Trevor McFedries - Building Web 3.0 - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 29]

My guest today is Trevor McFedries, the founder of technology startup Brud and the creator of virtual pop star Miquela, a Gen Z icon with millions of fans worldwide. Trevor’s background is fascinating - he worked as a DJ and producer, toured with Katy Perry, worked at Spotify, and done just about every interesting thing I can imagine. In our conversation, we discuss the music-industrial complex, the creation of Miquela, and what Web 3.0 will mean for creators and builders in the future. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Trevor McFedries. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:02:54] - [First question] - What unites the diversity of his career [00:03:39] - What inspired him to pivot away from football and step into creative arts [00:05:50] - Lessons learned from being a touring DJ and producer that apply to the creative tech sector [00:07:40] - A view of the music industrial complex from the inside [00:08:57] - How the internet deciding who becomes popular affected already established artists [00:10:57] - Interesting opportunities in the music landscape in 2021 [00:11:40] - Time spent at Spotify and the spark of insight that led to founding Brud [00:16:02] - The sequence of creating a digital artist like Lil Miquela [00:19:02] - What it feels like to be “othered” [00:20:24] - Embracing one's intersections and applying it to a business model [00:21:18] - The team behind Lil Miquela and her design process [00:25:49] - Ingredients required for building a great narrative [00:28:35] - What social media platforms matter today, and the state of the social landscape [00:32:21] - Expanding Lil Miquela’s world and digital media monetization [00:36:32] - Differences between web 2.0 and 3.0 that may directly affect creators [00:38:27] - Ways innovations like NFTs make spawn new network participants [00:39:49] - Programmable art and media experiences [00:41:03] - The most cutting-edge ideas in the digital persona space [00:43:21] - Technology that wasn’t available that had to be built to enable new experiences [00:45:49] - One of the hardest decisions he’s had to make in Brud’s history [00:47:16] - The furthest they’ve ever pushed the envelope [00:48:06] - What’s the thing that keeps him going every day [00:50:12] - Finding cultural white space and inventing a character that could speak to investing to inspire new generations [00:52:01] - Units of media contribution and creative container experimentation [00:53:27] - What has him the most excited about the future of his industry [00:54:32] - Missing technological components that could inspire new digital creatives [00:56:53] - Work ethic through the lens of developing a jump shot [00:59:00] - One business lesson that he believes in deeply [01:00:05] - The kindest thing anyone’s ever done for him

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

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 1:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 2:02Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 2:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest today is Trevor McFedries, the founder of technology startup Bруд and the creator of the virtual pop star Michaela, a Gen Z icon with millions of fans worldwide. Trevor's background is fascinating. He worked as a DJ and producer, toured with Katy Perry, worked at Spotify, and much more. In our conversation, we discuss the music industrial complex, the creation of Michaela, and what Web 3.0 will mean for creators and builders in the future. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Trevor McFedries.

• 3:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay, Trevor, so I think you probably have the most interesting sequence of things you've done, of anybody I've had on the show, from college football player, to rap artist, to DJ, to software developer, to Sequoia-backed founder, to tokenized community manager. You seem to have done everything interesting over the last 10 years. So my first question is, what unites all this stuff? It's all very different, yet it seems to be wildly creative and always interesting. How would you describe the thread that unites the disparate things that you've done?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  I think if I had to answer that, it's probably just a deep curiosity mix with some good, blue-collar Midwest work ethic. I've always just been really curious about things and was kind of ingrained very early on that if you work really hard at something, you can be good at it, whether that's football or that's crypto.

• 4:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I want to talk about transitions a lot because some of these things are pretty big jumps from one area to another. So maybe talk me through the very beginning. You're an athlete in college. Why did you stop doing that? What did you do first and next? And what lessons did you learn from that first professional chapter?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I actually was born in L.A. My mom and dad split up when I was one and I moved back to Davenport, Iowa, where I grew up until I was 16. And in Iowa, I was building flash video games, packing together websites for mom and pops around the neighborhood. And I was also playing in hardcore bands and really interested in music. But those things were hobbies. Like, it wasn't clear that could be real life. You know, in my head, it felt like I could be a University of Iowa football player and maybe one day be like head football coach or perhaps a firefighter or something. It was a pretty narrow scope of where I thought I could see myself down the road. And when I was 16, my mom more or less forced me to move to Los Angeles. But in her thinking, I think it really was about having me see what potential outcomes I could have for myself. And when I moved to L.A., all those things happened. I actually ended up going to Beverly Hills High School.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And one of my first friends there, his father had started a very big fashion line. And he had like 30 Ferraris lined in front of his house in like Beverly Hills. And I remember asking him in this moment, "Which was your favorite one to drive? Which one did you like the most?" And he was like, "Drive them? I don't drive them, I collect them." And I was just like, "Oh my." You know, like, it just blew my entire brain apart. And so, most of my first few years in L.A. were just that, recognizing that there were these people who were doing creative, interesting things as a profession, and that was something that I could potentially do as well. And so, when I decided I wanted to go to university, I was kind of toying through football scholarship offers. And then my actual dream, which was to go to like RISD. You know, I wanted to go to design school or I wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And my mom more or less said, "Those ones are free. If you don't like it, you can quit and come back and do whatever you want."

• 5:53Speaker 02

  And so, I took a football scholarship and thought I'd have all this time around the football to do stuff and make stuff. Turns out, 5:00 a.m. till 10:00 p.m., you're doing football or school stuff. And I ended up quitting, coming back to L.A. with this dream of starting a clothing line and having a web dev shop on the side, and that ended up becoming music as well. But that was kind of the initial jump. It was like, I wanted to do this thing because L.A. blew my brain apart. And then, when I went to school, I didn't have time to do those things. And so, my mother, who's endlessly supportive, let me come back, stay in her house, and try to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life.

• 6:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the things from the outside looking in, that's a thread that seems to unite a lot of this is the technology behind creativity or creators. And it starts with music. So you had a chunk of very successful run as a DJ touring with lots of very well-known musicians, as a music producer as well. What do you take from that stint of your life? I'm sure you're still interested in it, but when you were doing that most actively, what was it like acquiring those skills? What stands out about that skill set that is more broadly applicable in some of the chapters we'll talk about next?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  You speaking about even reminds me that probably one of the great threads to all of these things is just simply computers and more importantly, the internet. It was this great playing field leveler. It sounds probably trite to people who are younger, but the ability to pirate software and be a graphic designer, or pirate software and be a record producer as a kid who was broke in the Midwest was world changing and just unbelievable for someone like me. And so with music, the opportunity to sample records, make things, reimagine the songs in the way that house music producers were doing it was very exciting to me and something that I started doing pretty early on. Some of the things that I think I learned in creating music and being a creator first is that I've always found that there are people who are making things for their peers and there are people that are making things for their audience or their customers.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  It's kind of like a hologramism, but I always told DJs, don't DJ for DJs, don't write for writers, write for readers, DJ for people on the dance floor. And I think that's always informed what I've done and maybe that's the Midwest sensibility as well. But when I was a DJ, I acted like I was a janitor, you know, like these people worked all week to come out and have a good time. I'm not going to bang them over the head with minimal techno because I love it. If they want to hear a Pitbull song, I'll play them a Pitbull song, you know? And I think a lot of other DJs didn't really take that approach. It was far more about their artistic expression than it was about this collective experience.

• 8:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you describe how the music world worked when you were most steeped in it? So say when you're touring with Katy Perry or somebody like this. How did the business work and how did the performances work? What's interesting from the inside that wouldn't be obvious from the outside?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  I feel really lucky, I think, to have seen the last gasping breath of the giant music industry industrial complex. I was signed in 2007 to Interscope. Jimmy Iovine, obviously this titan of industry, effectively had like a playbook for us. And we were an act that was a priority record label. And for those of you who aren't aware of the industry, they're usually kind of the favorites, where the label said, hey, these are our priorities. Everyone in this company, we're going to break these artists. We're going to make this happen. And we got the real treatment. I was a part of a group called Shwayze. We had MTV reality show. We played TRL. We would go and do signings at record stores and our CD would be way up in front. We were able to get a commercial, like a Pontiac commercial, where our song is featured in it.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I mean, they're pushing all the buttons that should have just made this record skyrocket. The sad reality is that the internet was changing the dynamic of how these records were broken. And the compelling, cool thing for me was that I understood how those things worked. So I started getting pulled into those rooms, some of those executives. And I was able to explain how they might be able to use some of these tools to kind of better break our record.

• 9:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What about some of the artists that you worked with? Did you find most interesting? So you got to see this bridge from, let's call it the industrial complex, sort of top down king making and pulling the strings to all of a sudden the internet is taking over who gets popular and why. And some of these artists that you've worked with have been around in both of those worlds. Describe that transition seen through the partners that you had, the people that you worked with.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  You know, one of the more obvious anecdotes is Katy Perry. Katy and I were very close friends. Katy is someone who navigated the music industry for a long time as a young recording artist to being signed and dropped multiple times before she had a breakout success. And we were so young and kind of naive that I remember when she got signed, she was able to buy a new Prius. And I remember being like, oh, my God, like this is it. You won the game. This is crazy. You got a new car? That's amazing. And then at some point, we went on a Warped Tour in 2008 together and that we had our record in Shwayze and I was actually playing solo as a DJ as well, watching that tour. And Kiss the Girl came out. And I actually remember being in a studio in New York City with Katy and the producers and they were playing Hot and Cold, another single, and Kiss the Girl.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  And ask him when she'll be the first single and I was like, definitely not. Kiss the girl. Like definitely hot and cold. That is a banger. I don't know so much, like just couldn't have been more wrong. The most classic take, but you know, at some point on that Warped Tour, you know, like Katie playing for a hundred people to the entire festival lined up around this small stage. Her stage diving and going for it. And she's someone who was just so well versed in her craft and so talented, but it was undeniable. It was just this rocket ship. You're so young, you don't really understand how this is supposed to work, but since then, obviously people come and fail and fail miserably. But for Katie, it seemingly felt like she had all the tools, all the charisma, no one was an outworker. And to be able to be a part of that journey and to watch her go from literally her sitting on my couch or us hanging out with friends to

• 11:25Speaker 02

  going to the Super Bowl with her to watch her play the halftime show has been one of the great pleasures of my life.

• 11:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If we zoom forward and stick with music to the present day, what is the most interesting thing to you about the music landscape and industry in 2021?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness. For me, the stuff that I'm really interested in is I think there is going to be enough pressure applied by Web three and some of the financial opportunities around music that this legacy architecture might actually have to change. We still talk about mechanicals, which are, you know, literally language should describe a mechanical turn of a physical device, which was like antiquities. And we're going to be, I think we're going to actually see some real change in how the architecture of this machine works. And as a result, you know, I think we can build better futures for creative people, which is really, really exciting.

• 12:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  We'll come back to Web three O a little bit later on, but would love to rewind time back to your next major chapter. We could talk maybe briefly about Spotify, what you learned there. But then also the foundations of BRUD and the early building that you were doing and that I'll call it the spark of inspiration that led to that idea. So maybe with a quick sidebar on Spotify, what drew you there and what did you learn? And then what was the inspiration that created BRUD?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  So when I was in Shwayze, I've never drank or smoked in my life. I was a DJ and artist for a very long time. I didn't really party. I was always been a bit nerdy. And so I was playing a South by Southwest event. I believe in 2008, I think it was the Perez Hilton Showcase, to really kind of date it, like a celebrity gossip blogger event, South by Southwest. And there was another band playing called Chester French. And while we were playing that showcase in pure South by fashion, it was running, I think, like four or five hours behind. So I think we were supposed to play at 10. It ended up being like 2:00 in the morning. And as a result, all these artists were sitting backstage, a lot of people like drinking and hanging out and doing their thing. And I'm like sitting in the corner reading a book and it's like a curly, red-haired kid sitting in another corner reading a book. And I'm like, oh, maybe we should be friends. And so I met DA, DA Wallach.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And we started talking and our journeys in the music business, I think we both felt a little frustrated. I've been building some software tools for friends. He was, I think, people interested in technology and software as well. And he had joined Spotify a few years later. And I think, you know, they were thinking about trying to bring so many that could interface with artists, potentially kind of connect thoughts between like a bunch of Swedish engineers and like the Hollywood music industry. And I had just come off a tour, actually, in 2011, opening for Katy Perry, a world tour, where I was on the road for a year straight. And the idea of having some stability, being able to go to a gym, have a girlfriend, that sounded pretty sweet. And so I was pretty compelled by what Spotify had to offer. And DA, I came and went over to his place. We talked about it a bunch. I flew to New York. I met Ken Parks.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  And ended up deciding to do that thing. And it was really an incredible ride. It was a pretty special time. An opportunity, I think, to compose some of my thinking and create an artist's voice internally at Spotify. And that was really special. And beyond that, and it clicked and dots to brud, while I was there, I kind of, for the first time, got to see this lean startup model play out. You know, I only kind of known like more of a waterfall method of spending five years to go make a record and like push it off a cliff. Whereas at Spotify, it was make it, ship it, talk to the customers, learn what they like and they didn't like, and like iterate quite rapidly. And that seems so commonplace now, but it really felt radical to me. I thought it was super important. You know, while I was at Spotify, Dan and others had said like, look, we really want you to continue producing records and being involved in the artist community.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  A, because we want you to be on the ground, so you can give us feedback on how we could help artists more. But also it lends credibility to you in the space. It's like an artist is actually doing it. And so while I was there, I started producing and managing an artist named Banks. This girl I had met from the valley who was immensely talented. And we were talking a lot about how we could launch this project. And I really wanted to treat like a software product. And so I built some like data scrapers for Last FM and YouTube, really kind of basic stuff. So when we put songs out, we could better understand who the audience was and what they were responding to. And what was was kind of cool at the time, she was like this nice 26 year old Jewish girl from the valley. And everyone was like, oh, this should be Adele, this should be Florence and the Machine. And all the fans of it were fans of Trey Songz, The Weeknd, Drake. It was like young black kids, you know?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  And so for me, it allowed us to say, okay, well, you know what? We could probably go to urban outlets and then come back to pitchfork. Because I'm not sure you can go to pitchfork and go straight to urban outlets. And so that kind of like data informed decision making, as obvious as that is to every other business in the world, wasn't totally a commonplace in the music industry. And so being able to like leverage data, understand where the artists were, to be able to, I think most importantly, pair both a quantitative analysis with some qualitative. You know, I remember looking at some data further down the road and seeing there were all these urban music fans who liked Trey Songz, The Weeknd, and then a bunch of Keegan and Sarah fans. And we were like, what could possibly could have? And we're like, oh, like these songs, love songs, breakup songs. The lyrics here actually kind of connect these two bodies of people.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  And so can we hammer other fans of love song artists with lyrics on Facebook and try to bring them down the funnel? That converted pretty well. And so I think all of that stuff really informed what we become, Brad, which is this idea of trying to create characters and narratives that could touch people and impact their lives, and leveraging technology and especially data to do that in a more informed way.

• 16:34Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So Brad is the company behind certainly the most famous, what I'll call like purely digital celebrity, Lil' Mikayla. I would love to hear in as much detail as you're able and willing to share, the process of learning to make that happen. I don't know if there was a whiteboard at the start or whatever, whatever the blank canvas was that you began with. What were the first steps there? And the way I've asked the question is, if you were to launch a new artist or something today, what would you do? Like, what would be the sequence that you would go through that you've learned based on your experience there?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Whenever I talk to new artists, one of the first things I have them do is I try to have them think about. The things they're really passionate about that they're most embarrassed to tell their core peer group about. You know, you're super into death metal and all your fans are death metal fans and buddies, but you also love the ballet. And there actually probably is an opportunity to find other people that are deeply passionate about like death metal and the ballet. And because there isn't any representation for them in the world, you can have these really passionate people who can kind of be your super fan. And thinking about creating a new character in Michaela, I also try to think about where there's cultural white space. We can call Tony Hawk white space internally. Where are these emergent subcultures that kind of need a rock star personality to kind of break them through into the mainstream?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Often reference Skrillex in EDM and dance music. You kind of remember pre-Skrillex or even Stevie Oki. The idea of a rock star DJ was this dude in Ibiza with like a mesh T-shirt blowing in the breeze behind him, like six pack abs. It was very Sandro P. And all of a sudden you had this personality in Skrillex who was the frontman for a emo rock band, who would be DJing with some decks and jump on top of those decks and like stage dive into the crowd. That type of like rock star personality had never really existed behind the DJ booth. And I think when you brought those two things together, it gave this thing that kind of have cheesy Sandro P pastiche. It gave it this like rock star sensibility and you're like, man, this is so punk and cool. I want to pee a part of it. It's electric.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  And so, and thinking about creating a new character like Michaela, it was like, man, I think there's an opportunity. And this again seems quite trite now, but there was an opportunity to create a character that everyone could see themselves in. Almost looked like a future human. People look at Michaela and they see someone who's Dominican or Thai or, you know, whatever they want to see. And beyond that, early on, people said like, well, why isn't this, she's shaped like a beer model or something? You could have built anything. Why does she have a gap in her teeth? Why are eyebrows like that? And the idea was to better understand and identify like what some non-traditional beauty standards could be that we could champion through this icon. And how we could use her otherness and non-traditional point of views and features to explore stories of otherness. Right? And I think that is kind of the core theme in Michaela's life.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  And it's something that's obviously been really resonated with me as the kid who grew up like a weirdo black kid in like a most white Midwest. It was, where does it mean to be othered? And how can we kind of use these analogies in these parables to make people understand that it's okay to be different? And beyond that, that being different can be this superpower that you can use to create a better reality for yourself and for the people you care about.

• 19:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What does it feel like to be othered?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it can be incredibly terrifying as a young person. One of the things that I always think about, and this is even like a technology analogy, is I remember when Snapchat was really starting to crank and it was pretty difficult for my peers who were college age then to figure out why it was connecting so well. And I think the ability to post content without having the visible likes was really important because I remember being 12 and 13 and really wanting to feel the same. 10, 11, 12, I really wanted to feel like a part of this. I didn't want to feel like a freak. And then as I got older, 15, 16, I started to want to become an individual. And I actually took a lot of pride in how different I was. But at those formative years, when you feel different and you don't feel like you belong, it can be extremely tough. I remember when Tiger, the creator, first emerged, I was a, I was a black kid who was into

• 20:21Speaker 02

  computers and straight edge hardcore. You know, I, I wasn't into like 50 Cent and like Booboo Platinum. And as a result, I was too black for the white kids, too white for the black kids. But thankfully, there were these figures that have emerged, they've said, you know what? Here's a space you can operate in, but there are people like you. And that's really important. And that's what I wanted to do with Michaela as well. You know, here's a space, a person operating when people don't believe in or don't recognize as being real, who treat her identity as not being valid. And if you're a non-binary kid in Missouri, who's been told over and over again that your identity isn't valid, here's maybe someone you can see achieving great things that can inspire you. And that, that has played out.

• 20:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think that this elegant idea you have of embracing one's strange intersections is what I'll call it? I'm picturing a Venn diagram where it's that Skrillex slice or whatever you want to call it, unusual overlap. Do you think that same concept applies beyond artists just more broadly to business? Do you think that that holds true?

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yes, some of my favorite businesses have been established and it carved out a space for themselves that felt totally niche. Hey, this is a low TAM thing. There aren't many people like that. And if you can build that TAM, you can say, hey, we're out here, we exist, we're freaks. All of a sudden, you have this phenomenon. One of my favorite things about Star Wars is like, you know, we're nerds, no one understands us. This is the biggest media franchise of all time. You know, they've been able to tell this story of how they were outsiders. They, they were at the beginning. It's the Mac versus PC thing. I think it actually is a really great opportunity to create this really passionate subset of people that are going to go to bat to you because they feel ostracized, whether or not it's valid.

• 21:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If we go back now to the start of Lil' Michaela, so talk me through the sequencing. What happened first? What did you design first? And I'm very interested in what the team looks like behind a character like this. So you're no longer tied to the humanity of one person. You have more creative license, but it's still people behind this whole thing. Talk me through the sequencing. What happened first and what were you learning in the early days?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  So to back it up a little bit, a lot of this was informed by my experience of being a creative person, being an artist and also my experience in being other. I always thought there was, as a young person, like, what if someone can literally stand in your shoes and see what it feels like to be met with a racist epithet or whatever it is? Or what if you could understand what it was like to be catcalled walking down the street? And fast forward a few years later, like being on the internet, I would put a song into the world, SoundCloud, YouTube, whatever it is, and you'd read a comment. So I'm being like, ooh, I hate that snare sound. You kind of feel sick viscerally. And it became clear to me that this thing I made almost was an extension of myself. When people talk poorly about it, I felt some of the similar pains I would feel. People would talk about me personally, how I looked or whatever it was.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  And in thinking about that, then being met with some information around television programs, Will and Grace or the Jeffersons, there's all this great data around Will and Grace being responsible for gay marriage in the US. It became clear that those two things might be able to intersect, that narratives inform our reality. And I think that narratives are probably one of the most powerful tools we have in our lives. And that if media and powerful narratives are met with technology that enable them to scale and touch people, you actually do a lot of good or a lot of bad. And I think the opportunity to do a lot of good was really compelling. And what I was seeing in my own experience, kind of always were converging, was that I'd always lived in these, I guess, like hacker spaces, IRC, whatever it was. And they traditionally had this techno-optimist point of view on the world, that we're going to build technology to solve people and help people.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  And the bad started to take more of a kind of a regressive turn. And I thought that people were starting to be more frustrated with the reality. And we're starting to look for people to scapegoat. And that was frustrating and worrying to me. And so it was clear there were new types of media evolving that were accelerating those things. Social media, but a lot of the same ideas applied that you could create narratives that could travel through these new medias and shape your reality. And so all of those things combined to say, okay, wouldn't it be amazing if you could do and create Will and Grace style phenomena on a global scale? If we have more issues than ever that are global, whether it's climate change, or it's economic, or it's a pandemic. If we collectively agree and understand what's happening, perhaps we could kind of move towards solutions and build a better reality for all of us.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  And if we're going to do that, we're going to need to think about how to create talent that can scale and interact with people globally. Because as much as I love Jennifer Lawrence, she can't speak Mandarin that I know of. And she's kind of fixed in one location at a time. But if you can create a character that could speak Mandarin, Portuguese, English, Spanish, that could be in Shanghai, New York, and Rio at the same time. Wow, that would be really important for building a better, more tolerant future. And that was the dream. And so at that point, I was thinking, what would that character look like? In my head, I was always aware of what would be the Halloween costume. What would be the silhouette? If people remember the silhouette was Halloween costume, that would make this person a character, almost like a caricature. I also was hyper aware of the kind of success that I thought Lady Gaga had that was really important.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  I had kind of known legacy celebrity to be something where you saw this person and you trembled or you'd faint. People see Michael Jackson, they would just faint. And then there was this kind of emergent YouTuber celebrity where they would see them and they would run up and they would hug them. Because that was their friend, they engage with them day to day, like they're so into having to their lives. And I wanted to be able to split the difference in kind of the way I had seen Gaga do it. Where she was wearing high fashion meat dresses to award shows and catering to a coastal elite. As it's a romantic attachment, kind of a legacy celebrity. But also speaking to her little monsters in a way that felt way more Logan Paul or something that really pulled them in very close. And so that was the basic stuff and thinking about how we wanted to create Michaela and the characters.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  So that we could engage people in these ways that we thought would connect web two, but also legacy properties like a Vogue. And then we did that pretty well. And then you start thinking about, you know, literally the aesthetics. What would a future human look like? Is there a certain skin tone or facial shape? Or are there emergent aesthetic trends that we could ride to speak to people and that people want to aspire towards? And this might come on this journey as well. And that was all pulling the other references, literally modeling the character myself. Playing with hairstyles and waiting on the space buns, which have kind of become iconic, the freckles. If you think about Halloween costumes, because some iconic outfits for the most part, people are wearing the space buns and the freckles. And that's become a big part of who Mikaila is as a character.

• 26:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What have you learned about what makes for a great narrative? What are the ingredients that need to be there for a great narrative?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. Another great question. What I I'm an engineer and so often I come back to the to the frameworks. Obviously, a hero's journey and some of that stuff applies very well. The novel thing for us and the thing we've had to deal with is that there weren't established behaviors for entertaining a narrative on social media. And for those of you who aren't familiar with little Mikaila and her story, the story primarily unfolds across social in what I would describe as a transmedia way. And so I think of the best storytellers of our time as being the Kardashian Jenner Wests, these people who are able to connect dots across social media for their super fans, a middle layer where press TMZ style coverage, and then this layer of television or traditional long form linear narrative

• 27:12Speaker 02

  stuff to connect the dots across all the best of those bits. But what we were trying to do was start at the bottom of that inverted pyramid and just do the social bits. And so there is an established behavior of renting this VHS from the movie store and rewinding the tape at the beginning or starting at the first season of the Sopranos box set. People jump into this fray wherever they are in social. And if they're passionate, maybe they'll scroll back and figure out how other characters fit into the fray. But there needed to be different connective tissues. So all that is to say, one of our early champions was J.J. Abrams. And I think some of the things that he has told me on telling a story was A, like not to write too far out. I always wanted to write like six months in advance. And he'd be like, look, in television, you could think about something that's going to be the main star, and all of a sudden they call out a favor and this guest star

• 27:56Speaker 02

  people fall in love with. And so you want to have wiggle room to really take on information and iterate, which to me felt very much like software. You're like, yeah, let's have a thesis. Let's go put it out in the world. Let's see how it responds. Let's iterate accordingly. And that's what we've tried to do really at Broad is is really listen to our fans and make them a part of the process as much as possible.

• 28:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love that. And this idea of pick it up anywhere along the line, obviously, is a whole different. Skill set, the hero's journey is great, but it's very much a defined arc. If you're in the belly of the beast, the call to action is not going to make, you're not going to know what the hell is going on. You have to follow it linearly. It's a fascinating, fascinating difference.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I actually think if people at home are interested in exploring this, the hero's journey to me applies really well to film. Dan Harmon of like, I think Rick and Morty fame, has this story circle model. I think that's what it's called. I actually found that more informative and helpful for us because television kind of got to have something has legs, quote unquote. And so you kind of have this space, the office, community, parks and rec, stuff happens there. And they kind of leave the space and they come back to it. And that's often what we're doing in our narratives, have our home base, core cast of characters. And there, and then there are these situations, these challenges to overcome, and you're brought back to this stable center, rinse, repeat.

• 29:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you give me your impression of the state of social networks today? And at a high level, what's interesting that's happening? It seems like there's this new explosion of the three or four places that everyone knows Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, Snap. And now there seems to be a lot more experimentation, especially in COVID. What platforms matter and are most interesting to you today?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I could do that through so many lenses. I think in view through the traditional social media lens for people that are on, probably listening to this podcast. They probably use those platforms to brand build, right? And to try to create potential businesses or instantly revenue around that kind of brand. I think if you're thinking about it that way, it's clear to me that Clubhouse is probably a great vector for that. You can get on there and you can build audiences and you can share insights, you could probably do quite well. TikTok is a little more challenging because most people live in the for you page, less than the following page. So you're kind of only as good as your last hit and you got to be pretty special. And then I think there's emergent trends around Gen Z. To me, that are enabling like a different type of social, like even this dark social stuff. Discord is interesting to me immensely because I think people there are able to operate online with a little bit of anonymity.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  I often think the way that millennials and elders view social and the internet, it's pretty different than the way Gen Z interfaces with it. In my experience, it's pretty stark division. There is a generation of young people who. Have been met with this idea that their futures might not even exist. The climate change is such a real threat that A, they might not even get to their 50s or 60s. So why brand build? Or do the things that like legacy generations have tried to do to accrue wealth? Or to kind of accrue a brand that would lead to wealth? Beyond that, it feels like the cards are so stacked against them that the path to upward mobility is as challenging. Probably is more fruitful to think about being as present here and now and trying to live their lives as best they can in this moment.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  The double whammy of climate change and upward mobility being non-existent means why try to even play the game? I feel like millennials swam as fast as they could. They keep up, they're on a treadmill and are just kind of barely getting by. And Gen Z are like, no, what? I'm opting out. And then the second path in Gen Z that I see, which to me is really interesting because I see a lot of like TikTok stars in LA. When I was their age, 21, 22, whatever it was, it almost felt like you needed to have a talent in order to be respected and to be celebrated by your peers. And so, yeah, you were a rapper or you were famous for doing nothing. You became a DJ or a photographer or whatever it was, some kind of thing that was pretty easy to execute, but it could give you some a title. What's interesting to me about these TikTok kids is they just want to get rich. You know what I mean?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  And they've dropped the pretense of needing to have some romantic skillset. You talk to them, they're like, what do you do? It's like, what do you mean? I'm an influencer. Oh, do you want to be an actor? Do you want to make movies? Like, no, I want to get rich. I'm just tech investing. Wait, what? Yeah, like, I'm just gonna take the capital that I make from some ad, deploy it, because I can get into like hot deals and get rich. Oh, cool. So you don't want to make something or do? No, the point of the game is to get rich as fast as possible so I can have a chill life and do whatever I want. And you're like, oh, cool. And so they kind of decoupled themselves from a lot of the dominant narratives that I had beaten into my head when I was a young person. Your self-worth is determined by the value you create and, you know, the American dream. You can live it, you can do this. Kind of like, no, let's live now. Make dough as fast as possible so I can take my friends to Saddle Ranch or whatever.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  And again, like, I'm not caught up in even the legacy frameworks of what is romantic and appropriate. Saddle Ranch to me in LA is mad cheesy. If you had taste and you were a rich kid in the past, like, you're not going to the Saddle Ranch. Going across the street at Sunset Tower. That place sucks. It's stiff. I'm gonna go hang out with my friends. At this place, it feels like a Cabo San Lucas bar. And that, to me, I think is really disconcerting for millennials, especially who are so attached, to my opinion, some of these Western European ideas about what beauty and class and all of these things are and what you should aspire towards, which is what these kids are aspiring towards.

• 32:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So as I think about BRUD and what you're creating, Little Michaela, et cetera, the extensions around that or adjacent to that, it seems sort of like the opposite. You are creating something fairly indelible with cohesiveness, coherence, a common narrative, et cetera. How do you think about the vision from here forward for that world that you've begun to create? And also, how do you think about it as a business? Obviously, there's, when you create an ecosystem and a world, there are lots of ways to monetize around it. And media seems to be changing a lot in terms of how that monetization can happen. But how do you think about those two things operating together, continuing to expand this world that you're creating, but also building a business alongside of it?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  I would say that BRUD V1 business model is very similar to traditional media businesses operating, or media personalities operating, web two era, right? That is, you create some media, you hope that builds a fan base, you then try to figure out a way to sell something to that fan base, rinse and repeat. And the media you're creating isn't the thing that you're selling to those fans. I think what's really exciting about the web three model, not a bunch of tokens, just to get into it, is that you can create media and you can sell that media to somebody who's deeply passionate about collecting that moment or whatever it is. And what's awesome is you can also participate in the resale of that media forever. That's, that's great. You're still able to kind of build businesses around those things, but it's a direct path that revenue is really exciting.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  With our characters in our company, what we've always wanted to do is the fan first, right? To try to create media that we thought touched them and left a really big impact on their lives. One of the things that I'm also excited about in parallel to this shift from web two to web three is this evolution, people have called the creator economy.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  That to me, I think, actually is a super important interstitial between legacy models for creative people and more resilient future models. What I see in the creator and passion economy are creators who are pretty burnt out. They're kind of individuals with either a Substack or a Patreon or an OnlyFans or a Twitch channel. You're effectively on this treadmill where you're trying to crank out as much quality as you can to bring people into this world of yours and to monetize as best you can. I think I saw Ninja stop streaming for forty dollars and lost like ten percent of his subs. That's pretty brutal. And so you're seeing these creators who are trying to figure out how to build more resilient business models so they don't just fall apart. And that, to me, actually runs itself well on a more collectivist approach. That's what's kind of funny, you know, the bundling unbundling metaphor.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Luckily, you're seeing people on Substack being like, man, this Substack thing is quite hard. There were a fixed amount of us, you know, and there was a fixed amount of demand. Now all these new people are entering the fray and it's like the mission returns. What if all of us writing alone came together and brought something together and you're like, wouldn't that be called a magazine? Isn't that, anyways, sure, no. Again, imagining, yes, these things could be magazines, but there are actually ways with Web three and emerging crypto models to build your own economies and to capture more value. One of the things I speak to a lot is that you could imagine Glenn Greenwald, for instance, playing the kind of traditional value prop of Web two where it's like, man, Glenn is awesome. He writes great things. I'm going to pay five dollars of access to those things.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And that becomes a reason for you want to tell your friends, hey, this is really great. You should be a part of this. I want to be able to talk about it with you at dinner, kind of the traditional network effect. But what's cool about Web three is you can imagine someone like Glenn hypothetically saying, hey, I actually am going to create the Glenn token. If you hold this Glenn token, one of ten thousand that I minted, you have access to the media that I create. In which case, you're going to be not only encouraging your friends to access Glenn's media because it's important and it's relevant, but also because you see a financial upside. As there's more demand on a fixed amount of tokens, the value of that token goes up. And so all of a sudden, you not only have the contribution of effects of web two, but you have these financial incentives that your listeners are probably very familiar with, which is why you've had Bitcoin and ripple fanboys screaming at you to buy crypto for the last 10 years because

• 36:42Speaker 02

  when you buy their bags, they get a better return. So I think that's going to unlock a lot of really novel stuff in media and it's going to really empower a lot of creative people. You've obviously seen NFT selling for millions of dollars and that to me is a reflection of the first part of this pyramid where a lot of value has been captured by platforms. As sort of see the hyper financialization of some of these assets, we're going to see entirely another windfall of capital flow into creators here.

• 37:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think there's any other important or meaningful differences from the standpoint of the creator or art generally speaking, between web 2.0 and 3.0 that aren't mostly captured by this idea of crypto or NFTs?

• 37:18Speaker 02

  So we've moved through a few different phases. DeFi summer last year, I think was really important in establishing some of these primitives. And I think educating people like myself who don't have the best economic chops as to the power of some of these instruments for creating value. And then this non-fungible token moment and the provenance piece is actually, I think, and I think Fred Airson tweeted the other day, it turns out where people are interested in art and they are in finance more or less. And I think that's totally true. If you would have asked me if people would have been more interested in like earning 30% of their money or buying a JPEG for a hundred thousand dollars, I'd be like definitely earning 30%. But it turns out people are really interested in art. And so in this moment, you've now seen people who have come to terms with this idea of provenance and

• 37:57Speaker 02

  this idea that you can basically solve for these two things that I think a lot of people in media lived at odds, this idea that people could both individually own an asset. But that asset, that piece of media could also be universally accessible. And with that thing coming to pass, I think now this next phase is going to, you know, probably be reflected in DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations. Where people recognize, holy cow, these financial instruments can unlock a lot of value for myself as an individual. And man, now this media thing means I can apply some of this value to purchasing art. I think better establishing my identity and this emergent metaverse because your wallet effectively is your identity. It's no different than having a Picasso

• 38:38Speaker 02

  in your home. It is like having a people in your ETH wallet address. And then as we move to this DAO model, we will go, holy crap. If we all come together to collectively solve for things in this organization, we can apply our capital, our cultural human, all of these things and make really meaningful change in the world. And I think that to me is this next phase, this DAO phase.

• 38:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It sounds like classic technology stuff that when something like this happens, it unlocks a lot of new supply. So just like Uber and Airbnb or DoorDash or whoever created this whole new category of people, dashers, I think there's a million dashers or something. The idea of NFTs may create a lot more artists. Do you think that that's true? Are you seeing early signs of that? And what has you most excited in that scene? Generally speaking, where you've been very early?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I will say generally, I'm not a huge fan of the artwork that's emerged right now. I actually find the protocols to be almost more interesting artwork than the artwork itself. But another person tweeted with the New York Times PDF from their website version of the internet equivalent NFTs where people are effectively porting an old format. It's like reading a book on the radio. Here's a JPEG that you can purchase. I actually think as you get into more programmable art and into artwork that can be dynamic and respond to different outside variables, you know, you can imagine APIs plugging into some of this stuff. You can imagine different real world outcomes. You're going to start to see an entirely new type of crypto media that's going to be far more compelling. I also think as we start to see legacy infrastructure start to come on chain,

• 40:11Speaker 02

  the ability to sell rights, the ability to sell future access to things and include those things in these tokens is going to be really compelling. And so that to me, I think is the next chapter that I'm really excited for.

• 40:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So now you've really got my interest. I've never thought about this. So just make it hypothetical. We won't even tie it to a little Michaela or Brod or anything. Say more about this programmable media experience or programmable art. How might you approach something like that as a creator?

• 40:35Speaker 02

  I mean, like really simple, obvious ways. You could imagine right now people sells a NFT that's a Super Bowl NFT for next year's Super Bowl. And this NFT effectively has 30, whether they're 32 teams, I should know this, different outcomes. And now you kind of have to speculate on a people. But also, what if Tom Brady wins another ring? Man, it's actually really interesting. What are the odds of that? And me, as a fan of X, Y, or Z, how does this play into like? That's a really simple way, but you could imagine work at the dynamic that can reflect the weather. So you could imagine having a static artwork that has different weather behind it. And when you buy it, the IP address that purchases thing on chain or whatever it is, is tied to the weather in that area. And this work is not dynamic and reflects the weather that's happening outside of your home.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Simple cheeky stuff like that, that's actually quite boring to talk about it now. It's probably going to be really fun for artists to explore. And I think we'll kind of redefine what you think of as a visual artist. Cause you're going to be able to pull in people that are effectively programmers and people that are thinking about systems in a more wholesome way.

• 41:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow, I love that. And so as you think about your own pursuits and business and characters, what is the most cutting edge? Like, what is the most out there thing that you've considered or thought about or seen somebody else do?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. The thing that I'm really fixated on, and I think the thing that we talk a lot about at Bred is how we can build a new type of storytelling organization, one that includes the fan. It makes them a part of the community and a part of the organization. And what we're trying to do is think about how we can treat fans less like people that are just there to be sold to or to be mined for ideas, but to make them a part of the creativity. And so if you think about us existing primarily in broadcast media era, where effectively auteurs or solo geniuses are coming up with visions or stories and imposing them on you. Even think about a director effectively saying, here's what matters in this world that I'm taking you through. My cropped point of view.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  We're going to move to a space where even in like virtual reality, where people are creating scenes that are far more interactive and immersive, where you can take yourself to those journeys. But the thing about how that's reflected to me and even popular media and popular culture in general, is the celebrities to me that resonate the most aren't the ones that can get up and read the lines on the script. But the ones that actually are really great at interacting to all of the different inputs that are being imposed on the world in real time. So like Cardi B, she's someone who's so good on the spot. Lil Nas X, effectively a memer who became a celebrity who can react in real time in a way that feels really native to a generation. And so I think trying to build for more interactive futures is where we're at. And I think that crypto is going to be a big part of that. And so our company, Bred Inc., it will be moving to like Bred Dow.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  And we're going to help sponsor the creation of that DAO. And we're going to enable our fans to participate in the narrative creation by giving them tokens such that they can come together and vote on the directions of our characters and effectively move this thing that was a television show you watch on social media into a choose your own adventure game played out by fans all over the world. And that to me, I think is really incredible to be able to say this thing, Michaela has effectively like five or seven times the audience people viewing her stuff every day that a hit cable television show does. We collectively come together to bring this DAO to pass and then collectively create these narratives. We now have a say in this thing that seven to 10 million people interact with daily.

• 43:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's so fascinating and it begs the question of where the line between technology and media lies? General question, but also a specific question. I'm always most interested in media companies that necessarily have to build technology themselves to accomplish the outcome, the artistic outcome that they're after. What technology have you had to build that wasn't available to you? You're an engineer. I think you're fascinated with both these spaces. How do you think about building new technology to enable consumer experiences that you want to enable?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  You really nailed a really important part of what we do here as well. Often talking to investors like, well, are you a media company? Are you a tech company? To me, the best media companies are actually technology companies disguised as media companies. To me, Disney's a technology company. The Imagineers are cranking out these incredible tools for telling stories and those are being handed off to visionary folks. But some of the things we've had to build, we wanted to build and tell stories that were being told at the pace of the internet. If you think about legacy tooling for creating, especially CG or like 3D media, these platforms and these tools were primarily built for people that were A, doing longer lead, really expensive production. So if a high-end video game takes three to five years, feature film minions, whatever, take three to five years, hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  And what we wanted to do was to create media that could literally be as responsive as the other personalities on the web. So what we had to do was start thinking about how we could take some of these tools and almost create middleware and different pieces of software that allowed us to connect dots across those familiar pieces, but utilize them in ways such that we could create things. Not for 4K resolution five years from now, but at the resolution of an Instagram post in three hours. And so that meant compromises on certain things like is the lighting in our scene perfect? Are the composites perfect? Not necessarily. But one of the things that we recognize is the most important thing you could do is tell a great story. And that fans are going on this journey will let some of these weaknesses fall by the wayside if that story is really compelling. So what we had to build really is tooling around

• 45:49Speaker 02

  production, tooling around communication. I think one of the things we've always wanted to do decentralized celebrity. We wanted to do it in more of a centralized way initially where we have a stylist, a writer, a choreographer, all coming together to push their wares through this vehicle of Michaela and have a situation where one plus one equals three or whatever. But in doing so, you kind of got to create almost like governance, internal governance, and tools for allowing how decisions get made because there isn't just a Rihanna, say yes or no, or right or left. It's this collective body that's kind of what Pixar would call a brain trust, trying to solve for what the best outcome is.

• 46:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's been the hardest decision that you've had to make in broad's history?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  The hardest decision that we had to make is probably when in our narrative and our canon, there's this prequel, this time before Michaela was self-aware, before she knew that she was a bunch of code written by this creepy character, Daniel Kane. And that effectively was this moment where we were creating content and no one really knew what was going on. We weren't revealed as a company. There was no Bermuda. There was no Daniel Kane. There was no evil players. And there was this hack moment where we decided to effectively wipe all of Michaela's socials and create this stink where people had to be like, wait, what's happening? What happened to this character? We don't know what it is. And then reveal. And it was a very sensitive moment because it, it, there was a risk that we could do this thing and no one would care. And that effectively all of this work we had built would go to zero. That was definitely a really difficult one. I think beyond that, in the

• 47:10Speaker 02

  last four or five years, this company has been so heightened politically and socially that we've definitely goofed in trying to tell stories that we thought could better reflect the experience of the people that are like helping to craft those stories in the name of trying to highlight issues that we think are important. And some of the things that we've had to make is like, how far to push these boundaries. Grey's Anatomy dealing with the loss of a family member is something that's been established as like a medium where you can do that. But in doing that on social media, in between pictures of a latte and somebody in the bikini, how do we figure out how far we can go and how far we can't go? We're first to the door. So we're catching all the arrows there and making those decisions are actually quite difficult.

• 47:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's the furthest that you've ever pushed the envelope?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  We made it a point early on that our characters may have a point of view. You know what I mean? Michaela has been extremely vocal in her political ideologies. From being pro-choice to encouraging people to go out and write letters to their senators to support sex workers. I think some of the things that traditional media companies would have shied away from because they're polarizing. But we're interested in trying to tell stories that reflect the point of views of our characters and our team. And trying to highlight issues that we think are important. Michaela's had Black Lives Matter in her Instagram bio for years because we felt as an organization that it was important to highlight these things were going on. Obviously, in a post 2020 world where things were so heightened and people are so aware of that, it feels timely. But the reality is we're going to take positions that are unpopular with some folks if we feel like as an organization they need to be heard.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  And that we can use our platforms to accelerate and champion messages that we think are important.

• 48:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  For you personally, what keeps you going? For me, it's doing this. I just like meeting exceptional people, learning from them, applying those lessons somehow, rinse and repeat. I'll do that forever. What's your equivalent? What is the thing that when you wake up or the thing that when it happens, there's the most bliss or flow or whatever, however you want to characterize it?

• 48:57Speaker 02

  I'm really interested in new ideas and I'm really interested in creative and innovative people as a result. And I've sometimes joked with peers that we kind of live in this forever 21 economy. A lot of the value that's being created by innovators is being captured by kind of fast followers and rent seekers. And so the thing that I get most excited about, the thing I wake up every day thinking about is how to create better outcomes for people that are actually innovating, that are pushing humanity forward, that are building better businesses for all of us. And so that means, yes, thinking about how we can create virtual characters that can effectively act as heat shields and enable the talents of people who otherwise would have been pushed to the outsides of Hollywood or whatever else. In that situation, we have people who didn't necessarily have the charisma, but had the singing voice.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  So they could like be pushed through the talents of Michaela, people who were incredible writers, but antisocial and couldn't exist in a writer's room, who can now work with us. There are all these misfits who are extremely talented, who can kind of push their wares through this vehicle. And one of the things I'm really proud of is we don't have a lot of, you know, Michaela acts as a heat shield for a lot of these creative people. These are fragile, sensitive artist types. And you watch what happens to them, people when they become public figures, they get torn to shreds. And so we've been able to prevent, I think, hopefully, some of our folk, Britney Spears shaving her head in a parking lot moment, because they have this heat shield of this character, this headless brand, Michaela, push their wares through. And that's also why I spent the most time thinking about crypto. The ability to kind of solve for my dream, which was information wants to be free. Pirate stuff, go nuts, make media university accessible, but also being met as a 23 year old,

• 50:23Speaker 02

  like a broke musician who can't figure out a way to make a, make a living. You know, where you're like, wouldn't it be great if you could sell some stuff as well? The idea that NFTs and crypto enable the ability for people to own things individually and it creates scarce media, but to also allow everyone to interact with it. That keeps me up at night. It's so exciting. That's how I would probably speak to what gets my motor going.

• 50:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'll ask a selfish question. So let's say I wanted to create a nerdy business and investing version of Little Michaela. Warren Buffett is used by everyone. He's sort of the character, if you will, that's invoked to talk about business lessons or investing lessons or whatever. And we need a new character. Okay. So I think this is kind of universally true, actually. So let's say I wanted to create that character, but I don't want it to be an actual person. I want it to be an avatar or something like that. What advice would you give me? Where would you start? What matters most? What's the sequencing?

• 51:15Speaker 02

  I would probably start with what's the cultural white space? And if you were going to ask me, I would say there are a bunch of disaffected young people who had to experience hyper financialization that's destroyed their family's lives, that have lived through late stage capitalist environment that doesn't feel very equitable. And as a result, have looked for answers all over the place. It's kind of like a meme amongst leftist circles where it's like, man, funny. All these big brain leftist types held a bunch of crypto and were seemingly pretty interested in markets. I actually even saw a meme that was like, when did this? And it's a picture of some book about modern monetary theory. Get more sexy than this. And it was Thaw's Capital or something like Carl's Market.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  I think there are an emergent subset of young people who are like, man, actually some markets are cool. And there are ways that these can be utilized. So I'd probably start there. If I was going to say, I would say like, look, here's an opportunity to speak to, and maybe like a Glenn Whale radical market style way, how investing and how markets can be used to create better outcomes for people. And I would then kind of use that voice to speak to their concerns and then give them opportunities, follow this person's lead. And the same way, I think Warren Buffett's been able to take people on all of these Buffett memes that are, and it's not timing the markets, it's about timing market or whatever else.

• 52:34Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How do you think about the anatomy or the unit of media contribution? So Buffett's unit of contribution was the annual letter. Maybe the Instagram post is one unit of contribution. It seems like a lot of the most successful influencers, media personalities, whatever you want to call them, have a format that they define and then often they ride for a long period of time. They sort of stick with the same creative container. How do you think about creative containers and experimentation versus doubling down and compounding on one that works?

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Warren's letters are super important, but we can't underestimate the value of the aesthetics. It looks like the grandpa from Up. He's like driving around his old Lincoln in Omaha. If you were going to try to write, who's the good guy in the movie when like the disaster is going to happen? And there's just one crotchety old guy who knows what's actually going to be right. It's Warren. And so I think can't decouple the aesthetics of Warren from the kithy quotes and the letters. I would definitely start there as well. But I think for me, it seems like there's an opportunity to leverage memes to communicate far more, more effectively than you couldn't. Obviously, there's a place for letters and long form writing, but I think memes can like in infographics. God, there's so many bad misinformation infographics, but they're used because they're so effective.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  And I think even the liquidities of the world or whatever else, they're quite good at conveying some of these dense concepts in ways I think people would be drawn to rather quickly. So that's what I'd probably go focus on aesthetics and then speak to some of these things that I think intentionally made dense to make you feel dumb, but can be conveyed pretty quickly and eloquently via meme.

• 54:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What has you most excited about the future of what you are building personally?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  For me, capitalization and finding, you know, underutilized talent all. And that's really personally me. I literally grew up in a town where I never thought I could be anybody. I've literally gotten to all these wonderful schools, couldn't afford to go. My family didn't even have the credit to qualify for some of the loans. I just couldn't go because I grew up literally in the ghetto. I think there's an opportunity to leverage these toolings and this software to highlight and identify people that are very talented and allow them to create better outcomes for themselves and their families and allow them to express themselves in ways they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And while that's broad and a little opaque. But the reality is, I think everyone in the world is a creator. I think everyone in here has a story they need to tell. I think everyone has innovations they can bring to the forefront.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  If they had the means and the time to see those things through, I think we'd all be better off. And so I like to enable some of that. And I think that's the dream. And do I think crypto is a save all savior? It's gonna like create more equity or solve inequality? No. But I hope that in this great reshuffling, we can shift a little bit more value to some of those people. And then that's kind of why I do this every day.

• 55:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned the phrase earlier, American dream. We've talked a little bit about your entire fascinating story, starting very humble beginnings and having a fascinating life, very successful life by any measure. What's missing? You were able to walk a really interesting path. I think obviously what you just said is enabling that, something like that path for a lot more people is really exciting. What are the pieces crypto maybe is one part of this? What's missing? What needs to change?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Man, I thought you were gonna ask me what's missing in my life. I think this existential breakdown in your podcast, what's, what's missing in my life? There's a lot of user experience stuff. I think crypto is still pretty dense and clunky. I actually think, and this kind of lives a bit in opposite to what I just said about it being too clunky. I think a lot of traditional web people want to obfuscate and kind of hide the blockchain because they think it's going to be too difficult for folks to understand. I think that's a bit paternalistic and I think that there is people who have actually leaned the most into the blockchain. Like even six months ago, we were discussing, people are gonna say non-fungible tokens. It's like too dense, it's never gonna work. And now you can't walk a corner like NFTs said somewhere. And so I actually think that there are, you know, if you got on-ramp stuff, it's kind of been solved for, but I think where Walt experienced, some of the core identity stuff is still a step too dense.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  There are little things, you know, adding custom tokens, playing with the central exchanges, that kind of stuff is still a little bit too much friction. That UI UX stuff is gonna get a lot more simple in the coming months and to unlock a ton of value. I also think that there's a psychological change. I do feel like a lot of my creative peers have been conditioned to be hostile towards finance and towards business. And the kind of, I've forgotten what I was in the past, but when I was a kid, the idea of rap and rock coming together, crazy, you know? The idea of Wall Street and the Lower East Side coming together to build projects together probably seems as crazy now. The best artists, the great people of the future are gonna have a finance, economic, a human that's gonna allow them to build really novel, interesting things.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  And I think we're gonna need to allow and like maybe nudge creative people especially to move away from some of those pre-achquisitions. Candidly, some hostile conditioning we've had like in the Trump era. People are so frustrated, were so angry for so long. I was tweeting like, it almost feels like a collective autoimmune response. We've been attacking the body, our cells for so long that we don't know how to stop. And I think that people are so predisposed to anger and contempt for new ideas and new things. They're going to need to kind of shake some of that to allow for some of these things to potentially be created out of themselves.

• 57:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You said at the very beginning of the discussion, something about good old fashioned Midwestern work ethic. I'd love to just talk about work ethic a little bit. A friend of ours told me to ask you about you practicing your jump shot. And I'm fascinated by people with a specific kind of work ethic. And I'd love to hear what you've learned about that concept and maybe about your jump shot.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  This is probably the first one I'd like to shout out, Coach Freckin in Iowa. I grew up with a mom who championed me and did everything she could for me and God bless her. But I was met by a football coach right in eighth grade, coached at what's called Bettendorf High School. And Coach Freckin was the first dude who basically told me I wasn't anything. I wanted to be something I better put in the work and also met that with like an amount of love and care. Like, I'll never forget, I had a basketball tournament, which was kind of my first love in Chicago. We had our first games at 10:00, we were going to leave at 7:00 AM from Iowa. I was supposed to lift that day on a Saturday for the football team at 8:00. And I told Coach Freckin, I was like, yeah, you know, I can't make it. I got a basketball tournament in Chicago and I'm not going to be there. And he was like, what time's the tournament? Okay, what time are you leaving? Leaving at 7:00? Cool, I'll be here at 4:00. We'll get the workout in before you go.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  And I was like, what? And so I show up at 4:00 AM and here's this dude, I don't really know, clearly cares about me and wants me to be as good as I can be. He was going to work, you know, through this entire lift with me and then send me on my way. And instilled in me a lot of stuff that feels very blue collar Midwest. We had bulldog time, which wasn't on time, it was 15 minutes early. You weren't there 15 minutes early, you were late and the entire team had to pay. All these things that were beaten in my head made it really easy for me to get up at 6:00 AM, to get on a flight to go DJ somewhere. And beyond that, I think I learned that consistency is really key. It's easy to work hard in a sprint. But the ability to be really passionate about something and get up every day and make 500 threes like I've been doing recently or run through my like strength and conditioning

• 59:13Speaker 02

  program because I have these high dreams of playing pro basketball somewhere in the world at some point, even if it's in Guam. So if any of your listeners out here like own some basketball teams in Chile or whatever, I'll come play. That's one of the bizarre things that I do amongst a whole set of different things. I just try to be super consistent and try to learn a little bit every day and get a little bit better every day at every single thing that I do.

• 59:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's a hard question, I'm sure. But if you had to pick a single business lesson that you believe very deeply based on your experiences in your career, what would that lesson be?

• 59:43Speaker 02

  For me personally, it would be listen to yourself and embrace how different you are and embrace differentiation. I think that I am someone who you can imagine pitching a Sequoia boardroom doesn't look like your typical Stanford GSB kid. And I think I originally tried to pitch my business like I was and I failed miserably, got a lot of no's. And when I approached it the way I approached it, this is who I am, this is what I want to do. I got a lot of guesses. And I think that was the same was true in music. I spent time trying to chase producing pop hits and then made things that I was generally passionate about and that I cared about and built a pitch for myself. And those things kind of were then met at the right time and had success there. And so to me, I think it is really understand who you are and lean into you hard. Don't be afraid of who you are. And I think if you're able to kind of convey that effectively, you're going to find people

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  who appreciate you for what you are and are going to want to buy into what you do and back what it is that you want to build.

• 1:00:31Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love that answer. Great excuse to ask my traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  I have so many examples of things that my mother has done for me. I don't speak to it at times publicly, but we grew up with extremely humble roots. And I'm thinking now, I mean, it's something I didn't really realize until I was 12 or 13, but I remember being probably eight years old and I have a younger sister and my mom made us SpaghettiOs. And I remember asking my mom, and I was like 12 or 13, I was like, dude, you want to eat spaghetti with us? And she was like, no, no, no, honey, I already ate. And I remember later on in life realizing that she didn't, you know? And that she made time and figured out a way to make sure that we could eat. And that same lesson and that same moment played out so many times in my life. Whether it was her like taking extra shifts, like go to basketball camp, you know, sending me on a plane to California and figuring out whatever it took so that I can go to the school that had the good football team or whatever it was.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  That kind of stuff isn't lost on me. It's hard for me to pick one, but I think someone as selfless and as kind as my mother, it would be incredibly hard to choose, but all of those are good examples.

• 1:01:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow. What an incredible story and what a fun conversation. I mean, I think we've really covered what makes all of this technology that we've been talking about for years so exciting for the future. And this idea of growing up on the internet and N of one being okay and working and actually being advantaged on the internet relative to one size fits many or one size fits all is such a cool discussion. So thanks for the great closing couple of answers and all the great answers and insight. This has been a blast.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. Real pleasure.

• 1:02:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This episode was brought to you by Vanta. In this five part mini series, I sit down with Vanta CEO Christina Kachopo to hear about the origins of Vanta, how Vanta is automating security and when companies should look to partner with Vanta. In this week's episode, Christina and I discuss the broader security landscape for companies, what they should be aware of and how Vanta provides a holistic view of a company's security. Can you talk through the broader landscape of security here that Vanta I think will be going after because part of choosing a vendor here is yeah, there's one specific job to be done, maybe SOC two audit right now, and I need that done. And that's a great reason to go work with you all. But I think there's a bigger picture here of this continuous monitoring of other sort of certification. I'm thinking like lots of businesses we look at have HIPAA compliance or something like this.

• 1:02:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What else is in this alphabet soup of compliance standards? How do you think about Vanta, the business attacking some of those things? And sort of the overall vision for the future of what you offer customers?

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of these compliance standards out there. And I think over time, Vanta will, will tackle more and more pieces of the alphabet soup. HIPAA and ISO are up next, but looking forward, we think of what we're really trying to do here is sort of move the software industry overall. Toward thinking about continuous verification of software and software vendors, not point in time. And we think to do that, we'll probably have to introduce a new standard or partner with folks to do that. One of the killer features of the compliance certifications that we've been talking about are that buyers want them and the market knows what they are. And so I think that's really the puzzle to figure out. And I think we do that by just telling

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  the story of, we can think about, you know, the security of a software vendor by looking at what happened last Tuesday when an auditor came in, or we could think about it in a holistic, continuous, sort of almost status page sort of way. And doesn't it make more sense to do it in that continuous way?

• 1:03:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How do you think this means the software and the tooling that you and your company are building evolves? You talked about this, get your dashboard green. That's something, obviously, that's already built and working with customers, lots of different customers. What's the evolution of the software that Vanta offers itself? What will that feel like and look like to customers?

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  One of the key strengths of Vanta is we have this holistic perspective of a company's security. Everything from who the employees are, to what accounts they have, to what the cloud infrastructure looks like, what's the state of the laptops, right? It's this really broad perspective where just a laptop management tool, to take one example, can only kind of reason about the laptops at a company. And so what that gives us the opportunity to do is write these tests and checks and be able to go from, hey, it's Patrick's first day at work and here's the things he gets. And then when Patrick moves on, here's how we think about deprovisioning things in a safe way and sort of everything that you touch in between. And I think as we build out more and more of the security monitoring piece of Vanta,

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  you'll see this more emphasis on holistic security. So again, who are the people? What tools are they using? What are the resources and security speak? How do they use them? Because we just think that's something we're so well positioned to do. And it's something that any vertical security tool doesn't have the insight to be able to do.

• 1:05:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.