Building for the creator economy, from web2 to web3 - Ev Tchebotarev

foreign [Music] so we're going to be having a little bit of change of pace I guess uh with our current talk so uh it's a little bit about Journey from moving from web 2 into web 3 uh this includes a little bit of my personal journey and a little bit of the work that's been done so kind of like you'll see that it's a little bit intertwined but we'll get started so a 20-year Journey from web 2 to web3 a little bit about me so just so you know I'm gonna age myself so my name is Av and I'm 38 years old I do live in Toronto and I'm a 2X startup founder a starter company called 500px it's still around you can check it out at fire atpx.com and slowiko which is my current startup uh my claim to fame just to kind of like break ice a little bit I met King Charles 3 on the third and uh shook his hand and also was beaten by cheetah though not on the same occasion there was different occasions um and I've been passionate about photography for the last 23 years so it's been quite a long journey for me so kind of like a little bit about why photography I think it's one of the most important mediums that we have we are inherently visual uh animals we love to look at great photos we love photography um and you know whether we explore and whether we're in the world we're always surrounded by some sort of imagery so for me that was a journey where I wanted to capture the beauty of the world that's one of the images that I took in Italy but you know in the bottom right you'll see that uh usually dressed up pretty warm you're gonna be like in you know Waking Up Before Sunrise getting to the locations getting shots so this is something that I'm passionate and tens of millions maybe even hundreds of millions of people are passionate about and going and taking pictures I mean all of us have uh not just phones in our pockets we have like multiple cameras in our pockets and most of us take uh pictures whether it's office of different kind so when we started on a journey with foreign PX that was a decade ago we'll get it uh in that in a moment there's few things that are important to creators um and those are money fairness and leverage uh by money I mean it's very simply you want to have a living wage especially if you're making photography into your profession or dedicated a lot of time to this you kind of like want to get compensated with fairness so kind of like making sure that the platforms that people use or the middlemen that they compensate creators are fairly gonna talk about that a little bit and leverage so basically if you're utilizing the platform that the platform is giving you the leverage to achieve your goals and an example for example with fired PX or Instagram or any other platform it's basically using platform to utilize likes and exposure that you get and convert it into followers and convert followers into sales of some kind or you know orders or things like that so when we started with foreign PX that was 2003 so I told you it's going to be 20-year journey and in 2003 if you would type in facebook.com you'll find nothing because Facebook did not exist if you type almost any other website maybe except Google and a few others they would not exist so when we started you could only do very simple things you can post picture comment follow maybe share uh via email or text messages and like images so getting to the next stage of that and meaning like you know enabling personal e-commerce something that we take for granted today was pretty difficult and making portfolio websites as many photographers are currently using your creators are using was pretty much impossible because technology was just getting there in the next three or four years uh but kind of like photography and the Artistry and the creative part is a lifelong mission for me and so the underlying Foundation is arming artists with the tools for the digital Renaissance and it kind of like stems from 20 years ago when uh in 2003 storing was this it meant enabling Commercial Success With The Marketplace and Discovery so getting likes getting exposure and allowing photographers to basically sell their images but in 2020 made a mistake it's not 2011. it's uh 2021 enabling artistic provenance autonomy transparency and we kind of like go into that uh in the end of the presentation as well so uh what to do I was passionate about building uh something for artists because I was an artist myself and for me the journey looked like well we started foreign PX as a live Journal Blog then six years later found my co-founder and it took it took six years it was a pretty long journey then in 2010 we quit our day jobs to focus full-time building and then the trajectory kind of like exploded through a seed round then we raised series a was on the recent Horowitz then we race serious B with a Chinese public traded company and kind of like it felt that it's just gonna go up and to the right like a usual startup thing right uh that's where the story changes a little bit so the reality is that it's not always a a straight curve up into the right there's always some kind of setbacks so when we were shifting uh gears and getting investment from investors basically we saw that there are some problems that started to face the company was growing we had a lot more people and the user growth stalled for us the product Innovation slowed down I almost feel like there's a formula the more people you had on the team the less you can do so it almost feels like it's nice to have uh this kind of like a two Pizza approach as we uh as we heard yesterday the pragma conference that keeping tips Smalls and keeping teams accountable and the energy started to get wasted on Eternal issues uh and you know Founders that are living and like it started to become a bit more unmanageable the team size at the time was about 60 to 80 people so fast growing and required a bit of structure however I'm not going to go too much into like the uh bad parts we can meet outside after that and I'll tell you all about it about the running startup and building however there's been some uh good positive moments so the community has 17 million members uh 4 000 people are now able to make their living through photography specifically thanks to foreign PX they pursued their passion they were able to turn it into their business left their daytime jobs and became photographers to pursue what they love this is something where you know you're not touching necessarily 17 million lives but you're touching 4 000 lives in that regard and it's still a become of amazing photography for the community and for basically everyone in the world in 2018 it got acquired by a visual China group Chinese public traded company but it's still around as a brand 2023 and it's Toronto uh kind of like Local Company uh in the beginning so kind of like go back a little bit to how web 2 got structured how we built Community it basically comes down to keeping that community at the core of the interests and what I mean by this is kind of like very simple I'm going to show you a picture we hosted over 500 different photo walks with tens of thousands of people in all over the world from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Berlin to London to uh basically like Los Angeles everywhere Toronto you know you name it basically every city in the world we get to connect with people uh similar to those hackathons but imagine those hackathons are happening every week with a few hundred members here a few hundreds members there and we get to connect make some friends and kind of like basically learn from that uh but as we go from web 2 into web 3 um I left the company and started focusing a little bit on uh on myself and took a little pause uh and actually did a little detour uh those are actual screenshots in 2017. I wanted to build what's been done with foreign PX but on the blockchain so I uh kind of like tried to Market that in 2017 tried to talk to investors and a lot of investors basically did not understand what blockchain is what we want to do so I paused it and I said well it's a little bit too early let me just go and do some other things and come back to that and I did come back to this in 2021 but underlying all this there's still a dream uh for me is for liberating artists and I think this is where web3 and a messenger web3 is actually pretty powerful so we can take what we've done with web 2 with far apx uh and you know basically move it to web3 and let's see what kind of improvements we can make through that so first of all why web3 right and the one of the most powerful things is that you can help artists reverse the split that they're getting between their middlemen so with photography uh one of the major ways how people make money is sell that as a stock imagery majority of the stock imagery platforms would take somewhere between 75 percent uh somewhere over to 80 so basically it becomes a little bit less fair and with web3 we thought well we can actually move it 85 percent or even higher so it can be like 95 it can be 98 over 100 if photographer artist takes actual full custody of their art and markets that themselves which is kind of like impossible in web 2 because you need that scale and connections so the other thing is it brings this freedom for the artists and those are three things I think which are important provenance sovereignty and transparency and with provenance that basically creates uh you know when you compare the web to you with web3 it creates the origin so it it creates where the images have originated so from a particular photographer and it creates a history whether images have been moved from one artist another obviously using nfts the second one is sovereignty so you can actually as an artist take full control of the images if you are on the forest lock side those are stuck there in databases and you go and delete or you want to cancel this agreement with the company whether it's like Flickr or Instagram or others they'll keep your images right they'll just keep it for six months nine months a year or forever in case of Facebook uh but in this case with sovereignty that allows you to actually take control and take your images out oh using web 3 using nfts and basically let people either use them or or not the end transparency lastly it kind of like gives a sense of understanding whether art is being sold or resold and whether there's any worse trading involved or something like that so obviously some level of improvement but with web 2 you don't know who is buying your images you don't know how they're being used and in that cases I'm going to give you a bit more examples so kind of like I see that as moving through that realm of it from a JPEG to a stock image to nfts and with a JPEG if you took something with your phone you can view share like and save kind of like very standard as soon as you want to monetize the the piece of art or a photo that you took you basically have to be okay with rent so you're never buying the image you're actually renting similar to how Spotify works like you get a subscription but you're renting music at a time when you're listening it's not exclusive so oftentimes the same images are used multiple times and we see it and whether it's in advertising or uh yeah just basically like an advertising and you start that's where the memes are coming from where the same images are guys like getting reused over and over again so it's very important to know what's the provenance where the images are coming from and who else is using the images especially if you're a company that needs to have a brand and reputation things like that for example Apple Samsung and a whole bunch of others and it's opaque in the sense that it's impossible to know who is buying your images and whether your competitor has bought the same image with nfts you're obviously getting the benefit of transparency so you get a province as I mentioned earlier the origins and history of that so whoever has created the image you can track that over time and we're not inventing something new is this it's actually been done uh hundreds of years with Fine Art people would actually uh put their signature if they buy a fine print that you know sits in museums these days on the back of the uh canvas would be an ownership information and when I first saw this I'm like oh that's blockchain you guys like we invented blockchain and like you guys in the other blockchain 200 years before that the other important thing is royalties so obviously it does not exist in the web 2 world but in web 3 world while it's getting uh diminished in the pfp world in the profile pictures it's still quite usable for the art uh because art is not sold and resold by Traders day in and day out but it's more of the respect of The Collector are in the next user or collector of that art and lastly ownership you can basically verify it using blockchain so I want to shift gears a little bit I'm getting to the end of my slides but kind of like while building uh two companies span over uh two decades I learned something that I want to share I think might be useful so in in the early days with my first startup uh the life was you know work 996 so working nine to nine six days a week you could catch me in the office on Saturdays and Sundays late at night uh now it's more of a normal as I mentioned I'm getting a little bit older in the beginning of the presentation so now the work is more like nine to five ish so before everything that I would do was the first startup that was very personal and if if somebody has criticism I would be the one crying in the corner or at home because I would take it very personally now it's a bit of a better work-life balance where there's a separation between what we do what they were building as a platform and my personal worth for example uh there was an approval of the crowd back then and like one example of this we invested a lot of time and money into making our office really cool some people here either been in our office uh in Toronto and currently it's like more of a disregard of opinions and you know working from coffee shops or working from we work in places like that um back then there was more of an investment in appearances we paid a huge premium hundreds of thousands of dollars to have our sign visible in downtown Toronto so that people would know that we're there uh I would not do this now so there's no need for those nice perks uh but back then it was very very important to me and also back then we had investors that were pushing us to build for growth this is called companies like countries and Horowitz and a whole bunch of others that are trying to instigate as massive growth as possible and now it's more of a build with intention so be more focused on solving crucial artists issues that we can that actually make a meaningful impact and back there there was lots of drama so now we're trying to deal with kind of like a little bit less drama so there's my finishing slide kind of like where what are the next 10 years because it's nice to look in decades it takes a long time to build something so we see uh for the next 10 years that there's going to be a lot of interest in keeping our royalties and it's something that actually exists in some countries on the regulatory level where whether you're in France or some European countries if the artist is alive and the art is resold uh there are some royalties that are attached to the physical art when it's resolved so taking it digital and making sure that it's available for 100 of art is kind of important I think we'll see what I would call ubiquitous blockchains that everything of importance will be on a blockchain we just wouldn't know or care whether it's one blockchain or their other that also stems from that transactions will go from expensive as they are today on ethereum too cheap and to eventually free so that's already happening result use there's going to be a lot of talks today but eventually the platform's either going to subsidize those or there will be players that will subsidize the transactions for everybody else and that's going to be completely free to transact and we're going to have a much better future in that regard there's also this happening uh when we started with web 2 when we started with photo sharing that was very simple you share a jpeg and that's it right or a video and that's it now there's a bit of an evolution in the artistic medium and people are using whether it's a generative Art Plus photography or whether it's a on-chain Arc that evolves with every transaction so those things are becoming more important and more uh interesting for the artist to start using some of the methodologies that only exist in but three like only the stuff that can actually be on chain and so those are making a very interesting impact and the last two digital displays so we're currently hosting an exhibition in Italy with our current platform and the art exhibits around the world are turning from physical to more digital so it's a physical space but there's this place and the artwork is is having a clear provenance like who owns it or who can buy it and stuff like that so kind of like more likely to see more of those digital screens around the world uh so much so that I think people will have those at home eventually or they'll have them in their apple Vision Pro Set uh and lastly kind of like what I mentioned earlier IRL events like this one like getting uh personally getting to meet people is super critical regardless of how far the technology evolves because it's a fist bump or a handshake that can make a big difference Meeting those people sharing experiences is something that we take personally and with the current platform we actually talk to every single photographer that's on platform almost a thousand people we added a phone call or a zoom call or something like that to know them a little bit to verify who they are and just to ask them like Hey we're humans too let's chat even though some were staying Anonymous and they wouldn't turn their cameras which is which is totally fine um so this is the end of my presentation if you guys have questions ask them if uh if not I'll be outside as well to take questions and chat about all things building startups thank you