HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow

You might not expect a deep friendship to bloom from an argument about favorite authors...in a Miami bar...during spring break. Yet that’s exactly how Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow’s long journey to becoming business partners began... Fast forward more than a decade, and Greg and Wylie are now co-founders of Yuga Labs—the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. Since the collection was unveiled in spring 2021, the value of each digital ape has skyrocketed, with celebrities like Paris Hilton, Snoop Dog and Madonna getting in on the action. Within a year of its founding, Yuga Labs received a whopping $4 billion valuation, making it one of the fastest companies ever to achieve unicorn status. This week on How I Built This Lab, Greg and Wylie recount their whirlwind success story in one of their first-ever public interviews. We hear how a shared love of storytelling and online gaming helped spawn the idea for the bored apes; plus, Greg and Wylie tell Guy about the next big endeavor for Yuga Labs: expanding into the metaverse. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hey, so before we get to this brand new episode of How I Built This Lab, I wanted to make sure that you all knew about the How I Built This shop, where you can find t-shirts, hats, mugs, tons of other merch for you or any trailblazing entrepreneur, builder, innovator, or just fan of the show. We created a collection of How I Built This apparel, accessories, drinkware, and more just for you. It's currently available at wonderyshop.com, so go check it out right now. Okay, on to the show.

• 5:52Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. In February of 2021, four friends decided to start an NFT project. One night, one of the friends, a guy named Greg Solano, registered an LLC on LegalZoom and called it Yuga Labs. That was the company, a few documents in a file folder. Two months later, the friends launched their project. It was called Bored Ape Yacht Club, or B A Y C for short. On April 23rd, 2021, B A Y C went live. That day, 10,000 digital profile pictures of apes

• 6:33Guy Raz?

  wearing different clothing and different facial expressions went up for sale, and the cost for each ape was 0.08 Ethereum, or roughly $220 a pop at the time.

• 6:47Guy Raz?

  About a year later, in March of 2022, Yuga Labs attracted $450 million from investors at a valuation of $4 billion. So how did a group of friends who made digital profile pictures of cartoon apes go from a company worth nothing to one valued at over $4 billion in a year? Well, that's what we're going to find out today on the show. Greg Solano and Wiley Aronow created Bored Ape Yacht Club, and you'll hear from them in a moment. These guys rarely give interviews, not because they're too cool to do it. They're just super private and aren't really seeking attention.

• 7:31Guy Raz?

  Neither Greg nor Wiley are technical. In fact, they both have backgrounds in literature. It's how they first bonded. But they were also steeped in the culture around cryptocurrency and NFTs, non-fungible tokens. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time explaining NFTs because even though I own a few, I don't fully understand them myself. But basically, in the context of this interview, an NFT is a unique, verifiable digital object, a piece of art, or music, or a domain name, or a ticket that gives you access to an event, something whose ownership can be verified on the digital ledger known as the blockchain. And whatever you might think of people spending

• 8:15Guy Raz?

  the crypto equivalent of thousands or even millions of dollars on NFTs, the fact of the matter is, they do. In 2021, our fellow human beings spent over $22 billion on these digital products. And even with a recent market correction, the cheapest you can buy a Bored Ape avatar on the secondary market right now is around 85 Ethereum, or over $130,000 at the time of this recording.

• 8:48Guy Raz?

  And Wiley and Greg have big ambitions for Yuga Labs. With the $450 million they raised, the founders have plans to build a massive virtual world, a metaverse where anyone can hang out and create things and even buy and sell digital assets. Wiley and Greg are with me now, and I guess the two of you met at a bar on spring break in Miami, is that right?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we hit it off pretty much right away. I mean, it was a little bit like, the very first conversation we ever had was about David Foster Wallace. I had just read Infinite Jest and I was like, super obsessed, which is a bit of a stereotype, I think, for a guy at that age. And I was like, sort of proselytizing this at the bar. I was like, oh, you know, everyone needs to go read Infinite Jest. There's this guy, David Foster Wallace, he's incredible. And Greg immediately was like, oh, I hate that guy.

• 9:40Guy Raz?

  Oh, really? Greg, so you've been studying literature, right, Greg?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I was studying comparative literature, I was doing a minor in creative writing, you know. We both had designs of being writers and spent all of our, like, weekends and free time, like, writing short stories and poems and stuff. So we gravitated, fighting about, you know, immediately talking about books. And I was, you know, if you're in creative writing classes in the, you know, 2008, 2009, everybody's talking about David Foster Wallace. And I took that as like, an impetus to run in the opposite direction, away from kind of what felt like the flavor of the moment. And Wiley took that as a personal attack.

• 10:21Guy Raz?

  All right. And do you stay in touch after that, after that first meeting?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  We did, yeah. We stayed in touch through text messages and group chats, through our friends in Miami, and our friendship kind of blossomed from there. We had more in common, we were both obsessed with MMORPGs or massive multiplayer online role-playing games. We ended up playing World of Warcraft together for a while.

• 10:43Guy Raz?

  And Wiley, what did you do after you graduated from college?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I actually didn't graduate.

• 10:47Guy Raz?

  You didn't?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  No, I got sick, dropped out. And then honestly, I spent like the next 10 years really ill. I had a chronic illness. And I was just, you know, traveling all around the country, going to different doctors, basically just like bankrupting my family trying to heal my illness. I mean, I was, you know, nearly bed bound for many of those years.

• 11:06Guy Raz?

  Ultimately, it was resolved. I mean, do you still have health issues?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still do, but I'm, you know, I'd say 80% better and good enough to work like hell anyway, so.

• 11:16Guy Raz?

  All right, Craig, you graduate, uh, what, in 2009 or 10 from college?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  2011, yeah, I graduated from NYU in 2011 and then I, I immediately jumped over to a, a master's in fine arts and creative writing at the University of Virginia.

• 11:31Guy Raz?

  And so what did you think you wanted to do?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  You know, I, I found out about this crazy world where you could get an MFA in writing and basically get paid a stipend to sit around all day and, and read books and, and try your hand at writing and go to workshops and that kind of stuff. And that sounded like the, the dream thing to do for a couple of years there. Um, but I didn't really, you know, there's not a whole lot of money in poetry. I was like, you know.

• 11:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Um, I got a job out in California at a small publishing house and I worked for years as a editorial assistant all the way up, you know, to a senior editor. And so I was working on, uh, licensed books. So basically anything with certain video game studios or movie studios where the people kind of telling the stories behind games, films, other things, you know, really kind of lush illustrated coffee table books.

• 12:19Guy Raz?

  Okay. And Wiley, you hadn't really worked at all before the two of you guys got together?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  No, really, really not. I like to joke that this was my first job, although of course I had, you know, worked retail jobs and things like that when I was younger. I mean, when we started UGA Labs, I was approximately $40,000 in medical debt mostly.

• 12:36Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And my family was just struggling to support me as they just watched me, you know, get sicker and sicker over a decade.

• 12:42Guy Raz?

  Wow. That must've been incredibly frustrating.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. I mean, you know, the first time, you know, someone gets sick and they go to a doctor and the doctor's like, yeah, I don't know what's wrong with you. It's like the first time for a lot of people that they start to lose faith in the system. And then it just begins this whole process of like, okay, well, find, let's find another doctor and then let's find another. And, you know, it just, you know, I traveled all over the country, six months at a time, going from city to city. Cause, you know, that was the next doctor that was going to fix me or whatever, you know?

• 13:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Well, and Greg, were you following up with Wiley? Were you keeping in touch with him during that time?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a kind of a group chat with some other friends from Miami and people would just kind of be posting memes throughout the day. And occasionally Wiley and I would play like World of Warcraft for stints at a time. And actually, it was in 2017 that I texted him like, hey, I just, you know, I bought a little bit of this thing called Ethereum, you know, Ether, you should do this with me.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  And so it was really around like playing games, kind of beating up literary ideas and talking about books and eventually getting into crypto that our friendship was formed around, yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And that was really like the perfect thing that happened for me because it was like I had all this time on my hands. I had just been sitting around, you know, either meditating or reading books or playing online games and suddenly there was like this whole other world I could dive into. I had like previously traded a little bit, like penny stocks and things like that and gotten into technical analysis. And then here was like a whole world I could dive into that, you know, started to have culture built around it, like on crypto Twitter and things like that. And we just kind of fell into that world.

• 14:19Guy Raz?

  Greg, did you and Wiley see each other much between the time you finished your MFA and the time that you would eventually start the project that we're going to talk about? Did you physically see each other much?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Uh, no, like almost not at all, like four or five times, I almost want to say. I don't, I don't think it would be an exaggeration over like 10 years.

• 14:39Guy Raz?

  So really your relationship was through like playing games together and just kind of text conversations and things like that?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we started talking a lot more on the phone in 2017 when we both got into crypto and, you know, that was like just another tie for us to come together.

• 14:55Guy Raz?

  And how did you get into cryptocurrencies?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  So I first heard about Bitcoin in like 2009 or something like that from somebody who was mining it off of a laptop. And I just thought this is kind of crazy. I don't, I don't get it, you know, not interested basically. And it wasn't until 2017 where I think it was kind of a bull run back then Bitcoin had, had doubled or tripled in value over a period of time. So all of a sudden it was in the news and people were talking about it, thinking about it. And, you know, I bought a little bit of Bitcoin, I bought a little bit of Ethereum, I bought a little bit of Ripple. And what really struck me, though, was Ethereum. It was this, you know, you could, you could kind of read everything you could care to know

• 15:40Speaker 02

  it felt like about Bitcoin on a, on a couple of pieces of paper. But Ethereum felt like this really rich ecosystem, incredibly rich with, with possibility. At the time, I think, much more just possibility than, than actual like utility. But in any case, it felt like this thing that, you know, just really captured your attention and you could just dive into crypto Twitter, spend all day, every day, reading about it and feel like you're only scratching the surface. And it was, it was really exciting. So that's kind of what, what unlocked it for, for me, I think.

• 16:12Guy Raz?

  And Wiley, you were, you were battling this, this health condition and, you know, trying to kind of get through it, but it sounds like you were also dabbling in like some small investments or the stock market. How did you, how did you get into crypto?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and so going back as far as college, I was like, you know, trading penny stocks and things like that. And I was just kind of generally interested in the markets. And then, yeah, when Greg, you know, reached out about cryptocurrency and I was like, you know, he has this great story where he's like, you know, the first time you hear about cryptocurrency, you're like, that's stupid. And the second time you heard about it, it's because like a friend of a friend of a friend made a gazillion dollars and you're like, oh, had I paid attention, when the first time I had heard about it, I would also be a gazillionaire. So kind of a similar story where it's like, I heard about cryptocurrency back in 2015, ignored it, thought it was dumb because I just didn't do my due diligence, didn't read into it. And then by the time Greg reached out to me, I'd seen, you know, the markets were suddenly exciting.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  It was like the bull run was starting in 2017. And yeah, it just seemed like an amazing opportunity and I was able to sort of translate some of the skills that I'd learned from trading when I was younger into crypto. And back then, I think the markets were a little bit easier to trade from like a technical analysis perspective. And so I started really just investing a lot of time, reading about more TA, learning pattern analysis. I just kind of like, kind of fell into that world and I loved crypto Twitter and watching other trades. traders share their charts and their thoughts and their opinions on, you know, what direction the market was heading, new coins coming on the market every day. Back then, it was like, you know, just a really like vibrant and exciting place. And also like ridiculously funny on Twitter, especially, you know, it's because this was

• 17:57Speaker 01

  a lot of young people trading it. So it was just like a lot of memes and a lot of inside baseball jokes. And it just became really fun to be a part of.

• 18:05Guy Raz?

  So the two of you were both part of this kind of text chain of friends, but also independently got into crypto and presumably the two of you started to kind of exchange ideas and thoughts on it.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, which was kind of what we would do, you know, in the wider group, everyone just kind of joke around and post memes. But why don't I develop this relationship of kind of like a, it was almost like a little bit of like a writer's room for us, you know, I'd call him or he'd call me and with an idea for a short story or a potential novel or, or anything. And then we just had this kind of relationship where we could bat around an idea for hours and pick it apart and, and find good nuggets and what the other person was saying. And I think that's really core to our, our DNA as friends and how we've been successful as founders as well.

• 18:52Guy Raz?

  So initially you were not talking about, hey, let's start a business together. It was like, oh, I'm doing this thing and I'm using Coinbase or whatever it was. And I'm buying like bits of crypto.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like, you know, a thousand dollars was I think what I put into the markets in 2017, which was like, you know, half my paycheck. So it was a pretty big deal.

• 19:10Guy Raz?

  This was 2017 when you started, but between that time and the time the two of you decided to start a business, it was really just kind of talking about cryptocurrency. There was no conversation around, hey, let's do something together.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we would have ideas for projects that we'd dream about launching together, start writing something or a literary magazine that we were developing and kind of these like, felt like hobbies that never quite got off the ground. And in 2017, you know, we, we got into crypto together, but you know, we weren't building in this space. And by the time the bottom fell out of the crypto market in say, March of 2018, you know, it just felt like a lot of people. People left the space. There weren't interesting projects being launched. It felt like everything went quiet. You know, it's not even just cryptocurrencies itself, but ways of using crypto and adoption and just people even theorizing and talking about these things. Frankly, even just people on the internet,

• 20:06Speaker 02

  you know, on crypto Twitter, making memes, you know, everybody just kind of left the building, it felt like, for a bit there.

• 20:12Guy Raz?

  All right, so March of 2018, this is going on. And meantime, you were batting around potential ideas. But before we get to this idea that you land on, Craig, why did you think you wanted to work with Wiley? I mean, it's, it's actually amazing because the two of you really only met in person a few times, but there was some connection in this desire to maybe work with him.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  I think we have a very strong kind of yin and yang relationship, is how we like to talk about it. You know, there's a, there's a boldness to Wiley that's incredibly powerful in how he like approaches things and a willingness to keep focused on an idea for a long period of time. I liken it to if you want to get really fit and you got to find the right gym buddy who's going to push you and go as hard as you and not call in, you know, sick and be like, no, I can't go today, or whatever it is, make other plans. And when I had an idea I was extremely passionate about, you know, he was down to, to work through that idea and, and I think vice versa. And where he is kind of a maximalist and wants to pile on more

• 21:19Speaker 02

  complexity and ambition and just more to a project. He's a maximalist in that way. You know, I was a, literally an editor and a poet, and I'm always about simplifying things down to their core and what's the like most viable minimal thing that then other people can take and run with. And I think the process of working together has been really fruitful and meeting somewhere in the middle. And, you know, I rein him back and he pushes me into the pool.

• 21:50Guy Raz?

  Wiley, from your perspective, did you think when you started dabbling in crypto and you and Greg were kind of exchanging ideas, did you think, yeah, I think I might start something with this guy at some point?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  No, I think he mentioned at one point, we had like dreamt of starting a literary journal together or something like that, just because we both love poetry and short stories. But no, beyond that, I hadn't ever imagined that this would be, you know, one of the most important people of my life to some extent. When he reached out, literally, he just texted randomly out of the blue one day, you know, hey, let's make an NFT. I don't think Greg was really prepared for just how much fire in my belly I had. You know, I mean, I, again, I had been very, very ill for 10 years and just sitting around, meditating, reading books, trading online, playing online games. And suddenly, you know,

• 22:48Speaker 01

  this was a friend, someone I trusted artistically, coming to me saying, you know, I have a creative project in mind. Well, we didn't know what the idea was then. We had to come up with that later. But, you know, hey, I want to work on something with you. And it was like, okay, let's go.

• 23:02Guy Raz?

  When did you first get exposure to NFTs?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  So in 2017, you kind of couldn't have been involved in crypto without hearing about a project called CryptoKitties. You know, it was, it felt like it was clogging up the Ethereum network at one point with how many people were out there collecting these digital cats and breeding them and playing with them.

• 23:26Guy Raz?

  Did you think it was nonsense? Or what did you think?

• 23:28Speaker 02

  It was interesting to me in that like you could actually do something like here was a token, this something that's living on the blockchain. That's not just like a quote unquote store of value. This isn't meant to transact with. This isn't money. It's, you know, a digital cat. But what was strange at that time was I couldn't understand the end goal there. Like you could just keep breeding them and breeding them. There's no scarcity. It was difficult to understand like what cat could you really want? It felt like a game where the stakes weren't clear.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the model just felt a little dilutive. It didn't feel like a true collectible. My first NFT was a Crypto Kitty, actually, and I bought a couple of them. I thought, oh, these are so cool. But like ultimately, the game wasn't that fleshed out. The rarity didn't make a lot of sense. I mean, it's extremely innovative what they did. And it was, you know, they were basically pioneers, along with Matt and John over at Larva Labs who created CryptoPunks. But yeah, it didn't feel like it didn't capture my attention beyond a week or something.

• 24:30Guy Raz?

  Right. And it was, I mean, at the time, it was like digital art you could buy and you would. The concept was essentially what it is today.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  It was a bit different in our opinion. Number one, the on-ramp to buying a Crypto Kitty, understanding what one was and how to use it was frankly, much more difficult than it is today, I think. And the real precursor to what we've done and that we've built on was a project called CryptoPunks that came out a bit later.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  That was a collection of 10,000 pixelated punks. And it's like a profile picture. Some have 3D glasses. Some are like smoking cigarettes or other things. It just felt like this really strange, cool project. And there was only 10,000 of them. You weren't going to breed them and make more. It's just you could have one of the 10,000 or not.

• 25:24Guy Raz?

  So both of you are intrigued by these Crypto Kitties and the CryptoPunks projects. And both of you started to kind of dabble in it, like buy a few of these things?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, my first NFT was the Crypto Kitties. I didn't buy a punk.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  I didn't even buy a Crypto Kitty. I found out about CryptoPunks a little later when I, you know, had kind of stepped away from crypto and foolishly didn't pick one up back then. So like Wiley said, it was really in 2021, in late January, early February, where.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  There was this inflection point where there's these projects being released, or at least one in particular called Hash Masks, that felt like this isn't really a technical project. This doesn't feel like a creative technologist in a lab like put this together in the way that kind of Crypto Kitties or Crypto Punks felt back then. This was just an art project that was using blockchain as a medium and like any medium could open up the space of possibility. So that's when we got all of a sudden way more interested because of our backgrounds as storytellers.

• 26:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious about this project Hash Mask. It was released in early 2021, I guess. And that flipped a switch on for both of you. Tell me about that project. What is Hash Mask? Why was it different from anything before it?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was this project where each one is kind of this painting and each of these characters is wearing a mask. And there was a lot of kind of intrigue to the project, ideas about how you, you know, if you looked at the collection as a whole, kind of mapping up, you know, putting certain masks side by side that the backgrounds would connect and maybe tell you something. It felt kind of cryptic and fascinating. And more than anything, it really captured like, you know, it's not just us that were intrigued by this project. I mean, everybody on crypto Twitter when this was released was talking

• 27:25Speaker 02

  about it. You know, all the biggest accounts were buying them, talking about them, excited about like what this was.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Something that particularly made it exciting was, you know, by the time we had heard about it, it was already unaffordable to us because the project had made like $10 million.

• 27:40Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  You know, imagine that like NFTs, you know, post Crypto Kitties are basically something that no one is taking that seriously. And suddenly you're hearing about a project that just made $10 million overnight, essentially. And we're like, what is this? What is going on? And then the more you look at it, they're like, oh, this is like artful, the thing that we had always wanted to contribute to be a part of this ecosystem in a way that didn't require us to be engineers or super skillful traders or even investors, frankly. It was like we could potentially use our artistic background and come up with something that was in the same vein.

• 28:13Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, more from Wiley Aronow and Greg Solano, co-founders of Yuga Labs and the board A P I O T Club. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 28:29Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste,

• 29:14Guy Raz?

  judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them,

• 29:59Guy Raz?

  puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization. And how to position your business to prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures,

• 30:43Guy Raz?

  get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Football is back, and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right. If you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on?

• 31:45Speaker 04

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 in selling in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepix.com for restrictions and details.

• 32:07Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Greg Solano and Wiley Aronow, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Collection. Okay, so you guys were looking at things like CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, and Hashmasks. What was the spark that had one of you say to the other one, hey, you know, let's do one of these NFT projects?

• 32:31Speaker 02

  I think our relationship came out of being obsessed with MMORPGs where, you know, frankly, the pursuit of digital assets is everything and out of the fascination with cryptocurrency and with the culture that we saw on crypto Twitter and the idea of wanting to make something, but kind of always falling out. Like, you know, we'd work on a literary magazine together, but you know, well, is this actually going to be that big? Is this going to be that special? There's already McSweeney's and Paris Review and these other things. Whereas it felt like this unique moment where we actually know more deeply, perhaps, the crypto space than

• 33:14Speaker 02

  a lot of people with our storytelling backgrounds. And it felt like, you know, maybe this is our moment to make something together that's special and really just contribute finally to this space in a way other than as spectators, frankly.

• 33:26Guy Raz?

  So what happened? Did one of you like say to the other, "Hey, let's start a project"?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so Greg, you know, reached out and said, "Hey, let's make an NFT." I was, I think, within seconds responding back with ideas and we were kind of off to the races. I think we, the first step was kind of looking at what was already being done in NFTs and seeing where we can improve upon the model. At the time, there was kind of like predatory pricing structures to one degree or another. People were using like, quote unquote, bonding curves where the first NFT you bought in the collection would be cheaper than the last NFT in the collection. And that didn't feel like good for creating a community. That was the thing that we saw as missing from the ecosystem was, you know,

• 34:11Speaker 01

  basically, if you bought an NFT in a 10,000 collection, the people who got in later were being dunked on by the people who got on earlier. And it was like, oh, this isn't like a very egalitarian vibe in those discords. And in those days, it just felt like everyone was trying to take advantage of one another. And when we released the Board Ape Yacht Club, We were like, no, you know, we're going to price this $200 an ape. And that way, no one feels like they've gotten advantage over someone else. And we can try and create a club around this, a community.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  So, did you have a vision for what that project was going to be? Did you think it was going to be like hash masks where you would release, I don't know, 5,000 or 10,000 individual images? Tell me about the like workshopping process of trying to figure out what you wanted to do and make.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  We spent a long time batting around different ideas. And frankly, some of the times thinking more along the lines of what do we think people would like? Rather than, you know, what do we think is cool? And what do we think would be fun and strange? I think the first thing that unlocked for us was the idea of, hey, this NFT, this non-fungible token that lives on a blockchain. And anyone in the world can basically audit who owns this token. Like, how do we create a piece of art, a piece of storytelling, essentially, that embraces that aspect of the medium? And to us, that was, well, if, if I can say that this token, one of 10,000,

• 35:42Speaker 02

  can never be confused with any other, then we can have like a part of our website that's gated only to people in this community. This can be kind of a strange little exclusive club. There can be utility associated with this token.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And so our first idea there was, hey, maybe it's a, what's behind this, this wall? Basically, this door that you can only get in with the NFT. Perhaps it's a, like an art board where every 15 minutes, you can put a pixel down on this kind of board, this screen, with the idea being that you essentially have this collaborative art piece that's being created pixel by pixel by 10,000 people in this weird little club on the internet.

• 36:25Guy Raz?

  That if you owned, if you owned one of these images, one of these pieces of art, you had access to this private room where you could, you could collaborate on an art project.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  That's right. And there was like a really highfalutin idea. Like, we imagined the the profile pictures for that being Miro or Mondrian-esque. And it really wasn't our bag at all. But we were like, oh, this is what we think people would like. But what ended up happening was, over the course of sort of ideating that, the NFT market started to die out. Projects weren't selling out anymore. And it suddenly felt like this would be inauthentic. And when we talked with one of my oldest friends in the world, someone named Nicole Muniz, who later became our CEO, incidentally, I remember telling her the idea for this art board, this collaborative art experiment. And she goes, you know, the

• 37:17Speaker 01

  fact that you're imagining this as like, and comparing it to Miro or Mondrian is hilarious because this is the internet and the very first thing someone's going to draw on that board is going to be a penis. And she was absolutely right, by the way. But when she said that, it made us stop in our tracks and start to think about, okay, she's right. This is the internet. The first thing is either going to be an expletive or a penis or something. And we're like, okay, where do people draw penises? And then that's when it sort of dawned on us that this wasn't a fancy collaborative art board. This was a bathroom wall. And from the bathroom wall, we started thinking, okay, well, bathroom

• 38:01Speaker 01

  bar, like maybe the first dive bar that we ever met. And then we started sort of imagining this as a, a club in the Everglades. And then who goes to that club in the Everglades? And, you know, being an ape in crypto was something that had been popular for many years. It was sort of an affectionate term. To ape into a coin, you know, it meant to not really do your due diligence and just go hard, you know, to buy a lot of stuff, throwing caution to the wind. It was, it's an affectionate term within, you know, every trading community out there, I think, everything from Reddit to Twitter. And we started to think about the crypto Twitter personalities that we were particularly fond of on crypto Twitter. And, you know, these were people with a cat profile picture who you could cryptographically verify were worth, you know, sometimes a hundred million

• 38:45Speaker 01

  dollars or something in crypto. And these were people who, you know, weren't screwing off to the south of France. They were, you know, posting on Twitter late at night going, who wants to play League of Legends on board as hell? And we thought that was particularly funny. This is like, you know, a strange cultural moment that people who had made it rich, young, just weren't traditional in any way whatsoever. And we started to think of them as bored apes. So we designed the club and the collection around the idea of, well, you know, let's give it a little bit of a narrative. The year is 2035, and anyone who ape into crypto has made it beyond their wildest dreams. And now they all, what do you want to do? Well, you just want to play League of Legends with your friends late at

• 39:27Speaker 01

  night, or you want to go hang out, maybe at a weird little swamp bar in the Everglades with all your fellow bored apes. And so we started designing and thinking about the exterior of the club, the interior of the club, and then the aesthetics of the apes around this idea that this was a strange, weird, and very punk rock world.

• 39:42Guy Raz?

  And so, but the thing is, both of you guys are like literature guys, like that's your background. And yeah, you had some experience in crypto now that you had dabbled in that space and really got into it and immersed yourself in it. But from what I understand, neither of you are like technical, right? You're not coders, you're not programmers.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  That's correct. Yeah.

• 40:03Guy Raz?

  And isn't that a barrier to entry in starting an NFT project? Don't you have to know how to do some of that?

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So the first thing we did, you know, after I texted Wiley, let's make an NFT, he was all in immediately. And to kind of ensure that this new COVID side project wouldn't just flounder as a side project, the next day I filed a LegalZoom LLC. That was my way of kind of burning the ships. It's like, really, you're going to form an LLC and then give up on this? Like, no.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And we started working with Karem and Zishan, our other two co-founders, who are engineers, to sort of figure out how to make all this work.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so after filing the first LLC paperwork, I essentially got on the phone and called everybody I'd ever known that studied computer science.

• 40:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  You know, it wasn't very much more artful than that. I called Karem and was like, hey, do you know any JavaScript? And he was like, yeah, that's like a huge part of my job. And I was like, great, let's make an NFT like here. Look at what these things are. And like an hour later, he's like, this has nothing to do with JavaScript. Like, where did you even hear that?

• 41:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so then what happened? I mean, because you're still like, I want to do this, but there's a barrier to entry, which is like somebody who knows how to, you know, type this stuff into a computer.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Karem was not crypto native. I think he probably bought crypto a little bit in the past, but certainly not really paid attention to the space in the same way that Wiley and I had. But we were basically like, come on, come, you know, come be part of the team. And he was like, okay, like, sure. I'd also called my, our friend Zishan, who's a, you know, actually studied computer science with Karem. He was a little timid about jumping in too. But I think the idea that they would both have each other on their side of things to kind of lean on and get the technical part of the project done. They were like, okay, if we're all in it together, well, we're in. And so, you know, we added them to the LLC and we were off to the races.

• 41:56Guy Raz?

  And did you need a whole lot of money to make this happen? I mean, were those guys just, this was their side project? Did they also had day jobs? And you had a day job, Greg?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we all had day jobs, except for Wiley. So we were just nights and weekends putting things together. There were certainly parts of it that we needed to hire out for. You know, like even just like neither of them were much good at like websites. For example, they were, you know, more like backend stuff for a lot of what they were doing. And so I think at the end of the day, it was some, somewhere around like $30,000 is what we ended up spending to do this.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  And I had just almost near miraculously started to get better, probably three months before Greg reached out to me. So when I told my mom about this, I was like, you know, hey, I know I'm bankrupting the family from the past 10 years, but I need a little bit more money to start this LLC and to get this artwork done and figure out how we're gonna, you know, host this stuff and everything. And, uh, and she was just so ecstatic for me. I mean, she was so happy because it was like, you know, she had her son back for the first time in 10, 10 years. And she was just like, you know, whatever you need, let's make it work because I want to see you do something with your life.

• 43:08Guy Raz?

  All right. So you start to work on this in, in February of 2021. And the idea was you would put these, these apes up for sale on an NFT marketplace. And if you bought it, you owned this piece of art, but you also had access to the, to this bathroom wall, basically, right? Well, that, that was the initial concept?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Well, we tried to lay the groundwork a little bit firmer than that. And the sense was unlike a lot of other NFT collections where it felt like, you know, the, the project, say, selling out or, or minting out, uh, was kind of the thing in itself. And then, you know, now this was fully in the hands of the community and, and, you know, we'll see what happens, or it's just a collectible. We started to think about like, hey, this is a, this is the Bored Ape Yacht Club. There's these 10,000 apes, but there's also this like kind of hinting towards this lifestyle brand, maybe like, you know, it, it has this weird logo. It has this like brand identity that we wanted to, to empower. And so, and, and the other aspect that we, we baked in here was the idea that if you owned a Bored

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Ape, um, and could prove that on the smart contract level, you had it in your Ethereum wallet, then you also had a, by virtue of the terms, a full license, uh, to the commercial rights to use that ape. Cause that made a lot of sense to us. Cause it was like, this could be your, your identity on the internet. You could use it as your, your Twitter profile pic. You could do whatever you want. And if it's going to be your avatar and quote unquote, the metaverse here, then, you know, you should be able to use it how you wish.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Now, this is really interesting because, you know, we, we put that in because we'd seen, I don't know, a handful of other projects have those terms. Uh, the first time I'd ever seen it done was in hash masks. And we're like, this just makes sense. Let's definitely include this as part of the project. What we didn't realize was that because it was... You know, one of the first projects to do that that took off, how much the community was almost going to instantaneously start using that intellectual property.

• 45:16Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So on April 23rd, you launched this website, Board Ape Yacht Club. How did you even get the word out? Who would have known about it at the time?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  That was the uphill battle. And typically, a collection in those days would either immediately catch fire, it seemed like, and sell out immediately, or would kind of never happen to them. And so we tried to be very clever about ways of drumming up interest. We had a treasure hunt on our website saying, hey, somebody was on an airboat ride in a crypto wallet with one Ethereum, which would have been worth, I don't know, $2,000 or something like that at the time. You know, I'd fallen out, and if you solve these puzzles, you can win this $2,000, basically.

• 45:58Guy Raz?

  But how did you even get people to the website? There's tens, hundreds of millions of websites.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we were just on Twitter, following, tagging anyone we could to get attention. And then what we also did is we thought, you know, wouldn't it be funny to make kind of honorary board apes? So like, you know, ones in the likeness of certain influencers or something like that. You know, like Kobe on crypto Twitter wears his like Bitcoin glasses. What if we put those on a board ape and tweeted it at him and tried to get him to like laugh at it, how ridiculous this was? And so we did a lot of that. We've, you know, for a week there, we were trying to, you know, guerrilla market this thing in any way we could.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  But what's interesting, there wasn't a lot of excitement about board apes during the pre-sale. You could go to the website, you could see the honoraries that we had made. But on the website, you could only see, I don't know, maybe four, eight or so board ape images. The rest of the collection was unrevealed. So in our Discord, in those, like in that first week, we only pre-sold, I don't know, something like 300 to 500 of the NFTs.

• 47:04Guy Raz?

  And how many people were on your Discord server?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Not a lot.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  And most of them were there to try and win the $2,000 Ethereum and had no interest in spending any money on the project.

• 47:14Guy Raz?

  And the price that you were selling them for was 0.08 ETH. At the time, that was roughly $220, I think, right?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  That sounds about right, yeah.

• 47:22Guy Raz?

  And every single one, all 10,000, that was the price. There was no dynamic pricing. That was it. 0.08.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 47:29Guy Raz?

  Okay. And so how do they sell? Because I think for a week or so, very few sold. But then like May 1st, they sold out like the rest of them sold out almost immediately. What happened?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a pretty magical night. What had happened, I think, was the collection revealed and people saw all the apes and they fell in love with the art and people started tweeting about it. And then one influencer led to another. And then over the course of one night, they all sold out.

• 48:02Guy Raz?

  And this is because there were just, there weren't that many projects coming out at that point or because you had been really aggressive about tweeting and tweeting at other people in the space or?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Actually, there were a bunch of collections, there were a bunch of collections coming out around that time and they weren't selling out around then.

• 48:21Guy Raz?

  So what explains how you got the visibility? I get that it's cool and interesting, but sometimes that's not enough. You've got to get people to be aware.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  I think it was actually that number one, it was cheaper than almost everything out there. Number two was a flat price, so it wasn't getting more expensive, which is what was happening to a lot of these collections where like, cool, the first round of NFTs, say 500 or 2000 or one price, but now the next batch is more expensive and nobody wants to pay that. And the other thing was that, you know, there was something that you could do with this. There was the idea that this was kind of a mysterious club and that you could get access to this like bathroom wall, like there was a direct utility around the token that I think kind of was exciting. And I think some of what we were trying to do from a storytelling perspective and

• 49:10Speaker 02

  just frankly, the sheer effort of the website kind of shined through to people that once we got eyeballs on it and all the, on the treasure hunt and what we're, you know, the IP rights and everything else that we could do, it just felt like, hey, maybe these guys are doing it right. Let's take a chance on that.

• 49:25Guy Raz?

  But your sort of thinking was, or you knew, there was a community of people out there who would be interested in this for one of several reasons. Maybe they just, they thought, hey, it could be a good investment. Maybe they just liked the apes and they were like, 220 bucks? Yeah, it's nothing. There were people who liked the idea of having access to this digital bathroom wall. And then there were some people who thought, hey, this is cool. I'm gonna own this IP and I could do whatever I want with it.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I'd say that that sounds about right.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  But what formed quickly was a community. I think that that's something that had been missing from a lot of NFT projects, frankly, before the Board API Club. And I think it was this club nature to it that made people feel welcome. And, you know, when people bought an ape, it was the first time I had ever seen in an NFT Discord where people were excited for them to join the Discord and the rest of the community would celebrate it. Welcome, welcome, you know, you know, let's hang in the club together.

• 50:22Guy Raz?

  What's so interesting is, right, to sell 10,000 of anything, especially when you are not in known quantity, is very hard. I mean, this is the story of every business on How I Built This. It's like, how do you get the first person to buy something? I mean, you're talking about it so casually now, but was any part of you surprised that you sold them so quickly? Or were you pretty sure this is what was gonna happen?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  So to frame it even more, you know, that week I was kind of despondent, almost. Like, you know, I was sure that like, it didn't work because when this, when projects succeeded, they succeeded almost immediately. And if they didn't, that was it. And Wiley was pure fire at wanting to push through and brought me along and we hustled. But I will say, I think the, maybe the part that you're missing there is, a lot of the people who minted these were crypto native, to some extent or another, and were excited about something that maybe felt like it was pushing the space forward, that was doing things right,

• 51:27Speaker 02

  that was offering like, an interesting take on this thing that they'd seen before. If you work hard to try and Build things for the crypto ecosystem, then I think it's a rewarding feedback loop if you're opening up the space of possibility.

• 51:44Guy Raz?

  And by the way, you're selling out 10,000 of these at essentially the value at the time was $220. So you're making money off that, but that wasn't how you were going to make money. Part of how you were going to make money, aside from when they were resold, was if your apes that you held on to increased in value, presumably.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  That's actually not, that wasn't our model. We actually decided to go opposite that. You know, Matt and John, the creators of CryptoPunks, their monetization strategy, if they even thought that far, was around, hey, well, let's hold a bunch of punks ourselves, and if these are worth money later, we'll sell them. Our ethos was how do we make a club that's egalitarian, where you just want one membership, one membership is equal to any other membership. And so to be faithful to the spirit of the club, you know, Wiley and I were like, no, we've only ever owned one ape. We didn't even choose our apes. And frankly, obviously, we're never going to sell them. So it was really about actually

• 52:43Speaker 02

  building the club, treating this like a startup, and if we could make money off of the secondary tradings, because other people are, you know, making money selling their apes, cool, then we take a small piece of that and can keep building as well.

• 52:59Guy Raz?

  So that was your entire revenue model. It was like, we're not going to just keep a bunch of these apes. We're going to sell them all. We'll each get one. And if they, if other people resell them, we'll get a cut every time they're resold, and that's how we'll make money.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. On kind of the eBay of NFTs, say like OpenSea or LooksRare, these marketplaces, you can put on there a creator royalty of typically is anywhere between 2.5% to all the way up to like 10% for some collections. And then anytime one of these things trades, the creator gets a piece of this. The idea being, you know, there's a whole history in the art world of someone creating something, selling it to someone else, and then, you know, Sotheby's or Christie's picks it up and it sells for 100x that, and the original artist maybe doesn't get a piece of that. So we do actually collect a 2.5% royalty on the B Y C collection on OpenSea.

• 53:54Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. All right. So get into the club in May of 2021. It was 220 bucks.

• 54:03Guy Raz?

  And with that ape, you could do whatever you want. It would be like if Marvel said, hey, we've got 10,000 superheroes. And you want to buy one? And you get it, it's yours. You could do whatever you want with it. I could make art out of it and sell it. I could put it on the roof of my car and drive around and sell popsicles in that shape. I can make a cartoon out of it. I can, I can turn it into a movie. I don't have to pay you anything. Once I pay that 220 or that, that point 08 of ETH, it's mine. That's it.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like all the examples you just gave are actually either have happened or are happening right now. That's right.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that was basically the idea here where if we're embracing the technology, if we're properly embracing the medium that we're distributing this stuff on, then that means that we're embracing the fact that anyone can prove that they own this on the smart contract. And so what, you know, how can we attach certain privileges or rights to that permissionlessly? You know, they don't need to come to us with a separate agreement to, to prove that, you know, that the smart contract can be the thing in itself. And I think what we've found is that when you do that, you're really empowering creators and the hive mind and the, the network effects and all of the benefits that you get from that are so much more powerful.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Like you, you get to Disney levels of empathy and belovedness for a brand much sooner when somebody can own a little piece of Mickey Mouse.

• 55:35Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. We'll be right back. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Stay with us.

• 55:45Speaker 05

  Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With a Venture X Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One Venture X Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details.

• 56:25Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guests today are Wiley Aronow and Greg Solano, co-founders of Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club. They first conceived the idea for BAYC in February 2021 and launched the project in April of that year, selling each Bored Ape NFT for .08 ETH, or about the equivalent of $200 at the time. But now, at the time of this recording, Bored Apes are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You essentially have created a club that is so exclusive. Initially, the whole point was to make it cheap, that anybody with a spare $200 worth of ETH could get in.

• 57:10Guy Raz?

  And now, it's not accessible anymore. And I wonder if part of you is conflicted about that in any way.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  I would say, I think, number one, that's part of the inspiration, let's say, behind the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, which was essentially, this is like a lower-tier membership for the club. No one would ever confuse an MAYC for a BAYC. That's like a wild collection. And it's interesting. Like you said, Bored Apes were sold for $220, and frankly, we are not in control whatsoever of the price of these things. The reality is, a lot of what's happened here, we can't really take credit for. What we can kind of take credit for is that we set the circumstances in the right way. We thought hard on how to make things more egalitarian, how to empower creators and that kind of stuff.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  But it's really the kind of growth that's being fueled by the community and what they're creating and what they're doing that's created this incredibly powerful feedback loop. So all we can do is try and create as loving, welcoming, fun, strange, cool of a community as we can and kind of keep our heads down and do that.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  We're also, you know, building out ways to join the Yuga ecosystem in other ways. More broadly speaking, you know, we've just launched OtherSide, our metaverse that we're building, and we're trying to think of other ways to go more broad, but we don't want to, you know, touch the exclusivity and the nature of the club.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if we're focused on just what we have been, which is taking this thing that lives on the blockchain and making it more accessible and more fun, it translated into real world experiences, real world consumer goods that you can touch, there's a lot of opportunity in the world for people to actually own their digital assets and be able to use them. Like, our whole philosophy here is that, like, there's a ton of digital assets in the world in Web 2 that, you know, we're kind of just renting. And so as long as, you know, the value proposition of truly owning your assets is already there, and if we support that and innovate across that, everything else is going to figure itself out.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  And the other thing we're trying to figure out on the Yuga side is, you know, we're hyper-focused now on how to onboard the next million people into crypto. Something that we like talk about, Greg and I at least, all the time, is sort of like, how do we get this to pass the mom test to one extent? And that started because Greg's mom couldn't, and neither could my mom, for instance, have bought a Bored Ape a year and a half ago. We would have had to sit down and explain to them. It's not that they're, you know, stupid people, they're both very intelligent people. It's just that you had to be crypto-native in order to do it. And so we're thinking, okay, we need to get crypto to pass the mom test to a large degree, so that our own mothers can, you know, join the ecosystem and start having fun with everybody else. And I think by virtue of that, we think we can onboard,

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  you know, the next million, two million, five million people into crypto.

• 1:00:05Guy Raz?

  What is it about Bored Ape that makes it more appealing? I mean, I'm just curious in your view, like, just other projects where it's profiles of, I don't know, cats or robots or whatever, that just don't do as well, don't sell as much. What explains it in your view? Why this one?

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, hidden in your, in your question is, I think, the answer, which is just the community in itself. Like, that's what propels it forward. And that's what like the, the, the power and the net, network effects and the, you know, the belovedness of the brand comes from. It's like, it's that it was in actuality, a grassroots thing that sprung up magically on one day in May of last year, and has kept building on that. And so somebody trying to mimic that, you know, uh, copy it, or whatever it is, will never have kind of that, you know, immaculate conception of that moment.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Also, I just gotta say, I, I honestly believe that we're not going to be the last web three company to do this well.

• 1:01:04Guy Raz?

  No, no.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  There's going to be a lot more web three companies down the road that make it onto your show. This is, you know, some, something important is happening here.

• 1:01:12Guy Raz?

  I, I, I think so too. You're the first one. As you, as you know, How I Built This is a show about how companies were built. And this is very different because you are, you are architecting in, in incredible detail, a virtual club, a virtual space, like, and, and you're kind of workshopping this idea. The other thing about How I Built This that everyone who listens to the show knows is that in every case, the founders built it physically in the same space. I mean, was this all happening just like through the phone and email and like texts and stuff? Or, or did you at this point, Wiley, say, you know, I'll, I'll go out to Virginia or wherever, like, and, and let's start working in a room together?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Greg, you can speak more to this, but, you know, this was born during COVID. I mean, you know, we were basically still on lockdown. And, you know, I was in Asheville, North Carolina, Greg was in Virginia. Yeah, this was all by phone, by text, by Zoom.

• 1:02:09Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've spent, you know, four, six hours on the phone together almost every day since this whole thing started, you know, rarely in the same place.

• 1:02:18Guy Raz?

  So you brought in some outside funding from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the biggest, most famous venture firms in the world.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Well, I gotta back up there, Guy, because what had happened was we,

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  through a mutual connection, a guy named Beeple, who's a really celebrated NFT artist, he's incredible.

• 1:02:38Guy Raz?

  One of his pains was $69 million.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  That's right. And we didn't know him at the time, of course, but we followed each other on Twitter. And he reached out to us, and Greg, you tell this story so perfectly.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he's incredibly energetic and likes to text in all caps and all that. And so he just was like, hey, what's your phone number? What's your name? At this point, you know, it was just like an anonymous, like, Boredi Biakla Twitter that he was even DMing. And I was like, oh, OK, I guess I'll tell him. Like, here's my number. And then he connected us over text with a guy named Guy O'Seary, who he introduces as, in all caps, Israel's Sexiest Man Alive, and the manager to Red Hot Chili Peppers and U2 and Madonna.

• 1:03:23Guy Raz?

  So he wants to be, work with you in some capacity? And that's what leads to you bringing in outside investors?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Well, so, yeah, I think Guy saw us as a band. And to some extent, that's true, the four of us, Krems, Ishan, Greg and I, we did feel like a band, you know, because we were not tech bros. We weren't crypto bros. We didn't come from business. We were just kind of creatives and weirdos. And we had sort of a band-like energy in the way we sort of interacted with one another, I think. And he saw that and he thought, maybe we could use a manager. And then ultimately, what we realized was that Guy was so insightful, strategic, and would just hang around with an idea and box it out with me and Greg and Krems, Ishan, for hours and hours every night. They realized, you know, let's just make this guy a partner. Let's get him in the building and let's build this together. And that's what we ended up doing. And Guy took the lead with Nicole, our CEO, on the raise

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  and just did an incredible job, connected us with amazing, amazing people like Andreessen Horowitz, who have just been invaluable. I mean, at the time, we were so wildly profitable that we didn't really need to raise. But we started thinking, OK, well, there's a couple of reasons to do this. One, these people As we began got to know them, these investors are incredible strategists and they are incredible resources. So we don't like to take an idea and build it in isolation. We like to take an idea and then go around. You know, I learned this from my dad when I was growing up, but you know, when he had an idea, he would just go around to everybody. Didn't matter if you were a cashier or the guy at the bank, he just like, what do you think about this idea? And I think that's very valuable. And so we took that strategy to the smartest people we could find, which happened to be venture capitalists.

• 1:04:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Just really wanted to use that strategically. The other thing we were thinking of was, okay, well, we'd been around in 2017. We know that, you know, these market cycles happen. Let's make sure that we're extraordinarily well capitalized, well funded, have this huge war chest. So that way, if the worst were to happen, we can continue building incredible utility and continue to expand this ecosystem.

• 1:05:17Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, it's remarkable because here we are talking in the summer of 2022 and you launched really in the spring of 2021, which is just unbelievable. That $450 million funding round valued Ugo Labs at $4 billion. So tell me about your plans. And now you've got this war chest, you've got 60 people working for you. So you're more than well capitalized. I mean, you could, you could have a thousand people working for you and still have plenty of money. Tell me the vision now, where do you do, where are you going?

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of tentacles to go into here. I mean, you know, we immediately started thinking, well, that was another Guy O'Seary moment when he came to us and sort of led the charge on our first major acquisition, which was CryptoPunks and MeBits from Matt and John over at Larvalabs.

• 1:06:07Guy Raz?

  One of these projects that kind of originally inspired you.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Oh, the, the project that inspired us the most.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're, they're basically like the Mona Lisa of, of NFTs in our opinion.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  These were like two visionary geniuses who wanted to see the communities grow within the, the art that they had created. And we were just up to the task and we got along kind of famously and, and we were able to work it out thanks to Guy. And that was the first sort of, you know, major move outside of, you know, things that we had done within the Board API Club, like the Mutant API Club and the. Board Ape Kennel Club, which were the companion dogs that we gave for free to everybody who had a board ape. And then we started thinking bigger and bigger and Greg and I started going to our little sort of, you know, hobbit hole and started thinking about what we really wanted to do in this space beyond BAYC and with Eagle Labs.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  And we started kind of going back to our roots and we started thinking about our experience playing MMORPGs growing up, massive multiplayer online role playing games. And we started to look at like, what was going on with the metaverse? And we started to look at what Meta was building and we started to look at what Decentraland and Sandbox. And, you know, these are the two other major crypto-based metaverses. And we were looking at them and going, you know, I think we have our own spin on this. And I think we, we could be a major competitor and I think we have sort of a vision for interoperability and ownership in a way that I don't think a lot of other people had. And so then we started thinking, why don't we build our own metaverse? And that kind of led to OtherSide, which is the metaverse we launched only a few months ago.

• 1:07:39Guy Raz?

  Walk me through the experience of being in OtherSide. What does that actually mean?

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  So our vision of what the metaverse is, you know, at the, at the base level, you think about a virtual world, a world where you have a character and you're jumping into a space.

• 1:07:53Guy Raz?

  You're wearing goggles, right? You're standing in a room or sitting down, you're wearing goggles.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  You don't need to wear goggles. You could be on your phone. You can be on your computer. I think the, the important parts for us are the interaction. You, you know, it's not a metaverse if you're playing Skyrim by yourself, you're playing Super Mario by yourself. What makes it the metaverse is you're in a virtual world that the community, that people are helping kind of co-create, that it's maybe more akin to Minecraft or Roblox than some of these other virtual worlds. And actually owning your digital assets is a super important part of this whole experience for us. As kids who grew up obsessed with MMORPGs, we really valued the idea of

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Hey, we can make the gamified, interoperable, fun metaverse of our dreams, this virtual world that anyone can participate in permissionlessly, and where there's not like a really stringent terms and conditions that gates all your items. Like, if you were to get some item as your warlock in World of Warcraft, then you can actually take that thing off platform. When I grew up playing EverQuest, the best gift I ever got when I was like 10 years old was my buddy gifted me a sword that he got from like a dungeon. You could just, you could give it to somebody. You know, it was like you actually owned the asset in some sense. That said, once, you know, the servers were all sunsetted off on that old game and everything like that, that all stopped existing.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  The idea that you can actually own your assets and trade them and do what you want with them is, I think, incredibly powerful and much more akin to how we think about, you know, trading card games and all that with Magic the Gathering, where you can actually own your collectibles and you can trade them as you wish.

• 1:09:43Guy Raz?

  I mean, watching my kids play Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever with their friends who are not physically in the same room, I get it, I understand that this is where kids are socializing. I wonder, is this the future? Is this like the future of where humans will spend time?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  I think there's like this weird dystopian vision of the metaverse that exists in like culture. Like, if I ever go to a party and I tell you, yeah, I'm co-developing a metaverse at the community or whatever, they'll be like, "Oh, God, you know, that sounds terrible." There's a subset of, I think, people who think that, right? Because it's like, are we going to be sending our kids to like the Neuralink metaverse school? You know, like you just put on your headset and you go off? I don't think that that's really what the metaverse will end up being, frankly. When you ask if humanity is going to be spending more and more time in these online worlds, for sure, but I think primarily it'll be for the purpose of gaming and exploration and fun. I don't think it's the dystopian vision some people think it might be.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  I think there's another framing here as well, which is the simple fact that we already spend a huge amount of our lives digitally. And then actually finding kind of richer ways to interact with each other for the times that we are spending digitally is incredibly powerful. You know, when I grew up playing EverQuest, me and my, my best friend from elementary school were playing this online game and we met some people, you know, characters. They, to us on the screen, they look like a dwarf and a half elf and, you know, an ogre. And we got to chatting with them. It turned out they were around our age. They had our same humor. My mom at the time was like, how do you know that's not a 40 year old guy in a basement somewhere who's like trying to find something out about you or whatever?

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  And I was like, I, I don't think that's the case really. Um, you know, I don't think they would have the same sense of humor. And lo and behold, you know, they lived in Virginia, met them in person. And so we've already lived the experience of having incredibly rich digital lives translate into our real ones. And I think setting up, you know, the standards for things to be kind of more egalitarian, more fair, more transparent, allowing users more sovereignty over their assets. This stuff is just inherently better than doing it on a, on a database somewhere else.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  And we're, we're constantly thinking of ways to like incentivize cooperation. Like I, I love the, you know, the way you meet people in these MMORPGs or, or even like in something like Minecraft. Like I love Minecraft creative mode. But ultimately, like, once you're done building the castle in the sky, it can be a little bit boring, at least for me. And I love the idea that like, what actually incentivizes you to like, do something is, okay, you walk outside your castle, you turn on survival mode, and now you got to club a rat on the head and gain one experience point. And okay, eventually you're going to come across a, a big baddie or whatever, that you need help taking down. And it's that kind of like purpose that makes you want to interact with someone else in an online space, particularly online games.

• 1:12:35Guy Raz?

  Is your idea to continue to make products, both physical and digital products, that people will maybe buy from you and then trade and then you, you will? You know, perpetually get a share of those sales?

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  I'd say that, you know, there is the aspect of consumer goods associated with B O I C. That's a like a strong vertical. But really, I think the the vertical that we're most bullish in and that we think is most ripe for disruption is in the the games industry like we're talking about, where there's already single companies that are doing billions in digital assets that, um, you know, are essentially renting these things to the end user rather than having them own them. And so it's actually much more ripe for disruption with actually thinner margins than than what's happening in the space already.

• 1:13:26Guy Raz?

  What does the future of this space look like? Like, if somebody wanted to to get into the space now, is it even harder now, like just even a year and a half later since the time you guys launched, to create something that's going to take off in the same way?

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  I'd say it's actually a richer opportunity to build a lot of the the tools that communities need and want. When we threw an event, our Ape Fest event, it's not actually the smoothest process at this moment to to token gate of an in-person event in a safe and secure way to someone with an N F T. And so an enterprising startup that had been working on a, uh, actually, it was a COVID vaccine app, you know, for verifying that you had a your vaccine card pivoted to being an N F T authenticator for an event like this. It's brilliant. Loved it. Called Token Proof. It was a great success.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we're very excited about the future. Our community feels like unmatched. The Yuga community itself, you know, I think is only going to grow. I think we're very focused right now on scaling the company. That's something that, you know, we're learning for the first time, uh, but we're doing really well. And we have an amazing team at Yuga. The 60 people here are absolutely incredible. We've been hiring from within the community itself. Some of the first employees we had actually came from the Port API Club. They were people who were just being super helpful in our Discord, and they are just amazing people. And yeah, we just want to, you know, build a good culture in the company, build a good culture and be good stewards for the rest of the ecosystem.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  There's a lot of people building in this space. And if you become an authentic part of it, you get involved in Discords, you you have to use it as the secret, and then you'll find plenty of itches that you can join into scratch.

• 1:15:13Guy Raz?

  That's Greg Solano and Wiley Aronow, co-founders of Yuga Labs and Board A P yacht club. Wiley, Greg, thank you so much.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Thanks, Guy.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Thanks, Guy. Take care.

• 1:15:26Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy dot Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H I B T at I D dot Wondery dot com. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson and edited by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, J.C.

• 1:16:06Guy Raz?

  Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Carla Estevez, Catherine Seifer, and Kerry Thompson. Eva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.