This $20M/year Founder shares his 3 top business ideas with me

0:00men's interest in health is at an all-time high you look at one of the bestselling books of the last 12 months is the Peter AA book the fastest growing podcast of last year is the Andrew hubman podcast so I think like you look at the longevity space right now it used to be this thing that like the Nerds were interested in and now it's becoming cool now it's kind of breaking through to the mainstream and so there's going to become this like booming anti-aging Market I think men are going to become more and more proactive about maintaining kind of like a youthful appearance both professionally and

0:27personally start up by this time [Music] baby and we are off so sipping with Jason Jason I need my drink huh all right what are you drinking I have three drinks lined up for today depending on how the podcast goes we've got coffee if you really put me on the hot seat we've got a lroy if you decide to take it easy and we've got a water if uh this go is planned okay well we'll see we'll see at the end um you've got you got some fire ideas so I want to get right into it um AI coo for companies what do you mean by that okay

1:16basically I think that so how let me I'll let me flip this on you for a sec how many people work at your hold like uh how many people work inside your the holding company prob about 115 okay yeah so block workor today has we're about I think we're about to hit 70 I'm pretty sure uh we might end the year around 90 85 um the problem that I've seen happen is the coordination problem inside of companies so and specifically inside of blockworks right now so what I mean by this my first idea that I want to lay out here is like I think there's a real

1:50opportunity to build an AI either coo or chief of staff I don't really know what you call it where you basically every slack every email every ocean every Google doc assana jira everything that is written inside of the company gets pulled into basically this large AI database you basically need the founder to opt in and you need to uh you need everyone at the company to know that they are joining this thing this company where like there is opt in from day one right that's one probably one of the problems is some employees if you bring it to a larger company wouldn't want to do this but I think from if you had a

2:28small enough company where you could get everyone to opt in or if you could find a Founder who wanted to do this from day one if you pulled every single message again including personal private DMS on slack all that kind of stuff had the understanding that no one could read those messages except for this AI um I think you could actually build a really useful tool that ends up having a lot of these benefits inside of a company and why coo versus you know data scientist or CFO or what what what makes you think that coo is the most interesting place to start the problem that exists I'm I'm

3:07only speaking from personal knowledge here is because blockworks is the first you know we've been running blockworks for six and a half years and it's really the first like quotes around this real business but the problem that we have is uh is again the coordination and communication problem as the company scales so what I end up dealing with a lot and I know other Executives and leaders and just other people at the company deal with a lot is hey what is this person working on this week hey is anyone here working on this hey do we have a document that shows the product road map hey do you have any idea what

3:37the um you know the ARR was in Q2 compared to q1 what I found is when I step away let's say someone messages me I have a tendency to message I respond very quickly on slack if I don't respond for like a day the problem usually gets solved in some way and so I think that there's a lot of time that people end up spending inside of companies just answering these like menial little question questions where uh the usually the solution is a company Wiki so what's evolved is like a company Wiki um there's some tools for this I think a lot of people now startups do it on

4:10notion but that doesn't really solve it because Notions Pages even though I want to love them they end up often times sucking and there's like it's really hard to find things and I think that just like this one you could basically just call it a company chatbot would really solve it even things like you know we have new hires who just started I think we had four or five new hires who started this month and I heard that they're asking hey how long does Jason so my co-founder's name is Mike hey how long does Jason usually take to respond to a slack hey how long does Mike

4:37usually take to respond to a slack that's like uh it's this weird little menial question doesn't really make a big impact but it kind of does on a person's life so there are all these different questions that you could ask it anything from hey How long does it usually take Greg to respond to a slack all the way up to hey what was the revenue last quarter hey do we have a document that shows our product road map hey do you know if anyone's working on the graphic for the Das uh for our event redesign like all all of the kind of things yeah I think that's a really good

5:01framework for any sort of agent type experience whenever you have a bunch of Google docs or a ocean and you want the ability to extract that information in a really interesting way like there's probably an agent business there exactly ex I mean that's that's what I think it so this is of all of the ideas I had right I had some like some boring ideas some you know crypto ideas this one is really tough because I think one of the mistakes Founders end up making is they don't think if I'm success they don't think about if I'm successful what will the business be in five years and who

5:35will I be competing against and who you're competing against here in five years is Google Salesforce and slack and they have the Tableau business obviously as well Microsoft right because if this is successful Google says oh we I mean let's just build this in right so you end up that's why I that's why this is probably my least favorite of the ideas but I had to had to bring some you know sexy AI idea to the table of course you had to it's 24 you know you got to you got to um no I think uh I do like that framework though and I think even if you

6:06it it doesn't become a big business if you can extract you know a few million dollars out of it in a short amount of time there's still it could be still lifechanging yeah um what's your what's your favorite idea on this list let's go let's go to that one there are a couple ideas that I would do if I think I'd tee this up by basically saying I think I I've seen you talk a lot about this on Twitter and stuff like the nature of building a business is changing today right we're at a we're at a turning point in building companies and I've seen you

6:38tweet about you know how I think it makes a lot of sense not to take Venture money today and I think all of that I completely agree with a lot of those takes so a lot of these are built on the back of this idea that look in 2008 if you knew how to code you probably had a better chance of building a SAS product in a space you maybe didn't know much about compared with someone with deep expertise because you knew how to code and because you could go build this SAS product because software is just such a powerful thing but today because it is

7:06so easy to just spin up a company with these SAS products and with these AI tools I think deep domain expertise is now actually popular and Powerful again and I think you're going to see this like this entire generation of Founders who basically take that belief that it's super easy to build a company today and this idea that like maybe the original idea of hey we don't have to be profitable let you know everyone said we don't have to be profitable look at Amazon there's a whole generation of VCS that invested in companies on that one idea of hey we don't have to be profitable look at Amazon I think that's

7:38changing so some of the ideas that I really like there's probably two here um one is around actually Men's Health and specifically hair transplants Botox um if you look at basically Women's Health uh the women's Personal Care Market went from 27 billion in 1997 to 511 billion right it grew about 20x in the last 25 years I think the men's care Market is about to do the same thing so that there's one idea we could talk about there with Men's Health and like something I'd probably build around that it's a very unsexy business in-person physical you have to build physical offices and then there's I would

8:17probably do what I did with blockworks again because I just I think this idea of like creating a negative CAC SAS business is probably the only way to build a successful SAS business today in my mind so I want to I want to unpack that negative CAC piece in a bit because I I need I need to understand what you mean by it but I want to start with the botox for men not because I not because I need Botox you know just putting that out there just just saying for anyone who's not watching on YouTube I don't need Botox I don't need Botox and and if

8:48you don't believe me and you're listening to this go on YouTube let me know if I need Botox um but I do I have noticed that I've seen a lot of advert I live in Miami you know this and in Miami you know plastic surgery Botox it's everywhere and I have noticed that like 90 plus% of the marketing the images is of women like do you know of a leading men's Botox brand I don't I don't know of any of them and okay so here's here's where this idea originally came from the idea originally came from my friend who started losing his hair really quickly and he went to try to get he looked at

9:30the market and he tried like hyms and there's a pill that he was taking what's it a ran and it wasn't working so then he's like oh let me go try to get like hair transplant or hair plugs or whatever he's like I I saw a picture of Elon Musk it looks pretty good uh let me go you know Tom Brady like clearly got this let me go check it out and all of the best places in New York for hair transplants had a two-year waiting list a two-year waiting list to go get a hair transplant and this is a you know I don't I don't know how much it cost but

10:00I the procedure is like you know 20 or 30 or $40,000 to get right so this is a 2-year weight list to go pay $40,000 for something so that's when the idea started kind of like like okay there's there's something there so started looking into it what's happening is I think we're basically at like lasic eye surgery was 20 years ago for hair transplants um if you wanted to get like lasic eye surgery 20 years ago very like very risky very expensive long recovery process and that's what it is today for a hair transplant for men uh 40% of men go fully bald 70% of men experience

10:37balding in their life and you're selling to basically this massive Market of men who are honest just to be candid like pretty desperate if they're losing their hair like what you're seeing with the technology right now there used to be this old technology called fut where they would like take a scar like rip you know rip hairs out of your head and like you'd be left with a big scar now they can do it without any of the scarring so you're like we just hit this like technological precipice where I think we're on the other side of it but all the doctors who have the clinics they

11:06all practice the old thing um and they're all set up as these like old doctor's offices so yeah that I mean there's a lot of Reason like there's more I could ramble on about why I'm excited about this but that's that's like a really interesting area I think you could do hair transplants layer on men's Botox create like a kind of luxury feel that Fe feels very exclusive and yeah I think that that would be a really successful business so first of all i' love this idea like I feel like it's one of those ideas that would work like just would work with a high probability that

11:36it would work How would how would you go about let's starting this like what what steps would you take if you actually wanted to start this if I actually wanted to start this you need the I mean you need a doctor and you need a this is a perfect celebrity business right so you need a doctor and you need a celebrity and I don't think what you so there's the there's some Chicago Bears middle linebacker who got hair transplants bald guy I forget his name um and he was like plastered all over the Billboards I don't think you need those celebrities the first thing I would do is I would go get a you got to

12:09get a doctor so I look this up you need a doctor and you need two assistants basically because the way it works is they take the hair out of the back of your head put it on the front of your head so you need like the doctor to do that and the assistants to help with that so you that's three employees that you need you need a physical space so let's say you're paying a doctor 200 you know maybe let's say 300K a year each assistant is 100k a year so that's 500k a year uh maybe you need space in person in New York so that's 20K a month so

12:35that's another 250 a year so that's 750k a year right there of costs and then I think what you need is a celebrity that's like big on Tech Twitter so I would pick like a you know you have great hair but if you were balding I'd go to a Greg Eisenberg I'd go to S par or Austin Reef or Kevin Rose or you know maybe I'd go to Tim Ferris all the people you said before that great hair great hair they got great flow so I'd go to Tim be like Tim man you know how you've been losing your hair let me get your hair back I can get

13:06your hair back and you need like one or two success stories and the good thing about this is I mean you can charge let's say $50,000 and you can do one a day I think you can do one a day per doctor so I don't know I don't I'm trying not to do mental math these days in public but 50 * 365 is almost $20 million so that's 20 million bucks per location per doctor um that's that's how I would start it I also wonder you know would I want to start it in Manhattan like at $20,000 a month of rent or like the people in is

13:42it just because the you know New Yorkers are willing to pay that amount you know I I think you want I think you want to do that yeah I think you want to go to New York San Francisco or Miami where you know my like the way my friend put it he's like I'd pay whatever to get you know he works in private Equity um and he's just like yeah i' get I'd pay whatever to get my hair back I think you can basically yank the prices up and uh folks will not respond too much to the increase in pricing it would be cool if you can also do it in like a three-day

14:09Retreat weekend it's like hey I'm going to Upstate New York for three days and it's like a detox weekend and I also like they also there's a doctor there and he also does my hair okay so turkey is the hair transplant capital of the world if you ever fly back from Turkey you will see guys with bandages all across their head and a lot of these places you'll pay let's say $5,000 for the hair transplant because it's a lot cheaper there so you pay 5,000 there and then you'll pay another 5,000 for a two-e retreat because the first two weeks are I like if you look at the

14:45pictures like it's pretty gnarly so you you know you don't really want to be in public you don't want to walk around so you end up just like staying in your home all day but yeah I think you nailed it you would probably do some sort of like luxury Retreat yeah that's exactly right and Botox like tell me tell me why you think you know BOTOX for men is a good idea um a couple reasons one is Botox and women is just the fastest or second fastest growing like women's uh self-care Personal Care uh like area it used to be like Beauty and it's out past

15:19Beauty and makeup and all that kind of stuff um I don't I don't know why maybe the plastic surgery has gotten better but if you if you look at some of the men's data so lipos suction is actually the fastest growing area I just feel like I wouldn't want to maybe get into the lipos suction Arena I don't know but that's the fastest growing area then hair transplants than Botox actually so I don't know why I have this aversion to lipo section but I'd probably do hair transplants and then yeah some sort of Botox and injections um again I think what you need there is there's a stigma

15:51associated with getting Botox so you need to create a very like exclusive luxury H like I would call it high privacy place where there's a lot of trust that nobody knows that you're going to this place um and the one of the reasons I think this is going to work like men's interest in health is at an all-time high you look at one of the bestselling books of the last 12 months is was the it was the Peter AA book right you look at the fastest growing podcast of last year is the Andrew huberman podcast so I think like there's the clear interest and then I think um

16:22you look at the longevity space right now like longevity is now becoming it used to be this thing that like the Nerds were interested in now the Nerds and the billionaires and now it's becoming cool now it's kind of breaking through to the mainstream and so there's going to become this like booming anti-aging Market as men are I think men are going to become more and more proactive about maintaining kind of like a a youthful appearance um both professionally and personally um and if you like I don't know we we have a lot of like Millennials and genz at blockworks and it's very clear that men

16:55take their I don't know when I graduated college and like just started a job like I know every dude just looked the same like everyone's like wearing like a slubby button down with like some bad tucked in jeans like tucked in pants all the guys look good now right people are taking their appearance much more uh seriously and I think it's got a lot of Tailwinds behind it yeah yeah I think just in general framework wise longevity like that space there's thousands of businesses to be built in the longevity space um I also think longevity for pets is talk a lot about I've been thinking a

17:32lot about that um you know people love their their dogs their cats whatever and you know they get older and it's sad it gets very very sad you know a lot of people would pay a lot of money to extend their dog's life by two three four five years yeah I mean there's when people think longevity I think the first area that people go into is like some pills or supplements or something like everyone's I feel like got their own supplement brand now but yeah I think there's a pretty like unsexy boring physical business to be built here the reason you should not build this business is I bet the

18:11lawsuits are rampant in this industry I don't I don't know what it looks like but I bet this dealing with insurance and dealing with like customers who are angry that their hair doesn't look as flowy as they thought it would I bet that would would be a nightmare to deal with but yeah I think the the benefits outweigh the costs but that would probably be the reason not to go into it my uh my brother's a doctor and he he once went to Las Vegas I think he was speaking at an Opthalmology lasc conference so it was it was actually a conference where all the top doctors who did lasic surgery

18:43came in Las Vegas and at this time I was thinking I'm wear I wear glasses I was thinking should I get lasic a lot of my friends were getting it so I asked them I said hey like just curious what percentage of the doctors in that room were wearing the glasses and I expected him to say like I don't know 1% 5% a very small percentage right cuz these are people who do lasic so you you'd expect them right you'd expect them to to to not wear glasses but he was like n you know 85 90% of people were wearing glasses he was like it was the

19:17most amount of glasses I I had seen in a really long time and I asked him why and he said because they know that it's like a point you know six% chance that you'll lose some vision so they know the risks they've seen they've seen the horror stories yeah they've seen how the sausage is made yeah yeah well at this point I don't know how the sausage is made so I still think this is a good idea yeah it's one of those it's one of you know why I wouldn't do this idea is like I don't know enough about it so it's like do your research believe in it

19:50don't just like build a business to make money but like and also there are some like botox specifically there are like a bunch of benefits I think um that go beyond like youthful aging like for example I get migraines sometimes and like botox is actually really good for migraines yeah I I I have these things called cluster headaches which are a nightmare and uh Botox has been recommended as well so yeah um but yeah I agree I also think like the Brian Johnson Johnson fication I guess of of everything is just men are just really are interested in it I saw YouTube I saw a video of him uh where it was like an

20:32MTV Cribs kind of like interview where he was showing his house and he looks like like the title is like this man looks 20 years old and like the top comment on YouTube was like he just looks really slippery he looks 50y but he looks really slippery he does look a little like lizardy aleny but I just yeah I mean look at huberman petera like uh Brian Johnson like these these weird like Health folks areel celebrities now that's never happened in the history of the US or the world I don't know so yeah exactly so I like this idea interesting T you know you talked about this

21:10negative CA software piece like what what do you mean by that yeah basically if okay so another business I would build is just a B2B Niche media brand um I think for first time Founders um I am convinced that building a B2B niche media brand is the best way to go make your first buck um if you want and to I don't know maybe you could go exit like look at what uh Austin and Alex did with morning Brew like sold it for what 70 million or something like that um I think rolled a little Equity like they'll they'll do they'll do just fine off that and um so it's not a

21:47billion dollar outcome but because they didn't really go raise a bunch of venture they were able to go make lifechanging amounts of money where neither of them has to work again right and so I think the first thing here before getting into negative CAC is just go build a B2B Niche media brand that's the first thing I would do then if you really want to scale it past that 100 million valuation Mark what I would do is put a product at the bottom of my funnel and what you're going off of there is this model that one of our advisers Craig Fuller uh who runs Freight waves and sonar and a bunch of

22:17other things which I can talk about their success well I'll talk about their success now they he built Freight waves into the biggest supply chain media brand and then launched a supply chain data platform at the bottom of that funnel and built that into a $300 million a year business $300 million a year Enterprise Value business that's a completely that's a subscription SAS Data Business so what I mean by negative CAC is if you look at how a lot of software businesses last 20 years fund like do customer acquisition cost they are paying money for marketing right you pay maybe your CAC is $300 or maybe you

22:49have a really high value subscriber and it's a it's a ,000 whatever it may be what I mean by negative CAC is what we've built at blockworks so we have a neg we have a negative CAC model very similar to Freight waves and sonar um so we are getting paid to acquire these customers that's what negative CAC means is you get actually get paid to acquire your customers so how that works for blockworks is we have blockworks the media business and then we have blockworks research which is a subscription an Enterprise subscription platform so blockworks media up here is conferences podcasts newsletters news business and we own this audience with

23:24several million investors interested in crypto and up here this is a cash flow positive business that spits off a lot of cash but it also serves the purpose of owning the relationship with the audience right where we have these people in our audience so you've got now you've got cash flow and you've got relationship with the audience and then our job is to essentially try to figure out how we can convert even if we convert 0.1% of our audience into the blockworks research platform we have a you know we have a big old business on our hands so that's what I think I think s you saw SAS

24:01evolve from like just selling a SAS product into like bundling SAS products into SAS companies trying to turn into platforms like a Salesforce and now the next thing I think that's going to get really hot is hey how do I go build this negative CAC payback period especially in a world where my investors are forcing me to both sign up more customers and decrease the cost of signing up a customer that's basically breaking the laws of SAS physics and I think this negative CAC model uh is is the way to do it could you just using blockworks as an example can you just share like the

24:35scale of where you are at how many people are are visiting the properties how big is the audience how much revenue do you drive from maybe an average user just so people get a sense of like similar what they could expect for building a B2B yeah Niche business so block Works launched May 2018 we just started kind of side hustle ideating on it December 2017 officially quit our jobs and launch May 2018 first year of business 250k of Revenue second year of business 2 million of Revenue third year of business three and a. half million fourth year 12 a. half million fifth year 25 a. half million so and we and we

25:18didn't raise any Venture that whole time so that was we had no so we had no product at the bottom of the funnel it was all advertising and sponsorship dollars conferences podcasts newsletter and news and so that was basically that was the scale of the media business once we hit that scale we said and we were spitting off enough cash flow we said boom let's go build the product and raise our first round so now so then in May or April 2023 about a year ago we raised 12 million at of 135 post money valuation and that was to basically say look we've got this product at the

25:55bottom of the funnel it's growing tremendously we've never spent a dollar on marketing because we already own the relationship with the audience let's go put some fuel on the fire and go hire more engineers and you know analysts and and things like that so that's basically our business model and that's some of the like I guess the behind the scenes of some of the numbers and you know when you started this 2018 there were there were a few other crypto media companies you know so how did you know that there was still opportunity in the space um we picked a niche of a n of a niche so what

26:29we when we looked out at the landscape so blockworks is I'll get to that in a sec blockworks is built on this like one thesis and we've got so much wrong over the years but the one thesis was that crypto would eventually become this big institutional asset class and as that happened the number of investors and professionals who came into the industry would grow by orders of magnitude and those investors and professionals were going to demand a much higher quality level of information and we basically said look let's go try to own and build the information stack for those professionals and for those investors and so to get back to your question like

27:07when we looked out at the industry there was Twitter Reddit there were a couple podcasts there was like coindesk and coin Telegraph and they all were kind of appealing to like the mass markets like the retail Trader or the retail investor or the college graduate who just bought some Bitcoin we basically said look let's the first couple years of block works we the niche of the niche that we picked was we said we don't care about all all of crypto we're only going to focus on translating the like what's happening in crypto to the old school institutional Capital markets crowd so that's how we were able to have success in the early

27:45years as we said uh look there's all these cool things happening in crypto but to get off the ground and kind of fight the 800 pound gorilla at the time which was coindesk we need to just focus on this institutional crowd of crypto we did that for about three or four years and then once we we felt like we were kind of on par with coindesk we said now we can go a little broader but even now I mean we only focus on the deeply crypto native part of the industry we leave a lot of the other things to to other folks to cover um and it's our bet that

28:17like the people who matter in the industry are the real crypto professionals and like power crypto users and all the other people are just kind of like passer buyers or they're people that like it just doesn't make sense sense from a media business model perspective to to try to capture that yeah I call that niche of a niche of a niche like I call it a super Niche so it's like you pick your Niche and then okay you got to go deeper so what's your super Niche the interesting thing is the super Niche that you pick turns out it was probably one of the highest value Su

28:49like niche of a niche or super Niche right like if you would have we got we got remarkably lucky lucky right like one of the biggest learnings of this is I think it's much better to be a mediocre entrepreneur or have mediocre products in the in a extremely fast growing rocket ship industry then try to be the best entrepreneur in a really bad industry where the the growth rate is zero right because when the growth rate is zero you're basically playing a zero sum game you're you're eating away at someone else's business crypto grows every year so the P the whole pie is expanding um but yeah I mean we we got

29:23we got lucky picking like the I mean the fastest growing industry in the world for the last couple of years yeah and I think you can just you can apply this model to B2B but also B Toc like you could you know we should buy longevity.com and you know focus on you know the VC type high high value you know lot of disposable income type people and build a media business around that and then you can sell them products like you can just you you can think of so many different b2c and B2B opportunities with the same model around pick a niche and then pick that super Niche yeah I agree

30:06yeah I mean so the other but the other thing you need to think about if you're building a media business is where are the advertising dollars so I have a friend he started another he started B2B Niche media business but it turns out the readers of his newsletter and his listeners of his podcast and the readers of his publication they don't buy many things right so if you're a CMO who is the buyer of an ad you know adverti like runs the ad budget inside of a company for him they only buy conference sponsorships and he learned this a couple years into the business they only

30:37buy conference sponsorships so when he goes to them to try to sell newsletter ads well there there's no one there it's not a they're not used to buying that as opposed to our audience our investors if you if you run a coinbase or Fidelity you're very used to buying podcast ads and newsletter ads and things like that so I think it's important to think about like who are the buyers and sellers and what is the supply and demand of the ad Market in the media business that you're launching so how do you know that before it's too late because I'm sure a bunch of people will build a media business

31:08and then only realize six months or 12 months or two years even through it that oh wow these these advertisers are pretty sparse and uh I probably should have picked a different Niche I I think you have I mean I don't really I think you have to go talk to people I I think that's the only way um I would though look at existing advertisements that the existing ad market so let's say you're launching like a I don't know let's say you're launching like a wine media business or like a watch media business like the first let's say you're watching a wa launching a watch business uh media

31:43business the first thing I would do is probably launch with like just Rolexes and PEX or something like that or maybe just for up and cominging watch people who have a budget of like around 10K like Grand seos like maybe you just want the grand SEO reader or you know who has like 5K to buy a watch so that's like pick your core audience um and the reason like I think that you could go after that crowd is you already know the ad Market's already been like determined for you there's already so many watch brand spending money on Advertising as opposed to going and picking something

32:17like I don't know maybe wine where like I honestly don't see many wine ads so yeah that's that's probably how I think about it yeah I I also I also think like using the grand Seiko example funny I was I was talking to Kevin about Kevin Rose about Grand seos too like people who buy Grand seos are particular type of person like they they like to be unique yes like they don't want to follow the crowd they don't want to follow the herd so then you can what you can do if you have a bunch of grand SEO readers what are the other products that non-hard

32:49followers would like to buy right I bet the people who buy gr seos are also people who are maybe experimenting with like being sober right now and maybe there's some CBD drinks you could Market to them like so I think there's some overlap you can do I love the generalization on gr SEO enthusiasts I I mean as a as a as an almost Grand SEO purchaser uh I I feel like it's fair to to generalize you uh you want to buy a grand SEO I wanted to buy a watch um for a long time just cuz I don't really own any watches um and I wanted to buy a

33:25watch for a long time I could not get myself to invest in to buy something for myself yeah I just I'm I'm I'm cheap I could couldn't uh couldn't get myself to do it well you can you you can start with a Seiko right a Seiko yeah $100 100 bucks yeah yeah see how you feel all right that's enough about Grand seos you know I I gotta ask being that you're you're in crypto land do you have any crypto startup ideas for us so I do I a couple um the most successful crypto Founders are deeply crypto native and what we've we've seen a lot of failures when folks

34:05come in from web 2 or from finance and they don't fully drink the Kool-Aid and the the biggest mistake I hear people make when they're pitching is like yeah there's all these crypto nerds over here we're going to go try to build this like a safe crypto consumer app that appeals that brings crypto to the masses that's never worked and it will never work that's not uh that's crypto has grown very Bottoms Up it doesn't grow top down as opposed to maybe something like AI so yeah I think that's one of the big mistakes I am convinced that it was actually um one of our investors Vance

34:39van Spencer from framework tweeted this out I that crypto is this is going to sound ridiculous to probably you and a lot of your audience but like I really think crypto is the only real Venture investable vertical that is taking place right now I think if you look at fintech it's effectively dead and consolidating if you look at consumer there haven't been I mean this is your world but like there haven't really been any hits in the last 10 15 years there's like little Sparks of Joy but no real businesses if you look at Enterprise SAS the revenue multiples are like sub 10x now because everyone can compare them to the public

35:13markets which makes it non-viable for large VCS and there's a b bunch of competition and I think a lot of SAS companies people have realized they're just sexy front ends for Excel databases then you have like Ander roll and Palmer lucky and stuff like American dynamism defense I think that's interesting but it's only really playable for like the Andre of the world and some of the largest funds and then there's Ai and I think that AI is possibly The Last Hope for some of these huge Giga funds but there's really I don't know how like some of the early stage funds are going to do anything here because you need

35:50huge Capital commitments and a lot of the value ACR is going to recruit to the incumbents like a Microsoft or Google or something like that so the setup I think for this conversation is like I do have I think there there will be there will be I think crypto is the best industry in the world to go start a company in but you have to be deeply crypto native and I think you have to lean all the way in um I don't know what you think of that but yeah I mean I I'm as biased as you can possibly get by listen my my honest take is there's definitely some

36:21like crypto has been around for now 14 or so years right like it's not going anywhere um yes it's going to have ups and downs but the idea of blockchains decentralization we still haven't seen like a consumer blockchain really hit to your point and maybe that never happens like maybe it just it's more around Defi and stuff like that but yeah I think there's a lot of opportunities but then at the same time I'm like seeing all these like meme coin stuff and it like to me it takes away from the industry to take it seriously so I'm curious what are your thoughts on m coins in general

36:58and like do you consider mem coins a you know a venture opportunity yeah I'm here here I'll give you the I'll give you both sides of the argument I think here's the memec coin suck argument memec coin suck because there's all this attention on crypto now that Bitcoin just broke through its all-time high people are looking back at at crypto at you know there's the Bitcoin having this week Black Rock and Fidelity have their Bitcoin ETFs like the space is clearly coming back and we're entering another bull market so all these eyes are on crypto and all we see are these stupid meme coins that's the and it's like guys like come like

37:34you're doing what we thought you kids would do playing in your stupid little crypto sandbox you're creating these stupid meme coins that's the that's the that's the meme coins are stupid argument the mem coins a good argument is just that um marketing is harder than ever in today's world like finding attention on the Internet is nearly impossible today you can get these quick little hits maybe a viral tweet or something if you're if you're Greg and you know how to tweet but like for most people marketing is impossible and what you're about to see are a lot of meme coins actually turn into real businesses so you're going to see like the way I

38:06think about mem coins right now is there's like the mem coins that you can just kind of speculate on whatever everyone's gonna have fun with those they might actually they definitely will end in tears and then there's going to be the meme coins where like they basically see that as a customer acquisition strategy just like some nft Brands did so if you look at um like the most successful upand cominging exchange today is exchange called backpack they launched on the back of an nft Community called madlads right so their user acquisition strategy was let's go get 10,000 people to buy our nfts and then boom we'll launch a crypto exchange and

38:40now they're the fastest growing I think the the or one of the fastest growing crypto exchanges right now because they had this baked in audience of people who own the nfts uh torians right torians were another nft Community they launched the tensor nft exchange they're one of the top five nft exchanges out there pudgy Penguins um doing the same thing and you actually saw one there's a coin called dgen it's like this what I thought was a stupid little dgen coin the DJ they then launched their own layer three built on built on arbitrum which is a layer two on top of ethereum scaling solution and that the dgen chain

39:18L3 is doing the most transactions per second in the entire ethereum ecosystem today so that is like I think that's what we'll there will be some successful companies built on the back of these meme coins most of them will end in teers many tiar many many many many tiers I mean same with nfts right like a lot of the those ended in tiers and there's some cool ones I also think the last are of meme coins that are interesting are spec are speculation on events so people have tried to build in crypto and not in crypto prediction markets for a long time right there's all these like

39:51betting on the election sites there's Ki I think which is like a squ or Andre back company there's poly market and none of these have really taken off too much and if you look at what's happening with there's a token called Bowden and there's talk called Bowden and Biden and these actually have massive volumes and move directly in correlation with how people think the presidential election is going so when Biden did his big speech a couple this probably a month ago and people liked it the Bowden which is like inverse Biden coin went went down and then Biden really screwed something up the Bowden coin went up

40:31Trump has a good speech Bowen coin goes higher so I do think that these like meme coins as a form of speculation will mostly end in tears but they're also going to be a really interesting way for like the world to gamble on different events and like like it or hate it I kind of hate it but the world is moving towards like a full gambling Society right I'm watching the NFL and like the announcers are literally talking about their parlays like on NBA app and like there's gambling embedded inside of the app so yeah like it or hate it it's I mean I think that's where the world is

41:04going I agree with you I agree with you I think uh it's the financialization of everything that's like the the nice way of putting it the not so nice way of putting it is the world's turning into a casino and you'll be able to bet on everything but I will say you got me thinking about if these coins are just ways to acquire audience and then you now have this audience and then you can build products for them that that you know and you could put blinders on and just focus on building products that that Community is going to they're not even a community I'm not going to call

41:40them a community that group of people want to buy or use then you you might have a really big opportunity there I mean there's a lot that will end in tear but don't think about them as a think about them as just another growth hack to get users I talked to a um company earlier this week that's doing 500k a day in Revenue they have 40,000 users they launched a couple months ago and they built on the back of this like meme coin community and they have no desire to be in the meme coin game they're just they but they got 40,000 users and they're doing 500k a day on Revenue

42:11because they leaned to meme coins and then they're going to Pivot and basically launch up something else in crypto on the back of these 40,000 users very cool and that's why I invited you on I invited you on because I I like how you think how you think where uh uh I know you have a podcast tell tell us where people can listen to your podcast for more of you yeah podcast is called Empire so what we did the reason we launched it is a lot of the podcasts were not a lot of the crypto podcasts were either people like Shilling some random coin that they had a big bag of

42:44or they were just I think they didn't really understand what was going on in the industry and just because we like we from been been in the industry for almost seven years fulltime now and running block works like we have a very like Insider look into the industry and what's happening behind the scenes and how the deal the Venture raises are getting structured and all this kind of stuff and so we launched a podcast called Empire it's been around for almost three years and yeah my co-host Santiago and I basically just give you like the inside baseball of what's happening in crypto so I love it and

43:12block Works research yeah if you're an allocator or fund that invests in crypto and we basically built the the must subscribe to platform it's $4,500 a year it's about 400 bucks a month actually I guess it's a little less than that 350 whatever it is and and uh yeah I'd recommend it so DM me on I'm also on Twitter Jason yanowitz and you can DM me if you want to check out the platform or go listen to the Pod whatever your boat thanks uh thanks for coming on my man thanks for sipping with me wait what did you end up sipping were you sipping anything dude I had I had all three man

43:44you were you were taking me for a ride there at one point I need some coffee I've got the lroy now that you eased up on me so we're we're good all right I love it all right take care man