the down vote it goes up for them and it shows them their vote but it doesn't actually register it so you you kind of it's like the madman technique you basically make people lose their minds because they're commenting and they're voting something up or down and they see it on their version of the website so they actually see their you know toxic comment they see the vote up and down but the public doesn't see it so they would have to open another browser to see that their stuff isn't up there and so they might go for a year you know harassing somebody on a blog or on youtube or whatever and they think that their message is getting through and nobody's seeing it it's like they're yelling into the void it's like sending zod SPEAKER_115: into the forbidden whatever the glass was and sprint to uh all right next up on the program david SPEAKER_01: benneham who is doing some really cool gaming and nft and avatar work for the metaverse stick with us SPEAKER_64: if you've read business news over the past few weeks the only thing you could say is wow craziness in the markets keeps things interesting but when it comes to your finances sometimes less is more and diversification is important according to masterworks now you can add contemporary art to your portfolio with masterworks masterworks.io has revolutionized the art market by allowing any investor to buy shares of multi-million dollar paintings just like buying stock in a company they SPEAKER_60: already have over 250 million in aum that's assets under management and congratulations to the masterworks team on becoming new york's newest fintech unicorn ah man i should have wet my beak on that one okay so here's your call to action you can skip the waitlist and get access today by going to SPEAKER_64: masterworks.io slash twist that's masterworks.io slash twist and i've bought some shares and paintings SPEAKER_122: there i think it's a very cool service all right next up on the program david benneham who is a good friend of mine coming back for his second appearance on this week in startups he is the founder of ready SPEAKER_124: games which i am lucky to be an investor in they were founded in 2016 and they've recently launched SPEAKER_125: a fashion metaverse nft platform so i thought i would bring him on to talk about that i guess mini pivot or evolution of his ready gaming platform welcome back to the program david jason it's SPEAKER_126: great to see you i see you survive the pandemic very well we did and are you still north of the border SPEAKER_128: i'm still in canada up in montreal how do you like it uh you've been there for five years now i think we moved from the states uh four years ago in fact the last time i was on the show i think we talked about the economic benefits of uh taking a u.s startup and running operations out of out of another country like canada uh so i think to date now we're up to 1.5 million of government support in canada for what we're doing um that is unbelievable yeah so every year you are able to take your research SPEAKER_102: projects and get a credit you submit that to the government from what i understand and then you wait SPEAKER_136: and see and then they will give you reimburse a reimbursement for a developer or three exactly exactly SPEAKER_128: and the motivation and of course to qualify is you have to have canadian based engineers to qualify so most of the team now is in canada uh so we can get that that grant money and you were ahead of SPEAKER_125: the curve uh you obviously were in new york and uh raised money in silicon valley got the best of both worlds um but now everybody is remote anyway so it doesn't matter um so you were ahead of the curve on SPEAKER_145: that uh yeah now we're just caught up i'm just like everyone else working from my house well is SPEAKER_111: the panda i'm just as before we get into the product is the what's the state of the pandemic up there i know canada was behind uh was on serious lockdown and way behind on vaccines what's SPEAKER_128: the situation been this past six months or so i think now we would be uh around 10th in the world uh of countries over a million people to be fully vaccinated i think above the age of 12 SPEAKER_131: 12 across the country we're like at 85 86 percent with two vaccinations wow extraordinary people SPEAKER_138: believe in science yeah the rates have come down significantly here and where they do exist it's SPEAKER_128: it's like 6x unvaccinated people the ratio to uh vaccinated going into hospitals or whatever yeah SPEAKER_125: yeah i think makes sense makes total sense here we got to in california you know this high 60s low 70s depending on what region and we are the i think uh tip of the spear in terms of compliance but yeah to get above 80 is just so amazing and then we of course have these pills you're gonna be able to take from pfizer these antivirals should hopefully end the pandemic if we don't have another uh yeah major SPEAKER_138: variant in the meantime people play games on their phones so we're pretty so we're pretty pretty great SPEAKER_163: well it's interesting you say that um so it's to the audience you have to catch up because we're all SPEAKER_125: friends but um it is interesting uh a lot of what i'm seeing inside of companies is the companies that were getting a massive lift from the pandemic coinbase robin hood doordash whatever now it's kind of reversing and the go back to the real world is starting to uh benefit a little bit um but yeah video games have obviously had a huge bump so tell me about the new product you created and why you uh added this to the product line obviously we've been covering nfts and uh had roham from dapper labs on SPEAKER_111: open seas uh devon came on and of course we had medicoven who bought people 69 million dollar nft so SPEAKER_168: we've been all over this for the past year uh but nfts have been you know mainly limited to uh collectibles yeah and people have talked a bit about games so here we are you're uh jumping into SPEAKER_128: games so tell us what did you build and why yeah so i think just to set the stage at ready games we've been building tools for creators to create game content for the last four or five years and so our core platform was letting people create simple hyper casual games on mobile without knowing how to code we have over two million creators on that platform and i'd say about a year ago uh within the company we said to ourselves things are moving we need to be more 3d more grounded around multiplayer social gaming as opposed to solo and we want to bring in uh the whole avatar experience as the central unit of creation so so what these are like principles that we had and the reason we had those principles is we felt that the shift in gaming is increasingly just purely social you know people are going into games major ones like fortnite roblox it's obvious that the loop there is fundamentally a social loop around the game experience and so what we want to do is unblock creators to build social gaming experiences on mobile incredibly hard to do because it's very expensive computationally engineering wise to build like true back-end services to allow synchronous real-time gaming let alone to do it in a low code no code kind of way so so strategically we thought really reinvesting deeply in our into our intellectual technical intellectual property was important and it all had to work on mobile like you have to be able to create this content on mobile not on a desktop there's 2.3 billion people on SPEAKER_133: phones and we're super excited about that audience and super serving that audience so SPEAKER_128: over the course of the last year we probably had 10 engineers working full-time really rebuilding out the creative experience and it culminated in two things one is called the ready games network which is a platform that allows independent developers to take a casual mobile game usually a solo title and turn it into a multiplayer social game and then in addition to that we created an avatar system with all the cosmetics that you can purchase around what's called the metagame meaning the parts of the game that don't affect the core gameplay and that is really hard to achieve on mobile mostly very kind of advanced companies have this type of stuff so fortnight for instance has huge industry around the metagame that's all the skins and the stuff it doesn't give you any advantage when you play fortnight not gonna be better there's no pay to win but you look different and they do hundreds of millions of dollars as you know in sales on that stuff so we wanted to bring that kind of capacity into like picture it's a team of two three people creating a casual game give it to them yeah so SPEAKER_131: that's what we did with icon that's what launched last week icon is the authoring tool in the ready SPEAKER_128: games network that allows for the creation of all the avatar cosmetics to put it put the addressable market into perspective it's a 40 billion dollar spend this year just on cosmetics across all gaming platforms 40 billion uh buying digital goods and so as we on ramped like the the creator platform for the avatar system the ability to design clothing and shoes and scarves and all the cosmetics that go around it it was kind of a no-brainer to bind all of that to nfts and and and that's a deeper thing to discuss but just high level philosophically that's the jump that lets you see this as an asset that you can own as opposed to sort of use as a consumable and from there you know collect and use inside of ultimately multiple games which we'll get into how we support it across metaverses SPEAKER_133: across titles because that's critical to the value yeah and here is uh here's a quick video for those SPEAKER_125: of you watching on youtube we'll talk over it in sportscast it um it's just a 24 second video but SPEAKER_138: what are we seeing here well this is the internal avatar system we designed a modular system where the SPEAKER_128: clothing can fit on all the points and what you see here are the different types of avatars you can create and just now we're in the app itself and you're able to now customize that's a tailoring event people are now tailoring the items you can do all kinds of interesting textures and then you can bind it to nfts and from there essentially have the the rules set around how uh the product is sold you get five percent of the sale uh if you own the underlying nft um in addition to being the creator as a creator you get even more on top of it we'll get into that in more detail all the economics but uh SPEAKER_111: well that really is system everything yeah that that's the really interesting part of this is if they create their avatars here or if a game creates the avatars uh and i'm wearing that specific uh you know clothing when i go to my next game i could bring it with me if that game were to shut down you know fortnight shuts down or some you know get there's a new version all all of your skins don't come with you you lose them or if you decide you're going to go from minecraft to roblox you're basically whatever you did in minecraft is gone and you got to start over in roblox when you are trying to grow SPEAKER_64: a startup fast hiring engineers will slow you down like nothing else don't i know it so many companies i invest in are telling me they can't get their next version out because they don't have a great engineer well lemon.io will find you a perfect candidate in just 48 hours it's a marketplace of engineers from europe and they test and interview every developer to eliminate the risk of a failed project lemon io is the perfect solution if you are a technical co-founder and you need to delegate some of your important tasks or you have a project that needs specific technology and you don't have that skill on your team yet or you are just growing so fast that you need to add more developers and get more done faster they'll match you with the candidate within 48 hours and if it doesn't work out they'll replace the developer right away so here is your cta the old call to action if you could use a full-time or even part-time developer to run your projects faster go to lemon.io twist once again lemon l-e-m-o-n dot i-o slash twist and you'll receive a 15 discount for the first four weeks of work SPEAKER_120: with that amazing developer well done lemon okay check it out everybody lemon.io twist concept here SPEAKER_111: is your avatar would be your avatar and nfts means you actually own it it's on a blockchain somewhere it's proven and not only do you own it and have you're the custodian of it in other words you're the one storing it somewhere uh you actually could sell it to somebody else and make some money and the original person who created it would get a kickback a royalty of some type correct and and and i think SPEAKER_128: the innovation here is making this available to people on a mobile device from soup to nuts meaning you can compose your avatar accessory on the mobile device using our design tool you can then set the rules whether you want it to be bound to an nft or whether you want it to just be an in-app purchase unrelated to an nft you can then set the rules on the scarcity like is this limited in time limited SPEAKER_133: in quantity unlimited in both and the chain of custody is linked to the nft so to your point jason if the person resells the item somewhere else you can have the derivative right as the nft holder the SPEAKER_128: original creator that's the five percent i was mentioning to like perpetually be tapping um ongoing sales of the same item so if i make a shirt and jason you buy it put it on your avatar and then at some point you decide to sell that shirt to charlie uh i as david will get five percent of yourself charlie and then if charlie decides to sell it to to jennifer i will get five percent of charlie sale to jennifer and that will go on forever so what we start to build now is really the notion of like a master recording in music where if you you own the master that's that nft right you essentially will get that revenue on all of the transactions now what makes gaming so awesome with nfts is by definition game objects are smart objects they only have value in time and space unlike you know perhaps a static image right if you buy an nft of a static image it comes like someone bought the first tweet that went on twitter for example that's not really a smart object it's pretty cool that you potentially bought that thing maybe it's not pretty cool it's pretty 2d it's just Chamath Palihapitiya: a screenshot it's the same as a jpeg except right provenance right like it's it's got some sort of SPEAKER_00: provenance but it's got provenance because the person who did the screen grab says it has provenance let's be honest right like somebody else could take jack's first tweet and sell it as an nft and i SPEAKER_128: don't know if jack could even stop exactly so you that's what i wanted to bring up so in a game environment that sort of social contract around perceived value around the nft is really really different because in a game it's an object that renders it moves it walks it jumps it it all this stuff happens and as a smart object within the context of the game you can detect whether it's a ripoff or whether it's an original actual one and what you start to do at that point is create status and hierarchy and so what part of why we started with fashion and gaming as a point of entry for SPEAKER_133: the consumer is fashion is so awesome at creating status and hierarchy around perceived value like why is this handbag worth 10x more than that handbag right yeah they make you go yes but it's not just SPEAKER_182: scarcity it's also the brand equity behind it you know um and so we believe that applying that SPEAKER_128: kind of modality to digital and virtual goods makes a ton of sense right why is this avatar scarf more precious if it's coming through the nft process versus someone trying to rip it off now game developers because now game developers can make money off these cosmetic cells become aligned with SPEAKER_131: the nft owners yeah to signal to other game players whether someone's wearing a rare collectible nft item SPEAKER_128: in the game right smart object you can do that why would the developer do that because they want people to retrade and sell in their metaverse and the way they're going to create more incremental perceived SPEAKER_131: value is by honoring and treasuring the real versions of things and because again games are smart they're smart objects in everything in a game unlike say twitter you can generate that layer of intelligence and SPEAKER_128: everyone's interest is aligned the whole value chain agrees that we should do this so it's very juicy you SPEAKER_208: know what is the chances that a major game would want to open up and support something like this or SPEAKER_111: is this going to be something that'll be a ground up movement and take a couple years because if fortnite is making 100 of their skins do they really want people retrading them or do they want to control it is it realistic to get a roblox or a you know um minecraft or fortnite to be involved in this or is this going to be like an indie movement that grows up and is there an open standard here so two questions is there an open standard here if so who's defining it because that seems to be important as well if i make it in your uh icon you know is it going to be compatible and can i make a game not on the ready platform but have the nfts work all those questions come to mind so let's break that SPEAKER_128: question because as you pointed out it's two yeah let's start with the larger like sort of the market adoption question yeah so our focus so the things that you described tend to be large uh console or pc games so we intentionally focused on mobile we intentionally focused on building a creator network on mobile and now what's interesting with mobile is there's a huge long tail of dev teams building on mobile and so part of our initial adoption curve is just getting these smaller dev teams to bring in the ready games platform into their games to open up this monetization at the same time let's just bring in the creators let's get lots of creators creating and and we think that's actually how you get this flywheel really moving and you solve a lot of these cross game issues which gets to the second question which is like what's the open standard how does this work so by working with these smaller devs you can quickly sort of hash through these really important questions solve them meaning SPEAKER_131: we want it to be really open we want it to be portable yeah at which point i think the later and SPEAKER_128: middle adopters are going to be those bigger companies that you just mentioned in the end it's about growing the gross domestic product of this ecosystem writ large right right and if you get a really big gdp then why wouldn't a roblox eventually cooperate why wouldn't a fortnite cooperate you know they can still have control potentially editorial standards terms of service SPEAKER_131: of course nobody wants you wearing certain kinds of things that are offensive okay fine but within that SPEAKER_128: limitation let's grow this gdp from 40 billion a year of cosmetic game sales worldwide maybe 500 billion one day think about it it could go there in the next five or ten years SPEAKER_102: silly question but you know doing this inside of games is clearly such a huge win uh because SPEAKER_111: there's actually a purpose to it uh yeah uh if you believe gaming has a purpose i do um it's entertainment and it's social i wonder though if you're spending all the time building these tools SPEAKER_102: could you also not just make a tool that people use on mobile to design seekers and clothing that become nfts that just sell for that reason and then somebody who was a fashion student at fit in new york SPEAKER_111: who wanted to start selling their you know designs could start selling them and put them on openc and other platforms yes yeah the answer is yes that's what we want to that is what's SPEAKER_128: so we are releasing uh the next phase of the creator platform at the end of this month and what we're starting to work towards is you can go into icon you can design a line of clothing there and then you can actually both sell that clothing outside of icon so as you make clothes there will be a kind of unique hyperlink for each digital virtual good you create that unique hyperlink is embeddable in twitter and instant anywhere that embeds a url and then the callback will have SPEAKER_189: the buy process directly built into the pop-up yeah which means you can be on insta you can look at SPEAKER_128: a cool pair of digital shoes buy them on insta complete the transaction we could theoretically even use like shopify or something yeah do it right but then on our back end the nft piece is is done which then brings you to like well where do you take these things right and so let's talk about that for a minute so the cool thing with gaming is there is a file format that actually is the file format like the equivalent of a jpeg or a gif that's a universal file format it's called dot fbx if you work in gaming it's often what you're dealing with it's uh it's essentially the file format that allows for 3d objects with with potentially motion etc to all be encapsulated in an industry standard file format so when you work on blender for example you can export what you make as an fbx so we can of course take all the metadata related to the object that you've created encapsulate that around the object and then if you have a translator you can theoretically bring that object into another metaverse why the translator is important is that the proportions in one metaverse and another will be different literally like what is one meter because everything tends to be in the metric system like what does one meter mean in roblox versus one meter in fortnite they're not going to be exactly the same thing however you can build like a rosetta stone translator where you know that like a meter in fortnite is like this fraction of a meter in roblox and you can post process the fbx file to then go from being a roblox compatible file to a say a fortnite compatible file and then you want to create an open ecosystem where everyone's incentivized to contribute to these translators so if you want to bring a metaverse in it to be compatible with this type of reality you just need to build the translator and you SPEAKER_175: let's just take the fbx file as the unit so that fbx wouldn't be on a blockchain somewhere your nft would SPEAKER_125: be on there and then that would then go to your centralized server or something to translate it and you can provide that as a service how do you make money on all of this or is it just something to build the ecosystem in the hopes that your people pay for dev tools yeah so we we make them in two ways uh when SPEAKER_128: we create our own content obviously we can bind them to nfts and we are an nft holder we can also create nft auctions which we're going to start doing uh probably also late november where essentially we're taking the the hashtag that can correspond to a collection of things and we're going to be auctioning off those hashtags those hashtags become storefronts essentially so if you're looking for you know hashtag fall fashion hypothetically around avatar cosmetics anyone who wants to affiliate their item to that hashtag because there's presumably a large audience consuming that hashtag that nft owner behind hashtag fall fashion will be getting five percent of any object that's sold through that hashtag so now we're creating incentives to start putting objects into collections around SPEAKER_133: hashtags those hashtags themselves are bound to nfts so we would be behind some of those hashtags SPEAKER_163: to answer your question about the economics what would what impact will ar and vr have on all of this SPEAKER_125: and certainly these objects will be able to exist on you know or these nft based 3d objects SPEAKER_182: will be able to exist in vr ar i assume yeah exactly because we go back to that fbx file you know now SPEAKER_128: you're mapping the content onto the you know the ar the the sort of data points that the ar camera is getting and right now just to be clear the ar it's mostly around the human face it's not so great at the body so there's some real limitations with ar which is why we're really happy that we're working just purely core on the phone you know not dealing right now with ar uh right the phones aren't powerful enough to do body tracking and stuff like that you need a motion capture suit for that so but your theoretical question jason is correct this stuff would be compatible with vr and ar because again you're back to that rosetta stone like just translate it yeah translate it to wrap around using rec room SPEAKER_122: or something like that it's possible that yes you know this outfit uh that i bought in a ready game SPEAKER_111: i could just have it in my rec room vr playing ping pong and i'm wearing that shirt but in ar from what you're saying yeah we saw i think in zucks uh preview that they're working on getting your face a little bit better yes the name of their new vr headset i don't know there was a name to it like a thousand dollar one anyway they have a they have a more expensive one coming out that is supposedly got a a view of your face i guess they have a camera on your face of some type and they really want to get your smirk and your eyebrow raise perfect so that when you're at the poker table in oculus you're gonna project cambria that's what it was project cambria is going to be their high-end SPEAKER_125: one that does face reading and get your expression so one thing that that i guess that's a philosophical SPEAKER_128: point of difference right uh you know in internet 1.0 meaning you know up until like 2005 the whole premise was you're anonymous you can be anyone you want to be there was a famous cartoon of a dog at the computer and the punchline was like on the internet nobody knows your dog right and then there was this innovation starting around 2005 with things like facebook where everything became linked to personal identity everything had to be you you you you you and the reason why is that SPEAKER_131: an internet 2.0 it became about platforms and ad sales and ad sales are enhanced by knowing it's SPEAKER_128: really jason calacanis yeah well we're now moving into web 3.0 and web 3.0 is not going to be about personal identity it's going to be a return back to in some aspects of web one and that it's the SPEAKER_131: restoration of you can be anybody you want to be in web 3.0 you don't have to be yourself so to your SPEAKER_189: question about like oh the eyebrow tracking is so perfect in this metaverse who gives right do you SPEAKER_182: really want to be you isn't that so boring yeah i don't want to be me all the time i want to be something else you'd be a tiger or something yeah i want to be a dragon you know i'll be a dragon by SPEAKER_128: golly and so this obsession this mania with you know rendering the real you over and over again makes sense in an ad supported business because huh you know guess what in this new world we're SPEAKER_189: removing from platforms to protocols in web 3.0 it's it's like these platform players are terrified and they want to bring everything back into the real identity look how picture perfect this thing is no SPEAKER_168: thank you no thank you i mean there is a time for you to know who the actual real person is linkedin SPEAKER_111: perfect like sure you know we're hiring somebody who's a developer or whatever we kind of need to know who they are i mean it's also arguable because i've heard stories in the pandemic of developers SPEAKER_168: taking two or three jobs and working on them concurrently which i think is super brilliant and SPEAKER_111: crazy yeah um but yeah you know it's interesting when i gave my commentary on the metaverse i said SPEAKER_102: listen this is like any developer who puts one line of code into zuckerberg's world is sealing their own fate this is our chance to crack the facebook closed ecosystem it should all be open standards you should SPEAKER_111: not support oculus you should not support anything meta related and i hate the fact that he's using meta because now every time we use metaverse yeah it accrues to him which is what he does he just steals everybody else's innovations and spends all his time growing them and locking them down but i'm curious your thoughts on when you saw him pivot the entire company to that that is in one way a real recognition that this is serious because he's a serious you know smart guy with a lot of unlimited resources SPEAKER_122: basically but it's also kind of in a way like heartbreaking that he wants to just steal the SPEAKER_128: whole thing again well i just think the reality isn't in technology is that very very large tech companies have a certain shelf life and you can look at something like ibm which was an amazing company from literally the 1920s into the 1990s like unbelievable amount of time right yeah um and and so i think there is real fear at places like facebook um that you know they are very tied into a certain thing and and it's not unprecedented for their time to come yeah um and so i think what he did with the with the meta change and all that is partly a real recognition you know that the time potentially is coming SPEAKER_268: yeah i mean look at aol and yahoo they were just such huge footprints in the industry and then SPEAKER_111: yeah well and yahoo essentially you know yeah for all intents and purposes don't exist to most consumers as actual brands they still have a billion users between them you know going to their various sites SPEAKER_128: but so so just to be clear jason when we say that the time is coming it's because the blockchain yeah and the way that we've taken that sort of intellectual property of the blockchain and now started to apply it to things like smart objects yeah is allowing for a distributed internet to appear that's two-way that doesn't require a platform to authenticate so the reason these platforms exploded between 2005 and now is because the internet was essentially a one-way thing like internet 1.0 as you go fetch that web page yeah but the person giving you that web page doesn't really get anything in return for that it wasn't a two-way system and the platform ecosystem you're no longer really fetching a web page you're fetching a facebook post and it's in the facebook ecosystem it is two-way in the limited way that facebook can make it two-way and facebook can then be like taking a toll on that whole two-way reality now with the blockchain situation it can become two-way and distributed and then you kind of wonder well once that happens who wants to be locked into a SPEAKER_111: platform right it's awesome yeah i mean if all of the tweets in the world or photos on instagram or just on a blockchain somewhere you just kind of like dip your bucket into this flowing data on some SPEAKER_125: network and you just take a big scoop of you know here's a bunch of photos about hawaii and SPEAKER_122: they're not on anybody's particular server they're on all servers yeah well what you're getting at i SPEAKER_138: think jason is like this other big strategic challenge with nfts in the blockchain which is SPEAKER_128: if what you say is true then one of the big challenges is the user experience to kind of make sense of all this stuff for everyday people and have it appear in an easy digestible way it's different than building the underlying infrastructure of wallets and the blockchain like okay great that's hard and it's being done but now there's this other next layer of hardness it's kind of like what apple tried to solve with the personal computer very similar which is how do you take this underlying tech and make it approachable for everyday people that's what we're trying to do at ready games that's what we're so interested in is to to say look this is something anyone can use or do and that's why the phone is such an important point of entry right now because that is the most SPEAKER_125: casual computing device that we have in our hands yeah and it's quite possibly going to become the repository of your assets like it's going to be your wallet it already is to a certain extent i started SPEAKER_111: paying you could sort of see it on your watch uh or on your i don't know if you use apple pay on your watch but at some point i was like oh i have apple pay set up and i have an apple credit card i said yes to that and oh i can just so i started using an apple watch again and i was like oh when i'm in italy i can just bang this against the little thing and get my gelato like this is incredible i don't have to take my wallet out and that's that's what this nfts are going to do right you're going to just have these things stored on your wallet and or on some provider app there's another really cool SPEAKER_128: thing they do for kids which is totally overlooked which is worth just unpacking for a minute so i have two children you have a child three three now sorry and my oldest is 14 i think yours are even younger than mine and so we all face the same thing as parents which is kids on social media yeah you know yeah they want to go on tick tock they want to go on insta no way and you're like no way and i'm like no way uh but why do we say no way and the answer is because they have to be who they are SPEAKER_131: the financial model zuck put on all of us was you have to be you so you have to be you at the age of nine at the age of 12. right well that's super toxic so we say to all those people don't do it the facebook files that the wall street journal released had really scary information about how facebook knows SPEAKER_128: how bad this is for kids but the core of why it's bad is that it's the kid's real identity that's that internet 2.0 platform reality so imagine for kids in internet three you can create any identity you want SPEAKER_131: you can look like anything if you're a boy you can be a girl if you're a girl you can be a boy if you can be non-binary you can change the tone of your voice you can actually create a persona you can create a whole social graph you can be an object you can be a hamburger you can be an object yeah how so you can start to participate in some of the most fun aspects of digital culture as a kid SPEAKER_128: without getting necessarily the rejection that comes from literally like how do you look at the SPEAKER_122: age of 12 oh you look ugly do you look like a supermodel or not are you an adonis right yeah SPEAKER_111: so you have a photo it's demented do you have like some photos you have some photoshop team taking your kids photos and right airbrushing them before they put it online like the kardashians do like exactly SPEAKER_128: so now in internet three all that stuff can happen by building or forging your own identity and then what's so cool is as you build your assets and create your identity you own them like you can actually own them as the creator now they may not be worth anything down the road or they could be worth something but at the end of the day they can never be taken away from you the way facebook could SPEAKER_111: theoretically take away your profile that's the thing i really like i mean if you think about it SPEAKER_102: when we had blogs and rss feeds and even podcasting to this day everybody is trying to steal podcasting and rip it out from under us and be like oh no we'll host your files we'll take your rss feed and people forget like the the blogging which was the uh you know predated twitter and facebook all of that blogging and rss that dave weiner created and various people and the attachments to it so much great content and companies were built on it twitter was basically rss facebook was rss podcasting was rss plus and you know an embed attached file just you know all these things were SPEAKER_111: based on open standards of the web and then people basically you used to be able to have an rss feed of twitter handles i don't know if you could still get an rss feed of a twitter handle but you used to be able to subscribe to my twitter handle in your rss reader it was pretty cool yeah and that's what i would love to see come back is this open platform where the data can just be reconstructed anywhere um and that's why i'm just everybody's like oh we'll put this pixel into your let us serve up your files we'll tag all your users i don't want anybody who listens to my podcast to be tagged or resold or repackaged and advertised to and marketed to that it's just gross and it's so nice that this this is the thing i love about the crypto space i don't like the grifty nature of it and the yeah market manipulation stuff but i do like the open standards and i like the fact that it's SPEAKER_14: decentralized but you do point out man this is going to be hard to make it easy to use rss was very hard to use yes and the reason twitter became so great yeah and that's why i love the SPEAKER_128: constraint of the phone to make it easy to use on the phone because if you can achieve that with one hand on a smartphone pretty cool especially with a person who wouldn't self-affiliate as like an SPEAKER_102: early adopter techno geek i think just creating an e if if or maybe this is something that somebody in your ecosystem can just create based on what you've already built but if somebody just made a sneaker designer that let you print them to nfts and you could just design sneakers because you know there's a whole community that would be such an amazing way to create nfts and then you might inspire another SPEAKER_168: million people to design sneakers that person becomes famous and then their sneakers make it to the real world and somebody will actually make them and you know nike says i want to make those actual SPEAKER_128: sneakers that's possible but then put this in your pipe and smoke it for a second the the nature of a virtual sneaker is actually different than a real sneaker it can do different things you can fly and so this designer of the sneaker can do things you could never do in the real world i can have the texture on the sneaker potentially be animated and move right awesome right i can have that texture SPEAKER_131: animate and move differently when i'm in proximity to someone else wearing a certain kind of sneaker yeah SPEAKER_128: whoa maybe now when we dance together in that metaverse wearing these sneakers that sense each other they're going to start grooving and pulsating and there's a designer that designed that and then thought about how when there's three people it's different than two and four and this and that and all of a sudden you're like wait a minute to own this virtual good is meaningful because these are SPEAKER_182: not just like sneakers these are virtual sneakers yeah these are like you can never buy them in the real SPEAKER_124: world it's like it's like staying the sword from lord of the rings that glows blue when the orcs are near and you know exactly you know it's like you have these superpowers embedded into them SPEAKER_125: they they each do something unique right sneakers that had screens on them that that's got to come SPEAKER_144: too soon like jackets you you know you i could design a shirt in the metaverse that's like i'm wearing SPEAKER_128: this black t-shirt right now no one can see it who's not watching me but i'm wearing this t-shirt and i could certainly have the front of my t-shirt via billboard or a video feed or something incredible um so so now what's happening is you're composing a smart object as the as the creator and so the value of that nft behind that object can now extend in all kinds of other ways because you can then potentially remix that sneaker design you can put in the nft the right to remix it meaning another SPEAKER_125: sneaker designer could take some of that like the the yacht club apes are doing where they do those Chamath Palihapitiya: mutations so if you say hey you can take this and for 10 bucks or whatever you sell it for i get half SPEAKER_111: you can write the nft creator could say yeah you can modify this if i get that how does the ip rights work who owns the ip in these objects because i i my understanding of the board ap yacht club is when you buy that you get the rights to the ip and so if you wanted to make t-shirts with your board ape on or the mutation of it but i think crypto punks you don't get the right to it which SPEAKER_128: sounds dumb because those are selling for a lot of money so those rights all go into the nft you can set those rules there's no mandatory thing so in our context like you you can basically set the rule whether is this remixable which means you're kind of allowing someone to take it remix it but then you might still get a derivative derivative revenue off of it so where would that make sense if i designed a pair of like reactive sneakers and that took some real thought into designing that how you do that well then someone else wants to make a pair of reactive sneakers but who's not into like designing that kind of intelligence they'd have a huge incentive to remix that component start SPEAKER_111: on second base yeah you're exactly done you don't need to restart recreate the wheel everybody and you think about like creative commons you have people who are putting their photography out there or video clips out there with creative commons and they just want to link back other people don't care other people say you can use it but not for commercial i mean i think is i wonder if anybody's really taking what happens in creative commons and done an intellectual exercise for how that would SPEAKER_166: work with nfts and derivative rights and the smart contracts of you know what percentage gets kicked back SPEAKER_133: and all those things so we would support that because creative commons is a contract in its own right yeah and so you just encapsulate the creative commons rules into the nft rules and presto magico you have SPEAKER_166: an nft that's essentially a creative commons license yeah people forget about creative commons and what a great movement that was it really a lot of like what you see power today when you see like beautiful images on the web and in different apps it's happening because of this creative commons SPEAKER_223: licensing that was established decades ago yeah um well the open source movement really SPEAKER_125: is affiliated to that yeah yeah i mean it was the yeah it was the intellectual property version SPEAKER_122: of open source and now you know this serverless or decentralized nfts and everything just is a really interesting potential path for society let's continue success with it uh where can people SPEAKER_128: learn more or play with this stuff so if you go to uh the app store and type in icon avatar fashion you'll certainly hit the app for icon you can also go to the ready games.com the ready games.com and you'll SPEAKER_136: the ready games.com yeah i have to put the button so or i search on my app sir yeah facebook uh i or SPEAKER_182: i search for icon avatar yeah you'll hit it you'll hit it exactly beautiful yeah and i would say to SPEAKER_128: anyone out there who's a creator who's interested in potentially coming on the platform or doing some early creators coming on now you can reach out to me i'm not hard to find yeah i'm guessing david at the SPEAKER_149: games yeah yeah generally people will find me it's all right let's see you brother and uh jason it's David Friedberg: awesome brother thank you be well all right welcome to another edition of okay boomer and by another SPEAKER_01: edition i mean the second uh rachel reporting is with me again for our weekly friday segment where uh she as a member of gen z explains to me as a member of gen x and a representative of boomers everywhere uh and we talk about how gen z looks at the world welcome back to the program rachel reporting how are SPEAKER_337: you rachel hi i'm good sorry if you hear my dogs in the background that's quite all right we're in the SPEAKER_53: middle of a pandemic everybody's working from home and if you don't love dogs there's something wrong SPEAKER_111: with you dogs rule uh all right so last week you had um this guy ziod he's the ceo of juve consulting SPEAKER_00: talked about a lot of weird words episode 1320 if you want to look it up by number in your podcast player uh rachel what was the feedback on social media or from uh your guest or generally SPEAKER_115: the the fans of the show in the slack and other places definitely in the slack i got some messages SPEAKER_341: it was kind of mixed between people asking me how i thought the interview was versus them giving me their own opinion and i think some people were kind of surprised to hear his point of view because i don't necessarily think that gen z people are very open about how they would run a company because to be quite frank i don't think there are very many gen z's that are founders or ceos that are um that public yet just because we are a little bit younger of a generation i consider like on twitter i normally see more like millennial founders so i got a lot of people in my slack that were older than me coming in and just being like is this really is this really what like all of gen z thinks like is he a representation of like the whole generation and i don't think he's a representation necessarily of the entire generation but i do think he had interesting points to make about juke consulting his own company Chamath Palihapitiya: so what do you what did you think of the interview when you look at it as a member of gen z SPEAKER_00: and he comes on and let's face it he presented a version of gen c uh that i think that they need to SPEAKER_01: be coddled they're emotionally weak they need to get credit for their emotional labor whatever that SPEAKER_111: is and they need to partake in self-care and generally you know um be um really protected from SPEAKER_347: getting bumped and bruised what was your take on the interview and his take on gen z yeah so i SPEAKER_341: definitely see where he's coming from i think of bringing politics to work that's just not something that i would do personally i very much compartmentalize my work life versus like my life at home and that doesn't mean like i'm making all my social media private like i still follow co-workers and things like that but during the hours of nine to five or whatever hours we're working the conversations that i'm having with my peers aren't really being about aren't really focused on what i'm doing like during my time outside of work so that's i think where we differed the most Chamath Palihapitiya: he specifically was like the anti-coinbase which is like you have to bring your politics you have to SPEAKER_00: bring your whole self to work and i when i hear you have to bring your whole self to work i'm like SPEAKER_31: do you do you really like does the person who works you know at the drive-through window at in and out or does your accountant you know when they're doing your taxes have to bring their whole self to work and in by extension impose that on the co-workers and the customers right and you could just be an accountant and do a pretty good job at that and like if i'm an accountant and i'm in new york and i love the red sox like you don't need to put that in everybody's face or you live in trump county and you're a democrat and you got to bring like your go hillary stuff to you know work every SPEAKER_341: day like it's unnecessary so i actually i was thinking about it and the amount of like hours you're working during your life are extremely high so i do think i don't necessarily think i'm bringing my entire self to work because obviously i just don't think i would be as productive during my day if i talked to my co-workers about how much for example like i love the new taylor swift album that just dropped like that's not a productive work conversation but at the same time like i'm spending so many hours a day trying to create quality work i would hope those people that are also trying to create quality work are people that i could see as friends as well as co-workers obviously that's a lot different than like my friends outside of work but i see what he means how you would want like the people you're working with to not just be people that are engaging in your life nine to five that like you just deal with you want them to be people that you can have a conversation with and like hang out with SPEAKER_01: and here's the great part you can pick and choose that like very selectively like when i went to work in the 90s you went to work because you needed money and you had a skill so you traded a skill for and labor for money it had nothing to do with like my emotional state or my emotional labor or being validated like they needed to get done and i had the skill to do it and we transferred money for the SPEAKER_31: task essentially so maybe people i don't know when i hear this i think people need to grow up a little bit and like your emotional labor like what does this even mean emotional labor what does that mean to you and just did that part of the that's i think that was the part that i kind of was just like oh SPEAKER_29: enough i don't know just like i i'm so not regretting starting this this is like every week i'm gonna get to have this moment although not this week yeah but what the emotional labor thing speak to that like SPEAKER_31: is that something you believe in and explain to the audience what that really means so he explained SPEAKER_341: it as emotional labor is kind of the feeling of you know when you break up with your significant other and you have that feeling like oh my gosh that was a lot of hard work even though it wasn't really work at all it was just emotionally very taxing and how feelings like that can occur in like the work setting and how it's your employer's job to kind of see over that um i don't necessarily think it's my employer's job to dictate if i'm happy or not because for me that's just like a personal preference that i have i feel very strong that i dictate my own happiness and i'm in control of how i react to things but at the same time i think being as a gen z i know very well that we have so many options for work so if you're not happy at your employers you can quit and there is a ton of other opportunities out there i think especially with the internet and how savvy we are to make just as much money as you are in any job on your own so i think it puts employers at a really weird place where it's kind of like it's not your job to make me happy but i think that employers need to know that if somebody SPEAKER_362: especially a gen z isn't happy in their role it is so much easier for them to quit because of the SPEAKER_85: opportunities i like that i like the way you've explained that yeah i mean the if it's not fun to SPEAKER_102: come to work uh and you have other options you are well within your right to take another option or SPEAKER_00: the one i really respect is i'll see if i can make a go of this myself and be a consultant or something yeah or i'll make less money i'll lower my burn rate not have to work as much and you know i'll travel more so i kind of respect that the emotional labor i'd say i've heard it explained as what you're talking about is like the emotional toll going to work has on you okay got it like we don't want to be sad at work we don't necessarily need work to make us happy and you know joyful we have other things in our life to make it joyful but it shouldn't make us bummed and hate our lives and be like fml and so i kind of get that too uh and i agree with that but i think as long as you SPEAKER_341: don't hate your job i always thought like i've had jobs that i hated and now at this point in life i'm like as long as i don't hate my job i like it i don't know if that's a popular opinion but as long as i'm like content with my job i feel like that's a really good situation SPEAKER_01: i'm talking about i think that's a good baseline the thing you really should say is how much am i learning and how much responsibility am i being given i looked at every job SPEAKER_00: mm-hmm as am i learning am is my network growing and am i increasingly getting more responsibility from mike savino or elliot cook or whoever was managing me at the time i only had like three SPEAKER_53: two jobs i think yeah that that's all i cared about can you give me more responsibility can you give me am i learning and look you've been here for a couple of months you're doing a great job SPEAKER_341: i always thought of it actually it's funny that you mentioned that because i during the pandemic like i think most 2020 grads i applied to grad school because everybody under the sun applied to grad school because they waive all the test requirements so it was really easy and they waived fees to apply to grad school so my thing was if i can get a job where i'd learn more than i would going to the grad program that i got accepted to then i would skip out on my grad program and i SPEAKER_85: would take the job and uh and you get paid as opposed to going in debt and so well if it depends SPEAKER_341: if i got a scholarship or not so it's always it's always like you know you got to think about SPEAKER_73: it too i guess yeah so but you have living expenses in both cases so yeah unless you live you SPEAKER_00: know with your parents unless you have an allowance uh or a trust fund uh yeah so the other interpretation SPEAKER_31: of emotional labor um is like the management of your own emotional state and the weight of managing the emotional uh group of people you're around whether it's an organization a family you know or a workplace so the idea would be the fact that you kept everybody emotionally content at work and you contain your emotions and that was labor like just the dealing with one's own emotion as a product of labor i don't know that there is actually i'm trying to think out loud here about a job where like you managing your emotion is the job maybe acting i don't know exactly what maybe a therapist SPEAKER_00: a therapist yeah when they've yeah they've got to be empathetic and listen yeah but also they gotta so anyway emotional labor i think is like a weird word but hey listen if there's a group of gen z who are out um i think it is important for founders so i think great success on the first one uh today's is very good by the way because i think we're going in an opposite direction and i don't know if this is intentional in your reporting because you've been picking who you want to speak with uh and i'm giving you that challenge of hey find us something interesting to talk about each week but this is somebody who is doing the opposite of crying in their coffee and getting into their emotions and self-care and bringing their politics to work this is somebody who's just taking action and putting points on the board yeah in a very impressive way tell us about today's guest yeah so emily herrera SPEAKER_341: she is a 22 year old northeastern university student and she is just super incredible she is the founder of a gen z focused syndicate and women focused syndicate it's called the wirus and i was just blown away by her i actually found her from reading a business of fashion article which is not necessarily a article that i even read for work i read it like on my free time this woman was so well connected to any other gen z that had venture capital in their linkedin bio she was connected with them wow and i have never been to boston she goes to northeastern university i don't even remember connecting with her and i was like okay this is this is crazy um and i got talking with her and i just had a really good conversation i was absolutely blown away by her and i think she also explained how her syndicated syndicate operated very well i was confused how somebody my age could be an accredited investor and i think that was a really interesting part of the conversation that she SPEAKER_01: covered for everybody yeah i i was uh really uh engaged in this one and i was super impressed with the SPEAKER_111: just relentless drive to get stuff done uh that she showed and her fearlessness the opposite of being you know a victim or passive in your life this is a person who just takes action relentlessly SPEAKER_00: and uh i i really was genuinely impressed with her passion and her performance so let's uh go to the tape and uh we'll talk about this interview next week if you would like to reach out to our producers producers at thisweekinstartups.com you can reach all three of our producers including rachel and she hangs out in the slack room as well this week in startups.com slack and you can slide into her dms over there appropriately uh people are dming you now and giving you story ideas so that's great and this will take a little bit of pressure off me with the show because we're five days a week uh every friday we get to have rachel reporting on something millennial do you have a an idea of what uh week three and four of this will be like you got anything you want to preview or anything you want to get okay would you have anything you want to also get feedback on so tell us i would love to get SPEAKER_341: feedback on the types of questions i'm asking because i'm not sure if this is the direction that people are interested in so i think for both of them i touched a lot on being a gen z and i also touched a lot on their own companies which one are people more interested in are they more interested in the companies in which they are founding or are they more interested in them operating just as a gen z so i think like the discrepancy between those two things would be that would be great feedback but the two guests that were recommended to me are actually mentioned in the episode so i'm going to wait for people to listen okay okay because i actually mentioned two people that i'd like to have SPEAKER_01: out of the future uh if you have something about gen z that you find interesting just yeah email producers at or uh you know jump in the slack and please give us a tip all right there you have it SPEAKER_73: here's rachel's interview uh and uh we'll see you uh next week hello everybody rachel reporting here SPEAKER_395: today i'm talking to emily herrera she is a 22 year old northeastern university student and was SPEAKER_396: previously an analyst at contrary capital and is currently an analyst at bbg ventures outside of her positions in vc she is ingrained in the gen z vc community including her own recently launched investment community and syndicate called the yrs the virus is focused on gen z women which i'm a part of SPEAKER_397: which is very cool i myself am a part of a ton of different online communities and slack channels for those interested or a part of venture capital and many of them are exclusive to venture capital in fact emily and i are part of the same one called gen z vc over on slack which was really cool i noticed that in my research and in being in these groups this isn't really something special these are pretty giant groups especially the one that emily and i are both a part of as much as i would like to SPEAKER_396: say that this is unique for age i've noticed that the general interest around vc has definitely started to increase and a survey from charles schwab found that 16 percent of new retail investors during the pandemic were actually gen z's this year growth of gen z coming into the investing world must be impacting what companies are receiving fundings for and how vcs are seeing these companies SPEAKER_397: so i would love to dive into that a little bit more with you emily thank you so much for being on SPEAKER_400: yeah thank you for having me this is such an exciting opportunity i think it's like the new SPEAKER_401: interest in investors in our age group has just been so wonderful such like a warm acceptance of a group like this and i think that this is such a good opportunity to just highlight a lot of those SPEAKER_396: voices so thank you for having me yeah thank you for being on i guess that is a great place to start so how has gen z actually shifted the investing landscape yeah so i think gen z's um partially SPEAKER_401: because one they're digitally native and they come from things at a digitally native landscape um they look at things on how they could be created rather than changed so innovations really coming from ground up rather than thinking about previous frameworks looking at frameworks specifically um for vc SPEAKER_405: and how they can make it a lot more equitable and a lot more accurate according to especially if it's SPEAKER_401: consumer ways that they can really reach to consumers first and then get insights directly from communities from the consumers and then taking those insights and investing off of those so um i think it's it's a SPEAKER_405: really different perspective i find that similar to just looking at everything from a beginner's mindset SPEAKER_401: that's something that specifically in vc hasn't really been touched for a lot of years so it's really it's really refreshing so i think partially it's not just because they're young but it's because they look at everything from beginner's mindset even if they know someone in the industry or even if they think that they know something i just think that that's a mindset that's never really going SPEAKER_396: to change as we get older i completely agree with you i think having a beginner mindset in any field is very important because you see problems that arise that people that have maybe been in that space for SPEAKER_410: quite a while and this goes for like i said any field but you see these issues that have been around for quite a long time start to become more on your radar like i've noticed that sometimes new hires when they come into a workplace tend to notice like things wrong with the company a little bit quicker SPEAKER_397: than the people that have been there and were already established because it's just kind of getting like like you said like a fresh new pair of eyes and do you think i guess like with all of gen z that we are necessarily investing in different things than the generations that um were previously ingrained SPEAKER_411: in the venture capital community totally so this is something that i go back and forth on a lot for SPEAKER_405: just myself there is a new idea of investing where it's investing based off of morals investing off of principles investing off of personal mission and that puts a lot of responsibility on a consumer or a community member or just an individual to really get to know themselves and figure out what they're passionate about and what would be the success metrics that they would feel comfortable with in investing or even putting their social capital towards or even just their visual attention on social media towards so um i think that gen z kind of has a head start because they are super aware of their SPEAKER_401: interest and they're used to the idea of them being curators and they i think that they know a lot of SPEAKER_405: the value of just not just putting their dollar but also putting their words and actions towards um anything so i think that that's something that's going to end up trickling up towards some older individuals like my mom is now like really excited to get passionate about a lot of different topics and that's just something and being vocal about that is something that's a little bit newer i think that the hardest thing in being i think i'm more of a younger investor right now is is sticking to that moral principle SPEAKER_401: rather than investing just for immediate profit i think that's really a long-term investor because what i'm finding from individuals in our age group who are investing is that they're going to put their whole heart into making sure that that founder or that team or that mission is going to succeed and that could be tapping into their own personal networks their mentors networks getting their friends involved going on to online communities creating communities for some things that they're that they're they're passionate about so i think that it's a long-term game that they they really are not SPEAKER_403: going to stop until those companies in their portfolio are successful or at least their missions SPEAKER_397: are are brought to point so that makes a lot of sense especially considering what you said when you were on in the business of fashion article that i read where i actually found you off that article to have you on the show oh thank you in that article you said quote the wire is herrera stated that SPEAKER_396: the syndicate is aggressively focused on any dtc company to prove community retention attention and SPEAKER_397: adoration before considering anything else and adoration in this case i'm assuming kind of means respect and from this i have to ask you like do you only invest in companies that you respect and care for or are you willing to go against your own ideologies if you see something worth investing in SPEAKER_405: yeah that's such a good question and i think as we're getting a lot more excited about gen z women as a focus rather than being investors or being founders or being consumers i've had to have a mental shift of just investing in gen z women uh versus investing in companies that are going to SPEAKER_401: create an ideal gen z women experience and i can solidly say for the rest of my investing career i'm not going to put money or put human capital or attention behind uh any company or founder that i don't i wouldn't sit down and have a chat with that's i think one just a lot of my personality i just grew up like that but two i'm finding that that's that's a pretty common theme amongst other investors right now and also just individuals as consumers like it's just it's the same thing as if you're going to repost something people in our age group are more likely to go and check out their profiles and see who they're associated with um and that goes back to just a hyper awareness of someone's identity that i think our age group has but i think right now i'm at i'm personally at a standstill for wires because i'm trying to figure out you know there are so many wonderful d2c companies um that hit pain points of different facets of being a gen z woman but then there are also the fastest facets of being a SPEAKER_405: digitally native woman or a digitally native individual and really researching like what is the actual difference and so i'm finding that there are two two interests that are pain points SPEAKER_401: for a lot of digitally native women one is a pre-professional to professional transition so that's like really early future of work stuff there are so many new jobs and there are so many different communities and how the heck would the majority of people even know things like you know contrary dorm room what the syndicate is gen z vc like how do we actually get everyone on the same page um the gig economy like you know how do you how do you showcase to a professional that you know how to do content or um you know your passions in an appropriate way that can really match even like an early manager to an early career individual so um you see trends like that with tiktok making their tiktok resumes a lot of companies i'm looking at like home from college or pineapple or ladder those are those are companies that i'm really interested in and then second part being alternatives to investment so that could be things like how would someone who's super hyper connected um start a syndicate and create a thesis um things like republic which is an investment platform where you can you know back a couple dollars behind and you're totally where i know um i find like a lot of SPEAKER_416: people in our age group are are aware of things like republic which is something that my parents definitely didn't think about you know when they are 20 23 and then also finally being like crypto you know like how do you what what even is that going to be like how would i invest in a dow what does SPEAKER_401: that even mean is that actually going to give me any value but these are all opportunities to really curate an individual's portfolio if it's about their passions or just monetarily so those are my two personal interests on creating an ideal gen z women's experience but apart from that being in business fashion i'm also like very very bullish on making sure that individuals who are creating companies that are going to take an individual's money really care about the people who are buying from them and can relate to them and are intentional about their influence now on a SPEAKER_403: community who can skyrocket their career immediately and that's the stuff that i'm really passionate SPEAKER_410: about and everyone on wires loves that's awesome it's funny that you mentioned home from college i've actually made money from home from college that is a great platform platform oh very big fan of them i think i found them around my senior year of college maybe post pan like in while i was in the pandemic i think i found them anybody listening to the pod has to check them out they have julia's great um little short-term projects that i've completed for different brands and products for and stuff like that that great great shout out of a company on that part and i'd love to talk to you more about your syndicate the yrs how did you actually find those first couple backers because i feel like that would have been incredibly difficult just not only as like a woman but also at gen z and how did you go about that yeah i'm in a really specific situation where SPEAKER_401: wires mostly started as a newsletter for random opportunities to get involved in other women's side projects on campus and long story short i ended up joining a student fund and i realized a lot of the women didn't really know each other super personally they weren't super in touch in what they really wanted to invest in rather than the student fund that they were working for and i just wanted to workshop with them one-on-one on it and i found that a lot of women saw that theme where they're like wait a minute we're there's not a lot of us and we kind of like the way that each other work and think and um i was super blessed that my first couple of backers or introductions to their managers and their managers to back the syndicate were homegrown from virus which was incredible and i definitely was not intentional but so my first few were managers of some of the women that were in the community who were working as interns and as analysts and they were they were really crafting their especially the analysts they were really crafting their personal thesis and they would bring it to their managers their manager was like oh my god like i never thought as an entry-level analyst that i would think about an investment thesis and from that i just got so many i was so blessed to have so many intros and so many people who are really excited about the idea of just women taking ownership of what they want to put themselves towards and but i have a mixture i have people who just graduated wires who want to put you know 1k 2k 2k checks into the kinds of stuff that SPEAKER_405: we are interested in and then also a lot of parents are super passionate about it um previous founders it really spans a lot but i give my biggest shout out to to like the first core 20 individuals that SPEAKER_401: brought their theses to their managers and managers are like what the heck like i i never thought that SPEAKER_416: that someone in this age group would be that's interested so so that's the super long story short is it just started off mostly with um yrs alumni and their managers that's awesome so these people SPEAKER_411: that are backing are not just accredited investors so they're all accredited um okay so another thing SPEAKER_405: that we do in yrs so it's half community half syndicate so okay the community part is i'm so SPEAKER_411: like i wish i had this like a good year ago for myself and the community is not only the accredited SPEAKER_429: investors correct it's all it's all student um women mostly okay individuals 225 mostly um who SPEAKER_405: uh are either working at a vc as an intern as an analyst as a venture partner any of the or our syndicate leads and then individuals who are under 25 raising capital actively so already have their first check and then just general good talent so um that's the community we've workshopped a lot on like how to get accredited you know when you work at a fund is there some way that you can petition for yourself to get accredited you know if you're syndicating someone else's behalf that's another way of getting credit and then also series 65 so we spent the whole summer trying to workshop like how do you chunk through so i was never a finance major and it was a huge feat for me to get accredited it was i had such a low attention span during covid i was so passionate about it i was like wow i'm so intimidated by all these terms so i give credit to a good core 10 individuals who were just like all right if m m just wants to teach us how to do this like let's just sit down and just all SPEAKER_401: hold each other accountable and figure out the best way to come across it so we went through study guides and flashcards and group hangouts based off of um like college campuses which was i mean i would was SPEAKER_411: beyond my wildest dreams so that is so interesting i didn't know that there was a community per se SPEAKER_340: of accredited gen z's i always thought that it was more of people kind of pulling money together to SPEAKER_410: invest into a uh into a startup not that they were accredited oh yeah that is really cool and do you SPEAKER_405: teach them through workshops yeah so it's a combination of workshops um you know workshops flashcards classic like studying kinds of things we have like some acronyms and stuff that are really silly to wire us i think the most helpful thing was just meeting in person with other people that are on campus and just being like okay what even is this and i think that that's really fundamental to SPEAKER_416: being a part of wire is like being so open to ground like the absolute lowest of low question being like SPEAKER_405: okay i just haven't read this in two weeks someone want to give me the download um kind of similar to on tick tock if you saw like those presentations that people would go up and and make like the silliest thing ever we had a lot of those a lot of wine nights to be honest with you so it was it was really a hodgepodge but i think it really started with seeing so how i saw that was um some of the student funds i was working with and i used to work with them in recruiting for venture partners and having more diverse individuals in their recruitment so i'd work with them and i noticed that some of them had alumni syndicates and i was like oh my god these people are like 23 how are they already investing in like companies that are like series you know quadrillion like it it's something that was fascinating to me so i was chatting up a couple of the guys there um that were doing that and they were like oh it's not that hard you just have to work you know if you work at an investment bank you can you are probably taking a lot of different exams already and why not take 65 you probably know majority of the answers so i hit the girls that were a little bit older first um the investment banking girls were thinking about transitioning to vc um and they were really the ones that were hosting a lot of the workshops we had a lot of community kind of individuals we had some um marketing design individuals who were like you know what i could make a pretty study guide for this so it's really everyone coming to the plate so otherwise i would have no idea what to do yeah that's awesome so i'm SPEAKER_340: actually looking now and it says accreditation laws have changed so now if you're an employee in an SPEAKER_410: investing role at a firm or you pass a series seven you can be accredited i guess that also is the series 65 as well so that is really cool to know and i think that's going to open up a lot more gen z's in the investing field so that is really awesome that you're creating a community around that i find that doing anything honestly with community makes it so much easier i'm with you i wasn't a like a finance major i honestly found out about venture capital by accident i was handing out flyers at an event that was a shark tank event at school for volunteer hours love that people hosting the shark tank event were in venture capital and i was like you know what that sounds like kind of cool i'm in i my major was more on the tech side of things i was like there's a bunch of other like techie people here i guess i'll join and that's how i found it and it was definitely me stumbling my way through venture capital ever since until i graduated and i found out all about slack communities and those are the communities that have really really just opened up a whole new world of education for me that i wouldn't have necessarily gotten even in the classroom because honestly even if i was a finance major i'm not sure that i would have even heard about things like being an accredited investor by taking you know like the series 65 don't necessarily know if that's something that would have come on my radar so i think it's incredibly important especially as women and especially as young women to have these communities and to seek them out because they're not just going to fall on your lap they're obviously few and far between so it's really awesome that the virus is doing this and i do you know you're investing in like the craziest fastest venture market ever yeah this is SPEAKER_444: so interesting to join how has that been you know i think because i'm young i wouldn't say because i'm SPEAKER_405: gen z because i'm young i don't mind the pace and i also have no expectation of pace so i hear from mentors day and night about how it's so hard to keep up and for me it's like i mean i live on twitter like all day which is not good right but i'm just i've been introduced to it in this kind of pace and i don't care about sleep which is not good and i you know my trade is mostly in um journalism SPEAKER_401: so i don't mind staying up you know all night and and and and i don't mind the good update and changing the story from one day to the next that's just like my nature but i think again like i think SPEAKER_405: joining a community is such a great experience in starting your investment career because there are so many more people who know way more than i do about everything even if it's you know um d2c like food or beauty or future of work or um clean tech health tech there are just so many more people that just know more than i do um even if they're entry level they're more than happy to go and dive and come back and we can chat on it i think that's really what's been holding me afloat and i think that's when i talk to a lot of my mentors i think that's honestly what they're missing is just being able to share and admit that we don't always know everything about things that we think that we do so and i think that that's that's inherently very gen z but also it's very young because it's like we're only going to come up together yeah we're and it's you know it's only SPEAKER_410: going to get better with the time and it's funny that you mentioned that you're a journalism major because i don't know if you know this but jason is was actually a journalist and even though i was really heavily into the tech scene in college but while i was in college i actually had my own podcast i've always loved researching i loved writing things the research side of any project i did was always always the most fun for me and it's funny how i never thought that researching and writing would necessarily turn out to be a huge part of my career now as i'm helping produce a podcast that's all about tech all about investing and it's a really cool place to be in and i think that jason has said this before but he mentions that journalists should really consider moving into investing or should consider totally ending even as venture capitalists if at the end of their career or even while they are still journalists i think that would be awesome because who better be an investor than somebody who has done all that thorough research that is incredibly well spoken that obviously has a great way of talking to other people because in journalism like producing i'm sure that is an incredibly important an incredibly important factor and on the topic of writing do you actually write the deal members for your syndicate members then yeah wow that is awesome yeah for SPEAKER_405: sure i i think like memos so on research i yeah i fully agree like i have so many friends i'm SPEAKER_416: gonna give a shout out um to i don't know if i get rachel cantor um on twitter she's a phenomenal writer SPEAKER_405: she did morning brew's oh i know exactly who you're talking about yes you should chat with her she's a great person rachel cantor yes yes yes okay um she did sidekick morning for a great i mean she just started out her own newsletter and the morning group team reached out to her and she just like started basically within the next few weeks and that was her glory story she's just a a god to hear of a writer so she and i have been chatting on this a lot because she is so amazing at c2c and she doesn't even know it yet right like that's that's the nature of being a journalist you're like i know nothing and i'm just gonna ask everyone else all the questions and i'll just create a package and SPEAKER_401: deliver the information and that's so not an investor it's so not a vc thing to do like that's the polar opposite so uh you know double-edged sword sometimes you feel a little imposter sometimes because you're like i don't think i know anything but also you you so you know in the right environments you can go on and on about about anything and know the most people but i fully agree on that um i've noticed that like a lot of and i can send you later like so many old newsletter SPEAKER_416: writers just not necessarily even just like you know bloggers or or journalists there's a pipeline between a newsletter writer and becoming a syndicate lead i love it i love that it's bad you're so well SPEAKER_458: connected you know i know and and you know so you know what your audience wants like i was that was SPEAKER_416: originally why i suppose newsletter yeah um you know what your audience wants um you know what will click you you just gain insight from there and and again like it's a beginner's mindset and anyways you SPEAKER_410: can go on days on that but it totally makes sense i think the best skill that a lot of people that are interested in research and writing in general and journalism i'm very open about what i don't know like i'm very open i go and i ask people questions and sometimes i actually i prefer to do my own research by asking others not by making my own mistakes i always tell people that venture capital is so interesting to be in in the tech community and to watch because you get to see other people's mistakes in real time and that is such an interesting place to learn from and it's also great just as the nature of my job now and i'm sure being with the syndicate you're connected to so many smart individuals that instead of googling something you can go right to the source so if you have a question about morning brew you don't have to go google how morning brew operates you can go ask rachel and i think that is a really awesome place to be in and i hope that any other gen z's that are curious or really enjoy doing their own research hop on to the early stage investing space because i feel like i know a lot of my peers were very interested in things like investment banking but i didn't meet a lot of people in college and maybe this was specific to my college i don't want to make a broad generalization here but i didn't meet a lot of people that were necessarily interested in doing that really hard heavy research on early stage companies that didn't hit the market yet and slowly but surely i think i think they're they're like you know more gen z's are coming to the table oh yeah especially because SPEAKER_405: it's a lot of just networking i got this from um from bbg actually nisha and susan are super open about SPEAKER_401: just like you have to just be there you know and i think as you get a little older like you don't SPEAKER_405: you get busier right and then you also have more insight and you're like i don't think i need to SPEAKER_444: know this and i don't think i need you know like it's like anything like you get a little older and you're like yeah i don't really think i need that's not really gonna be an interest about when you're a SPEAKER_416: kid like that it's always a come up story so you're always going to be an underdog um and regardless of any background like i focus on women and and bipoc individuals but like regardless of anyone younger SPEAKER_405: like you always have a come up story so it's just grittier and it's a good place to be when especially because we have twitter like we're just native to things like twitter like twitter that's so true and we're never getting off it we're never gonna get off twitter as much as everyone wants to like delete all their notifications you're just never gonna do that because there's just so much SPEAKER_444: information there everyone is so accessible yeah and everyone's on the slide into literally SPEAKER_472: everybody's dms it's so funny that you mentioned that because whenever the producers reach out to SPEAKER_410: guests i we normally i know some of the other producers prefer to email and i am always the first thing i do is i slide in to their twitter dms or i slide into their linkedin depending on if they're into like tech stuff if they're not because i've noticed that like anybody that's interested in like the tech community and their twitter dms are open like they know exactly what they're doing they're asking they're asking for people to reach out to them but if they're not interested in the tech community then those linkedin um those linkedin dms are definitely definitely up up for ground and SPEAKER_444: what i'm finding is like twitter is just there's so much on there that i'm finding a lot of specifically wireless members so i've created a list on the wires of twitter it's like it's a little person yeah SPEAKER_405: so i created little lists um some of them are private to people who are in the same school because i find that that's like smart a good gateway in but then i also have a general list of just like mvps i think are really good thought leaders that are in our age group yeah and a lot every single person and virus i've spoken to one-on-one and like granted is my schoolwork going down the drain absolutely but i meet like really cool people and i think we're all in the same mindset where everyone on that list if you go and you follow that list and you follow the individuals they know to SPEAKER_480: follow you back like that's right that's always like everyone's worst nightmare like what if no one follows me back and like i don't have any content but but if they can see that you're only following SPEAKER_405: wires people like they know and i always encourage every single woman every time that i go to an event or i get a dm i'm always like just go follow the wires list and go follow them there if you talk to five people in anything that you're going to do in any kind of industry you're going to feel way more comfortable to go and explore it on your own so that list has been so fundamental and i'm going to give a huge shout out to all the girls on that list um because they know like if someone's going to follow you like they're like all right someone's new let's look let's let's bring her in figure out what she likes to do oh i love that catching with me i have a notion doc every time i meet someone that comes in i'm like this is what she likes go ham and i i just think that like i twitter is just like it's such a little gateway because you're like i could get on it but i'm going to be sucked in SPEAKER_457: yeah that's so true that is so true it's the best community it's one of the best community making tools though i've realized because there's something about being able to share your ideas SPEAKER_410: versus on instagram where i feel like it's much more of a visual platform yeah and i find that much more people or many more people our age tend to be focused on twitter and tick tock which are amazing platforms but for community building i feel like uh twitter has more of a focus on your thoughts and i think that's a better way to build community rather than what you're putting out on instagram in most cases obviously there are definitely i'm a part of a book club for example which started off on instagram but um for the most part i've noticed that the communities that i've been in and been invited to and have really prospered in have started on twitter and then made their way over to a discord or slack or some way where i can message others and um well thank you so much for being on i do have a final question for you i want to know what's your advice for young people looking to break into vc because i know you have a very non-traditional route it sounds like would you recommend doing more of a non-traditional route or would you recommend people going about it in the more traditional application sense i think it depends on the interest of an individual so if someone's SPEAKER_405: looking to go into something like deeper tech i would say you know maybe go into the deeper tech become what you feel comfortable and then just shoot right in um but i would say the majority i could i could talk to specifically to women 80 of consumer choices come from women i think it's easier to connect and understand a consumer focusing and that could be future work it could be health tech it could be anything but if you focus on consumer to me also equals community so figure out what kind of consumer facing industry you like go do a deep dive i would recommend looking at republic the investment platform they have how to create a thesis i think that they have a really so i have private materials and i'm welcome to anyone to talk to but they have a really good couple of videos on that and just talk to anyone that is of your age group that looks like they have anything figured out because we're so open to peer-to-peer mentorship it's crazy and so i would say join something consumer facing it's going to be the easiest way to get to a community look at things like republic and think about how to make a thesis and it's just research it sounds a lot harder than it and it actually is go on things like republic this i'm gonna give a shout out to um paige daughtry she just came SPEAKER_486: up that is so funny another producer was like yo have you ever heard of paige i was like wait a minute SPEAKER_487: yeah yeah definitely chat with page you're mentioning the best you're mentioning the best SPEAKER_405: people and best communities so far i like this this is good i'm so happy um so yeah shout out to page she gave us some insights when i was a republic fellow a few months back um she started off investing on republic little by little just just to get in get the you know quarterly update memos and and she just started her own email and gave out those and those updates and said you know this is i have a thesis i put a little bit of money into these things this is how they're doing um this is what i think about it wow and vc is a apprenticeship based entry-level market in terms of getting a job yeah so you know find people on twitter say hey look i'm giving quarterly updates um this is what my memo looks like here is how my how my companies are doing and you know obviously not really your companies but you know people are going to see that initiative and that kind of organization um the work isn't it too crazy it just requires a lot of like dedication and and and i think in this age group like a lot of passion for it so yeah someone's bound to pick you up and um get on twitter like 100 get on twitter so that's my advice there actually my final note is i do think that investing based off of like passion and interest long term does pay off and i'm you know my own portfolio i have yet to see how it comes out but from how i've spoken to a lot of mentors i think that the long-term game and the like i mean vc is such a new job yeah relative right 30-ish years ago started um and it's changed so much since it's only going to change more and more so get into as many things as possible investment dow syndicates talk to community managers do platform jobs there are just so many opportunities just do everything yeah that that's my advice there that is such good advice i love the advice you had on SPEAKER_340: mentorship nobody's mentioned that yet and i actually definitely got in to vc and into the SPEAKER_410: community via a mentor as well like a different penn state grad yeah that was a partner is a partner at a venture capital firm that so very nicely allowed me to be a fellow at his um firm before coming over to this weekend startup so i think mentorship is something that is very overlooked in any position because nobody sees apprenticeship kind of work um anymore they more see the mba or like that college degree and i think venture capital doesn't value those necessarily as much as other fields and very much values and you'll see greater outcomes with apprenticeship style learning so that is a great great no and again thank you so much for being on i'm definitely going to check out the virus i think this is an amazing platform i'm really really happy that we got to speak yeah thank you for having me and thank you everybody for listening if anybody else has any recommendations on who we should have on i'm going to start reaching out to rachel cantor and paige definitely for sure they seem great like great people again thank you so much emily thank you for having me thanks rachel