SPEAKER_00: hey everybody hey everybody we have a great interview today with akash nigam he is the founder and ceo of genies.com this is a digital avatar startup that is launching their marketplace on dapper labs which you know uh has a blockchain and nfts and was responsible for uh the nba's top shot and it's a fascinating discussion of the history of avatars virtual spaces and what the next generation of avatars and monetization options will be in the metaverse it's really science fiction and you're going to really enjoy that discussion and they've raised a ton of money like a lot of people in the nft digital goods and metaverse space but let's get into some news first we like to start the show now with news so if you haven't noticed we're going to start with news every day and then go into the interviews this means the episodes will be about 75 minutes i think and we have three new stories to cover today a quick tether update for our tether investigation gamestop is hiring a bunch of amazon executives and they've raised a ton of money and streaming is seeing its first decline in the number of subscriptions that each person has that is fascinating subscription overload so let's do the work stick with us this week in startups is brought

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SPEAKER_00: into the interview and some of the news items today i want to do a few housekeeping items on tether if you

SPEAKER_06: don't know tether is a stable coin and in the last episode we talked about all of the red flags i can

SPEAKER_00: tell you that personally and i'm going to say this in a very framed way so i don't get sued by tether

SPEAKER_06: tether has all the red flags i look for when i'm trying to determine if a company is a fraud i'm not saying tether is a fraud i'm saying the red flags the warning signs are going off like crazy now when a company has all of these red flags and they go dark that is a red flag in and of itself if tether wanted to they could stop jim kramer coffeezilla and this podcast and many other crypto enthusiasts who are concerned about tether and the crypto enthusiasts are the ones who are most concerned about the lack of disclosure so listen to episode 1232 and you'll hear my first salvo in the hashtag tether investigation we're using that specific hashtag on twitter tether investigation so you can search for that hashtag you follow me you can follow this week in startups and we're trying to get all the people who are concerned with it with this issue and who are joining this investigation to put pressure on tether to show us the facts and to eliminate this massive risk factor which could be a 60 billion dollar crater that could cause in my estimation and others some type of contagion in crypto and a contagion in crypto could cause a contagion in the overall economy and we've known there could be a black swan here because the space is highly unregulated and has global participants who

SPEAKER_00: have varying degrees of trust ethics morals and criminality and that's what happens when you have a new technology that's unregulated you could have bad actors and so we don't know that tether is a bad actor but we do know their behavior is the same behavior as bad actors my friend coffeezilla who joined me to expose the clubhouse coaching scammers on episode 1178 did a great video yesterday the same day i came out with my video and that is called exposing tether uh bitcoin's biggest secret so go ahead and do a search on youtube for coffee zilla c-o-f-f-e-e coffee zilla z-i-l-l-a he is awesome and we crowdsourced some facts uh since we did our recording yesterday tether had an official audit set up with new york city based accounting firm friedman llp but they bailed in 2018 because the auditor was asking for too much information and according to the terms of service they don't actually have to redeem your tokens for dollars immediately or at all and yesterday twitter user topher penderson reported that you can only exchange your tethers for real dollars if you have over a hundred thousand dollars to redeem we should check all those facts use the hashtag uh tether investigation and let's keep the tether investigation going one thing i would ask

SPEAKER_06: is that if you are a large holder of tethers that you stress test tethers you may have seen that tesla sold i think 100 million of their position in bitcoin and they said they just wanted to prove that it was liquid so this seems like a very reasonable strategy i would love to uh see i don't know a dozen users who have let's say a million dollars or ten million dollars or a hundred million dollars in tethers cash them in let's see cash them in and let's see what happens i'm not saying create a run on tethers we wouldn't want to create a run on tethers of course if everybody cash in their tethers they're backed by cash according to tether so there should be no problem but let's go ahead and let's test the system let's stress test it go ahead if you own tethers let's sell some

SPEAKER_00: tethers post your receipts let's see the receipts on twitter use the hashtag tether investigation and we're going to stay on this story uh and we're going to have some other folks on the podcast who have done much more work than us and we're going to stand on their shoulders obviously but we want this to be a group effort now gamestop and meme stocks have been an incredible story over the last year gamestop as you know is a store that sells games and consoles but that's a very challenged business but it had a lot of strong a strong short interest and uh the stonks folks over at reddit decided they would try to put on the short squeeze and it worked and it looks like gamestop is riding this momentum to take down a bunch of capital and uh fuel this reddit fueled run for all it's worth

SPEAKER_06: which seems to be the logical thing to do if people are rewarding you with a higher stock price

SPEAKER_00: and all these shorts are getting squeezed in this crazy battle well the logical thing to do for amc

SPEAKER_08: or gamestop or anybody caught up in this is to do a secondary or primary offering and get some more cash into the company so let's catch up on the wall street bet saga which we covered in january episode 1167 and uh the all in episode 19 gamestop ticker symbol gme so if you're on twitter you put the dollar sign gme and you can find the whole discussion of this is a video game retailer that was popular in the 2000s but in february 2020 pre-pandemic they were operating say 5 500 retail stores throughout the us canada australia and europe and it initially peaked at 56 a share back in 2013 and you know you just had this um slow decline the stock declined actually for seven years and it bottomed out under

SPEAKER_10: three dollars a share in april of 2020 in fact 2.80 then uh this reddit fueled run started in january

David Friedberg: of 2021 and gamestop peaked at 347 dollars a share a 24 billion dollar market cap and that gave retail

SPEAKER_08: investors national attention for doing this short squeeze and what happens in a short squeeze as you

SPEAKER_00: know is people are betting the stock is going to go down and then they have to buy shares to cover that and if the stock keeps going up at some point they get nervous because they've made the bet that it's going to go down and they cover their position and that is painful so over 170 million shares changed hands between january 25th and 27th according to cnbc uh and then gamestop plummeted back down to 40 dollars a share in mid-february so everybody said okay short squeeze didn't work where it worked marginally still you know from two dollars and 80 cents to 40 is incredible jump it's not to 350 but it's still uh extraordinary but then something happened in april and uh march and april and started going back up again so gamestop has been on a steady climb it's now sitting at 213 dollars a share a 15 billion dollar market cap so doubling down on their good fortune gamestop recently hired uh five former amazon executives they hired a new coo jenna owens who was gm of distribution at amazon and ran a team of 200 on the supply chain side she spent four years at amazon a new cto matt francis who was an engineering lead at aws for one year a new chief growth officer l elliott wilkie uh previously director of amazon fresh and prime pantry for eight years

SPEAKER_06: and they also hired chewy co-founder ryan cohen as a head of e-commerce and named him chairman of the board and just last week gamestop hired two more amazon execs as their ceo and cfo the ceo matt

SPEAKER_08: furlong who previously ran amazon australia and their north american consumer division for nine years a new cfo as well who spent 17 years as cfo of amazon's north american consumer division in total gamestop's recent hires have 40 years of combined amazon experience how can they afford to do all this on april 26th gamestop raised 550 million by issuing 3.5 million shares of common stock and this is via their q1 2020 earnings report with all these recent hires what's the plan well according to cnbc gamestop is attempting to shift from a brick and mortar focus to become more of an online player in gaming e-commerce so they also announced their q1 2021 earnings last week on june 9th they had a 25 increase in sales year-over-year from 1 billion to 1.27 billion 330 million in gross profit but with a net loss of 60 million puts about a 5 billion dollar run rate so they grew revenue 25 year-over-year despite a 12 decline in the global store base due to strategic cost cutting in other words they're shutting down stores that don't work um and they also broke an eight-quarter streak of negative year-over-year growth as they were slow to shift their focus from brick and mortar to e-commerce and uh they've declined to give their yearly forecast but they stated it has uh seen a steady increase in sales in q2 so maybe things are turning around and they have no long-term debt and 770 million in cash

SPEAKER_00: the new world of remote work is here to stay so are all of the hr and it headaches that come with it like how do you register your startup with dozens of state tax agencies or how do you comply with all those different local labor laws rippling which i use for my team at inside can answer those questions easily for you they make it easy to manage both local and remote employees and contractors whether they work from hq or timbuktu when you hire in new states rippling can automatically register your startup with each state's tax agency and keep you compliant with local labor laws rippling lets you onboard new hires in 90 seconds you can instantly set up payroll benefits and apps like slack and github and you can ship them on work laptop with all the software and security they need inside loves rippling because it takes a lot of complexity off our plate so we can focus on more important stuff like sales and hiring and our key business and now thanks to rippling's new peo option your employees can likely access better fortune 500 level benefits for less than other platforms so here is your call to action if you're looking for an easier way to run your startup remotely or just a better way to manage your hr and it visit rippling.com twist that's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot com slash twist so you got a bunch of executives a

David Friedberg: bunch of cash and a bunch of enthusiastic shareholders is this the type of company you want to short

SPEAKER_06: perhaps not and all of those executives know how to sell stuff so even if a hundred percent of video

SPEAKER_18: game sales became digital and you only bought from digital sources there are other things that video game

SPEAKER_06: buyers buy like computers and mouse pads and mice and headsets and all speakers you name it right there there is and they buy merch etc so there might be now because game stop has such a recognizable brand which is a very hard thing to create in the world when you have that recognizable brand you can build brand extensions and shareholders these activists retail shareholders are also the customers millennials

SPEAKER_08: gen z they love video games they prefer video games to television and to movies and they would much rather spend their time in video games than in theaters therefore they can go spend their money

David Friedberg: at a company that they own shares in this is uh the singularity that could make game stop actually worth the amount of money that it became worth because of the short squeeze i'm not a fan of shorting stocks i don't play in that game i find that crazy and gambling that being

SPEAKER_06: said a real brand has emerged with incredibly high name recognition with an army of super fans and i see this at the early stage when i invest through my syndicate because the accredited investors in my syndicate become super fans promoters supporters consultants advisors to those founders now we're talking about 100 200 people in a syndicate who are accredited investors and they're putting in five thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars when we talk about retail investors you could be talking about fifty thousand five hundred thousand eventually five million retail investors holding onto a share well what are they going to do if they people who own starbucks are more likely to go to starbucks people who owed amc are going to go to the movies to support their investment this is something

SPEAKER_00: that hedge funds betting against is going to be really really dangerous it's the same impact that you saw with people who own tesla cars wanting to buy the stock and being in love with the brand and buying a second and their tesla they're financially incentivized and they love the product massive danger for people playing financial games uh or shenanigans like shorting and spreading fear uncertainty and doubt the classic fud so market research firm i mark group estimated that the global gaming market was 167 billion in 2020 uh and we'll go to 287 billion now that's just a tam number that includes the selling of the video games and the consoles that doesn't mean that that is in fact gamestop's actual opportunity but uh it does show you the scale of of the business and you really can't say what if they got one percent of that but you could say you know there's enough money sloshing around in there for them to build a reasonable business they face massive competition from amazon plus microsoft and google

SPEAKER_06: now could they become like a pure play in gaming like netflix is to streaming not so sure about that uh it sounds to me if they're hiring all those amazon execs that maybe digital isn't the strategy maybe it's the strategy is to sell goods and services which is really easy maybe they'll come out with a gamestop pc a a branded gamestop pc maybe they uh buy some game studios and actually make some games there's a world of possibilities when you're sitting on a ton of cash and you've got a brand maybe they start buying small app companies right for 100 million 250 million each it's a gamestop studios game right for your ipad or for your desktop this could be very interesting what if gamestop created a crowdfunding site and they said to all these crazy investors we're going to spin up an equity crowdfunding

David Friedberg: for a game title and we want you all to pre-buy the game how crazy would that be anything that taps into hundreds of thousands of rabid fans and shareholders perhaps even millions could be the playbook here and this could be a new playbook that's happening somebody becomes a meme stock which translation means they're very popular amongst retail investors they issue more shares to raise money and then they hire incredibly talented management teams and say here's an incredible brand with incredible shareholders and a pile of cash go doesn't mean that it's going to work but it does mean that these retail investors have now become venture capitalists in a way they're putting money into a company they're getting attention for it and then they're recruiting massive talent sounds like what a venture capitalist does so we'll see if this becomes sustainable it is insane it's crazy nobody ever uh thought about this but gamestop recently launched nft.gamestop.com unclear what the purpose of this yet but it seems like they're getting into nft non-fungible tokens

SPEAKER_06: and retail investors are becoming more like sports fans aren't they they're kind of rooting for their positions just like i do for the knicks like a maniac and fly to new york to go watch two uh incredible playoff games and lose my voice but instead of buying nicks tickets they're buying shares in gamestop and they're rooting for the home team they would buy if gamestop people just bought gamestop t-shirts it could be a hundred million dollar a year business just like when elon sold

SPEAKER_00: the flamethrower they sold out immediately uh or the boring company i think sold 10 million dollars in

SPEAKER_06: merch many hands makes for light works and do not underestimate the power of a collective community we have seen this overthrow governments through revolutions we have seen it in pop culture send obscure people to the top of the charts and now we're seeing it in stocks the power of many people acting in unison using social media can create uh revolutions and this is a revolution okay and very quickly the average number of streaming services per u.s user has declined for the first time the number declined from 7.23 in november to 7.06 in april according to a report from the

SPEAKER_00: research firm omdia the number includes both free and paid services which is a little fugazi to be totally honest uh but after the 2020 explosion in vod video on demand growth uh i guess we're seeing a cooling of the market partially driven by viewing habits normalizing and injury consolidation said omdia and so pretty interesting to me i've always thought that six seven or eight would be the ones you

SPEAKER_08: could keep in your memory i'm just thinking about it out loud here i have netflix disney hulu hbo max nba spotify i don't know if they include that here and i might have one or two others in other words i can't even remember and oh yeah i want to get the criteria collection the reason this is amazing is because each of these services cost 10 bucks six seven eight services times ten sixty seventy eight dollars sounds a lot like the average cable bill so if you add the cable bill into it which now is in a cable bill it's just for your internet service at home what do people pay for internet service around 30 40 50 bucks on average so 70 bucks in services 30 40 bucks in the plumbing

David Friedberg: equals 100 bucks equals what people were paying previously in a bundle so we had the great unbundling and now we're just ordering all our cart and what's great about ordering all our cart is it keeps each of these services at the top of their game because competition results in greater and better outcomes hbo and netflix and amazon prime oh that's the other one i have and disney are on it they are on it trying to make incredible content and that is good for consumers on a global basis this is why

SPEAKER_08: things like bundling and monopolies are the worst things you can do in society whether it's in education housing uh healthcare or entertainment uh healthcare or entertainment we want to see vibrant competition

SPEAKER_00: and if you look at the things that have gotten more expensive and have disappointed us in society

SPEAKER_26: it's the ones with the least competition also known as the ones that are run by governments or monopolies what's run by governments monopolies here in the united states healthcare education and housing where are we suffering in america healthcare education and housing these are the things we need to solve and the way to solve them is through competition and who is responsible for the lack of competition in those unions politicians and nimby people people with a vested interest we need to crack those non-competitive spaces and make them competitive again if we truly want growth the amazing thing about these subscription services is just how many subscribers already have i told you disney would catch up to netflix they're well on their way uh netflix has 208 million subscribers disney's halfway there 103 disney's gonna blow past netflix i believe disney will always have about

SPEAKER_08: 50 percent more than netflix because disney appeals to families kids and adults so if you're into marvel and star wars you get everybody netflix you know netflix just got into kids i don't think they're

SPEAKER_26: very good at it they don't have any proprietary ip i really am uh concerned about netflix long term i don't think they're going away but i do think that this is going to be a challenging environment for them with disney having run the table and bought star wars pixar and marvel so hbo max didn't see this one coming 64 million uh they grouped their hbo and hbo max subscriptions together but hbo max has been wonderful i'm really loving the content there and so it's going to be an incredible future obviously amazon we talked about recently acquired mgm which means they have robocop rocky james bond all that

SPEAKER_08: good stuff and amazon is going to spend something like their lord of the ring series is going to be 465 million for the first season the most expensive ever game of thrones cost 100 million a season so amazon spent 250 million for the rights to the token uh jr token property in 2017 and they plan on

SPEAKER_26: doing five seasons which would cost over 2 billion and to nerds everywhere from the 80s and 90s congratulations this is your nirvana okay so next up is an amazing show let's get to it from websites and

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SPEAKER_00: doesn't matter all these beautiful templates just work and of course it's got built-in seo free and secure hosting and 24 7 award-winning customer support uh we we did remote demo day in 2020 we were suffering through the pandemic we were confused how are these startups going to get funded i said you know what throw up a squarespace site it's a project maybe it turns into a business and boy did it ever we have now funded over a dozen companies over 14 million dollars in funding and this all from setting up a simple squarespace website and weeding so go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use the offer code twist and save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and congratulations for the team going public by direct listing on may 19th what an amazing journey it's been just super congratulations i know you you all worked really hard over there to get the product to scale and to delight customers and it's just delightful for us and we look forward to having you on the pod anthony to take a little victory lap okay let's get back to this amazing episode okay next on the program we've got a founder of a company

SPEAKER_39: that just raised a ton of money to help you build your avatar and to help celebrities build their avatars what

SPEAKER_00: are avatars you ask well if you haven't been paying attention for the last 20 or 30 years avatars avatars are your virtual representation in a digital space so if you're on an oculus or previously in second life or in a video game world of warcraft you can decorate your avatar but something interesting has happened uh over the last decade or so many different platforms have started to create avatar creating tools you probably have seen this on your iphone where you can create basically what

SPEAKER_39: do they call it emojis or something memoji meme what do they call it memojis yeah emojis terrible name but these have now crashed into another movement which is creators online and nfts and digital goods being bought and traded and sold as collectibles not just some sword or hat of magic you could buy in world of warcraft but another use case one that is quite speculative but also quite inspiring and uh interesting so welcome to the program akash uh nigum how are you sir good how you doing

SPEAKER_46: thanks for having me uh a pleasure a pleasure so how long have you been working on genies oh my god

SPEAKER_50: maybe the most loaded question of all time um there was a predecessor to genies called blend uh which is what i dropped out of school for this is what like maybe 2015 at this point um and so it's been a long long long long journey but we only pivoted into genies december 8 2017 so i know the exact date

SPEAKER_51: so what like maybe three and a half four years got it so you've been at this for about six years

SPEAKER_39: what is the what was the goal of uh you know the first two projects in terms of your north star what you were trying to accomplish and then how has that changed because i know that you have gotten an investment now from dapper labs and coinbase ventures and obviously nfts have become a thing

SPEAKER_10: which i'm assuming you didn't anticipate and there might have been a different

SPEAKER_50: north star or goal for the company so i you know it's funny is that we've been talking about nfts for i think around whatever since we got into virtual identity and genies um three and a half years ago without even knowing what an nft was like the reason why it even came about was uh you know we've talked about genies or avatars being able to sell digital goods collectibles and skins but we would always compare that to places like fortnite or roblox and that's how we drew the comparison and i was posting on social media all of last year and talking about you know what genies and our celebrity genies would be able to do in the future whenever they announce a song album they could release digital goods and collectibles in association with that event and then roham ceo of dapper ended up reaching out he was like dude like you know everything that you're saying on social media is an nft you know that right and i was like no what's an nft so i think like you know so like i think like you know we've been talking about like the concept of what an nft can provide to humans and i think users in general um for a very very long time but i think the actual definition of an nft or like the you know as it pertains to crypto we didn't really um we didn't really plan on but i think the through line for sure the the business north star has always been how do you how do you allow humans to get back to their authentic self so we think that you know the founding philosophy of the internet was really um a place to really be exactly who you want to be and exactly who you are authentically inside in places like instagram or twitter where you're trying to posture and flex two notches above yourself get away from that so you know you've seen probably the movie ready player one or read the book you'll see how they take a amazing so you see how they take on a completely different form than they are in the real world which people think is like a different side of themselves is more so the true side of themselves and so we think that avatars over time will be able to extract that ability from people and allow them to get back to their authentic self so snapchat has bitmoji built

SPEAKER_39: into the platform and they have other reasons to obviously use snapchat sharing stories ephemeral messaging apple has meme og and they gotta hate that name apple's usually really good at naming that's a good at naming that's a terrible name i know they should go with i yeah imoji it probably was that somebody owned it or had the trademark on and they couldn't get it but the memoji obviously there's a reason for that you're already in uh your natural environment of chatting with somebody on imessage and then you look at something like fortnite which they took in 1.8 billion in digital sales in 2019 you're in a game there's a reason to be there so i guess what i'm wondering is with your service what is the reason to be there i understand that you're creating the ability for people to make these but unlike minecraft where people are building worlds uh you seem more like an avatar as a service is that a good way for me to think about it is that you're making a toolkit to make avatars or is it you're

SPEAKER_00: making a toolkit to make avatars so that you can sell things like nfts yeah so i think that's a good

SPEAKER_50: question i think like the best way to think about genies is that we're extrapolating avatars and digital goods that have been prevalent in gaming for decades and we're trying to bring it to social circles and social communities for the very first time so our goal is to really allow you to evangelize your avatar as your identity in places like instagram like tick tock like snapchat like wrote you can go everywhere any place that you exist any place that you have friends you can use genies as a virtual portable identity so instead of being stuck within one ecosystem he travels with you and if we allow people to start um having uh avatar affiliation with a genie and they care about it in this step one of a long step 10 journey for you know our company then over time we can start to introduce a lot of dynamic capabilities and like look like memoji and um you know memoji is amazing bitmoji is great too but i think the word avatar has evolved over time like i think maybe in 2014 and 15 and 16 what avatar meant was just a caricature of yourself that could render in 20 different ways and you can use it as a sticker pack and that was an avatar and i think in today's world especially after this cleanse of the pandemic and this metaverse thinking an avatar is more akin to like a virtual being it's like what has dynamic capability in this virtual world besides just a sticker pack it's like i want to be able to control this thing i want it to have machine learning capabilities i want it to be able to interact in a

SPEAKER_69: brand new way so that's kind of like the the way that we're seeing not just as a visual representation

SPEAKER_39: of yourself but as an entity unto itself that could be a version of myself or almost like a partner of myself i could have this character that i create the cyber surfer was my original avatar and on the you know bulletin boards in the 80s and into the 90s but the idea here is that you could have your avatar that is built on genies then be portable and go to other places right now to do that you

SPEAKER_00: would just be exporting a video clip or maybe an image but have you made any partnerships with the platforms where they say you know what we want to let you show up in fortnight with your genies or show up

SPEAKER_71: into oculus or are those platforms just way too threatened by this concept of a you know portable avatar

SPEAKER_50: so i would say this so for the past two and a half years as long as we've been doing genies we've been exclusively available to celebrities and tastemakers and it's not like we jumped into this business saying we want to build avatars for that community in fact we were four people in san francisco no entertainment background no la background no ties at all and when we released it december 8 2017 all the first adopters were celebrities and we're like why so we came down to la and the reason why and like we we started to like see the the the psychology around it was because

SPEAKER_52: they're the most scrutinized lifestyle and group they aren't able to be themselves in the real

SPEAKER_50: world right like they're always having to put on this different posture and so forth and so they started to build out this second identity and the second narrative through their genie because it allowed them to have this safe haven to therapeutically um become themselves so we've been catering to that audience perpetuating that over time uh but we wanted to always deliver that to also consumers and so the best way to allow consumers to leverage their genies and be able to participate in some of these celebrity moments with their avatars as well and buying their digital goods and so forth is coming out with our api so our api will integrate our genie creator into third-party platforms and your genie basically takes on a different superpower depending on the environment that it's on and by superpower i mean the use case right so uh one of the partners that we've already announced has been giphy um owned by facebook or like you know i think it's going to be owned by facebook they're in the phase of that whatever but you know 700 million daily active users they have integration distribution network within tick tock within snapchat within twitter you kind of name it they have the distribution network there it's an expected use case i would say you know like it isn't like the crazy virtual being type use case quite yet but our goal is to roll out hundreds of partners like this over this year so

SPEAKER_74: we just announced what's going to happen there i would take my i would be able to make

SPEAKER_39: gifs out of my avatar and then attach them to a tweet or something like that yeah so like you know you

SPEAKER_50: can create a genie um the genie can then and you know we'll talk about this here probably in a second but you can go to the genie's marketplace you can go buy different digital goods and collectibles from all of your favorite icons and tastemakers and ip that's out there and then you can leverage that um those digital goods on your avatar and then use it as a gif it'll render x y and z different gifs throughout the network and use it throughout the distribution network now the difference is that you'll be able to then between us and other you know avatar platforms like you named like uh memoji or bitmoji so you can take the genie avatar and then you can go log in to another platform and we have a few we probably have a few dozen that we're working with that are very um you know i would say influential within the social space where you have a completely different use case on that platform whether it's you know it becomes your dancing partner or your you know you're you're creating skits with it or things like that or been in another platform it may become your mannequin that you dress up from head to toe and you choose which accessories you want to buy depending on the platform um and the way that they want to integrate genies it assumes this different use case and so

SPEAKER_52: your genie depending on where you are almost becomes this like ultimate facebook login button right it's like it doesn't it comes with kind of like the visual identity it comes with all the

SPEAKER_38: goods and collections imagine facebook connect and having when you facebook connect you're in the

SPEAKER_39: facebook example or the google example it would take your not your avatar but your your profile photo and bring it with you or take your bio bring it with you take your email bring it with you here the next generation of social services you might be able to have a unified login with genies i make my avatar once and if i bought something from prada or i bought a madonna t-shirt i could then wear it on

SPEAKER_49: these other platforms and take it with me yeah i mean depending on the collectible right it's like an avatar becomes a vehicle to showcase your digital good nfts wherever you go um and then also of course

SPEAKER_50: like different use cases depending on the capabilities that they employ ah so that gets

SPEAKER_84: very interesting um if i heard correctly in in that sentence was embedded hey if you bought some nfts

SPEAKER_39: if you bought marshmallow the djs you know helmet or you bought this you know uh boxing gloves from floyd mayweather versus whatever jake paul or bloat paul whichever yeah yeah which i said that was on the on the site you could actually have those with you and you could flex when you're in a digital space

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SPEAKER_39: dollar credit right now do you have your own virtual space where genies can walk around and meet each

SPEAKER_98: other and interact so like i said we have step one of a long step 10 journey i think the winner ultimately is going to be the one that takes a very long-term thoughtful approach about how

SPEAKER_50: one builds affiliation and loyalty with their avatar and so step one is just affiliation and we have this genie's flywheel the flywheel is basically all the talent that we've worked with over the past two and a half years which is a few a few thousand at this point we have 99 celebrity avatar

SPEAKER_103: market share we announce our celebrities get out of it i mean aside from the touchy-feely stuff you talked about like oh my god it lets them solve all their psychological celebrity problems which i'm

SPEAKER_39: not sure if that actually makes sense because celebrities are kind of constructs already and so if you make a virtual version of it is a construct of who madonna is at their heart or who is actually cardi b or is it the character that is cardi b that you know she sort of manufactured but putting that aside what do they get out of it are you just paying them to do this are they

SPEAKER_00: doing it because they get to sell stuff i'm talking about today is cardi b making money from

SPEAKER_105: this is madonna making money from this yeah so i think celebrities have been leveraging their avatars

SPEAKER_50: because it does allow them to showcase a different side of their personality but they use it to memorialize any key life-defining moment so a song release an album release where they're looking to connect with different audiences this has been one of the predominant ways to connect with gen z

SPEAKER_106: gen z that's right now in plain english what does it mean like give me an example gen z for example they

SPEAKER_52: think that right now we live in a game simulation right like that's probably one of their number one lines that they say is like oh that's a glitch in the simulation if they like spill like a coke or something like that they um there's a reason why anime is at an all-time high like i think people love living in this virtual world people believe in like you know the kids are they believe that we were put on this earth for some abstract reason they're looking at crystals and moon rocks 24 7. so this their mindset is completely warped and different than a lot of the other

SPEAKER_50: generations and so i think when they see an avatar it's a really cool new story for them to be able to follow in some ways you can kind of imagine almost becoming genies becoming the decentralized disney right meaning that disney has set characters set script whatever and then you go make a movie and then people go watch that movie well what if i gave the tools to justin bieber cardi b and we said hey listen you go make your own movie and people can go follow this narrative and people can go fall in

SPEAKER_101: love with that ip okay so now it gets interesting you get everybody in phase one to make their characters

SPEAKER_39: now you're in phase two and i saw you had justin bieber used his uh genie to create a music video with chance the rapper he does yeah so now if you actually had a world builder you could have people going and buying stuff in nfts and making short videos like some of the memes people made etc and that could be a way to express yourself and now instead of just living in a simulation you're making a

SPEAKER_109: simulation and then you can control that world or participate in a simulation within the simulation

SPEAKER_50: that you and i are running right now and i would say that's very um you know that is what celebrities today already do with genies you were asking about the monetization angle with it justin bieber or sean mendes for example it's not like it's like a one and done they justin bieber has been using his genie in a in i would say 50 of his key life defining moments over the past two years a song release and album release or so forth they kind of sit there as a team and he was justin is a bunch of different artists that are like what's our pr plan what's our instagram plan what's our genie plan and the genie starts to build ip and value over time so that you know the marketplace we just announced the dapper labs which is debuted that's the next big thing after nba top shot they just announcement announced this four weeks ago justin bieber can now sell you know like if he comes out with the christmas album he can now sell a thousand limited edition santa claus hats for his fans to be able to go try scurry and go by and use on their own avatar so it becomes very valuable ip over time but i think the use case and utility in the context in which you use your avatar is super important and so that's where the api comes into play and the way that consumers can use their genie ultimately over time so giphy is a good start but we want hundreds of partners so that they have a virtual portable identity but the genie's world would be something that would come in right after we hook consumers where they currently exist right so like we want to hook them through behaviors that they're currently already already do so whether it's tick tock or instagram or twitter let's allow them to play with their genie avatars amongst those communities that were already created so that when we do roll out our own world and this could be years down the line you know it almost comes out as a new just another place or another environment where they can leverage their avatar and you did

SPEAKER_39: start with a social network blend before you pivoted into this so you obviously have an affinity for social networks and obviously something like second life which actually did really well made millions

SPEAKER_115: of dollars i don't know if you did you grow up on second life and some of those other services i'm curious your thoughts of the arc of second life so avatars are not a new thing right it's

SPEAKER_50: you know they've been around they've been around for forever um and i would say second life was ahead of its time in so many ways i would say that avatars back then were kind of for like an underground niche kind of community at least that's how it was perceived yeah yeah if you had an avatar back then it was like you know you were not you were probably not considered part of like the cool trendy like whatever crowd it was for nerds for sure now you have uh in this world where we just talked about gen z and their mentality where they've grown up forget growing up on the internet they grew up on instagram right and instagram soon gonna become outdated so they've grown up on all of these type of social platforms avatar is not weird at all like i think they're looking to swing the pendulum back to a place where they can actually therapeutically be yourself you go to the like i can't imagine what it's like to be a 14 year old in high school today and the different type of social pressures each person has to posture themselves online in a way that's going to be acceptable well what if you can have an avatar that allows you to really be yourself you can live in a suit uh synonymous environment as well and allow your avatar to build its own personality and still express yourself in ways

SPEAKER_113: that you know photo video and text and the normal platforms currently just don't justify

SPEAKER_39: yeah i mean if you every generation has become more open-minded about how they represent themselves in the world and who they are whether it's you know your gender or your sexuality or your style i mean you used to have to fall into like one of five groups you have to be a jock a goth a punk a rocker etc a nerd and uh now my god people can be part of uh any of these categories so with the um

SPEAKER_50: nfts have you started selling those yet and how is that going yeah so we did a a few different drops right digital goods releases we done one with sean mendes we did one with mesut ozil he's a top 10 international soccer player we did one with pac-man and we just kind of wanted to test to see who would who would react who would be the buyers and how they would they would do sean mendes decided in a pre-sale opportunity to sell different digital goods to memorialize his last album so he sold a guitar he sold a vest with a bunch of design from the album art things like that and he did around 600 000 in around 10 uh in around 10 minutes completely sold out the interesting portion about this which i think is different than most nfts is that most of the buyers were non-crypto community so a lot of his fans were galvanized around that and the big reason like you know that's kind of the bet with genies is that we're able to bridge the chasm between the crypto and the non-crypto community like you know people always talk about these days nfts are blowing up right like everyone i mean these days you know it's ebbs and flows but like when it was blowing up everybody's screaming that but if you jump into a clubhouse tonight and people are talking about nfts i guarantee you there's no teenagers there it's probably all business exec business executives music executives there's no like actual you know kids of culture reason why is if i go to a 13 year old today and i'm like hey listen you can go buy this nft it's going to accrue in value over the next four months and you get to flip it and you get to make like you know whatever two extra money they don't get like they don't care at all right they're sitting there like you know if i got a pokemon card when i was a kid i wasn't looking at the financial return i was just excited that i had one so um you know from our perspective we see kids that interact with nfts at that level but they max out their parents credit cards to buy fortnite skins all day long so we think that through this we're speaking a language and a mechanism that they understand where they can we don't have to scream the word the acronym nft we don't need to tell them about blockchain or crypto we just say look go buy this dope digital good or wearable from some of these icons that you already look up to and you're infatuated with you get to own that moment in time that album in time that song release in time but you get to use it and wear it and use it in front of all the different fan communities out there um that would relish that forever

SPEAKER_39: yeah i mean it's super interesting this is now maybe the fourth or fifth time i've seen somebody try to make this work it back in 2002 i don't know how old are you uh 28. 28. so 2002 you were uh eight years seven years old i was born in 92 10. 93 you were 10 years old there was a very cool service that started like in the early 2000s called we world and it let you create like a south park like avatar and actually they had a bunch of promoted artists and in fact taylor swift justin bieber bunch of other people had kind of done uh stuff there and it was just for communicating it was a very interesting very similar but we didn't have the technology or nfts or crypto or any of these kind of things it's super interesting when you take two technologies avatars and virtual worlds and then combine it with a new business model so is that why the company now i'm assuming you're just started making money this year or when did you first turn on revenue uh for the company we've been making revenue here

SPEAKER_113: and there in the past but it'd be more of like brand endorsement deals like somebody would be like hey

SPEAKER_50: yeah this year you know with everything we've been planning for digital goods but not as nfts like technically we weren't planning them to be nfts we're just like look like you're gonna sell digital goods people are gonna buy them they're gonna be non-tradable assets but it's very akin to what you see in fortnite when people are buying skins and they're not tradable right um we only technically made them nfts after we engage with roham and dapper labs so smart and they have an api and a

SPEAKER_103: platform for that so you can just adopt their technology and be part of their standard well it

SPEAKER_50: actually this is um yeah i mean like after nba top shot we actually um are now working with for the past i guess eight months now we've been working with them hands-on um and taking the nba top shot economy design team and everybody that builds nba top shot and they're actually the ones building the genies marketplace so this is yeah so we dapper labs announced this four weeks ago uh the next thing that they're announcing after nba top shot is the genies marketplace this will be the next one that's going to be debuted so hopefully over the next two to three months you know we've been working with their team and so forth so it's a custom it's kind of a custom integration but i would assume that

SPEAKER_84: over time stuff on an open standard i seem to remember when i had roham on the podcast he was talking about everything being open standards and eventually look i mean like the way i at least

SPEAKER_50: pitched dapper labs on his behalf so i don't know how he i mean i obviously know and i see what he does on twitter and so far i talk to him often but like i view them as trying to become basically the apple operating system of blockchain right so it's like they've showed they've so they've so far shown two rocket ship hits crypto kitties and then nba top shot but they're the makers of both of those um both those entities right so this will be the first time where i think they're trying to showcase that somebody that's not a dapper labs company can come to flow and then launch a product with them and it can do really really well and i think this is a really important case study for them because if it does go well then all of a sudden yes of course they should i mean they will and that's kind of the vision is make it open source they're probably going to take a lot of the learning from our use case plus tandem with the um with nba top shot and they're going to start to develop an api open source platforms that anybody can come build on flow and i think they already have started to do that in a very nascent manner but it's not really like at you know high complexity at all yeah his his pitch was listen it's all

SPEAKER_51: open standards if nba top shot wants to leave and not do the partnership with us they can go do it on

SPEAKER_39: their own eventually and obviously all those nfts are out there in the wild on an open standard and we don't control them afterwards and uh you know it's all up to the license people put on to each uh nft and we had like some crazy examples of like a gucci bag on roblox selling for four thousand dollars non-tradable non-tradable really that's the thing that's like that's why that's why you know let's

SPEAKER_50: say and why is that important if nfts like if nfts didn't exist this is it we would be doing the exact same thing right like this is this is literally what we've been planning for years um i would say that everything's been accelerated probably by three years like we probably were planning on this being uh you know our 2024 game plan but like i would say that um you know it's cool to see not cool but it's a you know this conviction at least on our side revised that a non-tradable asset the utilitarian value to a non-crypto user of being able to own a gucci bag just for the sake of being able to say i own this one is that value valuable to them psychologically is really really cool and i think most people obviously have become so obsessed and infatuated with nfts because they've taken every single headline but a lot of the people that are buying nfts um in different projects whether it's nba top shot and a few others i think nba top shot is like way better than most projects they're doing it for a financial return right like you know i sit there and i'm like the crypto is not like yeah well it's not like the crypto community is sitting there and probably being like the biggest basketball fans on earth right it's like you know they see the model they see how they want to be able to make returns and they buy accordingly and they sell accordingly nba top shot's kind of way you know they've obviously escaped that velocity velocity and they've gotten a lot of non-crypto members within the community that are buying and selling and trading now but it's cool to see that outside of the nft world just the value of owning a digital asset and showing it off to your friends without anything having to verify that is just gives almost more conviction to just the value of what

SPEAKER_39: digital goods economy can become if immersed in culture yeah and yours do you see people buying the digital goods on genies primarily as you know decorative and low cost a couple of dollars do you see them primarily as tradable assets or do you think it'll be a combination of those two things we're

SPEAKER_50: going to make them all tradable but to foster a healthy economy it actually is suggested that you don't have a secondary market out of the gates because then you get a bunch of people looking to just flip it immediately and that's just it doesn't stabilize for a long-term healthy economy right like we do want people here that are just obsessed with um owning the gucci bag and just being able to show off to their friends because they see utilitarian value just in that we're looking to specialize in affordable costing right so they are going to be low cost the economy will dictate exactly um how that increases in prices so like you know a four thousand dollar gucci rope a gucci bag and roblox doesn't surprise me at all i think there will be situations where there's going to be one of ones where people are just going nuts for it but we hope to cater to you know i think the crypto community is amazing and i think you know we talk about the crypto community being

SPEAKER_79: completely separate from the rest of the world today but over time everybody's going to be the

SPEAKER_51: crypto community right like everybody seems like a great onboarding for it i mean uh i saw that you did something with bandai which for people who don't know whether i think the owners and creators of pac-man

SPEAKER_39: which is 41 years old which is impossible because i remember playing for the first time in an arcade

SPEAKER_143: i guess i'm getting old but um explain to me how that partnership works yeah it's it's what we expect

SPEAKER_113: these are just test cases for us to show and give a glimpse into what's going to be a daily occurrence

SPEAKER_50: within the genie's marketplace right so like we had sean mendes do a digital goods drop we had pac-man celebrate an iconic key life defining moment and anniversary and do a digital goods drop as well um and that came about we opened up our asia offices last year one of the big um investors that we brought on board in the region was bondai namco um bondai namco actually um engaged our genies asia entity to to to do this um entire activation and sell these unique pac-man wearables that different people could buy depending on the flavor that they liked and then use on their own avatar now the the consumer genies have not yet rolled out to the masses we've just done a test flight we've maxed out on test flight and our pre-order is actually going to be available over the next two days so that people over the next three months until the marketplace is live will be able to sign up um so that when we do roll out the marketplace they can also access their genie and then all the different pre-sell wearables that they've garnered over the last three activations but at this point we're just stockpiling all of our talent and all different ip that we think is going to resonate with the community for all the different types of moments that are coming up in the fall and then also in the winter and then allowing them to release them throughout the week when the marketplace debuts and there's going to be around maybe you know at first maybe like two drops or so a week but eventually it's going to be a daily occurrence and then our goal is to make it so that it's not just celebrities or valuable ip partners that are selling their wearables but that we're going to make the tools that we have internally consumer facing so that the 16 year old in high school that wants to just create a wearable because there's an inside joke amongst her friends can just

SPEAKER_146: release it on the marketplace either so anybody like it'll be like etsy anybody can just release

SPEAKER_50: anything it'll be a total free-for-all that's why you know there's there's like you know step one of the vision but step two ugc anything right so the ability for me to just randomly be able to create it's very similar to what snapchat did with lenses which i thought was brilliant right it's like in the very beginning they controlled all the different lenses that they sold and they displayed within snapchat then eventually they took it to the second step where you had to be a designer but designers all of a sudden could participate and create their own lenses and then deploy it within different regions and then finally they've made it so that anybody you don't have to be technical or anything like that can create your own lens and then deploy it and it's been beautiful and so we see something very similar happening with our wearables we're already giving out documentation where designers can already start to create their own wearables we're already giving out to select members within the nft community within just a design community in general but to be able to tap into the creativity of gen z and allow them to come up with their own wearables that will be reflective of micro trends within high schools and colleges and so forth is very very interesting and that's just on digital goods eventually we're gonna have that for animations as well and what do you make

SPEAKER_39: money with you know like an apple 30 you know store fee how do you make money so we do right now we

SPEAKER_50: have a split with the ip partner so you know the ip partner you know we just signed with wmg that's one

SPEAKER_132: of them uh you know we're we're announcing a public split or is it a standard split like an app store or not a not a public split but i would say it's just you know the only thing i can say is a fair split

SPEAKER_150: um and so similar to app stores i would guess i have no yeah i mean or youtube yeah yeah i would

SPEAKER_50: say probably a little bit higher than that but you know it's it's it's it's um i think when it becomes ugc right so it's like ugc for anything digital goods animations you can sell your quintessential sound like if sean mendez wanted to record himself in the studio and he wanted to say like this is the one sound um of the first line of the verse that i recorded and i want to sell like you know 15 of these to my fans so then everybody can then use it on their own avatar and with face tracking if i entered a room or i entered a space on tick tock all of a sudden i said like you know the one line from sean mendez or things like that there's so many different things you can do with ugc

SPEAKER_88: but that's kind of for step two step three of the journey and how does ar uh factor into your

SPEAKER_50: plans if at all no in fact i mean it's a it's a prerequisite if you want to be an avatar in this world look there's a lot of different things i would say there's three things that we're focusing on this year uh to be able to um perpetuate what we've already created with genies one is ugc for digital goods so you know we already have the pipeline everything's set for all of our celebrities and ip to be able to sell but we just talked about that ugc for animation which means that you do have to have face tracking you do have to have body tracking you need to be able to interpret

SPEAKER_113: data so that it can mitigate the gap between how you face track and body track and what a mocap soup

SPEAKER_39: does right so see that's super cool so if i was uh you know a 50 year old uh boomer gen xer and i wanted to do tick tock dances i could make an avatar uh with genies and then just do my tick tock dancing

SPEAKER_50: and publish it as such so without revealing too much um at the very beginning of this of this discussion when i was saying like oh yeah ar dancing like making skits you know that is you know that that you can kind of imagine you're in the right ballpark of kind of uh of kind of what

SPEAKER_39: we're contemplating yeah i mean it's they're the idea that computer generated films like pixar

SPEAKER_00: and then capturing it what do they call the motion capturing when the guy played golem mocap mocap is

SPEAKER_39: the is the yeah so motion capture is now completely doable with an ipad obviously the the last ipad with the m1 they were actually showing motion capture software and stuff like that so being able to do

SPEAKER_00: motion capture and then put it onto your emoji and then do it with your friends in a virtual world means you could recreate star wars or some movie goodfellas whatever you can make your own version

SPEAKER_113: of that and then publish scenes and and think about think about it like this how vulnerable do you have

SPEAKER_50: tiktok trend using your physical self like i don't have the confidence i'll tell you right now to just put my video over there and then just like do a dance and then throw it up online for all my friends

SPEAKER_164: do the busted challenge with me right now i can do it right now i don't think anybody wants to see that

SPEAKER_58: if i mean look like if if you all of a sudden and i guarantee you look like and again like without

SPEAKER_50: revealing too much but like it's very public knowledge that the contributors of tiktok are the upper there's like you know there's a power user audience that's contributing right and the reason why is because you have to be very vulnerable to participate in tiktok well what if i can just do my you know face tracking body tracking my avatar can simulate it for me i can remove my physical self from it and

SPEAKER_147: my avatar just participates in the trend gives you permission to be goofy and more authentic be yourself

SPEAKER_84: exactly be yourself and have fun everybody can be an actor everybody can be a dancer in this crazy world

SPEAKER_50: and if and and the more that you use it on tiktok in front of all your friends the higher propensity you have to go buy for it from all the people that you care about on tiktok and then all this you

SPEAKER_171: know that's kind of the creator think about this if you had a star wars pack and you and i could play different star wars characters we could subscribe to a star wars pack you could be princess leia i could

SPEAKER_00: be luke skywalker you could be the mandalorian i could be boba fett and we could come up with our own stories and i mean i don't know if people are ready for this on an ip basis but we did have video games as this bridge moment right where you got to play luke skywalker or darth vader in a video game well now what if you could create your own stories and live in a world and do these kind of things is super super crazy and exciting do you want to join our product yeah you're nailing it well i mean the thing that's really amazing to me is i think a lot of times you know you have these very creative ideas but they don't hit sustainability and just like we me and second life and other

SPEAKER_109: ones you know they kind of fade over time because the founders can't keep addicts they can't keep

SPEAKER_39: getting funding and there's no sustainable business model but nfts are so clearly the business model of the metaverse of this virtual reality you know future and it's going to be ar2 which makes it even crazier when you think about it you know if you're wearing apple's new ar glasses which will come out

SPEAKER_00: eventually the idea that you could see justin bieber's avatar walking down the street and justin bieber could be you know wherever he is he could he could be in nashville but he's got his avatar in los

SPEAKER_39: angeles walking around talking to people it's kind of cool it's epic or he could be intensities at once

SPEAKER_113: no it's look like the i talk about avatars the same way that i view cars in the current world right like there's different car makers there's toyota there's four there's ferrari and each car maker

SPEAKER_50: comes out with a new model every single year and each model has different features that fit a certain personality and you use your car depending on the environment you're going to right if i'm going to a party in beverly hills maybe i take my nice car if i'm just going for a long drive maybe i take my tesla or a hybrid whatever so in the metaverse there's going to be different avatar makers and each year they're going to come out with a different avatar model that has different amenities and different features that you want to be able to utilize but you know it's definitely it's inevitable that everybody is going to you know everybody outside the gaming community is going to represent

SPEAKER_155: themselves as an avatar yeah i mean if for people who haven't read william gibson's bridge trilogy all

SPEAKER_39: tomorrow's parties adoro i don't know what the third one was but i i remember reading them back in the day and one of the virtual light was the last one it was a very cool did you read that series by chance this is a good one for you to read because it was kind of like san francisco cyberpunk and essentially

SPEAKER_00: people were going to important meetings because they were working on projects together

SPEAKER_39: like you know cyber hacking projects whatever but they were doing it all in virtual space in the metaverse

SPEAKER_00: and they were sweating what am i going to wear to this meeting and it was like you're in a digital

SPEAKER_39: meeting it doesn't matter it's like no i need to buy a new kimono and this woman always bought new kimonos before she went to different things and it might have turned out it was a guy or whatever um but wow what an incredible vision congratulations on uh everything thank you so much and now if people want to participate in this now it's still closed but you're doing a beta with a test flight

SPEAKER_105: app our pre-order is going to be available in the next couple of days so you can get in the pre-order

SPEAKER_50: line um to get your genie and then ah what does the genie cost are you going to charge 100 bucks a year or 10 bucks a month there's nothing to create a genie uh oh wow free to create a genie yeah you'll basically get everybody gets a starter genie so you get like this very basic you know avatar that has all like the basic features but in order to evolve it over time you need to go collect different digital collectibles and wearables and then eventually you'll have your you know we believe that everybody in the in the metaverse should have their own individualized closet and animations and so forth so that's where ugc comes into play but in order to evolve your avatar you you purchase

SPEAKER_39: and buy different collectibles perfect so you can go to genies.com in the next couple of days from this episode coming out create your basic genie and then start going shopping for your virtual 100 listen continued success with this it's a tremendous vision i'm going to be watching closely and uh congratulations on a business model showing up in a fabulous pivot i think it's awesome uh that you uh are still in the game and figuring it out it's it's really not easy to be on the bleeding edge but you know if you if you survive as an entrepreneur sometimes a business model will appear that you

SPEAKER_00: didn't anticipate and then all of a sudden your vision gets catalyzed and nfts what like i just said three years of acceleration in just one year it's crazy that's it that's just a when you're in the game good things can happen this is why you always want to be um building or creating you're either creating you're waiting and if you're creating stuff man all of a sudden a wave can come that you can ride so it's pretty cool thank you so much appreciate it all right sounds good talk to you soon and we'll see you all next time bye bye