00:04 • Piers
Hey guys. Welcome back to another episode of Metaverse Musing. Today, I’m delighted to introduce you all to Blake Robbins, who is one of my favorite people to follow online. I’ve learned a lot from his thoughts and writing over the years, and he continues to be a highly proficient curator of content. I strongly recommend people check out his blog online, where he’s got a reading list that he maintains consistently. I’ve found a few shortcuts to great content through that. Blake, I’m excited to chat.

00:33 • Blake
Thank you. I’m excited to chat with you as well. I’m equally a huge fan from afar and I always enjoy our conversations. It always feels like you’re actually living in the future where I’m trying to keep up with you.

00:47 • Piers
I would love to hear about your background for those that might not be familiar. I know you’ve been all over the internet doing some interesting things, creator economy and gaming related. It would be awesome if you could give a bit of an overview so people understand where you’re coming from.

01:02 • Blake
There’s so many different parts of the story. I view it as I’ve had multiple parallel stories in my career so far. I was born and raised in the suburbs in the Midwest. I always just assumed that I’d end up in the automotive world because that was all I was ever surrounded by. Once I got to college, I just realized, “Oh my gosh, I don’t want to end up working in an automotive company. I want to work at a company that really values me.” Not to say that those don’t, but I wanted to be in a high pace environment. That’s when I learned about startups, and I just became obsessed and that was all I ever knew. Once I got into startups, I went and interned at SpaceX and Nest and a bunch of other random companies while I was in college.

01:49 • Blake
That just opened my eyes to, “Oh my gosh, this is an amazing world where everyone pays it forward. Everyone wants you to win, and everyone’s aligned.” Over the years, I became obsessed with venture capital because that was the next level up of providing funding. I’m super ADD, as you’ll probably learn throughout this whole conversation, so I just thought that a world of venture would be great for me where I can jump between all these different contexts and just apply my learnings and spend time with a lot of different companies. Everyone told me, “Good luck. You’re not going to end up in venture,” and I was like, “I’m going to figure out a way to break into venture capital.” Thankfully, I did, and I continued to message a firm in Detroit called Ludlow.

02:42 • Blake
It was a team of two at the time and I was just like, “Hey, can I have an email address? I just want to learn and try and work with you all.” They were willing to let me do that my senior year of college, and that turned into me working with them full-time, and I was there for the past seven years. I worked my way up from associate to partner. I recently left about three months ago to join Benchmark where I’m a principal, spending time in a whole bunch of different areas. The reason I started this answer off with, “There’s a lot of different parallel paths,” because there is a path within crypto, there’s a path within gaming, there’s a path within creators. There’s all these other paths as well, but I’ll leave that up to you of how you want to navigate all of that, but there’s so many different parallel paths within all this too.

03:34 • Piers
Absolutely. It sounds like an interesting journey and would love to double click on each of those. Given the nature of our audience, perhaps we could touch upon the crypto side, just at a high level, where the interest started and how long you’ve been loosely tracking this world and what that journey has looked like.

03:55 • Blake
The main parallel path in my life has been that I’ve always been a huge gamer. Ever since I was a tiny kid, my brother and I would play games. My brother was always obsessed with single-player games. I realized the only way I could ever get access to a game that he didn’t want to play was a multiplayer game. I would just go and play every single multiplayer game you can imagine. For me, that was mainly Call of Duty and Halo and those things growing up. That turned into Counter Strike, and I still play way too much League of Legends and all of that. I would say my interest in crypto first started with Bitcoin around 2012-2013; the early Coinbase days. I was like, “What is this? This is cool.”

04:46 • Blake
I remember Mt. Gox and all that stuff happening and being like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.” I remember when Bitcoin hit a thousand dollars and I remember being like, “What is going on? This is crazy. There’s all these new billionaires and all these really rich people that I know.” Obviously, we were so early, but at the time it felt I was late, which is crazy to think about. I remember when the Ethereum whitepaper got released. I read that and I was just like, “This is super interesting.” I started to go deeper and deeper right around when ETH launched. The problem was ICO scams emerged right around there. There were all these altcoins. You know the story. There were so many scams within the place that I got super scared. It felt like there were so many false promises and so much out there saying, “We’re going to build X, Y, and Z using decentralization.”

05:49 • Blake
It made sense in theory, but none of it was getting built. There were all these billionaires being created and minted overnight. It felt like I was just completely lost. I had no way of vetting any of that stuff. I got really sketched out and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to hold my ETH, but I’m going to just leave for a minute.” I would say a little over two years ago, one of my friends, Fred Ehrsam from Paradigm, was just messaging me, “Hey, I know you’re still into gaming. I know you’re still into creators. You should start spending more time in crypto again, because there’s some interesting stuff that’s popping up.” This was right before the NFT total boom.

06:40 • Blake
We were spending a lot of time just jamming on how this stuff might emerge, what this might look like, how crypto can help gaming or help creators. That really pulled me back in. I’ve been spending at least 50% of my time for the past two plus years just obsessing over those topics. My skill set is focused on consumer and more consumer facing stuff. The ICO era made sense for me to fade away from because it just felt a lot of that was deeply technical. I’ve been mind-blown at what’s existed in DeFi and all this stuff that has emerged, but it’s also just a different area than my expertise. I spent a lot of time in gaming and a lot of time in the creator space and that side of this world, that it finally felt like crypto was having a real moment or there was a real place for it to be built.

07:42 • Piers
Absolutely. You have a unique vantage point in terms of the breadth of experience you’ve had across conventional gaming and consumer stuff. I’d love to know, to your mind, what it was in particular that appealed to you through that lens. It’s not a technical one where people go on and on about the perks of NFTs for virtual goods and games and stuff like that. I’d love to know, what thematically lept out to you and re-engaged that interest and continues to excite you?

08:17 • Blake
On one end, I’ve gone so deep in gaming and so deep in the creator space, and both of those topics have gotten very hot in the market over the past couple of years. I think what always shocked me within those specific, let’s say, – let’s remove content studios from gaming but maybe the peripheral companies around gaming of the tools that can be built and whatever else – that all felt like it hit an endpoint. There was only so much innovation that could happen within the creator space or within the gaming space without being the fully centralized party. You spend enough time in gaming looking at gaming companies, or you spending enough time in creator space looking at creator companies, it becomes clear that where most of the value of accrues is to the centralized parties or the centralized platforms within those, so…

09:16 • Blake
…Either the game studio themselves or YouTube and Twitch and the content platforms. Where they need to move, and what I feel has slowly emerged, is there is a shift in power between the biggest creators and the hardcore players of a game and things like that, where they should have more power than they’re giving credit to. Instead, they’re at the mercy of the platforms that they’re on. For me, I kept coming back to, “Creators should have more power. They should be able to own their audience in some way.” The fact that, if you are a big YouTube creator and you can’t go and message all your fans or your subscribers directly, let alone know who they are, is a wild concept to me. I always just was like, “There has to be something different.”

10:08 • Blake
When you continue to go deeper, you’re like, “It makes sense that crypto, and specifically this idea of decentralization and alignment and those pieces, should help emerge these new behaviors and new companies that can be built.” Once you unlock all of that, there’s so much potential, and it’s a whole new canvas of what you can build for people.

10:34 • Piers
Totally. It’s really interesting. For those listening who might not have context, it’s a good opportunity to double click on your creator economy focus. You run Creator Economics, a brilliant YouTube channel. You often have Reid on who works very closely with Mr. Beast. I believe he’s a good friend of yours. Perhaps you could give us some overview in terms of where you sit relative to some of this stuff and why it excites you and the journey you’ve had around that dimension. Then we’ll go deeper into the depths of the crypto gaming stuff.

11:03 • Blake
Yeah. I grew up on the internet in a lot of ways. For me, that just means spending a lot of time on YouTube and Twitch and mainly just becoming fans of big creators and seeing the influence that they have. I think for me, it always felt clear that they had a ton of influence and power, but they were never really respected by the mainstream until recently. For me, that was always clear. The thing that I was obsessed with is, “How can I spend time in those spaces as an investor while making sure that there actually is venture returns versus just individual?” I spend a lot of time thinking about, “Who are the creators that want to build something bigger than themselves?” That’s not to say that building a company for your own YouTube channel or your own podcast is not interesting.

12:03 • Blake
That’s a great lifestyle business, and people can make millions and millions of dollars, but who are the creators that want to build something bigger than themselves and build a bigger brand? Where that transpired for me was, I spent a lot of time in e-sports and that side of this world, where I helped incubate an e-sports team called Hundred Thieves. I was really close with Nate Shot and cold DM’d him saying, “Hey, you should start this business.” I spent a lot of time there. I got deep in that business and got to watch all of that transpire. In a lot of ways, it’s a new model of how a creator might build something bigger than themselves. That was the real thesis of that in that business for me. Reid is a close friend, and I’ve gotten to know a lot of big creators and help them think through what that looks of how they could build something bigger than themselves.

13:01 • Blake
Also, Ludlow invested in quite a few creator companies Stir and YouTooz. There’s a handful of others, but really trying to think about, “Where are there interesting opportunities for creators who are effectively small to medium sized businesses? For this whole new class of companies, what tools can you build for them?”

13:28 • Piers
Absolutely. It’s super interesting having seen the rise of a Hundred Thieves. It feels to my mind, still seeing the Mr. Beast / Hundred Thieves type thing, even folks Dr. Disrespect building these sorts of characters that are IP that will outlive their creators – it feels to my mind that there’s still a lot of room for growth before we see any stagnation to conventional wisdom as it relates to the creator economy. What’s your perspective on that? At which stage do these tools that we’re discussing in crypto start becoming interesting to these people who currently are just straight up crushing it in their absence anyway? Is that just a case of them being the 0.1% and we’re trying to build better tools for the long tail? Or how do you frame that?

14:17 • Blake
My view is that it’s hard to break through the noise on the internet, and crypto can unlock that. I think the likelihood of having major creators effectively leverage crypto today is small. You need someone to come up in a native way using the tools that are available for them. I wrote about this idea of how crypto unlocks this thesis of a full-time fan, which I just think is this cool thing where, if you are effectively spending all your time promoting and watching a creator, then in theory you should have upside for it. You can imagine that a BTS stan or a Justin Bieber stan, the amount of time that they spend on Twitter replying and being loyal to the artist of their choice, that in theory should allow them to earn certain things and be a part of the upside.

15:25 • Blake
I think we’re in this really cool space where, if you’re a creator, you should just be thinking about how can you actually leverage the tools that are out there and create alignment that essentially makes you have superpowers and help break through the noise where, if you tweet just the word ‘Bitcoin,’ -Fred loves to use that example of – you’re probably going to get a thousand likes on it, just purely by the religion that has formed around it. I think we will get to the same point as creators where you might just have a creator that’s like, “Hey, tweet out my video and I’ll pay you in tokens,” and you’ll earn tokens in the upside. It’s not hard to believe that’s where this is heading. Instead of just actually competing for the attention just by simply trying to get followers, it’s like, “How do we create alignment and build real loyalty in with economic upside?”

16:30 • Blake
I think that will have to form natively. The idea of a Dr. Disrespect or Nate Shot or someone doing that today is hard. Instead, you need someone to emerge. I can bet that the biggest creator in 5 to 10 years will have some crypto element to their brand or their content.

16:54 • Piers
Yeah. That makes sense. To really validate and prove out the model, it has to happen in a more native fashion. There’s the whole ‘thousand true fans thesis’ that you alluded to. Even with a small group paying a little bit every month, you can monetize effectively. It is crazy when you look forward 5 or 10 years. If some of the larger creators in terms of raw numbers of following, they could become absurdly powerful using these tools. Recently, they did something like call the top ten TikTok influencers into the White House to brief them on whatever it was. You start to see the power that these people and their followings wield once you give them this tooling to orchestrate and align that audience. It gets crazy thinking about some of the stuff that we could see out there.

17:45 • Piers
I wanted to go back to the crypto gaming topic. You look at it from the lens of inevitability of giving these creators greater tooling to help coordinate their audience and give them shared upside. I think that side of it makes a ton of sense, but in terms of where we’re at now and the state of the art of these games, I feel like a lot of how it’s starting to shake out is: we’re not seeing that at the large-scale creator level. A lot of it is just token incentives driving growth. Obviously, we’re in the first inclination of a lot of these economies, but I just wonder how you reflect upon where we’re at and where we need to get to. What things do you see out there right now that are really attractive at the actual game level? What things do you deem to be sub-optimal that we need to work on?

18:41 • Blake
I might be unpopular and this opinion of: this era that we’re in right now is far closer to the ICO boom in the way that you and I think of it, but that’s just because we’re through it. We’ve already gone through it, so we have clearer eyes of figuring out the signal and the noise. Whereas, I think if you’re a new consumer in this market or a new retail investor in this market, you’re coming in and it’s hard to filter through the signal and noise and understand who is real or not real within the space or just purely driven by money versus actually creating value. I think that fundamentally creates a really broken ecosystem where there’s tons of people just trying to get super rich.

19:35 • Blake
That is an unfortunate downside of what happens when you have hyper efficient markets and you have speculators. Within crypto gaming – the piece that I continue to struggle with but I continue to be long crypto gaming, and I think gaming in crypto will be the major unlock that brings this to the next billion plus users – I think the piece that I’m just too harsh on is that 99% of the games in crypto gaming today are not actually games. They are games in that maybe, definitionally, you are playing something that resembles a game, but if you remove the economic incentives, will anyone play those games? Probably not. Likely, no one’s playing that game if there isn’t an economic incentive.

20:37 • Blake
To me, that feels broken. That’s scary. If you are, on some level, bribing your users, that’s a scary place to be. I think that’s one piece. The other piece is within crypto gaming, there’s a whole new area that game developers have to figure out and navigate, and that’s, “How do you navigate speculators?” You have a whole new entrant within your game, which is not just a player who’s spending all their time in the game, but you have an investor who’s speculating on your game. When you introduce tokens, when you introduce NFTs, all those pieces are really critical points where you can accidentally break your game and the entire ecosystem, because you just have way more speculators than there are actual players, which leads to obvious crashes within your game.

21:41 • Blake
Those are the two major pieces that I continue to struggle with. I also just think most of the games today are ports from a Web2 world rather than leaning into what is native to crypto: what are the new primitives that you can explore versus what worked in Web2 that we can bring over here? I would love to see more innovation rather than, “Let’s lean into what worked in Web2 and try and bring it here.”

22:13 • Piers
Absolutely. I like that. On the topic of things that are native to the medium, I want to touch upon the on-chain gaming stuff in a minute. First of all, you said it just so happens that it’s almost working out as bribing players. The one side of it is that tokens are this incredibly effective bootstrapping and coordination mechanism where you can share upside and your user acquisition costs becomes aligning them with the network. Assuming that people want to stay in the games over time, then it’s a beautiful model in theory. As you say, these earlier generation games, we’re just starting to see the economic forces dominate them. You talk about game designers having to design around the speculative forces at play in this market. You’ve been a gamer your whole life.

23:05 • Piers
What aspects of this technology do appeal to you at the game level? Asset ownership is one thing. Maybe for some, earning potential really is another thing. If we’re to try and break out core game loops from the market players and the speculators and the people playing the market games, what aspects of this technology excite you as a gamer in video games? In what context do they belong?

23:31 • Blake
When I was in high school, I started a random website where I would boost people’s Halo accounts to fifty. I was thinking, “How can I make a quick buck online?” and I would just boost their accounts for them. You still see that today if you look for WoW accounts that are at certain levels or those things where games are just hard to grind or hard to reach certain levels, and there is an inherent status of that. That’s one world where you might view as another area where crypto unlocks where maybe you actually have people that are working on some to level these accounts. I view it as you almost have to create a whole new game within the game.

24:20 • Blake
You have to create a metagame for the speculators. What are they actually playing for? What are they fighting? This is getting super in the weeds, but maybe if you play League of Legends, they update the game every week and they patch the game with balancing champions. Maybe the patches and the balances are controlled by a DAO and it’s like a voting system, and that’s the speculators. So, you’re like, “I’m a huge master Yi fan or Yasuo fan. I want to make sure that Yasuo stays broken and is the best character,” and what happens in that? Obviously, there’s tons of nuances within that and how that might break the game. I do think there is this other side. If you are a game designer today, you should be thinking about almost creating a whole other metagame for the speculators.

25:12 • Blake
If the speculators are just sitting there as a ‘price goes up’ mechanism, that’s broken. Instead, what can you do to enable them to still be a part of the game or have some role within the game, rather than just sitting there? Are users going up? Yes or no? No? That’s broken. In this case, what that actually causes, if you use the League of Legends patch notes example, what will happen is you’d have real players buying the tokens because they’d be like, “Wait, I don’t want the speculator to go and own all these things. I want to control the outcome of those games.” So that’s one view, but I also think there is this idea of status within these things, and being able to have those things clearly just broadcasted throughout the world and being able to take those graphs other places is really interesting..

26:07 • Blake
I think the work that you put into a game shouldn’t just die the moment you uninstall or delete your account. Instead, that should have something that carries throughout your journey. It would be amazing for me to be able to see all the stats for things that I’ve done. I think there’s also just a whole new layer of, “Let’s create a Discord for people that have played 10,000 hours of League of Legends.” Even those small things get me excited. I think we’re in the very first inning. I don’t think we’ve seen some of that stuff unlocked, but again, it comes back to people actually wanting to play the game. That’s the piece that is most important. The other stuff comes in later.

26:55 • Piers
Absolutely. I love that. As you were saying, almost designing a metagame for the spectators around it, there’s one project that we’re overly excited about called Nor. For those listening, you should take a look. The core thesis that the entire thing is built around is exactly that. It’s separating out these independent magic circles for different player archetypes that don’t overlap but harmonize. It’s an interesting model. I couldn’t agree more in terms of the flexing and social aspect of this stuff. That’s one area that’s a no brainer to me, is portable and tradable cosmetics with almost infinite depth. You can put the whole exponential cost for linear gain in terms of these cool aesthetics or whatever they might be.

27:42 • Piers
That stuff makes a lot of sense to me too. I’m excited to see what ripping data out of the traditional gaming social graphs looks like over time and how we shift that on-chain and how that manifests and what it can unlock. You gave the example of the Discord for people with 10,000 hours in League of Legends. Similarly, someone with 25,000 hours across different FPS’s, if you can somehow port that identity layer on-chain, it becomes super attractive in terms of customer acquisition and targeting and all this stuff. We unlock this whole new dimension of liquidity for building those communities and reaching them. So, yes, very exciting. One of the big things that seems to excite people, and in theory it sounds good but we haven’t seen it effectively implemented yet, is player governance in games.

28:36 • Piers
Where do you stand on this concept? We’ve seen early forms of it. Old-school Runescape has its polling system. Personally, I don’t trust most people that I encounter in video games to make good decisions. I’m curious where you stand on this because it’s an important one.

28:52 • Blake
I think you likely need to delegate to certain people. I think that maybe you delegate to pro players or whoever. The reality is that most of us are not great at figuring out what people want. We will just vote for our inherent biases. You could argue That gets interesting when you have it as governance tokens, and that forces you to accept most of these people are not going to act in the best interest of the game and that becomes some type of attack. Then you work to figure out, “How do I make sure that it’s delegated to the right people?” My guess is that what would end up happening is that most of those people would delegate to the devs anyway, but it does create a world where, if things start to break, then it’s like, “Wait. There’s a great vocal leader that other people should be listening to.”

29:52 • Blake
For example, in Call of Duty Warzone right now, everyone just talks about how cheating is such a broken thing, and there’s all these hackers and all that stuff. I’m assuming the devs are aware of it but it’s not the highest priority because there must be a lot of stuff going on. Maybe though the devs see, “Player governance is saying this is actually the number one thing that we should be focusing on.” I could see that happening, but again, the shareholders of a game company and the players of the game are typically quite different. Also, the hardcore gamers of your game are quite different than the casual gamers. Understanding that from a game developer side, you have to really try and embrace that. I think that’s why centralized models for game development and design decisions have worked. If you listen too much to your hardcore audience or the loudest audience, you’re probably going to break the game and completely neglect some percentage of your user base.

31:00 • Piers
Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. I’ve come to acknowledge the Call of Duty disappointment every year as just a permanent feature of life. It’s always the case. To be fair, Modern Warfare 2 is brilliant. I’ve really enjoyed that, but I do still find myself playing MW2 more than most things. I’m super aligned on a lot of those things there. I think the delegation aspect to core community members that are nominated and elected by the player base is interesting. There are certain core roadmap items that should be off limits from community governance because you need a responsible steward to drive the core offering. I do believe that true player and audience agency for seemingly trivial things is a big deal, and people feeling a part of the mission is an incredibly powerful force, but we haven’t seen too much of it at scale yet. I’m excited for it.

31:56 • Piers
You touched upon earlier that you’re more curious to see things that are native to the medium, as am I. I think it’s one of the exciting things about a new medium and trying to figure out what we can do now that we couldn’t before. Could you give us an overview of some of the things that have been exciting you to that effect?

32:12 • Blake
There’s a lot of different ways to take the way the games are built in crypto. I think having things on-chain like a Dark Forest is the perfect example, but I think there’s going to be a lot more. I think even Loot, which I would argue suffered with way too many speculators before builders and players, there was something genuinely interesting there. Can you create universal stats that then can be used across these other places? What happens when things are composable? I think that’s one element. I also think there’s going to be a world where even chainmail is a game of, “Let me send you this NFT that you can’t ever get rid of.” Now we’ve created things that just sit in people’s wallets.

33:10 • Blake
There’s all these things that will happen over time. This is the reason why I’m just such a huge fan of Dom and Blitmaps and Loot and others, is he’s actually thinking about the medium in a native way that most people are not. How do you push the medium as a new canvas? I think 99% of people building right now are just like, “Let’s go make this NFT and sell it. We’ll figure something out after.” Whereas, there’s actual innovation that can stem from it. One of my favorite NFTs was this one that was called Animal Coloring Book where, if you sent it to someone, it ended up getting filled. Each time that the NFT got sent to someone, it got more colored, and it needed to be sent five times to addresses to be fully colored.

34:13 • Blake
That stuff is just cool. “What can you unlock within a new canvas?” is what I’m really focused on. There aren’t enough people really thinking about it in that way. I’m sure there are, but the projects that are out there today are not reflecting that.

34:34 • Piers
Interesting. It seems like you’re not too hard line on it having to be, from a technical lens, native to the medium. We’ve kind of seen the growth mechanic work in terms of token incentives for user acquisition and retention to a point. What if the majority of those token incentives went towards third party dev stuff and we had a community that got bootstrapped and a vast chunk of token supply does go towards that? It’s almost like an open-source project with token incentives for people to build on. Would you regard that as more native to the medium? I think that idea is interesting and cool.

35:15 • Blake
Yeah. I think that’s a perfect example, especially within gaming. If you look at the history of successful games, most of them came from mods, and most of it came from open source games that were allowing you to mod and make innovations. How do you, as a game, enable that? My view is that tokens to get people to play and tokens to keep them retained might be table stakes or it might just end up being that those are just noise, and you actually just want to get people that are playing your game straight up. The thing that you should be doing, like you’re saying is, “We have the core game. We have this simple game. We want someone to build a Battle Royale version of this.”

36:13
That becomes a DAO that votes on which one they want or that this is the one that they’re going to work on. I think that’s where we’re heading. I think that’s a cool opportunity. Again, it allows you to almost fork these games and make value accrue back to the original. It’s also why I’m very long CCO NFTs. I look at Nouns and Blitmaps and these things, and they’re becoming a base layer of what people can build on top of them.

36:48 • Piers
Totally. The thing you touched on there as well about having value flow back to the original, I think the elegance of the on-chain royalty aspect in the context of modern culture, if you can build the framework for it, is just so attractive if we could see it happen at scale. One project called Webaverse is building a web native game engine. They have most of the core functionality you could expect from a game engine. They’re doing some cool stuff that may or may not tend towards this direction over time. We’ll see. Your comments on the role of modern culture in the history of gaming is so true. It’s something a lot of people don’t really realize until they dig a little more. Many of the biggest titles out there started in that way.

37:36 • Piers
That’s where I think going through the labor of building primitives fully on-chain and unlocking modding 2.0 – which is composability in the context of crypto, i.e. the ability to drag and drop code and contracts and whatever – that’s where the on-chain gaming stuff gets interesting as well. Obviously just the state of the art of the technology means we’ve got a way to go until we can build any super complex games there.

38:03 • Blake
Yep.

38:06 • Piers
Yeah. Lots of interesting stuff to unpack there on the gaming side. Just zooming out a bit, I wanted to get your thoughts on where we’re at in terms of the tooling you are seeing that you think is on the right path as it relates to the creator economy. What are some of the platforms/primitives/coordination mechanisms or whatever they might be that you’re excited about?

38:33 • Blake
Right now, within the creator space for all of this, it’s just early. I think what we will see over time (and I suspect we will see) is bounties. Specifically, like I was saying where it’s like, “Tweet out this YouTube link and get X number of creator tokens,” and maybe Rally enables that or some of these others enable it. I think that is where we’re heading. Jesse Walden and I chatted quite a bit on this. There’s this idea that maybe what forms around creators is DAOs are formed automatically. Let’s use X Copy as an example. (or an artist more than a creator in the YouTube context)

39:31 • Blake
Maybe a DAO is formed around X Copy where they’re just buying all his best work. They want to get X Copy to be aligned with them, so they say something like, “50% of the treasury is claimable by X Copy himself.” So, there’s all these new mechanics that I think we will see over time. I would say gaming is even further ahead than where we are within the creator side of all this. I think we’re in such an early state of what this looks like. I think a lot of it is trying to figure out what performs best. We haven’t found what is the product market fit for getting creators to really blow up. In theory, you should be able to use tokens and those incentives to help a creator explode, but will that be sustainable?

40:28 • Blake
How fast will that happen or not? Those things are all so largely unexplored. The gold standard is Gary V and V Friends, honestly. That’s a very native approach to the space versus if you’re another type of creator. Obviously, with music NFTs we’re seeing some of this form right now, but it still feels so early. It’s hard to give you a definitive answer on things that I find super interesting because I think we’re still so early within all of this.

41:05 • Piers
Right. I don’t know where you acquired the patience and wisdom to acknowledge how early it is. I understand we’re early, but I’m just so damn excited about the limitless potential of this stuff that I’m constantly so eager for a lot of these things to materialize. Obviously, in your investor capacity at Benchmark and personally and beyond, how do you think about investable opportunities whilst acknowledging the huge amount of potential but also acknowledging we’re super early? What are you actively looking for at this point in time? I guess that’s what the question boils down to, about how you play these trends that we see coming.

41:46 • Blake
Benchmark has a view that we’re really trying to invest in companies that are enduring and around for decades. Within the landscape where we’re at right now and maybe the last year or so, that type of builder or founder is actually way more rare. There are a lot of people building, and this isn’t a knock against them, but they’re building for a quick flip or, “Let’s just ship something and we’ll see what happens in a year or two. Then we’ll decentralize it and step back.” From my own view, there’s still a lot of work. We’re still early. I’m just as excited as you and I spend all my time really obsessing over and thinking about what are the major unlocks here, but I think a lot of that still has to come from strong teams that are trying to build for the future and try and build for decades and building core pieces that can really make an impact.

42:52 • Blake
First and foremost, it’s just, “Who is here to build for the right reasons?” There’s a lot of noise within the ecosystem. That’s the first bar. Also, “Who is thinking about it from first principles?” I think there’s tons of copying of what works. That’s not necessarily bad, but it just creates a lot more noise. What works today isn’t necessarily what’s going to work for the next decade. There are tons of shortcuts within crypto that you can take of, “Let’s make a quick buck,” or, “Let’s play the game of enabling speculators.” The ones that I think are most interesting are the ones that are quietly building and keeping their heads down. I’m sure someone’s done this analysis of NFTs and the ones that have performed the best.

43:53 • Blake
With the NFTs that have performed the best, my assumptions are that they were cheap mints. They weren’t super hyped at the time. It just took time to really build out their community and the people that were investors who were a part of that. That’s the thing that I really try and push within the space: if you’re hearing a ton of noise around it, it’s probably too late, realistically. The piece that’s really hard in crypto is everyone is talking their own book to a level that you just don’t have in almost any other industry. Almost everyone has economic incentives to push something. How do you filter through that noise? How do you make sure that you’re finding people that are actually aligned and trying to build for the long-term? That is a hard thing to do when most people are just shilling some random coin.

44:49 • Piers
Right. I’m interested if you could maybe touch on your philosophy for uncovering those types and those people. I mentioned earlier on that you do an amazing job at curating. Your reading lists that you put out are one of the main things I make sure I ingest every month online. God knows there’s an infinite amount of content out there. How do you think through that process? What have you built that’s useful in terms of uncovering and finding signal in the noise? How come you’re so willing to share it all?

45:20 • Blake
I appreciate that. That’s very kind. I think for me, what I learned early on the internet is: I can put as many things as I want out there, and most people will ignore it. I’m not a big believer that there are secrets in these industries. I don’t think there is some secret like, “I figured out this area before other people and therefore I’m going to have some real alpha.” The alpha that we hear within the world of crypto is borderline insider trading. It’s like, “I figured out that this is going to release and therefore I’m going to buy that,” or, “I heard someone invested in that and I’m going to buy it.” That’s just a sketchy new world.

46:05 • Blake
For me, I am an open book. I’ve always just viewed it that my public persona or my public brand is basically just putting my thoughts out there and putting what I find interesting. By doing those reading lists, I get 10 to 20 articles sent to me every month from people that read those. They say, “Hey, I saw you liked this one. Did you see this one?” That’s the power of the internet. I’m basically staking certain areas that I’m spending time in and people say, “Hey, have you seen this company? Have you seen that?” That to me has paid way more dividends than ever being closed off like, “Here’s what I read. I don’t want to share that publicly.”

46:47 • Blake
That’s just not who I am. There are certain ways to figure out who is real and who is not, simply by looking up what they’ve done; put in the work. My major takeaway from a short career is that very few people want to put in the work. Most people are looking for shortcuts. I think in crypto that’s especially true where a lot of people are just looking to make a quick buck. Figure out who’s doing the building and putting in the work. That’s where I hopefully believe most of the value will accrue. That’s not to say you can’t make money and do other things other ways, but if you’re playing the long game, which I am, you need to find another way to play the game.

47:38 • Piers
I love that. I love the idea that having started doing your curation process, you’ve partially outsourced the curation as well; the internet feedback loop helping you out there. I love it. I want to head into some of the closing questions now. Zooming out a bit and talking about the metaverse (not the buzzword but the concept in its original and beautiful form), how do you reflect on our transition into an increasingly digital species on the 10, 20, 30-year view? I don’t know whether it’s still in your bio on Twitter, but you used to have, “Hanging out on the edge of the internet,” which I always liked. I feel like that perspective grants certain insights into the culture on the fringes and how things are moving, which is where I personally believe most of the exciting stuff happens.

48:30 • Piers
What do you think of this whole concept and direction of travel?

48:35 • Blake
For me, I’ve been living on the edges and living on the internet for my whole life. I feel lucky that that is true. Anyone who’s played games their entire life has grown up on the internet. I had more friends on Halo and Call of Duty than I did in my high school, just purely because I spent more time with these people. That is becoming more of a thing. Of course, that seems natural. For me, the early internet that I thought was so powerful was these random niche internet forums of, maybe you were interested in paintball or Halo or <insert random niche thing>, and there was a forum that existed for that.

49:30 • Blake
That just enabled cool interactions. You got to meet interesting people. We are a half step away from just unlocking all of that again. Social networks and Reddit and things like that have done a decent job of that, but I think we’re a close step to making that actual potential fully unlocked. That to me is where the metaverse really starts to become a thing is finding like-minded people, finding people that are interesting to you and where you spend all your time and your hobbies and just hanging out with them. Discord is close to the metaverse. You’re spending almost all your time hanging out with these people and chatting with them. Again, kids right now have tons of friends that they met in Roblox and Fortnite. I think as long as we don’t lose that, that’s a net positive. For me, it’s super exciting.

50:27 • Piers
Absolutely. I basically only see my little brothers in video game lobbies these days. That’s all very fun. I usually ask what’s one thing that you’ve learned in crypto which you wish you knew before, but with you I don’t want to limit it to crypto, so more so just in your internet quest. If you had to narrow it down – I know it’s an annoyingly difficult question. What’s a core insight? You mentioned one good one before about people not wanting to put in the work, but I wonder more broadly in the internet context.

51:08 • Blake
For me, I think it’s just finding your tribe and finding your people. I think that there’s a lot of different ways. I have a borderline cynical view of the internet in that social platforms are essentially games, and there’s a lot of different ways to play Twitter. There’s a lot of different ways to play these industries.For me, I’ve always optimized for quality over quantity. You can always optimize for fame, and there’s ways to play the game to get followers and you and I see those tactics all day of how to get followers and views and things like that. For me, I am much more focused on finding the people that I think are interesting and finding people that resonate with the way that I think about the world or want to push me.

52:06 • Blake
Thankfully, I was thoughtful about that early on. I didn’t fully realize what I was doing, but when I look back, I am so thankful that I never tried to take shortcuts. Do the work and be thoughtful and understand what you’re trying to build within this world. You might assume that people have short term memory, but the reality is that people really do remember. People understand. You can jeopardize your entire career and your reputation in a second. You should be much more focused on finding people that are like you and want to build. You’ll get much more fulfillment out of that than anything else.

52:57 • Piers
I love that. That’s a super interesting take. I couldn’t agree more. With Twitter in particular, a lot of people just tweet incessantly, even astonishingly uninsightful takes, because that seems to be what the algo is, but it’s just more noise upon noise, so I totally agree there. I think the idea of curating an audience and followership of people that are like-minded is super interesting. I’m curious, what would you regard as the most impactful book you’ve ever read?

53:32 • Blake
Oh my gosh. That’s a tough question. That’s such a tough question. I don’t know. There’s a book that I read a long time ago called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. There’s also a YouTube video of it where he was a professor who was about to pass away and he does his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon. That one always has stuck with me, but there’s tons of other random books that I’ve read over the years that have had impacts. That was the first real book that I read that opened my eyes to how to think about life. That’s one that’s probably an unconventional answer, but for me it had a super high impact at an early age.

54:21 • Piers
That’s great. I’ll investigate. Haven’t come across that before. Your favorite game ever? It sounds like there’s been far too many to narrow this down.

54:34 • Blake
You ask me this every year and you’ll get a different answer. League of Legends has to be the best game that I’ve ever played, just objectively. Counter Strike is a close second, and I think Valorant is fighting for a close second as well right now, but I’m just a huge fan of hardcore multiplayer games.

54:54 • Piers
Nice. I love that. We’ll have to get some Valorant in. I just updated the other day. I took a little break, but I’m back.

55:01 • Blake
You let me know and I’m down.

55:07 • Piers
In a similar vein, what would you regard as the most impactful digital experience you’ve ever had?

55:16 • Blake
Ooh, that’s a tough question. For me, there’s nothing better than the first time I loaded up Xbox Live, which sounds really weird. I remember when I played Halo for the first time as a kid online, it was just the coolest experience ever of like, “Oh my gosh, there’s matchmaking of similar skilled people,” and unlocking this grind that I just never would have had. I liked sports as a kid, but I was never competitive enough to play any sport at a decent level. It felt like there was this unlock of competitiveness in me that I just had never felt before. Also just talking to strangers online and people being somewhat civil, surprisingly. Yes, Xbox live gets a lot of heat for that back in the day, but 90% of the lobbies I was in, you could actually meet someone interesting who was just a kid who was also trying to play games online. That opened my eyes to like, “Wow, this is really cool, and there’s a lot of potential for where this is all heading.”

56:33 • Piers
That’s awesome. I love that. You clearly weren’t in any of my lobbies then if they were that peaceful.

56:40 • Blake
Maybe I was just numb. Maybe I was just numb to it at the time.

56:44 • Piers
Exactly. Lastly, just for those listening that might want to follow along with your stuff and learn more, where’s the best place for people to follow along and keep up to date with all your thoughts and the work you’re doing?

56:57 • Blake
Yeah. I’m most active on Twitter, just @BlakeIR. Feel free to message me on Twitter. Also, I have my site, BlakeIR.com where I put my reading lists and a bunch of random old blog posts as well. Those are the two main places to find me.

57:15 • Piers
I’ll reiterate for the third time, a strong vouch for the blog posts and the articles that get posted there. Blake, it’s been a pleasure chatting. It always is a pleasure. I’m very eager to stay in touch and chat a bunch about your thoughts as this stuff evolves over the coming years or decades, as you are thinking about things. We’ll have to get a Valorant game in soon. Thanks very much for coming on, man.

57:40 • Blake
Thank you.

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