Steal This Startup (7 of Them) by Jordan Gray aka @staRpauSe

steal this startup. Um, maybe you want to know more about me before you're buying something for free from me. So, a little bit about myself. Um, I have a long history of bringing nent and cutting edge technologies to market. Um, back before blogging was a thing, I did a individualized career program at the University of Minnesota, bringing together multimedia art to do online storytelling.

And since then I've had a a long career in advertising, working at Google and working in crypto and uh also doing a lot of art and tech projects. So that's a little bit of context. Why am I giving these things away for free? Well, honestly, because without execution, these are all just hallucinations. And I would ra I like hallucinations, but I'd rather have shared hallucinations with other people so we can all look at it together.

And also I'm one of those crazy people who loves the creative commons and open source and I just want to see these things built. So um to me it's way more important to bring them to the world than to try and prospect off of them. And that's why I share my ideas freely. Everything here is creative commons. Take it, run with it, have fun.

So before we get into the actual like nitty-gritty of things of to build, I want to talk about the industry a little bit. And the first thing to recognize, and hopefully this is obvious, is that blockchain is good at ownership and crypto is good at privacy. And these technologies can be stretched to be good at other things. But by leaning into these core competencies, it's much easier to be successful with the technologies and use them to their maximum benefit. And 30 secondond MBA, when I'm looking at a project to build something worth doing, the first thing to recognize is that there's a pain and then that there's people experiencing that pain, enough of them to make it worth it, and maybe that they'll actually pay for it.

And then assuming you execute, then you can profit and exit. And you've got your juggler juggling multiple pains, doing multiple fixes in the world, um giving presentations about lots of different things to fix like this. And a lot of the times when I'm talking to people about things to build, I get asked about NFTTS. Um I've launched several successful NFT projects. um did some open source code on near protocol and helped over 20 projects launch.

Uh we made over four million through that. So when people come to me and ask me what's next with NFTTS, um the things that I'm really looking at is solving pains for the two groups of people who are most involved in these and that is the creators or brands looking to interact with them and then the prospectors or fans of those brands. And the difficulties that they're having are up on the slides. We'll be referencing back to these as we go through the ideas. And of course, this isn't the only thing.

You don't always have to be solving a pain. Sometimes it's fun to just play and have a cool idea and have some fun with it. So, there's some of those in the mix, too. So, the startups, let's go get your pencils out. The first thing I want to talk about is this idea of curate to earn.

It's something that we had a little taste of in the blog house era in the 90s when people were getting paid to help like move music around on the internet when MP3s were a thing. The idea here is to take an piece of artwork or music and make it into a self-propagating soulbound token. So the artist mints it and after that first generation they sell it for $1 and earn a curation fee of 10 cents and just saying dollars and cents to make the numbers work and accessible. And then when that artist has it up for sale and somebody buys it, then that artist will make their money back. It's a little bit easier to see in this view than than just uh looking at a spreadsheet.

But after the artist sells the artwork for $110 to Bob, then that NFT automatically makes a copy of itself or says there's a copy of this for sale. The first copy is always stuck with the artist's account and that second one will always be with Bob's account. And when Bob sells it, it automatically is priced higher than it was originally. So, it's this automatically propagating thing and Bob earns his money back immediately. So, this isn't a pyramid scheme.

It's more of like a uh pyramax scheme, maximizing the fund for everybody. Um, and so Mary buys it for the 2.2 automatically like generated price. Bob gets his money back. The artist gets paid.

The next person comes along and Sue buys it from Mary for $33. So the artist gets paid, the previous curators get paid. So you're paid for getting into something early and enjoying it early. And then you also make your money back immediately. So at some point, yes, there's probably a last fool holding the hot potato, but um it's not like it's a pyramid or anything like that.

So, the cool thing about this is by the time the 10th artist or by the time the 10th purchase happens, the artist has actually earned twice as much as if they had sold an NFT straight away without this mechanic. And that's interesting because this is not doing royalties. And royalties, we see them, they're broken, it's a scam, everybody's like getting over royalties. This is actually looking at the work of curation and paying people for the work of curation and putting that in the smart contract. So it's it's not a security.

It's not fractionalization. Doesn't have the broken royalties. This is a way for NFTs to actually pay artists into the future and pay people for curating and discovering art. So next big problem in the world, oh my god, AI. What's happening?

Artists are upset. They don't understand the nuances of how these things work. They're feeling ripped off. The technologists don't care. They are kind of dismissive because they do understand how it works and they know it's unstoppable and the cat's already out of the bag.

You can't put fire back after you've lit it. So, what can we do to fix that? Maybe make it equitable for artists and other people to train models and then everybody wins. So this has already been done in small experiments with things like near crowd where people are doing labeling of data and getting paid for that. And then sites like Civotai where people will publish their models and they're not getting paid for it.

So it's kind of taking a few of the interesting things that exist in the world and bringing them together and making it efficient and making it so that artists don't have to hate AI and so that people don't have to feel guilty using it. Um, another great thing about this is with smart contracts, you can actually have in the like contract the license rights. So, commercial rights can give you a different amount of money for releasing your commercial rights or your non-commercial rights. And using the non-commercial or commercial can cost different amounts of money, too. So, this one, rug slots, fits more in the just for fun category.

Um, purely for entertainment's sake, everybody has felt the pain of a rug. We all have an NFT sitting around that we wish we didn't and we don't know what to do with it. You can kind of sell it for nothing and hopefully get some tax break out of it. Or you could play a game with it where every day or week or month, however often this thing plays, uh, you put in three NFTs, you put in $3, and everybody buys the NFTs from each other, and it's fun. and you'll get some meme coins or something like that for for playing the game and volume pumps.

Why not? So, another problem that I'm working on right now, uh I've run an art and tech nonprofit for over 10 years where we celebrate just that intersection of art and technology, all the play that happens there. And over time, we've worked with over 600 artists. We have a community of over 15,000 people. Subscribe to our mailing list.

We do yearly festivals. It's a lot of fun, but it's also a lot of work. And at some point, I want to leave a legacy and move on from being the the lynch pin that's making this thing work and just let it work on its own. So, it is a DAO today. And we started this news gathering process where the artists and all of the fans and the people who love this stuff can all share news articles, rate them, and then the newsletter is automatically published based off of that.

So, this is just a way to make participating through that whole process equitable. And then that allows me to step away and not have to actually be so hands-on with things like that. So, it's really cool that this flywheel is already turning. It can certainly be optimized. And there's a lot of opportunity taking something like this and applying it to any industry.

Any newsletter that you get could be set up like this where it's the community that's making it and getting value out of coming together over things that they love. Another kind of institutional legacy to leave. I'm interested in making physical spaces where people come together. In San Francisco, we have the Homebrew Crypto Club, which is kind of a cooperative. Um, not formally a DAO at the moment, but as we're moving towards a DAO, we're interested in how to use NFTTS for seasonal passes and things like that.

And the cool thing is that there's enterprise management software already out there for co-working spaces. And there aren't NFTs integrating with any of them. Seasonal passes make total sense with NFTs. The software to hook it up to is already there for physical spaces to take advantage of these things. Nobody's built it yet.

And then this is another fun one, more focused on art again. And this helps with the idea that you don't need to do so much price discovery and worry about supplies as an artist. just every day there would be a blind box drop where a collector would come and they know that every day there's cool new art so they're always checking it out. artists don't have to do so much promotion and somebody can collect one thing for free and then if they like it the second thing then they would pay for it and the artist would profit and all of this would be curated by a DAO and there are experiments that have gone on like this that are pretty successful things like Chico and Roco nouns is a similar model where there's just an ongoing auction but that's more focused on like generative profile pictures and this would be about uh individual artists and their artwork so more fine art. Um, so this is another thing that would be fun to build.

And then this last one is again just a way to have an entertaining auction for artists and for the like collectors as well. And the idea here, if you look at the rows, is the highest bidder. So, let's say that five artists were participating and five artists put their work into a cascade auction. So, A B CDE E and all of them put their artwork in. The bidding starts and the highest bidder will actually get one piece of artwork from every artist.

The next highest bidder will get N minus one pieces of art because they're the second highest bidder, the second most um distributed artwork. there will be more copies of it. The highest bidder gets the only unique artwork in the show or the only like one of one in the show and everybody else gets the ones that have more additions. And to keep this entertaining during the bidding process, every time somebody bids above one of the rows, everything below it shuffles. So the most rare piece of artwork isn't always the one that you think you're going to get to keep after you've put a high bid.

like you can there can be like upsets. Um, and then you can do fun things with tokconomics like allowing people to lock an asset if they really want to hang on to it. So whatever like in-game currency there is, they can spend that to lock it. Um, can can go deep on the the tokconomics of of this one. But yeah, just just another fun way of doing it.

And one of the big things that this solves for artists is when there's a group show, very often the most popular artist will maybe like make a sale and then the other artists who are also helping promote it might not have a sale and they don't really get anything out of the show. So, this is a way for artists to like band together and promote and make it equitable for everybody that's participating if the bids that come in all go to all of the artists in a more equitable way. And of course po apps because participation, everybody likes getting rewarded for participation. And speaking of that, why don't you go to shard dogstarpaws and get your po app for sitting around and listening to me gab. Um, that's your po app for being here today.

Um, if you got questions or if any of this excited you, uh, follow me on Twitter, say hi, DM. DMs are open. Come up to me. The thing that I'm most interested in at this point is probably be meeting Rust developers. Um, I have a lot of experience bringing ideas like this to market and making money with them and leading teams.

Um, definitely need more Rust developers to make all these things happen. So, yeah, thank you very much. Open to questions and let's go steal all these steal all these uh startups. questions. No questions.

Thoughts? Pretty quiet. That's okay, too. I know it's a lot to digest. It's okay.

Oh, also I'm talking tomorrow at Dow Planet. Stop by the Dow Planet House at 1:30. I'm doing a talk on breaking up with your DAO and doing a panel afterwards with some people who are experienced with how they have equitably and honorably parted ways with their organizations. So check that out tomorrow. Dow Planet 1:30.

Oh, question. Um, which one of them, the cascade or the curate to earn? Um, no, nobody's executed this yet. So, this is white paper stage. Yeah.

But it it all makes sense from the the contract point of view. Um have it pretty well outlined and would be happy to like go through details with anybody. Cool. Thanks. Hey, I have a question.

Oh, more questions. Questions? Yeah. Uh have you had any um experiments with like um onerson events? Uh like so okay.

Uh so we in we have in Honduras a yearly event about NFTs. Mhm. So we like to experiment with different things. For example, last time we have like an uh like live NFD creation and all all stuff like that. So I don't know if you have any ideas for us what can we do like in an inerson event because we have these galleries and artists coming to the stage.

So yeah happy to to to hear any thoughts. Yeah. So with Kottom Art and Tech, the nonprofit that I've been running, we do a lot of workshops for corporations and enterprises and things like that where we help like everyday people who don't necessarily consider them artists, themselves artists, participate in the creative process and contribute to greater works of art. And then those greater works of art, in the past, we would have them like printed as a as a wall poster for the office or things like that. Now, another thing that we can do is have them as an NFT that everybody gets.

Um, it would be great to chat and learn more about like things you've experimented with, things that you see your community like resonating with and not, and then maybe we could have some fun ideas about like the next experiment that you bring to life. Sounds good. Thank you. Cool. 2 minutes left.

I take critique really well, too. Feedback is a gift. If you hate all these ideas, that's okay. All right. Seems good.

All right. Thank you.