Exclusive Interview with STORYVERSE Co-Founder and CEO Justin Waldron | KBW2023

[Music] I think technolog is making this an opportunity that hasn't existed before and so if you think about it when we're reading a book we're always imagining what might be going on in the story um and we've never been in a position where we've been able to actually take something like that and turn it into something interactive it's too expensive and so what I'm excited about is with the combination of AI and blockchain I think finally these authors that create really great stories will finally have the opportunity to create this inter acve content for cheaply enough that it could possibly replace the way that we experience these stories so I think it's an opportunity for all these writers who have been building this content to finally have it in another form that people [Music] enjoy I think games are the biggest sort of piece of the entertainment industry now right so if you look at movies and music uh games are many times bigger than everything else combined at this point and uh my last company had a lot to do with that so my previous company zingo we started the movement toward premium games and what we've seen is that that grew the market to the place that it is today where it's over 100 billion a year spent on these games and so I think um there's no other era area inside of entertainment that's figured out really how to give consumers value and how to uh make as much revenue and create as much value as games have and so I think to me um maybe they are just games but games are you know really at like the Forefront of the way most people experience content today we don't really have any competitors in terms of sense of what we're focused on so we're very focused on enabling uh these IP holders who already have great IP in the space so the people who hold projects like for apes or pudgy Penguins or crypt punks or isuki a lot of these holders are excited about using their their IP but they don't have the cash or the time to go and build that IP and so our platform allows them to take the assets they already have and work with people who use our tools to go and create this these games this content and so on their side there's no work require they're just sharing in the upside of what's created it's a free option for them other platforms don't really have this type of functionality um and our tool set is unique like the ability for people to create no code games from scratch with this IP there's nobody else that's doing it yet so I think it's for writers it's a it's a new opportunity they don't have otherwise yeah really this is about like empowerment right so what we saw with artists is artists have not been able to sell their work online uh until about four years ago it's nfts that finally enabled artists to have the same sort of scale and and leverage that internet companies have had for 30 years and so before nfts there was no internet native business model for selling art but writers still haven't solved that problem so if you're a creative writer how do you sell your work online in a scaleable away I mean you try to publish it through Amazon or something but these models don't really work very well and what we're really excited about is giving writers the a way to compete with like modern forms of media like Tik Tok and games these are the things that grab people's attention now and writers and ebooks have been left a little bit in the Dust by these new forms of media and so if we can give those storytellers access to the same compelling form of media then the best storytellers now have the tools that the video creators and everybody else has and we think that'll be the thing that brings them into this new economy yeah absolutely and IP is huge in Asia right so I'm actually based in Tokyo and we spent a lot of time talking and working with uh some of the other like offline web 2 uh Japanese IP companies and I think there's a big opportunity here and I think the real idea is that your community is creating so much content around your brand now and for the first time ever on the blockchain you can verify who are the stakeholders in your community that own IP rights and what can they create together um and by partnering with other people this is something that you couldn't do without the blockchain um it's permissionless IP licensing and so that's something that I think uh will enable all these writers who would never be able to get a deal writing or creating content for these IPS to now work with them and that's going to bir just tons of new awesome content for people I'm really excited about AI I think AI is a really a democratizing force it's going to make the what it means to be a Creator will change completely so just like we've seen tools like Tik Tok turn more people into video creators we're going to see AI turn many people into creators of all sorts of kinds of content and I think that the bar between what a AAA game Studio can do and what a regular person in their bedroom can do that's not a professional game developer today the Gap is going to close and it's going to close pretty rapidly so what's on our mind is like what value will those people want and even if you can produce amazing content with AI you're only allowed to use legally the IP that you have the rights to and so what's really powerful about the platform we're doing is no matter how much AI progresses in terms of helping people create better content by themselves you still need the rights to use these characters and these characters are the characters that people they recognize and they they love and so there's a lot of value in using these characters and so we think that that'll only improve you know the usefulness