BaseLayer - Ep 4: Jacob Horne (Co-founder, Zora)

Hey, my name is Jacob Horn. I'm from Sydney, Australia, and I'm the co-founder of Zora. I don't think most people would guess I'm like a huge Formula 1 fan. There's this great quote, I think it was Jackie Stewart, where it's like, if you're in control, you're not going fast enough. And I think um when you're building in such a fast-paced industry like crypto, I think that really applies.

So, in in Australia, cafeterias aren't really that common. you weren't able to like buy food at school. So, I used to go to the local corner store each day and buy as much soda as I could and I would like sell that out of my locker. So, that kind of gave me my first like um entrepreneurial kick. And then in college, I started this small local online blog called The Social, which I think was like my first foray into like just building a website, working with friends, and trying to like create a scene and throw parties and stuff like that.

And then once I discovered Bitcoin, I guess like the big aha moment or the thing that like really sent me down the rabbit hole was like, well, if you can create a cryptocurrency, then surely you should be able to create a cryptocurrency for anything for any idea they have, be it a creative project, something on the internet, a full-blown startup. And I got sent down the the tokenization rabbit hole very very early, but basically was incredibly hard to build on top of Bitcoin. And then that's what actually helped me find my way across to Ethereum and yeah, understanding the power of programmability and being able to build on top of blockchains. So I was um basically hacking these side projects together and I was posting them on Twitter. Ben Jennings, who was the head of design at Coinbase at the time, he DM'd me asking if I'd be interested in joining.

I think it was like 3 and 1/2 years from when I joined in like January 2017 to leaving to then start Zora. Zora is a it's a social network. So what we do is that for creators all of that content that you're creating is tokenized and for their audience they can choose to basically buy and sell their individual posts, their videos, whatever it may be that they really like. So the basic premise of Zora is that everything that we're creating online has some value and crypto basically allows us to form markets around these things to reveal and then route that value to the people who are creating it, consuming it and wanting to basically trade and speculate on it. There's this uh famous quote from Stuart Brand in like the 1980s when the like kind of when the internet was like really starting to flourish and it was information wants to be free.

But the second half of that quote is information also wants to be expensive. Which said another way is that like we haven't actually found an effective way on the internet to have free to share information but also very rich value capture for the creators of that information and the consumers of it. And to me, it just felt completely obvious that that's such a huge problem that crypto can solve, which is, you know, we've got the ad model right now, and that's worked relatively well up until this point to sustain social media. But what if we could use crypto and tokenization to more explicitly capture that value and then unlock, you know, 100 times better value capture for creators and then a new way for people who are consuming content and information on the internet to engage with it and trade it. We're trying to build a consumer app that is usable by like as many people as possible.

So for Bass, when that came out, it made perfect sense to us because we're able to bring all of our infrastructure and tooling across that we had invested in for many years on Ethereum, but we're able to get extremely cheap transactions and very fast transactions and then comes with a lot of the infrastructure that Coinbase is starting to build in terms of developer tooling as well. I think in the version of the future where where correct and Zoro is successful is basically all of the media and content that is being produced on the internet is tokenized and the net result of that should mean all content is completely public to every single developer and every person on the internet at all times. And instead of using a single algorithm to basically discover and rank that, we're using an open market that anyone can participate in to help essentially like rank and stack like what should the market be paying attention to at any point in time. And the net effect of that is maybe it's helping us spend better attention. And then all of the time that we are spending consuming information, there's actually more value being routed to the consumers of it and the creators of it.

My advice to anyone who wants to build in crypto now is to focus on the app level. I think crypto has been in this like infrastructure phase for years, maybe even the better part of a decade, but the tech is now ready to build, I think, consumer internet scale experiences. It's more important to control your own destiny from a user experience standpoint. So, so spend as much time as you can on the the app experience. Hi, I'm Jacob Horn.

I'm co-founder of Zora and we're building on base.