110 - The Internet Reset | Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian is the Co-Founder of Reddit, as well as the Founder of venture capital firm SevenSevenSix. As a builder-turned-technology entrepreneur, Alexis is focused on making the world a better place through novel projects and initiatives like Coinbase, Axie Infinity, Opensea, and Riverside (which we used to record this episode!) We explore how Alexis would rebuild Reddit for Web3, and how many emergent behaviors in the early days of Reddit and the internet are surfacing again—this time, on steroids with crypto-enabled communities. Alexis is concerned with empowering the good parts about internet culture, doubling down on the importance of community and culture. Tune in for sage advice on investment insights and investor cheat codes—where are the next opportunities? Wherever they are, Alexis is sure to be found there. ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:00 Alexis Ohanian is Having Fun 8:57 Getting Into Crypto 16:40 Reddit and Web3 24:52 Emergent Behaviors 34:00 Rebuilding a Web3 Reddit 39:38 Internet Reputation 45:00 Permissionless Web3 53:52 What’s on the Horizon? 1:00:26 Seven Seven Six 1:04:10 The Case for Optimism 1:07:24 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Alexis on Twitter https://twitter.com/alexisohanian?s=20&t=YFn8AnfCSkaWdAxctt9QXw https://twitter.com/alexisohanian?s=20&t=YFn8AnfCSkaWdAxctt9QXw SevenSevenSix https://twitter.com/sevensevensix?s=20&t=YFn8AnfCSkaWdAxctt9QXw https://twitter.com/sevensevensix?s=20&t=YFn8AnfCSkaWdAxctt9QXw Alexis’ Art https://opensea.io/assets/0xb6329bd2741c4e5e91e26c4e653db643e74b2b19/696 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When I got crypto pilled was the wedge informing was seeing this community behavior that reminded me of early days of Reddit, except now with so much more potential and so much more upside because it's not singular, it's not centralized, it is truly global.

• 0:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Great episode for you guys today. The internet reset. Can we just pull out the power cord and restart this whole thing? That's the idea. We get into this discussion with Alexis Ohanian, who has been recently crypto pilled. A few things to take away from this episode. Number one, hear his story. How did Alexis actually get crypto pilled? The founder of Reddit, co-founder of Reddit, he fell down the rabbit hole. What does that look like? Number two, how he'd actually rebuild Reddit if it was on Web 3. What does

• 0:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  that look like? And number three, his investor cheat codes. Where are the next opportunities in crypto? Be on the lookout for some of those that are mentioned as well. David, what were your thoughts in this conversation with Alexis?

• 1:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I very clearly remembered the moment I got into Reddit and understood, like started to understand what was really going on there. And the thing that captivated me about that platform was just the emergent behaviors that the platform enabled the communities. And it was one of those, it was just one of these things where all these weird quirky internet culture things all seem to be born out of Reddit. So like the rage comics, some of the early memes and like memes and Reddit, I discovered these things around the same time. And it's really all about emergent behaviors. And so we take this conversation to Alexis about what he sees in the early days of Reddit and the parallels that he's

• 1:51David Hoffman?

  seeing now in Web 3. And that was a very important story for him and how he was able to wrap his mind around Web 3. It was using a lot of these early concept, these early principles that Reddit really leaned into that are now like on steroids in the world of Web 3, in the world of online internet crypto enabled. Communities. And so we unpack all these parallels and connect them to the internet at large and how we're going, we're kind of, this internet culture was definitely existent in web one, kind of lost in web two, but is now, as you said, getting reset and reborn in web three, which is what Alexis apparently makes him optimistic about the future of where this whole internet experiment is going.

• 2:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a super cool conversation. And Reddit, I think, is one of the most organic internet native social media platforms, certainly today. It's where I kind of got my start learning about crypto as well. And I think probably many of the bankless audience did too. So fantastic conversation, really fascinating. I think there's some insights here you can carry with you into the investing world as well about what's coming next in web three and what's coming next in crypto. Alexis has been on our bankless podcast wishlist for quite some time. So we are super excited to get right into the conversation with Alexis Ohanian. But first, we want to tell you about these awesome tools that will help you go bankless.

• 3:18David Hoffman?

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• 4:03David Hoffman?

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• 4:13Speaker 03

  So you've got some money, but how are you going to use it? You want to spend. You, me, shopping, now, bro. When you know you should be saving.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  You'll never buy a house at this rate.

• 4:25Speaker 03

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• 5:14David Hoffman?

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• 5:57David Hoffman?

  your ETH or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest, Alexis Ohanian. He's a technology entrepreneur, now a VC, now an investor. He's focused on making the world a better place as VC firm 776. He's an early investor in lots of products that we know and love: Coinbase, Axie Infinity, OpenSea in the Web3 space, even the software we're actually using to record this. It's called Riverside. He invested in that, too. You may also know him as one of the co-founders of Reddit, and he's really an expert in the internet, I think specifically internet communities. So he's got a lot to teach us today. Alexis, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing, man?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for having me, Ryan. I'm just happy to be here. I enjoyed chatting with you and David before the show began. I'm happy. I'm happy we hit record. So we can save all this gold for your listeners.

• 6:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what? You always look like you are having fun with the internet. Like, whatever you do, it always looks like you're having fun. And everything you do also feels like

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Mostly true.

• 7:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very human. Like, it feels just very authentically human. Do you, is that a through line? Is that something you've striven for? Is that just part of your nature?

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Uh, I think it's the latter. I think it's a part of my nature. You gotta look, I guess you gotta dig up the old content from like 05 and 06. You know, grinding it out, founding Reddit to see if I still have the same vibes, but I think so. I don't know. I've, the advice I find myself giving CEOs more often than not is to be, to think of communication on the internet just as you would communication offline. And, and you know, this, this really comes up in community building. There's people for 16 years, especially now the last couple of years, have been asking like, how do you build community? Blah, blah, blah. And, and a lot of it comes back to the same way you would do it offline. If you were inviting people over to your house

• 7:51Speaker 00

  or bringing folks over to, you know, a convention hall. Like, you, you think about community building online the same way you do offline. You bring good people together. You give them opportunities to, to, you know, have great experiences. You're, you know, that's sort of like the, the ideal party host is someone who's not there talking about themselves, but helping connect good people and starting good conversations and good times. And that's, that's so much of it. And I think I've been fortunate because creating Reddit was probably, was, was not just a great outcome for me professionally, but it also set the stage for getting the reps in for all the things that are most valuable now in Web 3, 16 years later.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  And, and it's, it's just about that authenticity. And I guess that's, I don't know, that's my vibe.

• 8:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that what brought you into Web 3? Is that what brought you into crypto? It's like, we talked to so many people on Bankless and they all have a story of how they came into crypto. And crypto has all of this surface area, right? Some people are, you know, it's purely the finance side of it, the economic side of it, the like sovereign money side of it, the individual expression side. What, what brought you into crypto? What was your hook?

• 8:59Speaker 00

  So there's what brought me into crypto, and then there's what crypto pilled me, which are two different questions. For the first, I

• 9:07Speaker 00

  2011, 2012, I was a partner at Y Combinator and I meet this, this bright young man who had just left Airbnb, a great job at Airbnb. I think it had just become a billion dollar company. It was a clear winner in Silicon Valley and he'd been doing fraud detection and prevention there. His name was Brian Armstrong and he'd entered that batch of YC and he said, "You know what? I think Bitcoin is going to be a big deal and right now it's a pain in the ass to buy and sell and I want to make it really easy. I want to make it so simple for anyone to buy some Bitcoin and participate in this." And candidly, the only reason I did that seed investment was because the r slash Bitcoin

• 9:51Speaker 00

  community on Reddit at the time was so engaged. No way. And, and as an investor, I'll tell you my cheat code and I've been pretty public. It's not that secret. But I visit the nascent Reddit communities, if there are them, if they exist, for the things I'm investing in because that's a great barometer. You can't really fake community on Reddit. If it's there, it's there. If it's not, like it requires such a Herculean effort to make work that you're not going to fake that one easily. And I don't know, I just saw something there that was pretty wild. It was really emphatic. I had been to enough, at this point, I still think I've been to more Reddit meetups than any person on the planet, like literally all over the world. And at more and more Reddit

• 10:35Speaker 00

  meetups, I was hearing from more and more Redditors. I mean, think of the folks who came out to a Reddit meetup in like 2011, 2012, 2013. These are diehard users. And I'd go to some meetups, yeah, I'd go to like Riga in Latvia or I went to a Reddit meetup in Halifax up there in Canada, Nova Scotia. Like, I mean, not just LA, New York, SF, but like everywhere. And I went to one in Bangalore, India. So, okay. One of the interesting through lines was like, for these really hardcore Redditors, I started hearing more and more about Bitcoin and about crypto and about these ideas of decentralization. And I thought, okay, well, the r slash Bitcoin community is super hyped about this. If you can get that many Redditors that excited about a new technology, you're probably, there's

• 11:20Speaker 00

  probably something worth paying attention to, but the government will definitely shut it down. So I'm not going to get my hopes up too high. But still, and those were the pretenses through which I got excited about doing this investment. And it was years that went by as I started to see more and more talented people, you know, wanted to go all in on it. And I thought, okay, this is interesting. You know, I still don't think it's gonna like survive because if it works, this will, this is, this is gonna assail so many institutions, right? It will upend, I mean, so many parts of our lives and, and reimagine them. And, and there's no way that that's gonna actually work because it just candidly

• 12:00Speaker 00

  just seems so far fetched. And, and then when I got crypto pilled properly was at the start of COVID because I started looking around and seeing, you know, and at this point, right, Coinbase is on its way to IPO. I had been making a number of investments over the years around the space and been lucky to be a part of some early pre-sales. And I'd done well, but the whole time I'm just like, kind of holding my breath because I'm like, this is too good to be true. Like when, when you're a kid reading about major historical events and, and technological shifts, there, at least when I was a kid doing those things, I just never could have imagined myself being a part of it, let alone live, like, living

• 12:43Speaker 00

  during that time, let alone being party to it, just seemed pretty, pretty far fetched. And so with every passing year, I'm like, holy shit, this thing is actually like, it's, it keeps growing, it's growing. There's, there's more and more talented, bright, driven people building on it, which is a great sign. And, and then I started seeing things, you know, as we're all locked inside, we're all feeling all kinds of, you know, existential dread, anxiety about the world. You started seeing people looking for ways to commune digitally. And all of a sudden Twitter, where I was already spending a ton of my time, started having more and more conversations around all things crypto. And NFTs were certainly one, one popular one, but more broadly, just more and more people talking about building, creating together and.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  I started to see things that reminded me of early Reddit. And that's when I got fully crypto-pilled because I realized like, okay, we've reached a point of no return. This is from a like, a regulation standpoint, and we'll see with this executive order that's coming out. But you know, we, we've essentially reached a point where, I mean, the, you know, country, Ukraine was taking donations over Bitcoin and Ethereum. Like, we've reached a point now where it's a part of the culture. There's enough people who are bought in, literally and figuratively to it. And, and, and it's here to stay. And so now you started thinking, okay, what can we do with this?

• 14:09Speaker 00

  And, and over the last few years, I just started seeing so much of this really interesting energy that just, like I said, reminded me of the early days of Reddit. Except now people who were early and right could benefit from the upside. And, and I mean that both financially, but also sort of spiritually, right? We are, I don't know, even back when we were just collecting like seashells on the beach. Our species really likes private property. And we, we like this idea. And, and look, the ability to have private property also incidentally makes it even more interesting to then have shared property. Because that shared property is only special if you have a concept of, of, of personal and, and private property.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  But at its core, like, there is something special about that. And seeing that switch flip among so many people who now found a new gateway into why this should matter. Because now they could reimagine how gaming could be different. And they started seeing versions that obviously an investor in Axie, like you said, so rare, another one. And seeing, seeing this resonate as a kid who grew up playing tons of video games and spent tons and tons of money that I'll never get back. Um, and yet also a kid who, you know, bought a ton of trading cards and Magic cards, even Spellfire, which was like the D and D knockoff of Magic the Gathering. You know, we took for granted the fact that we owned all of our in-game assets because,

• 15:30Speaker 00

  you know, you bought the card and then you got to keep them. And if you wanted to, you can give them to your kid's sister. You could sell them. You could do whatever you want with them. They were yours. And the metaphor seems so obvious to me. It's obviously still pretty contentious in some communities. But I think in hindsight, well, again, just feel very, very, very clear. And, and so as I sat here watching all of these people get so excited, creating together and hoping together. And, and that, I guess it was the, that communing of people tied into a sense of ownership and a, and a potential for, for creating something bigger. I mean, even looking at, you know, failures like Constitution DAO, you still see the same kind of energy that just reminded me of 15 years ago on Reddit as people pooled money together to help for a fundraiser,

• 16:16Speaker 00

  just to do some good work, right? But now you have something that's not limited to one platform. It is truly global. It is, it is boundaryless. And man, I mean, we're in the earliest days of it. So anyway, that's when I got crypto pilled was the wedge informing was seeing this community behavior that reminded me of early days of Reddit, except now it's so much more potential and so much more upside because it's not singular. It's, it's not centralized. It is truly global.

• 16:40David Hoffman?

  And that's definitely where I want to go down the rabbit hole of just to get this conversation started off, which is just the, the, the parallels. Cause there's so many parallels between Reddit and, and web three, as you've alluded to. And I, and I think a lot of the parallels between these two things are also very foundational to the internet itself. There's a lot of things about Reddit that captivated my attention when I first got into it, that also captivated my attention about web three. And I kind of want to unpack these things with you because I think it'll give listeners premonitions of things to come in, in the rest of this decade. The things that captivated my attention about Reddit when I first logged on was that like, it gave the user so much control.

• 17:21David Hoffman?

  And it gave the community so much control. So like a subreddit was basically like a blank slate of a DAO of sorts. It had, it was just up to the community to etch in the, the story of what the subreddit was. And everyone on Reddit would start with like a blank account and it kind of feels like, it felt like when you made your Reddit account, like it's like you spun up your, your brand new Ethereum address for the first time. These felt like the same things. And like learning how to Reddit and learning what Reddit was, was something that you had to experience for yourself.

• 17:55David Hoffman?

  There was no onboarding. You had to just go do it. And then the same thing of Web 3. Like, you can't really just like listen to bankless and understand Web 3. You have to go and actually experience it for yourself. And like, this is also true for like, kind of the Web 1.0 days. Like, you couldn't just go read about it. You had to go experience it. It was all community-driven. And now that we have this Web 3 data point, and this Reddit data point, and this Web 1 data point, it kind of all seems that there's some amount of just like, individual-first, community-first, user-self-sovereignty, emergent behavior platforms that the internet is trying to produce. And I'm wondering how you see this, using your history and experience at Reddit,

• 18:40David Hoffman?

  how you see this all unfolding in the world of Web 3 and beyond?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  I think we inadvertently got a lot of things right in a process that really was rooted in an experience growing up on forums. I mean, I ran a PHPBB forum in college. You know, open-source software, ran this, it was called EyesWide.org, had maybe 600, 700 community members active. And we just talked about politics, we talked about philosophy. I just loved doing it in college. And my friends at the time thought I was pretty weird for doing it. But it was, it just felt good to be a community manager. And I just really enjoyed the conversations there. And I felt like it was satisfying. This was right after 9/11.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  It was satisfying a part of me that wasn't getting fed with traditional media. And, you know, starting Reddit right after that, really in a lot of ways, right? This is just repackaging message boards and forums that have been around since the earliest days of the internet. But creating it in a sort of singular network with a slightly better interface, slightly. I still, I got a few things right with the upvotes and downvotes and comment sorting, but some of the other things are a little too Spartan. But designing all that was really just... And a sort of remix of Web 1. And then, you know, the whole innovation of quote unquote Web 2. And look, I know people can roll their eyes at the branding of Web 3.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  This is sort of a necessary evil. We're gonna, just at the same time, I swear, in 2005, starting Reddit, everyone was rolling their eyes the same way around Web 2. And they were just like, oh, this is just some fun JavaScript that lets you load things on the page in real time. Like, why are we calling this a movement and user-generated content? Whatever. Yes, it's all just branding. But it's, I think it's an important shorthand because it is identifying a major transition now. And this isn't my quote, but the idea that, you know, Web 2 was read and write, and now we've moved to Web 3, which is read and write and own, is really meaningful. Because we inadvertently got some things right. And I remember even designing the karma system was just, look, name taken from slash dot.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  The upvotes minus downvotes equals karma score was the laziest implementation I could come up with simply because it worked to encourage good content and discourage bad content. And, you know, it turned out it was very motivating for people because they liked seeing their name on a leaderboard. And I borrowed all kinds of elements from video games for things like awards and 10-year club badges and all these other things, which now people identify with. They'll introduce themselves, not with their government name or their Reddit username. They'll just say, I'm a five-year redditor, a 10-year redditor, a 12, 15-year redditor, right? But those are just pings that live on our server. But now, all of a sudden, if you talk about pings that live on a chain, you now have real receipts, right?

• 21:36Speaker 00

  And my very naive take on this is if it worked without ownership, it will work really well with ownership because there is value in having those receipts. And, and so I really believe in, you know, speaking broadly around Web 2. So this, you know, social media as we know it, as I know you all are younger than me, so as you all grew up with, is probably gonna look like a weird transition. It, I think, in the grand scheme of the internet is actually gonna look like a blip because...

• 22:12Speaker 00

  I don't see one, I don't see, it becomes an intelligence test. Once you provide ownership as to why you would ever want to participate in a scheme. Where you don't actually own the things that you produce.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  The user experiences today are still so janky and I actually don't, I mean, yeah, like we still could have done a better job. I take full responsibility, could have done a better job onboarding new users to Reddit for sure. I think it would have helped us grow a lot faster. I think, don't, don't take, don't have the lesson be make a terrible new user onboarding experience. Make the lesson from this, in spite of a terrible new user onboarding experience. There was something here that people still wanted to dive into, into because the content and the community was so good and so strong. But even if we'd had a better new user onboarding experience, you still would have needed, one still would have needed to like take time to actually understand the community before diving in. And why? Because these online communities are the same as offline communities.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  You move to a new town, if all of a sudden, I don't know where y'all are in the world, but all of a sudden you move.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  The next day to Bangalore, shout out the Redditors who I met at that meetup. You, you, you show up the first day and want to make some friends. You don't just barge into the first, I don't know, meetup you can find, or first restaurant you can find and just start saying hi to people and start pitching whatever you're into, right? That's just not, we as a human, as a species, we're going to spend a little bit of time understanding a new community. We're going to spend a little time observing and watching and listening to start to learn etiquette and culture and all these other things that we can have a good experience. Online communities should work the exact same way. And that's the part that is, on the one hand, it creates friction. But on the other hand, that friction creates the culture and the community and the reason why there are in jokes and there are out jokes.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  And so that's always a tension that we as a species have to figure out and navigate. But it's what defines communities and what's wild now is we know it worked. Social media proved it worked at scale with billions of people all across the world. In spite of the fact that the, the.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  The ownership equation wasn't there. The user experience was, was, all things considered, actually pretty bad. Right? Because at the end of the day, the, the way that you kept the lights on was by harvesting people's private information for advertising or some other version of that, which was not really rewarding the content creators or the community builders at the end of the day. So, I don't know. I think it's going to be a blip. And I know I just monologued at you, but hopefully that's a few lessons that are valuable for the builders of today.

• 24:53David Hoffman?

  Well, we are definitely here to hear your monologues. And so the next monologue I want to hear is unpacking the, the topic of just like emergence. When you don't ascribe too much top-down design structures, as I think, as I claim that like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram have done in their designs, telling the users, well, this is the way that this, this app is structured. Reddit and a lot of the Web one days, and I think what we're seeing a lot in the Web three days is like, just like a basic, here's a fundamental primitive platform for your community to exist. Now go create. You go do something. And like this natural, the creativity that, that a lot of these platforms bestow upon

• 25:36David Hoffman?

  their users gives them a lot of room to have their own emergent behaviors. And what is really emergent behavior, other than like the culture that we all agree on, that we decide that we have value? How, how do you see this like role of emergent behaviors in online communities? Like, how do you see this trajectory moving forward beyond platforms like Reddit and into the world of Web three?

• 25:57Speaker 00

  So, so we are in the earliest days of this year, right? And we're going to see emergent behaviors come up. And, and they're going to define a lot of what we love and enjoy. The wild dynamic here is I actually think at some point, you know, on the adoption curve, on the tech adoption curve, you get to that fat part in the middle. And the average user there actually doesn't want to tinker, doesn't want to create, does not want a blank canvas. The person there, and, and they're a necessary component, right? To become mainstream, you by definition have to grab those folks in the middle. Maybe you don't want to become mainstream, but if you want an idea to truly become mainstream, you need A lot of people who actually are never going to care about that stuff.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  And, and as a product designer and as an investor now, I think a ton about user experience because the user experience for those earliest adopters is different from the user experience of the mainstream. And that's, it's an interesting tension because yes, by its nature, everything on chain is very like, "Good luck, sovereign individual. Wish you all the best. Figure it out for yourself." And look, I consider myself a pretty early adopter. I, I still, however, I want to be coddled in certain parts of my like crypto and web three experience. Because I just like, there are things I want to invest my time in. And then there are other things that I don't. There are things I want to invest my anxiety in. And then there are other things I don't.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  And, and so every user is going to fall somewhere on that sort of tech adoption curve across different technologies and different needs. All that said, the emergent behavior period that we're in right now is fascinating because, I'll give you a specific example, right? Some of the most famous things about Reddit did not come from us. It, it came from our users. So for instance, even the code, the notion of self posts. So the idea, so originally Reddit started, we just let people link out. Uh, that was it. And, and we had a not very good SEO strategy, which meant that our comments pages were just sequentially numbered. So when you posted a new link, it would just, it would be appended with, you know, 3,465.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  And then if you posted one, it would be 3,466. And one of our users realized this and guessed what the link would be when they hit publish and made a self referring post, which created the first self post. We thought that was clever. Okay. Uh, let's just productize that. And so we did. And then it wasn't long thereafter that one of them showed up and said, "Hey, I'm going to, you know, I'm a dental hygienist. Ask me anything." I forget what the original one was. And it was this interesting meme. And, and people loved asking questions of some random person. It wasn't a celebrity. Just had an interesting life or maybe not even that interesting ostensibly. But you get to ask some fun questions and it actually becomes really interesting. And, and you know, AMAs are now ingrained in internet culture. I don't even know how many people actually even know those came from Reddit.

• 28:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We, we have a show called AMA, Ask Me Anything. And it's all from Reddit, right? That's where it originated, AMA.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, well, I'm glad, see, and I'm glad that it has flourished. It is. Totally invented by some random person on the internet, some pseudonymous person, we'll never know. And, and it's probably one of the most famous things that Reddit has done, right? And so that gives us a lens into like how you can benefit from merchant behavior, even when you have a top-down centralized company like we did, which is just, you know, still, still shipping the things we want to ship, but doing so that's pretty well-informed and reactive to interesting stuff we see happen. And, and that is the very nature of everything that is getting built right now. And the problem at the end of the day, any centralized organization still has to make, I mean, it's a gift and a curse. They

• 29:37Speaker 00

  still have to make hard decisions about what to focus on and what not to. Because if you focus on the right thing, like, I don't think SpaceX can happen in a truly decentralized fashion. Maybe someone wants to get out there and get it started, prove me wrong. But I, I really believe, right, something that complex, something that, you know, the average person actually can't contribute to helping SpaceX in a lot of ways, like you actually need rocket scientists to do a lot of that work, kind of thing. There are some projects where you really need centralization, and you could still take lessons from this world, fine. But like, I don't know, I, we'll see if, we'll see if the rocket doubt proves me wrong.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  But the, there are plenty of things, though, where a, a properly incentivized and connected decentralized community will outperform any centralized group a million times out of a million. And content creation is a really great example of that, right? As evidence, you can look at, I mean, even TikTok, which is still one of those web two manifestations, crushing Quibi, didn't matter how many dollars you had, how many A-listers you had, you're never going to compete with millions of teenagers with smartphones able to produce content endlessly that is on trend, that is inventing trends, that's, you know, what people want. Okay. But this- I I'm excited to see now because we get the Web one energy of hey, holy shit.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  I just made a website on GeoCities. Like, what can I do next? And I was that kid, right? That's how I got into programming was was I got I got a book on HTML4 and started building a website on GeoCities and like, this is the coolest thing ever. And I misread the page counter at the bottom. And so I thought, because every time I'd reload to check, you know, I was updating an image or whatever, I assumed it was a random person actually coming to see the website. It's like, oh, my God, there's like 10,000 people on my site. This is amazing. It was just 10,000 page views and it was all me. But right, that changed my life. Now, that in, ah, gosh, I was in, let's see, graduate 2000, what's in 1997? Maybe that's when it was 96, 97. I was 13, 14 years old.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  I had no idea, I could not have even conceived that 10 years later, I'd be designing these upvotes and downvotes and a real time commenting system and a platform like Reddit. Just not even 10 years later. And because my brain was still so naive and so just awestruck with like, oh, shit, I can put an image on the website that on a website that anyone in the world can see. And so we're in a similar stage now where everyone's just kind of like, oh, shit, we can put things on the internet that anyone can see. Like, what can we do next? The difference is, when all of us were doing it back then, you know, aside, except for some forums and message boards, we were pretty siloed, right? This was a sub subculture

• 32:27Speaker 00

  of people building. Today, thanks to the Web two blip, it is now mainstream culture. Internet culture is culture. Everyone is online and spending most of their lives there, right? You could even argue the metaverse has been here, not just with obvious examples like World of Warcraft and Fortnite, but even Instagram. There are people already buying assets. They're buying the Louis Vuitton purse to take a photo of to impress a bunch of digital people with their digital asset, which just happens to be a photo of them wearing the purse that 99.9999% of people will never actually see them with. So the metaverse is here, it's just not evenly distributed. And we're still in this interesting tinker phase of creation, except we have an audience

• 33:11Speaker 00

  that is global and ready and excited by what we're building. And so instead of it taking the next Alexis 10 years to be like, oh, I can make a website on GeoCities to, hey, I'm launching this thing called Reddit. It's gonna take, it's gonna take them 10 weeks, 10 months? I don't know, but the rate of innovation is gonna happen so much faster. And, and I'm, this is why I'm so excited by this. This is why, like, I don't have to be working right now, but the reason I needed to start 776, the reason I need to spend the time that I spend building this and working with amazing founders is because like this is building a new internet for my daughter and lots of people's kids to inherit. And I'm just amazed that I get to participate in it.

• 33:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is awesome. And this is exactly the, you know, the, the energy I think that we see in the space. I'm curious about this because I think there are a lot of probably 14, 15 year olds listening, you know, to Bankless and exploring the web three space in the same way you were when you were that age, like building stuff on GeoCities, right? And I'm curious if you could like, I guess, put yourself in the shoes of, let's say, you only, rather than you in, in 2005, when you started Reddit, you're in like the year 2022. And you've got these new web three primitives that are basically, we, we have the web one, web two communication protocol primitives.

• 34:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's great, but now we have this ownership protocol primitive now. How would you re-

• 34:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Build a Reddit, or how would you build the next big thing? Like, put these ingredients together for us, because you've got this expertise around communities, this experience with Reddit. Now, you've seen the potential of all of these new ownership primitives that are coming in Web 3. What would it look like? You know, a new Reddit, for example?

• 35:04Speaker 00

  I would think of Reddit a little bit like Craigslist, or a little bit like entrepreneurs 15 years ago thought about Craigslist, and not just because of the aesthetic similarities. But if you'll recall, you know, there were a couple of plucky founders in YC who we had backed, who were going after a section of Craigslist called Rentals. And they said, "Look, like, people can rent, you know, a bedroom for a couple of days on Craigslist, but the user experience is terrible, right? It doesn't feel safe at all. And we're going to build something called Airbnb, which will make it beautiful for people to feel safe renting out or renting someone's spare bedroom."

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Someone made this great mock-up of how all of these businesses basically carved up parts of Craigslist to offer verticalized sections of that platform. And so the way I would think about it is, you know, there are all these emergent community behaviors that we saw across Reddit over almost two decades, across all kinds of different things, from raising hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in a fundraiser, to trying to coordinate dollars to, like, name a bowl game off of r/cfb, the college football subreddit, to, you know, even just creating artwork, giving creators, like, shitty watercolor, a platform where they could just make great content.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  And so you start thinking about this, and you're like, "Okay, well..." I commented somewhere, I think I was on another pod, and I got asked about DAOs, or I guess it was ambitious predictions for the next five years. I think everyone, or a material number of people are going to participate in a DAO over the next five years. They won't know it, they don't need to know what it's called. Remember, the average person doesn't know what a hypertext transfer protocol is. They don't need to. They just need to know that they want to go on the internet and visit a website. And- We should be thinking about NFTs the same way. We should be thinking about DAOs the same way, right? These are underlying protocols. We are so damn down in the weeds. The average person only cares about user experience. The average person only talks about user experience. That's the thing they tell their friends when they use something delightful, right?

• 37:14Speaker 00

  They're not talking about the protocol layer to make it happen. They're talking about, oh, I did this dope thing. You should come do it with me. And so that's, if I'm, if I'm building here, I'm thinking about this stuff. And I'm thinking about how do we abstract away so much of the crappy parts of the user interface to make it seamless for people to get value out of this new technology? And so maybe it is pooling money together so that you can buy the constitution. And you know, there's, there's, there's probably a dozen companies now trying to do some version of the easy DAO. But thinking along those lines is what is going to get this all to the next level. And, and again, it's exciting. I wake up every morning like a kid on Christmas day because I'm like frantically on Twitter

• 37:58Speaker 00

  and catching up on some discords, just trying to see what I missed, just trying to see what else shipped and what else is happening. And, and so I would spend a lot of time actively engaged in the communities of builders who impress you the most, right? Follow them on Twitter, be a part of Telegram groups that you feel are high signal. Discord community is like, this is where the learning is happening in public. There are so many charlatans. It breaks my heart, all the charlatans in this space. I don't Ty Lopez just did an F T job. Like they suck. I hate, hate, hate, hate that part of it. It's a, it is a, unfortunately, a, you know, it is a reality, right? When you create, when you have a system like this, especially one that involves money and value creation like this, right? It's going to attract grifters.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  It's going to attract charlatans and you know, I cannot ever endorse any of them, but I realize they're a part of the process. So the, the best thing we can do is just shun them and hopefully encourage them to build real things. And But I would say stay away from the, stay away from quick cash grabs. Being long-term greedy in this environment is going to be so much more selfish and such a smarter move financially than being short-term greedy. And so that's, that's my like, it's one of my mantras.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Because if you're really creating something of long-term value for as many people as possible, like that actually in this system is going to create a lot of outsized value for you in the long run. But also do the thing that we need, which is building things that people actually want and, and actually sort of moves the needle on progress, not just another lazy cash grab.

• 39:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think people forget that the best asset they have in the web one, web two, web three space is their reputation and that, that remains so for sure.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  I was fundraising from a pretty well-known, I could say it's Peter Thiel. And this was, we were, they, they passed incidentally and, um, but he asked, he asked me, this was a long time ago, but he asked me, he's like, what's one thing about the world that you realize other people don't or whatever? The canonical Peter Thiel question. And I was like, well, it's that people will care more about their Reddit username than their government name. And I, I think I got it half right. I do know that that is true now. It's, you know, five years later, six years later. And there are so many Redditors who care more about their identity, even though it's totally contrived, it's fluffybunny16. Because that's where they have relationships. That's where they have fame. That's where they have whatever, a history of things that they've created.

• 40:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Purpose.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  They have something, right? They have meaning. They have community. Whereas they could show up for work at the office, I mean, for an office, but you can show up for work at the office every day, see the same people every day and not have any kind of connection with them. And that is special. And so I say I got it half right because I will now apply that argument to what is being created in web three. I believe wholeheartedly, the online identity, the digital identity, which will more often than not be synonymous, is going to be more valuable to more people than their government name. And incidentally, as a species, this is not totally new. And I learned this at, we sponsored a DragCon, gosh, this was like 2014, 2015. And I remember talking to a couple of folks during the AMAs and a couple of these queens

• 41:15Speaker 00

  said, like, we were talking on the subject and they were like, don't you understand, our entire culture is around a community of people who have decided, we want to create an identity for ourselves, right? This is the truest expression of ourself and doesn't usually align with what's on the government-issued ID, but it's who we are. And I'm sitting here like, okay, here is now a very clear offline precedent for this. The internet now enables it at a much greater scale, but still preserves this level of intimacy. And now that you add ownership to it, I mean, get out of the way. This is going to keep growing and steamrolling. And like I said, you might be sitting here, listening to this podcast, thinking, well, like, I don't actually want to spend all my time online.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  I never could imagine getting excited about a digital asset. And I just remind you of, I remind you that Instagram photo you took of that great outfit, because you're actually already participating in this in a way, because you're, you've created a digital self, you have a digital identity that you probably care just as much, if not more about than your offline one. That's why, that's why these apps are so popular. And that part, for the generation coming up, is, it's already hardwired. There's no, for, for this generation of true, true digital natives now, there's no turning that clock back, because it's such an empowering thing to have it, that I don't see it going back.

• 42:42David Hoffman?

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• 43:27David Hoffman?

  your assets between ETH, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Bova Networks.

• 43:32David Hoffman?

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• 44:16David Hoffman?

  If you're going Bankless, you need MetaMask. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi without giving up custody over your private keys. MetaMask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any DEX or aggregator. MetaMask Swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the DeFi exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the MetaMask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. MetaMask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I use to collect PoApps, NFTs, and do all my DeFi things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded MetaMask, you gotta try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download MetaMask for desktop and mobile at metamask.io and load up your Trezor,

• 44:59David Hoffman?

  Ledger, Lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3.

• 45:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know the last, the last concept I think we want to talk about is, you know, conceptually, because I think you're making a great case for, for Web3 throughout this. And to me, Web3 more resembles Web1 than it does like Web2, right? In that everything is, so I read the, the book that you wrote, I don't know, it was back in 2013, 2014, without their permission, right? It's a deep cut. Yeah, so with, yeah, deep cut. I went on the deep cut and so, but I think that the concept of without their permission is like with Web1, anybody could create a website, launch an app, start a community. Build a company, no permission required, no intermediary, right?

• 45:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I feel like between web two and web one and web two, we sort of lost a piece of that. You know, Chris Dixon calls it a little bit like the internet became Disney Disneyland. We've got like a few centralized companies that kind of control all the property. Didn't feel like New York City, didn't feel like Brooklyn. There was nothing organic about it. And now I feel like web three is starting to recapture that element. I'm wondering if you could talk about this, this maybe last concept of permissionlessness. Why is that so fundamental? Why is that so necessary?

• 46:18Speaker 00

  So I believe it is fundamental and necessary for tremendous creativity. I do look at this stuff as cycles. And I do think we're at the start of a new, excuse me, to your point, I think similar to web one, we're at the start of a new cycle where it is sort of inherently, well, it is inherently decentralized. And where now we have a bunch of people just figuring out what we can do, and they don't have to ask for permission to go do it. Ultimately, as you work your way up that tech adoption curve we talked about earlier, you're going to get to folks who want a certain amount of, not necessarily centralization, although in some cases, yes, but they just want a different user experience because they don't want to do all that work, right?

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Like, at a certain point, MySpace just touched on potentially what people wanted as a social network. But Facebook really nailed the simplicity of, and the timing, frankly, of being able to share photos really at the core of it, right? I was at this thing, I took a photo of you. You get an email notification that says, hey, I took a photo of you and you want to go see it. And that was the viral loop that spun up. And it was a perfect storm of timing more than anything else. They just got a bunch of people to be like, okay, MySpace felt a little, I don't know, but now the timing was right and okay. But for everything that's coming now, you have an underlying permissionlessness in the very technology that is going to stay,

• 47:47Speaker 00

  even as we see it centralized more and more, because. You're gonna, what's a good, a simple example of this is even like, let's just take custody at a very basic level. Right? There are still plenty of, I mean, there's, there's good reasons to also maintain your own storage. Uh, and, and have cold wallets and all that stuff, but on a simple human level. There are a bunch of people who would just rather know Coinbase is holding their Bitcoin. Cause they don't want to think about it. They don't want to worry about it. They don't want to think, oh, geez, my seed phrase, my ledger, where they, right? They're optimizing freezer experience and they're willing to trade some of that decentralization that's inherent in the technology for some centralization.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  And so the good news is the underlying technology is itself unruinable. And so even as we watch this develop over the next 10, 20 years, we won't see another Disneyland-ification. Because the atomic units of money and identity are still owned by individuals. And so I, look, I'm not a hardcore crypto anarchist. I actually, again, I, my north star here. And this is, I think, just as a product builder, still always comes back to user experience. What, what, what ends up winning a thousand times out of a thousand is along those lines of a user experience and, and making something people want. That is the motto of Y Combinator for a reason. And so what heartens me though is because this underlying technology is decentralized.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Even as we start to see people, and as it goes more and more mainstream, being willing to make the trade-offs and saying like, actually, no, I don't want total permissionless for the, I don't want total permissionlessness. Permissionlessness is not a feature for me. It's a bug. Like I just, I'm fine with that. You still have a fundamental structure that is itself permissionless and the builders can always keep building and that.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  In the same way that markets. And you're seeing, you know, meme stocks are just a reflection of what's already, what's, it's the, it's an old system being sort of radically affected by new tools. But the new system has this sort of, you know, baked into it, right? Whether it was all the things with DeFi, whether it's been here now with NFTs. Markets, I mean, even just looking at tokens as compensation, right? We're seeing more and more employees even working fiat jobs, looking for tokens as a signing bonus. We're going to see more and more people taking multiple gigs, getting paid in tokens. What happens when, you know, traditionally a startup founder, you know,

• 50:21Speaker 00

  we compensate every one of our employees at Reddit with Reddit stock or options specifically, and eventually RSUs, and these things are not liquid at all, right? There's an inevitable future here where those employees are going to get paid in tokens. What does that do to a world where now there's a market available? You could wake up one morning and realize, hey, look at that. Like Elon Musk just tweeted about my company. My tokens have 10xed. I'm going to sell a few of them and put a down payment on a house. Like, that will be a reality, right? And so this notion of liquidity is having a tremendous effect on shaping markets, on shaping behaviors, and we're seeing it, right? Whether it's GameStop getting memified, whether it's, you know, different tokens popping off, whether it's all this stuff with NFTs.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  You're now going to see a scenario where we play this out five years, 10 years, for anyone who's building, where your users are actually just as sort of liquid. Because now you don't actually own all the keys to the kingdom. Because it's not like, yeah, Google lets you download all of your data, and Facebook ostensibly lets you download all of your data. But the process is cumbersome, it's a pain in the ass. Like, it's not, it's not really a feature of it, right? They're deliberately doing that. But now users have all the authority and you saw this a little bit with OpenSea, like very, very ingenious approach because it all lives in a public database, right?

• 51:47Speaker 00

  You can now overnight reward a user base that you don't actually have and potentially bring them over to care about your platform, right? That the market of companies, of startups, still has not fully processed this new world because it hasn't really, it's still in its infancy, right? But in the same way that financial markets are rapidly going to have to and are adapting to this liquidity, it's going to happen across every front, even users. And that's rooted in the fact that you will actually own your identity online. You will actually own those photos you uploaded. You'll actually have the receipts of the time you spent, right? And so to, you know, put it specifically, right?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  You've got now, the bar is going to be so much higher for platform creators and builders in web three to maintain and earn attention and time. And I think that's a good thing. I think it means you really have to earn your users every day. And that's a thing, like we would say this, I'd walk around the office, be like, we've got to earn our users today, right? We have to be shipping features that they want. We have to be creating a great user experience. We have to be, you know, creating community events. We have to be doing things to earn our users every day. But it was kind of a metaphor because people couldn't, I mean, they could leave, but tomorrow it will be literal. And, and that's a very exciting new world to be living in because it gives, I think

• 53:13Speaker 00

  it more, much more fairly gives the value back to the people who have been creating all of it for so long. And I, that's a whole nother, I mean, it, we're, we've barely even started to see it happen yet, but we will. And it's going to be pretty exhilarating to watch.

• 53:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the way I've explained this this concept is that everyone on Ethereum or everyone in on in crypto is always just one transaction away from being somewhere completely different.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:41David Hoffman?

  Like you're it's so you're so close to everything else as being built. And so the ability to migrate is is so low that it almost incentivizes it at times.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:52David Hoffman?

  Alexis, I'm going to ask you the the impossible question. I know no one can actually predict the future, but I'm going to ask you to do it anyways. There are so many things in Web three. We got DAOs, we got NFTs, we got tokens, we got permissionless communities. And you're a veteran of much of the Internet. And so I'm wondering what you really see as like,

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  what's on the horizon? What are these primitives that we're talking about? And not only just with like tokens, but also the the properties, like the permissionlessness and the community first aspect of Web three? What do you seeing on the horizon as like colliding with Web three? Like what is where is Web three really going to the where the rubber is going to meet the pavement? That you're seeing that you're hopeful that we build out in the short term?

• 54:37Speaker 00

  One thing that really clearly dawned on me over the last couple of years was, so if I give someone the chance to sell 10 ETH or N ETH, whatever, one ETH, or an NFT worth one ETH, they will be more likely to sell the the one ETH or whatever the amount is. And and non-fungibility is actually for our species a lot more valuable than we realize. And is it rational? No, but humans are not rational creatures. And when I think about when I think about how

• 55:22Speaker 00

  We start to build

• 55:25Speaker 00

  utility into NFTs as an underlying technology. I mean, we're still in the, again, these are the simplest, stupidest days of it, right? We are, we're still at GeoCities here. And as we start to understand more and more utility, whether it is, you know, getting, I mean, we've seen examples of this, right? Restaurants using it as exclusive membership, or, you know, hopefully maybe one day at a golf course to get in, or you get on the list of different utility that is offline. But then you start thinking about what we can do, even if it's just allowing people access to online communities, allowing them access to coordinate, and even just have spontaneous meetings. I like, there's just,

• 56:08Speaker 00

  we know that communities already, and Reddit is a great precedent for this, where there is no incentive other than we have a community, we have a culture, you're part of it. We know that those work at scale massively well, and they'll do amazing things together, from raising money for total strangers to getting together offline. We know all this, there's a precedent for that. Seeing the infrastructure that gets built up around enabling communities in Web 3 is, is one of the things I'm most excited about over the next year or two, because we're going to start to see more and more people doing more and more clever things that pushes everyone to be like, oh, that was clever. Okay, I'm gonna do something better now. And that rate of innovation can happen so much faster now, thanks to, you know, the internet, social media, all that stuff, we're all watching, we're all building in public. And that's going to increase the rate of innovation.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  And I think even, like, I don't know, it's hard, I know, okay. The things I'm betting on are the things that are creating this kind of infrastructure around community or these communities themselves, right? I'm a pretty out and well-known ape holder from, from pretty early on. I'm very excited to see what happens in the coming months around all things Board API Club. And even that, actually, you know, the reason I ape'd in, in like May or June or whenever last year was because they launched with a board. The like the only, the only quote unquote utility, but it was novel at the time was that you could visit a part of the website, right? To be able to mess around on the bathroom

• 57:35Speaker 00

  wall, which was a total homage to r slash place, which was a Reddit April Fools' Day thing we did with pixels that was collaborative and the Uglab's team admitted, said as much. And I saw this and I'm like, oh, cool. This is like Reddit, but now I'm in. And, and again, I'm not the, I don't need to be the smartest guy in the room. I just need to be looking for things that I know worked 10 years ago when there was no real ownership involved. And, and as I'm seeing this stuff start to progress, I just can't help but feel like we will see real utility evolve. We'll see technologies that will make it even more valuable to either own NFTs with robust communities, or maybe find ways to access

• 58:18Speaker 00

  and get in and to further democratize it, right? It doesn't, it doesn't help if you just create a bunch of exclusive communities that only a few people can be a part of when there's, you know, millions and millions and millions, billions of people on this planet. And so that's obviously going to have to find ways to scale. I'm excited to see the stuff that does that because this connective tissue is, it's so strong. It's so incredibly strong. And again, if, if we know it works without real ownership, then by adding that really important element, it should grow even faster and even stronger.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  And, and then you start imagining ways for more and more onramps to exist. This is, this is probably another big area, whether, I mean, I backed Lolly because I was excited to see more people get into Bitcoin just from shopping online. You just passively, just like with Honey, except in Bitcoin, you save money on buying things you normally buy online. And for folks who would never even consider ever opening an investment account on Coinbase, you're now a Bitcoin holder. And, and you're now creating wallets for a whole hell of a lot of people who will probably, they're at the other end of that adoption curve when it comes to investing in crypto. They're now crypto holders. They're now wallet holders. And the onramps are the other really exciting area for me because...

• 59:45Speaker 00

  The, look, it, crypto is still a very male-dominated industry. We have, again, long-term greedy incentives to bring more women into Web 3. Because if we just look at the data from Web 2, women outperform on social media. They out-consume it, they out-create it, right? The engagement numbers, the things that we need in order to get Web 3 into the mainstream, will only happen with women. And so, I'm particularly excited about that as another on-ramp. In terms of things I'll be investing in, and things that we'll be spending our time in with 776, because it's, it has to happen. And the sooner it happens, the better it is for all of us.

• 1:00:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Alexis, with 776, I know it's over $350 million or something in assets under management? Like with the second raises or something?

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  750, but you know, that was our last, so our, yes, now 750. It's been a busy year.

• 1:00:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And is this, so is this all going to be deployed in like?

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Actually, that was probably, that's funny. Yeah, that was, I'm sure that was what it was up until a few weeks ago. Yeah, sorry.

• 1:00:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you just, yeah, it's just, it keeps going up. Is this, is this, are you mainly focusing this towards crypto? Or is like crypto and Web 3, is that just a portion of the portfolio? Notice you let around in Rainbow Wallet, which is absolutely fantastic. It's an NFT wallet that I think is everything you've talked about, which is like making the user experience in Web 3 actually good. But how much of the fund is allocated towards Web 3 versus other areas?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  It's not specific. I mean, it's not like redlined in, but a majority of the companies we're going to invest in are Web 3. We still, you know, we vested in a reusable rocket company called Stoke. So we're doing space tech, we're doing climate tech, we're doing food tech. We're doing some boring, you know, traditional software businesses, SaaS businesses too. But a little over majority is going to be crypto.

• 1:01:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. What else are you up to on chain? I noticed you, you just launched a project on the, a proof project on Grails. What is this about?

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Loved, I loved seeing your community ask about that. Yeah, my old arch-nemesis CEO, Kevin Rose, we've become pals over the last couple of years. And he's, he's been so, so spot on with, with NFT art culture. And he launched this project called Proof. It's a community of. You know, some artists, but also curators went on and he asked me to be a part of this drop where they, it was brilliant. Like they brought 20 artists, well 19 amazing artists and me together, didn't tell anyone who made the art and simply gave the opportunity for all these Proof members to mint, I think it was one or two, depending on how many passes

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  they had. So they could mint artwork for themselves, but not know who the artist is. And a lot of the artists were encouraged to sort of hide their identity in the art so that people were buying the art based solely on the vibes. Like, did they like the art? And then there was a big reveal. And this was amazing. I mean, you had the, really the who's who. That one, that Protograph from Larva Labs is like the original punk. It's like the OG punk code. So there's a bunch of amazing stuff. And so I did my first ever NFT artwork for it because it was a pretty amazing opportunity. And I was like, all right, I can dust off the old illustrator. That's a photo that my wife took of me in Olympia. And I'm really into low poly art for the last year or so. And so I just decided

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  to make, it's my first, I did a lot of snu doodles over the years, our Reddit mascot. I've done hundreds of those. This was my first time doing low poly art, but it was fun. And yeah, I was happy your community was asking about it. I might have to, might have to put out some more artwork.

• 1:03:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are excited about it. And we've had Kevin on the podcast before. So people are familiar with what's going on there. It's really cool. You guys are, you know, teaming up on some of this stuff. I guess as we draw to a close, Alexis, and this has been super insightful for us. You know, thank you very much. Kind of the final question for me is, there's been an increasing amount of pessimism, I think, about the internet. Like, some people say the internet's best years are behind us, right? We have like social media toxicity, this feeling of being preyed upon by large tech companies, all of these things. But I think you're optimistic about the future of the internet. Give us the case for why we should be optimistic about the future of the internet.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Ah, because we have to be. Because if we're pessimistic, we can't possibly build the better internet that we want. I, I think the criticisms about social media are very valid, very valid. I, I think we, we have an opportunity now to remove,

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  hmm, to reimagine the, like, we basically saw one version. We saw one timeline. And so we've learned how to build a lot of stuff. We, we have a blueprint for how things can work. And now we get to build another timeline, taking those lessons and reimagining a lot of those technologies now with ownership and with decentralization at its core. And I think the point, you know, for me personally, and, and folks know how I resigned from the, from the Reddit board and protest last, or a little over a year ago now. Um, I think we, we get a chance now to not have a centralized platform

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  making decisions that provide reach to specific ideas and not others. And I think this is an important distinction because first off, freedom of reach is nowhere in our constitution. Um, and, and when you have a centralized platform, putting something out to millions and millions of people, it's a tacit endorsement, right? Having, looking, scrolling through a feed and seeing, you know, oh, look, my uncle just got a new job. And oh, look how cute my niece is. And oh, like, this vaccine is putting a microchip into my brain. Like, that context matters because that context is normalizing stuff

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  and providing reach, tremendous reach, weaponized reach.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  That is not something that's a founding principle of our democracy and is creating really harmful impacts on our society. And so what I like about this, I hope, I really hope it'll be a renaissance with Web 3, is I know those toxic parts of our society are still going to be there. They're always going to be there. They have always been there. They will continue to be there. But we will not be reliant or victim to a handful of platforms making decisions or not making decisions about what belongs and what doesn't. And I actually think we're all going to be better off for it because it's going to be a chance to reset. And I don't know, we'll see. We obviously got a lot of work to do in this

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  country to help normalize things. But from a technological standpoint, but from an internet standpoint, I do think the internet's best years are ahead of it. And I really do believe that in 50 years, we will look back on Web 2 as being a blip, as being a sort of an errant thread in the timeline where, you know, we made some mistakes and now we got to spend the next few decades hopefully writing them.

• 1:07:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well said. Opportunity reset. The best years of the internet are still ahead. Alexis Sahanian, thank you so much for joining us on Bankless. This was a pleasure, my friend.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  My pleasure. Thanks, Ryan.

• 1:07:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items for you guys. Bankless Nation, a couple of them for you. First, learn more about 776. That is Alexis VC firm that you could check out. Number two, check out Alexis's art on Proof Collective. We'll include a link to the tweet thread where that was launched.

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me know what you think.

• 1:07:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And the third thing is go download the Rainbow Wallet. We just talked about it. And it is really a must have if you're into NFTs. Absolutely fantastic. Of course, guys, wrist and disclaimers, none of this has been financial advice. It never is. Bitcoin is risky. So is ETH. So is DeFi. All this stuff is risky. You could lose what you put in. There's still rough edges, as we talked about. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:08:23David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:09:08David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.