Bufficorn Ventures Rutting Season

[Music] good morning good morning good morning eth Denver bid week um it is uh a fabulous Monday morning here in Denver Colorado on what is it February 26th 2024 thank you for coming I'm Russell castano the uh Venture Steward for buffer corn Ventures and and I'm really excited about the um about what we have today um you know a lot of places have uh a demo day and uh as for us we don't have demo day because we're buffer corns and instead of uh instead of buffer corns to show off their stuff they they have rutting season so those of you who know about elk and buffalo understand rutting season so the idea behind that is to give our portfolio companies some time to um to show off what they do really get into a deeper um deeper story about why they're doing what they're doing what they're doing you know a lot of times you get these 30 second pitches these 90 second pitches five minute pitches and it's not enough to really capture the whole thing so hopefully not only will you when you watch this be able to understand what really quickly each of these startups is actually doing but also what they are um what what El like just not at a top level but deep down what kind of change they're trying to do maybe why they are doing what they're doing in in one case even the the sort of story arc of their company and where they are now um as a start as a previous startup founder many startup Founders um and as startup Founders yourselves you may find that this is really interesting and important material what you learn from other people you don't have to learn yourself um to start this off though I'm going to tell I'm going to go right through the a really quick version of what buff corn Ventures is and why why we exist because why do we need just another venture capital company Venture Capital firm come on baby or maybe I'll just do it manually there we go so um you know one thing that everybody knows is it's really hard to find good deals it's hard to find deals that actually communicate what they're trying to do that you have confidence that the team is going to be able to Ute that they have an idea that's really interesting and so that's really hard and competition for the ones that are good that really appeal is really really difficult on top of that um I don't know how many of you are out there that that have experienced this but there are people who like all work in one place none of them seem to be in web 3 like nobody in web 3 all works in the same place it seems to me everybody's distributed all over so you got these teams coming together all over the world communicating coordinating getting them plugged into the right things for them to be effective is insanely difficult so the solution we think to this is combining eth Denver the biggest best web3 experiment running and buffer corn Ventures so if you think of sort of a um you know a a web3 Community Fund and it's also regen and I'll talk about how it's regen in just a minute so um look we have the alpha we're the first big event in web 3 every year everyone's working all winter whether it's a crypto winner or not and they're all working hard to get their products out everyone knows that eth Denver is the place you come to either hack build a team make something new do something different and show the world what you're doing if you're a bidler team you're coming because it's the first big um the first big hackathon you can get with lots of bounties if you a team that's a startup this is a place where you're going to find your customers your partners all those kinds of people in the past we've had unicorns come out we've had great successes one inch poap came out of it pool together um even mdal even bankless um has come out of eth Denver and there's many many more stories you can't get into all of them um we've got all of these people coming all this energy so there's no question that we will get another unicorn coming out of eth Denver sometime in the next year or two and buff corn Ventures will be there to help them so we do have this front row to the alpha um we've got the um the hackathon going on we've got Pitch fests going on the BB pitchfest is going to be coming up on Sunday and lots of really good deal flow most of it we can't even handle all the deal flow we have deal flow is not our problem um we have all the different communities of communities that are a part of ethen bur and a part of sportd that are helping to Foster these um these startups and you know everybody says that you say oh yeah you're part of us and we're part of a team and everything but because we leverage the regen angle there's actually something in it for every Community member to u to benefit from the from From Success that comes out of BV portfolio companies um so we both invest in super early stage and early stage we aren't really heavy-handed about how we invest we don't say we're the only money in we're happy to have lots of people invest together more makes us better um our investment strategy most of you know this already we're making mostly safes these are really early stage Investments relatively small checks $25,000 to $150,000 uh for teams that will um Pro that will produce some real real um like deliver on some serious milestones and some of those Milestones may include things like um like being piloted at the next eth Denver um so if you look at last year with eth Denver I think we had 11 different Pilots this year you've got quite a few of our teams that are out there um making things happen last year I think blockade um had had their huge um huge uh promotion that went out during eth Denver so we got a whole lot of different things happening um and as far as conerns we we used to make this really difficult we don't do that anymore the reason I bring this up not like I'm not asking anybody to invest because we only work with um with investors actually however what I want you to say is 20% of anything that we do make goes back to Spork Dow okay so that goes back to Spork Dow and Spork Dow all of you should be members if you haven't make sure you stake your Spork they can get those that 20% those can come out as dividends to all of our members so so that means that whenever you see a buffer corn Ventures company coming out their success is actually your success as a spork down member okay enough about um about us enough about bucor Ventures this is really about the uh the teams that we have and so um I am really excited let's see is that is uh who's our let me let me let me check real quick who is uh first on our list here because I uh I just shouldn't wear these glasses oh so much better uh let's see first up is you should be coming up here if you are first up anyway um is split so is Brett here there he is okay you ready to come up oh just bring it up we can plug in up here so um so Brett came on um the beginning of last year um with Studio page they recently changed their name over to split social he's going to talk to you about uh about them um I'm really excited about what they're doing I like to describe it and uh he can correct me on this as if YouTube p and patreon had a baby that turned uh everything we know about streaming media upside down so here you go I'll move my laptop and you can have the whole area it's a beautiful baby it's a beautiful baby split social is a beautiful baby all right are we um not yet there's no signal no signal oh said there's no signal from it sign from from your thing here nothing want to use my laptop can you want to use mine yeah can I email this to you yeah I do have a direct let just try that first the re is that better okay window or is it just whatever window um it's it's mirroring you so you can yeah I'm good hello uh it's a lot of lights not used to that okay so the premise for split social is that YouTube's first principles are flawed um if you're not paying for the product you are the product so on YouTube advertisers pay for 99.6% of their revenue and as a result we now have these algorithms that serve advertisers and not the people so we have increasingly inflammatory content it tells us that we're worthless that we're not enough that we need to buy products to feel good about ourselves and the reality is it's tear tearing apart at the fabric of our society um we're living in an increasingly polarized world and it's because of these first principles uh we know this because we've talked to hundreds of creators and the creators are tired uh they feel like they're running on a treadmill like they're having to work for these algorithms like they're having to constantly sell products and they're not able to focus on their art and their creativity and this is how Society Works through our greatest challenges is our art and our creativity so on split we're flipping the script instead of advertisers paying for all all of the revenue of the platform the members pay for the platform so members pay $10 a month they get access to the entire library of creators there are no advertisers to take over that experience and then there's also Cooperative benefits within the network the way a member's money is broken down is each month $5 is paid out to creators based on watch time then there's the Cooperative projects which allows people to fund raise for future Creator creative projects that they want to put into the ecosystem and then the remainder is paid to The Cooperative to help build out the platform and grow the user base so the $5 Creator earnings it's all paid out based on watch time so depending on how many seconds a user watches of each creator in a month that determines where their money goes and how much the Creator is actually paid and because it's not ad-based the payouts are 15 to 100 times larger per video view right now on YouTube the average view is worth somewhere around3 cents to the Creator then there's the Cooperative benefits which is this is essentially allowing cre ators to talk about projects that they would like to make in the in the future and then having members vote on those projects that they would like to see come to life right before them so this is Creator grants and then also impact grants within the ecosystem the Creator economy is expected to hit 500 billion by 2026 this is one of the fastest growing economies in the world even further the streaming Market is expected to hit 1.9 trillion by 2030 now obviously we're not going to capture this entire Market we're very focused in the outdoor space this is most of the creators that we're talking to so we've been talking with dozens of outdoor creators that are making Adventure content um they're very excited and we think that this is an excellent Beach head for us because we can capture that market um and they're also very rebellious people that understand models like this and want to make a difference so we have we have a MVP built and we are currently taking that mvp to Market so we're talking with creators um we want to fully launch our beta at the beginning of next quarter from there we want to build out the remaining features like search recommendation algorithms all of that and go for a full launch in quarter three after that we want to establish product Market fit um and then move into the immutable onchain components of the platform uh we we're not sure exactly how to solve that and we don't want to move things on chain until we know better how that's going to work uh team there's myself I'm a two-time Founder uh I have a past building subscription video platforms out and growing those subscription video platforms out for large Brands and creators uh P Peter leair senior developer uh and Technical leader and then Ashton Wagner who has marketing experience and analytics experiences which are very important for this platform so going into our MVP and giving everybody a sense of what we have um right now this is our platform as you can see we're going with the Creator Focus members can come in here and they can watch creators on the platform they can engage with creators each creator has their own page this is very brand forward you know there's no other advertisements or anything taking people away from this experience where they can upload videos and people can watch their content then as a user when I watch content I'm able to come in here and I'm able to see what what creators I've watched how much I've watched of their content and what percentage of my subscription is paid out to that Creator so unlike YouTube where it's a black box and I have no idea what's going on here I can actually see who I've supported and how much I've supported them I can also see this breakdown by creators in general uh from there we've also built out the all the CMS components that are expected for a platform like this so creators can build out their Pages they can upload content they can get started on the network fairly simply um yeah so that's split social um I think that there was a Q&A component to this but yeah hello oh there you go hey can you see me I couldn't see anything when I was up there um so can you can you talk a little bit more about like how a Creator today what they would have to do to do the same kinds of things that split social is going to do like what what kind of Hoops they would have to jump through to do what you're trying to trying to enable them to do yeah so right now there's all these one-off subscription video platforms like patreons um U screen where creators need to go to another platform set up a subscription service and Market that platform to Their audience um it used to be fairly simple to do this but now there's over a half a million of them on the market so it's becoming increasingly difficult for creators to get subscribers on those platforms um and it a lot of times in the creators we've talked to it feels like they're begging for support because it's just them it's $10 a month and it feels a lot more like a donation or charity towards that Creator great now there here you go Scott hi Brad thanks for that presentation I was just wondering if you had any plans to integrate with farcaster because that seems to be a platform that has a lot of Buzz and uh maybe there's an opportunity there to serve a lot of videos yeah I don't know about integration yet um but I do think farcaster is a pretty great example um and what forecaster is doing with all the open graph items and Frames um I think that they're definitely an excellent example of how these platforms can work and how they can really improve Community um if not integrating I'm definitely learning from them right now and their Compu Community components are awesome I would like to build a lot of their engagement tools and things like that into the platform yeah like with farcaster you could essentially token gate right and and do it that way if you decided to go down that road so yep that'd be kind of cool do you have a question hey thanks for the presentation I I was curious if if if there's an token integrated into this platform or how you think about like leveraging crypto and tokens versus just building something that works for a user yeah so the concept of integrating web 3 is putting all of the analytics on chain so tokenizing the seconds watched and tokenizing the governments for the uh The Cooperative voting so that way members and viewers actually have a say over how the platform operates and it can't be taken away and ruined in the future making it more immutable um and then I think that there's also different layers of Engagement that come out of that so as your earning token for a creator for watching their content then that kind of gives you a proof of patronage within that Creator's ecosystem and in the future it will give you different types of Engagement opportunities or the ability to vote on different different things um but essentially giving the community some type of ownership over these creative spaces so um one question I have is how do you um intend on building enough building up enough of your um of your creator base right to um to make it so that subscribers are going to want to come in so what's your what's your sort of strategy on that uh yeah so right now it's a lot of cold emails a lot of DMs um but we're kind of breaking through at this point so talking with some large producers for different content creators right now um I think the focus is to build up the content first um focus on creators that are making excellent Outdoors content and really just owning that outdoor space so everything from rock climbing mountain biking a lot of the content creators that we have on the platform um and then hitting a critical mass from there with the producers that we're talking to these are some of the biggest names in the industry and it would be nice to be able to do a top- down approach uh get a thought leader get somebody's buyin in the space and then that will bring all of the creators that look up to them and want to create with them now one thing I understand about the stickiness of of what you've got here is once you have um so and I I like the idea of keeping it like all outdoor right then you've got viewers who are interested in the same sorts of things so one Creator brings them them in they start looking at their content and then they can see other creators content as well that they might be interested in so whereas something like patreon you sign up for one one one Creator and that's it there's not really any incentive for you to grow or to grow from somebody else's list of Watchers right that's the yeah that's the biggest thing so on a patreon you only get access to that one Creator um so on split there's opportunities for collaboration so behind one pay wall I get access to all of the content on the platform and that opens up a lot of different opportunities for collaboration so we're hearing with the extreme sport athletes you know they they like working together they like collaborating they cheer each other on at the X Games but the way that they make money in the current Paradigm is they have to compete with one another for views and they have to compete for subscriptions and sponsorships and all of that what they love about split is this is an opport opportunity that they can work together they can Market together they can create content together and they can you know it's more of a community and they like the idea of being able to promote other creators on the platform and being able to point to content that their friends are making great um one last question is so uh I've been a YouTube premium user because I despise ads and uh and so I'm paying not too much less than $10 a month already for somebody who is already a YouTube premium so these are your people just watching it like what what would they what would their experience be they come in they set up an account How would how would it be different than the typical YouTube experience that they would see with no ads but just that what would that be how would that be different yeah so there's two sides to it so first they have the opportunity to support their favorite creators um YouTube premium doesn't necessarily increase the payouts to creators it just takes the ads off of the platform the other side is we're hoping to have exclusive content on split um so in this case they would be able to see featur length films behind the scenes content things that wouldn't make it to YouTube that creators are looking to give to their most exclusive audiences thank you we good so uh the next company is smart funds and uh I believe smart funds. XYZ right that's um the URL and uh when when I first saw this they pitched last year at the buffet tank pitchfest and uh when um when we saw what they were doing and I'm not going to use my words to describe it because JJ can do it much much better um it kind of blew my mind and what it can do to bring conventional sort of minded investors in on um on blockchain and tokenized Investments as well as the other way around um like melted my brain a little bit so I'm really excited that JJ's going to uh be able to talk to us about this um are we live with the video we're good okay here you go my friends thank you Russell all right uh I am JJ I'm one of the founders of smart funds um this is my I think fifth time at eth Denver um so first time uh on stage excited to be here and Spilled to be a part of the buff corn ADV Ventures portfolio um so anyway today uh we're going to talk about smart funds which is a platform for alternative Investments so alts investing and before I jump into that I know normally when I'm pitching I have to explain I have to kind of translate the crypto concepts for the trafi folks I know today I get to translate the trafi concepts to this audience so alt investing just means anything in the private markets uh but alt investing is bigger than ever but is a very fragmented inefficient experience so first of all there's a bunch of legal complexity that makes participating in any investing very difficult um what you see is that family offices uh wealthy people have family offices are full-time people just to manage the back office of what's required to participate um in alter alternative Investments and then it's a very opaque Market uh and this is probably the biggest problem so uh in using the most common example secondary transactions um you have a very fragmented manual deal process so what happens is you literally have a human being who goes out there and matches buyers and sellers and then kind of haggles a price in between because there's no publicly available uh uh uh data on pricing so he just kind of uses his insight into market knowledge to kind of broker this uh this deal and you know usually have uh this three-month process of I want to sell uh some shares and then the broker goes out and finds a buyer and then after the after the deal gets paper papered over you're talking about a three-month process um if you saw the news uh Carta left um the secondary markets um they got kind of caught cheating on this problem they were trying to um access uh personal uh uh personal uh identity information from cap tables in order to kind of uh Grease the skids on connecting buyers and sellers so they weren't necessarily it was inappropriate for them to be using cap tables but this is an example of the difficulty in matching buyers and sellers and then of course this lack of Market data just means that uh price Discovery is difficult um in all secondary markets and then of course lack of liquidity so the only strategy that you have today in secondary markets is a long-term Buy and Hold and that stems from the three-month transaction process and so if you think about it the only sellers um of uh in the secondary markets are either Founders or early stage investors who are up a lot or employees who just want to get uh married or or or buy a house um and so they need some liquidity hopefully that's going to pop right back up um and so they need some liquidity and so they don't necessarily care about waiting for the IPO um they will just sell at any price now and the buyer is a sophisticated private markets participant who will look at the deal and he'll say you know this thing has you know 3x before it goes public in four years so I'm going to buy this now and ride it 3x and and sell later but be that's the only use case because of the three mon month transaction process and as a result of this what this means is the only demand in secondary markets are are for that very uh top uh issuances that are guaranteed to go public or if it's not guaranteed to go public maybe it's an Elon Musk company um but for that sort of midcore uh midtail of companies that are good companies but not necessarily on a definitive IPO track um no market for those companies in the secondary markets and then unpredictable Capital calls right blockchains help uh eliminate middlemen Capital calls are kind of currently this necessary middleman in the process of of alternative investment um transactions so Bayon company um which you know they do have a pretty robust crypto arm they did a a long form um study uh they published in the last month or two um that says hey by the way tokenization could revolutionize Alternatives and it's a very long research report and it goes on to basically say all the problems that I just listed can be solved by tokenization and I know you guys in this audience uh you know understand that to begin with but tokenization hasn't happened yet we have seen uh progress in tokenizing dollars we've seen progress in tokenizing treasury bills but we have not seen any progress in tokenizing the IL liquid stuff real estate um and pre-ipo equity and those kind of um Securities um and we've been talking about it for five years and so why hasn't it happened yet um well first of all again compliance challenges that um of the of the uh compliance progress that's been made on tokenized Securities you're still talking about you know limit order books that trade things that are tokenized securities not onchain uh tokenized Securities markets that has not that has not been that Gap has not been bridged yet then the cold start problem so if you go to a company and you explain to them all of the benefits of tokenization and they say great I uh you know how do I take advantage and you say well you have to tokenize your entire company right and they say well you know I'm I'm not ready to make that full jump yet and so there's a little bit of a cold start problem so smart fund solves that smart fund simplifies compliant tokenization for offchain Securities and that's powered by our uh smart SPV product so let's talk about uh our smart spvs for a second so smart spvs are a tokenized deal execution platform now if any of you have used um angelist or Carta um there are some venture-backed companies in the space uh sidecar and allocations among others that are all competing to offer kind of the the best uh on on uh web-based uh product to to manage um an SPV uh a special purpose vehicle if you're not familiar um and uh uh you know they help you kind of pull the capital and manage the cap table um and so if you've ever used that product and if you're in the private markets uh you probably have um then uh you know exactly what our product does it's from a feature perspective almost the exact same product but the big difference is that our back office is automated by smart contracts and that means the cap table is tokenized and so this is a big deal and which we'll talk a little more about in a second the uh automation by smart contracts enables us to offer a better faster cheaper product but it's the tokenization of the cap table which is really the magic here because now that you've tokenized the cap table you've actually created an onchain derivative and so what I mean by that is the original security is still exactly where it was before and what you have done by using our SPV is you have now created a security that lives on the blockchain that has a legal claim on the underlying share so it is still security this is still only for accredited investors but we have now created a derivative of the underlying share that lives on the blockchain so why spvs let's talk about that for a second the Simplicity of compliance right um it is much much easier to transact SPV ownership interests than the underlying shares itself everyone in the private markets is already very comfortable with spvs no matter what asset class you're in where you are on the capital stack you've probably you've almost certainly used spvs and maybe use them very frequently and then most uh you know kind of an underrated point is that you know CEOs want to keep greater control of their cap table they want they want access to secondary markets but they'd prefer to keep control of their cap table this gives them the opportunity to both keep control of their cap table and easily access secondary markets and then versatility spvs can be customized to go after a variety of different asset classes but most importantly the way to think about this is that our spvs are a legal wrapper for offchain Securities and what this does is it creates a new primitive for onchain alts markets now that we have tokenized this cap table now we can build onchain products on top and so this is not our unique um legal Theory um about using spvs as a compliance framework um this is uh from a a private markets research report done about 18 months ago that called SPV ownership units the new Atomic unit of private markets and they note that SPV interests like LP interests and funds they sit on top of the cap table and can be tra created permissionless Le what we've done is we've added the tokenization piece so smart funds will operate the first two alternative Primitives which is secondary and private credit um uh we think those are kind of key Primitives to making the ecosystem work but of course we're certainly uh excited about all the things other things that are going to get built on top and other protocols we'll partner with so effectively what that looks like it's very straightforward you just take your existing Holdings you wrap them in an SPV again something that people do all the time in private markets and the the cap table is then tokenized and then any um uh whitelisted protocol uh on top will have access to um all of these uh tokenized cap tables and so it is sandboxed it will be um only for uh whitelisted protocols um that will be uh kyc and uh for accredited investors as well um making sure we only have accredit investors is very important for um the the compliance aspect of in the marketing rules um so of course we hide all the blockchain stuff um you know that we talk about how cool it is to tokenize um our our Target customer is Legacy finance and trafi um as well as being able to bring individuals into private markets um and so you're still inviting people to your deals via email they can still subscribe via a bank wire and the the transaction is still tokenized on the back end now this is important because automating the back office expands access to private markets to these alternative markets for both participants and issuers so just very briefly because we've automated the back office and we've made distributions a single one button uh push operation um now all of a sudden you can go down to very small ticket sizes in secondary markets again today secondary transactions usually are starting at six figures and up because of the complexity of the transaction there's no such thing as a $5,000 secondary transaction we can change that and certainly for issuers as well because now that you can redu transaction time from 3 months to minutes all of a sudden you bring speculation and New Market participants onto the buy side uh of these alternative markets and then most importantly providing this framework will bring individuals into alt markets right now individuals hold over 50% of all Global wealth but only have 5% of exposure to Alternative markets because of all the complexity so is $150 trillion in Market wealth that cannot access alternative markets today and so the same Bane and company research report um did a nice job of kind of summarizing the opportunity here um it says that tokenization of alts will add an incremental 400 billion in annual revenue that's not the market size that's the incremental uh Revenue opportunity so obviously this is a very large opportunity um we have multiple uh uh revenue streams from our different products and just to put that in perspective we're talking about an order of magnitude cheaper um as well as an order of magnitude less time to complete a transaction we have a uh we're we're uh launching soon but we already have a bunch of customers lined up they're very excited about uh you know being able to have the access to the fastest cheapest SPV out there um we have some wonderful investors buff of corn Ventures included and partners that have enabled us to um uh to uh offer this product with uh the blockchain stuff hidden um and we'll be adding uh Partners investors and customers to the list uh very soon uh my co-founder and I John have been working together on the kinds of products and services that allow us to onboard institutional capital on chain for 5 years so uh this is a lot of um the result of some things we've learned along the way about compliance roadblocks um and about practical realities of of why tokenization hasn't happened yet we're building an Advisory Board of um well-connected individuals in uh particular um uh verticals that we're wanting to penetrate um and so uh uh please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or want to learn more um but before I do that I'm going to jump over and um we're going to run a quick demo here so great so um what you're looking at here is the dashboard of a an SPV for hot new startup not very cleverly named um it's a 250k uh deal um what you can see is that um 85k has been closed uh there's no additional commitments uh it's currently open to Capital and you can see over here on the right the contribution chart uh so um a little below that to uh the left um you can see uh the data room uh where you can download the due diligence necessary in order to uh make your decision you have the information about the deal that's a zero and 10 fee structure there you have the cap table um and an activity feed of all that's transpired with the with the vehicle to quickly run through the admin dashboard here the important thing to note on the settings page is that there's a an opportunity to uh choose between P private and public you can uh if you're running a deal you can raise uh privately from your existing network if you don't fill out the allocation you can switch over to the public setting it will then show up in our Marketplace which again is designed for compliance with 506c marketing rules um and uh other accredit investors will be able to participate uh data room very straightforward you can add additional documentation um investor reports this is more for LP specific uh perhaps tax documentation so this is an example you would be able to upload a K1 for a particular investor um this is uh uh as we move down to the investor tab this is a list of everyone who's been invited to the deal um where they are in the process if they've uh uh closed yet um CRM built in so you can communicate with some or all of your Syndicate um invitation requests if someone in the marketplace does see your deal they interest interested in it there's a one button they can push it shows up here and uh the GP has one button to push or the deal manager I should say has one button to push there that sends an email invitation to that prospective investor um similarly on commitments the commitment tab um if someone has committed but not closed their Capital um that will show up here and there'll be one button to push to send a capital call email and then most importantly contributions so what you see here is that um there's of people who have already closed to this deal but if we go over to the middle to the transfer method um what you see is that some people have closed doing using usdc and some have closed using ACH using Traditional Bank banking means so again that's what's important here to note that even the investors who use AC that transaction as you see on the right uh right column is still minted and so whether or not you use um crypto to to deploy or not uh the Automation and the and the tokenization still happens so let me go over to uh a different vehic Le um and I'll invite an already kyc account so you can see how fast it is to on board um a new investor um so we're going to go we're going to invite an investor and uh this account uh is from a dummy profile I have here uh minimum maximum allocation and shared carry so um basically everything you know everything you need to run um a venture capital early stage Syndicate is already built into the product we clicked send invite and it's that straightforward so now what I'm going to switch over to another profile here um which is the profile that I invited but what you can see is that it already knows that the investor we invited is Tom Brady and that Tom Brady is an accredited investor not the real Tom Brady by the way uh because Tom Brady's already kyc and been verified as an accredited investor in our system so now I'm switching over to the email of the new profile there's my email invitation to invest in this deal I click Babe Ruth has invited you to invest in super hot round uh we click on the deal and this will show you again how quick it is uh to onboard New Capital um in a compliant fashion so it's going to check to see that we are authenticated again for compliance purposes you can't have um uh uh you have to make sure that you have uh you're inviting only in accredited investors so we take a look and we accept the invitation we've we've done our due diligence we accept invite now here you see it knows that we've been kyc an accreditation verified already if you have not done those things it'll send you to our thirdparty partners um uh those things can be those things are handled offsite um we then have a dynamic nft which tracks your investor metadata we call the investor portal investor passport and that investor passport contains your information so we'll be able to support a variety of different uh kyc and accreditation providers going forward here you're actually signing documents um we're using electronic signature so I'm going to sign first and then there we go the documents have been signed now I'm going to go ahead um and download those documents so that we can actually see what we signed um obviously don't sign documents uh before you've read them unless you're on test net so now we're going to go ahead and download um what signed and this will obviously show up in the investor reporting tab as well um but what you see here is the electronic data uh metadata signat uh signature page um to for compliance with electronic signatures so this is for the super hot round SPV Tom Brady is the signer here's the date um of the transaction the email address the IP address all for compliance with electronic signatures and if we go up here and uh search Elsewhere for Tom Brady's name in the documentation we'll see sure enough there is his subscription his signature on the subscription agreement so you have actually signed uh legal documents um we'll go ahead and close that out so we have now signed documents and now we go over here and here what you notice is that this is the first time you've seen anything related to a web3 wallet um at all in this product and so here you have the option to close with usdc or via a or just make a commitment for the time being um I'm going to go ahead and close with usdc that's the most straightforward um so we go ahead and connect our wallet and we're going to make an investment of $7,500 any second now there we go all right it is that simple to deploy Capital into a legal compliant vehicle with an onchain cap table so now I'm going to go just take a look back at the um the GP side uh the the the deal Runner side and now you can see it's going to change because it knows that Tom Brady has signed his documents there we go and now if we go down to the contributions tab we will see that sure enough in this new vehicle there is uh the new transaction of $7,500 and this is the important thing everything that we've done today is leading up to this which is the onchain cap table this is your subscription um uh receipt so this is a legal receipt of an investment in an SPV for 7500 shares of super hot round and as we click through to super hot round this is the cap table so again this is all all the magic is all leading to this which is onchain Cap tables and now um super hot round now has um a legal uh security that lives on chain that can be transacted in compliant onchain uh private markets alt markets products uh anyway thank you and I look forward to [Applause] questions thanks any questions anybody has um I've got some so were those live transactions you were doing in that demo uh no this was a recording but uh that was live when I recorded it was live when you so what uh what what chain were you doing it on uh that was bass gorle that's actually why we're they just deprecated Bas gor um but we're still planning on launching on bass well I I I just uh every time I see you do it and it's actually you've cleaned it up it looks really nice a lot nicer now than it did a year ago when uh you showed it to us at at BV um I don't know how um like as somebody who has used CA um on both sides and everything like this this is such such an impressive Tool uh and I I hope that like that it's getting out there um and more people are are are learning about it um as far as your kyc process um do is that something that you do inherently or is that something that the um that can be outsourced to whoever like like if you're working with a certain group already and they have policies can you Outsource it to them do the kyc or how does that yeah so we have integrated and first of all thank you for the nice comment Russell um we have integrated an initial partner for both kyc and accreditation so we have one of each for the initial um uh launch uh over time we'll be able to support any and every uh reliable third-party uh accreditation provider and and kyc provider um which goes into how we structured our investor passport um the investor passport as a dynamic nft can point to any um Third Party Source that we deem is uh uh legitimate um so as as we go on we'll support you know whatever kyc and accreditation providers uh kind of win in the marketplace and certainly there's a a bunch of great uh progress being made there on on chain versions of that now well and and are there any uh regulatory issues um that I know most things that we do here that are securitizing anything have regulatory issues and I know that you've gone out of your way to um to address th those but are there any specific ones that are still sort of in flux and you're working to you know to to make to make sure Regulators see these as legit yeah I would say um uh we spend way more of our time uh dealing with compliance than smart contracts which you know we'd much rather have it the other way around um so again like the whole the whole purpose of what we're doing here is all based on the Simplicity of the compliance framework around spvs just starting with that makes the entire process 10x easier than if we were doing the underlying security itself and that being said there's still a bunch of small print um it's that the major requirements for transactions are accredited buyer accredited seller and since we have accreditation credentials required to uh access our products everyone is already accredited uh before they're able to even have the opportunity to buy or sell so from that perspective the major compliance issues um are addressed by our choice of SPV is there a bunch of fine print that we're going through uh and structuring you know certain Clauses um in the operating agreement and the PPM for the the specific spvs yes we're going through that with the fine Toth comb just to make sure but again it's the SPV compliance framework that already simplifies things greatly and then from there certainly there's still you know plenty of small print um but the idea is that we're trying to abstract that away um so that as long as you're in credited investor it's a seamless process cool and and uh one more question I have is if uh if you were and I know you can't throw out exact numbers cuz there's things are different but if you compare like the cost of setting up an SPV with smart funds for um a pretty straightforward investment like a startup um then um and you were you were setting it up there what kind of cost difference are you are you looking at like is an order of magnitude is it um for for doing something like a like you know $10 million raise or something like that yep so the amount of the raise is irrelevant to to the costs mostly um so SPV pricing across the board is extremely messy um basically everyone out there has a slightly different pricing model because of the complexities involved in setting them up there are some things that are out of our control like uh Blue Sky fees um so if you f when you uh file an SPV depending on whe which states your particular investors come from there are fees associated with filings you have to make in those States um and you know they can be zero they can be $5,000 and so that has nothing to do with us that's a pass through cost that is charged by states that typically averages about $1,200 per vehicle um from there um you know it also sort of depends on the you know extra bells and whistles that you might add to whatever your SPV is um today we are cheaper than everything else out there and again that all starts because we can automate the back office we're just able to scale our operations in a way that none of the other providers can but um so today we're cheaper but within 6 to 12 months we expect to be an order of magnitude cheaper as we finish automating the the the back office we've automated um the key functions which are subscriptions redemptions and fees um and the kind of typical fund admin stuff what we have not automated yet is tax and K1 but that's coming um so for now that tax and K1 is just a pass through cost to our partner um but as we uh automate that certainly for the Venture Capital use case um that goes away as a cost um and at that point will be um at least 50% cheaper than the next um uh uh the next uh cheapest uh option on the market um and so you know when you're uh you know typical customers like an angel Syndicate um and you he doesn't have a formal fund but they do a bunch of deals every year and if they're doing 50 deals a year and there's many Angel syndicates that do in normal Economic Times um and you're doing 50 spvs a year and and you know your current market rates are starting at 10K and up you're looking at 500k a year in SPV costs so in order to uh reduce that by you know today 25% but getting to to 50 or 75% over the next year is a pretty substantial cost savings over time that's great and uh one last question unless there's more up here there is one hang on awesome um so it sounds like you have some great traction with the institutional and some great traction sounds like you have with the institutional investors curious how this is being received by the equity Sellers and what their biggest concerns are yeah um great question so it's being very well received um with a lot of trepidation and this is true of you know if you've ever tried to onboard trafi into anything onchain right like they're half fascinated and half terrified um we have uh a lot of folks in our pipeline um who say this is awesome I just don't want to go first um we have some folks in our pipeline who are willing to go first so I'm very excited to see kind of what Snowball Effect happens after we get you know number one and number two on chain um so the reception is great um and the need is even greater so um you know uh uh a lot of private companies are underwater um after raising money in 2020 and 2021 at wildly inflated valuations that are not coming back and now they're stuck right they're their their valuations are for their company are underwater um and in the current market there's no there's zero demand for their secondary shares we haven't really started kind of formally outreaching to that group yet but there's a lot of them that need something like this um and so um you know the folks that have the options are still waiting to see other people go first but there's a lot of folks out there without options that didn't have an alternative before this so um a lot of interest um a lot of caution um as they dip their toes into the water but there you know we see a tremendous amount of interest in this concept broadly and as people get comfortable with it we think it'll uh it'll really snowball great um last question and I should have asked this to uh to Brett as well um are you raising and uh tell us about it uh we are raising we're uh closing some things right now so I'm not ready to talk about how much left we're raising um or at what price um but we are raising um and uh maybe raising a little more uh later this summer so this will still be uh worth talking about um for the next few months um we're uh as I as I noted we're about to expand uh customers partners and investors um and so uh we'll we'll sort of um we'll talk more as soon as that's closed so uh we we'll leave a couple things under wraps until then great thank you so much thank you come thank you good job I'm running up and down the stairs because it's a lot more fun to be up there and watching from up there than down here so while margarit uh connects her laptop um Margaret uh represents blockade Labs um and uh they were another company that came last year during uh eth Denver and applied via our uh Buffet tank pitchfest um really interesting interesting format We Came Upon was we asked we asked startups for a 90 second Pitch so they have 90 seconds to make their pitch if they can't make it in 90 seconds then uh they're out and uh a bunch of people said well why do we do that and you know the thing that I was like if they can't if they can't say what they're doing in 90 seconds then most people aren't going to pay much of attention to them anyway so this forced it and it was really hard for a lot of the companies to do that but I think any startups that are out there if you don't have your 90c pitch done um you're missing a huge opportunity so um so um JJ and and uh um margarite both uh both nailed their uh their early pitches and uh are you ready to go I wanted to M you can so are you are you what uh you can yeah oh you have to hang on WE tech tech um stuff here [Music] this one um no to that one oh wow the things that are happening on the screen right now I don't know how to that okay I can let's see so where so you've got here right and then you've going to you could present but I don't want to do a split screen right let's do that exit Okay always practice your slide um where is it there let's see function H don't what to do this so we got the split screen what side is the is this that's the audience window says enter full screen mode that's [Applause] Act spe oh no this is really hard everybody supp not let's see would some the next person like to come up and talk while we figure out this uh Pro or do you can you do it with uh um I can yeah if the next person wants to go I can go after I think because I think Jonathan him Joseph is still on his way oh do you mind uh can you just do it without the uh without the notes yeah um I could just leave the notes open sure let's uh switch you back here there does that work yeah do you want this or do you want hold it uh I'll hold it that's F great all right you guys get to see my notes so um so I'm margarit CEO of blockade lab uh we recently did a demo day for a tokenomics cohort so this is uh similar to that demo but um what we do is we us your natural language to create 3D worlds and environments um on demand and so I'll give you a look at what that looks like so we have various tools like a sketch feature that'll give you users more control and in a 360 uh design space and then use uh your natural language to then generate and autoc complete the prompts that you have provided sketch being an example of a prompt here then you can use remix which allows you to change the Styles so once you have an underlying structure that you like we we have pre-made various Styles and you can also create your own we launched about a year ago and be quickly became um the number one environment map generator in the world so we're approaching maybe like 11 million of these 360 worlds created by our users um last about a year ago is when we uh we launched this product and right out of the gate uh we had massive uh traction with users that this was a whole new type of experience and a very difficult problem one that hadn't been um making 360 sky boxes is a very like difficult problem for technical artists and so there's not a huge amount of them or Big Supply because artists don't really enjoy making them so therefore on your various game asset marketplaces there aren't that many and so this unlocked the ability for not just a technical artist to make these 360 panoramic images but also uh also for artist use and so um with this while we were doing the 2D uh 360 images that was just the beginning we've been able to push that into the realm of 3D so I'm going to give you a story of one of the example users that we have and how they use the product uh this is Echo uh a person having fun on the internet who has an idea she's got an idea for a game based on an inside joke if that sounds like a niche project well it is but it doesn't need to have a big addressable Market maybe just one her best friend to be worth doing so long as it's easy and it is easy within a few minutes Ekko can iterate on her idea a dozen times before arriving the world she creates surrounds her but it isn't actually 3D it feels 3D but is much faster and easier to refine before full spatial rendering over the course of the next 5 minutes Ekko identifies and tweaks a half a dozen visual details to her preference using the edit tool then the is almost perfect but only from her Central Viewpoint so when you're creating you're creating as a center Viewpoint this 360d projection but then she presses the button marked 3D and the world becomes comes to life suddenly she can walk around the space and it feels real she can walk behind houses and see what couldn't be seen because it didn't exist before she pressed the button a AI is a fancy form of autocomplete and we use the information we do have what the scene looks like and obviously contains to create what we don't like like ambient sounds light sources and more this is examples on the scene of uh some of the 3D R&D we have and that is an important word the scene Ekko has created is a beginning it's a seed and at blockade the same technology that lets us turn a 2d scene into to a realized 3D World lets us expand that 3D World arguably indefinitely internally we call them world seeds for this reason for this reason Echo could stop right now a seed can go unnoticed its potential never expressed but it can also be tended nurtured grown into something more that whole process took less than half half an hour and the iterative loop of playing your game or exploring your world finding things you want want to improve Nuance to or expand tasking your AI assistant to make those improvements and then repeating the process until you've your satisfied isn't work it's a more productive form of play now Ekko created this game really just for her friend an audience of two but world seeds can be connected to build even larger more complex and diverse settings with proper credit and token rewards attributed to each Creator and although we've talked about this from the perspective of games since entering our paid beta in August we've discovered a lot of other folks who think like Echo so our users also include folks in architecture entertainment and education simply put if we make World building easy they want it and they will pay for it and even with the full vision only partly realized we've already got the numbers to back it up so we are currently approaching 500,000 ARR which is pretty exciting for us we had just launched monetization in August so this is our smart environments road map we've come a long way in less than a year but to pull this ambitious plan off we need to we need more validated useful training data as much as we can get our hands on our tokenized Rewards program on our way to a largely tokenized ecosystem is designed to do exactly that we've got a lot of work to do or we got a lot to do but every time line we've set for ourselves to solve a hard problem we've beaten and we're not slowing down so that is pretty much it except for one more thing oh yes the a few weeks ago the world saw Apple Vision proly uh and and although it'll takes some time for most people to see what playing many worlds overlapping seamlessly connected and creation at your fingertips where you are in complete control the Apple Vision Pro cost more than $3,500 and launched with only six immersive environments just six think about the implications of that it's a future we saw coming and it's what blocky games has built for so if you've seen any of the videos with apple Vision Pro you know you can go into full immersion environments and back out into reality so this product is leading up to the ability to you have that experience immersive experience on demand that can also overlap with any geometric space such as your living room all right that's it guys um thanks for thanks for uh me reading half of it it's a new presentation and I was not expecting to give this Dem so quickly but um but thank you and uh Buffalo corn Ventures invested in blockade last February when we had just launched the 362d generator um and then since then we've raised an additional 1.5 million and um and we're preparing on the other side of GTC we're an Nvidia Inception program participant um so around GTC we're going to be bringing on new investment so great um thanks a lot mared and uh we'll have to figure out how to do I I've never done presentations like that so I wish I could have helped you more with I could done a live I could do a live demo if you guys want I have it do it yeah let's see okay so this is an example of our web app we have a web app and an API um API with a Unity SDK but for the web app um what's really nice here we have an enhanced prompt feature which uses gp4 so if that uses our services best best practices so I'm going to say testing this service out make something beautiful so it'll interpret my request here for what I'm asking for um let's see let's do render let's do it takes about 10 to 15 seconds for it to render a new image um which is pretty pretty quick because these are 6K resolution images and we actually are about to release an 8K resolution since 8K is the required resolution for Apple Vision [Music] Pro so you'll see the prompt here created its its prompt for what it thought would to create a beautiful scene then I can take this and I can when I go to download launch 3D mesh so now you're looking at this is a 3D scene you can see the wireframe this is a pretty dark image but um you can change the density well this is kind of fun you can see how like this epic mesh you can get really really fine fine points that you can't even see the mesh then but the objects the objects all have 3D information so where we are right now is still projecting the 3D information from that central location but the next big releases we have are what we call Mesh complete which means that the rest of the information such as what's the other side of the tree look look like when you if you need that information you'll be able to render it and eventually that can be re real-time generation so yeah that that prompt that could have looked better but I think you get the idea and the sketch feature toolbar was on the side um we have an edit mode coming out that's really exciting the edit mode allows you to select for example the tree and replace it with a totem or change a building of a house to a skyscraper uh within your scene so and being able to do that in the immersive 360 design space that was totally cool um I remember the first time I saw your your demo last year when you did it for us on I I was just like what the heck is this um that's amazing and so um you talked about the um what you're doing with the um the Apple display right and what do you see you know what do you see like a year two years down the road um assuming these things take off because you know there's other other PL other tools that Google that Google has put out that Apple's put out that haven't gone that well but there's no doubt that the direction is the right direction right so so where do you think blockade fits in what is this new sort of mesh experience that combines a sort of metaverse sort of thing with reality like where do you like where do you see where do you see blockades sitting so we we've actually purposely stayed very Niche focused on 360 immersive design space which actually is still very complicated especially if you're leveraging all of the Gen generative AI capabilities of your creation process within that space um but what is the biggest frustration with users is their ability to control and optimize and iterate on the thing they're trying to create so if you've ever used chat gbt or any other generator I'm sure you get to a point where you're like oh my God that is not the thing I'm looking for and then you might take something that worked a little bit and you move on but in a lot of cases it's not highly uh it doesn't have high utility for you right as output so we are creating not only just the generative IML side but also the uh user interface the sdks that are needed for utilizing the underlying technology um so for example with apple even though there's like not a ton of users with them they're going to have a cheaper version of the soon and app developers are definitely uh designing for these immersive experiences right now and immersive apps but what what you'll find is that every single app within the apple head like headset is allows you to be in an environment so so there's going to be a lot more demand for customization that matches the user experience and set and setting of whatever they're doing um and then you can do things like audio reactive you can have light that's reactive based on the environment so there's a lot of um with there's a lot of I guess like granular areas for us to explore that will allow us to be the specialists in environments where other people are focusing more broad on uh various generation capabilities I suppose so we are the only uh environment generator especially with and with 3D uh that exists today now I don't know um if you if you cover this quite as in depth because I didn't get it at first um but your your your users really are typically game developers right game game platforms um and so when you think about like I think I'm saying this just so that people who are watching can understand that the you you're not saying that like Joe Schmo would be necessarily subscribed to using your API and do these things that that one of the things that blockade and correct me if wrong one of the thing BL blockade does is makes it so that these teams that are developing games can do them an order of magnitude more quickly and efficiently and inexpensively um right well that is that is definitely uh one of their major sectors but um actually so we have 100,000 registered users which is a lot and um only what was it like 1,800 1900 of those are paying users so the goal is to actually convert all of those interested users into like this being a real need for them in order for their uh creative projects so actually uh we do think that immersive storytelling and immersive design so design designers will uh benefit from this tool even if it's concept like we talked with the Amazon Studios and so for something called previs when you're starting concept out your scenes um they're really interested in how they could use this tool for that purpose so it's a matter of like how best can we create environments and then who's using that really does span from a casual mid Journey type user that's just curious all the way to the professional Market but we are targeting the professional market right now because those are the people that can build real products that's great that's great do we have any other questions up here no okay well thank you very much I will be coming right up there [Applause] now wow let me see here see margarite this is how I do the notes okay so hi it's me again Russell and uh I did want to talk a little bit take a little break from all the pitches and everything and talk a little bit about um um talk really to Founders and to people who are interested in solving problems and and driving Innovation um I'm going to be talking more about this in a session um I think on Saturday but I wanted to give sort of a a really high level intro to it um and hopefully let's see if I can try one more thing to get it looking a little more right um h no Let's Just Go With It screw it we're going live um there we go so so it's all about how we how we innovate and why you know why do we even need startup and why are things so freaking hard for startups when you'd think that we're blazing a new territory this shouldn't be that hard there shouldn't be so many things built up and fighting us and uh you'll note that I did use some uh you know in the old days you used to come up with your deck and you worked with an artist to come up with uh um with pictures and everything that go along with it so I uh just used Dolly to come up with with images and I was really interesting you know how in dreams you like try to look at the clock you try to read words it looks like gibberish like even though I gave it the words it still came out like gibberish it was really interesting how gibbered it was but you'll you'll see so um so you know all of us in our lives we see all around us every day how much technology changes how many things have um how many things have had to happen before we could get to where we are and and how often times we end up getting back to where we started but in a different way and Technology keeps on going you get this this strange sort of cycle and this is uh this was using sort of Music um as a as an example of it I'm a big fan of Corey drro and he talks about this in a few of his different books and different talks um he also talks about inch ification which I won't get into but uh but you know this you can sort of follow the path of written music to played music to streaming music and all that that kind of stuff um there are are many many business models that you can look at in this picture that were made and destroyed at subsequent steps um and so as a as a Founder like that is what you're doing you're trying to find a way either to fit into an existing technology or an te an existing method of do of doing business or you are really changing things and really really mixing things up so um if you look at sort of Music disruption um you started off and you had composers and the composers would write their music you didn't really have great printing presses necessarily right away and so they had to conduct they had either play themselves or they had to conduct the actual Orchestra or group of musical providers that music creators that would actually let you listen to music and you had to be there to listen to it then um printed music came out and the printing made it so anyone that could play an instrument could play it themselves or they could hire somebody to play and so the uh the the artists the musicians themselves became sort of these like tools that you would use to play music that was provided by the greats who made them then um musical recordings came out right and so you could hear the music from the from the artist that you wanted by the composer that you wanted whenever you wanted now when this happened Believe It or Not There were huge laws that had to change because the printed music Publishers wanted to sue all the recording the new nent recording industry people making records on wax essentially um of of music right and they were trying to stop them right and so there were there were regulations and laws that had to be passed to enable someone to actually make a recording and distribute it and the royalties associated with that have been fluid over time so then that happened right and then you had um so you had the this recording industry then you had different platforms for Distributing it when you went from from records to tapes finally to streaming which totally blew it up um with the Napster you know the Napster changes that started there um down to now where everybody's listening to Spotify and the artists are getting you know half a penny for every time time someone listens to it this disruption every step of the way was a new potential business model and a new business failure right and that's how you really should think about what you're trying to do with your company right and and a lot of the companies that that we have in BV and the ones you've already seen the ones you will see are really focusing on that how you know what are the changes that can make that bring things to the user or to The Listener or to whoever it is um in a way that eliminates a middleman makes it more efficient makes it more pleasurable changes the way we all can work together so disruption is kind of is kind of neat you've got this real disruption stuff um and then you've got the idea of pseudo disruption and um real disruption is is something like um like when the radio came out and newspapers or when television came out and the radio now newspapers is still around radio's still around TV's still around we have Internet streaming but those took a huge chunk out of the existing um media in in in in a really really short time they didn't go away but they have had and you've normally you know see this talked about with the adoption cycle of different Technologies but what it is is really a business model disruption cell phones were another thing in uh you know in the 70s and 80s in the United States we're like oh yeah we have the best you know technology the best phone system best you know broadcast television all these different things uh pretty soon 80s and 90s especially when you look at um in Asia they started deploying you know mobile networks and mobile technologies that we were very hesitant to adopt in the United States and the United States is arguably one that's been left behind because we were so strong in the old technology another business model that was killed and those of you as anyone remember MCI so MCI was one of the first competitors to AT&T they set up um they set up radio radio towers that would transmit wirelessly and that was how they competed with AT&T who had these lines that was really really Innovative technology that they were doing of course nether gone um then you look at things like pseudo um pseudo disruption and pseudo disruption Happ happens largely because of some regulatory element or some business moat that's been created so if you look at what Uber did um and they broke the taxi cartels in city after city right and you I'm sure you've heard the stories about how um how taxi cabs used to have to buy the coin to register to to drive around there wasn't anything they were really changing about really anything other than maybe using a mobile app and doing some more real-time stuff Uber merely made it so that you didn't have to go get a special licensing and you didn't have to go do um you know do go go through this whole process to be able to drive a taxi cab essentially you could turn your c car into one to the end user it was about the same service right and maybe in the beginning it was a little Superior now it's just the same crap you're getting in somebody's car in the back and riding in it so it was it was definitely disruptive um any of the taxi cab companies are there anybody who held a coin um um or a license to be a cab in uh in England or anything like that their their their business model was upset in a huge way now I think it's interesting what is this web 3 in blockchain and crypto like is crypto genuine or is crypto pseudo disruption you can make Arguments for both I mean money money transfers they're highly regulated there's a there's a big moat around it regulatory wise the SEC and really the power and and and the big mines and blockchain are always butting heads over it um Hester Pierce is going to be here Tong Chan is going to be here um talking about just those kinds of things as e Denver comes on however there's also you know a dismi disintermediation you don't need to have a bank like I I tell people all the time say oh what exchange do you use it's like well I use exchanges as little as possible because I don't need an exchange like to me an exchange is just an onramp ramp or off-ramp we don't we can do you know peer-to-peer exchanges um that is both I guess it's both genuine and pseudo um disruption we'll see in the next couple of years what really happens but we will know for sure if the regula regulations don't change and the rest of the world changes in the United States doesn't that um that maybe it was more pseudo regulation pseudo um disruption is what's holding back blockchain so there are some different tools that all the competition for anybody who's starting up a startup has to deal with these Moes um that are protecting them and um they really really hamstring you uh and uh it's probably the hardest thing about being a f a Founder is you can find your business problem you can find your solution you can even make a really useful usable solution however when it gets down to um to actually implementing it and going up against the competition there are these Moes um these steering Trends so you get like the Googles the apples they have so much control they can sway what everyone is talking about so Apple wants us to learn about their new dis their new um visual dis what's it what's it called I can't I for some reason I've got it what is it Mark ah Vision Pro right so Apple Vision Pro everybody wants to talk about that they're not talking about anything else that they might be I mean the fact that OSX is getting crappier and crappier every year or that iOS can no longer have a a connection that doesn't get lost when you walk 10 feet or something like that those aren't necessarily true but they can distract you from real business opportunities for your company and push you into one that they have control over that they can put you into their system with their moat with their access um you've got resource control that can be information that can be the data like um Facebook Twitter they have information about you that they resell because you are the product YouTube they control all that so they basically if anyone wants to play and communicate with the people that they have they have to go through them in the channels that they've identified um you've got regulatory manipulation so the big players are putting up blockers to make it so small players can't um in the uh in the payment card industry like credit cards debit cards there are things called the payment card industry digital security standards um you may have rfps that go out for services that require you to have three years of of uh of contracts that show that you have this clearance well if you're a new company you can't have that at all right um so there's a lot of things regulatory wise that they can do to stop you and then the the worst thing and and uh Microsoft was infamously doing this and came out think book micros surfs um which was they just acquire their competition uh they acquire them and put them out and then they bury it I mean any of you who used um mint the service that was bought by into it mint was a great service put together you could manage your own finances um and it is being Sunset and there's nothing to replace it um I would argue that there were probably 50 great wallets for doing crypto um four years ago and now there's hardly any and none and almost none of them can you actually import from a from a printed out QR coded key so anyway that's just a personal problem but uh but there are all sorts of ways that they are stifling disruptors um and and you have to walk this um you know walk this Gauntlet as a founder and figure out like what kind of um startup you want to be now I'm not going to talk about this stuff because this is all what as a as a society we can do and uh we can talk about that some other time but I do want like everybody to think about like what how are you disrupting and what kind of a Founder what kind of a company do you want do you want to do genuine or pseudo disruption um which one do you have to do right are you trying to do something that you can establish change really quickly or is it something that this is going to be a slow roll of a change um are you doing this for the progress of of society or are you doing this merely for money are you doing in sort of a regenerative M way that's going to be helping the helping a larger Community or are you just going to be helping a small group of people or just yourself um like I said this is a a real quick preview to some of the stuff I'm going to be talking about in a different talk but I did think it was really important to um to frame it that way so um let's stop there and get back to where we really should be um the so any of the founders that we've got if you guys want to come up here here we're going to do some question and answers with you guys there's three seats so who wants they're going fast these are my Founders my BB folks I didn't tell anyone I was going to do this so you're and you haven't even they haven't even seen you yet so have a seat sure oh you booted margarite you guys that's not very nice no no no go ahead ahead so I don't know if any of you there have questions if you do raise your hand we've got a mic um so you can ask but I'm really interested so actually we this is a a good mix of people um that we have why don't you first introduce introduce yourselves again actually especially Adam because we haven't talked to you so you want to start all right so my name is Adam zasada uh I represent today here Olympics a company which is a web pregame development Studio but I'm also the founder and uh CEO of xerx kyc backed by bicorn we won the pitch tank last year we had had an incredible story uh we learned a lot about the regulations in the crypto space and after over a year a year and a half of researching this topic don't tell them every all the all your stuff you're going to tell them your pitch too so all right but yeah don't tell me your whole story yeah so I guess I guess that's it I guess that's it you know uh but what I want to say is like what we realized you know after a year and a half is that being an expert in crypto regulations means being aware of the lack of clarity for sure yeah hey uh JJ from Smart funds uh and we're the real world asset tokenization platform um and Al alternative investing Brett Stewart from split social uh we're flipping the script from an ad-based the consumer is the product to a subscription based community of creators great so so um here's the the first question I want to ask you and this is one that everyone who's ever been a Founder not everyone but I guess 99% really um have to deal with is money right um money when it comes in seems like it's never going to stop and as soon as it does stop it just evaporates really much much faster than you um ever expected and uh I would my first question would be what is one thing that you spent money on in your first 3 to six months that if you could take it all back you uh you like this is the one thing that would make a difference to you that that you would have uh have changed product can you expand on that well if I could do it again we raised last year right we were trying to raise so last year was quite tough for crypto I mean you're probably a scam or a fraud plus uh all the you know cold wallet VCS had their money in FTX so and also interest rates Etc so what I mean by this is I would focus you know the funds that I had to build um a funnel for onboarding of people to whitel list them for my project and show it to my investors look I got 10,000 people waiting for nothing of course I would phrase it differently rather than I would have built everything and then be like oh but you have no traction you know so that was it so you so so it is that you put all that into having all these people whitelisted and and knowing that they were there only and to find out that that really didn't help you I had the 2021 uh Playbook where you build a proof of concept get an MVP get some Partners we partnered with one of the biggest companies in the identity space we also launched with a product with hle protocols so you can privately that I'll talk in my presentation but basically we had some clients proof of concept successful not enough for investors okay makes sense JJ uh so unquestionably the amount of money wasted on legal work um so uh when I first met Russell and uh uh showed him what we were working on um we were also working on mcon right yes correct um we were working on a um a different version of the product that was related to open-ended uh vehicles and uh hedge funds um and so we built an MVP for that um and you know a little bit too early to Market but also um all sorts of compliance headaches um but in order to just build an MVP right there's still an incredible amount of legal work that needs to be done just to just to have an MVP that's compliant so the compliance costs uh in this space are are a pretty significant barrier to entry uh I would agree with the product statement um I think we are really ambitious with our product development and we just wanted to provide a lot of value and get it to Market and start working right away um I think in the modern world there's a lot of low code Solutions along with a service offering that can get you more traction early on to get early investors more interested so Margaret I don't know if you'd be interested in answering this question because you're up there but they have a m would you m would you mind can you answer the to the question was like if you could go back in your first like for you you've been doing this for a little longer um like your first maybe year what would you not spend money on Margaret's being being uh asked questions by multiple people now oh here she's coming down so it's okay okay sorry that I was like it's silly not to have you up here oh here so one thing I would do differently over the course of block aade started as a game Studio back a web 3 game Studio back in um 20 January 2018 right when nfts were getting traction um I had been a creative in the Bitcoin space since uh 2014 uh worked with Bitcoin in creative ways for art so I was very green when I started I think for me some of the biggest challenges were having done smaller successful projects with a lower burn before really ramping up into doing the more ambitious projects but um being more slow and methodical in building up the revenues and being self-sufficient being sustainable and then taking investment to put that into a model that's proven that works and now I'm just accelerating my sales funnel and targeted marketing and things like that so I think that working in Innovative technology it's it's really easy to get excited and jump the gun and take a bunch of money early and then um and then work and then it's just very hard to for example building web 3 games the technology of the blockchain underneath you is still constantly being in innovated and then you're trying to build a game application on top which is already a really hard challenge so that by the time you bring this to the market there's a good chance you're going to be completely outdated in how you're operating um and I that's probably true for a lot of other application developers and how they're thinking about their ux and the product and the experience and then also the functionality of how they're leveraging the centralized Technologies so sorry if that was too long that was great so um so another thing that comes up is um is sort of uh determining who your customer really is and who you're developing your your company for for and identifying your users and I uh I know for for for me and in a couple of different startups that I've been in um and certainly many of that I've seen is that this changes you have to do pivots quite often um maybe if uh if not about users maybe if each of you could recognize like a pivot that you felt was was critical and uh whether it was super impactful to the business or not um and also how it affected you and sort of what you thought about the company when you start with that JJ sure so as I mentioned you know we uh our our SPV and real world asset um direction is a pivot a somewhat of a pivot um as we had started as um uh back office infrastructure for onchain hedge funds and when we started with that product um we thought that our our first customers were all going to be the the degens right the degens who um understood how to um use for lack of a better word onchain uh Financial Services um and that these you know uh the DG would be the hedge fund cios of the future um now we still think that's probably going to happen but not for at least a couple more years so um you know there was uh uh both compliance um issues that were not necessarily our fault but um you know the the Regulatory Agencies have been playing necessarily that fair so they've thrown a cou they had thrown a couple of uh extra roadblocks in the way um so between that and the timing that's uh what helped us kind of uh shift a little bit to the real world asset stuff um for which the timing is now great so um a well-timed pivot can always go well yeah so when we first launched our product we assumed that our target audience was YouTubers people that were using tools like patreon and uscreen um we thought that they were frustrated with YouTube and that they needed something like our platform to succeed uh we spent a lot of time talking to these creators hearing from them that they wanted to be paid more but they weren't ready to make the switch and we realized that they actually really enjoy YouTube um it took us a while to realize that there's an entire audience of creators or an entire group of creators that are left behind by social media uh social media really rewards very frequent posting uh lower quality content and there's an entire group of creators that have been to film School they've apprenticed under top filmmakers and they want to make art and they want to get into storytelling and they're left behind by the current system so once we discovered that we have had a lot more luck talking to creators and have found a lot more people that are interested in our product I'm skipping this one yeah um for us uh we as a web 3 game Studio we had raised capital in 2021 uh about $5 million to build a cyberpunk RPG and then as we're developing this is a multi-year development project um I come into passing with a old friend of mine who built an AI company and it's akin to Mid journey in various ways but with a lot more user controls the platform hasn't really taken off and he was wanting my advice and also help in fundraising but as I was working with this platform I started to be able to make my our own game characters so all of this game was 2D but all of the game characters on demand um and I realized I mean this content creation for games and scalable content is one of the most expensive problems and um it had taken us multiple Cycles you generally to get content get it rigged up do Q Q&A do tweakings and then finally be able to take it to to Market and product um so if you could just have faucets of content that was designed around your specifications that could be generated in real time this would be huge especially for web 3 developers where content in like that part of it is really really difficult um and especially if you have need ideas and you want to move iteratively so I made the decision uh back in 2022 to acquire this ml team um and very high risk at the time 2022 like mid Journey had just hit the market um it was yet to be seen how big generative AI was going to be how defensible it was if you could build a product that could be monetized um instead of continuing work on the game we decided to think about what would the largest problem we could go after and the fastest to Market that we could do and with our skill sets with his team doing large resolution images in 360 was something we launched within 2 months of the acquisition um and then from there being able to monetize so like it was the goal of still though wanting to create games is still there but understanding that how we make games is fundamentally changed and will continue to change that to spend your money in participating in that development process um and then hopefully in the future being able to utilize those Technologies great so we had you two basically decided that your story to your users and the users that tell that you were targeting was a little inconsistent and you actually decided that once you started building what you needed to do the tool that you actually supposed to be building that there was more value in templa that and making it something that more people could leverage y um so that's that's really important information um are there any questions out up there I've got more but if there's any other ones I don't want to skip you guys no okay so as far as recruiting um this is a really really hard thing uh for for all startups uh and when you have very limited resources what would you tell to um another startup you know starting today you know about the team that you need to um to get you through to the next phase um do you want to start with that one sure so um my project started as a hakon project so the original team was kind of organic although not everybody joined Jeremy from our original team is here shout out Jeremy Altan who was the only one who didn't join our Corporation even though he initially wanted to but we were delayed too much with the document documents and so on he's presenting at near today as one of the uh near people you know leading the leading the pack um regarding other top talent that we hired we hired a 10x engineer who was the only person who worked more than me in a co-working space in Bali and it there would be no way that a startup like ours would be able to hire him for you know equity and and and and and for very little payroll if we hadn't met in person and just bonded as friends you know so these personal connections I think are very important and word of mouth because you really compete with huge companies out there and unless you do exactly what somebody wanted to do you really you know competing against bigger players I'd say so uh with the I would say even retaining the talent so like for us in acquiring the ml team uh in all of our my projects I've it's always been oh you and I together could do this thing and that thing would be amazing and so it's always been collaborative as far as the talent coming together um but then I would say the retaining the talent is another tricky part because especially in the AI space you know your top ml Engineers are being hunted down by these major players like stability and other folks who have endless pockets of um of being able to acquire them so for us it's got to be something that's fueled with passion and customers that really you're solving a pain point that there's so much appreciation coming back to the team that it creates this feedback loop in which people want to stay on the passion project even if they're making less uh yeah we've had very limited Financial Resources so uh for us building a team is has been about passion it's been about finding people that see the vision um that believe in what we're building also believe in the space and care about the space um I hav had we're very early stage so I can't really comment too much more on that sure so I think um you know as we've all sort of talked about you know having to Pivot um you know where we are in web 3 is still very early in the maturity of the technology platform form so finding product Market fit has been a challenge for you know pretty much everyone in the space um and so you almost have to expect some pivots uh along the way um and so from that perspective I think it's really important for um you know the the the core founding team um uh even more so than complimentary skill sets um people that you want to be in the Foxhole with because pivoting um and I know we just lived through uh uh the the bare Market which I'm officially putting in the rearview mirror um but you know Capital was pretty much un available to all of us uh during that time um and you know pivoting during that time um you know none of that's fun right like to be in those kind of environments where you're having to figure things out and capital is not available um and so you need people you want to be in the Foxhole with um uh you know who obviously also have complimentary skill sets so um you know if you don't have that kind of personal compatibility um then you know uh you're not going to survive the kind of messiness that that comes with the earliest stages of trying to find product Market fit in web 3 and then you know the other thing that's very unique about uh web 3 is the accessibility of talent at a place like this right so um you know just going here and not necessarily recruiting but you know you you go and you work on a hackathon project and you spend a week building with people and you know there isn't a better kind of interview SL trial process slash you know can I work with this person um so I think uh you know uh the Big hackathons E Denver in particular um is a fabulous place to find team members okay this is the last question and this one's uh uh this one's horribly self-serving so I apologize um I would love for any of you to give a 20 second sound bite that you really want of yourself saying on camera here so that you can use it for whatever purpose you want so um so we'll give you 10 seconds to think and then you can come up with the coolest thing ever that's going to get like cast all over the world and tweeted and everything so um all right so since I'm here with the Olympics protocol I'm responsible for growth we are organizing awesome compete to earn tournaments in our game Clash of orbs and uh you should go to olympics.

CC to learn more about that and we are basically creating a new sustainable web free gaming economics model where you compete to earn so you're really rewarded for winning for your skills not in the typical play to earn scenario so to speak so the hard shill he goes with the hard shill okay that's fair that's fair who wants to go next smart fund simplifies tokenization for offchain Securities if you uh I think that we're at a very difficult time in our society and content and social networks are increasingly polarizing but I'm optimistic for the future and I believe that we shape our reality with what we put in our minds and in order to change our reality we need to start thinking differently and free our minds as a creative I am very excited to see where we take generative Ai and these other emergent Technologies to see and unlock creativity at a broad scale around the world and what people will make quickly and cheaply iteratively um I'm excited that blockade Labs has participated in the world building side of this but um but where those dreams and where we can push those boundaries is still like completely open ocean at the moment and I think it's a very exciting time for the creatives in humanity thank you all and uh I I will say this um I um you know I as my I'm a chief of staff for spor down for for eth Denver and I can tell you that we all are working really hard to make eth Denver the best event ever um as the um investment Steward of buff corn Ventures I really believe in the companies the portfolio companies that we have and I think that we are on the um the precipice of an amazing time I know you hear lots of people talk about the flippening and this this or that valuation of some crypto and I would say if you're looking looking at it that way you might be looking it the wrong way um you should be looking at it at what will the web 3 economy in whatever however it like ends up turning out what will that bring how will that grow um you think about it this way gold platinum silver they're all out there and you can mine them and they're worth it for jewelry but where they're really worth it is putting it in components um making other things in the production that happen happens and the value that you add to the rest of the world and the products that come out of it and the services that can it can provide we are now technology has gotten to the point where there is no reason for web 3 not to eat the payments and B banking infrastructures lunch there's no reason for us to have any ticketing platform that isn't on blockchain there's no re like all of the different Technologies we talking about why do we have any Registries at all that on our blockchain it is time for us to come out and show show the rest of the world what blockchain can do so if you're working on applications work on applications that mean something for people because that's where we are now blockchain is at the technology technological level where we can make things that make the world a better place thank you for coming and uh stay watching buffer corn Ventures buffer corn V at um on Twitter and look for all these companies thanks um next we have you coming up to talk right okay so give him just a second we'll set up and these guys will get off and we'll give Adam a chance to tell you about what happened with Ox kyc sure thank you so Adam's going to come back up and some of the things he wasn't he was trying not to tell you he will tell you and some of the things he won't tell you at all there we go I got you got let me get that laptop I need to get oh got loads of them how are we on video he's uh setting up we're good y here you go thank you fantastic hi everyone my name is Adam zasada and I represent zerx kyc last year uh Jeremy here was pitching at the pitch tank and we won the competition and I'm going to give you a brief brief history of uh of my journey as a Founder our journey as a company and what what's next for us and for Theo Brer web free space in general especially considering web free gaming So currently we're uh you can use us as web free marketing tool for Discord and in the future telegram um and U but I'm going to go back to the start where we started so we started as a hackaton project during E4 so and we've built onchain privacy preserving kyc verification for sanctions so we verify your uh kyc profile using onfido who is our official partner and we put an onchain attestation that this wallet is not sanctioned without revealing the name and surname So currently you can use this with hle protocol to privately yield Farm on curve Bey finance and as of this week you can also do private lios taking using our onchain attestations this solves the Privacy pool problem where you are shielded from Bad actors so to speak and you can become somewhat compliant the big problem with that was that uh this solution is not fully compliant because full compliance requires the actual name and surname so the concept is a little bit self deting because our target market is probably smaller than the investment we raised so far but here is a next level of the journey that we we we envisioned uh before as like a decentralized identity protocol and we've worked with the biggest industry on ramps and off ramps uh in the world on these designs digital identity Foundation polygon ID many more we got all the designs for the actual implementation so imagine you're you're an on-ramp and you're able to uh provide credentials to our decentralized storage which is accepted by another vendor let's say this is moonay let's say this is uh ramp Network then they could uh talk to each other and um profit share on the reusable kyc credentials at users permission so this is like a future protocol that can be also used to gamify communities on Discord quite complicated but long story short we are just providing a reusable identity um solution and uh but we've never managed to actually build it because it's super difficult to get past the the kind of uh gatekeeping of these big companies which are amazing and are happy to talk about it but since there is lack of uh regulatory Clarity we've had I mean these these things take time this will probably take years to actually become a reality even though technically it's possible already today and uh one of the companies samab is doing like a CFI version of it right now with reusable credentials within for web free companies um moving on we we we since this was kind of a flop in terms of I mean we we've created a product but we were like okay sanctions sanctions sanctions but uh not enough clients maybe we can get 20 30k revenues that's not enough to to raise money so we went like what's the biggest what's the biggest Trend in web free right now where we have the biggest amount of users since we earn money on a per user basis and we're like web free gaming everybody's saying web free gaming is going to be the next big thing here you have you know 100 million gamers in next two years that's probably now year and a half from now you have couple million daily active wallets in total um depends how you calculate so we thought okay there's a lot of bots and duplicate accounts farming rewards farming these games uh let's use our facial biometric system to Shield uh users from from you know from these Bots and duplicate accounts we've um so we've created an onchain uniqueness verification protocol as well as API for verification of uniqueness on the basis of facial biometric used by a web free game studio called insert stons as well as it's possible to use it for uh for Galaxia Studios a web free game Studio Discord because we realize we can also gamify this and use these facial Biometrics on Discord so we we found a new problem there's over 25 million daily active users on Discord 4 million are Bots and spam 6 million are multi accounting and everybody's tired or doing captas and all sorts of verifications all the time so we're like verify yourself once show your face and you're done but this was a problem because Community moderators weren't really happy with um talking to customers to tell them that hey you have to go to this external website to verify your facial Biometrics this is why we pivoted yet again change the name to sunscreen because kyc triggers some people on Discord as you can imagine and uh decided that maybe instead of uh and this been only validated with the founders of soundbox for now that they would be happy to use it that so to use instead of a face we' use device fingerprinting which you can do natively within Discord or within telegram that would mean one user one device so you could still Farm rewards if you have more devices but it's an incremental step but this is more of an idea for a feature rather than a whole company I believe but this is where we where we came at um and this is where we're currently at actually um oops did I break something or maybe I'm just going to skip this slide well we we had some competition for sunscreen there is bot Basher but uh you know there their solution um by human old their solution is pretty good but it's $1 per user that's really quite a lot and worldcoin is obviously trying to scan us all we want to scan us all as well but we want to start with the devices you could plug into G passport and we can start competing with them but we need like a million dollars at least to get it started uh We've gaed a huge team shout out mg Dylan uh Jeremy and uh and the rest of the pack we are currently profitable but that's not because we sell anything to our customers that's just because we became small software house uh or actually two of our employees are working for our friends SL Partners um and uh I've recently joined that's why I'm here uh Olympics a web free game compete to earn protocol which we are if we if we will be able to deliver on our promise of the device fingerprint for creation of unique invites for the Discord server we' be able to use this straight away at Olympics where I'm responsible for growth to actually uh build Fair uh giveaway and gaming competitions to grow the community organically without people farming rewards and with a 100% certainty an incredible user experience for getting real people onto your server fast so this is this is our goal we raised uh so far 200k from outlier Ventures buff aorn and Angel Investors including the Celestia CTO um I already talked about heno and uh here is like a slide which technically describes our zero knowledge proof and I still have a lot of time but one thing I'll add is that uh so these on train attestations they're quite useful for a lot of things um they can be also used for for example indicating that there is a full kyc profile available for a given user so um I can talk a long time about Mica regulations for example in this in this uh in this aspect Mica requires so what's the big problem with these big onramps why aren't they jumping on it if it's this streamlines the kyc process for them because they could potentially use the kyc profile of someone who already used moonay to someone who already used ramp and profit pay for the kyc but still less than doing it all over again as well as well what's the problem why why aren't they doing it and it's a regulatory uncertainty so right now micro regulation in combination with aml5 as well as the travel rule uh requires uh requires transfers to be verified over €1,000 for incoming and outgoing transactions within European Union what this means is that basically if you send ,000 to a metamask wallet or you receive ,000 from a metamask type wallet self-hosted wallet any kind of wallet you have to kyc the originator which is kind of crazy how would you so you receive ,000 from someone and the virtual asset service provider has to freeze These funds until they verify themselves with a kyc similar thing is happening in the US with the regulation for incoming transactions over 10,000 uh that you have to uh kyc it at source so how do you go about it well basically it's really difficult to enforce it and there is a big question mark when I talk to CEOs of these biggest onramps multi-million dollar companies they say we've seen a lot of Comm uh we've seen a lot of compliance issues and compliance thresholds that were enforced and never really came to fruition because how will the European Union for example verify that this metamask wallet is not within the European Union or that you will claim that you're not sending this to yourself and blah blah blah so the the space thinks this is kind of not true that these regulations will actually be enforced so it's Al also not really actionable from our standpoint and from investor standpoint uh the space of decentralized ID is also very crowded because I'm sure you've already heard about a couple of projects in the space nobody almost nobody uh was really thinking about it like we did in on this slide where I showed the reasonable kyc uh credentials which we believe is the best design in the world right now and some uh industry leaders would agree but it's not really actable right now so this is the design that will become a billion dollar company in a couple of years but uh for now it's in a freeze mode until we find better times or until we get the viral marketing tool going on with Olympics uh thank you very much and I guess I got 10 more minutes for Q&A thank you Russell and big shout out to Buffy corn Ventures big shout out to miow from Olympics the CEO without him I wouldn't be here today without Russell same thing so I wanted to come up here and ask a couple questions too are there any questions up there that we have I don't think um if there are any come pop up then just the mic is over there um because one of the things that I really loved about Ox kyc was uh I was the um I ran the um my Colorado program in the state of Colorado so I was the director of digital transformation here and we came out with the first state sponsored DMV sponsored digital ID and uh and I have a lot of like I like you talking about regulations and uncertainty like it's hard for people to understand how much that can affect you so just imagine that you have like the blessing from the DMV from the governor of the of of a state that a digital a digital ID digital identity digital ID is good right you can use it it's legal the whole thing and yet we had to create training programs for all the grocery stores so that their training people would do it we still to this day I think could never convince Whole Foods that we weren't scamming them with the uh um with thing just because lawyers typically are not paid to be liberal in how they interpret things they're they're they're they're trying to keep you safe so regulatory wise this is a great example of there's this moat and you could because originally you talked about kyc which is why kyc which is know your customer in case you don't know we're all in crypto we know that but um but uh but and it's a little different there's different types of kyc that you have to have and and the idea of having a tokenization of that proof is brilliant and it makes intuitive sense to everyone that understands it but you know 15 years ago there were lots of states in the United States that didn't accept digital signatures so that you could do in electronic form like DocuSign wasn't around then or it wasn't accepted everywhere and and like this is exactly you said this could be a $2 million thing or two billion dollar dollar dollar thing yeah two million two billion dollar thing but um but regulatory wise they're not willing to do it when you look at a kyc process for a bank can cost them $50 $80 per person if you can have a process that does it for eight or N9 that's a huge opportunity for disruption um so so a couple of things I wanted to ask there were a couple of different iterations you went to you started off with a kyc which um which I think was Capital kyc it was for financial transactions and everything right then you went to um liveness to to make sure that someone was uh in like duplicating uh you know that you weren't a duplicate of your of yourself um mainly for like online communities and stuff like that they were already there right gaming most web three Gaming use cases so I think it's interesting that you're going to e Olympics because the the biggest opportunity for all of this in my opinion is gambling um as gambling gets more and more Le can you speak a little bit to sort of what you think at least the opportunity is in the gaming space for um for this kind of uh for for this kind of a solution um in the near future uh okay so uh imagine like you're did you ever play poker for like big Stakes high Stakes or anything like this but you but you can feel the thrill of of money gambling all right so essentially with Olympics is what we want to bring to uh to the web free Gaming Community is the you know the thrill the dopamine Rush of actually being able to play for Stakes so Olympics created something called the trust which is a mechanism where you lock into a smart contract uh money that you're are sure that the person you're winning against won't quit and just leave when they feel like they're going to lose and uh plus the compan is already operational for four years and they built a whole stack of uh unity and other you know plugins that that are able to you can essentially just run your game really easily really quickly on top of Olympics and out the web free capabilities in order to compete to earn so I think that relates to your question did I answer it completely or would you would you want me to add anything well I mean I I'd say like you know with with all the online gambling that's that's out there and more gaming that's coming out and even here like in Colorado we did the game Jam three or four years ago we were trying to use like oracles to do nonchain non-skill based gaming okay which still would need like some sort of identifying aspect how close do you think the gaming industry is at a much larger level not just like online gaming but across the board to accepting a digital digitally proved identity I mean all all games that are bigger have some sort of identifier for each player it's very it's very vague and it's sometimes really bad for example sandbox never really had a problem problem with you know people cheating because the game is kind of like a Sandbox as the name suggests I mean pan unintended uh so but when I talk to them and they see one device one user they're excited they are not so excited when they see they have to go to an external page but if we could do it seamlessly within with the protocol that we we have a designed for well then you at least can map users to devices later you can map it to addresses you know this is the double-edge of web free that unless you have fully homomorphic encryption or uh basically some kind of private ZK chains your all of your transactions on chain that's good really for rewards and like you know showing nfts that you get as rewards for games and so on and so forth you can combine this into a profile connect it to your ens gitcoin passport and device fingerprint we could be the device fingerprint part of it you know you can now also connect your worldcoin account which is kind of the Maxi version of what we tried to build and for some time we tried to be you know a competitor so to speak even but I I guess that answerers complety right now so we can just add one one small brick to the wall but in the in in a good sense you know like like Pink Floyd okay okay any any other questions up there okay thanks a lot really appreciate it okay next up is open dollar yes thank you um I always mess up his name Joseph is it shitti pretty close I should know I'm Italian too I should know how to say his name but I don't um but uh but Joseph has been involved in the spor Dow eth Denver Community for a long time the first spor proposal oh and he made the first spor Dow proposal he also he and his team have been like doing amazing work over at Camp Biddle we taking people from uh from 0 to one on uh getting them up and ready for a career in web 3 development among other things and uh just about every Community that's doing good things or trying to do good things um Joseph has um has some sort of some sort of uh part of I think um you see him on Twitter as as Cupa Joseph I think and uh I'll just hand it off to you uh enjoy and and knock everybody sock socks off thank you Russell wow incred incredible audience today thank you so much everybody for coming out um yeah I'm I'm Joseph shizzy I'm one of the co-founders of open dollar uh and we are building a new decentralized over collateralized stable coin on arbitrum that is more flexible powerful and safer than any other stable coin that exists uh so the problem that we're trying to solve is defi lending is still very inflexible today and there's a lot of downsides to that uh debt is tied to account right why is that such a big weakness you would never take out a 30-year mortgage on a house if you couldn't sell the house until your loan was paid back right but that's exactly how lending Works in defi right now you deposit collateral you can take out a loan but you can never access your Capital you can never access your collateral until your loans are paid back on a on compound maker every every uh uh lending protocol in defi uh would which means that there's no secondary loan markets because those loans are tied to accounts and uh if you want to close out or get out of a position you always have to find Capital to do so and redemptions for stable coins um are involuntary or not existent with uh stable coin protocols like liquidy you can redeem your stable coin against collateral and unlock it but you can do it against other people's vaults without their consent uh and it has been a really great safety measure for liquidity but it means that their protocol hasn't grown as fast as it could and it's not as scalable uh uh for the type of lending that we want to bring to the rest of the world so our solution for open dollar is we've created a new defi primitive called nfvs non-fungible vaults uh a non-fungible vault is a debt position it has collateral inside of it and it also has debt minted against it so every time you open a CDP with open dollar you get an nfv you get to deposit liquid stake tokens like Lio eth or rocket pool eth and you get to borrow the OD open dollar stable coin against it when you want to get out of that position you don't have to pay back your debt you can sell the entire position as an nft on any kind of marketplace and if you're holding the stable coin and you want to get out of it and into the underlying collateral that is backing it you can do so by buying somebody else's Vault on the marketplace when usdc dep pegged last spring you don't get to call up Circle and call them at 2 am on a Saturday and say hey guys uh send me one of those treasury bills that's backing your your stable coin they don't do that right they don't have redemptions they don't have a way for you to get in and out of those positions and actually creating uh a way for people to redeem their stable coin for the underlying uh makes it much safer so I think we can actually build stable coins that are safer in defi uh than with traditional Financial rails uh and and just you know make defi safer overall so OD that's the the over collateralized LST back stable coin um will be launched on arbitrum First and we are uh uh planning to launch in the next few weeks uh so OD will always be over collateralized which means that it's always fully backed by more than 100% of the value in the tokens behind it so no Pon inomics so how does open dollar make money um we get a 2% or slightly less stability fee on the OD that people borrow from us uh if there are liquidations if the value of your collateral goes down your position is liquidated and we can earn additional fees on liquidation penalties I think there are other stable coins that want to pass the yield from collateral onto the stable coin holders um and this is a real mistake because the people who are minting the new stable coin who are adding tvl and providing the most value to the uh the most value to the protocol are the people actively managing safes so 100% of the yield deposited uh in lsts into open goes to the depositors we don't take any cut on that so the market size uh that we're trying to address here is actually uh I think really interesting um in the US the secondary loan Market is $3 trillion a year T trillion with a t uh and in defi it's currently zero dollars right there are no secondary loan marketplaces in defi um and if there if there are come see me because I I'd really like to learn more but I haven't seen any anything um because in every lending protocol that uh has has come about in Def so far we've always tied debt to accounts and it doesn't have to be that way so we can bring the feature set of defi lending up to traditional Finance um and start and and make a lot of sense to traditional uh uh Financial funds who are doing tons of volume in secondary loans um and doing interest rate swaps and all of these kinds of financial Primitives that exist in the traditional uh traditional markets but don't exist in defi today so we can we can start to tackle that um and the stable coin Market size is currently about 150 billion uh I think that is going to grow exponentially as the demand for stable coins is very closely linked to the demand for the collateral backing them right and so as there's an exponential increase in demand for lsts uh and there's more are you he's not pointing at me okay um as there's an exponential increase in demand for lsts and the LST Market Market size Rises we're going to meet this demand for leverage on those assets so there is a lot of competition there's a lot of uh other stable coins out there um and there's a lot of different uh breakdowns and tradeoffs that you get with every one of them we've been hugely inspired by liquidy hugely usually inspired by maker and a and other successful lending protocols and we've taken the best of Maker's really powerful liquidation engine we've taken the best of liquidy redemption module that lets people get out of the stable coin and makes it safer um and we've we've taken all that inspiration and put it into the next generation of stable coins which is open dollar and added our non-fungible vaults on top of it so uh our our own new Financial defi primi our own new Financial primitive uh for nfvs and really trying to take the best of um what exists now and then iterate on it and and really bring defi up a level uh and match the feature set of traditional Finance so a little bit about our team uh I'm Joseph as I said before uh before starting open dollar I was working at openc and helped build the marketplace uh seport behind Open Sea so slightly more than 1% of all ethereum transactions used smart contracts that I've written or contributed to um before that I was I was the first devell hired at gitcoin and I was a lead blockchain engineer at Airbus my CTO Patrick um worked at superfluid and was the first employee or early employee at several uh other defi startups that have been successful we just added Ivan to our team recently who uh was a BD lead at at Lio and uh is really helping with our goto Market working with uh lots of large hedge funds family offices and people holding a lot of Lio eth who are looking for additional Financial Services on top of that so I'm very excited to announce that we are this is the first time announcing this publicly we are officially uh raising another funding round another seed round for open dollar to help us scale uh and bring non-fungible vaults to Defi and bring a secondary loans to the masses uh and and um and really scale our operations we raised the preed round uh led by skycatcher and supported by Buffy corn Ventures so thanks for having us here today um and we also have Tom Preston Warner who's one of the co-founders of GitHub as one of our advisers and uh several other um investment Dows and syndicates it's really cool because actually the majority of our investors um are not traditional VCS they investment Dows or syndicates of more people so the open dollar cap table is really stacked with a lot of really smart people who who believe in in us and believe in defi which is um really exciting we've done one uh we've done one audit so far with code Arena we posted a $355,000 uh Bounty Challenge on COD Arena and had hundreds of people contribute to the security of open dollar and we're fin we're finalizing one more audit with Quant stamp that will be uh the report for that will be published in the next week or two and then we'll will be ready to go live uh and raise more funding to scale open dollar so that's that's about us uh open dollar is the most flexible stable coin protocol um and yeah thank you for your time everybody I think Russell is going to come up and do some ask questions I you haven't been here to see this excellent so you were you were an event so I I like to be up here and and ask questions because it's more fun up here um so you know you and I were talking uh like last week about this a little bit why do you think that um that really the community is like seemingly satisfied with the way that borrowing you know borrowing works on blockchain with web 3 like why why has this been tolerated so long it seems like your solution that you're coming up with is one that that like is clearly something that is desperately needed you know you know Russell it's a great question and I think the best ideas are always seem simple and always seem obvious in hindsight but it took a lot of iterations for us to get here and to get to lending uh as it is in defi um and I also think it's somewhat that the people building dii protocols do not have access to the same Financial tools that hedge funds and and uh uh you know large financial institutions doing traditional Finance when Jeff Bezos wants to buy a new $500 million super yacht which he did he doesn't sell Amazon stock he borrows against it which he did right and that is something that the ultra Rich uh always have access to but most of the defi hackers that I know are are uh are young people that have not already made billions of dollars right we're we're figuring things out and so there's these these these types of Primitives that not everyone has access to and so they're not an inspiration for the type of protocols that have been built so far um so we're trying to you know bring open dollar uh to everyone and make these kind of Primitives that exist in in traditional Finance finally usable in Defi and then because it's defi accessible to more people so if you take uh like the typical web 3 worker maybe they're working with opis or something like that and they uh they don't have other sorts of investment tools necessarily that that people who have regular employment would would this help them like could they start setting up their like their sort of retirement or let's say they're sitting on5 or $6,000 they want to start saving for their retirement or something like that would that be a good use of this or would it yes I I think it's possible because I think my great great great grandkids are going to retire on my one eth validator right that's how bullish I am right um so maybe who knows but uh I think you know there are Dows like raid Guild that that person might be working for that have a big Dow treasury split between a lot of people and they want that's one of our our Target customers is is people with big Dow treasuries and you know uh they might be holding Stak eth or a liquid steak token of eth and sitting on that yield and and earning a bit and they want to be able to pay those individual contributors pay those Freelancers and and meet their monthly uh uh you know bills but they don't want to have to sell their e now you can borrow against it at a rate that is so cheap you know the the rate that we're charging 2% or less is less than the yield on lioe so that means that your loan uh you know is not going to necessarily pay itself off on a reasonable timeline but it is paying for the yield is paying for the interest that you're you're that um you're being charged right so now those Dows and those organizations like opis can access more Capital without having to sell and pay taxes which makes their entire operation more Capital efficient so this would be like something like uh with link Dow or something like that they could have or or you have a dow that's just to buy something right that you could you could you could you could fund that Treasury and then get a loan on it to do it and you wouldn't have to liquidate the treasure you wouldn't have to do yeah that's I mean that's a huge that's a huge plus I think I think it will be and the fact that the entire position is an nft means that um if you ever need to liquidate that position quickly you don't have to go find more Capital if you've already taken that OD you borrowed and invested it in other projects or created a leverage position or gone and bought other tokens or just sold it so that you can act you can have your monthly expenses right if you need to get out of that position in the future for any reason you don't need to go find more stable coin and pay back your loan you can sell the entire position as an nft which is extremely to do with all the existing nft infrastructure that has been built around Dows around nft marketplaces um and and you can use that so we get to tap into all this existing infrastructure uh and because you can get out of those loans easier you can create um higher leverage positions or take on more risk uh than in traditional defi uh lending marketplaces that's great is there uh what can we do to learn more as individuals about what you're doing and how can we be a part of it you can go to open dollar.com and follow read our documentation or our blogs on some of the principles or motivations behind the protocol um hang out on Discord or farcaster and and learn more there or come see me afterwards and uh uh you know talk to us as human beings uh and and and see how else we can collaborate okay thank you very much that's been great Russell can you take a picture of me in front of the open dollar before I go oh sorry thank you oh yeah it's definitely going to die in like 10 seconds go open dollar go open dollar good is he taking it I don't know it's a camera oh it's a camera you got it all right we're like that we're like there okay you take the picture no I'm videoing okay one second oh that's all right open dollar p people now we lost the background is it okay it's okay good no technical problems any other any other questions from anyone while we're here we still have three minutes on the clock no it's very clear to yeah there's a token it's called open dollar governor odg and it's live on arbitrum not Financial advice yeah the technical structure of the vaults every vault is an ERC 721 uh and you can transfer it normally you can approve it normally uh and it is um the images of the vault is actually this is what it actually looks like there's like an image and it's rendered as an SVG onchain uh uh yeah it's really cool so uh 721 is compatible with every nft Marketplace are the Assets in the TVA token bound account no the assets are in the coin join which is part of the safe engine uh but the ownership of the assets is owned by the safe and the safe has a particular owner which matches the nft owner excellent thank you for that great question we good did we take a picture you already took one yeah all right cool but he's making fingers at me I don't know what that means you're good all right thank you guys thanks a lot next up we have buildt cities we have Angelo coming up to tell us all about what they're doing woohoo and uh oh let's see here so a lot of these guys got here in the nick of time because we rescheduled when we're going to do this to have it be on a larger stage and uh and so some people um were running on no sleep or very little sleep and doing presentations on the Fly and so um appreciate the uh the founders Journey see you're much better than me isn't there a control code you can do we are good to go stand I or um there was one over here it's that's okay I can use this oh this fine I I'll use this yeah I'll just hold this all right good morning Denver Good Morning eth Denver um let me ask you a quick question uh raise your hand how many of you feel a very strong affinity for an online community okay got some hands here got some hands over here okay great and how many of you feel a very strong affinity for the physical neighborhood you live in some hands over here some more hands here okay cool good crossover and then now how many of you have heard of the network State all right so equivalent hands all around so this is the Right audience I'm in the right place um so my name is Angelo I'm one of the founders of build Republic and we are building a Global Cooperative of startup cities and the operating system for Network States so I want to start off by sharing uh just a little kind of origin story that eth Denver and buff gor ADV Ventures are really near and dear to our heart as this is really where we got our start about uh so it was two two years two eth Enver ago and our first check uh buff Corno was an investor as well and uh so that we could go ahead and start building now you also notice a keyword Cooperative in here which is actually the same structure as spor Dow and the nested buff of corn Ventures entity and um so I don't know if you saw the the Tweet going around but basically each Denver generated $100 million of impact for the city of Denver thanks to the Builder energy here that comes in every year from E Denver so when we see that and we see that kind of excitement and all this Innovation coming into one town we're thinking at build Republic how do we scale that to any City around the world and so one way to look at what we're doing with our platform and the build Republic Cooperative is meant to replicate the same experience any city in the world on a 24 7 365 basis so kind of the life cycle of innovation ecosystems in any City our main thesis really is that Talent opportunity and Innovation will be evenly distributed over the next decade and the built environment which is real estate infrastructure will be an extension of these shared centers of gravity of shared values and Ambitions right you know GDP of the internet does not have latitude longitude coordinates you can create value anywhere and reinvest that into local ecosystem so our mission this is really our mission within the context of that thesis is to unlock the hidden equity in communities around the globe by activating IRL startup ecosystems and economies in areas where there were none before so by creating onchain digital twins of any city in the world we're breaking down the last remaining barriers to Innovation and economic development so that opportunity is equally distributed no matter where you live so CU you see today Equity is really trapped in wouldbe Founders and Ventures due to proximity politics or perception so proximity resources consolidate into a handful of ecosystems the silicone valleys of the worlds of the world New York uh but now crosses border over the Internet passports limit our physical Mobility but we now teleport over Zoom perception of pedigree feeds bias but git repos and design portfolios show that Merit is Merit so at build Republic we ask ourselves hey what if every city in the world had the same resources as Silicone Valley what if the same alchemy that birthed y combinator Airbnb coinbase Etc could be distributed through cyberspace and manifest in the built environment of any of any city in the world solving the problems that matter to them where they are at um well we'll go straight into screenshots are a little bit easier to work with so uh this app is live today um uh the protocol is live it's been out for uh just over 6 months and um uh very easily log in right now it's you just log in with the Discord it surfaces all your digital networks and then overlays them in physical in your physical City so if you log in with and and select the eth Denver uh Discord uh and then go ahead and pick your favorite cities you would be able to actually see oh here's all the eth Denver folks you know in Austin or London or Sydney Australia and so after this conference ends uh you could still connect with those people again in any city um so this is just a kind of screenshot of the main dashboard you see we'll dive into the Denver directory and again same thing you can look for folks by both skills so if you're looking for a designer from eth Denver uh in Denver you can look here if you're looking for somebody from you know the the ethereum foundation uh and you're looking specifically for specific skill set you can do all those kind of uh filter searches uh in each city um uh and then again you can also the same way that you can view City directories you can also view different networks so if you wanted to find if you encountered an ecosystem let's say open dollar you're in their Discord and you like what they're building and you want to connect with more people from that Community you can very easily see uh who's in that community and where they're at in the world uh and by the way that's not like there's not GPS tracking it's just you opt into the city so it's not it's at the city aggregate level not um not exact coordinates um and then again same way that you can see in the directory you can see the people um each person has a profile which shows the networks that are part of uh nft collections they're they're a part of um we just introduced live video conferencing and live streaming in the platform so this is taken from one of our weekly meetings of Builders these are uh representation from five different unique countries uh and again every week we're starting to host um uh what's called our Builder Forum where people from projects come together and uh help each other move the needle forward for their projects in a few weeks we'll actually be dropping an AI agent that will automatically transcribe the contents of the of the meetups that anybody can spin up a room for and you can actually surface uh it will actually make suggestions be like oh you should connect with this person from Denver or this person from London regarding this project and that's an llm that's tagged on to the uh to the database of uh of the network um um this is our membership kind of gallery so the protocol is already generating Revenue uh and 90% of the proceeds from membership actually get reinvested back into the cities and I'll get into that in a little bit um so we're kind of dog fooding our own infrastructure also with our own community so again I mentioned that the premium membership um that's live today you can me the membership be a part of it and we're building the infrastructure now for Resident tiers which touches a little bit more of the IRL components third spaces hacker houses and actually meeting places in cities where people can connect work on the projects that they that they want to work on and uh and really help each other out um and then the citizen tier that's a little bit down the line that's kind of touches more on the network State Concepts um another way kind of look at this gitcoin for cities um but this is where we're going so this is the final kind of form really of every city where you would literally be able to go in into the platform check out whatever City you're either visiting or thinking of moving to or are already currently in you'd be able to see the projects people are working on the events that are going on in that City that relate to Innovation and building and Entrepreneurship physical spaces so that's third spaces that's hacker houses that's co-working spaces uh and we're um allowing people to list those on the directory uh and then the final piece is the treasury and governance so that's literally actually each City will have its own treasury for Capital allocation into the projects events and some of the other ecosystem development stuff this is our road map uh we're delivering the remaining 80% of that City stack this year and then uh 2025 will add on the final layers which mainly relate to uh governance and treasury um but uh that's where we're at today and um and um and that'll be kind of the foundation for growth for tomorrow so uh again for those of you who are familiar with the network state which looks like there's a lot of folks in the audience who are uh we are this is the space that we operate in and just a quick um kind of network state in one sense for those who are not familiar a network state is a highly aligned online Community with a capacity for Collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing States um build Republic in essence becomes the operating system for any online community to take these very steps and create their own full stack startup Society City and uh even new States so um this is kind of a overview on the on the left you'll see the current um this was taken from uh I believe it's uh yeah crunch based data of SE Sage Equity funding for the last thousand deals I think over the course of the last year and you'll notice all the hotspots right they're in the places you expect Silicone Valley New York um you know in Europe there and then on the other side here you see crypto asset activity scaled by a um uh a country's uh GDP so the larger bubbles indicate the higher activity relative to the size of the economy and you can see almost quite nicely the complement of all this economic activity in emerging markets that are not currently served by traditional kind of early stage kind of capital spending so when we think of network States we really view it as a vessel to fulfill our mission of unlocking hidden equity in any communities around the globe and um that's what we think the the right vehicle to do it is and um that's what we're building so we've already proven this CIS out um we have a team of three our co-founder has over 10 years of experience building startup ecosystems in smaller cities um so this is an example of a city in calan uh literally just started with kind of very Grassroots Meetup meetups uh he was doing them up to the point that he was able to get uh 40 folks regularly meeting from that he was able to um uh get local investors crowdfund a third space that's kind of a multiuse real estate and actually renovate an old Elks Lodge that hadn't been used for 10 years um and then if you walk in there today as soon as they open their doors uh day one 100% occupancy their retention rates like 98% for the building uh because that Community was built in uh beforehand it's been covered in uh courts the Atlantic uh recognized by Brookings Institute and uh a couple others Idaho this city Coran Idaho has now two times more startups per capita than the rest of the state um um so um so yeah um again creating onchain digital twins I don't want to go into too much detail I would love to Feld interest afterwards uh if you're more interested in how this works um but basically there's kind of stages you saw today we we have a directory uh we'll probably have the first city with its full onchain treasury in the next 6 months and kind of the natural progression for each City thereafter where they start to spin out as their own complete kind of um uh you know uh digital twins basically um and then naturally as a Cooperative as more cities come online uh they're kind of managing their own ecosystems their own Capital allocation uh it progressively kind of decentral izes um so we're growing we mentioned calan uh that's kind of our blueprint ecosystem um and we have more in the pipeline that are you know some more active than others and we very much designed the protocol to be something that um you get out what you put into it so as more projects are in the ecosystem more events more activity um that will unlock additional privileges in the platform itself uh and again I mentioned we are structured the the same way as sporal there's a lot of legal jargon to say that we will be a Cooperative of startup City ecosystem so all these cities will be their own entity that nests within the Cooperative um and that was very much inspired by spor Dow um and the structure there because um uh just the economic impact Denver generates for the city of Denver is just really inspiring to think how can you do that any city in the world um uh and also on a year- round basis so time me more about that if you're interested about how that's going to how that's going to work um we've tokenized land we've done a lot of like the R&D heavy lifting for the stuff that we'll be introducing later we have 160 Acres of Farmland as part of a like a sub entity as a dow that we crowdfunded on chain up in Northeast Colorado it's generating Revenue we're streaming that Revenue to uh to our members and um that's kind of the exciting components that are in the works um for um yeah this is our team I mentioned corane ecosystem lead over 10 years of experience uh building startup ecosystems in Overlook cities uh it's consulted with over 200 cities around the US myself I'm a veteran turn fittech operator that's what most my experience is um and then now working on build full-time and then our CTO uh based in uh based in build Legos uh has over 15 years or sorry 20 years uh developing uh uh developing Tech products and uh and a Serial entrepreneur so uh I'll leave you with this just a reminder every city was once a startup every city started with the first brick um you can view any City with under 100,000 people we kind of view that as like a sieg stage startup right they could grow not necessarily in terms of population but maybe value acrel and um you know this isn't that crazy when you think about and look at the history of any City uh around the world that's really just getting the resource of the right people at the right time and in a way that's transparent um and um uh yeah we have a conference coming up on Friday building Network state conference right across the street fory Museum of Transportation there's only 15 tickets left um it should be awesome it's literally an old uh it's just a bunch of old cars and uh we'll have an open bar uh at the end lunch and just a ton of great speakers uh from other network State projects that uh that we work with very closely and you can on board again today uh directly in the platform build cities. Network and um with respect to fundraising we are Fielding interest for our next round um uh that we would love to talk to you about if that's of interest thank thank you uh that was great so I'm interested uh what should someone do if they want to if they want to kick this off or like is this happen from an individual standpoint or does this happen from a right from a um from elected officials from a board like like how how should this work what what are the ways it can emerge I guess it's a great question so um uh so I have um I spent a decent amount of time in the Army and learned a lot of valuable lessons about leadership and I view a lot of this very much as a leadership challenge right you want to have a ecosystem lead in a given City it's somebody who's got to be passionate about driving innovation in that ecosystem passionate about building startups in a way that's infectious enough for other people to uh a um have an ecosystem develop in the first place and then B believe that this is possible so Russell yourself as far as what the work you've done for uh not only eth Denver but I think even more broadly just the Denver uh and Colorado e system in general um you know we want to um kind of find surface and uh work with leaders like yourself um uh again in cities that uh again anywhere in the world but it does take that typically that first person to kind of you know light up the torch and then um um you know figure the next steps for building a startup ecosystem uh Brad Feld has a great book on this uh we also have our own ecosystem Playbook that our co-founders developed it's called better you can find that at flourishing pledge.com um another great book is startup communities by Brad Feld and that talks all about how he built a startup ecosystem in Boulder Colorado um which also became home of Tech Stars uh and again it's uh one of the one of the most uh I think biggest take ways from that book was if you're building a startup ecosystem you have to look on a 20-year time Horizon and always reset the clock every day so it's always day one and a 20-year time Horizon so hopefully that answers the question but usually it's it's just great people and great leaders how uh how required is it for this to be a technical tool I mean I know it obviously is technical is it's Technology based but for like I know of uh like the city of Trinidad in southern uh Colorado right is a really really cool funky place not a lot of people um but there are you know like what can we do to improve that place a lot of people who live there have said that they've had events what do you say to to a uh to a city like that can can Bill Bill cities be uh keep on calling it bid because we use bid too much uh but um Can Bild cities really help um a small City like that sort of find its way in a new technical world yes uh so that is absolutely kind of our um our you know Mission really um and so um there's a couple different stories I could share I've only got a minute left but um um you know our actually our first city that will probably come online as with the full stack of Treasury governance um and and everything else is actually where our co-founders base in Legos and one the challenges they have there is not the most reliable um uh governance and legislative Foundation to incubate new businesses to get resources uh there's a lot of there's not there's a high risk for external investors to invest into that region and so we think and we hope that we can uh provide that infrastructure that uh not necessarily circumvents but kind of runs in parallel to um uh um to the city itself in a way that can still Foster innovation in that area and Foster Economic Development even though it it's very it always starts very small uh but can kind of grow from there and that's that's kind of the hope so um and uh we're introducing more mechanism we're yeah I'll I'll leave it at that but please talk to me after if you want to learn more about how we're doing that because there's a lot there's a long conversation we could have about that I'm not trying to pressure you I I just wanted to give you the opportunity to let people know exactly how to like regardless of where they are and what they're doing like if they want to do this for their City what is the best way to reach out to you to engage with you to and like what maybe two or three things can they do first to be ready to have a good conversation with you sure so first come to build cities. Network join the platform and then you can join our internal Community it is on a Discord uh if they don't use Discord we also have Twitter we have have uh email list we have the uh events uh we are running uh virtual events in our platform on a weekly basis that um now actually uh two per week and so we have several different contact channels that you'll find on our website that please please definitely reach out to us and uh you know we'll walk you through the process on on on how this is coming together and uh we're also building this together this is very new and uh not a lot of reference points so we're looking for those insights and your feedback and uh we don't want to pretend to have all the answers either so this is a group effort I gave everybody else the chance so I need to give you the chance to two two things um are you ra raising money and opportunity for a 20 second sound bike that will be extremely uh extremely uh viral and go all over the place sure so we are Fielding interest now for a upcoming round um I won't disclose when but uh please talk to us if you're interested in joining that round we're reaching a lot of nice inflection points with both growth and revenue and we want to accelerate our road map we know exactly what we need to build and we're just looking to do it a little bit faster 20 second sound bite um uh I will just say the concept of network states are possible it may not look like they are how they might be perceived in the book um but we can um build parallel ecosystems that support economic development in any market around the world fantastic thank you very much and thank you all for coming I think that that brings us to the end unless I've forgotten somebody um that brings us to the end um once again I'm Russell castaner the investment Steward for buff corn Ventures um our website is buffer corn.

Ventures we're um all over warcast or and uh warcaster and Twitter and even conventional things like LinkedIn so if you're interested in you have a a start start up or if you're an investor and you're interested in getting in the super early stage Alpha part of the business um talk to me otherwise have a great eth Denver and I look forward to talking to you one-on-one very soon thank [Applause] you