[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting Show.
This is Brian Morrissey here with Jason Yanowitz. I think I've done, like, three... This is the third podcast I've done with you, Jason. Back at it. [laughs] Back at it. I don't know if I have more to share.
I think you've, like- No, you do, because you-... milk- milked me dry here on one- No, I didn't milk you dry.
[laughs] The reason I like to have people back on is because we, we check in on the, the things that we did before. So I was revisiting the podcast we did before.
Did you actually do the things you said you were gonna do, basically? Yeah, for the most part. But the business has changed quite a bit from a couple years ago, even when we first talked on the podcast.
And, you know, for those who don't know, Blockworks is a crypto media company, one of the survivors in the space.
And let's [chuckles] talk about that, how you guys, you know, were able to thread the needle when some others got over their skis. I think that's, that's inevitable in media.
But now, I mean, you've got a multifaceted media business that is kinda changing into a media and information and data business. Is that correct? Yeah. I think of us now as... So we've been around for seven years.
We are today easily the largest and the largest media player in the crypto space. We are one of the big players in the data and research space.
I now think of us almost more as a research and data platform, less as a pure play media business. And we can get into this.
Like, I, I think the beautiful model that we've been able to create, we've done a lot of things wrong, but one of the models we've been able to create really nicely is we have a basically a software business at the bottom, like a SaaS business at the bottom, and we have this negative CAC, negative customer acquisition cost, uh, payback model because we own a media company as well.
So we can actually get and acquire subscribers while getting paid to acquire those subscribers. So that's, that's kind of the, that, that's the business today of Blockworks. Yeah. Well, that's the dream, right?
Negative CAC. Everyone wants the, everyone wants the data biz. They wanna be the Bloomberg of X, right? I mean- Yeah... because the, the multiples are better. But you don't start there, right?
You started in events, with small scale events, right? Yeah. I mean, we, we, we basically built a media company ass backwards, right?
So the way you're supposed to create a media company is you go create a bunch of great content, and then you get people to read your content and join your audience, and then you wake up in two years and you say, "I gotta, I gotta make some money here.
What am, what am I doing? I gotta make some money." So you either turn on subscriptions or you, you know, sell ads on your Substack or something.
We started with events, and the reason we started with events is because we were going up against these Goliath businesses, right?
The Bloombergs, Wall Street Journals of the world, but also the CoinDesks and crypto publications of the world. And we thought the one place that we could win was institutional crypto conferences.
The whole thesis of the bus- of Block... We got, again, we got so much wrong at Blockworks, but one of the things that we got really right was the early thesis.
Which is, whi- which was just that crypto would eventually become this big institutional asset class, and as that happened, the number of people who came into the industry would grow by orders of magnitude, right?
Like, you used to not be in crypto, then I saw you paying attention to, like, Web3 and NFTs and stuff. Yeah, yeah.
No, I moved to Miami and I got [laughs] You know, now, now you're, now you moved to Miami and you're a full-blown crypto bro.
And so it's like, okay, as crypto grows by orders of magnitude, the number of people who comes into the industry grows exponentially, and those people are gonna demand a more sophisticated level of information and quality of information.
And so that's what we're doing. We started with events. We layered on the podcast business. We layered on the newsletters.
We launched, we hired journalists in 2020, launched the media business in 2021, the, like, old school media with, like, news and journalism, not just podcasts and newsletters.
And then we launched the research and data platform in 2022, and then we just launched our advisory business a couple weeks ago. Yeah.
What I always wonder is, 'cause everyone goes back, they're like, "Oh, this was all planned all along. This is where we wanted to go."
And, and you had mentioned in a podcast you did recently, that's when I reached out, 'cause that, that sort of resonated, that you sort of have to know where you wanna go, but there's a lot of steps between that.
I mean, you, you were doing small scale events, and then you, like, went into, then you started building a podcast network, then you started doing larger events. And it was sort of bit by bit.
But did you know that you always wanted to get to this position where you can be, you know, I guess to really credibly say that you're going towards being like a Bloomberg, you know, of crypto?
The idea was that the last time finance underwent a massive transition was in the '80s and '90s when finance got digitized. And that was this huge opportunity for both software businesses, right?
TD Ameritrades and Charles Schwabs of the world, but also media and information.
So there's all these huge media and information companies that came out of the digitization of finance, and we just thought, "Hey, look, you know, cryp- crypto..."
I'm actually a little more pessimistic on the use ca- cases of crypto and, like, you know, maybe enterprise world or something like that. But I've always thought that all, all of finance would move on chain.
And that is just the redigi- almost the redigitization of, of finance. And so we basically just said, like, "Okay, there's gonna be this, the biggest opportunity for, for media and information in 40 years.
Somebody's gonna go build that. If n- you know, wh- basically, why not us?" And so that was the original.
The original idea was, like, that original, that early thesis I just laid out, plus, okay, finance is about to completely move on chain, and there's all these financial people, millions of Wall Street folks and VC, PE, financial advisors, RIAs, sovereign wealth funds, pensions, who have no clue what any of this crypto stuff is.
That's our opportunity. And then on the kind of buyer side of the advertising marketplace, you've got all these brands that want to pull AUM onto the platform.
The Coinbases, Geminis of the world, but also the DeFi protocols, but alsoOne day, the financial institutions of the world, we thought would offer crypto products, which seemed really crazy several years ago.
But now you see, you know, BlackRock's got a, a Bitcoin ETF, and so, you know, that, that opens up a whole another advertising base for us as well. How would you compare the path you took to other crypto media companies?
I mean, 'cause there was a... There are others, right? And I feel like you've taken a somewhat different... I mean, first of all, your focus is a little different than like a Decrypt, Cointelegraph.
It seems like you're, you've obviously been moving more towards the institutional side than them. Yeah, we actually started with the institutional side.
I mean, there are three, there are three, like, real media companies today in crypto. It's CoinDesk, The Block, and Blockworks, in my opinion.
Really, like, professional, buttoned-up media businesses, and with semi-sustainable business models. I mean, we saw obviously CoinDesk and The Block had to sell last year, which was tough. But- Yeah...
we started institutional thinking that that was the most valuable audience. We said, "There's this premier audience that nobody in cryp- everyone in crypto wants to meet, but nobody knows them."
And, uh, it was the institutional crowd. It was the folks from Goldman and KKR and Citadel and Two Sigma and that kind of crowd.
And so we, we built this amazing audience from 2017, '18, '19, 2020, of just this institutional audience. And what happened was in May 2020...
So COVID hits March 2020, and two months later, May 2020, Paul Tudor Jones calls Bitcoin the fastest horse in the race. That coincides with massive monetary stimulus, and the price of these things goes crazy, right?
Bitcoin goes from, I think, at the lows around 3,500, shoots up to around 65, 70,000. The whole industry went crazy in 2021, 2022.
And what we realized was the institutional crowd was not actually the most valuable crowd. It was the deeply crypto native crowd. Because those are the folks managing money on-chain.
Those are the folks with massive pools of capital. So yes, Fidelity might have a lot of money, they're this big organization, but they only wanna spend $25,000 on your deal.
Whereas Arbitrum and Uniswap and, you know, I'm sure some of your listeners might have no idea of these companies, they have billions of dollars in their treasuries. Billions with a B.
So we said, "Hey, look, if our, if those are our adver- or if our advertisers are really those protocols, they have billions of dollars."
There's a Digiday article from maybe 2022 about how we were training our sales team to sell to protocols and DAOs. And for two years, that made completely no sense.
But now we've kind of shifted our audience from this institutional crowd into the crypto native audience, and there was, like, a specific moment, moment in time that we decided to do that, which I can talk about if it's interesting.
But it's opened up, it's kinda opened the floodgates to, like, we are really the only media brand out there who has the scale to accept the dollars from these protocols and who has the ability on the sales and marketing side to actually sell into these protocols.
Yeah, that's interesting, 'cause, I mean, I would've thought, like, I mean, I'm not, like, deep into the world.
But [chuckles] but there were a lot of, like, publications, partic- Crypto is a weird market in that it's very insular. I guess maybe a lot of markets are. But there's, like, a vocabulary and everything among...
It's almost like there's a cultural element to crypto that doesn't exist in a lot of other, you know, fields. I don't know if people are still doing, like, DGen and NGMI and all that stuff.
Like, it's- Well, it, it's not just the culture and the, the language. Yeah, there's all the dumb Twitter language and stuff like that, whatever. I wouldn't say it's dumb. I'm not gonna- Well, it was like, it was cool.
Now it's cri- now it's cringe. Like, whatever... drag any of these things. [laughs] But there's actually a totally different sales motion. So let me walk you through a deal recently.
We closed a $960,000 deal with a L2 called Arbitrum.
And for the media company people who are not into crypto, I'm first off sorry that I'm gonna bore you for a couple minutes here, but it actually might be helpful to explain.
So, like, the analogy that I would use is there's all these L1s and L2s. Those are layer ones, layer twos, who are trying to scale the blockchain. The easiest analogy is these are just the cloud providers.
So there's a huge fight right now for the cloud provider. So Amaz- AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, they want one thing. They want founders and developers to come build on their platform.
Same thing with all these blockchains. So there used to be Ethereum. Now there's layer twos who kind of help scale Ethereum.
Then there's, like, Solana and Aptos and, like, o- other, and Polygon and, like, other people like that who have taken a different approach to scaling. But it's all one thing.
It's just trying to scale a blockchain so you can have lots of transactions on a blockchain. And they wanna reach the founders and developers. And so we just closed a $960,000 deal with Arbitrum.
However, there's no CMO that we sold to. We didn't actually go talk to anyone at Arbitrum. We didn't talk to a marketing team. There was no head of marketing. There was no CMO.
We posted on the for- [laughs] The for- I'm, like, imagining you're selling it to, like, some sort of ape avatar or something. [laughs] I mean, I don't- With no name. I don't know if... I mean, we... That's right.
That's right. [laughs] I don't know if I can share my screen on this thing, but it's... I mean, I'll send it to you afterwards. [laughs] Basically, okay, Arbitrum is, is run by a DAO.
The holders of the ARB token, A-R-B token, are the- Yeah...
people who vote in the DAO, and whatever gets voted on then moves, then basically happens inside of the smart con- That, that then moves to then change the smart contracts.
And so we essentially lobbied and sold into not the head of marketing, but all of the delegates, the big holders- Oh, right. I see...
of the ARB token, who are people and individuals and organizations who have been delegated ARB tokens. So if, if I'm Andreessen Horowitz, I don't actually wanna vote on Arbitrum things.
I wanna delegate my ARB tokens to someone who's deeper into the community than me. So anyways, we got this deal done. It moved on ch- it moved on-chain.
We then got people to vote with their ARB for us, and we, we won a 12-month, $960,000 deal with Arbitrum, and we've, we've won many of those, those deals.I mean, is that gonna be the exception though?
I mean, is this, is this gonna be like the norm? I mean, DAOs are still pretty niche of a niche. I mean, I don't think so. I don't think so. No. I think protocols will become the largest organizations in the world.
They'll end up being bigger than any software business and bigger than any bank. And if I'm wrong, that's, that's all right.
But, you know, then we'll be wrong, and then we'll go back to selling to BlackRock and to Coinbase and to, you know, go work with some boring media agencies or something like that.
[laughs] But if I'm, if I'm right, there is no one in the world who can com- I mean, it's gonna take Bloomberg five years to understand h- how to sell what we're selling, or Wall Street Journal probably 10 years to understand that, so.
Yeah. So you say now you think of yourself as, like, a, a data and research business. But the majority of the business is still in, like, media, like events and ads and- Not anymore, no. No.
Um, I mean, this year, this year it's probably... So we, last year it was, like, 5% research and data. This year it's 20% to 25% research and data, and next year we'll be on par with the events and the digital business.
So next year I think we could get to 33/33/33, which is, you know, 33% of revenue coming from events, 33% of revenue coming from podcasts and newsletters, and 33% of revenue coming from the research and data side of the business.
Okay. So- So long term, 'cause you, you took, you took a round of funding, right?
After, after saying you had no plans to ever raise, which is the first step to raising funding is to say you have no plans [chuckles] to ever raise, right? Exactly.
[laughs] Go on the podcast, say you want to, you want nothing to do with investors, and that's how you, [chuckles] that's how you raise. [laughs] Exactly.
But you raised money and, and nobody wants to raise money for media businesses these days. It's just a bad idea. I got an email the other day from someone who's like, "I'm thinking about raising money."
I was like, "Stop now." Stop. "Stop now. Don't do it, and just bootstrap it, and that'll get you either you break out or it doesn't work." But whatever.
It's, it's, media businesses, I think we've now realized it's not made for, for venture investing, institutional investing at all. But that's to build the data and research business.
How, how do you think about, you're kinda operating a bunch of businesses that are related, but, like, they all, they have different dynamics, right?
And then, and I think it's interesting that you didn't do it all at the same time, 'cause even if this is the way you sort of want it to go, I don't think...
First of all, you couldn't have done it back in 2020, say, right? No. I think we had to take these, the steps that we took.
I mean, there are a lot of other, there are a lot of businesses in our industry and outside of our industry that look very similar. They just took a different path.
So there are different research and data providers, but, you know, they, because they started with research and data, they never actually prioritized media, so they don't actually own the distribution that we own.
So I think you kinda had to do it sequentially like we did. I mean, you say, so we are running kind of different businesses inside of Blockworks, but none of them would actually work if they were by themselves.
So we could run a research and data business. There's no way that thing would work by itself. There's no way we could run that business profitably. And the whole thing of Block- we always wanna stay profitable.
So there's no way you could actually... I mean, you could raise boatloads of venture money, and you could get on the VC hamster wheel, like, I mean, go, I mean, I'm not gonna name names.
There are several other research and data companies that run these, like, wildly unprofitable businesses, and they're just stuck on this VC hamster wheel, and, I mean, it, it really doesn't look good for them.
So, so we could go compete with them outside of it, but all these businesses serve different functions. So, like, if you, for, for Blockworks. So the news business builds a lot of trust in the brand.
Like, the news business s- is, like, real high trust type, like a very high trust business that builds this, like, deep connection with our audience and, and deep trust in all of the things that Blockworks does, not just the news.
The podcasts and newsletters are the distribution mechanism. So they serve... So page views are going to zero. Like, no- nobody's gonna go- nobody's gonna visit a website one day. Page views are going to zero.
So the news business, high trust, but, like, not actually a great business model for people who are stuck in news on a website. So we've distribute the news through things like podcasts and newsletters.
We've got five different newsletters. Business on that side looks kind of like an Axios or a Morning Brew. Then we've got a podcast business.
Looks kind of, if you break down the numbers, similar to, like, a Barstool Sports. So we own the largest podcast network in the industry. That serves distribution. All right, so you've got news, trust.
Podcast, newsletters, distribution and cash. Events are the, spit off a lot of cash flow, right? Yeah. So events are the- That's what you said the last time.
I, I was, like, doing some community thing, and you corrected me. [chuckles] You're like, "No, no, no. The job of events is cash." Job of events- It's always stuck with me. [laughs]... is to make money.
If you're in the events business and they're not making a lot of money, you are [chuckles] you should shut down those, those events because- I mean, even some sort of cliche, and I appreciate that you just- I mean, because anyone who's listening to this who hosts events, like, events suck.
Like, events suck to host. They're- Oh, I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy. [laughs] Total pain in the ass. So if your event is not spitting off a bunch of cash flow, like, get out of the events business.
So you've got, okay, events serve ca- or distribute cash, which you can then re- reinvest in other parts of the business without, so that you're not stuck on the VC hamster wheel. News is trust.
Podcasts and newsletters is distribution, and then you're missing one super key thing, the enterprise value of the business. Yeah.
So o- the problem with media businesses [chuckles] and why one of the many reasons th- they shouldn't raise venture is, like, they just don't, don't get high multiples. They're, like, low, low enterprise value.
So the research and data business serves as the, kind of the, the high multiple enterprise value type of that.
But if we just did research and data, then you get stuck in a shitty SaaS model where you're raising money, spend half that money on engineers and product people, half the money on marketing and sales, and now you've got a wildly unprofitable research business.
So it all, it all needs to flow together. Yeah.
It's interesting 'cause I, you know, the, the whole negative CAC thing, I think, you know, Craig Fuller was always talk- I haven't, I don't think I've done a, aA podcast with Craig [laughs] You should have Craig on.
He's 10 times smarter than I am with this stuff. But [laughs] you're smart. But Craig is smart, too. But, you know, he, he split off Sonar. They split it off 'cause it seems like they wanna sell. I don't know.
And, and depending on who's gonna buy, they, they might look at like... I mean, that's, that's, uh, very compelling. I mean, your thesis is basically, I think, the Bloomberg thesis really in some ways.
I mean, maybe it's a little different- Well-... with, with podcasts being heavier, but. Yeah. Craig, you know, I haven't talked to Craig about this. They spl- they...
So they, the, he had l- right, FreightWaves and Sonar. Sonar was the research and data plat- Yeah... the data platform. FreightWaves was the media business. And, you know, investors are dumb. Invest...
not, not, not investors as in, like, one or two investors, but, like, the market, I would say. Not investors. [laughs] Like, the market is dumb. The market follows the m- the market follows the market.
The market follows the herd. The market follows what the multiples that the market sets are. There's not really...
It's, not dumb is the right word, but, like, they just kinda follow, like, what the other people say the mark- what the, the market multiples should be. Yeah. So why...
Here's, here's a question for you, and this all ties back to Craig's thing. Why are SaaS multiples and ARR multiples, like, so, so much higher? Because they're recurring. Because they're recurring.
Because they're recurring. However- Once you get a, once you get a Bloomberg terminal, you don't give it back. Okay. That's right. So- It's $21,000 a year...
well, Bloomberg Terminal's specifically amazing 'cause it's a hardware product. But most software product, it's... Yeah, they get these crazy high multiples. However, you can cancel a SaaS product with one click.
It's super easy to cancel, and actually the churn is relatively high. So what is, like, the silliest thing in the market, in my opinion, SaaS is overvalued, conferences and media- Right...
are, are under, are undervalued because, like, we... So- But that, that's changing right now, isn't it? Like, I- So it's currently changing, but our whole thesis for, like, the last several years was, was that.
Was that SaaS is, SaaS is overvalued, media and events are undervalued, and the reason for this is because I'll, I'll show you two businesses on paper. They both have 90 perque- 90% recurring revenue.
One of them's gonna get a 10 times revenue multiple, the other's gonna get a 1.5X revenue multiple.
The conference is gonna get 1.5X revenue multiple, SaaS product's gonna get 10 times revenue multiple, but they're both recurring revenue. Because I could either...
I could argue either they're both recurring revenue or neither are actually recurring revenue. The conference...
I mean, if we, if our conferences have 90% of our sponsors renew year after year after year for seven years in a row, why is that not recurring? It's, it's- It is recurring...
I mean, well, that's why, like, within the events business, trade shows get different multiples, right? Because, I mean, trade shows, I... They're not for me exactly.
I mean, [laughs] I can't imagine, like, wanting to do that. But, you know, at the end of trade shows, sponsors line up to sign their contract for the next year. I mean, that's good.
Like, in the media, you don't get a lot of people lining up to, like [laughs] sign IOs. So yeah, that's, that's a good business too. Yeah.
So talk to me about the events business, because like as you said, total pain in the ass, right? And now you have... I don't know, how big is the Digital Asset Summit? I know Permissionless is big.
Digital Asset Summit in... So our next one is March 2025, 2,500 attendees, three-day conference. Okay. These are big events. I mean, it's- We think of that, we think of that as small.
So, like, we used to host- [laughs]... you know, Permissionless was several thousand attendees. We're getting out of the several thousand attendees game because- Oh, you are? Yeah, we're getting out of it.
I mean, we haven't really publicly announced too much, but I, I mean, I can, I can share it here. It's like we had two conference brands.
So we had Digital Asset Summit, which is our very B2B, buttoned-up, it's, like, the only crypto event where people are wearing suit and tie. Goldman, KKR, Citadel, Two Sigma, like that, you know, that kind of crowd.
Hosted in both New York and London. Then we had our very, like, crypto native, shorts and a T-shirt- Oh... several thousand attendees. Some guy in a American flag thong. I mean, you say that, Ryan, but, like- [laughs]...
be careful what you wish for, honestly. Yeah. So that was our more... It was, it was more B2C. B2C and B2B in crypto is weird 'cause, like, you will have these 24-year-old kids who also manage, like, $30 million.
So, like, B2C, B2B- Yeah... it's, like, not always the right distinction. But yeah, it was, like, younger crypto native crowd. We're getting out of that game. It's just not the, it's just not- Interesting...
the game that we want to play, and we're moving Permissionless to become more of a B2B event, but for the deeply crypto... I keep using this word crypto native 'cause it's what people in crypto say. But, like- Sure...
crypto B2B, and then there's, like, finance B2B, I'd call it, for Digital Asset Summit. So maybe if I can- So what is the strategic rationale from that?
Is that to sort of, like, really differentiate yourself from the sort of... Let's, let's face it, I mean, I joke around about it, but crypto does have, like, an interesting fringe element to it.
I mean, I can say this, I see it every day. [laughs] And look, the, with the, the booms and the crashes, right? There's, there's still a lot of crypto, you know, pessimists to the f- to, to haters out there.
And there are a lot of events in crypto. I don't know, maybe it's just being on Twitter a lot. I feel like some people who are in crypto do nothing but go to events in various places.
Maybe every space has a lot of events. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of bad events. There's a lot of bad events. No, the crypto uniquely does have a lot of... There's an oversupply of events, for sure.
But, like, big, like, party type events it feels like. I don't know. Sometimes I'm wondering, like, I don't know- Yeah, yeah, yeah... there's something...
'Cause again, there's a cultural, there's a cultural part- There is... of, of crypto- There is... that is different than most business categories, that's for sure. Yeah. There is. There is.
The re- the reason we're getting out of B2C is we are not the world's best B2C conference ho- like, organizers. There are other big conferences. ETHDenver, Token2049 in Singapore had 20,000 attendees. Consensus, right?
CoinDesk's Consensus. Yeah. Like, you know, 10,000 plus. So that, that's one of the, the reasons.
But there's actually just a much more logical, quantitative reason, which is the only thing that could kill Blockworks at this point is getting overextended on a large conference.
So at the beginning, we had to take these risks.
Like, we bet, we've bet the farm two or three times at Blockworks, where we put every dollar in the bank account into these big conferences, and we had to make it work, and if it didn't work, the business was dead.
We no longer have to do that.And we no longer wanna make those bets on the conference side of the business. So we'll still make really risky, really...
like get really extended, but more on the data and research side of the business- Mm-hmm... less on the conference side. I don't, I don't wanna die by a conference.
And so what I see happening with big conferences is if you can hit the narrative with your event, you get really big, right?
So you have 10,000 people, and then 20,000 people, and then what does everyone do internally at, at your company? No-nobody's sitting there saying, "Next year, let's go smaller." So you say, "20,000.
Let's go 40,000 next year. We're gonna be in a bull market." Yeah. "Let's go bigger." All right. Well, we need to book a bigger venue, we need to outlay more costs.
W- and by the way, a lot of those are fixed costs because you're a conference organizer, because it's a conference. So boom.
All right, let's go bigger, and then let's go bigger, and then let-- and then but because it's crypto, it's a v- extremely volatile industry.
So what happens is you are booking these events farther and farther out in advance 'cause they're getting bigger and bigger, and then you get on the other side of a bull market, and you get trapped in a bear market where you've put up fixed costs like you're in a bull, but really the sponsorship dollars are you're in a bear.
And that's how you end up like Coindesk, where, you know, they made 50 million top line last year, but they lost 75 million, or they spent 75 million. So, you know, that's- That's bad. [laughs] You're hit, you're... Yes.
The first one was horrific. The next one was still bad. [laughs] 50 million buck- well, 50 million top line, not that bad.
75 million in costs, I mean, you're lo- I don't wa- I don't wanna lose 25 million in a year, you know what I mean?
Well, the other thing is, look, events are really great ab- about, you know, generating cash really quickly.
And like before you have that built-in trust in the media brand, you can spring up an event and like ma- make it work without much of a brand, really.
You know, it doesn't take like decade of building trust to build an event brand. I think one of the things that I've noticed with event brands is that they're very fragile.
Y- it-- beyond the market conditions, think about technology. This is like the major technology event, particularly big events, has ch- none of them have lasted a long time. I mean, CES, okay.
Outside of those, like you have marquee industry events that have a boom and a bust. There, there is a cycle to all of these events. That's right. I mean, I do think s- one of... So there's a metric I care...
I think of an event as a marketplace, and I think that like you're basically con- you're, you're creating a pop-up marketplace for three days and then tearing it down, and so you're bringing buyers and sellers together.
So conference organizers track these metrics like attendees and revenue and obv- obviously the, the, the basic conference metrics.
The thing that I care about is if you're creating a marketplace, what's the marketplace metrics? So things like GMV, right? Like how much, how many transactions are happening on your marketplace?
Those are the metrics that conference organizers in the B2B space should be looking at. It's not attendees and sponsorship dollars. Yeah.
It's how much business was getting done at your conference, because it's the GMV of your event because- But it's hard, it's hard to know, right?
That's the, that's the advantage of hosted buyer forum type events and- Yeah... you know, where you bring in a, you explicitly bring in a, a, a buy side.
You know, you do whatever you have to do to get them there, and then you do a lot of matchmaking, and then you can, you can sort of divine, you know, what- Yeah... kind of economic activity you're creating.
It's hard to do, but like you have to invest in things like a good app, and not just like one of those like, "Hey, we'll sell you a good app and white label it." Like, you know, they're, they're...
the, the best conferences I know right now are building their own apps in-house. They're building apps.
They're getting the best apps on the market if they, if they exist, but I think s- a lot of them have to build it in-house. You're doing follow-ups that aren't like, "Hey, here's a survey, Brian.
What'd you think of the event?" It's like, "Hey, I'm gonna schedule a follow-up call with your chief revenue officer in two months." Yeah. "Tell me if you got any business from that."
That's how you should track the success of a conference. Yeah. No, that's, that's, that's very true.
I mean, because like, I would always say it's like the, the stuff that goes on on stage is absolutely important, but the role, it's not the value.
It is, it is path to the value, and the value of, of B2B events is in matching up a buy and a sell side. And so, but, uh, you're totally right.
There's usually no way of measuring that outside of, you know, did you get the right people in the room? Right. You don't know if they, they did- Right... any sort of transactions.
But I also wonder, so the business is obviously changing, and I think when you, you're sort of saying like, okay, we're gonna pull back on the B2C events because you, you sort of use the events in order to be able to launch the media and to go deeper into the podcast network, and then eventually be able to get to the place where you could build up the data business.
And now, if you were to look forward five years, I would guess that your forecast is for media to be a smaller, a much smaller part of the business. I mean, yes and no. Perhaps. I'd like...
So like if you fast-forward a couple years, I'd like- Bloomberg Media is far smaller than Bloomberg [laughs] Terminal. So, so in 20, in 15 years or 10 years- [laughs]... pr- probably, yes. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, obviously Bloomberg is- Bloomberg Media is a nice business. Bloomberg Terminal is a great business. [laughs] I mean, Bloomberg Terminal is one of the best businesses in the world, I would argue.
But, [laughs] you know, what, what are they doing? Ten billion of recurring revenue- Yeah. [laughs]... with the hardware product. So for us, I mean, you know, fr- first off, just taking into account like the...
we used to, you know, as of 2019, 82% of our revenue came from conferences.
Then we shifted it down and down and down, and now we're at like, you know, next year we'll do probably 33% from conferences, 33% from podcast and newsletters, 33% from the data side of our business.
Fast-forward, I mean, the, the goal internally at the company is 100 million in revenue from the media side of our business, which the media and events.
So I'd like media, podcasts, newsletters, events to do 100 million in revenue. I'd like the data side of our business to do 100 million in revenue.
So I don't really know what the conference versus podcast versus newsletter versus media breakdown will be, but that whole bucketHundred million in revenue, and then the research data side of the business, software, product, et cetera, that's 100 million in revenue.
So that's what it-- I think it'll be like, give it five years, and then, yeah, look, 10 years, like you want, you want most of it coming from the SaaS product. I mean, can you do $100 million in, in media in crypto?
I mean, there's not that many hundred million dollar in, like, revenue outside of, like, massive- Yeah, you can.
Coin- I mean, CoinDesk got to, CoinDesk got to fifty million in, uh, in the last market, and this upcoming, this upcoming market will be 10 times bigger than the last market.
So I mean, you've-- Yeah, it's I, I, I think we could, I think we could do well, well above that. I, I'm not saying in two years from now, but I'm saying- Right. [laughs]... in the [chuckles]
not short-term, not long-term, like in the medium term. Yeah. Okay. So last thing is, like, what do you think are some of the... I mean, you survived the sort of crypto winter and, and this is a boom and a bust market.
I wonder, like, how... I, I think you could probably argue maybe it depends on the election, maybe it doesn't.
Like, probably still in, in, in this upswing that's, that's been happening in the crypto- I don't think it, I don't think the election matters as much as most people say, but. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't. I don't. Oh.
I thought everyone wanted Gary Gensler gone. He's gone either way. Oh. He's not staying if Ka- he's not staying if Kamala wins. I wonder, does that change how you operate the business because...
And I wonder, like, does your... Because, I mean, you had to like, you had to live through it. Everyone lives through that weird blip during COVID, but then all of a sudden a ton of money got dumped.
It went from like, "Oh my God, the, the world is ending," to, "Hey, things are great." But does the business, how tied is it to the crypto cycles, right?
Like, I mean, you know, during the crypto winter, I'm sure your business, like, buckled. It's definitely tied. In the same way that any media business on, a B2B media business is tied to their own industry, right?
Like, you know, Sean, Sean's got, you know, Construction Dive, and if the construction industry gets whacked twenty-five percent, like his media business probably gets whacked like, I don't know- Yeah...
ten percent or something. So yeah, I mean, we're, we're tied to it. Not as much on the subscription side of the business, more on the advertising side.
So the dynamic there is when prices are going up, new users are coming into the industry, all the platforms want those new users to come onto their platform to buy Bitcoin there instead of at their competitor.
It's the same reason why, I don't know, I'm still using the same bank account that my mom signed me up for when I was 18 years old. Like- [laughs]... you know, these platforms are very sticky, right?
So if I'm Coinbase, I'm like, "I'm gonna spend every last dollar I have to make sure that Brian, when he comes into crypto, buys Bitcoin on my platform, not my competitor's platform."
So that's why advertising dollars are so robust, I would say, in the bull markets.
In the bear markets, nobody new is coming into the industry, so the focus on getting investors to buy on your platform goes, goes basically away.
However, there's a new, there's a different audience that becomes really valuable, and it's developers.
So the Coinbases of the world, they tighten up their advertising budgets in bear markets, but the protocols, the, like, DeFi protocols and lend and borrow protocols and L1s and L2s and these, the Arbitrums and Uniswaps and Solanas and Ethereums of the world, they need to reach the developers, so they actually spend more in bear markets to kinda get those people on their platform.
And so that's why- Oh... we're turning Permissionless into more of a B2B developer conference is to start to kind of- Yeah... recession-proof the, the business if we go into a downturn. Right.
'Cause the more consumer-focused ones, it's like, they get so much of their traffic from people just... It's like- That dries up.
That all- When the Bitcoin price [chuckles] is, like, up, everyone's checking That all dries up. [laughs] That all dries up.
But we think we've done a pretty decent job of, like, in the next downturn, which, you know, twenty twenty-six, twenty twenty-seven, whatever it looks like, like we, you know, we feel pretty confident.
I mean, we'll pr- our numbers might go down a little, but, like, we feel pretty confident that we're, they're, we're pretty bear market-proof right now. Yeah. So tell me about the advisory business.
Why did you add that part? I mean, 'cause that seems more... It's not a data play, but it, I, I mean, it's related to the data. So explain.
And, and you've, you've, at least you put out there, like, pretty, pretty bullish forecast for this. So we launched Blockworks Advisory a couple weeks ago, which is a consulting business.
If anyone wants to read more about it, you can type in, like, Semaphore Blockworks Advisory or something. We- Max called you something interesting. He called you a darling, I think. Darling. Super nice.
The crypto, crypto darling. We love that. Thank you, Max. [laughs] I was like, "Darling? Wow." [laughs] Never thought I'd be called a darling. [laughs] Yeah, I appreciate that, Max.
So [chuckles] we launched our data platform in May of twenty twenty-two, and we have 20... What's the exact number? I think we have 17 analysts full-time in-house at Blockworks today.
Research and data analysts at the company. We have 17 of them. And they are deeper into the weeds of these crypto businesses than anybody in the world.
They're deeper in than a lot of the founders, they're deeper in than their own investors, they're deeper in than employees who work at the businesses.
And so what started happening is the, the blue chip brands, you know, Solana, Arbitrum, Uniswap, Optimism, Polygon, Athena Labs, like the really, really, really blue chip folks started asking us, they would come to us and say, "Hey, you got these analysts and your whole team is, like, deeper into the weeds than, like, half my company."
These were the founders asking us these things. "Can you help me build an incentive program, build a grants program? Help me with my go-to-market strategy?"
We started by saying, "No, that's, that's actually not what we do, but I appreciate it." And after getting requests from all of these founders, we started saying, "Hey, look, we've got these research analysts.
Let's take like two or three of them and move them into more of like a services consulting type of business." And yeah, I mean, we've, you know, we did that a couple months ago.
We've brought in already seven figures of revenue from that side of the business.It drives the other sides of our business, right?
So if someone comes to us and says they need help, we might say, "Hey, yes, by the way, on go to market, you should spend money on ads. You should buy ads on our podcast.
You should probably sponsor our upcoming conference. You should... Your team, to get smarter, should probably subscribe to our data platform.
And yes, we can sell a, you know, six hundred thousand dollar consulting project over here." And so that started happening more and more, and then we, we, we formalized it with the launch of Blockworks Advisory.
So yeah, we think we can bring in several million dollars from it, yeah, next year in twenty twenty-five. And that's totally different obviously than the news part.
Like, and I wonder where, where do you see the news, news part as part of the model, right? Like, I mean, you said it's like to establish trust, but then I wonder, is it, is it... Does it end up becoming necessary?
News, news is at the backbone of the whole business. We... I think about news very differently than probably most of our competitors do.
Like, I, I, I don't think about, like, breaking news and just covering, like, press releases and just, like, news stories. Like, I, I, I really don't see the value in that anymore.
I think consumers just go to Twitter for that, and everyone's like, "Ah, yeah, but Twitter, fake news." It's like people go to Twitter for news. I'm sorry. Like, you're just...
Your business is, is getting rocked by, by Twitter if you're just in the pure play news business. What I like is more of the podcasting and newsletter business.
I think that's a phenomenal business model, and I think if you talk to our journalists, they're some of the smartest people in the whole industry with the most unique takes.
But their whole career, they've been told, "Don't have personal opinions. Don't have personal opinions. Just put out the news. Just put out the facts." And that's just a commoditized business. There's no value in that.
And so what we are training and trying to teach and push our journalists to do is, "Hey, you, you know those unique opinions that you have?
You know how you have, like, really insightful takes, and you're deeper into, like, this part of the ecosystem than anyone? Hey, share that. That's a good thing to share, actually."
That, that's where our content is unique, not in our, you know, I don't know, news formatting, like, you know, smart brevity or something. I don't know.
And, and it also seems like you're, you're, you're starting to build franchises, right? Called- That's the other thing is the dangerous place for media businesses is this, like, messy middle. Once, you know...
You can have a lot of s- success scaling or starting a media business. Pretty easy to start a digital media business.
The hard part becomes once you've hit maybe 50 employees, and you're scaling past, you know, 20, 25, 30 million of revenue because you kind of ent- enter this messy middle of, like, size, where you're not big like The New York Times and Bloomberg, but you're not small, where you're just, like, creating content that nobody else...
Like, you're, you're, you're so niche. So we started to enter that messy middle, and I was like, "This is the danger zone." So what we started...
What we actually did is we, in January, completely pivoted the news and editorial and content strategy of the business, broke the whole thing into what we call house, a house of brands.
So we now have several different brands inside of Blockworks that are targeted around very specific communities.
So there are these really diehard communities inside of crypto that if you're outside of crypto, it all looks like one big crypto bubble, or crypto bubble's probably the wrong word there.
But anyways- If you're outside crypto- One, one big-... it looks that way. [laughs] Yeah. One, maybe it is all one big bubble. To all the people outside of crypto. [laughs] In many forms of the word bubble, yeah.
Inside of crypto, there's all these super unique factions of people, and those factions are, like, diehard, almost, like, cult personalities- Right... inside of these communities.
So we have built sub-brands around these diehard cult communities. So there's the Solana community. They love Solana. If you bring up Ethereum, they don't wanna talk to you. S- Diehard Solana people.
So we have a brand called Lightspeed. It's a podcast called Lightspeed.
There's a newsletter called Lightspeed, and then we had an in-person activation, which was the Solana Founder Summit hosted by Lightspeed at the per- at Permissionless. There's 0x Research.
There's a whole group of, like, research analysts and kinda, like, analysts and nerdy people who like to get technical and stuff like that.
We have 0x Research podcast, 0x Research newsletter, and then we had, like, research, like the research track at the event.
So we've got in-person activations, podcasts, and newsletters inside of these cult communities with a brand layered on top of them, and that is how... You're asking about, like, 100 million in revenue.
Like, is that really possible? Like, if it was just Blockworks, probably not. Probably not. But because we own these brands, that's h- that's how we're gonna get there. I mean, you have a very large niche.
[laughs] I don't know if, if crypto would be called a niche, but within that, I mean, you just end up, like, you know, creating, you know- Yeah... niches. I mean, that's the thing.
It's like, you know, Stripe just acquired a stablecoin company for $1.1 billion today. I think it's the largest- Yeah... acquisition in Stripe's history maybe, or maybe it's the large- Some sort of...
One of their largest, I think. Maybe their largest. There's a whole community growing around, like, payments and stablecoins.
So, like, when we things, see things like this, it's like, all right, probably not big enough yet, but, like, boom, beautiful s- like, community and audience to build a media brand around. And, and- Okay.
And then Blockworks just, say, is the umbrella brand for- You start to look a bit like...
You know, it's kinda the best parts of Barstool Sports combined with the best parts of Industry Dive combined with the best parts of, like, you know, like Informa's got all their...
Like, Informa's not hosting informal conferences. They're hosting, like, conferences around sub, like, small communities. Yeah. That's actually what they're doing, right?
And so that's, that's our, that's our, that's our- But Informa is, like, a corporate brand. You know? Like, it's not a brand that they, it's- Yeah, nobody's plugged into Informa. Nobody's...
That's probably a bad example. But in the same, like Industry Dive, I mean, Sean has been one of our advisors since day one. May- maybe, no, it's a couple of years into the business we started working with Sean.
But he's, I mean, he's been more helpful than... I mean, he's on the shortlist of just people who have been really- Yeah...
influential and helpful for, for Blockworks, and it's like- It's interesting the way, the way they did it, and in some ways, like Bloomberg is this way, right? It's like Bloomberg this, Bloomberg...
It's a dominant brand, right?
Whereas House of Brands is slightly different approach from, like, just the brand architecture in that, like, you have unique identities, and I guess they're, like, almost endorsed brands, right?
Because, you know, they're not endorsed. They're under Block. It's this, we talk about the stamp of approval. Like, you could go launch a Solana brand tomorrow. You're Brian. You love Solana. Yeah.
Go launch a Solana brand. Boom, we've given it the Blockworks stamp of approval. Like, this is a trusted brand. Yeah. And by the way, to tie- And you just-...
the whole conversation back together, it's like the reason these venture-backed media businesses didn't work is a media company is nothing but trust.
Like, in one word, media is just trust, and if you throw too much venture dollars to... You can't use venture dollars to buy trust, right?
You can use venture dollars to buy distribution and customers and audience, but you can't buy trust. And so that's why, like, it really does just take several years to build one of these things.
Let's check in in another couple years, Jason. Thank you ever so much. Yeah, no pressure. No, I, I got two boards now. I got the board, and then I got Brian, so. [laughs] Well. Thanks, Brian.
I think the other board's gonna be harder. All right, thanks. [upbeat music]