20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!

Devin Finzer is the Founder & CEO @ Opensea, the world's first and largest NFT marketplace allowing you to discover, collect, and sell extraordinary NFTs. To date, Devin has raised over $423M for the company with their last $300M round valuing Opensea at $13.3BN. Before changing the world of NFTs, Devin co-founded ClaimDog which was acquired by Credit Karma and before founding ClaimDog, Devin was an engineer at Pinterest. Do want to say, I always love Semil Shah's startup of the year, for 2021 it was Opensea, check out his piece here. In Today’s Episode with Devin Finzer You Will Learn: 1.) How Devin made his way into the world of NFTs and came to found the first and largest NFT marketplace in the form of Opensea? 2.) The Scaling Story: What were the first early signs that Opensea was working when they were in YC? What core metrics did they look at to determine success? Given NFTs not being "hot" at the time, how was the fundraising process for Opensea coming out of YC? What were the early investors most excited about? What was the inflection point when Opensea and NFTs really started to take off? What most surprised Devin about the way in which the inflection point happened? When scaling from $150M to $4BN in GMV, what are the first things to break in a company? How does Devin maintain company morale with such volatile crypto and NFT markets? 3.) The Next Decade of NFTs: How does Devin predict large brands and companies will utilise NFTs for their businesses? In what ways does Devin think creators and celebrities will use NFTs moving forward to create more efficient business models? How does Devin respond to the statement, "NFTs do more to harm than help income inequality?" What are Devin's biggest concerns moving forward when analysing the NFT market? How does Devin see the future for the development and experimentation of NFTs? 4.) The Future of NFT & Gaming: How does Devin see NFTs impacting the world of gaming most? How does Devin think about interacting with these gaming communities that are external to the centralised Opensea marketplace? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Devin Finzer Devin’s Favourite Book: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to 20 VC and what a start to the year it's been. On Monday, we had former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, discussing the winners and losers for the next decade of NFTs. And today, we're joined by likely the most prominent figure in the industry as the founder of the world's largest NFT marketplace. You guessed it, OpenSea. And I'm so thrilled to welcome Devin Finzer, founder and CEO at OpenSea. As mentioned, OpenSea is the world's first and largest NFT marketplace, allowing you to discover, collect and sell extraordinary NFTs. To date, Devin has raised over $423 million for the company, with their last $300 million round valuing OpenSea at a reported $13.3 billion. Before changing the world of NFTs, Devin co-founded ClaimDog, which was acquired by Credit Karma. And before founding ClaimDog, Devin was also an engineer at Pinterest.

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  I do also want to say I always loved Sam Murschall's Startup of the Year piece. For 2021, it was OpenSea, and you can check out his piece on the 20minutevc.com where we've linked to it. And I do also want to say a huge thank you to Dylan at Figma for some fantastic question suggestions today. I really appreciated that. But before we move into the show today, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Now, there are three things to me that really stood out about why I love Squarespace. First, mobile optimized websites. All websites are optimized for mobile with Squarespace, so content automatically adjusts. So your site looks great no matter what device it's on. Pretty awesome.

• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  So whether you're running SPVs, a traditional venture fund like me, or even a rolling fund, Angel List has you covered. And I'm also super excited about their new product, Angel List Stack, which is purpose-built for founders. With Angel List Stack, you can create a fundraising-ready startup in just a few clicks. Angel List handles your company's incorporation, banking, cap table and fundraising processes, all in a single place. This allows founders to focus on building. If you're a founder, you can launch your company at stack.angellist.com/20vc. Whether you're a founder or a funder, you're in great hands with Angel List. But that's enough from me, so now I'm very, very excited to hand over to Devon Finzer, co-founder and CEO at OpenSea.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:42Harry Stebbings?

  Devon, this is such a joy to do. I've heard so many great things from so many mutual friends, from Avishal Goh, from Dylan Field, from Alexis Ohanian, who all actually provided questions as well. But thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:54Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all. I've wanted to do this one actually for a while now. So I want to start with some context here. We see OpenSea today, this incredible company with incredible trajectory. What was the founding moment for you and how did it all start, Devon?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, I mean, it really started with just an interest in crypto more generally. So back in 2017, I had followed crypto peripherally, but I'd never really sunk my teeth into it and gotten my hands dirty with playing around with smart contracts, seeing what was available. I'm reading the white papers. Going to meetups actually at the time was a really great way to kind of get deeper into all the things that were happening in crypto at the time. But yeah, got very academically interested in crypto with my co-founder and started thinking of different crypto ideas. A lot of the trend at the time was sort of like, think about a marketplace and build it in a decentralized way. So the first idea that we had was building this decentralized marketplace for sharing internet bandwidth. And that was the idea that we got into Y Combinator with. But we ended up sort of

• 4:50Speaker 02

  being more interested in this early sort of more mainstream use case for crypto, which was really pioneered by CryptoKitties, which was one of the first NFTs in the first blockchain game. And just thought that was really cool. Like, I hadn't been super deep in like gaming. So I realized like how much fun it was to like build in the gaming ecosystem and sort of started thinking about ideas related to CryptoKitties and this idea of sort of a more generic marketplace for digital stuff, which, you know, the idea was that more and more NFTs would come online over the coming years. It became really exciting and compelling. So we decided to go and build it and kind of pivoted from our original idea into that.

• 5:27Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I apologize for the base question here, but we have two questions, and I want to make sure that everyone kind of follows the conversation with us. So first, starting with the core, what is an NFT?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. So an NFT stands for non-fungible token, but you can kind of think of it as like a digital thing on the internet that you own in kind of a similar way that you might own a physical item. You know, when you own a physical thing, like a chair or something like that, you can kind of like do whatever you want with that thing. You can like throw it away. You can give it to a friend. You can go and like put it for sale on eBay. Whereas with digital stuff, you know, you own digital stuff in a variety of contexts. Like maybe you own an item inside of a video game, or like you own your Twitter handle to some extent, or like domain names. A lot of people own domain names. But you don't necessarily have like the same property rights that over those items that you have in the physical world. For example, an item inside of a video game, maybe you can kind

• 6:22Speaker 02

  of like move it around in the video game, but you can't necessarily go and like sell it on some other marketplace or like freely gift it. So NFTs There are these digital items that have those property rights kind of baked into them. Again, in the same way that like something like Bitcoin or Ethereum is a currency. And there have been many different digital currencies, but they sort of have those like, you know, property rights associated with them that make them really exciting.

• 6:46Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so that's what they are. And this was a challenge. He goes, ask him, why are they so fucking interesting and exciting then?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think they're really interesting because, you know, it's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet, right? And there's all of these sort of interesting implications to that. If you look at kind of what are the emergent properties that NFTs have? One is they're like immutable, depending on the NFT, you can sort of be guaranteed that they're going to be around for a long period of time. And they're not going to necessarily just change all of a sudden. Two is liquidity, right? You can trade them or you can buy and sell them openly on marketplaces. Three is like global transferability, right? So you can transfer them anywhere around the world freely, regardless of like where you live. So there's a host of other like sort of special properties that emerge. But all of these things are just like really interesting building blocks.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  If you're thinking about a new application to build that couldn't exist without sort of these digital objects with those sorts of rights baked into them.

• 7:45Harry Stebbings?

  Well, today we've seen the majority in collectible format. Like, how do you see the most popular use cases of NFTs? And how do you expect this to change over time?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so certainly around collectibles. I think game items is is another emerging category that that has taken off to some extent with games like Axie Infinity or Decentraland or Sandbox. I think gaming is this really interesting natural fit for NFTs because people have been buying digital items online for quite some time now. And spent, for example, billions of dollars buying virtual clothing in some a game like Fortnite. And so gamers are already used to digital things having value. They've just sort of been confined to these like closed worlds, right? You know, it's hard for you to go and like take something inside of Fortnite and bring it into some other game and some other developer. I think that concept of like, you know, open worlds, open economic systems inside of games.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Is one that's very early and is going to be really exciting.

• 8:43Harry Stebbings?

  Well, is that the core change that we've seen then, the interoperability of kind of valuable assets between different platforms, games, whatever it is, that was traditionally locked within a, I'm going to show my age, but like a Sims of the world?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, all right. Sorry, the question is whether that's sort of one of the.

• 8:59Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, like how key is interoperability to the rise and their importance moving forward?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think it's one of the really interesting things about it, but you know, interestingly enough, you know, the NFT space has grown significantly without that being a use case yet, right? It's like sort of still in people's imagination. Most of your point, most of the NFT sort of market has been around just like really simple, collectible stuff, right? But there are sort of early experiments like Loot, for example, where, you know, you could have these items that kind of exist independently from any individual experience around them. And I think that's a really compelling idea. Of course, like the game developers are rightly skeptical of this. I think the existing games don't necessarily have a incentive to like open up their economies and allow this sort of interoperability.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And you kind of have to think about what are the reasons that a game developer would want to do that? But I think new games and new developers who are more experimental and kind of want to figure out what's the business model incentive structure that works. They will eventually crack this and eventually build sort of these open worlds that I think could be really interesting.

• 10:04Harry Stebbings?

  Now, we're going to go back to the hypergrace, but I do want to start with a sense of chronology because, you know, it's been an incredible last 18 months or so. But as I said, I spoke to Alexis Ohanian before the show and he suggested that I ask a question around Y C Demo Day. He said it was in the middle of crypto winter. How was that experience for you and how did that go?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was a lot of fun. Like I think Y C Demo Day, there were only a couple of crypto companies, maybe like five or six crypto companies. You know, at that time we had like sort of built the product, launched it and kind of gotten early traction, but it's very early. And, you know, I would say like, you know, we got positive reception from some VCs and like others were rightly like more skeptical or just not interested. And certainly like there continues to be a whole section of tech that just thinks crypto is is not sort of. Interesting phenomenon. But yeah, you know, like after Demo Day, we raised from sort of a mix of both like traditional investors, crypto investors who were more kind of sold on the vision of NFTs.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  It wasn't as crazy of a funding environment back then as it is today, where it's just like so easy to go and raise a giant seed round and an insane valuation. It was a lot more conservative, but you know, there were still a lot of people that got excited by the idea of OpenSea.

• 11:16Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, speaking of one person got excited, one was Abigail. And he asked, you know, what gave you the conviction to keep going when the market was telling you otherwise, the crypto winter was real and you could have shut down. What gave you the conviction to keep going when the market was bluntly shitting on you?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  I guess it was just sort of treating it more as a project than as like a company that needed to achieve like extremely high growth in a short period of time, right? Because on one hand, you know, we weren't really growing that fast. We're kind of like linearly growing. Sometimes we had like a negative month or whatnot, but we still did have like some transaction volume on the marketplace. So it wasn't like no one was using the product. You know, there were people who thought OpenSea was cool and like there were a lot of kind of early users who were like, this is a really nice service that you guys are providing. And you know, you see like users complain and like care about what you're doing and that, you know, keeps you going for sure. And then I would say the bigger factor was just seeing the momentum in the developer community, right?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  And so you saw all these people who are excited about building NFT projects. It just takes time, right? It just takes time for those projects to actually come to fruition. So I think there are actually a lot of really positive signals despite it being a bear market. And you know, it's a very different climate right now. So a lot of this advice doesn't apply. But in a scenario where we do see another bear market, I think the key is really just do something that you're excited about and that, you know, you'll keep on working on regardless of whether you have like immediate traction.

• 12:42Harry Stebbings?

  I want to touch on that. I do want to touch on one thing before that. You said about the transaction volumes and you know, I see so many founders chasing GMV today. And Bill Gurley from Benchmark said on the show, you know, not all GMV equal. How do you think about the North Star metric fee which determines success with OpenSea? Is it purely GMV? How do you think about that and bluntly the other elements to focus on?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  We definitely, you know, don't look just at GMV where we look at number of transactions, right? So number of sales as a more healthy metric because that's an indicator of are people able to sell the stuff that they want to sell in the marketplace? And then also is the NFT space sort of providing value to users in an interesting way, right? So a game economy, for example, can have items that sell for like 50 cents each, all the way up to hundreds or thousands of dollars. And each one of those transactions is could be really valuable to a user. So we don't just look at GMV is such a skewed metric because if things are selling for really high prices, then you can have really huge GMV growth. But we tend to sort of be more grounded in like number of transactions, which again is also going to be influenced by the growth of the market.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And then also just how many people are coming to the website with a wallet connected. So really basic stuff like that to get them get a sense of like, are we continuing to see growth?

• 13:57Harry Stebbings?

  On the element of like, you know, just do something you're excited by because the winter will come. I totally get you there. The challenge is when you have a team and you have a much more extended family to convince. Like a Brian at Coinbase said on the show that it's challenging bluntly when you have crypto winters to keep everyone in Coinbase as motivated as they are when it's, you know, fucking bull market. How do you think about keeping that continued morale and enthusiasm in the team when it is a winter? And what do you think you'll need to do or change in terms of your leadership, your words and how you operate?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I do think one thing that maybe helped but also hurt was just having a really small team. Like we had like six to seven people, right? When even when things started taking off, we were really small. So most of the people who had joined were there because they were interested enough in the project and like they were excited about NFTs. And the other thing was we didn't really have a bull market before, right? There was like a little mini wave of excitement about NFTs, but it never really, it's not like there was this huge spike and then everything kind of came crashing down. It was more just like things started at a pretty low level and kind of continued for that level for a while. So people weren't like seeing like a lot of negative direction of the transaction volume. Yeah, I think in terms of like how to keep the team motivated, I actually would say.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Morale was just as good when things were slow as it is now when things are fast because it's just such a fun and exciting space to work on. And I think everyone in the company kind of has that mentality.

• 15:22Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you is like, when was that inflection point? What was the tipping point where I was like, boom, this is really taking off in a way we did not expect? Was there a moment or a period where it really became clear?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Maybe two, like to August of last year, like, you know, we started having more competitors and like people started paying a little more attention to the NFT space. And, you know, it's kind of clear and, you know, volume started kind of going generally upwards. So it's clear there was momentum building and about a year ago. And that's when we sort of started like, okay, we started saying, okay, we need to kind of hire and be more ready for this because it's starting to happen. Our more art projects were online, more artists were doing things, more people were paying attention. And then the other big inflection point was, so I think in January, we did about eight million dollars of transaction volume. In February, we did ninety five million in transaction volume. And then in March, it was like a hundred and sixty million. So that course of three months was like a big step function.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  There was sort of this pent up excitement around NFTs that hadn't really gone viral into the crypto community. And that sort of started to happen in those months, right? Where like you had these projects that launched that that really got people excited and then people would buy and sell them on secondary marketplaces. And then similarly, there's a similar inflection point from like July to August of this year, where we went from about three hundred and fifty million to three point four billion dollars of transaction volume. And so that was like another wave where things just like kind of continued. And, you know, we saw a lot of user growth there too. Yeah, it's really been this last year that we've seen kind of things take off.

• 16:54Harry Stebbings?

  Pause, right, three billion plus in GMV and scaling that fast. I mean, it's just, it's almost unprecedented. My question, actually, I can't take it, it's Avishel's question, but he said, you know, scaling so fast, what are the biggest challenges? And what breaks first?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  A couple of things, like customer support becomes a really big challenge, right? Because there's just more people and, you know, you hadn't really built out that org or function. So that is one of the main things, and especially with the product that is still very. Early adopter phase, right? Where like there's so much new stuff, there's wallets, there's all these things. So that's been an org that we're like continuing to scale and build out, obviously like platform, right? So, you know, dealing with more web traffic and more site usage and more like, you know, deploys become riskier, right? Because they impact more people. So that's another one. And then, of course, like as an extremely young company, like, and this probably isn't the case for every company, because I think some tend to develop this more earlier, but like just operations of the company.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  So like basic HR, basic finance, basic legal, like all those things, you know, you sort of have to really quickly kind of ensure that you're equipped there. I would say the two main ones are sort of customer support and relatedly trust and safety. So ensuring that people aren't selling fraudulent items and then core platform.

• 18:08Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, when you put on the contemplative hat and you look back at the last year and the growth of NFTs, what surprised you most?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I think the thing that surprised me was just like that the cultural movement around crypto was what drove the NFT movement to be big, right? So like, you know, you look at these sort of profile picture projects, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but basically it's like, you know, people collecting digital art and then setting them as their Twitter profile, right? So people will collect a CryptoPunk, which is this sort of antique NFT and set it as their profile picture. And that whole phenomenon, which is really like this growing community of people with all of these interesting like cultural norms associated with them and like ways of interacting online,

• 18:54Speaker 02

  really rallying around this idea of like a collectible that you can own and just have people admire. That phenomenon, I didn't think was sort of what would drive a wave of excitement around NFTs. You know, I sort of had more of a thesis around like games or things that are useful or like inherently useful NFTs versus these like more collectible use cases.

• 19:16Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about NFTs as status symbols now and the social capital associated to it? As you mentioned there, it is this incredible symbol of pride for someone that they put it on all their socials. But how do you think about NFT as status?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of like the first, it seems to be the first kind of killer use case, right? Is just purchasing this to symbolize that you're part of some exclusive club, right? And now there's, especially as things are starting to open up, I think there is like an even an in-person element to where people are talking about kind of like what things they bought. And, you know, there's now these crypto folks who are willing, are looking to kind of spend on something in the same way that, you know, someone who on Wall Street might like spend money on, you know, a nice watch or something like that. It's now the equivalent of that in the digital world. So I think it's a lot of the same patterns that humans have adopted in physical society, applied to the digital world.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And I think that's one element of the NFT space, but I think it goes much more broad than that. And, you know, it's not necessarily just about status. It's about being a part of a community, you know, building interesting things that you can do with NFTs, right? If you look at the Loot project, building like brand new experiences and building better experiences than you could without that sort of like coordination layer that NFTs provide where you can have this item that can kind of live across multiple different applications. So I think the status stuff is interesting, but I think it's just sort of like the thing that has driven, has allowed NFTs to gain a ton of mind share. And I think more sort of creative use cases will be what drive it to the next level.

• 20:52Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, how do you think about prioritization? Because if you think about OpenSea as kind of a new economy, you have so many different things that you could do on the back of it, from landing to insurance to social, like verticalized social networks. How do you think about kind of the prioritization of your product roadmap, given the hugely expansive kind of adjacencies that you could move into?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  As a company, we're just, as we scale, like we're really just building the execution muscle so that we don't have to make quite as aggressive trade-offs and we can do more things as a company, right? So the more we can bring on the right people, build the right processes internally that To be able to effectively execute on new initiatives, then the more like of that priority queue, we can tackle effectively. But when we look at how to prioritize, like we think about kind of what does the customer want. We're a very customer centric company for the time being. We have invested a lot in our developer tools. At the end of the day, I think developers and really do care about like, is the platform going to work for most

• 21:51Speaker 02

  regular users or most users who come on it and want to buy, sell and discover? Because if you don't have that foundation of being a really good marketplace, you know, it's hard to kind of have things that are more peripheral. So we do, you know, for the time being, like, the focus is really on building the best trusted marketplace for consumers. And so that involves like investing in the right tools for buying and selling, the right ways to sort of remove fraud from the platform, and then also kind of the best discovery experience where you can go and you can find what you're looking for. So those are all areas that we're investing in.

• 22:22Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to ask, you know, we spoke a little bit about kind of the gaming elements within NFTs. And, you know, we've seen multiple kind of adjacencies away from collectibles. You know, more and more, we see elements like utility and the experience layer of NFTs. You know, we mentioned before, you know, Axie, there's so rare, there's many others. How do you think about interacting with these communities that are maybe external to a centralized NFT marketplace?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, for it depends on the project, right? So for a lot of games, where the main place where people will buy and sell the items. So good examples like Crypto Boxles or Zed Run, where they don't have their own secondary marketplace and, you know, they rely on OpenSea. And one of the exciting things about OpenSea is that when someone transacts on OpenSea, the project can actually take a percentage of the sale. And so there's this nice symbiotic relationship where the project earns when a sale occurs, which is really important. Other times, you know, there is like sort of an internal in-game marketplace, like in the case of Axie, which has its own chain. And so it's sort of like a separate ecosystem and the interaction there is a little bit less. And then sort of somewhere in the middle where like they have their own marketplace, but like the

• 23:26Speaker 02

  items are viewable on OpenSea there, where sort of like this, you know, visualizer explorer for all the content and sort of a proof of authenticity for for the NFT. So there's a variety of ways we can. Interact with games, the one that we really try to strive towards is providing a really good marketplace for games so that they don't have to build it themselves, but they can still monetize.

• 23:45Harry Stebbings?

  A horribly macro question, but I am just intrigued. I got asked it the other day. And it's how do you respond to the statement that NFTs do more harm than help income inequality? When you look at a lot of the people that made money in the early days, it's been quite centralized, tax-centric, mostly male. How do you think there's more to harm than hurt income inequality?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think it's definitely like a huge concern. You have to kind of look at things from like the short-term lens and the long-term lens, right? So the short-term lens, I'm not sure the breakdown, but a lot of the people who have made the most money from NFTs are probably the people who are already made a lot of money from crypto, for example, right? Long-term, like if you think about the potential of NFTs, really what we're talking about is a way for, or one segment of this market is really a way for artists and creators to directly monetize their work and directly tap into their fanbases and have those people support them, right? So on the contrary side, we also know people who have, you know, paid off student loans by selling digital art as NFTs, right? Or creators or musicians who maybe were making a very small

• 24:48Speaker 02

  amount using Spotify and like sort of the pay to stream model, but now are able to actually really effectively monetize as a creator or musician using NFTs. So it opens a brand-new business model for these types of folks. On the flip side, there's a lot of success stories of people who didn't come from as wealthy financial backgrounds who have been able to reach people who want to support them more effectively. And same story with charities and then all these things. And I'm not saying that that equation like nets out to something that, you know, is worth sort of saying that it's working in the short run, but I think long run, you know, this does open up the playing field for really anyone to like directly tap into a fanbase or people who want to support them. So I think long-term, you're talking about kind of brand-new business models

• 25:31Speaker 02

  and a different model than kind of what you see on existing social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, where most of the value accrues to platform itself.

• 25:41Harry Stebbings?

  I'm gonna ask a bit of a weird one, but when you think about like people as companies today, and it could be, they all say it could be Jay-Z, it could be Taylor Swift. Do you think we'll see Taylor Swift do Taylor Swift NFTs? And bluntly, with the size of fanbases today, this could actually fundamentally change the game of economics for these creators. Like in a hugely meaningful way, I mean, to the tune of hundreds of billions.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't see why not. I mean, you look at people, artists who've already done NFTs. There's folks who are kind of in that territory. I think Eminem has now done some NFTs. DJs like Zed have done NFTs. So like, you know, there's a lot of sort of more mainstream artists who have started experimenting. I don't think Taylor Swift has done anything to my knowledge, but I wouldn't be surprised if she did. I think there is a question of like, what is going to resonate most with fans, right? Sometimes the sort of pure collectible NFT is not as compelling to people as something that has a little more creativity associated with it or a little more utility. So there's a question around that, but I think, you know, yeah, it's just a matter of time. I mean, tons of major brands are sort of streaming into the space, you know, Time Magazine did a launch recently. So it's, it's already starting to happen.

• 26:47Harry Stebbings?

  So what would creativity and utility look like? Would that mean access to Taylor Swift tools? And I'm sticking on Taylor Swift because I think Taylor Swift should do it and I will buy it. Is it access to exclusive content? Is it the next ticket? How do we think about utility value in that realm, I'm guessing?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it could be any of the above, right? Yeah. So access to exclusive content, tickets. The interesting thing is you can, you know, provide sort of immediate utility. But in the same way that like, when you have an event ticket, you often like will collect it afterwards. You can have that same dynamic where like you use it originally for the immediate utility, but then it serves a more collectible use case over time. And again, you can have really cool experiences where like, you know, people who own a Taylor Swift ticket can then, you know, have access to something else in the future. And like, and even the opposite direction, right? You could have like, now what we're seeing with Board Ape Yacht Club, which is another NFT project that's similar to CryptoPunks in that there's only 10,000 of these kind of rare apes, right? Is that traditional brands are starting to build interesting things on top of Board Ape Yacht Club.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  And like, now there's all these additional projects where if you own one of these things, you get access or you get something new and like, that's really like an ecosystem emerging on top of it. So there might be like an interesting interplay between kind of these like more crypto native brands and IP that's emerging with like more traditional artists coming in.

• 28:05Harry Stebbings?

  What's a new NFT collection, Devon?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  I have a bunch of random NFTs. I don't think like particularly exciting. I have some like Decentraland land. So Decentraland is basically like a virtual world where you can like go and explore and like create interesting experiences and like you have this avatar. It's kind of like Second Life. I'm a big fan of it. I think maybe, you know, we'll see whether it eventually takes off, but I've always been really like excited about it. Crypto voxels. I have some like crypto voxels wearables. I have a cool cat, which is sort of in the territory of like these more collectible like Crypto Punk type things. I have some E N S names. So E N S names are like sort of the domain names of Ethereum world. So just a bunch of random stuff, but nothing like super impressive.

• 28:45Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so help me out. Like as a new, what would you advise a new V to buy?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so well, I guess first thing is like sort of setting up your wallet and getting accustomed to how it works by getting cryptocurrency because you're going to need that. A good starting place might be like participating in some of the games that are out there. So for example, I think Crypto Voxel is a cool starting place where you can go in and like build a, it's sort of like Minecraft where if you own some land, you can like build stuff on top of it. You can have an avatar and those avatars can have like wearable hats and things like that. So the the wearables are pretty cheap. So that might be like, I think that's a cool way to kind of get a little more depth versus just buying like a pure collectible. But of course, you can also just buy a pure collectible.

• 29:28Harry Stebbings?

  How much is a Crypto Punk?

• 29:30Speaker 02

  A Crypto Punk, those ones are really expensive. So like, you know, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars at least.

• 29:35Harry Stebbings?

  All a first buy, isn't it?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:38Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, well, maybe nice to hear. Definitely move into a quick fire around there, Devon. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Sure, sounds good.

• 29:47Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, what's the favorite book and why?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Favorite book? I guess I don't have a single one, but I really like Homo Deus. That's a sequel to Sapiens. Yeah, very forward thinking, very thoughtful view of sort of some of the trends in technology and society today.

• 30:01Harry Stebbings?

  What's the hardest element of your role with OpenSea today?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Maybe personal time management.

• 30:05Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, what do you not have? Enough time for.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  I guess what I meant is sort of being very rigorous around what I do and what I don't do, right? Ensuring that I'm using my time as effectively as possible to really like focus on the core, critical pieces of the business that need to be addressed versus things that are necessarily easier to do.

• 30:22Harry Stebbings?

  Who's your closest mentor or your go to person and what have you learned from them?

• 30:27Speaker 02

  I don't know if the closest, but one that comes to mind is Dylan Field. I think you had him on the show. Founder of Figma is a really close mentor of mine. I mean, what's great about Dylan is he is able to do so many different things. He's running Figma, but he's also extremely deep in the NFT space. So he's just been like very helpful from like mentoring us on company building, but also on sort of like NFT strategy as well.

• 30:50Harry Stebbings?

  No, this I loved it and he provided some question space. That was awesome. Tell me, you can have a billboard anywhere in the world. What does it say and where is it?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Oh man, maybe I just do it in New York. I live in New York. I'm not religious, but the, I believe it's the serenity, prayer or whatever, like the Grammy, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference. I like that as sort of like something that kind of think of mine. So maybe I'd say that.

• 31:15Harry Stebbings?

  Devin, I love it. I was gonna go for Times Square, buy all.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 31:22Harry Stebbings?

  I love the way ABC thinks versus a very pure founder. Tell me, what's the biggest misnomer about NFTs today? Do you think?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the biggest one is just that they're only about art and collectibles, right? I think people just don't know that they're, they're all sorts of things.

• 31:34Harry Stebbings?

  What makes you nervous moving forward about the NFT market?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of like volatility up and down the technical stack, right? There's like underlying blockchains that are shifting around. There's like wallet layers. There are just so many moving pieces that I could see, you know, some of those kind of interplaying and just such complicated ways that it makes it hard for people to build applications on top of this.

• 31:57Harry Stebbings?

  And then final one, you know, we've seen this incredible growth, as we said, I can't believe that 303 billion. Now is five years for you in OpenSea. How big could this be, Devin?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  I mean, what we've always been excited about is size, not just in terms of kind of like market and the business, but really just in terms of the number of people that could be impacted. So we really do think that, you know, this is like. Technology that will ultimately, over the long haul, impact billions of people and have sort of use cases across so many different like sectors and so many different areas. So I do think it will be huge and something that eventually like really changes how our society works. Maybe not five years, but you know, longer term.

• 32:35Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I think we'll do with ten. Devin, this has been such a joy to do. So thank you so much for joining me, man.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 32:43Harry Stebbings?

  Just the most unbelievable trajectory and time ahead for Devin and OpenSea. I want to say a huge thank you, Tim, for making the time to do the show there. And a huge thank you to Dylan and Alexis for providing some fantastic questions. If you'd like to see more from us, you can, of course, on the twentyminutevc.com. However, before we leave you today, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Now, there are three things for me that really stood out about why I love Squarespace. First, mobile optimized websites. All websites are optimized for mobile with Squarespace, so content automatically adjusts, so your site looks great no matter what device it's on. Pretty awesome. Second, email campaigns. Squarespace makes it super easy to grow

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