Keith Grossman joins to go deep on leading TIME, a 99-year-old-brand, into web3 along with his experience on building value-based communities. Recorded on August 17, 2022 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.
Keith has been the President of Time since 2019 where he leads their business operations including global advertising, marketing, digital, and consumer businesses. He released TIMEPieces, a new NFT community and initiative from TIME featuring original works by more than 40 artists last September.
Follow Keith at https://twitter.com/KeithGrossman
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Mikey Piro (MP):
GM. GM, everybody. We're very excited today. Today, while everyone piles in, we are joined by Keith Gross in. And Keith is the global leader in the rapidly evolving world of Web Three. I mean, that sounds really weird to say out loud, but it's so true. He leads Times growth for Web Three and under his leadership, Times, NST and Web Three, community timepieces has grown to include over 50,000 pieces. It says that's pretty wild. 50,000 people, 50,000 artists, great collectors and enthusiasts. In 2021, Times Web Three strategy produced eight figures of revenue, which we're going to talk about. And brand expanded into NFT for community building and to partner with NFT creators to develop their own unique IP animated series with time for TV. That's going to be fun to talk about too. Look, I met you in person a few times. I was dragging my kids along in La, one event that you hosted. And I think for me personally, just listening to you constantly, because it's great to see you all over the web, I think the one word that comes to my mind when I think of Keith Grossman is generous. And you're generous with your time, you're generous with your introductions and your network, you're generous with praise. That's not to say you're a pushover, because that is not the case, but you are extremely generous and I'm really thankful and fortunate that we get to get to hear you in this little intimate group. And I'm very excited for this morning. So I'm going to let you go for it and lead it in.
Keith Grossman (KG):
Well, I mean, first, thank you. That's a nice word. I was on my heels as to what word you were going to choose.
And I could have thought a million different words, but before anything, I really just wanted to thank Janet and Buzz who this morning, as you may or may not know, I was having issues getting into this server. I have, in full disclosure, a member of the CPG Genesis family and I have found that you, Mikey, like Chris Kentino and others, have just been hugely influential in helping me think about the space. Right. And in my mind, the reason that I think being generous, if we're going to use that word, is important is because none of us know what we're doing. We're all just making our best educated guesses and pushing forward. And we're all on this sort of like if you've ever seen and I use the analogy all the time, we're all on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, invisible bridge together. And we know that the bridge is there. We just can't see sort of how long it is and where it's going and we need everyone to sort of show us the pitfalls and what works and what doesn't work, and then we just continue to build on what is going in the right direction.
(MP):
I would love for your take. We're just going to dive right in. It felt like there are a couple of folks who espoused the Wagner ethos very early, and it's been very tough with this market and the world around us. I think for certain folks to continue to carry it when things are up and to the right, it's really easy to have that positive attitude. But I think that all ups and downs. We've hit some rough patches. What do you think about wag me as an ethos now? And how are you continuing to espouse? We're not all going to make it, but I think we are trying to treat everyone like they will.
(KG)
So I think you have to break it down to a few different things, right? If it's wagmere, then the answer is 100%. Right. Web Three. There's no doubt in my mind. Like, we've gotten to a point where the foundation layer from a technological perspective is strong enough now and diverse enough now that you can build some real amazing innovation, but that the high layer, right? Like, that prevents mass adoption. The friction there is great enough that it's going to prevent just sort of mass adoption, I would say for maybe another 24 to 36 months.
I don't see anything happening on a grand scale before that. But what that means to me is, like, this is the time for building, this is the time for creating, this is the time to change systems the way that we all interact and operate. And do I think that web three is going to wag me?
Like 100%? Do I think everyone is going to wag me? There's no shot. It's impossible. Right. If you look at just pure stats, what is it, like 2% of companies last? And I mean, look at what it takes to run Club CPG, right? This is not a small endeavor, right. Like, you actually have a team and it's quite robust and you're working around the clock in different areas in the world and you may be operating completely differently, but it still takes a lot. And I look at what it takes to run timepieces and it takes a lot, and the commitment is a lot. And I think that the first thing that people have to realize when they're going to move in the community space is a tremendous commitment from resources. Two, as an ecosystem hasn't defined the difference between success, failure and a rug pole. I think that that's a huge distinction because right now you're either on forever or you're a rug pull. And there has to be a moment where communities can bow out gracefully and recognize that they didn't succeed. And that's totally fine. That's normal in any business, right? I think that this moment in time is actually quite a good one. I hate that people lost money and are losing money, but I think it's a natural evolution of any ecosystem for people to be euphoric at one point and then for it to sort of correct and then for it to build out. And when you have an ecosystem where money is involved, such as web three, one of the challenges you're going to always find is that you're going to have nefarious players in it, unfortunately. And I think that it's really important that people continue to be educated on how to identify these people, that their greed is constrained. And I think that this moment in time is going to give a lot of people a wake up call on constraining greed right. That not everything is going to win, and you can't always mince and double overnight and all this stuff. And the reality is that at the individual level, we're all not going to make it, right? But that's okay. I think that in the aggregate level, the ecosystem will make it. And so if at the individual level you can't make it by yourself, I think what you should really look for is how do you either find the tools necessary, the education necessary, or the group necessary to attach yourself to be part of a team that you believe.
(MP):
Is going somewhere 100%. Wow. There was a time to unpack there. And I'm going to move this and ask a couple of more questions about building the time community. I think one of the pieces for those that aren't aware of how much effort Keep puts towards really standing behind this transition of web two to web three and bringing everybody, all types, all people, all shapes and sizes, all colors and creeds along with it diversity and inclusive behaviors, that is at the ethos at the core of what Club CPG has started. That's one of the things I deeply love about this particular community, is that that is a foundational element. And you just watch Keith operate and I don't know, I don't like using the buzzwords as this hetero white male. I just like to show up and be who I am. And I see that in you. What are some of the thoughts on how we can, as we're building, look at that particular angle and also some insights you had from building your team and some things that you've done a great job. Timepieces is crushing it. We're going to talk about all the things that you're doing across timepieces, but the team part of it has been impressive to watch.
(KG):
Well, okay. Well, thanks. What I would say is what I like about web Three, and I'm going to talk about it from a very selfish perspective for a second, is it really empowers what is in my mind. Stakeholder capitalism, right? And stakeholder capitalism, if you're not familiar with it, is slightly different than the Milton Friedman definition of capitalism, which is that a company's only job is to return to the shareholder. And in stakeholder capitalism, you have to think about your community, your employees, the environment that you work in the world, the community that you surround, right. And how all of them can be uplifted together. And the underlying thesis of stakeholder capitalism, which I really like, and I think will play out positively, is that values create value, right? And when you think about that, values create value over time. And so if you're going to run a stakeholder capitalistic community or company, you need to be able to identify what your values are, right? And so from the very get go for timepieces, we said that our values were inclusivity, optimism, constructive feedback, and this hashtag give first mentality. And while we've been very successful in growing the community to over 500 people across Twitter and discord, what we've also done, and a lot of people don't realize, is we've kicked out over 10,000 people who violated those
And inclusivity doesn't always mean everyone, right? We're not going to be inclusive of people who are exclusive.
So I think that what's really important about that. And it's a very weird statement to say, but I think what's really important about that is how you are willing to build your community, and when are you willing to say no to the community and when are you willing to and how are you empowering the moderators to sort of implement those values? When do you cross the line? Right? For a very long time, a lot of people thought the only thing that mattered was selling an NFC and then reselling the NFC. I don't think that it doesn't really matter if that makes sense if you're thinking about a long term horizon. Right. And I always say within the timepiece community, we're not building for nine minutes or nine weeks or nine months or even nine years. We're building for 99 more years. Right. And so I don't care if somebody doesn't like what we're doing and sell the timepiece because they don't want to be part of the community anymore. It's not the worst thing on the planet. And like, a real example of that is when Russia invaded Ukraine, I was watching the great work of Nadia and Ukraine. Now I was watching the great work of relief. And I was thinking to myself, we're a values based community. We have to do something too. And I called the team up and the team said, we love this idea, but how are we going to do it? And we ended up doing an auction a few days later, and in 48 hours, we raised close to $400,000, which we then donated to Ukraine. After we did that, you'd say, wow, that's amazing. But after we did that, there were a few people in our discord that were very upset that we had just done the time drop, and they said, how dare you? You just did a drop and now you've shifted all of your marketing dollars over to this other drop.
The other drop, by the way, had your royalties to us, your royalties to the artists, and your royalties to open Sea 100% went to help humanitarian aid in Ukraine, right? And I said to the people who were complaining, I said, look, and I was pretty pissed about it, and my team was wonderful in terms of calming me down. Maya Draison is a saint if you've ever come across her. Her and I have worked together for nearly 20 years, but she calmed me down. And in our weekly time hall that we host, I said, look, if you're upset that we did this, then your values don't align with our values. You should sell your pieces and leave the community, right? And we don't really care. We'll take that on the chin because we're thinking so long term about that. The flip side of it, and by the way, it was very well received within timepieces, right? Because what you see is you see that you have a group of people that are rallying around something bigger than a floor price or a short term gain in Ethan, right? The benefit is during sort of the quote unquote crypto winter from May forward. Like, we've seen growth in our community, right, and we've seen engagement go up in our community and we report on that every week. And we think that that's really important for when the cycle sort of shifts. The flip side is that there are greedbased communities in this ecosystem. Like, we shouldn't kid ourselves and there's nothing wrong with them. You just have to know that you're in a greed based community if that's the case. And the reality of a greed based community is that they are not thinking about the world bigger than sort of the east price at the moment, or what the flip could potentially be at the moment. And so the trick in a greed based community, if you want to call it a trick, is you have to exit before everyone else exits because the community is your exit liquidity. I don't want that for timepieces, right? I want to be a values based community. And so it's just a much different game. Both are always going to exist because web three is going to represent the moment in time where an ownership stake and money can enter into the digital ecosystem.
(MP):
Time to unpack there as well.
No, it's great because this is giving people so much to think about, because I think A, the pace of our communities is like, there's always something happening and it feels like it's CNN plus plus or there's news just constantly happening that you sort of get lost in things going up and down. It's a very odd mixture of like the rampant pace of 24 by seven finance that's also coupled with social credits and social dynamics that are not decoupled. And so to take a step back and really think about values and think about how you want to move through this space. I've had moments where I've thrown this chair across the room for missing a mint. And that was like a very big AHA moment. Like, this isn't you and this isn't what you want to do. And I think it resonates with me about the two types of communities. I just buy stuff and hold it because I think it's fun and cool and I am a proud member for Of Time. I think there's some amazing fun things you've done and there's great mechanics. You've worked there. And yeah, it's about the people for me.
(KG):
Thank you. By the way, so I just saw Summer Watson and jumped in, and I think Aku is a great example of a value space community, right? And it's not just in the IP that a community like a coup did. It's like, look at how the community acts at the moment of greatest exposure, right? Like, when faced with the Errand mint that could have sidelined and would have 100% sidelined. Any other greed based organization, like a values based organization looks at the long term and says, we have to take care of the people that care about us. And they returned all the money from their own treasuries. Right. By the way, in full disclosure, I love Summer, I love Micah, and I love that team. I'm also an investor in them, and I put my money where my mouth is on that. So I have to say at all times where my holdings are. But I say it because we all saw it. We saw in action what a values based community truly can be when the most challenging situation can be presented to them.
(MP):
It's hard to assess the character except when things get really hard.
(KG):
Totally. Right now, that's a wonderful time to assess characters of communities. Right now is possibly, I would say, the best time because this is the moment where you have to look at your community and you have to say, does the community care about each other? Does the community care about me? Do I care about the community and what are they building towards? And I think it's super easy to do to think that everything is great when eating is at 4000 and people are chugging along. Ask yourself how you felt five weeks ago when each was 887. Right. And people thought it was going down to 400.
We've had a little bit of a bounce back. Look at the communities that you're in and really make the assessment. Now, it doesn't make a difference. You're not going to be in every community, but really think about if your most valuable asset is time, no pun intended, where do you really want to spend the most part of your time and where do you want to just sort of trade off of? Because the trading part is fun. Like, let's not kid ourselves. When you're outside of the artwork and you're into the PFPs, that's the same thing as the collectibles business, which is a trading based business, 100%.
(MP):
So Time has these four prong strategic approach that I would love for you to talk about so that the folks who are not as familiar with Timepieces and Time kind of where you're going with it. From the briefing that was provided to me, it's talking about consumer behavior and helping brands onboard Web Three fostering and uplifting creators and artists. We just talked about building value based communities and then blockchain and the big screen in the Metaverse. Which I am like. I want to save that one for the end because I feel like having worked at Meta and watched all of the amazing things that have been being built for so long. Where you're charting that course for Time is. Like. A lot of fun and juicy things. But let's talk a little bit about the consumer behavior and your approach with Time on Web Three onboarding. And how did you come up with, like, that's the position you want to be in instead of going like, we're just going to be like a different sotheby's of art or an art blocks?
(KG):
Sure. So what you're referencing, just to clarify for everyone, is points from our V Two Mom. And V two. Mom stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles. Measures And Mikey just outlined the methods, and it's really a focusing exercise that Mark Benioff, our owner, has instituted, and I actually really like because I think it really helps us decide where do we want to spend our time? The order matters. And just in clarification, the order of the Vichy Mom is actually number one creator success.
So how do we ensure the success of the artists? Number two is community and collector success. Number three is essentially CMO and institutional success. And number four is blockchain to big screen. Metaverse actually falls into the community sort of bucket. If I can go down, if it's okay, Mikey, I'll go down. Each one sort of like individually, which is like when I started to think about Timepieces and what our power would be, what's our strategy, and every brand is going to have a different strategy. What I realized was the three years that I was at Time, every person that I talked to had a favorite cover of Time. Right. And our superpower was, what's inside that red border of Time? And when you think about it, why is that the case? It's because for about 100 years, time has been the closest thing to a consistent meme capturing living history at any given moment. Right. And that's why the cover is powerful and the cover, she's always depicted by some great artist or creator or photographer that captured that moment in Time. And when I asked people what their favorite article of Time is, most people don't have a favorite article of time. As a matter of fact, only one person in three years has ever told me their favorite article, Time. And that was if you've ever had Stacey's pet shops. Stacey told me that she read an article of a time when she was at their doctor's office and it changed her life. And it was about how she, as a female executive, can have it all, quote, unquote, which was a family and a professional success and whatnot. And she said that inspired her to go off and start Stacy Peter chips, which I loved. Right? But that example is not to highlight that the edit good or bad, the edit is actually quite good. What it is to highlight is that what's made Time powerful is the cover. And what makes the cover powerful is the artist, right? And so when we entered into Web Three, originally, our sort of success was by looking backwards in the past 100 years and doing one of one of great covers that represented amazing moments in time. When we did timepieces and Timepieces took me six or seven months to think through. And look, we made a lot of mistakes and we had some successes and we went through our bad times, too, right? And like our challenging times with our first Mint, and we learned a lot and we had to build a lot of IP to fix it for being a company with our global recognition. What I realized was we had to look and use sort of the future artists. Because the reality of Web Two is the formula for success in Web Two is brand highlights a creator who attracts an audience, right? So, like, time hires Ian Bremmer, who writes about, I don't know, maybe like, Nancy Pelosi almost putting us into World War III by going to Taiwan. And people Google it, they see Time, they seem grammar, they see the article, they read it because they trust us and then they move on. That's an audience, right? Web Three is a completely different beast when it comes to community based initiatives, right? And the reason I say community based initiatives, I saw that Chris Cantino entered into the conversation, our faithful regional manager. And I think Chris has done remarkable Twitter threads on all the other potential use cases of NFPs, which I think people should not discount and people should really read, including the recent one on subscriptions. And when you look at, like, community based NFPs, the formula for success is community uplifts a creator. And then that creator is validated by a brand. By the brand validating the creators, uplifting it further them further, and then the community validates the brand. So when you think about Timepieces, the only sort of branding on Timepieces is that little Time logo in the corner and its name, right? Other than that, the hero of all timepieces is the creator, right? And what we think about is what is created success really means. What means elevating the creator by using our platform to make sure that they have a larger audience. I think you all saw that most prominently at the highest level with Michael Johnson and Summers, a coup being on the cover of Time most recently. And by the way, that's the fifth most successful cover of Time in 2002 in the Cover store. We don't know what the retail sales are yet. That takes six months to confirm, believe it or not, because that's how slow Web Zero is. But it looks like it's going to become number four by the end of this week in the store. And number one is BTS, by the way, which is crazy. So we have to think about how do we use our brand to elevate them? Then we have to think about, well, there's a new social contract between creators and brands in Web Three because of the advent of the smart contract. And so it's important to us that the creators are compensated fairly for that. And so the way that we've structured that is the first 1% of primary and secondary sales of Timepieces go to charity. And to date, we've supported free democratic presses or humanitarian aid in Ukraine, and we've donated over $600,000. And then the remaining 99% of primary and secondary sales are split with the creators in perpetuity forever.
Every three months, Mike gets an Eave transfer from Time, as Mike and Summer saw like 24 hours after the sale and the close of the Aku cover NFP, like 50% of the revenue went right to a coup. And we're very serious about that. We think that that's really important, that we're in this together and that this aligns incentives properly. And then every time an artist has a drop or is doing an initiative, we want to be there for them, we want to uplift them, we want to make sure they're successful. We want to make sure that we're promoting them. And at the same time, we want to make sure that if we have access to things, that we are giving them access to things, right? So if we know connections that can help them, we're going to do that. And so Wayne Lightl on the team has done a remarkable job of beginning to really think about how she can constantly bring value to the artist. Right. And that's why this is number one, like tamika on our social handle, constantly highlighting and using the Time Twitter feed or Timepiece Twitter feed to push out sort of information about the artists. And we're lucky, right, by having that type of relationship. The artists also are very supportive of Timepieces and right. And that's why the artists creators are number one in our BT mom. Number two is the community and the collectors. And we talked about that before, and so I don't need to rehash that. Number three is the CMOS and institutions that we believe we could bring into the Web Three ecosystem. I love web Three, and I think you do too, right? I know Chris Cantino does, and I know Summer does. And I'm looking at this group and there's some people in the group that I know already, and there's others that I don't know, but I know Metazoe does. Right. There's something so amazing about Web three. It is so fun, isn't it? Like, fun you can't look at it and not be like, I'm having so much fun even on the down days, right? It is so fun, right?
(MP):
I think the piece that is the most upsetting to me in this pandemic is that you put on these in real life events and the energy that comes out of them when you're finding people who love it just as much as you do. It's second to none. And I haven't found it. I mean, you go to a baseball game or you go to some sporting event, it is nowhere close to finding somebody who is so passionate about this space. So, yeah, I just love it. Absolutely.
(KG):
So I'll give you a real example. I started my career at Wired, and Maya Drezen actually started her career pretty much at Wired, and she's my partner at time, along with Will Bond and a few others. But Maya and I have really worked together for almost my entire professional career. We've known each other for over 20 years. And Maya was actually at the Wired launch party back in 1993 when Wired was coming out. And there was this amazing sentence in the first issue of Wired that said something to the expensive technology is ripping through society like a Bengali typhoon. Okay? And even when I say that sentence today, I just said I get chills because I think about like, that's how I feel about Web Three. It is whipping through society. It's whipping through the world like a Ben Valley typhoon. And Maya and I went to the NFT now launch party. Okay. In Brooklyn. And when we left, Maya turned to me and said, I feel like I felt in 93 when I went to Wired launch party. And what she meant when she said that was, here we were in a room full of people and we were all celebrating the future, and then we left the room and we walked out into a world that doesn't even realize what it's being going to be hit with yet. Right. It's really important to me, and I tell that story because it's easy to talk about the successes the time has had, but let's talk about a lot of the failures that we've had. And I think that we have to really assess that. I spent seven months in clubhouse listening and taking notes and asking questions from everyone to try and create what I thought was a really awesome, fair, community based ecosystem and structure only to find that when I went to build it and execute it, we had underestimated and I had underestimated a demand. I had underestimated bots, I had underestimated gas. Wars I had underestimated rollout and fair distribution, right? Like in the goal of timepieces was actually to democratize the access to time. I mean, we were selling covers of time for 100 e when each was at $4,000. I wanted it at point 108 to be as accessible of a community as possible for people while still being good business for us with all the splits. When I saw that we created gas wars, and we had bought and really, of the 6000 pieces or so, it only went to 1200 wallets, right? In the first roughly 1200 wallets in the first minute, it really broke our heart. I mean, you could see it. And I've done a lot of launches in my career, right? Like, I launched the tablet edition of wired back in 2010. We launched predictive algorithms with ours technica. We launched quick take and bloomberg. When I screwed up launches in the past, or something went wrong, we really disappointed, like, five people and colleagues. This one was awful. I mean, it felt like I disappointed like 200 people, right? And so you learn a lot about transparency in those moments. You learn a lot about sort of asking for forgiveness in those moments. You learn a lot about making amends where you can in those moments, and doing the right thing. And you also learn a lot about how committed are you to the space, right? And how do you think long about the space? The reality is that it took us three or four months to turn the sentiment of timepieces around from the launch on the genesis piece. But all of these things were really important to us because we realized that there were all these flaws in what was available to big brands to enter into this space properly. And we started to build a lot of the IP internally. I started to work with salesforce. I sit on the web three advisory board of salesforce, I don't know if you know this or not, to help them build their NFP cloud, which I think will actually onboard over 100 million people into the space easily, if not more. I figured, why would we just sit here as time? And with all the connections that I have at the c suite level, with government officials, with thought leaders, where I'm constantly espousing the virtues of this evolution, because I think it's an important sort of position that we take as a validator of what's happening. That's why we accept cryptocurrency, is to validate it, right? Like for digital subscriptions, we figured, well, we've built all this stuff, why not also help companies enter into the space? And my challenge was, and this gives you an idea of how utterly dorky and weird I am as an individual was. I was like, well, if time's first announcements was that we were bringing in a community or a brand like Mikey, you'd be like, oh, that's so great. You brought in XYZ, right? Congrats. I figured if we brought in a city and we did it with Salesforce and Mastercard and offered real utility, like legitimate utility of access to Mastercard's price with Miami program, I felt like it would actually just capture everyone's attention. And then we have a lot more announcements that will come down the pike in the coming weeks of other brands that we're going to help enter into the space, but we're not going to do it in mass. We're going to just be very careful and very selective and make sure that we bring people in the right way. That's, to me, what's important, and the right way is not the timepieces way, because the timepieces strategy is a strategy for time. The right way is a strategy for each sort of individual clients. And that dovestails to like, why have we been hiring so much, right? And we've expanded the team. It's close to 20 people on just Web free loan, not counting the engineers. But we've been hiring a lot to diversify the sort of time operations. So that way it's not just me and Maya and Lane and two or three other people in Wilban. I had to look at it and say, well, I'm not a founder, right, like you and Chris Cantino. You guys are founders of Club CPG. I'm just a steward of time, right? So if I walked across the street tomorrow and got hit by a car, god forbid, I need to have an organization that can sustain itself with or without me. And so what we've been hiring is we've been hiring out, knowing that this is a real business and that this is a real evolution of our brand and that we're going to not only commit to it as time, but we're going to commit to helping others within it evolve. I paused because the last one is blockchain big screen, and that's a completely different pivot. So I know I just talked for.
(MP):
What I was processing and what I think, if you were listening and you had read the release about Miami is that there is some alpha for Art Basel is what I pieced together there. But you don't have to necessarily share it yet.
(KG):
I mean, that's what we're talking about it. There's nothing but we're talking about it at this point, right. The goal is to get it launched prior to our boss, and we can do it. And I'm not worried about it. We've already begun all of the conversations, and we've figured out a lot of the stuff before the approvals even took place with the commission. But the goal is to get it dropped before our puzzle. The most important thing, and I think that this is a reality whether or not you agree with it or not, the environmental impact of Ethereum as perceived, whether real or not real, is irrelevant. It's perceived as real. No city salesforce Mastercard would enter into Web Three until the merge took place. I think that you can't understate how important this shift from proof of work to proof of stake is. Because ultimately. When you move into proof of stake and you remove sort of the perception of ethereum is just an energy suck on the environment. Then all of a sudden you find yourself in a scenario where that's not sort of the leading issue. But people can start to focus on. Like. What is the value being unleashed by ethereum and partnering with on the ethereum blockchain.
(MP):
Especially as Miami. Which is sort of like underwater. Literally. And has a lot of exposure to these changing climates that we're facing. I think it's going to be a fun ride to watch. And what came to my mind, and it's kind of like I've been traveling a bunch. I've had the good fortune of being able to and then invited to Michelin Star restaurants. And Michelin started as you were driving around on the web or on the world, michelin gave you a guide. And what I see is, like, the Web Three version of Michelin is this trifecta of time in the city of Miami and Mastercard kind of putting their stamp on. Like, these are web three real world experiences that as you travel around, I'm sure you'll pick off more cities as you go. That's what I was excited for, because it's a mark of approval.
(KG):
That the second I mean, I couldn't agree more. And there will be more cities, I could tell you right now. And this is not Alpha. I said this publicly the other day. I'm in active talks with four cities in one country right now. Okay? So for people who think that webs three is not going to make it just in the beginning, you're just wrong. The Web three movement will make it. It's just a question of not every individual is going to make it. But that's natural business sort of acumen, just sort of like, I don't go to weddings. I don't know if we've ever talked about this. I don't go to weddings because I find them boring. Because in the United States, 50% of weddings end in divorce. But 100% of weddings when do you take this awfully wedded person to be your spouse tend to end, and I do, and the numbers just don't match up. So when I don't believe that someone's going to actually end well, like, I just send a gift. And I saved my time.
(MP):
I did not know that. That is amazing.
(KG):
Yes, it was a great strategy until I started to talk about it publicly. And then people were like, is that why you didn't choke my weather? I lost a lot of friends on that one.
Sometimes I think that we have to divorce our emotions from the reality of how numbers play out. And the numbers are pretty obvious that in the history of business, not every business will always succeed 100%.
(KG):
Two things, because I flipped down for 1 second, I saw two really interesting comments as we're going through. One is, what is a V to? Mom, I think you should just search for it online. It's V number two. And then m om, you'll find it on Salesforce website. And it's just how they structure their business models, which is vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. To be honest, every sort of company has a different approach, right? Like Jeff Bezos, if you looked at his approach, was write these long form narratives and no PowerPoints. This is in one page. Could you tell me what your entire business strategy is and where you're going to focus for the following months are? I personally love this approach. Like, there's billions of different approaches, but this really allows the team to focus on, like, if it's not on the B two, mom, why are you wasting your time doing it? The other thing is, I saw Lou's comments about Clubs PPG being on the cover of Time. So lou. I love your comments. Okay. And what I will say about the cover of Time is that there's very limited real estate cover of Time, and those cover of Times are like, the single number one requested thing that ever happened.
And I love that a coup was on the cover. I love that people was on the cover. I can totally one day see Club CPG being an article, but the reality is, I think that you're asking the wrong question, which is like, if you look at why do I think that Club CPG could be a potential article and I just stay out of editorial, I think it's because of the impact that this community has, and it's on a few different levels. One, is it's one of the original sort of tokenized communities in web three? Number two, I think it has a really interesting genesis community and pop community that shouldn't be underestimated because both have value in their own rights. Number three, honestly, and I've said this a billion times in the annals of web three, chris Cantino's Twitter threads might become one of the most influenced and referenced Twitter handles on the Twitter threads on how companies and organizations adopted to the space. I can't underestimate the impact that being part of the community as a genesis holder has provided me. I am thankful for it every day, which is why when I was asked, it was the first thing I said, no problem, we'll do this ASAP.
(MP):
So Chris Cantino is the goat in terms of those Twitter threads. It was also his birthday yesterday. Happy birthday.
(KG):
I know. I wished happy birthday to all. I said to all and then everyone was like, It's just Chris. And I was like, well, then all of his personalities, if he has multiple ones and everything.
(MP):
I am not the founder of Club CPG. It roots way back with Jamie and Chris. I've been very fortunate in my journey to have just been trying to help as much as possible and kind of work to this position, and I'm very thankful for it. We have one last pillar, and then I'm going to start queuing up all of these quotes and questions and so yeah, talk to us about the big screen because I think that's really important and there were some fun things that you're doing right now.
(KG):
Sure. I had this moment where I had on my screen at home, the robotos on the screen, and my daughter walked in and I have an eight year old daughter, her name is Ellie. And my daughter and if you go on Instagram, you'll see if you go hashtag how I Found Ellie, you'll see I have literally chronicled the cockamaminess of what it's like to have an eight year old with my wife for her entire growth. But it's been like the stupid stuff, right? The stuff that will make you laugh. I know. Mikey, you have like twelve children, so I mean, it would be too exhausting to do how many? Three is the same as twelve to me.
I don't know how you do it. It's amazing. But Ellie walks in, she's eight, she looks at my screen and she says, those are so cute. And I said, what? And she said, what's on the screens? Those robots. And I said to her, what do you see? And she says, I see science and math. And I said, really? And I literally walked away from that conversation. And I called Maria Perez Brown, who is the head of kids documentaries and programming at Times Studios, and I said, we need to get together enough coffee right now. And she lives like 15 blocks away from me. So we met in New York City at a bakery called Levan on the Upper West Side, but not the one in the 70s if you're in New York, or the one on like 117th. And we walked for 3 hours and what I said to Maria was, I said, you know what I'm seeing in web three? I'm seeing an insane amount of IP like original creativity emerging without the historic constraints of the structure, saying that this is a good piece of creative or this is a bad piece of creative. And I'm seeing these communities form around the IP and vote with their dollars in a way that I've never seen before. And most IP creation from the studios is top down. And I'm like and this is a Bottoms Up creation where all of a sudden you can see that communities are forming around IP and you can develop that IP into television shows. And if you launch those television shows, how amazing would it be if you already knew that you had a community that A, not only loved the product, but B, a smaller subset of the community had an ownership stake in the product, right? And I said, beyond that, I don't know how to do it. Right? I don't know anything about how to do it. And so then Maria Perez Brown, who is absolutely one of the most amazing human beings on the planet, and I wish she was here today, she said to me, oh, well, let me see what you mean. And I brought her into the robotics, and I said, you have to have dinner with Pablo. This was during Nftnyc, the first one, right? I said, you have to have dinner with Pablo. He's here tonight. And they sat down. She told me their entire conversation was in Spanish, right? The whole dinner was in Spanish. She loved it more than anything else. And they walked away with a handshake agreement that we were going to create a new television show series based on the minds of Pablo's family and ultimately the robot. Then we went on and we signed Will with the widows and toy boogers, and we're in talks with Smiles verse, and they all take place in different stages. But the whole premise was there's great IP emerging in the web three space and the traditional sort of filters are not in place to say whether or not something should be greenlit or not, right? And I'll never forget that the day that we announced the robotics and it was in The Hollywood Reporter, maria and Pablo were on stage in our time hall and Maria said to me, or said to the whole group, she's like, in any other structure, Pablo would have never had access to Maria, right? But web three, in the community base of web three, showing its support organically and voting with it, with their dollars to show their commitment to it, all of a sudden separated the week from the chaff, right? And so the whole premise is, how do we look at this IP and how do we then extend it from the blockchain to the big screen? And what we were thrilled about was the announcement that the robot is in the littles, which are the two ones that are the furthest along. And just remember, they all take place differently and they're happening at hyper speed. Because I said to everyone, web three expectations are different than web two expectations, as we all can laugh about, have been kicked up for production by Novana, which is one of the largest production houses in Canada. And now we're just talking to distributors for it. But it's go time and this is going to happen. And if you want the real extreme example of how powerful Web Three really is, right, it's easy to see that with a coup. It's easy to see that with robotics. It's easy to see that with the Littles. There's a lot of great communities that this can happen to. But I was saying to someone the other day. And I'm telling the story of shits and giggles now. Mikey. For a second. Right. Is I said to someone. Wouldn't you want a business that if I told you there would be 5000 pieces in the business. That you'd have 1700 to 1800 owners in the business. That the business would have generated roughly $25 million in gross sales in a little over a year and two to $3 million in profit. And with a highly engaged community. Wouldn't she want that business? You are at Meta, that's a pretty good business. One year in, right? That's a pretty good business. Profitable, highly engaged. That's Crypto Dickbutz. Okay. Right. And there's no scenario, as everyone knows, in the corporate world, where I could go into a meeting with a straight face and present Crypto Dick Butts to someone and get Crypto Dick butts sort of approved for budgeting. But in web three, that can emerge. And it doesn't make a difference to me what you think, if you like them or if you don't like them. I happen to be an owner of crypto, big ones. I bought one because it just makes me laugh that something like that can actually exist. But the reality is it's a Ravenous fan base that is a profitable business and a successful community, and they're rallying around something that essentially should be on Adult Swim, right? We are on cartoon networks. And I think that's the reality of what web Three does. And if you contrast that to web Two, what do you have? Like in the movie theater? So you have four that's not original. It could be a great movie, but not original. It's just a remake of what the comic books were that we read when we were younger. Top Gun, Maverick, which I loved, right, personally, but not original either. You see the consistent recycling in web two of existing IP because it's what people know works. And in web three, what you're seeing is the community is now recalibrating around new IP that can all of a sudden sort of signal that there are alternative things that could work, too, and not one is better than the other. But I can tell you right now that if web three didn't exist, there would be no Crypto Dickbuck cartoon movie coming out, right. Because there's no way that the studio films would have improved it. Web Three proves that is possible. And that's probably the most extreme example I can give. I bet. We never thought we'd do, like a dissertation on Crypto Dickbutts.
(MP):
There are going to be many papers written on crypto. Dickbutts I remember trying to write a term paper at West Point about South Park because we were studying satire. And it was early days of South Park, and my teachers were like, this is garbage. And yet it's still there today and keeps going. And it's an amazing piece of satire that has a tremendous creative process. Man that was a genius call and a half. And we are just getting to the Q and A. I'm going to go back and relisten to this a couple of times. There's so much packed into what you have said, and you're a pro. That was great. All right, folks, take out your phones. Get ready for the poet. The poet. All one word. All lower case. I'll put it in the chat. There's only a few of these is Timepieces FTW.
(KG):
Thank you. And by the way, to everyone, and as you just saw, I miscalculated where my window was on that one. Everyone who joined, I just wanted to thank you. I know we have a few more minutes for Q and A, but I hope I've answered a lot of questions.
(MP):
Oh, we've got them queued up. We've got Harold standing by. I'm going to bring Harold.
(KG):
Harold? No, not Harold.
Joking. I like Harold. Bring Harold up. All right, Harold.
(Member):
Glad to be up here with you, too. This has been amazing. And so my question is quick but very direct. As you create your creator, you all are in the media space, and normally that is a very top down driven thing. You all make decisions and then we as consumers buy it. Can you talk a little bit about your thought on how web three changes that when so many people can now be creators and how you all are thinking about it? We trademark the phrase proof of experience because we see many people being able to document their own stories, what could be their own Time cover. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you see the community, the world, globally becoming more in the distribution side of what becomes that front cover of Time.