It's a different world, honestly. [laughs] Um, a lot of people, like, have cat avatars and stuff like this, and they're using a lot of acronyms that you really have to try to translate.
What's wrong with the cat avatar, Brian? [laughs] Why, why you throwing shade at the cat avatar? [laughs] I don't own any NFTs yet.
It seems to me like a homeowners association with, like, a nudist colony, and a little bit of Lord of the Flies.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.
Thank you to everyone who's left a rating and review of the show. It's appreciated. If you do use Apple Podcasts, please do go leave a rating and a review. This week, I'm speaking to Jason Yanowitz.
Jason is a co-founder of Blockworks, which if you don't know, it is a publisher focused on crypto.
There's a whole group of these new publishers in this new area, and I'm officially, uh, crypto curious, so I'm hoping that Jason doesn't get too aggressive with the acronyms and the jargon, because there'll be long pauses from my end if he does.
Jason, welcome. Thanks for having me. Glad to hear that we're pulling you down into the crypto rabbit hole. No. No, I love it.
I feel like I've been following your newsletter, and I, every couple weeks I see that you're inching deeper, so it's good to see.
No, I have, and I'm actually open-minded about it, and I think we're gonna get into it later, because for some reason, everything is divisive these days. Like, even the vibe shift, I feel like, is divisive.
People say, "There's no vibe shift." There is a vibe shift. Um, but like, for some reason, everything becomes divisive, and I wanna get into it, because I, I believe in a lot of the, the concepts. They make sense to me.
Also, I f- I feel like you can be critical of something and still say, "Hey, yeah, this sounds like it might be inevitable." But let's start going over your own, like, journey to how, um, you got here.
Like, what, how did you get into crypto? Like, was there some burning bush moment that you had in Miami at some point? Yeah, it was actually a Burning Man. [laughs] No, I'm just kidding. It was 2015.
I lived in, uh, Budapest, uh, Hungary- Okay... actually, and the Hungarian people that I was friends with, you know, their parents lived under, you know, com- like, Soviet regime, right? Yeah.
The 1950s and '60s, and stuff like that, and so they were super into this concept of, like, self-sovereign money and Bitcoin, and they kind of pulled me into the rabbit hole, and, uh, that was 2015.
And, uh, I thought it was cool, and then 2017, and I, like, put it aside, and then 2017, when the market started ripping again, uh, that's when I did, picked it back up and, like, jumped full time into it.
Yeah, so you got into it. Were you immediately a true believer?
'Cause that's the part I wanna get into, because I feel like there are definitely religious overtones to some parts of crypto, and I think that's a positive, and of course, it can be a negative, too.
There are, your p- your belief on crypto depends entirely on when you came into the cycle, right? Yeah. And so, so I guess, so no, I was not a true, like, true believer. Wha- Feels like a religion already.
[laughs] I guess it is a religion, really, if you look at crypto Twitter, but- Yeah, exactly... you, um, so like, I heard about Bitcoin.
I think it takes, I, I don't think you have, like, I don't think anyone, when they first hear about this stuff, has that like, boom, aha moment.
Maybe they're 10 times smarter than I am, probably are, but it took me about two years. 2017 is when I heard...
I actually went to this talk on a Sunday afternoon and heard all about Ethereum from the CMO of this company, ConsenSys. Doesn't really matter, but- Yeah...
that was when I was like, "Ah, this is really, really interesting."
Um, and that was kind of the, that event was, like, the genesis moment for Blockworks, I would call it, uh, which was the, the kind of aha moment that we had, which was entirely wrong for the first couple of months, is that every sort of, like, enterprise and Fortune 500 would adopt this stuff.
We were on the right track, which is that the institutions would a- eventually adopt this stuff, and that this would eventually become an institutional asset class.
But early, early, early thesis of Blockworks is that we would build media, and then sell advisory and consulting services. Uh, and that was entirely wrong. Horrible business model, and just the wrong thesis.
But wait, so I'm sorry. This was in 2017? This was 2017, yeah. Okay. Okay, so the original... I'm, I'm trying to go back in time.
Like, in 2017, there was a, a lot of the sort of narrative, if you will, was around blockchains, like, overall, like, and how blockchains would be in every industry, and there was the sort of Bitcoin crowd, which was, you know, a little strange.
This was before the ICO craze, right? Yeah, this was as the ICO craze was going on. This was, like, the heart, this was, like, the heart of the bubble, I would call it.
The heart of the, we ran up from 1,000 bucks to 20,000 bucks. Yeah. And yeah, the narrative was, the narrative at that time was all of these...
It was, it was like Walmart was running commercials for moving their supply chain onto the blockchain. Right, yeah. Right?
It was very, like, blockchain not Bitcoin meets, like, ICOs, and both of those were ac- both of those were the foundation of something that was, turned out to be true three to four years later, but both of those specific ideas, enterprise blockchain and ICOs, turned out to be wildly wrong.
Yeah. So the initial white space that you and, and your co-founder saw was in the corporations and institutions adopting blockchain? The, yes. I can back it up. Okay.
The white space that we saw was entirely around just information in the industry. Okay. So we would go to these events.
I was kind of pulling my co-founder to come to these events and things like that, and the white space that we saw was that, I'm not sure how long you've been looking at the industry, but, like, in 2017, there were basically two media sites.
You had CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. Yeah. You had, like, maybe one or two podcasts, and then you've got, like, a bunch of information on things like Twitter and Reddit. And we would go to these events.
They were clearly run by a bunch of scammers, but you'd have, like, one or two people that you would meet at the event, and you'd say, like, "There's something here," right? "There's something here."
And then you'd look online and you'd be like, "I don't agree with any of this. Like, this seems like a bunch of people pumping different coins and things like that, but, like, 1% of this feels real."
And we've done so much wrong over the last four years, but the one thing that we got right is believing that crypto would eventually become an institutional asset class, and that there would need, that we would need better information, insights, data analysis, news, research, et cetera, for the massiveCohort of capital markets people coming into crypto.
And so that's kind of the bedrock of, uh, what Blockworks was built on. Well, I mean, if you think about it, you can get a lot of things wrong, but you have to get one or two big things right.
And so you got the big thing right, right? Like, I mean, the fact that i- in 2017, if you saw
crypto, in quotes, as inevitable, and you attached yourself onto that, then that's the big thing you just have to get right, you know? Yeah.
I mean, I think that most startups and companies have pivoted so many times in their history that it's ki- almost a little bit hard to tell the story, right? But I think the main thing is that they're on...
[laughs] They're in the right industry, and they're like, their like early, early, early thesis is right. Yeah.
The execution might be wrong 10 different times, but we're st- we just hit the phase of Blockworks where I feel like the train is on the tracks. There's like rocket fuel behind us, and we're scaling- Yeah...
pretty quickly now. But for the first couple years, it's like, all right, what are we building here? What are we doing here? So... Yeah.
So tell me about those first couple years, 'cause you mentioned like the early media companies in here, and it's all coin, coin, coin, coin, and I think that's because the action was in the coins.
The, the ICOs were hot at the time, and stuff like this. You know, the initial focus was different than that.
So we hosted our first event February of 2018, and then I went like full-time, like quit my job, and my co-founder quit his job, and we launched the business full-time May of 2018.
And by that point we had the thesis locked in, which is that crypto would eventually become an institutional asset class, and potentially even one of the largest asset classes in the world.
And if that happened, there needed to be better information and insights and things like that. Us, we don't come from, like, this almost entrenched media...
Like, I, I meet so many people who are like media operators, right? And like one of our advisors, like Sean Griffey, like love the guy. Yeah. He's like, he's been a media operator for like 30 years, right?
We come from a totally different world, right? Like, I worked in software before this, and then at a VC firm before that. I just didn't know the media space, right?
And so we built the media company basically ass backwards. So we launched with conferences first.
Most media companies, you launch with editorial, you launch with news, you build your audience, and then you're like, "Great, let's monetize this community." We were like, "Let's build conferences." Yeah. Great.
We built some of the best conferences in the industry. Then we built podcasts, and we built the largest podcast network in the industry. Then we launched a newsletter.
We're like, "Great, now we're building the newsletter." Then we launched webinars. And then we're like, "What the hell are we doing here?"
We've got all these products, and you can kind of think of it like floating here, here. I'm using my hands here, but like I don't know if... I don't think this goes out on video. [laughs] Yeah.
But like, you've got all these floating products, right? And we're like, "What is... What are we doing here?" And then COVID hit, and then we can get into what happened- Yeah...
during COVID, and then January of 2021, we launched our media site. So if you actually go to blockworks.co, you see this whole news site. I'm biased, but I think we have the best journalists in the industry.
They're putting out really hard-hitting news, getting a lot of scoops. That is only one year old. That's only one year old, but that tied our entire business together, I'd say. Yeah.
So l- let's actually go back to starting on events, 'cause it's something I know really well, 'cause at Digiday- We started like Digiday. Yeah. It was very similar.
There's advantages and disadvantages to that [laughs] that I, that I'd love to get into. I think the advantages of starting in events is just simply monetization.
Events monetize really well, particularly if you can put yourself in a fast-growing space that has lots of money being thrown at it, and you can be a, a way that people can make more money by connecting with each other.
So that must have been a big advantage, right? [laughs] 'Cause you didn't have to take funding. Exactly. Yeah, so we've never had to raise outside venture funding because of the- Yeah...
because we started with conferences. Um, and we've got, like we kind of just... We, we got lucky, right? We just didn't know really what we didn't know.
But we ended up building a community of like some of the most valuable people in the world, which are massive money managers, hedge fund managers, portfolio managers at endowments, insurance institutions, family offices, who are allocating to crypto.
And that turned out to be a really valuable audience for this, like, institutional bucket of crypto companies that ended up getting built in like 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Fireblocks, and Copper, and BlockFi, and Gemini, and Coinbase. All these institutional c- uh, crypto brands, and they used Blockworks to acquire customers, and we kind of sat in the middle of that relationship.
Okay, so but th- they're looking to acquire, like these are big, not on the, the retail side. Like, not like the, you know, me with my like few thousand dollars worth of coins side.
[laughs] Oh, don't discount yourself, Brian. Don't, [laughs] don't discount yourself. As I said, I'm still curious to newbie in this. [laughs] Yeah. Uh, we'll change that by the end of the episode.
[laughs] Well, I don't know the value will be in the hundreds of dollars, uh, depending on how long this thing goes. [laughs] So we pushed as far to the end of the B2B spectrum as humanly possible.
Like, we did not have a social media. We did not put out content. We did not care about any of that. We had conferences where you paid $1,000 a ticket, like $3,000 a ticket for a VIP ticket.
Sponsorships w- were very expensive. Quickly became the q- uh, most expensive sponsorships in the entire industry with the conferences. And yeah, it was, it was about as B2B as you can get.
And I think that's what the company's e- ethos and core of the company was for the first about two and a half, three years, was really this like B2B, you know, there's all these other media companies.
We are the institutional media brand in crypto. We bridge the gap between capital markets, finance, and, and crypto. Yeah. And that's a great place to be, right?
Anytime you can like be at the intersection of two massive industries and needs. They, they speak different languages, I think, to some degree, probably still.
And so, you know, anytime you can be that, that translation and connectivity layer, it's a good, good place to be. Yeah. It's workable.
Explain how you got into podcasts then, because again, you don't know what you don't know, right? [laughs] So that's the good part about it.
But normally people would be like, "Okay, now I need to like start like a newsletter."Because they need to continue to market to these people for the events, really. That's why a lot of events companies
sometimes can be not very good because it's really just treated as a way to be able to continue to market to people for the events, 'cause that's where the money is. Yeah.
I think if we had bigger brains and we were smarter, we would've done the newsletter earlier. [laughs] But again, we didn't come from this, like, entrenched media world. Like, I didn't know- Yeah...
like, the Politico business model, and, like, everyone's like, "Oh, the Axios business model's so good," and like- [laughs] I'm like, I didn't know any of that. So we were...
So Mike and I sat down, and we're like, "What do we like? What do we use and consume- Yeah... and listen to?" and things like that.
And there's this one podcast that, uh, this guy Naval and Nick Szabo went on Tim Ferriss's podcast in 2017, and I remember it was, like, winter break or something like that. It was over the holidays.
And Mike and I were roommates at the time, and we would listen to this like three-hour podcast, and every 10 minutes we would play it, we'd play 10 minutes, and then we'd pause it and be like, "Did you understand that?"
He'd be like, "Nope." [laughs] "Did you understand that?" I'd be like, "Nope."
And we'd talk about it, and then we'd research it, and then once we understood it, we'd spend like an hour researching those 10 minutes, and then we'd, we were like, "All right. You got it? Great."
And we'd play the next 10 minutes. This took us, like, three days or something. And but podcasts, we can really look back at the history of Blockworks and credit podcasts for our understanding.
And so we're, again, not these, like, entrenched media folks. Yeah. We, we're biased towards podcasts. We said, "Let's, let's build a podcast network."
And, and, and by the way, I think, like, even extend this out to 2022. Uh, there's this guy Michael Saylor who runs MicroStrategy- Oh, yeah...
bought a bunch of Bitcoin, has basically turned MicroStrategy into this, like, Bitcoin, like, uh, you know, a call option on Bitcoin.
He, if you look at how he convinced his board members to buy Bitcoin, he's not sending them research reports. He sent them eight different podcasts to listen to. Yeah.
He m- made his entire board listen to eight podcasts. So that's kind of just the ethos of the industry, and we, we love the podcast market too.
Now we have 15 different podcasts, largest podcast network in the industry, but back then we just liked podcasts. And we were lucky enough, we linked up with this guy Anthony Pompliano. He was pretty big.
He had like 100,000 followers at the time. Everyone's talking about why Drake would be using Bitcoin to bet on the Super Bowl. They want Bitcoin instead of dollars. Settlement times are faster and cost is cheaper.
Bitcoin is superior from a technology format than wires or ACHs. Now I'm... He has like a million and a half, but- Yeah, yeah. He's popular. [laughs]...
we got lucky with our first podcast, became the number four podcast on all of iTunes. And so that was our first show, and we're like, "Oh my God. [laughs] This thing wasn't that hard." Little did we know, but yeah.
So that was the first show. Yeah. Well, I mean, every, every market is different, and I feel like what's interesting about the crypto market is that it has so many peculiarities, right?
Like, I mean, you go on Twitter, and I think that's, again, its strengths, and I think people end up, you know, criticizing it or being turned off from it for because of that, um, those peculiarities.
Like, you know, you go on, like... If you get, like, pulled into, like, crypto Twitter, it's a different world, honestly.
[laughs] Um, a lot of people, like, have cat avatars and stuff like this, and they're using a lot of acronyms, like I said before, that, like, you really ha- at lea- at least for me, I have to try to, like, translate.
Um, not like the big ones like NGMI. I, I know those. What's, what, what, what's wrong with the cat avatar, Brian? [laughs] Why, why you throwing shade at the cat avatar? [laughs] I don't own any NFTs yet.
But I think, like, that it's interesting because I think one of the big white spaces i- in crypto is this inherent distrust of institutions, right? So when crypto, to me, is...
And, and correct me if I'm wrong, but, like, from an outsider perspective, like, crypto is very defined by what it's against, right?
Like, Bitcoin was born out of the financial crisis, and it was in opposition to a lot of failings of institutions. So I feel like that ethos really works against established brands, right?
'Cause nobody i- who is a true believer in crypto, in my view, is going to trust the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times when they are, um, covering crypto, or even CNBC. Yeah.
I, so I would say yes. I, so I agree with you. There is this, like, inherent distrust of the institutions, and that's definitely the ethos of the, of the space.
And yeah, Bitcoin was born out of the financial crisis and all, all that kind of fun stuff. I think the mistrust of the media comes from, um... I mean, first off, there's a gr- it's not just crypto.
Like, there's a bigger thing going on in America- Sure... where there's, like, a mistrust of institutions and m- like, trust of institutions and government and the media- Yeah... is at an all-time low.
So it's not just crypto. But, but that's what...
But just to be clear, that's what I think what, what makes crypto super interesting is that is it is part and parcel of a larger overall societal trend to, like, to, to distrust institutions and to wanna create a n- a, a new and ideally better future.
Right. Well, actually I, I, I think that's really important because, like, when I talk to folks about crypto, everyone's like, everyone says the same thing. Like, "Oh, I don't understand it.
It's this compli-" They're like, "Yeah, I see all the kids are doing it, but, like, what is crypto and blockchain?" They're like, "I could never understand it." I'm like, "Great. That doesn't matter.
You don't understand, you know, the protocol of the webpage that we're using for this application right now, just HTTP. You don't understand that if you use Gmail, you're using the SMT protocol every single day.
You don't need to understand the Ethereum protocol, right? You don't need to understand. But what you do, do you believe that the world is going more digital?
Do you believe that we should be able to send money instantaneously around the world, uh, right, in two seconds or less? Do you believe that it's too hard to issue equity if you're a company?
Do you believe that the payment rails that we've built on, uh, you know, ACH launched in, like, 1972, we're using 50-year-old payment rails. Should that be improved? Do you love your banking experience?"
I'm assuming I know the answer to all of those. Yeah. So therefore, that is the narrative for crypto right now. That is why all this stuff is getting built. It's not this, like, esoteric, like, movement of anybody.
It's just an improvement upon technology. Financial technology improves every 10 years, right?
Like, credit cards and then ATMs and better accounting machines, and you have, like, retail brokerages like E-Trade and Charles Schwab. Then you have, like, Venmo and all...
Every 10 years, like, financial technology just improves, and crypto's not this, like, super weird thing. It's just an improvement upon tech- Yeah... financial technology.
But, but as far as building a media brand for this space-Yeah, the way I see it is you're standing in some ways between the old world and the new world, right? So, like, you wanna be able to appeal- Right. Right...
to both sides, so to speak, and one side is very institutional.
They're very used to CNBC and that sort of thing, but the other side, and I joke with the cat avatar, but their, the, the needs of that kind of audience and their preferences and their biases are somewhat different.
So you're trying to have one foot in, in both these worlds? Yeah, you're exactly right. Media has done themselves a disservice because they're hyper skeptical of crypto. That's just like- Yeah...
mainstream media are hyper skeptical of crypto, and therefore they don't cover it very well at all. And so the coverage is, like, a solid two out of 10.
And so that leaves a massive white space for, uh, crypto media companies to come in. And, like, there are other great crypto media companies, too, right? Like Blockworks is not the other only one.
There are other great ones that we love, and I know all their founders, and they're good friends of mine, and every day I'm like, "Why isn't The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal taking this seriously?"
Like, that is mind-blowing to me. This is a $2 trillion industry, and that leaves a massive white space for us.
So getting into your question about, like, bridging the gap, if you look at our website, it, you know, doesn't come as much of a surprise of, like, who we took inspiration from.
It looks like a Bloomberg meets Wall Street Journal- Yeah...
with some, like, maybe cool crypto images on it, but the feel is like Bloomberg, and that's because we have 120 people from JPMorgan that sub- subscribed to our newsletter last month.
Those JPMorgan people need something that looks and feels like- Right... something they understand so that when we're putting this crazy content in there, they're like, "Ah, but okay. The, the wrapper is clean.
I like the wrapper around this crazy content." Yeah. But so you, you want to reach the people at JPMorgan, right? Sometimes there's different needs for different sides of the audience, right?
So the sort of true believer, the people who are super deep in the speeds and feeds aspect, to use the early sort of tech journalism term, they're, like, on the crypto side, but you're trying to appeal to the people who need to know crypto in order to apply it to their particular context within an institution.
Yeah. That's exactly right.
I would say you're catching us at a really interesting time, which is Blockworks, I would draw a line in the sand from Blockworks, like, 1.0 and Blockworks 2.0, and that is, like, where we're at exactly right now, moving into what I'd call, like, Blockworks 2.0, which is the last three years
were the entire goal was to build the best institutional media brand in crypto, and I think I can solidly say that we've done that. I think that we've built the most institutionally focused conferences.
We have the largest institutionally focused newsletter. The, the website, like, uh, the webinars, everything that we do is very, every single...
If you are on Wall Street or in capital markets allocating to crypto, you read Blockworks or listen to our podcast in, in some way or another.
Now we are expanding the scope of the business, which is, I would say that was a very B2B business.
We're now venturing into the prosumer side of things as well, and there's a really specific reason for this, which is if you think about for the last, like, 50 years, right, who's, who's a big investor?
It's, like, the money managers, right? It's the- Yeah... family offices. It's the high net worth individuals. It's the hedge fund managers. It's the private equity folks. It's VCs.
In crypto, that looks different because the movement was kind of built from the, from retail up. Like, institutions get, didn't get into this stuff until pretty late.
So we had, like, the retail folks had, like, 10 years to front run the opportunity. So, like, there are a lot of people who are 23 years old and have $100 million allocated to this stuff. Don't tell me this, Jason.
Don't tell me this. [laughs] Okay, well [laughs] then I won't tell you it. [laughs] But it's true, and I know it because we know the people, and they read our stuff. Jesus.
And there are more than you would like to admit, and you're living with all them in br- in, uh, Miami, Brian. Uh, so you're stuck with them until you- Oh, my God... come back to New York. But that- That's a movie...
is a new sort of investor that has never, uh, the new sort of investor that's never existed, so.
And by, and by the way, Paradigm, the best, one of the, one of the top five VCs in all of crypto, they just hired a new research analyst yester- uh, earlier this week. I'm reading his bio.
The last line of his bio says in his free time he also attends high school in California, right? So these, that's one, that's one of the things- Yeah... that crypto's broken down is, like, these age barriers, right?
Yeah, yeah. So I, I, I, I wanna, like, correct the record. The, to the young whales out there, 'cause I know you're all loyal listeners, I d- I have nothing against you. [laughs] Get, get what's yours.
Secure the bag, et cetera. There's probably some acronym. I don't know. I, I fully support you. [laughs] Um,
but tell me about that because, like, I think that's an interesting dynamic because, like, your event, like, you have an event coming up down here, um, a little north of here. I think it's in Palm Beach, right? Um,
but it's massive. It's not... Like, I think about financial, uh, conferences. I don't think of 5, 6,000 people. Yeah. So we're hosting an event called Permissionless.
It's May 17th through 19th, and we thought there would be 5,000 people.
It's just th- what, what doesn't exist right now is just an industry conference to bring together everyone on all these crazy people on crypto Twitter who, you know, maybe have, have built some wealth over the last couple years.
There's no one place for them to go hang out together. Um, and that's what we're building, right? So it's a three-day event.
You've got everything from, like, the biggest panelists and speakers in the world, like the Chris Dixons who leads crypto at a- Andreessen Horowitz, and, like- Yeah...
these really, really large folks speaking, and the biggest companies are spons- like, Coinbase is the presenting partner. But we're also doing funky things, right? We've got a big NFT gallery.
Um, I think, uh, I actually I can't say the DJ, but we've got some really big DJs who are gonna come out and play to, like, 5,000 people. We're putting on a concert, so that's like, feels like a festival. Yeah.
We've got art galleries that we're partnering with. We're launching our own NFTs, right? So we've got all these funky things going on. Uh, so let's just say there's gonna be 5,000 people.
There'll probably be more than that. Like, these are all investors in crypto, or like... 'Cause I think crypto is interesting 'cause it's like, it touches so many different parts.
A lot of focus is on finance because financialization is, is at the heart of it, but there is a cultural element to this which is, makes it interesting to me at least.
The idea of what an investor is is changing.So I think this is a big pushback that we get when we kind of explain this at Blockworks, which is like, but they're all, but they're all investors, right?
That's a very common thing to say. I think that's because of how, like, quote unquote Web2 is different than Web3. Web2, what it did is it brought information online, and it made it so that information flowed freely.
Like, you could now send a text message or a video or an image, and you'd get that instantaneously. And therefore, you were... Everyone became users, right? You, like- Yeah...
1,000x'd the amount of users who consume content and things like that, but you were a consumer and a user.
Now, because of this, uh, because of what, like, just how crypto works and how blockchain works, where you need a token for everything, the, a user and an investor are the same thing now, right?
Like, I might be an art collector, and in the past, I'm just an art collector, but now I own the NFT, and let's say I have $20,000 worth of NFTs, but I've collected them. But am I an investor as well? Like, I think so.
I think every- I think we should categorize everyone as investors because you're empowering people, especially young people, to take control of their financial decisions, and that's what we would like to happen over the next couple of years.
Like, the current system is clearly broken. Um, and so we... I think crypto is one of the many ways that you can empower young people to think more like investors, which is good. I, we think that's good. Yeah.
And I think it's, again, it's like one of those everyone's strengths becomes their weaknesses, but that's the strength, I think, of crypto. But then it's used against it because people say it's all speculation.
Oh, it's definitely the weakness as well. Yeah. Get rich quick. Yeah. Um, and people are gonna lose. What is it?
There's, like, a meme that, like, people are gonna have to go back and work at McDonald's or something like that. I don't know. There's just a whole different way of communicating that's like...
It's more Reddit than anything else, it seems to me, like, culturally, and I think that, that can be, like, a really difficult, um, way in. But let's talk about the business. So you're gonna do $20 million this year?
More? What are you gonna do? Uh, I think, I mean, yeah, you're probably pulling that from the Digiday article. We, um- I saw that from, yeah, from Kaylee Barber. Yeah.
Shout out to you, Kaylee, 'cause I would have, I would have been bugging you, Kaylee, to get the number out of Jason. [laughs] She was, uh, she was pulling it out of me.
Um, yeah, I, we, I think we thought we would do over 20 million this year. It's looking like it'll be maybe a decent chunk higher, but um, you know, it's, it's a very cyclical market, so it's, it's always tough to say.
Yeah. Okay. And is that mostly events? Like, how are you looking at the revenue- Yeah... sort of split? So that was, that was one... So we used to, our revenue, like, going into 2020 wa- ca- was 80% events.
We're like, "This is awesome. We make so much money from these things." And then COVID hit, and we're like, "Oh, shit, we just lost 80% of our revenue."
And so [laughs] one of the big focuses of '20, the second half of 2020, like the post or mid-COVID, whatever you wanna call it, and then 2021, was diversifying our revenue stream.
So we're pretty diversified across, like, four different avenues, I'd say. Um, one is conferences. Definitely generate a decent chunk of change from those. The second is podcasts.
Definitely generate a decent chunk of change from those. Then you've got, uh, the newsletter, and then you've got digital.
So digital would be, like, branded content, um, investor guides, uh- The webinars, the regular sort of- We have a news ticker-... blockchain tackling... on the website. Okay. The ticker. Yeah. Webinar. Exactly, exactly.
And so that's the fourth bucket. There will be a subscription play later this year, but that, but right now it's entirely advertising and sponsorship based. Wow. That's ama- well, and tickets too for- Yeah...
for the events, right? Tickets too, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, that's, like, amazing because, like, I... So how do you think about this?
Because, like, you know, I, I like go to, e- going down, like, the list of your, like, sponsors and stuff like this, like, uh, some of them are new to me, but, like, I'll Google them, and then it'll, I'll be like, "Oh, just, they just closed a Series E for $415 million at like a $8 billion valuation."
I'm like, "Yeah, not too big." I know the numbers are just, like, honestly, they're just, like, stratospheric.
Like, people could be like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, their, their, you know, their Series A is like 88 billion." I'd be like, "Okay, sure."
It reminds me of, like, how people used to come on my old podcast and, and talk about their, like, uh, you know, Facebook video views of, like, 6 trillion. I'd be like, "Okay, that's, that sounds reasonable."
Um, but how much, I mean, you obviously- Yeah... are surfing a wave. It's good to be in a, in a market that, like, has, has this much money coming into it. So is this like a land grab?
Because, like, I s- I, I see that there's, there's a lot of money going around in, like, for instance, it's, uh, a much lower level, but around sports betting, [laughs] there might be a parallel here, and those are gonna, those deals are gonna end because it's a land grab.
Yeah. So here's what's happening in crypto is you've got all [laughs]... Like, the amount of venture capital money that's flowed into crypto is just bonkers. There's like 32 billion.
I'm gonna botch these numbers, so I won't try to give them out, but like we- It could be 320 billion, Jason. One of the reasons- I'm gonna be like, "Okay."
[laughs] You should see the $100 billion round that we're about to raise. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Why not? You just wait for that, Brian.
No, one of the reasons that, uh, that Blockworks is positioned so well is that we've known a lot of these companies [laughs] since day one.
So, like, we were in the room when, like, BlockFi was raising, like, their seed round, and they had, like, three employees, right? We were... I remember when, like, Copper raised...
I remember when Fireblocks raised, like, 2 million bucks. Well, Fireblocks just raised 500 million bucks. And so a lot of our...
We've been, like, buddy-buddy and know all the founders and the CMOs at these companies since they had, like, literally four employees and, like, two co-founders trying to scrap together this thing, and they had just raised a million bucks.
And now all of these companies are unicorns, and they're raising 100 million to 500 million. Unicorns. And when you raise that much money- They're like decacorns... you basically... [laughs] Decacorns, baby. Yeah.
Unicorn is so 2014. Yeah. That was, like, a big deal. That was like- One of the things that-... the Web 2- Like, you, you like raised-... Web 2.0 showed. I know. I know. I feel like TechCrunch.
So, um, if you, uh, [laughs] if you, um, go raise, if you're building a software company and you go raise a billion dollars, I mean, there's not, there's not really much you'd make. What are you gonna do with that?
There's only two things. You go take half of that, and you spend it on product. You hire engineers and designers and front end and back end and full stack and all that fun stuff. Spend a bunch of money there.
And then you go acquire users and customers, and that's marketing and sales.And Blockworks, we, we know, I mean, we've, we've worked with hundreds of companies in the industry, like the Coinbases, and Geminis, and Blockfis, and Aaves, and Uniswaps.
They're all big clients and customers of ours. And so they raise a round, and they come to us, and they're like, "Hey, we've got $3 million to spend. How, how should we allocate that?"
And, um, and some, some of it goes to Blockworks, and we'll, we'll just guide people, right? Yeah. It's always great to attach y- yourself to a, a market that's moving like that. I'm very jealous.
[laughs] So I, I wanna talk just l- d- to end on the, the Web3 stuff, right? 'Cause a lot of this stuff is in the f- the financial world, and DeFi, the decentralized finance, and that's amazing, and it's massive, right?
But I think a lot of people are looking at this as the next technological paradigm shift, I think. Let's leave the Metaverse stuff to aside for a minute. How do you explain Web3? 'Cause, uh, nobody seems...
It's like the vibe shift. N- people agree that it's happening, but they can't actually describe what it is. I think it's a lot more concrete than the vibe shift.
I think that the easy explanation for Web3 is basically just an improvement upon financial technology. That's the literally the only thing that's happening here.
And you're just, um, you're basically taking a bunch of things that are analog and archaic.
So, so again, I, I mentioned this earlier, but, like, the thing that the internet did that was so fricking cool is it brought all this stuff online.
It brought information online, and it made it so information could flow freely from person to person instantaneously. Pictures, videos, um, text, all, all that kind of stuff flowed freely.
The only thing it didn't change is how monetary value moved on the internet. So what's wild is, like, you send a text to your friend in London, they're gonna get it in one second.
I send a wire to my friend in London, it takes three days. Like, that just, that just doesn't make sense. Like, the banking system still uses SWIFT and, and A- ACH, which was built in 1972. So all...
So, like, crypto is just an improvement upon financial technology, and so when you look at DeFi, like, everyone's like, "Oh, aren't, isn't DeFi just recreating the tr- traditional financial markets?
Like, aren't we just basically building exchanges and stuff here?" Yeah, absolutely, and that's amazing. Yeah. 'Cause I hate my bank account, and I've never had a good experience with my bank account.
And so why are you upset that we're building better financial technologies here? And then with artists, it's like NFTs and all this stuff, why you... Why... I have a bunch of friends who are artists.
They've made more money with NFTs in the past year than they ever have in their life. Why, why are you mad that these artists are doing really, really well right now? So that's all that's happening. Yeah.
Okay, so there's a lot of Web3 profits, and it has become a meme, Web3 changes all of this, you know? Isn't it a meme?
And it's because there's a lot of people who are making promises that maybe they're, like, standing at an intersection in Miami holding up a sign, like, [laughs] the Web 2.0 world is ending, and that we're gonna have th- these new structures.
And NFTs, I think, were the first sort of tangible example of this promise of a lot of people were using could and should when it comes to Web3 technologies, an entirely new architecture of ownership for the digital economy.
Are you skeptical of that? Or... 'Cause there's a lot of promises that are being made that, at least that I read. I am not skeptical at all, no. I just think that people overestimate how quickly things happen.
So in, like, ni- in, uh, in 2017, I remember everyone's like, "The institutions are coming. The institutions are coming." And everyone's like... And then in '20... That was in 2017.
And then 2018, like, JP Morgan would say something and you're like, "See? The institutions are here." Well, no, it took... They- they're not, so they're still not here. It's five years later, right?
But they're coming, slowly but surely. And like Paul Tudor Jones, there- there's, like, these little moments that change everything in history, right?
And so, like, the moment for hedge funds getting into crypto was, I think it was June or July of 2020, when Paul Tudor Jones, one of the most famous hedge fund managers of all time, called Bitcoin the fastest horse in the race.
And what that did is it took away the career risk of hedge fund managers allocating to crypto. And now it's like, "See? Paul Tudor Jones did it." Yeah. Okay. These, there are these little moments in time, right?
A- And so that just continues happening. So when I see... But, like, when I see things like DAOs and Metaverse stuff, it's a w- it's a wild... Like, Metaverse stuff is wildly bubbly right now.
Like, it's wa- but bubbles are good. But I think that's one of the things that I really disagree with people on. Bubbles bring capital and talent, and, like, that's how innovative technologies get built.
Like, if you look at, um, like, if you look at the rail- like, railroads.
Railroads went through a massive mania from 1840 to 18, like, 70, and all these bubbles, right, of building railroads to transcontinental railroads. And, like, the railroad index went from, like,
200 to 2,000 in, like, three years, and then it crashed all the way down. Railroad... But, but then, but obviously railroads got built, right?
But bubbles just bring talent and capital, and that's what cryp- that's what crypto keeps doing. Yeah. But as far as Web3 and media goes, you're a Web 2.0- Yeah... company in some ways, right?
I mean, as far as I can tell, you're using a, a, you're an LLC probably, and I don't think that most of your revenue is coming in through crypto, and you don't have a DAO.
Maybe you're gonna be doing some NFTs and stuff like this. But explain, is it just too early? 'Cause if the publications covering crypto are themselves not, quote-unquote, "crypto native," then it's clearly too early.
That's the way I'm gauging it. Yeah. It's j- it's too early. You're exactly right.
And, like, the way that we think about it is, um, this is gonna sound really obnoxious comparing Blockworks to Netflix here, but, like, Reed Hastings in the late 1990s- Although their stock's down 40%, so you might wanna go somewhere else.
[laughs] Yeah, shit, don't compare it to them. Yeah. But Reed Hastings knew that Netflix would eventually go online and create what we now know of as Netflix, but back then it was just...
You remember, like, you'd used to mail these DVDs in, uh, into Netflix, and they'd send it back to you, and stuff like that. But every year-His whole team would be like, "Is now the year? Is this the year?"
And he'd be like, "No, broadband's not good enough, guys. It, we still- Yeah... it's too slow. It's too slow." And then one year he said, "Boom. Now is the, this is the year, and let's do it."
And that changed everything for Netflix. And one day we will do that at Blockworks. Like, we, there will one day be a Blockworks DAO. Okay.
We will eventually turn a lot of our stuff into NFTs, whether that's content or podcast episodes or NFTs for subscription instead of subscriptions one day, but the tooling is just not there yet.
So like, we're using Riverside. Riverside didn't exist until last year. Podcast tooling's getting better, too. It's like sometimes things make sense, but the tooling just isn't good enough. Right.
But I strongly, strongly believe in, in what, where all this stuff is going. Yeah.
Just to wrap it up, because I'm, I'm thinking about writing about it, like, later, I guess, when this comes out in the week, is inevitabilities.
It was inevitable that you were going to be streaming video o- o- over broadband. Like, it was inevitable. I remember, like, I actually sat out. Right. This is one I got right.
I sat out getting a DVD player because I was like, "This is clearly a bridge technology," and then they dropped to like $25, and I'm like- [laughs]...
"I'm still holding out," because it was inevitable, and just the question is at what time. We were almost arguing about timeframes. I, I don't know why people get, like, so upset about it.
It's almost like the mask stuff. It's just the time. It's like, uh, do, do, do they end now, or do they end in, like, a few weeks? It's just like, calm down. Yeah. I think you're right.
But I think what people get wrong is thinking that crypto is gonna, like, change all these things. It's not crypto. Crypto's just a tool for all this stuff. So like Jared Dicker- Yeah... gotta love the guy.
He's been pumping, like, media, crypto, the convergence of, for so long. The reason Jared is both right and wrong on some of this stuff, like, he... If you listen to Jared's stuff, he's not saying this, crypto does this.
He says, "Look at the headwinds," right? So when he talks about, like, DAOs, for example, it's not the crypto technology's gonna change all this stuff, and, like, DAOs are gonna change everything. It's media...
His thesis is that media companies are talent companies, and that Web 2, like, the structure right now is not set up to maximize and make that, ma- maximize all the value from that.
And so, like, his thesis is media companies are talent companies. Secondary thesis is there should be a new media structure that is owned by creators, operators, and consumers.
Well, I'm, I don't know if you've ever issued equity. It's an absolute pain in the ass. It's an absolute nightmare. And, like, it's, it's, it's so fricking hard. It's, it's horrible. It's just a horrible process.
DAOs are not this massive paradigm shift and all this stuff like people think they are. DAOs are just a, a corporate structure for a world where it's fully remote and fully digital. Yeah.
And fully, like, inter- like, fully global. That's all that a DAO is. It's like an LLC but built for a world where it's remote and global and digital. And so- With, with some wrinkles. I don't know.
DAO- With some, with some wrinkles as there should- I don't know. When I... Of the idea of DAOs, which are decen- for those who don't know, decentralized autonomous organizations. But, like, that's what people get wrong.
Like- I don't know. It's based on smart contracts and stuff. It seems to me like a homeowner's association with, like, a nudist colony and a little bit of Lord of the Flies. Why not? [laughs] Web3 fixes this.
What's, what's, what's wrong? All right. I bet I agree with you more than you think.
So Brian, this has been awesome, and you are an, an excellent interviewer, and I've been listening to your podcast for a while, and the newsletter is a must subscribe too. Awesome. So this is, this is awesome. Cool.
I appreciate you bringing me on. Thank you so much, Jason, and thank you all for listening. Uh, we will be back next week with a new episode. [outro music]