Sergio Silva began his career at Goldman Sachs and Barclays before delving into the world of Web 3, taking on the role of Senior Director at Fireblocks and founder of Seize the Meebs. His passion for memes and their role in shaping online personalities and communities has led him to become a respected collector and founding member of Neon DAO, a for-profit investment fund focused on building and promoting the open metaverse. Recorded on April 26, 2023 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.
When former finance professional Sergio Silva stumbled upon the world of NFTs and memes, he never expected to find parallels between his experience at Goldman Sachs and the newfound respect owning a CryptoPunk garnered him. Little did he know, it would be the beginning of a journey that would change his perspective on the limitless potential of visual communication and the role of NFTs and memes in our online identities and communities.
In this episode, you will be able to:
"Being able to understand the bridge from the real world into the digital life and how that is going to work and how you can position yourself there is where a lot of the opportunities are going to be found." - Sergito
Follow Sergio at https://twitter.com/sergitosergito/
Follow Club CPG at https://twitter.com/CPGCLUB
To learn more about Crypto Packages Goods, visit https://www.cryptopackagedgoods.com/
00:00:01 - Mikey Piro
Emgm. We are back. Another genius call. We are interviewing Sergio Silva, or Sergio. He is currently the Senior Director at Fireblocks and also the founder of Seize the Meebs. He joined that company in 2021 to build the Latin American sales team before he transitioned to his current role in July of 22. He's also again the founder of Seize the Meebs, which an addition to art and Meme product, focused on promoting digital asset ownership and the exploration of NFTs as value delivery platforms. He is an avid collector and again the founding member of a Neon Dow, which is a for profit investment fund focused on building and promoting the open metaverse. And I have so many fun questions to ask about an open metaverse. He started his career at Goldman Sachs and then went to Barclays. And now we're fortunate that he left all that Web Two garbage and is here with us in Web Three. And so Sergio, welcome to welcome to the Pod. Welcome to the genius call. It's great to have you. How's everything going?
00:01:04 - Sergio Silva
Thanks for having me. It's good. It's funny, I listened to the bio and I'm like, wow, that's a lot of buzzwords. I should probably edit that out with Metaverse and this and that. But no, very excited to be here. Huge fan of what you guys have built at CPG. So it's quite the honor to be spending some time with you today.
00:01:23 - Mikey Piro
We appreciate you coming on, and I don't think there's too many buzzwords. I think those are all very salient points when we move into a metaverse world. The idea that you have a structured vocabulary around these things I think is really important. I would like to start your origin story of how you got into NFTs. I feel like there's a lot of overlap between what Djens do and what Wall Street does, and then there's just not. And so how did you get to this Web Three awakening and give us a little background there?
00:01:55 - Sergio Silva
Sure, and you're totally right. I mean, Wall Street is just regulated Djenning and it's other people's money, so it's probably even more of a Djen because you're not really putting your capital at risk somebody else's. But how I got here was I was trying to study DeFi. I think having the Wall Street background, it's actually hard to think about DeFi and decentralized finance if you just look at it with the regular framework that you have after studying finance and working in traditional finance. And so I was really putting in the time, researching protocols and trying to understand what worked, what didn't. And during that time, I subscribed to a couple of newsletters and one of them flagged or highlighted Gmoney's buy of his Ape Crypto punk for 100 and 4160 thousand dollars. And yeah, that definitely caught my attention. I had no idea about NFPs, but people were paying six figures for JPEGs and being the curious guy that I am, I went down a rabbit hole and I need help getting out.
00:02:58 - Mikey Piro
So GMoney has been on the show and it's really fascinating to think through his mindset for what came ahead of his purchase. And for him, he had a couple of unlocks that made instant kind of sense in his mind. What was the moment? Do you have a particular purchase in mind or what was the thing that you zeroed in on when you went down that rabbit hole where you're like, okay, this is it?
00:03:26 - Sergio Silva
Yes. So I downloaded Discord and joined the Punks Discord in February of 21 and I spent a few days glued to it. It was a very different place back then and it was a lot and it was right before the Hype cycle really kicked off. So I was very lucky to buy my Punk for 6.1 Ether. And it was through seeing the interactions and reading what the punks in there were talking about and how knowledgeable they were, that's when I realized, okay, there's something here. This is really smart people that are here. And me buying the Punk and starting to use it as my profile picture on Twitter. And Discord immediately made others or signal to others that I kind of was a punk. And what it meant back then, it still means almost the same, but back then there was no apes, no doodle, nothing else. And so it was a very unique way of signaling and people immediately gave you respect for having a Punk. And it really reminded me of being 24 years old with a Goldman Sachs business card and going around Latin America meeting with very senior people both at the government central bank level, also at the private investment level. And just the fact that I had a Goldman Sachs email and business card opened the door for me buying the Punk and using it reminded me of that. And so that was my AHA moment when it came to online personality and being able to signal through the ownership of that.
00:04:48 - Mikey Piro
JPEG is the Discord vibe from Punks where you started to meme yourself. I mean, I think memes always existed in a certain sense and I think they've gotten like Turbocharged. I often talk about like Wednesday nights I sit with my kids and I watch YouTube with them and we just watch effectively people repurpose memes and somebody try not to laugh at them. And I think that it's become this really interesting part of culture that once you spend more time in it, you really have an appreciation for it. And maybe certain memes aren't for you and certain ones go certain ways, but I feel like that's where you intersected, where you're like the Web Three resident Djen at Fireblocks. And part of that is how sees the memes and meming itself. How did you get into and exploring memes and the meebits themselves?
00:05:44 - Sergio Silva
Yeah, so memes have always been very important in my life. I think my early exposure to the internet was stuff like nangag and reddit and other boards. I used to be on online forums a lot. Means are just a very easy way of spreading ideas visually and especially for online communities where a lot of the participants are like myself, not native english speakers. So being able to communicate through images in a way that unified the community mindset was just something that always had a lot of value to me. And when I came to crypto and I realized, first of all, crypto twitter is just a gold mine of memes, right. The culture and the humor of crypto twitter reminds me a lot of the culture and the humor of being mexican in Mexico. We love to make fun of ourselves. Everybody has a nickname. We're always kind of not bullying each other, but there's just very significant humor that we use sometimes to cope and deal with a lot of the important situations that as country we've been through. And so that reminded me, crypto twitter, a little bit of being Mexican and being from Latin America country and just celebrating whatever we had wins and then just kind of like trying to get through the bad times with laughter. And as the NFD market started to develop and this whole new culture started being built, I think it was really easy to make the connection that, okay, we're building something new here with web three and memes are going to be just the way in which we propel this forward. Again, given the fact that you can just create something visual that most people can understand and can almost find consensus as to what it means, I think that's the way civilizations have been always created and developed, going back religion, going back to caveman paintings, it's always been memes in a way. And so it was just a very natural transition, natural fit to try to incorporate them as much as possible into web three as well.
00:07:48 - Mikey Piro
How do you see the transformation or how do you define a metaverse? We talked about a lot of the buzzwords there and how do you see an intersection? For some people, a metaverse is just what we're doing right now. Like, we created a very small metaverse. For others, it's like a fully immersive virtual reality and then there's a lot of things in between that. How do you think about the metaverse and then we're going to circle back to seize the mebs and fireblocks. But what would you define the metaverse as?
00:08:19 - Sergio Silva
Yeah, I think the metaverse is just this new layer of digital life, right? It's just kind of overlaying in real life with just capabilities in the digital space, whether that is like this call and zoom or just working over slack to then just socializing, whether that's on discord, whether in the future that's going to be AR VR. I think the metaverse is that it's just like our digital ecosystem where we live. And it doesn't have to be too complicated. I think things got very complicated with the Hype cycle a couple of years ago, because in order to justify things, you have to make it seem like there's something that you're doing that nobody else is doing. But in reality, the metaverse is just that, just that digital layer that we are integrated into our regular life and using all the conveniences that technology allows us, such as being able to have face to face conversations even though we're.
00:09:18 - Mikey Piro
Sitting in different parts of the world 100%. Where do you think that the metaversal opportunities are in the near term? And then also tell us a bit more about Fireblocks for those who haven't heard about it and what the company is up to.
00:09:37 - Sergio Silva
Sure. So I'll start with fireblocks. Fireblocks is the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure to institutions. So when you think of that meme of the institutions are coming. Actually, we are one of the first calls they make when they come into the space. Because as you know, wallet infrastructure that we all know, browser extensions, hardware, wallets, even multi six, those are retail focused products, right? Those are things for you and I. But you can't really run digitalized business using retail products. And so what we do, what we provide, is self custody solutions. So all of our clients custody their own assets, but using technology and policy engines and APIs as the case, that enables them to actually run it at institutional level. So we service 1700 clients around the world. We have offices pretty much in every continent now. The company is only five years old, but it's really grown quite quickly. And then we're very proud to power stuff like bank of New York Mellons institutional bitcoin custody that's being built on top of Fireblocks. Stuff like Revolute in Europe that has a couple hundred thousand retail clients. Or wallet infrastructure runs on Fireblocks in Latin America, BTG, which is the largest investment bank in the whole region, they have an exchange called Mint that they built on top of Fireblocks, and they have a new stable coin that they're also using Fireblocks technology. So a lot of different use cases. I mean, at the end of the day, anybody that needs to do anything on chain needs a wallet. And so we provide those at the institutional level. When it comes to opportunities in the Metaverse, I don't think the metaverse itself is going to change the course of human nature. I think technology what it does, and we've seen it through time, technology just enhances human nature, makes things a little bit more efficient, reduces frictions. And so I think opportunities in the metaverse will be for people who identify what we're going to be able to reduce the friction in and how do you capture that value. And so I think stuff like a lot of people like infrastructure because it's just like the safest bet, right? Everybody's going to need to use roads and bridges and the like. But when it comes to digital economies, digital assets, I think just being able to understand kind of like the bridge from the real world into the digital life and how that is going to work and how you can position yourself there. I think that's where a lot of the opportunities are going to be found for people who are not like Devs or who don't have a gigantic backing or just financial trading experience and the like. So if you as a person, let's call a normal person with web three experience understand, okay, well, how can I onboard, let's say my family, my friends, what do they care about what will bring them into the space? So what's that link between who they are now and who they'll be after web three? And can I create that? Can I facilitate it? Can I introduce it to them? And if so, that's an opportunity. And I think that onboarding people, bridging people, helping them understand why this is really good technology that's going to make their lives easier once it gets easier to use it. Obviously, I think that's what opportunities are really going to be.
00:13:02 - Mikey Piro
It's fascinating to think through the larger implications of that infrastructure now and how these financial institutions are using it. And one of the things that's kind of come front and center around regulation more recently is the lack of clarity around that. What are you seeing from your chair and how are these financial institutions kind of straddling both this uncertainty and also trying to drive forward innovation using fireblocks?
00:13:30 - Sergio Silva
Sure. So I can't speak officially on behalf of fireblocks on that topic, but I can tell you my perspective just from talking to our clients and seeing what's around, I think the regulatory environment is going to get more challenging than it is. I think, unfortunately, government or they decided to make it a partisan issue. Now I have no idea why or what they're trying to get out of it. I myself lean very liberal on my social choices and the like, but I have found myself started to really want to support some of the Republican candidates who are just being more conscious about being intentional in the regulation that we need and understanding that pushing this industry offshore is going to hurt more people. But between now and then, I think we're going to continue to see that clash of right versus left. And unfortunately, crypto seems to be in the crosshairs of the ruling party. Luckily, they don't have full control of Congress, so that's going to slow them down. But all you need is a little bit of noise for things to get not nice. And unfortunately, I think we're going to have some of that down the line. How are companies reacting as you would expect them? Right? Just definitely. I mean, we've seen this publicly, big companies that had made a splash coming into the space, are now leaving or just firing their teams or putting plants on ice. And that's being felt across the ecosystem. There's a lot less business being made. I think, again, this will provide opportunities for those that are here and well capitalized. Fireblocks has raised a billion dollars of VC funding over the last five years. So we're very well capitalized, well positioned to get through this and we continue to have really good business. I'm just speaking broadly as the whole industry and you can see there's like layoffs everywhere and the like, very cyclical industry and it's definitely being felt the big financial institutions take time for their projects to happen. It's a two, three year kind of initiative. And so we haven't really seen a lot of people pulling back because their target date is 2025 or 2024. And so there's definitely time, but definitely not seeing new Entrants, let's call that like, definitely a lot of people that you expect would be coming in are waiting or pausing. So people are already developing, are still working on it, but then the market has shrunk a little bit, especially from the new Entrant side.
00:16:13 - Mikey Piro
It was fascinating to be in Nftnyc and sort of along the lines of your point, watching the true believers still show up. And I think it was refreshing in that you weren't on one hand, getting shield somebody's shitcoin project constantly. On the other side, these are the folks who are really here to build and I consider a lot of what CPG does, those are the true believers as well. And yeah, I think the macroeconomic state of things apart from crypto is making any sort of aggressive growth challenging. But I think, like you had said, being well capitalized and having a clear vision and more importantly, providing a clear value and product to the financial institutions at that infrastructure level. Like my previous life, I worked in telecom technology. It's like boring. But you need it, right? We need it right now. We need the fiber here to make it go. And so it's a reliable place to be and I think it's fascinating to hear that perspective from you.
00:17:17 - Sergio Silva
I was going to say, you mentioned Telco actually had the opportunity this week I was in Seattle with Deutsche Telecom. They had a Web three day feature, a handful of their partners, and it's really interesting to again, see the long term perspective. This is a company that most people don't know this, but they actually stake either they've invested in sello, they hold tokens of flow, this is all public information they put out. But again, their approach is years, not kind of like what we see in the day to day Web three space where people are so worried about one day price movements. So definitely, I think as people mature in the industry, it's very new. Most people are having here for two years at the most. I think we're going to start seeing that load time preference really take charge, and it's going to be really positive for those that are still here. But it is also difficult to still be here. Right. If you saw your net worth rise a lot and then you didn't take profits, or if you came in at the top and then you've seen nothing but just a meltdown of the valuation of the stuff that you hold. It's a blessing and a curse that the space is so tied to floor prices and that you have 24/7 kind of open financial markets on things that are not really financial products. It's good when things are going up, but it's very negative and destructive when we have markets like the ones we've seen this last couple of months.
00:18:48 - Mikey Piro
I agree completely. It's interesting to think about the, like you said, the 24 x seven markets and things pumping and dropping, as opposed to telecom infrastructure, where they're like, deciding to put high quality things in the ground for a decade.
00:19:06 - Sergio Silva
Right.
00:19:06 - Mikey Piro
There's a very different planning process, it's a different risk profile. It's one where I think both industries, I mean, they're industries apart from themselves, but you can sort of learn a lot by positioning yourself and thinking critically about how the rate at which capital is deployed and how it's deployed and why specifically on this metaversal thing, it intersects. Really interestingly. But I digress. I think part of this cycle, like, circling back to memes, and when you're on, people are leaving, but you've done a tremendous job with Seize the Memes. Let's talk a little bit about that project and where the inspiration came from, because I believe well, it did. It came from me. Bits so let's talk a little bit about why you fell in love with me.
00:19:55 - Sergio Silva
Bits yeah, so mebits, as most people know, they are Larva Labs third NFD project. They had the Punks, then they had the Autoglyphs, and then the Meebits, which dropped in May of 2021. Larva Labs has track record of being ahead of the market by a few years. Right. Punks were free to claim it took a little bit to mint out in 2017, and their prices didn't really start going above one ether until very late 2020. Same thing with Autoglyphs. They were pretty much a cherry drop until later. And so I think Mivits are or we're three or four years ahead of their time as well. I really like their look. Not only are they the first fully rigged 3D metaverse asset created by pretty much the pioneers of the Nifty space, that in itself has a ton of value. But I like the way they look for a couple of reasons. First, if you just go back in art history again, going back to the Cape painting days, humans were voyeuristic by nature. We love ourselves. You walk through any museum and majority of the art is human forms, right? And so that's why social media has been so successful, because we just love watching ourselves or watching others or showing ourselves, right? It's again, human nature. And how does that gain expressed in this new digital era? And that's where mebits come in. There's 20,000 very diverse asset set, a bunch of different cool trades, a bunch of Easter eggs in the trades as well. So, I don't know, I feel like that's the kind of asset that I want to pass on to my eventual kids, where like, hey, we were here for this moment. And if the metaverse does end up materializing as this 3D world that you go in through your computer or your phone me, this will be there for that. But if not, I still think that the provenance value of being larval apps, the fact that they're beautiful little human characters and that we will all at some point want to represent ourselves in a human form, that's where my love for them started. Unfortunately, the mebits dropped. They were an AirDrop to punks, and then for 10,000 of them, and then 10,000 were sold in a Dutch auction. People bought them thinking they were going to moon like punks. There was no real organic demand from EBITS. And that community, a big, strong community, didn't really form until late last year. Obviously, they are now owned by Ugalaps, which is again, another good thing for the project, given that uglylabs, very good track record of developing IP and utility. But the mimics community was never there until late last year. And so what I wanted to do is, having been an investor, collector, advisor, critic in the space, I wanted to have more skin in the game and really understand what it was like to be a project founder, what it's like. And so when I was looking through ideas and was talking to a few friends, it just kind of came together. It was like memes, obviously six five to nine memes were really popping off. And I really love the message, I love what they're building. I had my start in Nifty Gateway as far as collecting so open editions, limited editions. It's something where I see value in helping propagate the message. And then MEB, it's just being able to say, hey, we took the IP of the mebits that we own and we want to use it to create a new project. Kind of almost show the composability of owning your NFT's IP, which is kind of like what DFI does, right? DeFi is composable money Legos. And so NFTs can be composable culture Legos and put all together in a blender. Think over a weekend. And then we was talking to some friends, needed community. They were excited about it and it just kind of like went from there. We had some really nice early momentum. And then when that faded, like usually does for new projects, we found ourselves with a really close knit, really amazing community. We've had honored to have so many good artists drop with us over season one. We did 22 cards over the span of two and a half months and it was just a really amazing experience. A lot of lessons early on, both good and bad, but looking back, just really proud of the body of work that we put out.
00:24:31 - Mikey Piro
The cards and the way that they come across, it's beautiful. You spoke about a lot of the lessons that you were learning along the way. Wanting to be a project founder, if you could distill one major kind of like if I were to do this again from a clean sheet of paper, here's the first thing that I would try and rectify. Do you have a point of view on that?
00:24:55 - Sergio Silva
Yes. So I think the biggest thing is really understanding there's going to be a lot of criticism and thought coming your way, regardless of how well things do or don't. I think of a very thick skin. Learning English in high school, it was impossible to communicate and people try to bully me a lot and so I really had to develop a thick skin and it's been one of my biggest, I think, assets professionally and Wall Street too. Right. It's alliance, then. I was not expecting how much anxiety I started feeling over the first two weeks. It's funny, right before Price started really shooting up and that gave me a lot more anxiety than anything I had ever experienced. And it was more because I know what I have planned, I know what I want to deliver and I know there's value in it. But we sold our first token at 0.5 Ether. A week later it was trading for Four Ether. And so the value that you can generate for somebody at 0.5 is much different than the value that you're going to be able to generate for somebody at Four Ether. Understanding that relationship of the Four Ether buyer having a much higher expectation. Even though they didn't buy it directly from you. Right. They bought it from somebody else. That really caught me by surprise. 2020 hindsight. I'm like, okay, well, it totally makes sense, but I don't think I was ready for that kind of pressure and it shocked me. I think we did very well through it, but it definitely shook me to my core. And I wish if I did it again we're doing season two here in a couple of weeks, but if I had to do it from scratch again, I think just really being prepared to take a lot of the heat that eventually comes the founder's way regardless.
00:27:00 - Mikey Piro
Yeah, there's a thick skin and then there's like titanium skin and you can only sort of develop the titanium after you've sort of been dipped in the first crucible. I think we can relate on that on a few different instances. It's really interesting. Also, you've got another launch coming in a couple of weeks, I want to turn our attention a little bit more towards the Metaverse Dow. But what to give the folks a little bit of alpha because I do this often. What are some of the things that you're potentially able to share with us for that next drop?
00:27:36 - Sergio Silva
We have an incredible lineup of artists and I think you're getting really good value on the art you're receiving. It's also a very cohesive set, right? It's not just like additions. Everybody's doing additions now. These are additions around some very strong IP that I think will be very relevant in the future. For season two, we're adding punks. So our artists, we send them like an asset folder with all the me bits that we own or the community has provided permission. Now we have a bunch of punks as well. And so a lot of the pieces will feature punks. And I think again, it builds a narrative. It builds a story beyond just, oh, we opened up Addition art platform. It's more like, hey, this is the first significant project that is showcasing IP utility within the Uvalaps ecosystem that is not board apes.
00:28:29 - Mikey Piro
Amazing. That's wonderful. All right, we'll have to check it out. So there you go. You heard it here, folks. There's some punks coming in the season. Let's turn to Neon Dow, which is an investment dow and you sort of describe it like as a group chat with a wallet. Let's dig into that a little bit more. Can you give us a little bit more detail on that?
00:28:55 - Sergio Silva
Yes. So early on, after being in the punks discord for a while and seeing how people, how the punks were thinking about the Web Three world, I realized that dows were also going to be super important in how you organize labor or just the ability to do things together with this brand new set of Internet friends. And I joined what was then called Metaverse Dow, which was started by a few punks and they were buying and developing Crypto Voxel plots. Early on, I realized there's a ton of value in this because we were distributed around the world a bunch of different backgrounds, right? Most people usually when they start companies, they started with ex coworkers or ex classmates or people that they are very similar in background to. And it's great. Obviously the majority of companies out there that started that way are very successful. But there's also something to be said about being able to start something with people of very different backgrounds, locations, outlooks, perspectives. And so metaverse was that. It was that for me. And then as we started growing, we were approached by Tribute Labs, which are the incredible team behind Flamingo Dow and so many of the nice big investment dowels that you see around. They wanted to create a Metaverse focus dow and asked us if we could just pretty much turn Metaverse Dow into something bigger. And obviously we're very excited. For the opportunity. So we merged Metaverse dow with what is now Neon Dow. Neon Dow is the original Metaverse plus actually artifact the team members. They're also members of Neon Dow, founding members of Neon Dow and then a bunch of investors and collectors from Flamingo Dow and the rest of the trivial apps network. So we raised, I believe it was 6000 Ether in the summer of 21, if I remember correctly. And we've used it to make investments both NFTs and Tokens, as well as venture investments into different projects and platforms that are working on building the open Metaverse.
00:31:18 - Mikey Piro
Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned on the governance side of things? I think there's a lot of variation in Dows in how they're structured and how the Tokenomics of kind of voting rights. How does Neon Dow work specifically and how are you juggling like risk and other assets and that hands on day to day of it?
00:31:45 - Sergio Silva
Yes. So think of us as, I don't want to say decentralized, because we're not decentralized, but a distributed VC team where it's only 70 members. So we're an LLC traditional fund in the legal sense. We use web retooling and experience to enhance our operations and deploy our capital. What have we learned from governance? We've come across some of the issues that are well known with governance. One being active participation. We have weekly calls or two and a half hours. They're my favorite two and a half hours of the week. And it's really cool because Tribute Labs is kind of like the fund manager. So they structure everything for us, the calls, if we have guests, we have to make any votes on allocations and the like. They built a lot of tooling. We can vote via what we call emoji consensus on discord, where if X amount of people vote yes on deploying a certain amount of ether into a project, there's bots that actually automatically go out and do that for us. So it's a lot of web, three rails, but think of it as more of like a distributed VC or just investment fund on top of it and it's a really nice combination. But going back to the issues, for example, I was busy this week, I couldn't join the call. NFP, NYC was last week, we canceled that call. So it's been two weeks. I don't really have participated in Doubt and we have recap emails and the like, but I would love to be much more active. And only having the one or two calls a week makes it difficult. When there's overlap with work life commitments outside of the space, the same happens to others. We have very prominent investors, but they're in Asia and so a 02:00 P.m. Call Eastern time doesn't really work for them trying to fix that. How do you get a higher level of participation so the Dow itself doesn't become just kind of like the embodiment of what ten or 15 people think, right? You really want to tap into this kind of like hive mind effect of having people around the world with a lot of different backgrounds. We have builders, we have depths, we have lawyers, we have investors, we have people who just ended up in Web Three out of nowhere and being able to use all that together and outperform. And it is hard to get everybody active. At the same time, we're thinking of different ideas into which incentivize participation. I think the problem with bigger Dows is that it's really hard to work with 202,000 people. You're not really going to come. You see it with sports teams, right? Everybody has an opinion on Monday morning about what the coach should have done and that's just like a sport. You're like a fan thinking of winning a match or winning a championship that at the end of the day doesn't really mean too much in your life. Whereas with Dows, where you have a financial incentive for things to go a certain way that naturally creates a lot more conflict. I think it's just Dows overall are super interesting exercise in just human behavior. Again, I'm a huge human behavior kind of guy. And so going through this exercise, seeing how they work, I think it was going to be really good long term for everybody involved. And in the meantime, we're learning a lot, even about ourselves. I realize I have a certain way that I always look at things and I've learned this because I hear myself talk on the calls and then I hear others present their own frameworks and I'm like, Whoa, that's better or different or what's making me think of things this way. Whereas this person has a very different view. And so in that sense, I would encourage everybody to seek participation in a Dow, whether it's a full, truly decentralized Dow or just one of those Dows which are like group chats with a joint wallet and really use it as an opportunity to one, maybe I don't want to say Mitigate, but just allocate assets. You're not the only person just investing those or participating those is a good way to diversify. But if not too, it's just a really good way of leveraging your network. Learning from others and in a space that tends to be so PvP, being part of a Dow or an investment group can be a really good opportunity to really leverage this moment in time.
00:36:36 - Mikey Piro
There is a lot to unpack there. I cannot emphasize enough your recommendation for folks that participate in a Dow. I think it is a new corporate structure built on the backs of a lot of other governance like government works in a sort of similar way in that there's procedures and protocols you have to follow. I think where Web Three accelerates this governance methodology is really fascinating. We could for sure spend a ton more time on the Dow part of it. And thank you for that answer. I like to talk about the future, especially with folks that are leaning into the future themselves. Let's go near term to far term. Where do you think the you don't have to be all rosy because I don't know that I could be rosy talking about the rest of 2023. But what do you see in the rest of this year that you are excited about or not excited about?
00:37:37 - Sergio Silva
I'm very excited about the buying opportunities that are going to present themselves in the second half of this year. I think it's no secret and you mentioned it earlier, the macro picture is not really good right now and things are kind of barely hanging on in the economy in a way or another. We have record credit card debt in the US. We have record high car payments. We have home prices down significantly year on year. So the signs are all pointing towards just kind of like almost like a return to normal. People forget humans. We're cyclical, right? Like we are very cyclical. It's in our nature. We go around the sun 365 days and so it is part of who we are and it's nice when everything's going up but at some point things have to return to kind of like that normal or long term average, we're due for that. Unfortunately, crypto and NFTs being such a big consumer discretionary product, I think they will continue, especially on the NFT side, continue to suffer when it comes to price, short term price. But I think there'll be some incredible opportunities to add art and certain pieces and different kinds of NFTs that will, I think, stand test of time as relevant artifacts of what we're living today. And so I'm excited for that. Unfortunately, again, it's an excitement that comes trying to turn a bad thing into good. But I do think that we will continue to see kind of more of like this bleeding out of value in the space and floor prices. Let's call it long term. I pretty much took my Wall Street career and staked it on web three so that I think it's an answer in itself. I do think that being early in this new ownership layer moment of the internet and how the internet has changed our lives and the world is going to be just one of the most asymmetric traits, both professionally and investment wise. To think that the iPhone is, what, 18 years, 15 years old and it's already had such an impact, it'll be foolish to look away right now. And I think long term we will come to a place where, listen, I don't see the whole world using web three and I consider it like Tinder. Actually, I was talking to my cousins. They're both engineers at Microsoft and they've been there for 15 years. They have no idea about crypto. And I was like, listen, it is like Tinder. You guys are both married. You've been married for 20 years. You guys don't need tinder. You will never, ever use Tinder in your life. However, that doesn't mean that dating apps have not completely changed the social structure of certain countries because it's not in every country, right? Not even in every city. But they've definitely had a very outsized impact in dating life. In New York City, for example. What is it? Like 50% of marriages in the States now start in a dating app? That's a significant change. I actually don't know this day and age, my friend group or my family who uses dating apps, but that doesn't mean they haven't changed the world and will continue to have such an impact. And that's the way I see web three. Do I expect I'm looking out the window right now and there's all these stories walking around and do I expect them all to have a crypto wall one day? No, probably not. Just like you wouldn't expect to have people in there to have Tinder, but there's going to be a large group of people that will definitely use Web Three a lot and will understand why and will continue to add value to its own value proposition. And that's how I see it in the future. Just a very significant percentage of the population using Web Three, not 7 billion, though.
00:41:42 - Mikey Piro
I love this framework, and I think I disagree with you a little bit slightly on everyone using a wallet piece of it, but I'm smirking because I hope that your cousins are in very happy relationships and that life never throws them a curveball. I grew up ahead of these apps, and now I've been immersed in them, and I'm very thankful. Like, I met my current partner for two years on the apps. The crazy part about it is, until you use them, until you step into the world, there is such a gap in experience, and that gap in experience fills in a tremendous amount of insights. And so it's like, I don't want your cousins to go use Tinder. That'd be a bad idea, but I would encourage them to go use crypto because the gaps that you fill in are significant. And I think that I don't like using the wallet term anymore. 43, 37, and an ERC out of East Denver where we're kind of switching to this is your Ethereum profile or your Web Three profile is much more in line, where I think mass adoption needs to go because I think trying to tell somebody that they have to really take tight control of their wallet. What do you do when you're in a foreign country and it's like, I got my wallet? There's paranoia around it, but if you get locked out of your Google account, it's like, cool, just text me a message and I can get back into that. So those are, I think, a dramatic shift in both us learning as an industry, hey, maybe we have some marketing to do here to show people what the real value of this is, and the wallet is a piece of it, but your online profile is a bigger part of it. Then I think that it will go to everyone in that it'll be this alternative decentralization point. I worked at Meta for a bit. There's been rumors of them creating decentralized social protocols. There's a couple of other instances where people are making those. We had Dan Romero on. Who does Farcaster. We've had the lens protocol folks on. So I think Web Three, not just as a financial instrument, but as a personal profile instrument, will take a bunch to adopt, but it's going to come through. And I think it really plays into exactly that metaversal part of it, because I think the Metaverse is a lot of things, and it will be a lot of things for a lot of people. So having explicit control over the profile, that works well with this murder verse, but maybe doesn't work well with this metaverse, I think is going to be something that people don't realize that are using crypto. But hopefully after 2023, it starts to accelerate a little bit.
00:44:28 - Sergio Silva
I think it'll be the next generation, actually, because they grew up with digital life, right? They understand I don't have kids, but you talk to anybody that has kids that play with roadblocks and the kids get it, they understand. And so when they come of age, I think they're the ones who are going to naturally transition into it. Again, going back to the Tinder example, I think there's two things more that I like to add. First, we need more use cases, real use case, right? Like Tinder. What it did, it really removed the barriers to meeting other people, what you want to meet them for different answers there, but it definitely reduced the barriers of meeting people. And if you look, traditionally, you were like date people that you met at church, at school, at work, and Tinder just kind of disrupted that social behavior model. So definitely need more use cases. And two, Tinder was a dirty word. Like Tinder early on when it came out, I remember I was a Goldman Sachs and people were literally swiping secrets. Or it was almost kind of like reminding me of when in high school and somebody found like a Playboy magazine or something like that, and it was kind of like mischievous, right? Like, oh my God, look at what I'm doing. I shouldn't be doing this. It took a few years before dating apps really became socially acceptable. And I see that with NFTs today, where it's almost like a dirty word and people are trying to use different terms and they have the reasons, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But the parallels are just very clear to me, and I think it's just a matter of time. And hopefully in that time, we can find use cases that are a little more relevant to the person down the street.
00:46:11 - Mikey Piro
It's going to take a little bit of time, and hopefully the stigma is removed quickly. We've got just a couple of minutes left. I usually like to leave the folks that I'm interviewing the opportunity to kind of touch on things that maybe we didn't get to. I, again, like to look at the future and see what you think is coming. Maybe you can tell us about some of your other projects that you see that you're excited about. But I leave a couple of minutes for you to expound on. If you were somebody who was just listening to this pod and was looking for kind of distillation of your advice in the here and now, what would you give to them? What would you say to them?
00:46:53 - Sergio Silva
So I'm a big believer in taking advantage of this moment to learn and educate ourselves. Right. Listen, not everybody will understand the technology, just like you don't understand. Most people that use email don't understand how it works and TCP and IP and all that stuff. I don't myself, but I do find that crypto, it's open source and all the information is out there and there's a ton of value and there's no formal right now, before, if you were not really just kind of like doing things, you missed a lot of opportunities. Today, that's not really the case. And so people ask me a lot, like, how do I get started in crypto? How do I get started investing in crypto? What do I buy? Right. I'm sure you get the same questions a lot, especially in the moon market. What do I buy? What do I buy? I think the first investment into crypto or Web Three, should be time, and it should be the time to really understand where things came from, what worked, what didn't, why. Because it's through that iteration that you'll be able to really develop your own personal framework and your intellectual framework about the space one and two, but hopefully find those opportunities that we were talking about earlier, where I have a Trotify background, but for people with different backgrounds, like linkstyle. Like my Duties project, where they got a bunch of golfers to buy a membership into the Dow and now they're buying a golf course. Actually an investor in Links Dow myself, but I'm not a golfer. And so I'm using it to learn more about golf and the golf community and the opportunity to create these kinds of new businesses that are enabled by Web Three. They're not ugly. They're not like a full Web Three specific business. It's pretty much a kind of like distributed golf club. And so how do you get those opportunities? By participating, by being here. And obviously, people think being here means tweeting GM every day. It's not the case. Right? But I find the crypto community, the crypto industry is so welcoming, so willing to educate, and I think people should be taking full advantage of those opportunities, networking, going to events. I think people say bear markets are for building, but if you don't know what to build, bear markets are for learning. And that I think, is probably the best way to go about things. And then also, I think as Web Three grows, we're going to continue. When cycle turns, there's going to be a lot of demand for experts or just people with experience or people that want to work in a Web Three team somewhere. And being able to talk about things you've done over the last 2612 months that are really relevant I think is going to be super valuable. And I don't think there's another space in the world right now where you can just be one or two degrees of separation with the big decision makers and the big teams and the people that are actually making a difference. I think if you look at, for example, I don't know, I was watching Midnight in Paris a few weeks ago and you see how those parties were like all the artists that we now see at Christie's and so they're all dead now, right? But all the artists from those days, they used to party together and hang out together and go to dinners together. And at least in the crypto art space today, you can do that and you can be part of that. And I think getting close to the people, getting close to the technology, taking advantage of stuff like CPG and everything that you guys do is just one of the best bets that you can make. That involves zero money and I think it will pay off very nicely.