[upbeat music] I think a struggle for a lot of people when it comes to Web3 is, one, understanding what the hell it is. Even the curious wanna see real use cases to know that there's a there there. Yeah.
So I'll answer your question for how it changes publishing second. For the first part with actual use cases, I think there are a bunch that I'd strongly consider the audience digging into.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.
I have a special treat this week. We're gonna go down the Web3 rabbit hole. This should have, like, eh, one of those explicit warning labels but just like a Web3 war- warning label.
[laughs] And to do so, I wanna bring in my personal Web3 shaman, Jared Dicker. Jared, welcome to the Rebooting show. Thank you. I love, um, I love how I'm now the Web3 shaman for all of my old media friends.
[laughs] All of VideoSmart. So it's a great job. It, it's a great non-paying job to have. [laughs] Oh, God. Uh, okay, on that hostile note, Jared. [laughs] Let's... No, in all seriousness- [laughs]...
you're, you're now at, at Churning Group, but you are, like, a media veteran. We'd been talking about esoteric ad tech stuff for years, and now you're in an even more esoteric field, uh, which is crypto and Web3 stuff.
Explain to me your own journey because I remember you leaving for a, a blockchain journalism startup, and I remember you talking to me about it and I was like, "I don't get it." But explain how you got into- [laughs]...
the, the, the crypto world. 'Cause you were early on this stuff. You saw this early, I think. Yeah, I mean, I've had a very diagonal journey throughout my career.
Like, started as a music journalist, if you could call it that.
Literally just blogging and lying to PR agents to try to get interviews [laughs] with musicians, and then building a portfolio there and then accidentally falling into media at the Huffington Post off a Craigslist ad and just realizing that the bar was pretty low on the business side of media.
So if you felt creative and wanted to take risks, there was just massive opportunity and it was a ton of fun there. But my crypto journey, to just keep a long story short, I mean, I've always been pretty exposed to it.
I remember when I was at the Huffington Post and even at, like, Time Inc. and HubbleMass, um, being around engineers, you always had exposure.
They were pretty early on identifying, like, Bitcoin and Ethereum and really kinda thinking through what that could look like. But personally, my story started because of the news business.
I was at the Washington Post around 2016, 2017. Trump came into office and there were two kind of headwinds that the media business was facing. Um, some because of Trump, some, you know, just outside of Trump.
One was, um, this notion of, like, deep fakes and fake news that now that people were getting information in a more distributed way across Facebook and other social platforms, that the information that, you know, the algorithms were targeting at you or that you were consuming may not, you know, in fact be the information that you presume it is.
Um, which being in the news business is amazing because, you know, it's all built on ethics and curation and editing content in order to inform the public, and now all of a sudden people are questioning around the globe whether that information, uh, is legitimate.
The second avenue was really the shift of media models which you and I have spoken about a long time, right?
Uh, Facebook and Google really dominating the advertising business and publishers now deciding that the product that they used to give away for free to their customers they now want their customers to pay for.
Which had a ton of value behind it and there was a strong stance behind it.
The investment that went into great journalism and how much it cost and the value that it brought, but there was just a major disconnect between what we in the media business presumed as valuable and worth paying for and what consumers were really ready to pay for.
So basically bundling those two challenges together, what was very unique is that if you were able to have information on chain, like a way to have an immutable ledger to see the provenance of where information started, whether or not it was manipulated, how it could be managed and owned, could be a great way to really think about how to perceive more value on work being created, journalism, any sort of medium being created.
So I left and became the founding CEO of a startup called POET which quite simply was trying to put all digital IP on chain. Back then nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. They thought [laughs] I was crazy.
Now it's like- Yeah... oh, NFTs, of course. Like, everything should be on chain. Everything should be ownable. Like, we should all own our content.
So definitely early, um, but I'm very thankful for that because it allowed me to really kinda dig in, you know, sink my teeth in, meet the right people, really understand what the technology could do where now when the market is a bit more ready, I won't say ready, but a bit more ready, it's a great position to be in to really try to predict and understand, like, how- Yeah...
these different industries work. At TCG what is your role and what are you looking at?
Because I think one of the things with crypto is a lot of people in media look at it and be like, "Oh, this is just speculation and it's, at best it's about decentralized finance and that doesn't really impact us much."
But what is your role? I'm a partner at TCG. TCG over the past, I'd say, five to seven years has moved more towards, like, growth stage investing.
So later stage majority investments in companies that everyone is very familiar with from Barstool Sports to Crunchyroll to Hodinkee, MeatEater, et cetera.
But how we ended up taking a more hyper-focus on Web3 was the firm invested in the growth stage round of Dapper Labs which is the creator of NBA Top Shots I'd say January of 2021.
They also led the series of Zed RunWhich depending on how much time we have, you'll find fascinating. Oh, I know Zebrun. Yeah. Yeah, will you, you explain it. Great. I'm trying to get my crypto cred out there.
So like, as simply as possible, um, it is a virtual horse racing platform. So individuals can purchase horse NFTs. They come with attributes. You could breed them, train them, and then race them.
So effectively making horse racing a 24/7 sport, no longer barred by physical limitations, completely virtual. But what they were saying was something very similar from what I was seeing at WaPo.
At the Washington Post, I, I was, uh, writing a lot more in this space, really focusing deeper on Web3, starting to invest directly on my own.
And what was fascinating was I was investing in a lot of these early stage Web3 companies, and the desired use for my time, even though my expertise was crypto, had nothing to do with crypto.
It was like, how do we do distribution, go to market, branding? How do we leverage content? How do we do audience acquisition?
And I was like, holy shit, like, three years ago when I was at Poet, I couldn't get consumers interested at all, and founders were pretty not interested in reaching people beyond, like, the MetaMask users.
It was people who understood how to use crypto and had a wallet, that was the audience. And now all of a sudden it was like, we wanna reach internet scale.
We wanna hit every single industry from fashion to, to music, to entertainment, and how do we do that?
And with all of the VC capital coming into the space, which was billions at the time, now exponentially more so, that seemed to be the biggest gap.
Founders were able to get support on solidity engineering or tokenomics or regulation, but when it came to, like, building a real company that hopefully would last five, 10 to 100 years, that's what was missing in that relationship.
But TCG was seeing the same thing.
So I joined last June as a partner, and we kinda decided at that point, even though we were focusing predominantly later stage, that there'd be a massive opportunity for us to work more earlier stage with companies in the infancy of what they're creating as they're thinking about go to market and audience and overall business models.
So that's where my focus is now, uh, really focusing more early stage as well as, you know, late stage, but predominantly early stage on these Web3 companies.
And to summarize your question with a quicker answer, we believe that there is an opportunity for Web3 at consumer scale. We're objective enough to know that we're nowhere near close to that yet.
Like, decentralization directly conflicts with user experience, and when you think about consumers, you have to think about convenience over quality like nine out of 10 times, and the products really aren't there.
So what we're really focused on is, like, how can we identify these different areas of Web2 interest at the inflection point of when they're gonna enter Web3?
So really trying to shepherd in these new consumers and help sustain them, educate them, show that value by contributing in what we deeply understand, which is consumer, commerce, community, and businesses in that realm.
What's fascinating about crypto is it's very narrative driven, and I think it's a very attractive narrative, right? It's institutions have failed us. We need to, to decentralize. We need to have power to individuals.
We're sick of gatekeepers who are keeping people out. Like, I think the narrative is, like, straight on, and I think a lot of people are attracted initially to the narrative.
I think with the next phase usually is you get these true believers, right? And, like, you create an us versus them dynamic, and that helps because you get an in group and you have an out group.
They don't get it and stuff like this. This happened with internet 1.0. It's like a normal phase. But then there comes a, a mainstream. You can't just keep preaching to the choir, right?
You need to shift because I think in some ways, the earlier stage of the us versus them works against you then in the next phase when you need to go mainstream.
Like, if you're going to onboard the next 100 million people with wallets, you can't be like NGMI to everyone. Yeah.
I think there's a couple things happening and key themes, likely skeuomorphic, how this directly connects into this next phase, and one that I think is completely newly foundational.
But there is the business model component of what's happening here, and really trying to see what the major nuances and differences are gonna be from the existing models.
So ownership is a key theme in Web3, people being able to purchase something, right, whether that's an NFT or a membership to a publication or access within a community, and be able to hold that value and build on top of that value.
Does that start to change the way that economics work in media and other industries, right? If I'm a subscriber to The New York Times right now, I use my email for subscription. I pay monthly.
I get access to content or bundles of content. Is there a world by way of Web3 where there is a smaller part of the audience that is willing to pay more but own their subscription in a way that they wholly manage it?
It's scarce, so if The New York Times does a great job at that membership, then more people outside will want to be able to purchase it.
And it incentivizes media companies to really think about what they could start to add onto as it relates to their relationship with the customer outside of content, whether that's in person events or the ability to better connect your community members with one another, or in fact giving people exposure or equity to the businesses or the companies themselves, I think is definitely something that's starting to become a lot more accelerated.
And look, you and I spoke when I was at Poet, when the whole mission was to put digital IP on chain and I'm trying to convince talent agencies and media companies and entertainment companies to adopt this, and now all of a sudden you have CAA and Warner Music investing directly in Web3 companies.
You have adoption from Universal Music Group. You have Time Magazine going completely crypto pilled.
Like, we're definitely at a moment where the institutions are starting to take notice and see this as an innovative new way to think about their relationships and their business.
But the other avenue that I think is more exciting, it's not just about the business model, it's about creating entirely new genres of things, where people deeply understand crypto, they believe in it philosophically, they live and breathe it, which anyone whoWorks or contributes in Web three knows that it's like a twenty four seven market where you constantly feel behind, even if you dedicate your entire life to it and your husband and wife hate you because you're never [chuckles] around at night anymore.
But I do think that there is this notion of new genre building, right? I do think it'll breed new genres.
I think rather than just thinking about Web three as a model for musicians or artists and how that could affect royalties and streaming, I think you have an entirely new genre of music being created that is very crypto native, and fans do wanna own these assets and collect these assets and trade them and, you know, it really starts to attract an entirely new group of people that want to engage or participate a completely different way.
Now, the challenge there is, like, how big could that get?
You know, we talk about consumer scale, and if there's new genres being created, right, there's people who like punk music, there's people who like anime, there's people who like K-pop, but that's not internet scale.
So I think that is going to be an interesting one to watch as well, because I do think we'll see more and more of these native crypto audiences and users being built across a variety of industries.
How that scales will kinda be a bit more TBD.
But on the former, when you have these larger companies really thinking about what gaming starts to look like when it's not just free to play and it's play to earn, or what IP starts to look like when you own a Bored Ape and you have full commercial use to be able to do that and you're a company like Jenkins the Valet, which is partnering with Neil Strauss to write a children's book around a Bored Ape that's gonna be released, right, like, in mass market.
I think it's definitely early days, but we're edging closer and closer. There'll be challenges there, but- Yeah... Brian, and this is something you know well, like pivot to social, pivot to mobile, VR, AR.
I think crypto is definitely that for a lot of these incumbent type brands and companies, but I think it really starts to unlock new areas where they drive stronger audience relationships- Yeah...
and even drive a new element- Yeah... of revenue. So that is always attractive when you're in the business of making money. And I think, like, a lot of people, they see crypto as, like, just a get rich quick scheme.
It always attracts a lot of scurrilous characters. Any of these new things. Social media did the same thing, SEO did the same thing. I, I don't know if the pickup artist guy is now in crypto. I think that's perfect.
[laughs] It's very fitting.
[laughs] But I think that there's something there, and I just know, like, as I get older, I just do not wanna be the old guy who is shaking his fist at the cloud all the time, because I saw people do that with Internet 1.0 and Web 2.0, which, you know, fine, it didn't work out the way people said it was gonna work out at South by Southwest in 2012.
But at the same time, there was change going on. So explain to me where you see this intersecting with the existing publishing business.
Because I think a struggle for a lot of people when it comes to Web3 is, one, understanding what the hell it is.
Like, when you talk about crypto, we can see Bitcoin prices, Ethereum prices, and these various coins and stuff like this, and DeFi. Okay, I get it. Web3, I think for a lot of people, it's still so theoretical.
I go to some of these companies' websites and I see one of the drop-downs being white papers and I'm like, "What? White papers? What about products?" [laughs] I don't want a, a white paper.
When are we gonna see, like, r-real use cases? It's a, it's, uh- Even the curious wanna see real use cases to know that there's a there there. Yeah. So I'll answer your question for how it changes publishing second.
For the first part with actual use cases, I think there are a bunch that I'd strongly consider the audience digging into.
One of which, full disclosure, we invested in this company called Rabbit Hole, R-A-B-B-I-T Hole, like going down the rabbit hole. Amazing name. And their focus is really around acquisition.
They'll work with the protocols like Polygon or certain products and applications, and as those companies start to bring new products to market, they work with Rabbit Hole to create what they call quests, but think of them as, like, education on-ramps that are interactive.
And the audience could go through and work through those things, and they could learn how to, you know, manage and execute on a protocol or buy an NFT or sign up for a wallet, and they earn credentialism there.
So there are platforms like a Rabbit Hole which are trying to get more exposure to these larger kinda crypto companies that are predominantly contributed on by people who understand crypto and make it more seamless, like a zero-to-one education on-ramp where people could do things as simply as sign up for a wallet or really learn how to, like, build reputation or contribute to certain protocols.
A big theme, too, is this notion of twenty four/seven markets, right?
What crypto has really unlocked is kind of removing any barriers whatsoever because of decentralization to, like, both digital and physical limits, right? It's no longer nine to five and closed on the weekends.
These things are twenty four/seven because they're actively managed and contributed on by the community.
So you saw this with Coinbase, which basically took the stock market, which was a nine-to-five, closed-on-the-weekends type behavior, to now twenty four/seven with emerging equities and tokens and the ability for people to buy, trade, and send money twenty four/seven.
Zed Run, another amazing example, right? Hopefully one day I could buy a racehorse. Right now I can't. [laughs] It's very difficult for me to go see races.
I could go to my local place in Monmouth, New Jersey, but I'd be considered a degenerate. But then other than that, I'm going to, like, the Kentucky Derby or Belmont, and it's very hard, right?
It's very hard to buy a horse, it's very hard to race a horse, it's very hard to go in person, and now all of a sudden you have this twenty four/seven market around a sport where people could participate, they could engage, they could be a part of it.
So those themes are very key, and we're seeing that, right, across Zed Run. You're seeing it with Axie Infinity, which is kinda changing the way that people work online.
So I think there are a lot of active products happening now.
On the media side, I think it's a good question, because it's something that, to be quite honest, I'm asked probably 20 times a day because of my background, and it's a very hard thing to define. What is Web3 media?
So there's a couple things that I try to point to.That I think are somewhat comprehensible, right? One is this notion of why subscribe when you could invest.
And this idea came to me during the creator economy boom of all of four months, before crypto took that over completely.
Like many writers, many of which we've known, you, right, left and created their own Substack, and I, as a reader, found myself subscribing to a lot of them. I was subscribing to a lot of different Substacks.
Some I paid for, some were free. But one thing that I noticed, I didn't really read these things.
Like, some of them I read, some of them I skimmed, some I never opened, but the relationship I had with those writers felt very personal.
I didn't wanna unsubscribe because we're friends, [laughs] right, and I don't want you to be like, "Wow, Jared's an asshole. He, he unsubscribed."
The other is you have the Glenn Greenwald type example, which is even if people don't read Glenn Greenwald, those readers are probably subscribing and paying because they want Glenn to continue putting what he's putting out there because it's philosophically tied to their beliefs.
So it's not really like subscribing to something. You are really, like, investing in this. You're either investing in this relationship, you know, you're investing in this content being created.
So what web three really unlocks is it actually allows that notion of like why subscribe when I could invest to actually become tangible, right? By use of NFTs, um, or tokens, right? There's ERC-721s, which are NFTs.
There's ERC-720s, which are tokens. But it really gives the ability for you as a creator to sell this value directly to your audience, and they could own tokens, right?
You see what Kyle's doing with Dirt, you know, and a few other examples there, where people own, right, part of the media company.
That token gives them access to, like, community or to decide where maybe the funds of the revenue are going, what content should be created, what different areas they should explore, and, you know, the potential to kinda share in that upside.
So that I think is really interesting because maybe not for, like, a New York Times or a Washington Post and these larger, more reputable centurial brands that have an existing business model that, you know, aren't necessarily gonna, like, drop those and change.
But if you look at, like, the bundling of media, and I'm gonna be careful here because I don't want you to disagree 'cause we could go deep on this.
But, like, the bundling of media was, like, you know, the Times and WAPO, and then the unbundling was Substack and people realizing, "Holy shit, this is really hard.
I used to just create, and now I'm doing finance and accounting and audience development, and I have to fly to this event to make money, and this is a lot of work," to now what's happening in, like, this why subscribe when you could invest era.
I think bottoms-up media starts to become really interesting, where you could have a creator be able to find a designer through a DAO or an editor through a DAO and contribute with one another and be able to programmably share those profits or contractually have something programmable with how that relationship works or leverage the community a little bit more to help create for you to have built-in s- sort of distribution.
I mean, you may have strong feelings here, but it's fascinating to watch, like, an FWB, which is friends with benefits, which you can say is a media company in itself. They do a lot of things. They do events.
There's professional relationships in there, but a lot of them do create content.
And if you're a friends with benefit token holder, you kinda feel like you want to help get exposure to your other friends with benefits members and do that built-in distribution.
So it kinda, like, changes the relationship to, like, okay, I'm creating content and this is my audience, and everything kinda lives and dies by the last thing that I create, and I wanna monetize via advertising or via subscriptions, but the content is really the connection, to now, right, the investment is the connection, and you're really not programmed to just, like, create content and monetize that and get that audience, but more so think about how you could bring more value to people who have invested and bought into your company.
Yeah. A few reactions to that 'cause I think that's, like, totally right on, and I actually agree with most of that because there's gradations to all these things.
Is The New York Times going to convert itself into a DAO? No. I just do not see that happening. It-- will The New York Times have login with your wallet in which you have control over how your data is used? Yes.
Like, that makes total sense to me. Why would that not be an option? I don't understand- Right... why I have to log in with Google or, God forbid, Facebook. I, I don't want to.
Like, it makes complete sense that my wallet should be my identity, and so much of the internet is built around identity systems, so it's going to have a profound effect on publishing. I agree with that.
I also think that, like, if you look at the trends that are going on right now within media and moving to what I call primary engagement media, these are, are smaller, these are tighter communities, these are more valuable.
People have more of a connection. And like you said, I'm gonna check your name on Substack to see how many stars you have next to your name about how, how often you open. I'll get your figures back to you later.
[laughs] But a lot of people, like you said, like- I think I'm good with you. I think I'm good with you. But if I'm not, I'll ramp up.
Seriously, like, as someone who's run a subscription business before, one of the things you realize is that a lot of people subscribe, paying to, to subscribe, and they, they might not be as active as you would think they are.
But the reason that they're subscribing is 'cause they wanna support you, and particularly when it's personally, and they want this thing to be out in the world, even if they're not always consuming it.
They want it to be out in the world. You look at Patreon and you look at the inflection of people paying to have things out in the world, and there's something there about that.
We're seeing this even with Ukraine and stuff like this. Yeah. These GoFundMes that I've been promoting that people are paying money in order to have these Ukrainian publications exist.
They're not getting any utility out of it. This is a different type of exchange, and I think that that's an interesting aspect. Yes, there's still a lot of would, could of web three, but to me it makes sense.
It, it just needs- Yeah... to have better tools. It needs to abstract a little bit of the technical and financialization aspects, but I think that's also part of it. Yeah. Two things to react to.
One is from a user experience point of view, and you kind of hinted at this with login with wallet, like, I strongly encourage everyone to, like, sign up for a MetaMask or a Rainbow Wallet or any which wallet and go to OpenSea or go to any other Ethereum-type platform, and what's fantastic about Web3 Login is that your profile is the same everywhere, right?
Because it's basically reading your wallet. So if you go to OpenSea, you see your profile, which includes your NFTs or any other information that they want to expose. You go to another siteLog in with your wallet.
It's the same thing. So instead of like creating a profile on each of these sites, curating, figuring out what should be displayed, you're in full control of that.
Like, the wallet itself right, which I bet you anything will change terms very quickly, like whether that's like identity or a different profile.
There could be like any term for what a wallet is, but that UX is pretty revolutionary and exciting. You don't have to start from scratch on any of these sites.
You're effectively pulling through all your reputation, any asset, things that are tied to your, you know, Ethereum address that's within that wallet, and your profile is there already set up for you beautifully.
That's one thing.
The second thing, which is a total different direction, but to your point about on-ramping, is I think because of just the hype and the acceleration and where the focus is in market around NFTs, Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks and things being sold very high, there's a big emphasis on NFTs as the product.
So people think of like an NFT as like this asset, right? This JPEG that you could sell and buy and hold. But we need to like move from like NFT as a product to NFT as a process, right?
So all of a sudden, if you could think of what an NFT is, which is just like minting something on chain to show provable ownership, that this thing is owned by this wallet, then all of a sudden things start to change.
Like, you could imagine any CMS, right, whether it's at a WaPo or a New York Times or any publisher.
If you could make it very simple where within the CMS, when you're writing in the drafts and bu- when you save to draft, right, or even when you go to publish, it mints on chain automatically.
So you have full text on chain that could be hidden right before it's published. There's ways to do all of those things.
But if you start to build that within the process, I think it's gonna be very hard to find a creator that's not gonna want their IP and their work on chain proven with their byline, where it shows any edits or adjustments before it goes live, where you could manage the ownership controls, you could see who the original author was.
And I think that's something, even in the poet days, is highly desirable for a lot of creators.
You look at the Gawker example where people's archives went away, or you even look at like my ability to go and search a Google Image and save any image, and it doesn't carry any credential information.
Like, I could literally just save it to my iPhone photos, and I could share it to anyone. That process is highly attractive, I think, to anyone creating on the internet.
To your point, it just needs to be baked into the process.
When you start inconveniencing people in order to do that, even if it sounds insanely valuable for them, if it's not within their workflow, it's gonna be very hard.
So I think that's the next frontier of where people need to focus, is how this integrates within the workflow, uh, creators or publishers or anyone else.
So o- one question I have is do people need to get more comfortable with the technical aspects of crypto and Web3, or does crypto and Web3 need to require a little less of the technical acumen?
And I ask this because I had one of those... You probably have more of these. Like, we have the- these conversations with 22-year-olds who are like unbelievably smart and terrify you.
[laughs] I had this conversation for this project I'm, I'm doing, this consulting project, and this guy is unbelievably bright. He is just like, "Yeah, dude, I don't know. The future's technical."
[laughs] I was like, "Oh man, I'm doomed." The analogy I use is learning Web3 is like going to the gym. For the first time. For the first time. [laughs] Yeah. W- w- which is something I'm terribly bad at because of Web3.
[laughs] The amount of time it takes for Web3, I can't find myself going down to the basement and going on my Peloton.
But I like that analogy because I do think critics in this space will be like, "Look, if Web3 is gonna be more widely adopted, then it needs to be simpler."
But I do believe that there is a ton of value in those complexities and understanding them because that's really where a lot of the unlock is gonna be more deeply rooted.
So I think people going through the process of learning how to register for a wallet and how to sign a transaction or how to send an NFT or buy crypto and read about that and go through that is actually to the benefit, right?
Especially if you believe that Web3 will continue, and I'm a firm believer that this is definitely the future, but I think when you look around even two years back, the dialogue around Web3 back then and Web3 now is completely different to the point where there's so much capital, so many founders, so many companies, no users [laughs] yet.
So we're definitely like in the process where like everyone's creating, like all the talent's coming here, like so much energy. So like it's, it's gonna will it into existence.
But I do think like going through that process and learning it is important because I think like there are some companies that are figuring it out in a very bright way, like how to blend UX with, you know, progressive decentralization, showing some aspects of what you could do on crypto and making it a bit more simpler.
But you don't wanna sacrifice it too much where you just end up in the same boat. So it is like a tightrope, but I think on the consumer side, it is important.
It is important to like work out those muscles and go to the gym and build that strength because to your point, I think it's gonna be very important for the future.
I think it's honestly less scary and less of a barrier to entry than like sitting at a computer at Code Academy and learning Python or like solidity.
Like, learning how to be a consumer in crypto is highly attainable regardless of your background, and the commitment is far less than learning an entirely new trade. So I do think that it's very important though.
I know there's arguments on both sides, but my opinion is like it's definitely worth the effort because I think it'll unlock more opportunities. I think there's gonna be a lot more jobs in this space.
There's things like on chain reputation and shit that's gonna blow people's minds that I think will be very important for them to invest. Yeah.
You know, the old journalism saying is follow the money and stuff, but it's really follow the capital, and it's financial capital and human capital.
And the, the financial capital, I think some 33 billion was like plowed into crypto Web3 companies last year.
And then the human capital from everything I've read, I haven't gotten like very good stats on it, but the talent is going. It's moving in this direction. Like you said, s- the third thing is users.
[laughs] And to me, onboarding the billion is the big challenge, but a probably opportunity in this space. I mean, it's fascinating too because we're consumer investors at TCG and we focus on consumer in the Web3 space.
It's a very interesting descriptor in Web3 because consumer is very loose in Web3 because effectively likeYou're trying to get a lot of people to use a lot of different products. Everyone's a consumer.
So like the idea of like B2B and B2C kind of weakens in crypto because like if you wanna learn how to participate in a DAO like, and you're using a tool, is that a B2B tool, or like is that a tool that you'd use like you'd use a social application in Web2?
So, you know, I've found that the consumer focus is very just farther and wider in this space, where effectively it feels like if you're building any company in Web3, you are kind of leaning in and focusing, you know, more deeply on consumer.
Um, but there's a lot of things, Brian, that, that are like amazing. Like we talk to companies now, and there's so many Web2 tactics that are gonna be highly advantageous for these companies, like SEO, right?
Like, a lot of these Web3 companies haven't prioritized SEO. They haven't thought about, you know, the zero to one and how people find their products, or TikTok, or distribution.
So it's really fascinating because I think crypto companies love to look in the future. Not many of them look in the past.
And I think there's an amazing decade of like digital media that has taught us about acquisition and distribution and how to program for value that are the largest gaps that are happening in the Web3 space right now that are [laughs] going to be key strategies, you know, at least for us and with our companies.
Yeah. One of the few things that's great about getting older is you just, you start to notice the same patterns sort of repeating themselves in slightly different ways. [laughs] So- Yeah...
it gives you a little bit of perspective. I know there's just so many advantages with this energy and we're gonna topple everything of youth, but I think sometimes you can learn from how cycles went in the past.
And to me, it's not clear, but it, it, there's a good chance this is gonna be a new technology paradigm. And so there's too many people who have too much on the line. I think that's the inevitable.
I know that turns- Mm-hmm... off a lot of people, but there's some truth to the inevitability. If enough people are behind something, it's gonna happen ultimately. Yeah.
And I think it's gonna, it's gonna start to create new themes and like arguments and market where Web3 is pretty integral in those conversations.
So one is this idea, and like forgive me for using the word metaverse, this idea of open and closed metaverses, right? So there's a lot of companies that we're working with. One is Altered State Machine.
That's doing brilliant stuff in AI with NFTs, but preaches this notion of an open metaverse, like the ability for an individual to move within all of these different environments, whether they're brand-driven or entertainment-driven or sports-driven, but gives you, the individual, the opportunity to like step out and choose which arena you're going into.
And then you look at like a Facebook, right? That talks about the metaverse and presumes this world where like every single person, regardless of your age and your interest, is gonna wanna live in like this same spot.
And it's very hard to like imagine that sort of world where like you could program interests for all of these many people. We've seen where that's gone very, [laughs] very significantly.
But also like different age gating, like privacy, like all of these things are gonna start to come up, so like that's another key theme that's gonna start to come where I think Web3 starts to become a core component of that argument, which is, okay, like we're talking metaverse, we're talking virtual worlds, we're talking digital assets, but we don't want them contained the same way that they were contained for the past two decades.
So there's gonna be that arena, which probably will have cleaner UX and on-ramping, versus the other arena, which is, no, like let's do this in a different way and be smart about it. Yeah. I think that's totally right.
I remember like one of my, you know, quotes I did like that didn't age well, but now it might age well. I forget what year. It was like 2000.
I was like, "If you were gonna recreate MySpace today, it would look a lot more like Second Life." You know, I thought, "Oh, that sounds pithy."
And then it looked like an asshole for a little while, but I'm like, "Hey, now it's coming around."
Um, I don't know if like, you know, with the metaverse that Facebook is the best messenger, but it seems to me that the avatar would be the key, right? That has to be open, and that's like the wallet, right?
I mean, ultimately- Right... that's the thing you can take and go from place to place. We're not gonna be living in Facebook's metaverse. At least I'm not. No, exactly.
Like, you know, a major theme is interoperability, right?
Like, that's the, also the promise of like this decentralized world, where you could take, you know, what you have and move and port it through different arenas or not be locked in within, within a single arena, and I think, I think that's gonna be just a major component and, you know, somewhat critical.
Now, to the point that we made earlier, like there's a lot of people who deeply believe that within the Web3 community now.
There's gonna be a focus on being able to like get new audiences to move that over, but I do think that the advantage is in Web3 just with the headwinds that we've seen, with like data collection and privacy and people feeling locked in and algorithms.
So putting on my marketing hat, which I love to wear 90% [laughs] of the time, there's a lot of arguments and products to be built that lean on those concerns that existing users and audiences have had within the existing paradigms.
Okay, so final question is if someone were to build a Web3 media company, obviously it's gonna focus on a specific area, what would be the principles or themes that you think would likely be present within this company entity?
I don't even know what it would be, 'cause it might be a DAO. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, so I love to use the example of doing local news in Web3 as the example. I talk about this all the time.
There's media people who absolutely hate the idea of what this unlocks, and there's people that are more accustomed or willing to think through it, because there are a lot of gaps here.
But when you think about local news, right, you basically had a business that is centuries old that was always a service, right?
Like, you would get your local newspaper, um, and it would give you information on your town, right, like what was happening downtown, what was happening with crime, government, you know, anything that was effectively critical for you as, you know, a resident of this area.
It was an amazing service. And over the...Of course, in the '90s, and then of course in the 2000s, as media businesses went to scale, those strategies shifted.
Like subscriptions didn't come first, unfortunately, advertising really came first, and a lot of the investments in content really started to sway towards being able to get more scale.
So your local newspaper no longer was doing like things around like local government or the town fair.
It would highlight the Trump election or the 2012 election or, and insert any election on the front page because there'd be benefit in getting some sort of distribution or syndication in order to monetize.
And the value depleted in a way. And I like to think of local news in Web3 as a way of bringing that service value back. So how would that work?
Say a town like where I live in New Jersey, all the residents pay X amount of money if they want in order to build the local news DAO.
And all of that money goes within a treasury that effectively is going to be used in order to build a local newspaper that services the residents.
That DAO chooses and votes on like, who's gonna be the writer and the editor, and if they need others to be able to contribute to this, but they make those decisions.
And then they decide, okay, this group is going to then create that content for everyone within the community.
And where I think it starts to shift in an interesting way, like outside of like, yes, there could be the ability for people to own and earn revenues on and so forth, but I think that's less interesting.
I think what's more interesting is now you have the residents within the town helping direct what could be covered, right?
So instead of hearing about the New Jersey state election, um, or micro-elections leading up to it, I wanna know like why there's a 5G tower being built in the middle of town and who's funding it and what that's going to affect, and other people in the town may, you know, want that as well.
And I feel like for service type media, it's an amazing model because you basically have a direct connection with your audience.
They're incentivized to, like, contribute as well, and you're providing a service and you get, you know, an immediate feedback loop.
It's like being a standup comic as to be like, you know, whether your doing is landing or not. But I think that it's a great example of like how bottoms-up media could really start to look.
Now, in services, I think that works. When I put this out on Twitter, people will be like, "Oh my God, like I can't imagine if like The Washington Post listened to their users about what we'd cover and it'd kill ethics."
And I don't disagree like with that either. But I think if you think about it as like, we have an idea, we have a group of people who wanna create around this idea, we're gonna pool together resources, right?
We're gonna help decide like where those areas of focus are. There can be economics around it, whether that's like governance of how you vote on which content to use or built-in distribution and so forth.
But I do think like the service side of media is a very interesting arena to focus on as it relates to like what Web3 foundation could look like in- Yeah... in media.
I, I could see that being very powerful, but also going very wrong. But you know, that's the way it is. And I think there'll be gradations of all these things 'cause you're gonna need guardrails.
'Cause I mean, like I live in Miami Beach right now, and the developers would just infiltrate this and [laughs] Right. And absolutely, I know how this would go in Miami Beach, but this might be a particular local issue.
But Garrett, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. This was an unlock for me. Oh, thank you so much. I always enjoy jamming with you. And yeah, thanks for having me on. Awesome. Thank you all for, uh, listening.
Thank you to, uh, Jay Sparks, our producer, and we'll be back next week. [outro music]