Fireside With Yuga Labs' Greg Solano l KBW2024

[Music] welcome to Korea Greg thank you yeah it's my first time here so it's uh I'm still a bit jet likeed but it's been beautiful I've had a lot of good food um yeah I was going to ask that question um you know this is my third year here in uh at C blockchain week they do an amazing job putting together uh great talks great people but I remember the food the most so um what what have you discovered I guess there's actually some um B uh restaurant out here right yeah yeah um last uh last night we had a little bit of a Meetup at Bard and hungry Soul um which is amazing if you haven't please check it out I think some people in the audience have tried it yeah it's a it's a great cheeseburger I hear the shrimp burger is actually really good too um yeah it's and and just the like Decor the the mural outside the store it's pretty great yeah that's cool I think that's like a great example of sort of things that happen that you don't expect when you when you create um you know some art right like yeah we're going on a little over three years since um the birth of of Bape yach club and boic and um to be halfway around the world uh at a restaurant that one of our holders created is is just incredible this is a a special convers ation for me because edge of nft podcast was actually created a week before board Apes launched and I think it's been uh an incredible journey for us I'm sure for you the last three years I think none of us could have predicted the highs and and the lows in our industry yeah absolutely it's been a a wild ride for for me um over these three years so we'll talk a little bit about that but one thing that I found interesting um is you have a background in in publishing book publishing and you know I I I sort of have thought a lot about the the future media and content creation from from what from different lens obviously our industry and then personally being a content creator and I feel like uh I heard a quote recently that that media is dead by journalism is alive and well and I think the the point there being it's all about storytelling and and that companies have to do that and that individuals have to do that and there's opportunity with uh I think any sort of nft collection to tell Amazing Stories so I'm just curious what your thoughts are in terms of the evolution of Ip in in in the context of of media and its future yeah um yeah my background is uh in book publishing and and poetry I have a masters in Fine Arts and poetry of all things um and and my co-founder uh Gordon he's uh a writer as well that's that's actually how we connected and I think in crypto in particular like messaging is so important um managing expectations getting your your message out there to your holders is just that you see it in in the projects that are most successful and you also see it in a way where um storytelling helps like Empower communities in a lot of ways like um I never would have thought by you know making monkey jpegs that all of a sudden you'd have businesses all across the world you know bored and hungry here uh board brewing a Distillery we've got 400 plus um made by Apes businesses around the world um some doing over you know some doing multi-million a year in ARR um and it's I think a lot of it comes down to just stories that people connect with and the opportunity to tell their own abut that's that's amazing so we talked about some of the challenges in the space and and Yuga hasn't been immune from that um you made a decision after Hiatus to to step into the role of CEO again which um definitely caught a lot of headlines uh and you know you've talked already about sort of why you did that I'm really curious about um what it was like getting back into the driver's seat um and sort of what were some of the changes that you made since inheriting that role again yeah um so yeah I co-founded Yuga um three and a half years ago um and just stepped back in as CEO six about six months ago um and really the only way I know how to run a company is to be extremely Hands-On in product all the time and it was a a weird sensation with you know after the tremendous success of our first year as a company um um we had just felt there's a bit of impostor syndrome settling in it felt like we need to bring in you know Mommy and Daddy to show us how to really run a company um and I think we lost something special in doing that and really as I've stepped back in and um changing the way that we work a lot of it comes down to shipping much more quickly um iterating and um I think Yuga when it's at its best it functions almost more like a a product Studio it's a a creative place it moves fast and when we don't do that um and we we function more in this kind of web two Corporate Way it doesn't it doesn't work for anybody to be fair though as Yuga has shipped more product I think there's been more attention more eyeballs on Yuga than you know traditional pfp projects that can get away with quote being experiment and exploring do you feel like there's been extra pressure on on you and the team that you've had to address in terms of sort of balancing this culture of sort of meeting uh a broad set of expectations that are sometimes unrealistic but also sort of shipping product fast yeah um look I think in the same way now I think we talk about meme coins and and pumped off fun and we look at like you know we can see the onchain data of the the million tokens that have come out in a quarter or whatever it is and I think sometimes a month now a month yeah it's crazy yeah the numbers have gotten absurd um at the same time I think we all forget you know three years ago it felt like every once a week there was 10 new you know board ape derivative projects that were launching and raising a bun bunch of money and piecing out um so I have a lot of respect for the people that are around still building um you know from that cohort in 2021 and and I do think as a Founder you have to have tough skin uh it's not for you know the the weak of heart um I you know luckily I think I do and um the best way to um get over you know to deal with anything on Twitter or whenever you're down it's just to get back and create stuff and ship so um I try not to focus on on that side of things yeah I mean fortunately people have short-term memories and uh I think when they when you ship something thing amazing uh that's what they're focused on at that point is that that next great win right yeah and I mean musicians they have hits and and they have some songs that don't land right same thing book publishing right it's yeah publishing is always a hits driven business and content is and and that's what we're doing here after all actually I think with nfts so I think there were some lessons learned with with project Dragon um it got mixed reviews um I'm curious what you learned uh from that project and where it's going and what you've sort of how that's applying to some of the other upcoming projects that we'll talk more about later yeah so project dragon is a uh an other side experience um that we launched for the first time two months ago um and or you know actually month and a half I think um it's a mass concurrency uh kind of team fight shooter so you're like defending parts of the map um I think we had 1500 people in one space which for you know a shooter game is impossible for most platforms um but very much it was us building in public and with the express uh you know we tried to put everybody on notice that like we're building this with the same exact tool set that we're making available to our community via the odk right now it's like a small group of like five that's opening up to about 20 over the next um little bit here and with the idea of opening up to more and more more as the year goes on um and what I'm proud of is that we had some hiccups on the first one we did the second event um a couple weeks later and it was it's just getting better and better and and I'm excited to ship again um this month and go from away from these long quiet periods to to shipping other side every single month alongside our community right on so I I think one reason everyone's here and uh you know I I certainly get the target with wearing a hat edge of nft and and Yuga gets it is Reflections on the industry as a whole and uh our nft is dead um that's the headline that's that's constantly there do you feel like we're past the greatest challenges with nfts or are there more challenges ahead I think there's a huge amount of opportunities ahead um with nfts it's it's the thing that brought normal people on chain outside of the walled Gardens of centralized exchanges really you know there's I can't tell you how many people first installed metamask or um any wallet frankly just so that they could participate in an nft ecosystem it's the first time they used it uh as a token gating like mechanism a key for Merch for events or other things um and instead of just you know heading to coinbase or binance or somewhere else you know and just watching numbers go up and down on a screen um I think over the past two years as you know we've we've taken some kicks here in crypto um it's one of the things I miss most and what I'm most excited about is getting people back on chain away from Sexes and and and just having fun so what is the future of nfts look like to you and is there a geographical shift in the mix there uh a lot of it I think the initial energy stemmed from uh the United States and and sort of broaden from there and in my travels I've seen a tremendous amount of passion interest and nfts um to this present moment in Asia Korea whatnot so um you know both from a sort of experience perspective um uh application perspective and from a geographical perspective where do you think nfts go next yeah I mean we've certainly been um astounded at the reception that we've gotten across the world we held ape fest last year in Hong Kong we're doing it this uh in two months in Lisbon Portugal um our European Apes have been have been another great Food City yeah they've been looking for love out there for a long time and I'm excited to head back to Lisbon um and and you can see it I think even in just what holders are building around the world the Bor and Hungary that we talked about earlier they actually were featured on Korea's long EST running uh variety of show on like Sunday or Monday of this week um that's like air time that somebody would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting but they're getting reached out to because you know they're so fascinated about what that team is doing and rightfully so so um yeah I I think there's a lot of energy in Asia for for the brand and for nfts more broadly and is it is it about the art is it about applications to gaming is it about um lower cost cost nfts that are more addressable to a broader Market or is it going to continue to be a mix I think it's going to be a mix I think at the end of the day what um you know we we collaborate and partner with some some of the biggest brands in the world um we have a BAP collab coming up uh we you know we had BMW out at ape fest last year and um and they're a great team and we have some stuff coming with them and what they are so interested in when they when they experiment and come into web 3 you know some of these big Brands is the level of community and engagement that they get is like nothing else they get anywhere else because once you fill up people's hands and you give them ownership and you engage with them in that way they they return it back to you and um I think BMW's tweet about ape Fest was like by an order of several magnitudes their most engagement they've ever had on a tweet and for some of these Legacy brands that means a lot and I think Legacy brands or new ones like like you know a level of intimacy with with u media is what nfts end up offering um yeah I couldn't agree more I remember the first nfla that we hosted and all these projects came out and met each other but in many times they were meeting each other within the community for the first time and I imagine you know the Deep uh bonds that sort of were built digitally they only get Amplified by the the physical and I think it's sort of this cycle of of deeper and deeper connections that sort of can continue infinitely right absolutely I mean uh ape Fest was a crazy idea we had a couple years ago and it's my favorite time of the year getting everybody all over the world together in one place um to just have fun and connect and you you recognize people by the ape on their t-shirt more than their face but you you still feel like they're family so you're pretty relaxed but when I when we talked um before about all the things going on all the projects coming up uh I'm impressed uh so uh I need some uh CEO tips from you in terms of how to keep a a chill profile but let's talk about some of the exciting things going on because there's a lot happening just in the next few weeks yeah um so actually sharing the news here first we're going to Tweet about it a little later today but um dooky Dash our um mobile game is coming out next week on September 12 12 um I think the best mobile games are the right mix of stupid and stupid fun and and doky dash checks that box and a little round of applause there that's really exciting congrats um yeah we're super excited that the game's been you know been getting tuned and and we've had kind of little stealth tests around the world but um yeah excited to kick off the real feature set with the launch next week uh we have got a million-dollar prize pool up for season one let's go yeah no we're we're stoked so um really really happy about that um Bape is another cab that we just announced um I'm actually I'm wearing the shoes that um you guys like the shoes these are pretty awesome shoes I have some shoe Envy right now yeah they the uh the Bape sharks does so the new um the new shoe um that's coming out soon uh we've got something special with BMW um something fun coming out with BMW we've got ape Fest around the corner um and I think maybe the biggest thing though really is is ape chain uh coming out of the next few weeks here with main net um yeah well I want to talk about other date too mainly because I'm a holder and um I didn't get an ape in time I saw them uh it's one of my big regrets in life but uh let's talk about ape chain first uh because I think this is really interesting that this was a community initiative um that was sort of uh created by someone in uh in the community and it was a proposal that that you guys got behind so maybe you can talk about what's going on there yeah so um the apoin dowo is a really active dowo ecosystem and um they were looking at different ethereum scaling Solutions you know and so optimism arbitrum a few different people came in and made proposals and um the Dow voted for arbitrum we didn't vote we didn't participate we didn't even give our thoughts on it at the time um but since then we've actually gotten really deeply engaged with the ecosystem um and are basically a major contributor at this point and we're really excited for everything that's coming I mean AP chain is really a bet that daps at the end of the day are really what matter and so everything about the chain is designed to facilitate Discovery um incentivize creators and make available to speak about other side a little bit um the tool set that we're building uh other side ourselves with something like project Dragon we're making available to the community uh through the other side development kit um and all that Commerce happens on AP chain so um the possibility set of the kinds of things people can build um between other side of AP chain I think are going to be really spectacular like really novel experiences that you can't do elsewhere in crypto or nfts at the end of the day um metaverses are a lot harder to build than than layer twos I think so um we've got I think a really robust ecosystem between the two absolutely congrats on that it's really exciting so uh yeah what else is going on with other side um I'm gonna ask because I I have a vestage taken in we're we're chatting so what's what's going on there yeah um we've got uh so we we've got project dragon that we're shipping monthly it's our kind of team fight shooter game on other side um we've got two islands that we've visited so far uh kind of boyc Island the swamp we've been to Metropolis the next Island we're going to be opening up is the Nexus it's the birthplace and home of the kotas uh on other side so we're excited for that so if I hypothetically have a really rare Kota is there any kind of potential features that I can take advantage of yep you'll be able to hang out as your really rare spectacular Koda in the Nexus and um play as them in Project dragon and other experiences and um and also get access to some special stuff in the odk so um we've got that we've also got a bunch of different mini games that we're working on we just did a uh a poker event on other side um we had a little VIP table we raised $445,000 for charity um which is great and um yeah I'm excited at the same you know we're we're kind of focused on environments and and getting our avatars and stuff into these new game modes but also uh rolling out some new feature sets for social stuff so poker um we got something special for doing kind of Twitter spaces on other side coming out um in the next bit and and yeah we're just excited wow lot going on for sure really exciting um it's been such an honor to to be here with you at create blockchain week and to learn about everything going on one last question before we wrap is what does Yuga Labs look like in five years um I think I said this a little bit earlier uh I think Yuga at its best uh resembles like a product studio and what I mean by that is a small team that's focused on taking uh the best stuff that we're seeing in crypto adding our own creative flare to it um and and seeing if we can get more people engaged especially by making you know with everything that we do we're focused on two things content and tools and so at the same time we're building other side we're giving those tools to our community to to build alongside us the same way when we built the club um we decentralized the IP for board apes and um I don't know I don't have a crystal ball or magic a ball to shake to know exactly what we look like in five years but what I can tell you is I hope that we're the kind of company that's um just earnestly engaging with the best ways to bring people on train right on let's give it up to Greg thank you for your time thank you [Music]