#1159 Shane Mac | Private, Secure Texting Disrupts iMessage

Shane Mac is the co-founder & CEO of XMTP Labs. In this conversation, we talk about decentralized messaging, what exactly happens when you send an encrypted message, how XMTP hopes to build the protocol that various applications & technologies can be built on top to empower private direct messaging. This is an important problem, and they are working diligently to come up with a solution that can usher in global adoption of private messaging. ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more. The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40. General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Shane Mack is the co-founder and CEO of XMTP Labs. In this conversation, we talk about decentralized messaging. What exactly happens when you send an encrypted message?

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  How XMTP hopes to build the protocol that various applications and other types of technologies are built on top to empower private direct messaging. This is an important problem, and Shane and his team are working diligently to come up with a solution that will work in ushering global adoption of private messaging. After you get done listening to this conversation, jump on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you disagree with. The feedback's always helpful and helps us improve the listening experience. Here is my conversation with Shane Mack.

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  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Shane here with me. I thought a great place to start is there's this big, big problem in the crypto world that most people don't understand unless you are an active user of many of the products or applications. And it's this private direct messaging, the ability for one wallet to communicate with another. You guys are building a solution for it. But explain like, what is the problem? Why is this such a big thing that no one has seemed to be able to crack yet?

• 3:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a good question. Let's go back to how it started. So a few years ago, you know, I'd been in messaging for almost 15 years now and building on top of mostly web two platforms, SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp, and seeing the whole rise of kind of centralized messaging. And Robert Leschner, who was the CEO and the co-founder of Compound Labs, probably one of the biggest DeFi platforms, 2020, so right around pandemic time, he came to Matt and I and we were just kind of thinking about ideas. I, you know, I was in a lockup for my last company to get acquired. Matt wasn't sure what he wanted to do yet because he, his last company got acquired by Kraken. And we both are passionate about communication. And I didn't really see it. I was like, well, how would you talk to a wallet, et cetera? And Robert said to us, listen, guys,

• 4:12Speaker 05

  I have $11 billion in a smart contract. I know every single person's address and I can't send a message to them. He's like, imagine a bank had every customer in their bank and they couldn't send them an email. He's like, it's a huge problem. He's like, I need to be able to communicate. I need to tell them about staking, liquidation events coming, new regulation that's happening with Compound. The government's probably going to have regulation that they're going to require us to send to say, hey, you're an investor in this new DeFi protocol and pool. Like, here's the documents. None of that exists. He's like, trillions of dollars are sent between wallet addresses every day and you can't send an email.

• 4:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Because what ultimately his problem was, is there was a product and basically these were users of that product. And it's the company or the product can't communicate with those users. Usually when people think of private messaging, they're thinking like two random users on the internet want to communicate with each other outside of company's products, et cetera. But this actually started because it was somebody saying, hey, I have all these people using this. There's tons of economic value here, but I can't communicate with the people who are essentially the customers or the product users. Huge problem. And I think easier to understand why that's a problem versus maybe two individuals who just want to communicate with each other.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Totally. I think the peer-to-peer use case is actually kind of hard to see right now. You're like WhatsApp works great. iMessage works great because your identity is already there. So the question is, is there a new identity? And if there is, communication protocols usually follow. And I think what's happening is the wallet address is becoming the new identity. And there's new interactions where that is the only thing that you used. So in this scenario, Robert Leshner didn't have your email. A lot of Web 3 and DeFi and all of the crypto space, actually the wallet is the login. That's the whole point. You own it, your assets. Now you can own your communication with that wallet login. And I think what's happening is whenever you have that new identity pop up, there's new relationships that form and those new relationships enable a new communication protocol. And that's kind of like where we're at in the shift. And I think it started in a very B to C type use case.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Like I'm a DeFi protocol and I need to talk to these 12,000 wallet holders. Cause the only thing I have are people giving me money in their wallet address. How can I talk to them? And that really kind of like was the spark of the idea. And around the same time, Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park was on a clubhouse back in 2020 when we're all just hanging out, you know, everyone's just sitting at home drinking wine and you're like, what is going to happen in the world? And he's like, talking about the day he got rugged by Facebook. They had the largest Facebook audience in the world at one time. And he was like, all of a sudden, I couldn't reach any fans. And when he saw the NFT, he didn't see like, oh, make money on this art and stuff. He saw, hey, this NFT gives me a wallet address.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  That address is public on a ledger. If I have a million people that own my NFT, can anyone take that audience from me? Can anyone take those million addresses that are like, have a basically a connection and a consent mechanism to say, hey, I have a tie to this community. I own your token. And he's like, no. And that was like the spark when Matt called me. He's like, hey, something's happening here with this DeFi stuff, but also now this NFT stuff's happening, where I think there's a new relationship that is going to form. And that was really where it was then. And today I think it's grown a lot where I see it as a whole different mechanism by which the next WhatsApps of the world are going to be built on top of decentralized technology,

• 7:34Speaker 05

  like an X MTP. But back then, that's really how it started with solving that problem.

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you kind of zoom out for a second, right? And I'm going to use the term crypto to describe an entire industry, but there's obviously various protocols. There's different DeFi products. There's kind of all the fragmentation that you would expect to kind of pop up when there's new technology and innovation happening. Where did you guys kind of initially start, right? There's Bitcoin, there's Ethereum, and then there's like this long tail of other smart contract platforms. Then there's all the products. Like, how did you guys think about initially starting and just saying like, how does this work?

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Totally. I go back to the Robert Lesnar story and really the DeFi world and the NFT kind of thing. So we started in the EVM world, but we're not on-chain messaging because it doesn't scale and it's actually not that private or secure. And so it's using the public-private key pair of the wallets to enable communication between the wallets. But because it's not on-chain, it's not dependent on EVM. So we could do it on Bitcoin, on Solana. It doesn't really matter.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  But this is really an important data point, I think, because for those that don't know, you can put messages on a blockchain, right?

• 8:38Speaker 05

  We started there, actually.

• 8:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And there are messages that are, you know, stupid things that people kind of put in and it's funny, whatever. People have written inscriptions into various blockchains because they're announcing, they want to kind of cement the company milestone or something like that. There's even been cases where I think in China, there was some freedom of speech and there was like an incident on the college campus around sexual assault and one of the people kept getting censored. So they literally just wrote it into the Ethereum blockchain and became this like, you know, kind of national thing. But you guys are not actually doing that because you said it's not private. I'm assuming it's expensive to some degree on some of these changes.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  It just doesn't really scale.

• 9:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Explain kind of like, why can't you do it on the blockchain even though you could write messages on blockchain?

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Totally. And people are actually doing it where like, you know, almost like when you send an NFT and you can put metadata on it, right? They're doing it in that way. But when you think about privacy and security, and if you care about that, and when we talk to every developer in the industry, all of them are like, I want private and secure messaging. And if you start thinking about the metadata that comes along with that, so who's talking to who? When are messages sent? All that stuff is on a blockchain. And to make that private, you really can't use a blockchain to do that. And so it's been very intentional to actually use the wallets and the public, private key pair as the mechanism by which you're sending and verifying who you are. But the messages are sent in an off-chain way to protect privacy and security and to be able to scale.

• 10:06Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at how it's built today, what exactly is happening? So do I have my wallet, which has all of my assets? And then I've got like a separate inbox where I'm receiving messages and sending them? Or how is like the user experience of the wallet holder?

• 10:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there's over 250 applications already built on top of X M T P. And you can think of it like an email client, an iMessage client. I actually have this app on my phone that I use for X M T P. That is literally iMessage for X M T P. And it looks like iMessage and it is iMessage. And what's changing is

• 10:41Speaker 05

  The application layer can be anything. So it can look like an email client, it can look like an iMessage client, it can look like a DM client. We're the entire DM layer of Lens. So if you use any Lens ecosystem app, it's like a decentralized Twitter. The DM layer is XMTP, and it allows you to communicate within anyone within the Lens ecosystem, but in this world with any wallet in the entire ecosystem.

• 11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's take the XMTP client that you have that looks like iMessage on your phone.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  That's a company called Converse that built that.

• 11:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so Converse. If I'm using that and I say, I want to send a message to you, what's happening? I type into my phone, right? What is kind of the sequence of events between when I type into the phone and you actually receive the message?

• 11:25Speaker 05

  Totally. So first off is identity. So you're picking an identity and mapping it to your wallet address, usually. You don't have to, you can use a ZRX address, that's fine. I'm typing in shane mac dot eth, it's resolving to my wallet address. Then I'm typing up a message in the app. The app is then encrypting it, it's fully end-to-end encrypted. And we want to like shoot for signal protocol level encryption, right? Like, that's really the goal here, is to get to that level so that everyone has that out of the box when they plug into the network. It's sent through the nodes, the node operators are actually where you get to where it becomes decentralized. And so they're delivering the message to the other client, and the private key on the other side is the only thing that can

• 12:08Speaker 05

  access the message. So the private key is actually the decryption mechanism. And the thing that's changing here is, in the past, take WhatsApp for example, login with WhatsApp is their identity, their app, their servers, right? In this world, you can use any identity that maps to wallet address, any application. In a decentralized network like XMC.

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So any identity means that, let's say, for example, Facebook for a while, it became a huge thing that you couldn't get a four-letter identification anymore. So facebook.com/whateverusername, you would have to know somebody at the company to get four letters, right? Five letters, if it was available, you could have it. If it was six letters, whatever, but four letters or less, they wouldn't give it to you because they decided that that wasn't a identity that they thought was applicable to their service. Here, whether it's one letter, 20 letters, whatever name.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Dot Lens, dot ENS.

• 13:10Anthony Pompliano?

  As long as you just map it to the wallet address, you can use it.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Now, and it's decentralized. So the ENS community, dot ETH, right? The Lens community, I'm Shane Mac dot Lens. The unstoppable domains, like, it doesn't matter. And so you just have to know what it is, right? But then you own that, and you own that identity. And I think that's a pretty major shift where you can take your identity with you. And if you think about, like, what's really interesting is, the same way a wallet can access your assets, in the way we're constructed and how this works, any application can access your communication. And if today, you're using an app, and the only way to get your messages is through that same app, you don't own your communication.

• 13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, through the application itself, like, you're using this one specifically for this one client, but really, the idea is that you could have any client, anywhere, built. Now, can I go across clients, right? It's like, one of the things that I think when people start understanding the silos in finance, they're like, if I have PayPal, and you have Cash App, I can't send you money, right? So there's these siloed kind of payment systems. Obviously, the promise of some of these technologies, like Bitcoin, Lightning Network, other platforms, is now there's interoperability. So if you're using Client A, and somebody else is using Client B, if they're both plugged into Lightning Network, for example, then they can send between those platforms. Is the same thing true with messaging here and across these different applications?

• 14:36Speaker 05

  Totally. That's exactly right. It's actually the magic of the whole thing. It's a portable inbox. So when I go to the Lens app, there's one called Orb that I like. It's awesome. It's a beautiful app. Click DMs. It's the same DMs that show up in Converse. And the moment that you sign you with your key and the private key decrypts and you can take your messages with you to any application. I think is the aha moment where people go, oh yeah, I have 12 messaging apps on my phone. I can't get anything out of there. I don't own the relationships. I don't own the network. I don't own the data. I don't own the identity and I'm stuck within this ecosystem and I can't take anything with me. And that's kind of the fundamental shift is can we build a global, private, secure messaging like network and protocol?

• 15:19Speaker 05

  Where thousands of applications can be built and the next WhatsApps, the next Twilio's, the next Sendgrits, the next billion dollar companies are built on top of X and TP.

• 15:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Now you said that the messages go through the various nodes. What nodes are those?

• 15:32Speaker 05

  So today X M T P Labs, our company runs the nodes. We're working really hard to get decentralized so that other parties are running nodes and have a test nut running by H2. And at that point, the nodes will be ran by third parties delivering that, you know, they're just servers that are delivering messages. But they're incentivized by the applications paying into the ecosystem to fund the nodes that are actually a decentralized network to deliver the messages and make sure that they're delivered in a secure way.

• 16:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the idea would be that me as a user, I'll say a sender of a message, you as a recipient, we're not picking which node path or anything like that. It's literally just the nodes are able to get the message from me to you. And even if at some point it's intercepted or delivered to somebody else, it's all encrypted. So without the private keys from your wallet, no one else can read that message.

• 16:21Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, how do you think about the response from the signals, from the iMessages, from the, you know, various messaging platforms like a WhatsApp, whatever? When they see these types of technologies, are they interested in them? Are they trying to figure it out? Or is it just so far outside of what they do that, you know, it's kind of classic innovator's dilemma?

• 16:42Speaker 05

  No, I actually see it there. We're like so inspired by Signal and even WhatsApp is built on the Signal protocol, right? But because they're own the app. WhatsApp, that's where they get all the metadata, where Signal actively chooses not to collect metadata. And same with us. We actually have a really strong intention around what we don't collect, right? What we don't see. And I think that's very important at the protocol level to let that happen at the application level. But I see a future, take this, like, Signal just got rid of SMS. So they just threw out SMS. They used to support it. So you could get your SMS messages in Signal. But they're unencrypted. It's a shitty old technology, but it is interoperable, right? EU is coming in with pretty strict new privacy laws. And whether you agree with them or not, if you watch the Signal kind of President Meredith,

• 17:27Speaker 05

  she had a great talk about how it's kind of like encroaching on privacy. And it's really kind of like coming against the ability to have an interoperable and private layer.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So she's making the claim that the privacy enhancing regulation from the view of the legislators is actually hurting privacy in some weird way. Explain that a little more.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  But so, but let me break this down with Signal, because what I think is interesting is, if they want to have an interoperable layer, where they can communicate to any identity that is more owned by people, because they believe in security, privacy and ownership, then having a secure layer that's not SMS, that could be X M T P, that Signal app could just plug into. And now, the messages that are through the X M T P network or to wallets, could be right in the inbox alongside the people within your Signal application, makes tons of sense to me. Or even iMessage, the green bubble in the future, to me, if we're successful, this has nothing to do with Web three. Web three is the starting point, because it's a real problem, and there's a new identity that needs communication. But why shouldn't iMessage

• 18:33Speaker 05

  plug into X M T P and get more secure, more encrypted, and more decentralized communication? So people can own it? Imagine a gray bubble in the future, instead of a green bubble alongside your blue bubble, that is actually the more secure way to reach any other application outside of the iMessage ecosystem.

• 18:52Anthony Pompliano?

  When you send messages through this type of kind of messaging protocol, do I have to pay for the messages? Like, is there some sort of cost to it? Or is it being essentially subsidized? By the various applications and they're the one really kind of paying for the ability to communicate.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, today, we hope to always have free for users like they shouldn't have to pay to communicate. And the applications will fund the node operations to scale. I think the business models live in the mass centers, the spam mitigation, how to disincentivize spam using economics. And if you get into like, if I want to send a hundred thousand messages to a bunch of wallet addresses, there's a new consent mechanism that should be invented in the future that we've actually researched, we're working on a lot. We call it postage that I think is really where the monetization comes from, which is people like marketers wanting to reach your attention. There should be a, you know, a monetization model built into that.

• 19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I love having these conversations because I'm an investor and I don't even know everything you guys are working on. So I'm getting live updates right now.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  That's great. This is my investor update.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, perfect. Explain this postage concept a little bit more.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, think about it really simply as we're going from a privacy world to a consent world. The past was privacy and there's a lot of laws around. You gotta use ads to get people's data, get them to opt in and then send them messages, right? And people spend all their money to get access to that. In this world, the addresses are actually public. So what actually matters now, and I think is where to innovate, is giving people more control over their inbox by putting in consent layers. And so it's already happening. Developers have built token gated chat. Developers have built actually full filtering. So you can say if you don't have one ETH in your wallet, you can't reach my wallet. And they started to add in all these things, but in the future, you can imagine the protocol very simply could have a dynamic fee

• 20:41Speaker 05

  for each wallet based on the value of that wallet to the sender. And if you want to send 500,000 messages and take someone's attention, there's a cost to that. And that is how the ecosystem, much like you think today, in kind of like the way the ad networks work, but we don't want to ever do ads. We want to actually invent a new model that is around consent that gives people more control, but at the same time values their attention. So I think there's a whole new kind of mechanism here that gives people a lot more control over their attention. And the protocol itself can like value, more specifically, value each wallet versus like, hey, it costs, you know, MailChimp,

• 21:23Speaker 05

  10,000 emails cost this. Actually, every wallet has a unique value.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So is there even a way that you could like split it like it costs X dollars or whatever to send 100,000 messages and then if they're read you pay, you know, X plus 20% and if they act it's X plus 40% or something because like you really do have the ability, not only to know who it is, but then you see the actions, but the actions end up being, you know, quote unquote on chain. And so you could almost, I think of it kind of like sending emails is one thing, but like really the valuable ones, the ones that are opened, but even the more valuable ones, the ones where people clicked.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 21:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you could almost create like some sort of metered ability. And again, these businesses paying for this stuff, right? But like they're likely to want to pay a lot more if I know, hey, somebody's going to open the email, they're going to click on that link and they're going to go to my website. That's a way different conversation than like, maybe they open it, maybe they don't, but I'm paying either way, right?

• 22:17Speaker 05

  Totally. There's so many things to innovate on in that layer, especially like the relationship that's formed. You could imagine if I voted for a DAO, imagine there's like a yes, no button. We call them content types inside the message and you knew that I voted on chain for the, for a thing that someone asked me to vote for, that's a very valuable interaction. And so the cost of that can be very different. You could even innovate the other way, which is imagine people were like, I really wanted to talk to you, I'm not going to take your money, right? You can innovate both ways where almost like staking, you could almost give it back, et cetera. I think the most important thing though is the protocol itself, it's very important for what we don't collect because the red states, and when you get into all that area, it's

• 22:59Speaker 05

  very kind of, we have to be very intentionable, intentional about what applications can see of metadata and what they can't see and what we can't see. Like, because if you're just giving all of that metadata away at the, at the application level, that might not be a good thing. And so we've spent a lot of time at the protocol level, really trying to just like, Keep privacy and security at the forefront. But then the applications, I think that layer might live on top of it where they can decide based on actions that happen on chain or more meaningful actions or consent, or they say, this is a great message, whatever can create the economics.

• 23:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting because basically at the protocol level, if you guys aren't collecting any of this information, you don't have access to it. But if an application basically is able to collect it kind of before it gets to the protocol, then they have access to whatever they're collecting. And so as a user, if you're worried about privacy or really want to spend time making sure that you have private communications, you not just have to worry about what is the protocol, but you have to understand what is the application layer that I'm using. And also I'm assuming you have to have some understanding of what is the application layer that the recipient of my message is using because there may be some way for that application to be collecting metadata as well.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Exactly. I mean, imagine a future that is enabled by X M T P so the world can have a private and secure messaging layer and someone buys a company and one individual can now read your unencrypted D M's. That can't happen. You can just leave. You can take all of your encrypted messaging with you and leave that application. And I think that's a very powerful like shift in the world that puts power and ownership back to people.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk a little bit about what some of the use cases are. Like, why do people need to message these wallets? You mentioned kind of the B to C use case of, hey, I have a product, there's much people using it, I need to communicate with them, but I don't have an ability to do that. You guys helped solve that problem. What are some of the other use cases that like an individual user would say, I need to be able to communicate either with wallets or I want to use this type of protocol for those communications?

• 25:03Speaker 05

  Totally. I think the first one, go back to the B to C use case. If you look at how the mobile world played out, messaging and communication was actually the entire retention layer. So every application couldn't get retention. Messaging actually was the retention layer. And I think that same phase is happening right now. DApps are out there. People have a lot of users. If you look at the metrics of the last three years, people logging in with email is going down. People logging in with wallet is going up. So as wallets become the identity, people want to control their identity and the DApps and applications actually want the wallet address as you're logging, you need a way to communicate because you need a way to get people to come back to your application.

• 25:44Speaker 05

  And I think that notification, that notification re-engagement layer is actually probably one of the like most powerful use cases that every application within the next two years in Web three, crypto, et cetera, will be able to re-engage and have a relationship with users that they just don't have today. And the, you know, the other ones are like way more interesting and cool. There's a lot of people, OTC swap was built one where it's actually trading NFTs, but you can do the trading and swapping inside of the conversation. I actually feel like crypto isn't that big and the owning your conversations could be bigger than owning your assets. And the conversation drives commerce more than commerce drives the conversation. And I think that's always been true. And the missing piece of

• 26:29Speaker 05

  crypto is that the conversation is happening in chaos all over. And you see all these public wallet, is this your public wallet? Who's this public wallet? People are just throwing zero X addresses all over Discord and shit. And I think the trust that it can enable to allow for these new types of use cases where you're doing commerce as part of the conversation and it's more trusted is a, is a, I think a huge world. Someone else just built a loan application and the loan is actually done all through the conversation. But because the content types, they can yes, no, on change, execute the loan within the chat, which is really cool to see like.

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is really what a lot of the legacy companies are trying to do, right? They are trying to enhance chat functionality. They're trying to drastically reduce the friction for the person who's on the company side of the chat to be able to execute different things. One of the most fascinating statistics, and I'm going to get the numbers wrong. So I don't want to misspeak, but Peloton actually sells hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Pelotons via their chat.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Which you would think like, wait, what do you mean? What ends up happening is that most of these companies historically have looked at the chat functionality on a website as a customer service mechanism. So somebody's got a problem, they write in, they're thinking about potentially buying something, they've got a question, you know, whatever. Can't find their order, you know, all the things that people use the chat for. But Peloton, and I'm sure other companies, but they're the one that I'm familiar with, actually looked at it as, no, this is our, this is our sales team. And so when you write in, we want you to buy things. And they looked at it as more of like an offensive opportunity. And so they were able to drastically enhance the sales experience and conversion in that chat. While I'm sure they were doing all kinds of stuff on the backend to figure out, how the hell do we get people who are in this chat from our side and are kind of helping to educate

• 28:18Anthony Pompliano?

  our customers, one click to be allowed to do sales, convert, whatever, but you're still going through a legacy system, right? And so even though, let's say I'm on the company's side, you're the customer, you're sitting there chatting and, okay, you're going to purchase now. Like it's still going through our legacy stuff.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  Usually it's a link to the website.

• 28:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Whatever, right? Like now, all of a sudden, if we can basically execute that sale right there in the chat, it's the virtual, you know, comparison to like, you're at the store, I come over with a little register, right? Like an Apple store. There's no leaving. Once they decide that you're going to buy, like they come into you, you just stand right here at the table and just execute. And so it's very similar, I think, in terms of, you know, this ability of, you're not sending them and hoping that they convert on the website or going through the payment flow or anything that's happening right there in the chat. It's pretty powerful. Hey guys, what's going on? I hope that you're enjoying this conversation, but I wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that I'm hosting on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is called Lyceum Miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founder's Fund, Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Codie Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Augermeier, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up. But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece,

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  where people used to come together, talk about ideas, and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life, once again, after three years of a hiatus from real-life events. And so, I'm hosting the event. And as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to lyceummiami.com, and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is gonna be a great time, so come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4, Miami Beach Convention Center.

• 30:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Totally, and I think your Apple Store analogy is very cool because the wallet is the Apple Store of crypto and Web 3. And what's changed is that the commerce is now enabled inside the wallet, and communication's going to be as well. And I think if you think about the wallets as the gateway to commerce, you can think about the wallets as also the key to communication. And the fact that those are together, that's where this all changes.

• 31:22Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at some of these decentralized social networking that's popping up, there's one now, I'm gonna mispronounce, but Nostra, Nostr, however you wanna pronounce it, that's been in the top 10 in the social network downloads. There's a number of other ones that have popped up over the years. There's obviously Lens and others.

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What are they getting right? And what do they still need to improve on? Like, when you kind of look at it, because you guys are a messaging layer, and ultimately, kind of wallet-to-wallet communication is a form of social networking, right? It's kind of private, you know, direct messaging. But it seems like many of these platforms are trying to take it a step further and create more of one-to-many communications, and really kind of build up the social network functionality. What do you think they're getting right? And what do you think that they still need to improve on? Need to kind of enhance or improve on.

• 32:11Speaker 05

  Totally. And you know, we work with Lens directly and we're the DM layer of Lens. So when you use any Lens app and you go to send a DM, you can send a DM to anyone within the Lens ecosystem, but you can also send a DM to shane mac dot ETH. And that kind of shows you the interoperability of the whole space. But when you look at the space, I think the first thing on the, what is it getting right? Is it's following a macro trend that people want. When you see Noster in the top 10 in the app store, I think people are grasping that they want to own their like network and their identity and be able to take it with them and not have it in the hands of a centralized like single company, especially with everything happening around Facebook and Twitter, etc. When you see one person buy a company, take it private and like

• 32:56Speaker 05

  they get to make any decision for that company, whether you like it or not. It's like, damn, that's, that's crazy that one person can actually own all this and read my DMs that I've sent since 2007. You know, it's kind of like one of those moments in history. And so the fact that these are all popping up, I think people are starting to grasp it. And the idea that you can own and control your identity, your network and your communication is a pretty radical idea. That wasn't possible without the infrastructure that's been built here. The thing that we're getting wrong, and I'm not going to say any of the networks, is the UX is shit. The user experience, because you, the wallet logins weren't built for mobile, the app stores aren't playing along well. Apple doesn't really see that yet. The consumer use cases of messaging and social and owning your communication

• 33:38Speaker 05

  and having a better SMS than you have an iMessage, like they're not there yet. So the app stores are, you know, making it hard to use wallets and publish things. And the wallet addresses are having a hard time doing the logins and the deep linking between apps is broken. I mean, it's, I'll like punch myself in the face trying to log into these apps with like 10 different signatures. And you're like, why is this so hard? And it just reminds me though of, you know, I've been in technology since the beginning of like the social era. And it feels like that, right? It feels like Twitter is just on SMS. And you're like, I can't search anything. I can't do anything. I'm just tweeting to the ether here, 23232. And some dude responded to me on Twitter.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  2006, like, we're there, but because we went through this like golden era of amazing mobile applications, it kind of feels like we're starting over and it's really painful.

• 34:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The user experience and user interfaces, I've said for a long time now, are atrocious. And I've always wondered, is it because the design talent hasn't yet kind of gotten excited and moved over? That may have been true three, four, five years ago. Now I see a number of very talented designers who are starting to come over, a lot of product people, things that like, you're like, okay, you know how to build products. Now can you figure out this specific problem? Let's see. But like you have the skill set and the experience. But there's also like what I'll call like some maybe like infrastructure type challenges. So for example, human readable domains versus kind of the O X wallet addresses. Like I was talking to a group last night and I literally

• 35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  was like, dude, I don't know why people won't say it, but like, there's times where I go to send a transaction, my heart's pumping a little bit, right? You know, like, you know, palms are weak or palms are sweaty or whatever, right? The M and M line, like, you're like, I hope this shit gets there. I hope I didn't make a mistake. And so obviously, if even people who are doing this on a day to day basis are dealing with that, like, it's got to improve. And so I do wonder how much of that is like, one designer or one product team can actually make some of these changes? I think what you're talking about, like, definitely, we need improvement. But also, it seems like we almost need kind of ecosystem buy in to really kind of shift some of these as well, to make it so that somebody off the street who doesn't know anything about technology can use these products and it's seamless, easy to do. And ultimately, I think will just lead to kind

• 35:56Anthony Pompliano?

  of more usage, more adoption, right?

• 35:58Speaker 05

  Totally. And it's happening. I mean, if you look at the Rainbow team, or you look at the orb app on Lens, there's, there's a lot of other apps on Lens that are actually really good as well. And the entire ecosystem of apps is starting to get a lot better. The problem is actually in the setup and the onboarding into the world. So the apps have gotten better now. The designers, I think, have come and there's a lot of great applications. But the start to, I'm now sending my first message of go to E and S and go tell me how long it takes you to get an E and S name, right? It's like, What is ENS? What are their three steps for? Why am I waiting two minutes to verify this? What's a transaction? How do I get ETH in my wallet to buy this stupid name?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Like, there's so, the gap is so big and I watch it all the time. Versus, that part of it, I think, has to shift. Identity, the ability to use a wallet, and the ability to send a message or send an asset, I think, will all come together. I think the wallets are doing a pretty decent job, like, starting to innovate here. But that has to happen. Rainbow did a great job with the ENS name, so now inside of the Rainbow Wallet, you can easily buy an ENS name and it actually feels like really slick. So it's cool to see them integrate, like, an open protocol like ENS into their app at the great UX. But you still have to go through the entire hurdle of getting your Ethereum into the wallet and like all that shit. So, until the, kind of, onboarding is improved.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  I think that's the thing that we need to spend a lot of time on.

• 37:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The other piece feels like, uh, social networks have to be driven by density. Like, you, you need the network there, right? There's a whole point of why you come. And, uh, we've seen a number of networks explode and then kind of falter, right? And explode in hindsight, actually isn't nearly that big. What do you think is kind of that tipping point? Like, when you guys have seen some of these applications, is it, uh, there's like an aha moment, right? I, I think Slack's aha moment was like 2,500 messages between a team, right? And then it was like, they're not leaving, right? Facebook, uh, the Taurus, I came, it was 10 people in seven days or seven people in 10 days, whatever it was, that you friended, it was like 85% likely that you're staying as a retained user.

• 38:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you guys seen anything around those data points in terms of messaging? Uh, whether it's through social networks, applications, anything like that, where people, once they start using it, they're not gonna leave?

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's an interaction success within the first, uh, like 25 seconds of activating the inbox.

• 38:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  So like- Do I even get a response, right? And so we've actually, coming from the, the social messaging world, it's, it's kind of like we're obsessed with network effects and interaction success internally as our driving force. And mapping the interactions to the overlap of communities is something we take very seriously. So if I know that Lens is in the ecosystem, it's all public data. So in this world, I can actually know the overlap of Lens wallets to the ENS community. And I can walk into the ENS community and say, by the way, 35% of the people in the ENS community are already on XMTB. And so you actually know where those overlaps happen. And I think you can build network effects where you can increase interaction success

• 39:13Speaker 05

  in a proactive way that's never been possible because of on-chain data. And that's a very huge opportunity, I think, to build better network effects where you don't end up in the like, I never got a response. I just got on this network, I sent a message, no one wrote me back, it didn't really work. And I think that's where you can end up if you were just like, I'm just going for wallet addresses. Or yeah, we have 5 million wallets and you can spin up wallets in an hour.

• 39:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  So you really have to, I think, get into that. The interaction success works right when you get on it. You know that another person's on the network. We can suggest that, much like the social networks, you know, they were like, here's your 10 friends. The Twitter was like, here's people to follow. You had to like, get that right. And I think we need to also get that right with knowing the ecosystems you're a part of so that you know that you're in a trusted, I know that you're also a person with the ENS or you're also in the PoEAP community or you're also in the Lens community. And making sure that you're connecting those people to have a quick interaction success. So they're like, oh, this inbox works.

• 40:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  I think it's very important.

• 40:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the challenges with this, like the risks of people starting to use these types of protocols? Right? Like you guys are obviously building one that is probably the most popular so far. But like, what is the downside? So what do you guys see as those risks associated with it?

• 40:21Speaker 05

  You know, we focus solely on how can we make the developers insanely successful? I almost say like, how can we make it rugless? The risk for me is actually more of just like why I'm doing it, which is I spent 15 years building on top of Twitter and Facebook and SMS and every protocol in the world. And I spent 15 years getting rugged and we built, just was our first company. We grew to 100 million people in two years in 2007 to 2010. And we were like, probably the first API partner that ever like took Twitter data out of Twitter to show like how you can map a social address book. And BlackBerry bought it in 2010 and it was a meaningful acquisition, you know, BlackBerry, it was 45 million bucks. BlackBerry bought it cash. It was a good like thing.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  It was only a 12 person team, small, but like that moment of going through history, we had just went through a lawsuit with LinkedIn. They seasoned Assistus on the API. Twitter changed the API regulations twice. They cut off the app developers. And then I did this again because I'm, I don't know, naive and just, I just love messaging. And then I built the business application. That was the first ever launch on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, et cetera. For the last nine years, I was the CEO of Assist. And like, I think if we do that to developers, we will lose. And we have to be able to build trust with developers by making them not have to trust us. And I really obsess over that relationship because I've been there and I watched the

• 41:49Speaker 05

  business models change. Twitter kind of started as an open protocol and then it became the hardest company to work with as a developer. Facebook changed everything on us. And then I have whole teams trying to keep up or you're getting new API docs or new laws. And doing that for that long, I think fucking over that community and how hard it was, it needs to be the exact opposite. It needs to be like thousands of developers in the way that we structure this makes it permissionless, anyone can plug in and rugless. And people are like, this is an amazing protocol to build with. And for me, losing that spirit or that relationship or that trust within the Dev community, to me is the biggest risk of the whole thing.

• 42:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  And why I'm doing it, like, there's no point, I don't want to do what I did, like, I had to deal with in the past. Like, I'm here because there's a way to build an ecosystem because of new technology that enables it to centralize backend. So the next Twilio's and WhatsApps and biggest companies in the world, I get to meet those founders today and watch them build the biggest companies in a way that wasn't possible 10 years ago.

• 42:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What else do you guys do to build trust with the developer community?

• 42:55Speaker 05

  I mean, we spend a ton of time here. We're at every single event building with them. We have a whole DevX team internally that is like trying to build widgets or protocols or put out documents around like best practices, stuff like that. Design team is doing design passes of how the brand should look for other developers. I do a monthly call with how to fundraise for the developers. I'm like, we need to get these companies funded, right? The biggest problem they have isn't I can't build product. They're actually all great product teams. They're like, how do I raise money for the product? And so I'm sitting there being like doing, I did a one with like 35 people showed up at the last one and it was all the, some of the best founders we have. And I'm just doing Q and A.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  What are we struggling with raising money, especially in this market, right? And so helping them build legitimate projects, turn them into real companies. And just like then they really trust us and we're enabling and building those connections. And I say, it's not up to us to convince developers. It's up to us to connect developers. And I think we're more about connecting the ecosystem as well as the investors, as well as the talent, as well as ourselves than we are about convincing.

• 44:03Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about building the business, I think what's really interesting is you and Matt have spent a bunch of time building a number of different companies with great success. Like, what are some of the principles or methodology that you used as you went to go build this company?

• 44:17Speaker 05

  It's a good question. I mean, first off is like, we are kind of obsessed with culture and the way we build the company. I mean, we're a remote company, but we also are trying to build a company that is a very productive but amazing place to work. And so all of our kind of perks or the way we think about structuring things is very much about giving people time back, not around like fluffy perks and fancy offices.

• 44:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What's an example?

• 44:46Speaker 05

  We give everyone a personal assistant. And so I did this in my last company. I was NSF trying to hire people out of Facebook and Twitter's and you know, my VCs are like, you need free lunch and you need to do all this nap rooms and whatever. And I was like, I was spending so much money on lunch. And then I decided to go remote first in 2014. And half the company was remote from then on because they left San Francisco. It was kind of my hack. I'd hire them from Twitter downtown because they wanted to leave. And I'd let them leave. And I called my assistant. I was like, hey, do you have other assistants that I can offer? So we have one assistant for every like five employees and everyone can use it, but also for their personal lives. So if they wanted to book an Airbnb for their family, book flights for their family, find babysitters, order groceries on Instacart, whatever they want to do.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Their life doesn't stop at work. So how can I help them actually take care of their life so they can just be more focused at work? And that ended up being a really powerful thing. And so we do the same thing here. We really focus on just like giving people things that make them more productive, give them more time and more well being. And just focus on doing great work and having like that kind of environment of a culture.

• 45:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's what you guys do now is you it's one for every five employees? Or how do you?

• 45:57Speaker 05

  It's more vague than that. Right now, everyone has access to an assistant that you can use for anything. And then we scale it up based on like, it's funny, but it's trying to teach leadership as well. Like I'm very much around leadership is about creating other leaders. And what that means is giving control away and giving decision making away and trying. I think I'm successful at this role if I make the least amount of decisions and really having that ethos. And it's funny watching people struggle to use an assistant. It's really hard for people to give work away. They're like, I'm paid to do this work. I'm like, I'm like, no, no. If you don't like, if you want to focus on this work and give that away, why should you do that work? And just it kind of is almost a forcing function to try to teach the behaviors we want to see.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  But it's it's a struggle. People like won't, you know, like I have to remind people like, hey, you should you should let someone else do that. Yeah. And it's cool to kind of like practice that with people.

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some other things like giving everyone access to an assistant that you guys do that may be different than other companies?

• 46:59Speaker 05

  I'm really kind of intentional about cadence and focus, like a pretty obsessive amount. And so every Monday, since the company started, I write a weekly dispatch with me and Matt, and now with our exec team. And we write this dispatch on last week, this week, and then kind of what we're seeing in the industry. But the most important thing is, you know, we're 89 dispatches in and we've never missed a week since the day with me and Matt started, and it was just me and Matt. And I just take those like written communication, weekly cadence, and everything in a weekly drumbeat very seriously. And I think it matters. And I think that creating that momentum and cadence for everyone to just like really

• 47:43Speaker 05

  feel like we can control that. We can't control if the market adopts, how long it's going to take, etc. But we can control if we're clearly communicating every week and like never missing a week.

• 47:54Anthony Pompliano?

  When people receive that weekly dispatch, what do you hope they do with it? Is it just like for your information? Is it something that they can then use actionably that week? Like what's kind of the desired impact?

• 48:04Speaker 05

  To highlight and see the impact they're having on the organization is probably the first and foremost. I want people to see the orgs or the teams they're working on. We know we're 32 people, 32 people. I want people to see the teams and the orgs they're working on and the impact it's having. And I usually try to tie that to the partners and what the developers are doing with what we're building. I think tying together the developers to our impact and work is the thing I'd spend most of my time trying to kind of tie together. But we're focused on a lot of what we're not doing. I'd spend a lot of time telling like, really, you know, our goal is to be the default communication protocol for Web 3. That's our goal for the year. And to decentralize our operations. And it's that focus.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  And a lot of the people I think are like doing tons of stuff, and you have logins and identity and all this stuff, like we're just a private and secure DM layer. Like, let's be the best in the world at that. Because messaging is the largest layer of the past internet, and I think it's going to be the same.

• 49:01Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at...

• 49:04Anthony Pompliano?

  The people that you're hiring, are they young people, people with more experience? Are they kind of crypto native? Are they coming from web two? Like, where have you guys found success? And what's interesting to me is, let's say you were hiring all of the above, right? You put those people together and like, I think the public narrative is that the crypto native person is very different than like the web two native person. And so when you put them together, it might be difficult, right? Or even somewhat abrasive in terms of their views of the world, or how they operate, or their experience level, or whatever. Like, what have you guys found with 30 people? Like, you probably have enough of data points now to kind of understand some of these dynamics.

• 49:40Speaker 05

  Totally. I think one of the most interesting things is I hired a head of people as our like 11th hire. And people would usually tell me that's way too early. And she's phenomenal. And I did it, and you know, Matt and I like talked about it because I was like, we have to be able to be an education company to get people out of web two into web three to be really successful. And we're doing communication. We're not just a financial thing. Like, I wasn't, you know, in crypto for 10 years, building financial applications. I was in communication, building messaging for 10 years, and now I'm doing the same thing. And I think bringing that experience with crypto native people and actually how they work together. Our first value at our company is curiosity.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  We celebrate what we don't know, not what we do. The reason is because it accelerates learning and it accelerates vulnerability to be more open that all this shit's new and no one has any clue what they're fucking doing. So as long as you start there, you can build a culture of people being able to say, I don't know. People can be able to raise their hand and speak up when they actually have a real problem. People have a culture of, actually, bring me the problems, not the solutions. Because the other way actually doesn't allow people to end up working on the problems. And so we focus a lot on that trust and bonding within the culture so that we can hire actually anyone. And we have, I think, hired young, we were, we were like, man, we're, we call ourselves a mature startup. Just because like, I'm not in S, I'm not even in Miami. I don't have a law office. I'm not like, it's not that at all.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  It's like, we're here to do great work. I'm not hanging out. After work a lot with a lot of people, I mean, we're kind of remote, but it's not like a me 25 in San Francisco at 9pm like, hey, guys, let's shoot Papa shot in the office. Like, it's just not that kind of company. And I think I would call it a mature startup. And then our last offsite, we just did in, uh, out in, uh, Long Beach. And I was like, dang, this dude's like 24 percent, like he's here, this guy. Like, we had a lot of youth in us and I was like, oh, this is great. But we're really trying hard to get that. How do you bring the cultures together and have the right base of curiosity and knowledge sharing and trust? That enables people to say what they don't know. And I think creating that environment is how you make it successful.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  What we have found, though, is there are very specific roles that you need a lot of crypto experience. The protocol research role, the decentralization tokenomics. There's a ton of stuff that like, you just, like, we need it fast and we have to do this in an accelerated timeline. And I, you, you know, you can't take someone for three years to go learn tokenomics. And there are people that have done that. So I think there are specialized roles where we really do have to focus on people with really crypto experience.

• 52:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, um, it's fascinating to kind of think about, uh, one of the things I've seen recently that I, it never really hit me. If you are 25, maybe 26 years old, uh, and you kind of graduated out into the pandemic, uh, you never worked in an office before. And so one of the things that surprised me is we had somebody come and visit, uh, who works for one of our businesses, uh, is a young guy. And he was like walking around like starry eyed. He was like, wait, so like, you guys all come here like every day, like, like, yes, like, holy shit, like, this is cool. And I was telling somebody yesterday, I was like, it hit me. I was like, you know, once you do it for a long time, you're like, office, right? Like, you kind of almost like, uh, become jaded to some degree.

• 53:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you're like 23 to 25 years old, there is this element, a little bit of like, I want to be around people, right? And so like, I think that's some of these companies that are remote first, uh, as I've talked to a lot of CEOs, they're like, actually, some of our people want different experiences.

• 53:22Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 53:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Which then brings this like hybrid thing and like, like it becomes a little bit less black and white. I think, you know, people want to analyze it black and white. But if you got your young people who are like, dude, I got all the time. I want to do 9pm pop a shot.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 53:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, I don't got a family. I don't got shit to do. Like, if not, I'm gonna go to the bar. So I might as well hang out with people from work, right? Versus-

• 53:41Speaker 05

  And you want them talking about it. You want those conversations-

• 53:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. Versus the, you know, 45-year-old who's like, yo, I got three kids, right? I'm married. I got this going on, whatever. I'm worried about my mortgage. Like, that's a whole different lifestyle, right? It's a whole different kind of time management. And so when you have such different experiences, expectations, ambitions, whatever, and you put them together, like, maybe the right solution is actually some sort of hybrid where people have access to go and do things in person if they want, or there's offsites, or like, there's some ability to do stuff like that, but also it ends up being remote first. Like, how have you guys thought about office, remote, you know, offsites? And kind of like, what are the cadence and the way that people work?

• 54:20Speaker 05

  Totally. And I think, and I've spent a lot of time with remote work, going remote first at my last company. And I worked with Robert Stevens, who was the founder of Geek Squad, who runs probably the largest remote company in the world, or created it. So I learned a lot from him. And the two things that we do here, this is culture stuff too. I think it's about enabling individuals to make choices by giving them the funding to actually get together. So I have a policy, or not I, we have a policy that everyone has a budget per year to fly and spend time and meet with anyone else. And so we enable it, and we tell people, you want to go one-on-one and go work with someone in Portland? You have a coworking budget as well as a stipend to travel for hanging out with other people.

• 55:03Speaker 05

  And so there was a meetup in Vancouver like a few weeks ago, and like seven people were there. From like, I'm going to New York on the 22nd, because there's seven people doing a New York meetup. And so all these meetups are happening, so we're funding and enabling kind of like these hubs and pods to happen organically. But we create the budget and our head of people pushes people to like, go do this. Go make that happen.

• 55:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't be the loner. Like, get out and meet people.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  And do it. And then we do two offsites a year that are much bigger, right? One in January, one in going into H2, that are everyone and bring everyone together. And then-

• 55:36Speaker 05

  I think you also fund great homework offices or a monthly stipend for coworking if you want to be around other people. So our Vancouver office has a few people in it, actually. We have a few people in SF. There's like five now. They're thinking about getting a pod. And so we have a budget for if you want a hub to form, you can actually self-create it. And so I think enabling that, creating budgets for it and championing it, to giving people the permission to do that is something that is very powerful. Because people that say remote is cool or easier are totally full of shit. It's harder to lead remotely. I actually love being in an office. I miss fucking vibing and running around in office. But I really love the ability to hire anyone in the world. And I won't trade the ability

• 56:20Speaker 05

  to, I can't imagine being on a Zoom call, being like, where do you live, to know if I could hire you. And I think that, that is so much more valuable for me to actually do the extra work to write more, communicate more, be more clear, make sure we're all on the same page, give budgets for getting together. But it ain't cheaper. I'll tell you, our offsites and our budgets to get together is not cheaper than having an office. It's probably the same. And it's more work.

• 56:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  So I just really, I don't think it's like this magic bullet type thing where, like, ah, you can just work anywhere.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What about like, meeting styles, or like, communication, right? Is, do you guys work asynchronous, asynchronously? Do you have kind of, uh, remote first meetings where everyone's on their computer, even if they're in person? Like, how does that stuff work?

• 57:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, everyone's on the computer, even if they're in person. That's been something I've done for almost 10 years now. Changed everything for me. That was really the moment when we had two offices, New York SF and half the team remote. The big meeting room of people. And then the remote people on the TV was 10 times worse than everyone's on their own computer and we're all equal. And that was a big change. So I still, we still do that and require that, no matter what. Um, if I think about the

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Kind of culture of communication. We're very async. We're like a GitHub culture. You know, we're a protocol. Like, it's a very technical thing, but we still work in Slack. You know, but my co-founder, Matt, is way more tool crazy than I am.

• 57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I've known that for a while. I know he is.

• 57:53Speaker 05

  I'm very simple. And I like to be like, okay, we can like chill out. Let's write the comms. Let's do the thing. Matt has like, you know, 19 different widgets wired up with the notification blocker and just like.

• 58:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm jealous of how he's figured all this out because I can't imagine how much time it takes to figure it all out. But like, he showed me some of it before and it's like, yeah, like, yeah, it's better if you can figure it out. It just takes a long time and you got to try a lot of things, I think, to figure out what doesn't work as well.

• 58:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think what I wanted people to know is they can design and control their attention however they see fit. Like when you work with us, however works for you is what should be how it works. And you should just be clear on these are my hours that I'm off. At this day, I don't do any meetings. I block full, snooze all day, like whatever, however you work, I don't care. Like I, I work really well in the morning, mid-days I get distracted. Like, I want people to know that they have the permission and freedom to design their day how they want as an individual. I think that's the most important thing, which leads to an asynchronous communication culture. And we do one Friday weekly wrap-up that, that, sorry, I literally am running back to the hotel.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  And it's an hour meeting every Friday that we do on a Eastern time zone globally. And it's all recorded and we use Rewatch. I don't know if you've heard of Rewatch.

• 59:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 59:09Speaker 05

  It was built by a GitHub, old GitHub team that's kind of like grain. And it's, it allows you to, every meeting is recorded and every meeting can be turned into like, like almost like an Instagram story. Can be commented. You can have conversations around. You can break out any transcript of it. And anything that happens within the organization in an asynchronous way can start a conversation or be turned into content to then be shared. And that, it's insane. Like the Rewatch platform is nuts. And one of our protocol engineers, Naomi, she came, she, I think she worked.

• 59:45Speaker 05

  On it. And she's like, we have like, you have to use this. It's one of those tools where like, you have to get your whole company on it. It's on every Zoom call. It's a big like, it's a, it's a, it's like a Slack. It like, it's like, okay, we're going in, we gotta like, do this, we're setting up, we're signing a contract. And then once you get into it, it's like, how did we operate without this? It's one of those tools and I don't have those very often. You know, like Matt has them daily, you know, I have them like every three years. I'm like Slack was one. This is one where I'm like, oh yeah, like the ability to have a conversation or turn any meeting easily into a beautiful two second or two minute clip where then we're having a conversation around it and it just works. And it's all integrated with Notion and etc. Like it's pretty powerful.

• 1:00:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Where can we send people to find out more about the protocol if they want to learn?

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  X M T P dot org.

• 1:00:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And when they go there, what is the best way for them if they're building something to actually kind of start using it?

• 1:00:41Speaker 05

  Totally. So it's all open source and there's S D K's for all mobile apps. There's a kind of open source J S app for the web. You can fork our inbox. So we have a full inbox product. X M T P dot chat. If you want to literally go to X M T P dot chat right now and just sign in with your wallet and say Shane Mac dot E. You can send me a message. It'll go to my converse app. And so you can actually use it, but that all the applications we build are forkable. And you can use them because they're all open source and they're just basically resource clients for developers. And so you can go use right now and you can, I'm Shane Mac on Twitter as well. So.

• 1:01:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you tweet about?

• 1:01:18Speaker 05

  Me? Just whatever's on my mind. I try to tweet less. I try to like, I try to like, you know, just

• 1:01:27Speaker 05

  Twitter was like a snark engine for me 10 years ago, right? Uh, and now I just try to have more optimism and just bring more curiosity to the world. I think, you know, maybe you get older, maybe I get more boring. I don't know.

• 1:01:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm the same way.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  But you know, less imposter syndrome, you know, you're not running around pounding your chest being like, oh no, this shit's, you know, great. I'm like, I really want to build a great company. And I think like, Thinking about long-term things, talking about them on Twitter, having a longer-term view so that everyone can be on with it, being a little calmer with that. You know, I've been a part of like a massive failure. We did Xarley. We blew like forty million dollars in three years and that everyone hated it. I hated it and it was like my fault. That was in 2010 and then like Gist was a success, but I was really lucky and young. Like I didn't, I wasn't the CEO. TA was and he's amazing and like I picked the right, I picked the right captain, you know, and I learned and got into the space and then Assist

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  was great and I was doing that for almost nine years of my life, doing business messaging on top of these protocols. But you sell it, it's not a venture outcome. When you sell something, got acquired for fifty million bucks after a merger, some investors are like, oh, you got, you know, a little bit, some, your employees don't do that well. Like you have these exits in the venture world and you just start over. And you're, lose your whole team. And I, I was as obsessed of culture at my last company as I am at this one. And I had the most amazing team ever and I'm like, all that just goes away. And so for me, like what I tweet about is trying to think about how to create something enduring and not sell something and us have like a 10-year vision here.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  So that we're kind of like building something that can last. Like I really just like, if I have to sell again and start over, like it's, it wasn't the choice. It was kind of like, you know, it was just the market and you had to.

• 1:03:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  And I just really am inspired to build something that's lasting.

• 1:03:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I think you're doing a great job.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  Trying.

• 1:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  X M T P.

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, X M T P, like S M T P, but with an X.

• 1:03:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Dot org and Shane Mack on Twitter.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks, dude.

• 1:03:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much for coming. I think not only it's fun to talk, but also like the work you guys are doing is very important. And I think it's unclear to a lot of people why it's important, but over time, kind of, you know, it'll come into clarity and we need as many people as possible, building privacy-enhancing technology. But doing it in a way that isn't like, hey, come use my product and like screw it. Everything else, but actually building kind of infrastructure where anyone can come in, they can use it, they can fork the open source software, they can build applications on top of it, like really try to kind of, you know, arm the rebels, right? If you will, if you kind of take the Shopify phrase. And it just feels like you guys are kind of doing that and being intentional about the way

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  you're doing it, which I really appreciate. So thanks so much for kind of explaining it to everyone.

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  We're trying to, and I think if you think about just the mission of enabling everyone to own their communication, I think it's such a powerful thing. And the applications then can, people don't have to know that really that's what's happening underneath, but you are more protected. And then if you do want to leave something, or you do have a change of feelings about the leadership, or something does happen, you can take your identity, your network, and your conversations with you is like the most powerful thing that we could give people. And for crypto itself and Web 3 and the wallet, I think sign in with wallet is way more cool than login with Facebook and the ability for people to own that. And for me, just working on that and working towards that as like a mission and a vision

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  for us and really for crypto itself, crypto is still small. I actually wonder if owning your communication will be way bigger than owning your assets.

• 1:05:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's a shot. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this and we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  Anytime, man.