Mike Jones: How the Former CEO of MySpace Thinks About Disruption

Mike Jones is the CEO of Science Inc, a start-up accelerator based in Los Angeles. He previously was the CEO of Myspace, along with a number of other companies. In this conversation, Jones and Anthony Pompliano discuss disruption, Myspace, the future of finance, and how valuable companies can be spotted early from great investors.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Mike Jones is the CEO of Science Inc., a startup accelerator based in Los Angeles. He previously was the CEO of MySpace, along with a number of other companies. In this conversation, we discuss disruption, MySpace, the future of finance, and how valuable companies can be spotted early by great investors. This conversation was a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. This podcast is presented by Blockworks Group, the only blockchain event and media production company I trust. If you're an investor, lawyer, accountant, or entrepreneur, and want to attend exclusive events and dinners, visit them at blockworksgroup.io. I promise you won't be disappointed.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Before we get into this episode, I want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors. Soluna is a blockchain computing company powered by its own renewable energy. The team is planning to build a 900-megawatt facility on top of a 37,000-acre location, one of the best wind sites in the world in southern Morocco. You'll hear more from them later

• 1:38Speaker 00

  in this episode, but I'd love if you could go check out their website. You can find them at soluna.io. All right, guys, I'm super excited to have Mike here. Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  No problem. Thanks for having me.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  All right, we've got a lot to cover, so I think a lot of people know you as the former CEO of MySpace, and now, obviously, with all of your guys' success at Science, but you did things before that.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  I did, I did.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Let's maybe cover that first.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Sure, so I had, you know, I'd started my first company when I was a sophomore in college, and that company eventually grew. Opened an office right here in New York, as well as an office in Los Angeles. Eventually sold that business. I started my second company right thereafter, and that ended up becoming a company called Userplane that AOL acquired about five years after we started. Within AOL, I was a senior vice president and ran some of their product divisions and some of their M&A strategy. Then I jumped into private equity, bought and sold companies for a large private equity firm, then ran one of those businesses that was subsequently sold. And I was recruited out of that into MySpace when News Corp had acquired MySpace and MySpace was having challenges and Facebook was obviously coming up strong.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So at that point, I was an active angel investor in Los Angeles, had devised and mentored and invested in quite a few different, very early-stage startups, was running MySpace. And at the conclusion of that, then I started Science with a handful of partners.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Got it. So let's go back to AOL real quick, because this is during the early days of the internet. AOL's on an absolute tear. What was that culture like? What was people's thoughts in terms of the potential of the internet, of the company, etc.?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Sure. So it was after AOL had been acquired or merged with Time Warner. So you had this massive media behemoth. AOL was coming off the back of their huge revenue growth from their dial-up business. They still had substantial dial-up revenue even when I joined, and they began acquiring their way into the web 2.0 movement. And we had built a distributed communication platform that reached hundreds of millions of users, and they liked this kind of object-oriented web development, where we had little components of our technology on lots of different websites touching millions of users. And AOL started seeing that they really wanted to be big in web versus just relying completely on their dial-up and their client traffic.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  So they bought my company, they bought a company called Weblogs, and they began an acquisition spree, really driven by their CEO at the time named John Miller, to expand into the web business. And frankly, the core of that strategy is what way AOL is today. So they actually navigated a very difficult transition, if you can imagine, coming off the back of billions of dollars of subscription dial-up revenue in the midst of this ever-changing connectivity environment, and then built themselves into a big media company.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely, that's super interesting. It has obviously a lot of parallels to today. All right, and so when you get to MySpace, I think a lot of people don't know kind of the MySpace story other than kind of the jokes of, oh, don't be the MySpace.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  But I think that there's a lot of important lessons in there, right? Because MySpace ultimately was a successful business for a period of time.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  What was kind of the things that drove the positive side or the growth of that company?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  So if you think about the time when MySpace launched, it was right on the back of Friendster. And Friendster was one of the first social networks. And one way I think about it is that everything was kind of a magnitude of 10 in social networks. So if you assume that Six Degrees, which was one of the first social networks, maybe reached a million users. Friendster reached 10 million users. MySpace reached 100 million users. And then, of course, Facebook succeeded in reaching beyond a billion users. So at the point of MySpace coming forth, I think we were at a time where people were still really nervous around putting their real name into a website. Like, that was a controversial concept. You still weren't in an Amazon-infested world. You weren't putting your credit card in to buy things online. There was still general fear around identity in the internet, which meant that at the beginning of MySpace,

• 5:37Speaker 01

  they couldn't build a real social graph, right? They had to build your internet identity. So people would say, "I use MySpace to connect with my internet friends." Like, it was never my true friends. It was always this parallel shadow of yourself that was representative through MySpace. You know, there was this early-stage mistake that was written into the code by a guy named Gabe Harriman, where you could manipulate the HTML. And suddenly, people started personalizing their pages and customizing all their identity through MySpace. So once again, it became kind of your aspirational self. It wasn't really your true self. And that network grew. But at some point, when Facebook came out, I think everyone realized, my gosh, you know, if you actually connected to your real friends, this product gets even better, right? So if social's good, it's obviously way better when it's connected to real people.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  And my belief is that, at the point of MySpace growing up, you know, hitting 100 million users, you know, really reaching for big ad revenue, obviously being acquired by News Corp. It was too late for them to do a fundamental change into like your real identity. Like the DNA had been set and planted. You know, what the company had grown was a was a big company. But it was never quite in the position to do a full restart saying, well, we're not about your internet friends. We're not about your fun customized profiles. We're actually about your real identity and your real people. That really just wasn't going to happen.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And do you think that part of this was MySpace was successful in capturing the market that was available for what the product was built to do?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  And then Facebook figured out, hey, there's just a bigger market for a different, a different type of product.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think that, you know, it's like they say that, you know, the first person to crash through the wall ends up bloody, but the second person has a clear path. So I think like my, you know, you know, six degrees started the wall, started crashing the wall. Friendster crashed through MySpace, really opened it up. And then suddenly Facebook just collided right through there and built like, obviously, the behemoth that is today. So I don't think Facebook exists if MySpace hadn't done what it did. But I don't think MySpace at the time could have done what Facebook did. So it's an interesting path.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And then, you know, while you're there, obviously, there's, you know, press, pressure and all that kind of stuff. Like, is there, like, is Facebook rating the MySpace talent and trying to say, hey, you guys know stuff about social networks? Or did you guys feel like, you know, it was fairly separate in terms of the, the types of people or just talk about the talent?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  We didn't have a lot of talent crossover. I mean, MySpace was headquartered in Los Angeles, but we did have global operations. They might have picked up some of our global people. The core LA team was not descended upon by Facebook recruiters. And Facebook played its own playbook, I mean, extremely effectively, obviously, right? And so, yeah, we, we watched Facebook closely mainly because I'm beyond them out strategizing us and, and putting product out there way faster than MySpace did. The other big concern for us is we were driving a lot of revenue and that brand revenue was recognized off of com score ratings. And so, you know, the, the month I joined was the month that Facebook's com score became bigger than MySpace's. And that was a big problem, right? Because we're out there floating, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and insertion orders with big, major brands.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And suddenly they're like, whoa, how that happened so fast? And then suddenly we're on our heels. And so, you know, I, I, it was, it was, you know, if you ever get the, if you're, if you're a student of business like I am and curious about so many different things in technology, there's, there's no better experience than walking into a massively distressed company because it really challenges you as an athlete on how you can really navigate your way through this. So the people that were in that journey with me over, you know, whatever that was like a four year period until we eventually sold off the assets of MySpace to three or four different buyers. You know, were kind of some of the best people I've ever worked with because in the face of massive distress and huge market questionability for MySpace,

• 9:26Speaker 01

  we built and ran still a substantial sized business. We were able to maintain team. We were able to build, you know, break it off into pieces and sell it subsequently. So, you know, an incredible experience not to miss.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely. No. And so, you know, obviously that experience kind of pushes you forward into what is today's science.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  And you guys have built a couple of, you know, pretty notable companies there.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  What was the original thought process behind science? Was it just, hey, let's go invest in companies? Was it full on incubation? Kind of how were you guys thinking about it, you know, as you started it?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  So we had, you know, at this point in my career, I had done a lot of angel investing and I had some big wins. I was at, I was an angel in DocStock and Goodreads and Maker Studios and seeing like a lot of the kind of top companies in LA come through my portfolio, which made me happy. But I also saw that, you know, startup struggle, right? There's a massive information asymmetry between investors, corporate partners and startup founders because you're taking, you know, typically very young founders and you're throwing them in the midst of big business and they're often unprepared for the skills that they need to go off and become successful. And my belief was look, as an asset class, although some venture funds outperform standard market, you know, from a portfolio view perspective, we sit on a lot of failure.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, when you're, when you're talking about venture capital and like, well, they're great returns for certain funds, but eight out of 10 startups fail. That's a really bad statistic. And my belief was that, that if we had a group of operators. You know, that sat in co mingled with the startups that we could reduce that failure rate. Maybe we could get in front of that problem, get in front of those problems and really, you know, handhold or help train or help accessorize the talent of these startups to become more successful. And so that was the principle behind science. So, you know, luckily I found, you know, three other like minded individuals. We all four kind of covered all the core critical skill sets that a startup we thought would need. And then we, you know, hung a shingle, raised capital and then incubated, you know, at this point, you know, hundreds of companies.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so was there a specific focus on consumer at the time? Was there just, hey, we think we can help all companies? Kind of how did you guys pick what you wanted to focus?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So similar to, you know, any startup founder, we did what we were passionate about. Typically I lead the general strategic direction of the firm. And at that point, I was very passionate about not being in the ad based business. And if you can imagine coming off the back of MySpace and worrying about daily banner ads served and CPMs and big insertion orders, I just didn't want to do that. It was just, it was just mind numbing for me at that point. And so I said, look, look, I want to sell stuff with a credit card. I don't want to worry about retention. I just want to worry about happy customers. And so when we originally opened our doors, we focused really on two sectors, direct to consumer commerce and the marketplaces. The belief was that A, in direct to consumer commerce, we thought the legacy CPG brands were

• 12:15Speaker 01

  unprepared to compete in a D to C world. We didn't think they understood their customers' names. They really understood the name of their Walmart rep or their Sears rep at the time. And we thought that there were big brands to be built direct to consumer. And then in marketplaces, we just believed in the changing nature of employment, income and salary, where areas where people can come together through technology and earn money and share goods and services. And so the two big companies that came out of the strategy were, was Dollar Shave Club and then Dogva.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  So let's talk about those. I want to talk about the big ones first. Dollar Shave Club, for example, your guys' idea, somebody else's idea, how does that all come together? And then, you know, once you guys decide, okay, we think that this can be big, kind of what are those first steps?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  So yeah, it was definitely not our idea. We were looking at different CPG startups from founders, obviously evaluating both the concept and the founder. It happened to be that a friend had referred me to this fellow named Mike Dubin, who came in and told us his vision around Dollar Shave Club. And he had done some lightweight testing on Groupon, he had access to some product, and he felt that there were too many choices for men to make in the bathroom compartment. They thought that there was too many brands, he needed a strong brand that would connect with men and make that choice really simple. And he wanted to start with razors. And he happened to have cut this really fantastic video.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Oh, he already had the video cut?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  He had already cut the video.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Legendary video.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Legendary video. And it hit upon two themes that I really was hunting for. One was, I believed that at that point YouTube would break a company. Like that YouTube is a platform, there would be this merger between content and commerce. And when he first pitched me the idea, I think the team and I were like, oh, my gosh, you know, a dollar a month, this is going to be so hard to get to scale. Like, this just sounds so hard, you know? But then, when he showed me the video at the very end of the meeting, which I believe he was reluctant to do because it wasn't final cut, and he had honestly talked to a lot of venture guys and they weren't really supportive of this concept. You know, I saw this and I was like, look, you know, I think that could really open up YouTube.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Like, you really understand your brand. And suddenly, he really shone through to us on his vision. And so, you know, we invited him to become part of Science. He came in, we made an investment, we joined the board, we became both his incubation partner and his investment partner. And he moved into our offices, along with a handful of other direct-to-consumer startups at the time, including like MeUndies, which became another big brand for us.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And so, at what point do you say? You know, along that journey, man, we hit that this is going to be a billion plus company. Is it you're looking at the data every day and you kind of just know look it's trending well? Or is there like a big inflection point where you, you know, it might have been it's just when you release the video, right? At some point, you just know that this is a hit.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, um, we do, one thing that's unique about science is that, and it's, and we can even talk about it relative to crypto is that we are, we are intimate to daily data. So we want to have access at founder level data within our businesses as long as they'll permit us, because we are looking for the insights. Either this is working, this isn't working. Maybe we see something that we think works, but the founders aren't quite seeing it. With Dollar Shaped Flips, certainly you saw that the audience broke out with that video. Certainly, we saw that the, that the conversion retention data was kind of industry, you know, industry leading. But also what we saw was, you know, an incredible CEO that

• 15:55Speaker 01

  really rose up to that challenge, you know, attracted incredible talent around him, built an early stage team that was just like one of the best early stage teams. And, and, you know, and all those things came together. And, you know, we obviously ended up with a lot of conviction on that business because we were so close to it.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so talk to me about one that didn't go well, right? Like you bring somebody in, they've got a great idea. You think again, hey, great founder, great idea, all this stuff. You bring them into the incubation model. We're like, what are the common fail points? Is it just bad idea that doesn't work? Is it the founder doesn't listen? You know, kind of where do you see there?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So we had, yeah, we had two fairly phenomenal misses. So one was this fellow walked into our office one day and he showed us this, um, this dating app that, um, that had swiping, not Tinder. Meanwhile, literally within that same week, this old friend of mine named Sean Rad showed me this dating app that was Tinder. And when I first saw the non-Tinder dating app, and because I had, in my private equity days, you know, I had worked with a firm and acquired a big dating network, and then we subsequently sold it to Match, so I understood the industry. And the moment I saw this app, I was like, oh my gosh, like this methodology is gonna crush.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I still have no idea how, in the same week, I saw the same app with two different brands. Like, I meant, and I've never asked Sean, and I've never asked the other founder on, like, did you see something from each other? How did this come about? It just, and sometimes it just happens that way in startups, where literally it feels like two people have the same concept at the same time, and I'm not under, I cannot explain why.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  They're pranking you.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe they were pranking me. I mean, it just felt like a weird cosmic coincidence, to be honest. So, we, so without understanding the gravity of either of these two companies, we back non-Tinder, because obviously Tinder was already backed by IC. Within a week of us backing it, the developer takes the app off the App Store and initiates a lawsuit against the founder who we had backed. Turns out, the founder, without us really fully knowing, was in this, like, payment dispute with the developer, and the developer was the one that had control over the Apple iTunes account. And if you ever go into a dispute with Apple, at the end of the day, they default with

• 18:21Speaker 01

  whomever owns the iTunes account. So at this point, as far as Apple's concerned, the developer owned the code, the developer owned the app. We had no access to the binary, we couldn't manipulate it, and we couldn't take it down or change it. So the founder then spins up another team to basically clone the app that just got taken down, even though it had users and traction, and by the time the clone was done, the complete battle was over.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it didn't matter.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Tinder was so fast and so on fire, that even the three months it might have taken us to prop up a new app, like, the battle was already, already completed. And so...

• 18:54Speaker 00

  It's something we talk a lot about, it's just like, speed kills.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  And you know, once you get momentum going and literally taking an app off the App Store, removing a feature, anything you do that kind of kills that momentum can be fatal.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Fatal.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  But but at the same time, if you have two companies, same ideas, similar talent, the one that could just iterate faster is likely to win.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, I can tell you a second one.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Second one was, we had been witnessing this change in consumer behavior around food out of Sweden, which was that people were buying basically ready to cook meals out of supermarkets, pre-chopped, pre-ready. So we took the concept, we immediately raised a million dollars and and launched this company called Fresh Dish. That was like a pre-prepped meal kit service. It was before Blue Apron had launched.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  We had it on subscription. It quickly jumped to like a quarter million a month in sales, like kind of the fastest we had seen. We hated dealing with cold chain. Our team just hated dealing with, you know, dicing raw chicken and figuring out how to basically put it into a box. We brought in a very senior founder who was an older executive that came out of a very successful e-commerce company. The first thing he did was remove the subscription concept. He was like, no, I just, I don't believe this concept is right for subscription. You know, consumers want one-off. We were, we were like six months into Dollar Shave Club, so we didn't understand exactly how powerful subscription was at that point, how critical. The moment he removes off subscription is the same time when Plated and Blue Apron and these contenders come up.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Obviously, they they dominate, right? So in that case, you know, the whether the founder was right or wrong, if that decision was wrong, we as on the board should not have allowed that decision to be made, missed out on a major opportunity, right? Like, so again, it was another weird moment in time that us, along with, you know, multiple other startups, kind of launched the same thing at the same time. One maneuver in our business model essentially killed the killed the concept.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, so let's move to crypto now, right? You guys have Science Blockchain.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Similar team, similar structure as the non-blockchain side of the business?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, somewhat. We have, we have, we did a, you know, we did a security token ICO in 2017. We took that pool of capital, the same way that we have incubation pools of capital. And we have a dedicated team that works with startups. They pitch us every day. Sometimes we co-found the startups with them. Sometimes we invest in the startups. In all cases, we want some level of operational involvement to kind of help them on strategy. Yeah, so very similar.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Got it. And what are the types of things that pushed you into the blockchain space? Was it the developers you saw were going into it? Was it just, hey, this piece of technology? What kind of initially got you guys interested?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Well, so we, we originally got very interested in 2013 and 14. And so we had set up a lightweight mining operation. We were actually about to launch our own exchange. But, you know, similar to a lot of people at that time, because we're funded by institutional investors, I got very nervous over the legality of what we were dealing with. And so we kind of put everything on pause. And late 2016, you know, there's a network of crypto enthusiasts out of LA. We're very tied into these, these, these people. And in late 2016, you know, you could feel it was happening, like it was all coming back. Ethereum was just starting to really move and people understood that there was something special happening there. So you go into 2017 and we said, look, look, we have to build here.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  So, so at that point, we dove into the, yeah, we dove into creating our own bespoke vehicle to see what we, to see what we could do.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Got it. And what are the areas you guys are interested in right now?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, when we looked at blockchain broadly, I felt that although, you know, everybody and, you know, everybody and their mother has a concept of some token ICO, 95% of it is like incenting, incentivizing users to do stuff, which is almost like the most boring and obvious concept around blockchain. You know, we looked at things that we thought were, you know, I have an original strategy map that we built early 2017 that still just holds true. We certainly fintech. Like, let's just assume, obviously, that's logical. Second was securities, fine, like creating liquid tradable objects around, you know, around securities. I love that, right? But then we thought about technology, we looked at things like ticketing. You know, ticketing is a highly logical use of blockchain. We looked at encrypted messaging. We love that.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  We looked at areas where it was logical for users to have a non-centralized and non-corporate-controlled controlled data store. Medical records, I still love. Credit scores, I still love. Areas where there's a piece of me that needs to exist in this digital manifestation. I don't want Experian owning that piece of me, but I do want that piece of me to exist someplace where it has some level of control and encryption and permission-based systems. And so we, we found these areas where we thought it was logical to build, and then we found founders and startups that were building in those areas.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Got it. And when you look out across the landscape right now, where do you think we are in terms of, not even want to say cycles, but just, you know, it feels like there's a lot of talent rushing in. It feels like there's a lot of experimentation going on. I think on the infrastructure side, so you've got companies like Coinbase, Gemini, Circle, you know, even Robinhood, etc., that are kind of what I would consider more crypto incumbents. So these are people who have figured out business models with revenue, are either at profitability or headed that way. And they seem like, like true technology companies in a centralized fashion, for the most part.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  On the other side is where all the experimentation, the decentralized world is happening. It doesn't feel like we have traction there yet, right? It feels like there's a lot of ideas, there's a lot of, you know, people trying, but we haven't really seen a breakout company, application, etc. Is that what you guys are seeing, or do you guys look at it differently than just kind of centralized, decentralized?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think your assessment's correct. And, and the way I kind of framed it up is, imagine if we, imagine if, you know, I've been meaning to spend a lot of time to look at the early days of the stock exchange, but it's almost like the stock exchange and all the supporting financial infrastructure around the stock exchange was suddenly built, but there's no really good companies to put on the exchange, right? That's kind of, it feels kind of like where we're at, right? Which is even the companies you're mentioning, Coinbase, Robin Hood and Gemini and these different custodian platforms and trading platforms, exchange platforms, it's all predicated on something of actual high value and desirability to be floated on these things.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  But to your point, outside of a magical store of value that is or is not Bitcoin, or ETH, or whatever you want to call it, there's not that many products that we all would want to trade on an actual stock exchange if we looked at it that way. So, we do look for companies like actually building and using whatever chain they're going to be on. One of the reasons why I think this pickle we're in right now, which is basically that finance and finance infrastructure and capital is so far ahead of development, is a direct result of 2017 and the ICOs, which is that people with bad concepts and people with great concepts all were essentially overfunded.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And they were overfunded also without any governance, which means that they ended up with pools of capital with essentially zero accountability. And which means that there's not a lot of pressure on release dates, board reviews, executive comp, right? There's small groups, typically engineering led, sitting on a ton of capital with no urgency.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Which is why we're just not seeing the right stuff come to market. Now, you know, of course, I believe that our portfolios do have more discipline because we're working with them hand in hand on getting their products to market on whatever chain they're supporting. But for the most part, I think a lot of these projects are very stagnant.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, you know, I come out of the kind of growth, the metrics, et cetera world. You know, obviously having worked at Facebook, so we can know, we'll talk about the MySpace Facebook stuff later.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  But I think that, you know, the people who figured out how to be data-driven, high levels of iteration, or frequent levels of iteration, in a centralized world, one big, right? If you look at the Facebooks of the world, or the Twitters, the Googles, et cetera, they figured out how to do that.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Something I I've been thinking more and more about is, is it actually going to be true that people who figure out how to do that stuff in the decentralized world on a global scale will actually win, you know, magnitudes bigger, right? Is that the opportunity? Or are they actually somewhat parallel, right? Facebook's a global company and so whether it's centralized, decentralized, it's not really going to matter.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Well, I think that the, I think that focusing on, and very similar to the philosophy that you experienced inside Facebook, obviously with our, you know, our equity-driven startups, everything is, everything looks like a live hedge fund, right? Like, they're trading and they're marketing and their performance and all their apps are monitored on a live basis. They have the religion of data. Beautiful. On the crypto side, I wish we were at that point, but I don't think we are, because that's also predicated on general adoption of this tech.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Right? And so, you know, the, the challenge that we're dealing with, and I think we're about to break through with some major deals, is getting large, massive corporations to pick up and adopt these protocols of these, in essence, kind of B2B software platforms. Because for the most part, most of these technologies are B2B software platforms, and for the most part, they're going to need mass level, you know, partnership and adoption. After they get that, I would love to focus on the optimization and the daily data. Right now, I just want big breakthrough deals, just to start getting volume onto these networks, which is what people really need.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. And, and part of this is, you need some technology, doesn't have to be the best technology, but they need some technology. They need the validation and trust, whether that comes through corporations, that comes through time, right? There's a whole bunch of ways you can get that.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  And then you get the usage and can kind of get into the data.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Part of this is, you can't really do a lot of the, you know, powerful data-driven decision-making and iteration.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Unless you have data.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah, you need volume. And the, right now, most of the volume that we all talk about, and even looking to our earlier conversation before this podcast around active DApps, a lot of it is self-supporting within the industry. So the data people, it's like even you think about somebody releasing their next chain, that's X times faster than one of the current chains, but the only use case right now is really the current chains trading among each other, or these DApps trading tokens within their current chains. It's not like somebody's like, oh, my gosh, only if I had a stronger chain, I have this massive corporate client that wants to onboard. I don't even think we're at that point.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, I think that's completely fair. What do you think about Bitcoin itself? Right? So obviously, there's a bunch of company building that's going on.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Bitcoin may be the most obvious, most simple,

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  you know, quote unquote, company being built right in front of our eyes.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  And it's almost too easy, right?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  People kind of overlook it and they're like, oh, what about all the other shiny stuff?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  How do you guys look at it?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  So there's a, I had a really great conversation Saturday night with some Bitcoin enthusiasts and then some, I guess, counter Bitcoin enthusiasts. And the conclusion I pulled back from was this, is that in the broad-based global consumer world, the best product does not always win, right? And right now, like, aside from people that might listen to your podcast, or people that I know within the crypto industry, most people know only one thing, which is Bitcoin. So if you think of Bitcoin as a brand, from a crypto perspective, it is probably the only mass-recognized brand that exists today in crypto. It may not be the best.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Someone may have a faster transit mechanism, or they have a better chain with additional features. But for the general person, if they're going to enter into crypto, I still think they're probably going to enter into Bitcoin. And if a normal place is going to, God forbid, actually accept a payment system in crypto, they're probably going to start with Bitcoin. It doesn't mean that Bitcoin's best. I just think that that brand may prove to actually hold more weight than we're all giving it credit for, which means that it might, you know, it might have a lot of long-lasting power.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is, it's funny because as like with all rules in life, there's always exceptions. And so there's this book, I think it might literally be called Think Bigger. And it talks about this idea of, you know, in many categories, the first mover won. So Coke, right? Pepsi can try as hard as they want.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  But Coke's out in front.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Right? And so you kind of go through a bunch of these. Now, flip side goes social networks, search engines, et cetera.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Technology world, actually, the first one hasn't won.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  True.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Right? And so I don't want to say that it's binary in terms of, oh, tech industry operates one way, and other industries operate the other way.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  But with Bitcoin around this, like, human psychology, this brand awareness is one component. And then two is also, by being first, it was able to grab a lion's share of the computing power.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  True.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Right?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  And that's like the network lock-in.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  And it becomes pretty hard, I think, that, like, to me, that's the part that... You have to not only convince somebody to donate their computing power or rent their computing power, but you have to get them to leave what they're doing.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Right? And I think that's going to be the big challenge for anyone who wants to unseat Bitcoin. Is how do you convince a miner to do that?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I don't know if you can. Yeah, it might be really hard. And if you think historically, like, why was, why did gold become gold? Right? It's not, gold isn't the, certainly titanium is more valuable than gold, or platinum, or, you know, other, other raw minerals could have been a competitor to gold. But at some point, when gold was recognized as the default currency or the default standard of trade, suddenly that lasted what, hundreds? I mean, I don't know, 5,000 years, right? And so it's not that it's the best, right? And so I definitely agree Bitcoin has a substantial advantage because of the miners and because of the amount of network lock-in that's happened and the amount of capital that's poured into it. But I think from a consumer perspective, it would take something very major, right?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So a major global platform, a major product coming out with the ability to access billions of people to truly unseat it. And, you know, unlike the Facebook Myspace wars, I mean, at the end of the day, if Myspace and Facebook at their heart, at their heart, they're more entertainment than they are utility. You know, you know, crypto at this point is more of a utility. So it's not like I can like or not like Bitcoin. Like, I might have an opinion on whether I do or don't like my experience at Facebook. If you look at Bitcoin as purely a payment mechanism or a store of value, like, I shouldn't have a feeling about it. It's a utility, right? Now, with that stated, Google certainly is a utility and certainly broke apart from Yahoo and the other search engines at the time that

• 33:52Speaker 01

  almost felt a little bit more like entertainment. So Bitcoin stays in the utility bucket, they probably have a lot longer lasting power than we expect.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I, I'm fascinated by the narrative that Bitcoin could become money, store of value, global reserve currency, all this stuff. And the part that, to me, feels like there is accelerating momentum is when you look at places like Venezuela, right? Where, you know, Bitcoin is not the best store of value.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Right? If every Venezuelan could, they would buy US dollars.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Right? Because that is a more stable store of value than the Boliviar or Bitcoin.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  But when you start talking to some of the people who either are there or have family there, what they say is, you know, look, the Boliviar is absolutely not going to be sustainable.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  And so I could try to get into US dollars. It's dangerous, right? So the actual, the ability to get there, they've got to do some pretty crazy stuff to be able to get the US dollar. And then two is, the government can come take it from them.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Right? If it's under their mattress, if it's in their bank account, I mean, all these different things. And so you not only get the currency issues, but you get the government issues.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  And with Bitcoin, obviously, you start resolving some of that stuff. And so it's almost like this trade off between the store of value is good enough. Right? And I also want the other advantages that come along with this digital asset.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  And so the part that feels much more like a tech company that is valuable, right? Take a Dollar Shave Club. Some people want Dollar Shave Club because they don't want to pick a brand.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Right? Some people want it because I just forget to buy razors.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Right? And it shows up.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Some people want it because it's cheap. It brings different utility or value prop to different people with the same offering.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  With Bitcoin, it feels very similar to that.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  There's different values that people can get out of the same asset.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, and I mean, the, you know, I like the Venezuelan example. I think that you could use, you could swap all those terms for China, too. So.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  You know, there's a lot of, there's substantial restrictions on Chinese people moving their money into other currencies. And I have a feeling that, let's just say, like, I've talked to enough people to believe that, that if you're in China, you're feeling very happy about being able to move your money into crypto, more so than keeping it within your local currency. And it's almost easier than going into other international currencies. And I know, I know we don't talk about it a lot, and people don't really want to recognize that that's a big factor in this, but I think it's actually a really huge factor. So I definitely agree with that. I also think that one of the beauty, you know, I've had two counter arguments on the Bitcoin side of the world. One is with enthusiasts that are really upset because they believe because Bitcoin doesn't have.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  A CEO and a management team that it's somewhat directionless and they're frustrated by that and they think it should be much more powerful and much more valuable than it is because frankly, it's been depressed because it doesn't have kind of consolidated push. On the flip side, the companies right now that do have, you know, clear management teams on top of their token or their platform, I'm not sure they're clearly telling the audience what it's for, you know, and I spend a lot of time with these CEOs of all the major tokens and I often leave the conversation feeling like I'm really unclear what they want this thing to be. So on one hand, I'm kind of happy that no one's telling me what Bitcoin wanted to be and the public's like, look, you know, yeah, I'm in Venezuela and I want my capital in Bitcoin because that's just a safer place for me, or, you know,

• 37:14Speaker 01

  or I just believe it's a long-term store value because I believe in the brand. In a certain sense, that's almost better because Bitcoin was out there saying, we're creating a venture fund to fund, you know, millions of little tiny startups that are all going to be built on top of Bitcoin and some of them are going to be doing all sorts of different things. I'm just not sure it would be as clean as it is now.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. And part of this too is, so there's the technology argument around the utility and different use cases. And one thing that we've, you know, really tried to unpack, and I don't even know if we actually have answers to this, but today, your interaction with the financial system is you probably have a bank account, you have a brokerage account, two separate things, used for two separate things, but in all, that's where you store and buy and sell value, right? In the digital world, what we're seeing is we've got a tokenized or digitized currency, right, in a Bitcoin or others. Now we're starting to see these tokenized securities, right? So obviously you guys tokenized some equity type stuff.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  And I think that you're going to end up seeing the commodities, bonds, all this stuff will get tokenized or digitized.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Well, like a Coinbase, a Circle of Gemini, they actually are going to create a world where you could hold all of those different assets in one single location.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  And it changes the user experience, not of a single asset, it actually changes the user experience that individuals have with the financial system.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Right? And you start thinking through the repercussions, not just in the Western world, right? And you guys have built big global companies and brands, right? And the one trend that I think goes untalked about in crypto is the African countries who were almost completely unbanked a decade ago.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Actually have better mobile banking than here in the US.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Or, you know, we may see this with the rest of the financial system in other parts of the world where they just leapfrog if the Western world stays behind.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  That's right. I totally agree. And there's a few themes you hit upon there that I think are really fascinating. And one is, we were looking at a bunch of startups that are approaching the merger of your brokerage account and your checking account, where their statement is like, "Look, what we're going to do is, you're going to deposit money with us. We're going to give you a standard ATM card. When your money's sitting with us, we will be investing it into bonds. And we'll be investing in the things that are low yield, a low risk, but actually gets you X percent return on this trajectory. And then every time you swipe your ATM card, we're going to dynamically be selling your position in those products to basically get your capital available to pay for your restaurant bill that night."

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And so I like this bleeding where you're combining the performance-oriented brokerage with your kind of cash account. And I think that banks have a lot of financial incentive right now to keep those two things separate, because you can then charge a lot of fees on both, and then banks can arbitrage your checking account balance or your savings account balance into their own debt products. And then brokerage can lock up your cap, all this stuff. So I think there is a change to the financial system where you have startups thinking about bringing these two things together. So I love that. The second theme you hit upon, which somebody also was talking to me a lot about, is this concept where like, could you be in a world where your bank account was all obviously in the digital assets, and you could be holding commodities? And then every time you swiped

• 40:31Speaker 01

  your card, you would be dynamically selling the right commodity at that time based on price and arbitrage, right? So again, like, having your money work for you in a different way and do it through tokenized securities. I love that view as well. I worry that the US financial system is highly motivated not to allow that view to happen. And I don't really want to, it's hard to bet against that US financial system. And the third piece of your argument, which I definitely agree, is that where you have countries where, for instance, they didn't have landlines, and they jumped right to cellphones. That was an incredible leapfrog moment on infrastructure for those countries. When you have countries like Kenya, where they typically didn't have typical banking and credit card infrastructure, and they immediately went right onto M-Pesa, their digital payment platform within their telephone providers, that was a huge change for them, right? And

• 41:16Speaker 01

  they're arguably, you know, one of the core countries in Africa that are already existing on a digital currency, that no one seems to want to really talk about, that has nothing to do with Bitcoin, is probably not even truly decentralized, but highly effective.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Look, we like to say the US dollar is the first digital currency most people interact with, right? Ninety-two percent of the money supply is digital. And so, you know, if you look in New York City, for example, people who carry around cash, right, versus credit, it has been a dwindling number. And then if you look at the subway system, so Subway card is like a real world utility token.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Right? A lot of the projects are trying to do this is I have to take my US dollars, I have to exchange it for my Subway card, and then I go and I can swipe to use something.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Right? How many of those do we need in our life?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  There's some for sure that it makes sense in a system. So Subway is a great example in the real world.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Maybe some gift cards at like a certain company, whatever, but when you really think about your everyday life, there's just not that many opportunities for that. And so I think we're going to get big compression on the utility token side.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  And on the financial side, though, there's a lot of opportunity.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  And so, you know, it just feels like there's going to be a migration there over time to like more quality type problems to solve.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  I totally agree. Yeah, you have to ask yourself, like, how often have you been like, I really want transferability of my airline miles? Like, I really need to do that every day. I wish this was a transferable token without a centralized system, right? The reality is like, we all have lots of point systems, you know? We have credits on our gift cards, we have, you know, whatever, subway rides on our Metro cards, we have miles with our airline accounts, but it's not that frequently I want to move them all around, right? Which in theory would be the benefit of a decentralized system. So we're already doing all this. It works pretty, pretty well, right? Everyone interacts with these things all day. But on the flip side, you know, in the security system, our security tokens, you have a lot of products that are liquid, which become really interesting for me. So we focus really heavily on REITs and a company in New York called Real Blocks that we'll eventually be announcing a big partnership

• 43:15Speaker 01

  with. And what we, what we love about them is they are figuring out ways to onboard REIT products into a tokenized security system because REITs are fairly vanilla. Like, we can take portions of REIT and put it into a tradable object. They're not really traded now. There's a lot of REIT inventory, like, like, you know, an unbelievable amount of capital locked up in REITs. They're small. Players that want to buy into REITs, but they can't afford the minimum size blocks when the big players do their offerings. And so I think that if we see an asset class like REITs start putting out hopefully billions of dollars of product and you know, and security, security tokens that allow the tradability of such, I think you could see a lot of volume on that. And that could be one of the first products that really opens up that security token exchange.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Solves a real problem.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Right. Makes, makes sense. All right. So let's do some rapid fire questions here before we wrap up. What's the one thing that you think in crypto that a high majority of other people would disagree?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well, I think, you know, you obviously have a lot of people really believing, almost every pitch, as I mentioned earlier, talks about you can incentivize people's use is the main use of crypto. And coming out of MySpace, right, and, and building a lot of consumer products, I think everyone here would be surprised at how hard it is to get people to change their behaviors, even if you do incentivize them. So the number of times I've been pitched the like, we're Spotify on crypto where you get paid for every song you listen to. I'm just telling you, it's not going to work out for you, you know? And by the way, every, I've gotten so many pitches that were the Facebook for crypto, right? Where you earn money back off of your ad views. There have been incentivized.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  My friends aren't there though. I can't, who, I don't care.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  That's what, that's what they don't get is like, there's no network effect on this stuff. And there, there have been so, there's so many ways right now, by the way, like in the internet world where you can get paid to click on ads. Trust me, it's out there, but no one uses them, right? Or if they use them, it's small, it's small buckets. So coupons were one of the first like incentivized use products out there, right? And if you think about the population that actually clips coupons, it's not actually that large. So I really don't believe that tokens as, as incentivized system to compete against major Fortune 100 consumer product companies is a realistic use case.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Absolutely. No, I tend to agree with that. All right. So if you could wave a magic wand and change one regulation, what would it be? Change or improve. You don't have to necessarily just change it, but you can improve it.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, right now.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  You know, I feel like there's so many regulations I would love to change or improve. You know, I really don't like the 99, you know, investor limit that we have off of what Reg D holdings. It causes a really big problem in crypto, which basically means that even if I go through the process of only working with accredited investors, which is what we do, I still have this 99 investor limit. The purpose, not necessarily a purpose, of one of the upsides of a crypto security token offering is that I could be much more broadly available to a lot of people. The moment you restrict it to 99, you essentially are just basically limiting it back to high net worth. And so the concept of you getting lots of people involved in your offering and you doing it the right way through a security token offering, and then you're also adhering to

• 46:29Speaker 01

  the 99 investor rule, I don't know, it just kind of flies in the face of innovation in a little bit. So I think that would be a nice regulation to change.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Other than a company that you guys are building or have funded, what do you think the most important company in crypto is?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  I mean, let's see, I mean, there's obviously, there's obvious companies in crypto with Coinbase and et cetera. I'd like to give you a non-obvious answer. Oh gosh, I have to really think about this. Listen, I think the miners are substantially overlooked. You know, I mean, when I spend time with miners, I'm spending time with these like hardware nerds that are operating the core of our infrastructure at a very quiet level. I think that they move price more than anyone wants to actually recognize. I think they are a massive underlying force of this industry that people don't talk about. So I, so why don't we give some attention to miners and say that the miners are somewhat

• 47:28Speaker 01

  unrecognized as like a massive component to the story.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  I think that's fair. All right, so let's forget about crypto for a second. This is my one non-crypto question, and then I end every podcast with letting you ask me a question. So think about that for a second. We have to admit that aliens are real.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  All right. We always think of aliens as human-like, right? Whenever you see them depicted in sci-fi and movies, etc.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Nobody ever really talks about alien animals.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  So do we think there's alien animals? And do we think aliens have pets?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I'm gonna assume yes to both of those answers.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Why?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I mean, well, I'm assuming that whatever form an alien's gonna take shape will be really based on like the biology and the physics of whatever planet they're on. So if you assume that aliens might look different than us in any form, then you have to assume that their animals are gonna look different than us. If you believe in evolution, then you have to believe in evolution from an interplanetary scale. So like, you have to assume that they had subspecies before they were highly intelligent creatures. And if there was different physics on that planet, it has to be different than what it is here. So 100%.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  I think that's a pretty reasonable argument there.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  I wish I could use a more unreasonable.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Everyone thinks about space, no one thinks about the animals.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  No, I agree. And I'm sure they have pets.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Actually, I've never said before, I'm gonna start a space PETA.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Protect the rights of alien species? I like that.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  All right. So what one question do you have for me?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  So what are the, like, you see a bunch of projects.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  If you were to, you know, if you had $50 million to invest into one company, and you had an epic team that was gonna run that company, and it was gonna support the overall growth within the crypto industry, what would you want that company to do?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  So there, I'm gonna answer this in two ways. There's if I was gonna invest the capital and just push the industry forward in general, right? And not worry about financial return.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  And then there's if there was financial return.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  On the financial return side, I think that whatever company wins, building the global securities exchange. So there's nothing to be token, just digital securities on a global scale. So not jurisdiction by jurisdiction, but anyone, anywhere can buy any asset, anywhere, in a regulatory compliant way. That will be a, you know, multi-billion, hundreds of billions of dollar worth company, right? Whoever figures that one out is gonna be a huge winner.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  If you know who that is, let me know. Well, I'm in. Okay. Uh, the if I was not worried about the financial, um, return, uh, I would actually put it behind an effort to go and drive adoption of Bitcoin. Yeah. In developing worlds, uh, specifically around governments and central banks. Yeah. And the thought process there being, um, we're already seeing kind of the fiat experiment fail on a couple of countries. Yeah. And so if, if we could go in however, through technology, through literally just conversation, whatever it is, and convince these countries that you should switch over to this decentralized, you know, technology. Yeah. Now they're going to lose some power. Mm hmm. Right? And so, so there's got to be, you can't just go in and say, you have to do this.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. So not going to work. Um, but, but I do think that once you get kind of the slippery slope going of some of the smaller, less developed countries, uh, switching over. Yep. There will be an acceleration of adoption. Yeah. And it won't be just a bind it like the, like, I don't know, the EU is not just like, ah, we're going to get rid of the euro and we're going to go, you know, Bitcoin. Yeah. You get more coexistence at first, right? And then what I believe will happen at some point in the future, it could be a hundred years out. Mm hmm. People will be able to vote with their dollars, right? Or, or their euros or whatever. Yeah. And they'll say, look, I'm going to put my value in one of these two stores of value mediums of exchange. Yeah. And you'll just see the flows of that value will tell you what is better, what's more desired, right?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  And so I think that like right now, we're not even at a point where people have, like they believe they have the option. Mm hmm. Right? So it's more of just like, I have the US dollar. Oh, I took 10 basis points, you know, and I, I bought some Bitcoin. Yep. When it actually becomes more kind of like a decision and I can choose between the two and they're somewhat, uh, equally weighted. Yep. I think that's going to be pretty powerful. And so there's, there's probably some like, um,

• 51:49Speaker 00

  I don't know. It, it's not a, a technology piece really that drives that adoption. I really do think it's education. Yeah. And it's the, um, you know, kind of just going and banging on doors. Agreed. Right? Yeah. I don't know. That's what I would do. I like that. 50 million bucks would, uh, would get us like three days in crypto world though, depending on how, uh, The volatile movie. Brutal. Absolutely. No, man, look, this is awesome. I really appreciate you, uh, you coming on and we'll have to do it again. Sounds, sounds great. And thanks for having me.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  All right, and we're back here with John Belizere, the CEO of Saluna. You can check them out at saluna.io. So John, you gotta tell me, why'd you choose to leverage wind rather than solar power for this project?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Thanks, Pop. Why wind versus solar? I get that question a lot. It's a great question. I mean, there are many benefits to consuming and applying energy on that site, you know, from a wind versus solar perspective. But our location in Dakla made it pretty easy. We're sitting on one of the best wind sites in the world. Wind travels there at 22 to 23 miles an hour consistently. If you look at a wind almanac, it is one of the reddest parts of the world. But you know, we did look at solar, and when we looked at that difference, what was interesting was wind blows all the time. In fact, the wind blows fiercer at night in the Dakla region than it does during the day. Solar doesn't have

• 53:11Speaker 02

  that benefit, right? It actually, you can only benefit from solar during the day, and you've got to combine that with a really large battery. And when we loaded that into our calculations, we found that we were deploying more cost than we needed to for the amount of energy that we'd be getting out. So wind proved to be a much better application of this site, especially since it's a wind site, than solar. We also looked at blending it, so wind and solar. But the wind was so productive that solar was not really much, really more additive than the wind on the site. And so that's why we went with solar to start out versus, I'm sorry, that's how we went with wind versus solar.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Very cool. So in Morocco, we're long wind, short solar. If you guys want to learn more about the project, you can go to saluna.io. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.