BaseLayer S2 Ep 2: Gabriel and Luca (Co-Founders, Noise)

Luca is operationally very savvy. I think he has the ability to carry 10,000 things in his head. He's He's He's usually switched on. I'll put it that way. I think Gabe's an intellectual in one way or another, and I have a lot of admiration for [music] his interests in stories, cinema, the arts.

I want some of those qualities. Yeah. That's one. Hi, I'm Wait, who the heck [laughter] are you? I'm Gabriel.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Noice. I'm Luca. [music] I'm one of the co-founders of Noice. I'm the COO. We were both at USC, and we were part of the blockchain club, where a lot of students got really into trading NFTs at that time.

And Luca and I started talking to each other, realized we were both from the Midwest. We're two Midwestern guys in LA. We probably have a lot in common. [music] What he won't say on camera is I had to teach him how to trade NFTs, so I was kind of a resource for him throughout his journey. It's not untrue.

I don't know. And then we just became friends after that. Yeah, I kind of got my start maybe like the the traditional like hustler route, where you get into markets. Like I was flipping sneakers with some of my friends. That quickly converted to trading the AMC and GME craze.

Trading is maybe the wrong word. Losing money is probably more closer to the reality. But what that kind of led me down was this rabbit hole towards [music] NFTs as my first experience with blockchains. I think as someone who was still in high school when this was kind of kicking off, it felt like I, you know, the delta to succeed was maybe smaller than if I were to go a traditional route.

At one point, we stumbled on crypto. We had no idea what was going on with it. We knew that it was going parabolic at times, and we did had no clue what the underlying technology was about. And me being from from Venezuela, the whole anti-central bank monetary policy, it just made immediate sense to me. Maybe in the United States this isn't as relevant, but when you come from a country like Venezuela, like yeah, that's a huge problem.

There's no human on earth who isn't influenced [music] some form or another by trends. And we think that Noise has an opportunity to actually [music] take this subjective information, use markets as a way to make it objective, and provide a lot of value for the world. [music] Noise is an interactive media company. We just want to produce information around brands and trends specifically [music] that nobody else can. If you want to compare these two really culturally relevant, you know, trends, brands, [music] things that are continuous, uh we haven't really had any pure form to do so.

That's one of the key objectives of Noise, and it's one [music] where, you know, you wake up and you almost have this for you page for the internet. Like, what's happening? What's trending? [music] I don't want to go to my personalized feeds, potentially see something on a social media channel that [music] isn't even true or it's AI. Instead, I want to use capital and markets as this coordination mechanism to really elicit some valuable truth for people.

Base, and by extension, uh Coinbase as well, is a very well-known brand. I think very design-forward. We're very design-forward. They seem to be taking this [music] long-term view on what all these products could do, not today, but maybe 5 years from now, maybe 10 years from now. Attention on the internet is this primary driver of capital.

And I think for us, we just wanted a way to kind of make that very direct.

So, we we have a little mantra, which is action your taste [music] at Noise. We believe that everyone at our organization is so unique in the way that they are opinionated about their own presence, their own design, how they want to build products. You know, maybe it could be an engineer who really cares about security, or it could be uh you know, a designer who really cares about color systems. [music] Then, add some of that is kind of what our family at Noise has become. And I think you can see that through the product.

You know, [music] can you just make people feel a certain way? Can you build something that people want to be a part of, that they're excited by. We really, really care about that stuff cuz I think that's probably [music] the best chance that at success we have. Hi, I'm Gabe. I'm Luca.

And we're building Noise on Base.