Building Crypto Brands with Celebrities: Sina Nader's Journey and New Ventures (E8)

(logo whooshing) - I'm Phil Harmon. - And I'm Douglas Sporthwick. - And this is "Old Men, New Money." Today we have Cena Nader. He is one of the OGs in the space. He's built brands from ground up. He was head of crypto at Robinhood. He led partnerships at FTX, which was a ride. He did a tremendous amount of work in just a year's time. I'll let him touch all over that. But he's also the head of strategy for Mist and Labs. And he has a announcement to make here of a new startup that he's recently launched that we're really excited to hear about. But welcome to the show, Cena.

And I'll let you give a little bit more of your background and introduce yourself directly. - Phil Douglas, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to chatting with you guys. Yeah, you touched on all of it at TLDR, the kind of way that I think of myself as a hybrid kind of Wall Street and crypto person. Started off at Morgan Stanley and then Credit Suisse on the private banking side and then got the bug and then jumped in the only way that I could figure out how to jump in, which was to launch a fund of funds because I realized that I'm not a programmer, so I can't go create a protocol. And I can trade, but I'm not a trader.

So I'm not gonna go watch my own fund to trade, but I know how to pick good traders. So why don't I launch a fund of funds? And it turned out to be one of the first fund of funds in the space. And that was really my education on crypto because my job was to go and interview all the different hedge fund managers and pick the ones that I thought were good to invest in. And I would ask them every question that I could think of, what do you think about the different protocols? What do you think about liquidity and market making programs? What do you think about different market microstructures and trading and on?

So that was my education on crypto. What context, what year was that? So that we know where that fell. So that was officially launched in 2017. Okay. And so did that for a couple of years. And then Robinhood came knocking and they said, hey, would you like to lead our crypto platform? And so I was happy to join the era. I think official title was president and CEO of Robinhood Crypto. But colloquially, I was the head of crypto and basically helped them to stabilize the ship because quite frankly, what happened was the founders of Robinhood decided that they wanted to have a crypto platform.

And they brought the entire company together, like hundreds of people together. They said, build this crypto platform. They did it in eight weeks or eight or 10 weeks, I think. And then everyone dissolved back into like their daily jobs. And so no one was really like manning the ship on the crypto side. And so I came in and put in a lot of processes and procedures and also wrote the five-year plan for the crypto division, which I'm proud to see that they're still implementing to this day, which is a lot of fun, quite frankly, to see. And then after Robinhood, I joined this company that people might've heard of, it's called FTX.

Quite a bit we can talk about there. Happy to talk about that with you guys. And then join Mr. Labs after that to help basically bring the SWE brand onto kind of into people's awareness. And then now I've been working on a new project. It's called Party, that's P-A-R-T-I, party.com. And it's basically a media platform with financial services baked into it. And happy to talk about that more as well. - Awesome, very exciting. Well, so when you talk about Robinhood, it's a name brand today, right? And you joined to really launch the division there. What did they, first of all, what attracted you there?

What did they say to you where they say, "Hey, just do what you need to do and off to the races." Did they give you guidelines of, you can work this amount of budget and see what you can do with it, see if anything comes of it. Like what did that conversation sound like? - So I guess I have to go back a little bit earlier to actually my Wall Street days because while I was on Wall Street, people say, "Why did you get into crypto?" And the reason I got into crypto was Wall Street. So I perceived that there was this like principal agent problem on Wall Street where the banks, quite frankly, might have different interests than their customers.

And for me, that was a philosophical problem. And then to me, when I first started to figure out what crypto was about, I realized, "Hey, this might actually present a solution to this principal agent problem that I perceive and that's problematic to me philosophically on Wall Street." So I was hooked, like I was in. I became a crypto person at that moment when I realized that. And as a crypto person, my thing then became how do I help more people get familiar with this crypto stuff? How do I bring crypto to more people?

And then I had to ask myself, can I really do that best in my little five person fund of funds, which is a lot of fun to run, super educational for me, or can I do that best with a well-financed operation with hundreds of engineers, a big team, a great brand name, and that was Robinhood. And so it was a no brainer. I basically said, "I have to go to Robinhood so that I can try to bring crypto to more people." And to your question, what were the conversations like? The founders were super supportive. Vlad in particular, who's still the CEO, he gave us full support to the crypto division. And basically they, I had carte blanche.

They said, "Hey, Sina, tell us what you think we should do." And I literally wrote the plan. It was a fun process really talking to every single corner of the company from legal and compliance, operations, finance, you name it, marketing, research, like the whole like user experience and coalescing around a vision for the crypto division. And I got buy-in from Vlad, Beju, the other co-founder, the entire C-suite. And it was funny, I actually presented four different options for Sina's plan for what we should do for crypto here.

And there was like the conservative, then there was like the base case, and then there was like aggressive, and then there was ultra aggressive. And they're like, "You know what, forget ultra aggressive. Let's go ultra aggressive." And I was like, "Cool, let's go." And so they were super supportive.

And long story short, I was able to stabilize a platform and kind of redo a lot of things that needed to be upgraded in terms of the custody sort of program, the liquidity and market making programs, the float and finance, cash management side of things, got it ready for growth, wrote the plan for growth, and then handed it to them and then went to my next station. - My kids, I think their first crypto trades were on Robinhood and I had them get off of it because it seemed like you couldn't withdraw crypto at the time, so you'd buy it, but then you were stuck. And then it was, "Is this a CFD?

Are they actually buying the underlying?" And me being the skeptic, I said, "You got to move it." But I believe that's all changed since. - It has indeed. And that was one of my first sort of suggestions and recommendations was, "Hey guys, imagine if you had a stock trading platform where people couldn't ACAT in their stocks or ACAT out their stocks. People, their brains would explode." So same thing for crypto. And so I'm happy to say that that was put in place and now people can indeed move crypto in and out of the platform. - So how close to the script are they? Are they still following the script? - That's a great question.

I probably shouldn't answer for confidentiality purposes entirely, but I'm pleased to see that they're doing a number of the things that I laid out and some new things as well. It's fun to watch them grow. - So then that takes you to FTX, right? And so I think everyone's obviously knows what happened there, but you did some things that were very impressive in the time that you were there and dealing with in sports entertainment and building that brand from the ground up.

What were the things when you, did you tackle it the same way going in as you did Robinhood, something that had an existing brand or was your thought process completely different? - Wow, great question. So I went in actually thinking that I would be doing what I did at Robinhood, which was more operational stuff, getting things set and getting processes, taking care of the people, processes and procedures, getting SOPs written and so on and so forth. But I quickly realized that they actually had quite a bit of that already in place because FTX in the US was basically a copy paste of the code that they'd written for FTX International.

And so operationally FTX was actually working just fine. And I realized, okay, if the operations are good, what's the problem? The problem is nobody heard of us. Nobody knew what FTX was. So I quickly shifted gears and I'm like, huh. Okay, so now the problem is how do we get people here? And I like laser focused in or I zoomed in on two things. One is users and volume. And everything that I did was, this was my kind of Occam's razor of cut through. Does this help us increase users? Does this help us increase volume?

And to do that, I stumbled upon this path of, hey, if we work with well-known and well-liked people, that can be a way to jumpstart people's awareness of us. It's a tried and true model. That's why people have, they work with endorsers and spokespeople. And so accidentally ended up doing these deals. And it turned out for whatever reason, I had a penchant or a propensity to being able to do these type of deals.

And so I put together a lot of the sort of big name deals that you heard of for FTX that helped capture the imaginations or intrigued the imaginations of people, which was exactly the goal, but I didn't consciously realize it at the time. So I'm not some sort of marketing genius, but in retrospect, I realized that, oh, these steps that we took were actually helping to catapult a brand onto people's kind of collective radar and then take it to the next level from there. There's a lot more to say there, but hopefully that gives you some kind of...

From the outside, I think a lot of us would look at it from the outside and just say, "Look, FTX has got a blank checkbook." They can just write whatever ticket they want for a celebrity. Now, let's say Tom Brady, Larry David, two very well-known names, that obviously I think that you... - Steph Curry. - Pardon, Steph Curry. But there must have major league baseball, but there must be... Did you find that every celebrity you went to was like, "Yes," or did you get a lot of no's before you got the yes's? - It's another great question. So it was definitely a journey with, I think all of them actually, because crypto was and is still a new thing.

And where this... So it's a double whammy. Crypto as an industry is unknown, not well explored. And then FTX as a brand is completely unheard of. So there's like these two unknown factors compounding each other. And then you're asking somebody who's already got a well-known, a well-loved and well-regarded brand, whether it's a personal brand in the case of individuals or an entire league in the case of major league baseball, you're asking them to wrap themselves in your flag. And now it's two unknown kind of flags you're asking them to wrap themselves in.

So it was a lot of education and a lot of just conversation, honest conversation about, "Look, this is what crypto is. This is what we do as a business. And this is what we're hoping to do for the industry." And you asked about the dollars and cents of it all. That's a common thing that people think, "Oh, FTX had all this money and of course they could do these deals." The thing that I learned as the one that was actually doing the majority of these deals was that it's actually not about the money for these super prominent name. And why is it not because of the money? 'Cause quite frankly, they don't need the money.

They don't have to do a deal. Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Major League Baseball, Larry David, they don't have to do any deal. So there has to be something super, super interesting and super exciting philosophically, fundamentally. And I think what I was able to help collectively for us to arrive at was this understanding that, "Oh, there's something here that there's an overlap of interests that we can work together on." And so the philosophical part was much more important than the monetary component. - So what was that overlap?

That obviously Larry David's commercial deals were always very, "I don't want to touch this stuff." Was that the overlap? He just wanted to slag off crypto? - Larry David was an interesting one. He, I believe, was interested to do something that could showcase all of his creative capabilities in the condensed timeframe, right? Kirby enthusiasm, Seinfeld, these are 30-minute or hour-long shows and over a season, right? That's a whole long sort of thing. But can you compress that? Can you do something funny in two minutes, in a minute, in 30 seconds? So I think it was a creative challenge for him. That's my guess.

I don't know if that's actually what it was, but the sort of aha moment or the moment where I could see something starting to happen in Larry's head was when I was pitching him for the commercial, something happened and he realized that this was a great way for him to showcase some of his own like comic thoughts that he was having, both touching on crypto and finance and history and weaving them all together in a hilarious way that only Larry David knows how to do. So it was a combination. - But it was a great commercial. Fantastic. - Thank you.

Well, you might be tickled to know that it was actually done in about 10 weeks with a team of like a hundred and I think 27 people. And yeah, the genesis for it, if you want, I can tell you how it actually started. So we got the green light actually filled with our mutual friend Nathaniel Whitmore, who was our head of marketing. He and I collectively got the green light from the CEO at the time, SPF. And Nathaniel and I were on a phone call and I was driving up the coast at the time. And I was just about to go into a car wash for some reason. And we agreed that this just before I went in the car wash, I'm like, so are we doing this thing?

Or we agree that we're gonna do a Super Bowl commercial, which none of us have ever done. We have no fucking idea what's what actually goes into it. Are we doing this? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, cool. All right, I gotta call you back. I'm going to a car wash. So I went to a car wash in Half Moon Bay and then drove out of the car wash, got back on the phone with Nathaniel and we sketched out the rest of it. So literally from a car wash in Half Moon Bay, California to an award-winning Super Bowl commercial for like funniest commercial in the Super Bowl in something like all in or something like 12 weeks, which neither of us had ever done.

And then by the way, in the middle of this, we had to go and convince Larry David to join us who he'd never talked to us. He'd never heard of us. So it was just a rip roaring like adventure of the time. - And you had no teachings in celebrity wrangling. - Not at all. I said earlier, like for some unknown reason, like I just, I'm able to figure out, I guess, the right words to say or how to arrive at a mutual like place of as beneficial for everyone. But yeah, I'm not a, I had no background in this, but I guess it turns out I have a desire to help elevate brands. This is maybe some psychological thing for myself.

What is it about me that wants to make things more well-known? I don't know. But for whatever reason, I have a drive to want to do that. And I leverage that with the celebrities, brands, athletes, and then so on and so forth. - Well, let me ask you this. So, you know, you played football. Did it help coming at it from almost like an athlete's perspective when you're talking to Tom Brady, you're talking to Steph Curry? 'Cause in the grand scheme of things for startups, these people are untouchable, right? So how, first of all, how did you get to them? Did you have to go through an agency or was there an existing relationship at all?

And how long did it take from initial introduction to inking a deal with these folks? - Yeah, great questions. And the short answer is yes, absolutely. The athletic background helped for sure. I could relate to what these guys are going through. So I played it like you did. I played division one football, the highest level that I could have played without going pro. I know you actually went pro. I had tipped to you. That gave me a sense of what it takes and the determination, the grit, the resilience, the drive, the passion, all of that stuff. So I had some idea of the firepower that I was talking to. So that definitely helped.

And I think they sensed that and they got us just mutual athletes to understand each other in a different sort of way. So that definitely helped. In terms of how long it took, so you first asked how did I get to them? So there was a combination of personal networks and just personal and professional networks that I was able to leverage to find ways to talk to you, wherever we wanted to talk to you. And in terms of how long it took, it varied, but I would say roughly somewhere in the short end, I think three weeks up to the long end, probably three-ish months, something like that.

- Even on the long end, that's extremely quick when you're talking about deals of this magnitude. - We didn't take, I didn't take any days off. We worked around the clock pretty much. I actually worked the entire two and a half years that I was there. I worked every single day, seven days a week. I was on basically, I was available 24/7, literally didn't take a single day off. Even when my first child was born, I tried to take two weeks off. And I told people, hey, I'm gonna take one hard week off and then slowly get back in on the next week. I work every single day. It just, it was hard to stay away.

It was so exciting and things were going so well. - What did the Mrs. say about that? - She was, you know what, all credit to her. She was oddly understanding. I don't know how, but somehow she found it in her to see that, hey, this is, they're doing some interesting things here. Let's give them space. And she was extremely supportive. - I know when you're dealing with celebrities like that, and especially on the athlete side, everybody all asks for, I was just heard Fisher just came and spoke to the Beverly Hills Basketball League. And so everyone always asks him, what's a Kobe story?

Could you share a, like a Tom Brady story and a Steph Curry story that would be interesting to the audience? - I can give you a quick one where the moment that I realized I was not in Kansas anymore was when I was invited to come down actually to LA for a dinner with Tom. And I had to respectfully decline because I was on the way to a golfing event with Steph and Curry. - What choices in life? - But when does one ever get to say that? Oh, sorry, I can't make it to this thing with Tom Brady because it's just bonkers. Just a whole different sort of life.

But other things, honestly, like I was just taken aback at how like human and humble actually both of these guys are. And this was another one of my key takeaways was these are Steph Curry is the greatest shooter in basketball history. Tom Brady, greatest quarterback of all time. I would, my preconceptions of them would have been, oh, super full of themselves, potentially arrogant. I found them to be none of those. In fact, they were super down to earth, super fun and funny and engaging and just cool people to hang out with. And that to me was a huge takeaway and very different than what I would have expected.

They're just down to earth guys that happened to be extremely driven and extremely talented. And it was just a huge pleasure to be able to work with both of them. - So did they understand crypto or did they look at it as an opportunity or like what was that conversation? Was a lot of education that have to happen? - There was definitely some education, but they were like, I give them all credit for being like aware that this is something that they need to pay attention to. And they need to like, maybe that's why they're great athletes. Tom Brady is scanning the field to see where he can throw the ball.

Steph and Curry similar and looking for opportunities for the shot. It's not that different in finance, I would argue. And they're just looking at this as, this is something that I need to know about on the field, whether it's the athletic field or the business field. And so with that kind of intention of, hey, I need to know what's going on in the world, I think that's where we started. And then we walk them through and my job was to walk them through an understanding of what actually crypto is, where it is now, where it could be. And here's why I think you should maybe dive deeper and come along with us on this ride in crypto world.

- Now we've seen NFL players take salary in Bitcoin. We've seen the same thing we've seen NBA players try to tokenize their future earnings. Did either of these guys have Bitcoin? Had they already bought it? From what I understand or what I hear certainly is that the NFL locker rooms, everyone's just talking about Bitcoin. - Yeah, so I don't wanna go into the financial portfolios of any particular person, but the last part of what you said, I think is exactly right. In the locker rooms, just cocktail parties all around, people are just talking about this stuff.

And I think even more now with Bitcoin at all time highs, looking like it's about to get closer, maybe hopefully cross through the 100,000. - Maybe during this conversation. - That would be amazing. And then with the supportive administration that's coming in that's supportive to crypto. And then you've got the Fidelity's, the Black Rocks, the Franklin Templeton's of the world, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Visa, MasterCard. - And the corporates. - And the corporate. - For strategy, Microsoft, maybe Apple. You can put your hat the way if we throw that one in. - Yeah, exactly.

If you get cash in your balance sheet, it's being made quite plain that there's something better. - There you go. And it's just logic. And there's nothing personal about it to anybody. It's just logic. And yeah, for that reason, I think the excitement will continue to grow. And I would suspect that we'll see more and more of this. - So you went from two of the all-time greats in their sports profession to America's pastime with the MLB. What, how was that received with the MLB? Because traditionally, the MLB is a very conservative league. So I'm curious how that came about.

- Yeah, so that was another, that could be a book in and of itself, but this was the first league-wide deal with a crypto company of any major US sports league. And I was quite honestly thrilled that they were open to the idea of us going and doing something that had never been done, which is to take the umpires and put a logo on their chest and the arm. And that to me was like sacred ground, right? - And whose idea was that? Because that is obviously prime real estate because it's always looked upon before every pitch. - It was something that I think we floated to the MLB and they were receptive to it, or they were open-minded about it.

And as to why, I don't know for sure, but what my gut instinct was and is to a degree is that it is America's pastime and it has been around for a long time. And with any brand or business or service that's been around for a long time, you wanna find ways to keep it fresh, engaging. And if you can, merge it or blend it with whatever is the most top of mind for people currently. And they're like, oh, this crypto sort of stuff seems to be picking up interest. It's no longer quite the taboo that it was even a couple of years before that. And so let's talk about it.

And we had a conversation, several conversations more with the league, with the league sort of business executives. And then we had to also convince the umpires union. And that was a new one for me. I was working with the umpires union and getting them to understand what the possibilities and the potential of the promise was here. And so I was delighted to be able to convince them at the end of the day that, hey, this is a net positive for major league baseball. And let us tell us what you need to feel comfortable and we'll do it and let's play ball.

- So when you were targeting and trying to acquire new customers, when you were at FTX, were you thinking of, all right, we're gonna do mass education and we're trying to target the world or even just domestically, or were you thinking we're really gonna refine it and target crypto curious, crypto people that are actively trading. Like how did you approach it with the different avatars? - Yeah, in the case of FTX, there were a few buckets. Broadly you could bifurcate them into institutional and retail. Institutional speaks for itself. These are professional traders managing large sums of money. And they know what they're doing.

They can move money here and there. It's straightforward. They trade on APIs and they've got some other sort of more advanced tools. On the retail side, there's a lot more striation in terms of, like you said, there's crypto curious folks. There's people that maybe have dabbled a little bit, but they're not experts. And then all the way up to like people that we would call power users. And these were individuals that were not institutions, but they were trading, let's say four or five hours a day of their day was spent on crypto.

And there were some really hardcore people, like individuals that were not with a firm out of like somewhere in Asia or something that were trading hundreds of millions of dollars per day just on an individual basis. So, you know, pretty-- - But a Gmail account. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you look at all of that and you say, okay, you've got institutions, you've got retail, you've got different types of retail within that. How do you go about going after them? It turns out you have to have different strategies because different things matter to different people.

And so for the institutions like they cared about liquidity and what kind of execution they could get and like the latency and more technical things. The retail was more about trust. And can we trust these guys? And can they teach me a little bit about crypto? And is it easy to use? What's the user experience and so forth?

And then at a meta level above all of this, something that I learned and I think all of us learned on the FTX side was that there's actually a funny thing that starts to happen is when you start to get these like large names and interesting names like Tom Brady's and Stephen Curry's and Larry Davids of the world, you would think that's a retail oriented thing, right? We're making commercials, we're doing retail campaigns.

But what happened in addition to that was that institutions, I would say nine out of 10 of the institutional meetings that we took, whether that was myself or our CEO or whoever else in the company, they would start off with, oh my God, we saw that Tom Brady commercial. That was so cool. Wow, we saw you on these Major League Baseball umpires. Or we saw your Super Bowl commercial. Like it was uncanny that nine out of 10. - Institutions are people too. - Bingo, that's it. And that's what I didn't personally think about it like that. I was like, oh, there's institutions are very serious, but guess what?

They're people exactly like you said, Douglas. - Yeah. - So I always like to talk about the applications of crypto and digital securities in sports and entertainment with your sports background and everything that you've done so far. Where do you see the opportunities in sports entertainment for the use of kind of this new money or new assets? We may call it whether we're talking about crypto or digital securities. Where do you think it's gonna go?

- It's such a great question, but it's also, I think if I'm totally honest, it's unanswerable because at least for me, 'cause I don't think that I'm smart enough to have known, let's say when the internet was starting. If you asked me in like 1993, like how is the internet gonna affect the NFL? How is the internet gonna affect basketball or soccer? Like I could probably hazard a couple of guesses, but I don't think, I know that I wouldn't have guessed all of the different ways and the totality of the different ways. So I think that pattern applies here.

So I can give you a few ideas, but I think ultimately if we're gonna, if I make a baseball analogy, like the walk off, home run kind of situation would be where this actually becomes almost invisible. So crypto and blockchain and web three technologies become invisible in the same way that you and I are not thinking right now about TCP/IP or hypertext transfer protocols. How are we talking on the internet? Where do the electrons go? And we don't think about that. We just know that. - Yeah, there's a session about tech right now. Everyone wants to talk about blockchain or which wallet and the average person doesn't care.

- They don't give a shit. - They just don't get from A to B. - That's it. I wanna watch the content that I wanna watch. I don't care about how I do it. So I think that's the ultimate like end game here is that it becomes invisible. Now, before that, we've got a lot of different, first we have to crawl. We're not even really crawling yet, in my opinion. Then we got to walk, then you can run, then maybe build a car and then a rocket ship. But so to be more concrete, okay.

So I learned from one of the sports teams that I got to know, they have a large, beautiful stadium and what percent of the well-known global sports team, what percentage of their fans do you think actually made it into the stadium to watch a game? And let's just pick, let's say it was basketball as the sport. What percentage of the fans of a team do you think actually made it into their stadium to watch a game? - 1%. - Half a percent. - Less than, yeah. You guys are right on things, actually 1%. So that means what? 99% of their fans do not make it into the stadium to watch a game.

So that immediately to me says latent demand for more engagement and more ways to like tap into this latent passion that they have for their team. They're clearly fans, these users, these people, but they're not able to come in and cheer and get into the whole thing at the stadium. So services that enable them to feel like they're part of the action, I think are super exciting. So I'll just make up an example. Take Formula One racing, okay. Imagine a thing where you could get users coming together, sending transactions on the blockchain where each transaction moves a picture of a car forward like an inch or a two inches or whatever.

And then you have, you overlay that with an actual racer and they're racing on a track or a straight line. Let's see who can make it across the course the fastest. All the fans that are typing away basically make it interactive and other countless other combinations and permutations. But basically finding ways to make, to let fans express their passion for their teams and drivers and players through the use of blockchain and crypto technologies. I think there's a lot to be done there. And I think that's where we're starting to go toward. - I wanna tease what you're doing.

I have a couple of questions before we get to what you're doing with your new announcement, but it obviously has to do with the entertainment sector. But in our listeners, you're gonna wanna stay on to hear more about that. But before we get there, so you concluded FTX, right? You go into, was it like a step back reflect, figure out what you wanna do? Like what's going through your mind at that moment? Is that where maybe the relationship with Tom took you to start talking about Autograph and what they're doing? Or what did you do during that time? What's going through SEMA's mind? - Yeah, it's a great question.

Honestly, when I realized that all this goodwill and trust and brand equity that I built up for FTX have been put to very unfortunate use, that shook me for a good month and a half. I was just shell shocked. Like what the hell just happened? Trying to wrap my mind around it. And once I calmed myself down enough to be able to think clearly about it, I said, hold on, let me ask myself a couple of questions. Do I still love this space? So I still love this technology. And if so, what do I do with it? So the first question, do I love this space? I realized that FTX was actually not a failure of crypto technology. It was a failure of human nature.

So if we agree on that, then I'm like, okay. So then I can still play and I can still be in this space because it wasn't the technology's fault. And so then the question is, why did I get into this stuff in the first place? If you remember, I talked about the principal agent problem. I felt like just in general, it was atrocious to me that some centralized party, let's say a bank, could decide that they don't like the color of my shirt and they don't wanna send my wire transfer. If I wanna send money, Douglas is traveling in France. I wanna send him a wire for some reason. They might not let me do it and I have no recourse.

I have zero recourse. But if Douglas has a USDC or a Solano wallet or whatever on Ethereum or a Bitcoin wallet, I can just click and he gets the money in minutes or even sooner. That to me was the reason I got into it and that still holds, right? So then the question is, okay, now what do I do? I basically said, let me try to look for the smartest people that I can find in the space and see if I can help them out with the skills that I developed at FTX. And the skills that I developed were basically take a brand and kind of elevate it.

And so I found this team of people called Mists and Labs actually through a mutual friend with actually Tom Brady. So the world, things come full circle. - So you didn't find them on Facebook. - I didn't find them on Facebook. But it's interesting 'cause they were at Facebook before as they were the kind of the top cryptography team at Facebook and they realized that the product they were working on at Facebook wasn't going to fly because of multiple different reasons, jurisdictions and stuff globally. But the tech they built was really incredible. So they're like, let's go and do something with this ourselves.

And so they launched this company called Mistin. And the more that I learned about them, the more impressed I was and I'm not a technical person. So I talked to my technical friends and they're like, wow, no, this tech is like really impressive. And as I got into it, I realized it was probably arguably the most advanced blockchain that's out there. And I think still that's the case. But the thing was that they were not really known about. And I was like, oh, I've seen this movie before, really good technology, but nobody's heard of them. That is exactly the pattern that I walked into at FTX. They had objectively good trading technology.

That's why people would use FTX, but nobody'd heard about them. I came and developed some tools to change that. At Mistin and for their SWE blockchain that they developed, similar thing. So I basically came in and applied some of my different tools that I learned how to deploy and helped to increase their profile and elevate the brand. And my sort of major things that I was working on were getting them involved in the financial services space. And I'm happy to say now that SWE is available via different products from like Vanette, from 21 shares and from Grayscale.

And there's like over 100, I think $150 million or so that's already flowed into SWE from these different financial products that these guys have created and so on and so forth. - And SWE say that, I guess they look at blockchain in a different way. How is that? What is that different way that they look at it? - It's hard to explain satisfactorily as a non-technical person, but let me take a stab at it. Basically, they realized that there's a different way to organize data. And they use what's called an object oriented architecture which I know probably doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people, including myself initially.

But basically they figured out you don't have to put all the transactions through at the same time or have people wait in line to do the transactions. There's a smarter way to route the transactions through so you can have faster throughput and you can basically just do a lot more with the technology. I know that if there's any technical people listening that probably wasn't fully satisfactory, but essentially it can be a whole lot faster. And let me put it in a way that I think most people will understand. SWE is designed to be scalable in the same way that Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services are scalable. It's technically infinite.

You just add more computers and you have more servers and more processing power, and theoretically just add more and just expands into infinity. So there's no bottleneck issue. That's the promise of SWE is like it can be scalable technically to infinity and the speed is really strong. The speed is really fast, I should say. And so the way that SWE folks talk about it is SWE is the chain, is the blockchain that gets us to mass adoption. So it's like the idea is for SWE to be big enough pipes that all the stuff that needs to flow through it can flow through it in a seamless way. - They say Ethereum's for altcoins, solves for meme coins.

What's SWE for? - SWE is for web three. So I think of it as, again, using pipelines as an analogy. If a pipeline is this big, it can get a certain amount through it. If it's this big, it can get a certain amount through it. And really the idea is for the pipes to be big enough to be able to handle all of the requirements of web three, which is quite a bit. So another way to think of it actually is this is not exactly a perfect analogy, but Cisco, if you remember Cisco systems, they provide the routers and the servers and the switches that power our communications here, but they're invisible. They're just the backbone of the internet.

SWE, I believe is looking to be that for web three, to be the backbone of web three. That's the end game for them, I would say. - Got it. - So if we have some startup founders or folks that are in startups listening that are thinking about growing the brand, what advice would you give to them approaching these large organizations or people that maybe they could learn from your success of having those conversations? Or was it very much just an individual base? You just had the network that happened to know somebody that trusted you and were happy to make the introduction.

- I never fully appreciated the wisdom behind the old saying, it's not what you know, it's who you know. That's the first thing I would say is that is, I found that to be very true. The other thing that I found to be very true was something that I actually read in the Wall Street Journal many years ago when I was at Credit Suisse on a Sunday in a cafe reading the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, some, I think it was a book review. And there was some line, it was blah, blah, blah. And logic, you know, and emotion wins over logic.

And emotion winning over logic was something that I just, I recorded that in my brain as I was reading it as, huh, that's interesting. I don't fully understand that, but it seems profound. So let me try to hold on to it. And looking back retrospectively at FTX stuff, every single time, all the big wins, I was not pushing logical buttons, I was pushing emotional buttons. So I would submit to your viewers and listeners to really meditate on the importance of the emotional and the right brain side of stuff, rather than focusing on the left brain side.

That goes both for your pitches to these individuals or teams or partners, and also to the messaging that you put out there for your customers and end users to really think about the emotional side. Because ultimately people are not gonna make a decision on the rational side. Most times they're gonna make a decision on how it feels for them and what kind of, what their gut feel is. So really, yeah. - For sure. But again, they're just people. - That's it, that's it. Whether it's institutions or these mega celebrities are just very important people at keyword people. They are absolutely people and people are emotional creatures.

We're driven by emotion. And as far as I can tell, we really respond to stories. And the confluence of all of these are how we would first start to think about it. That just grounds like a priori stuff. Getting deeper, there's all to millions and millions of combinations and permutations of this. I could probably fill multiple books, but I would submit starting with the emotional side of stuff is probably a good place to start. - That's fantastic, that's fantastic. Talking about the startups, and oftentimes I like to ask experts, if you were to start over knowing what you know now, what would you do?

But in this case, you're actually started a new company and you're doing that. So tell us a little bit more about the new company, how it came about, what's your inspiration and why are you excited about it? - Yeah, so I'm working on a company called Party. It's P-A-R-T-I. Yeah, right there. Who doesn't like a party? - You got an emotional reaction. - Bingo, so I'm trying to apply all these things that I've learned along the way. And so when my co-founder came to me and said, "Hey, I got this domain called party.com, P-A-R-T-I.com." I was like, okay, keep talking, but I'm already in. That's such an amazing brand name just on that.

I can do so much with that brand. But anyway, it's called Party. And you can think of it as a media company with a financial services layer baked in. And if I wanna be a little bit cheeky about it, I could say, imagine if Robinhood and Netflix or Robinhood and YouTube had a baby. And so what would that look like potentially? It would be like a place where people can come and watch the content that they want from the creators and content producers that they enjoy. And we say, oh, by the way, we know that about 14 to 15% of you in the US have crypto. We're gonna offer you crypto trading capabilities here.

If you wanna swap out of some Ethereum into some Solana or vice versa or Bitcoin to Solana or vice versa, we'll let you do that either way with really attractive rates. - About what? - Yeah, you come for the videos and stay for the crypto trading, if that's your thing, or just come for the videos. We're happy with that as well. It's a party, that's it, man. And so that's super high level. But what makes it, in my opinion, what makes it even more kind of sticky and interesting is for the creators.

So creators right now, as you guys may well know, as many of your listeners may well know, they're kind of getting screwed by a lot of these other kind of larger platforms in terms of what they keep. So if I'm a creator and I go on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever, and I post in content and I get lots and lots of views, I'm getting, I don't know, maybe 40, 50, 60% of the economics. At Party, we say, wait a minute, people come to these platforms because of the creators are the main attraction. So why don't we offer the creators the economics that we think they deserve, which is basically up to 100% of the economics they bring.

And that's instant, some guys make you wait two weeks as well or a month to get your money. - Douglas, I think you might be a finance person or something, that's very insightful. It is 100% instant as fast as the blockchain can be. And by the way, it's peer to peer. So if you Douglas are a content creator and I wanna subscribe to you or I wanna tip you, it goes directly from my crypto wallet to your crypto wallet directly. The party platform does not ever touch the money, just goes right to you. And as far as we know, that's a first.

And as far as we know, it's also a first for a platform to say to the creators, hey, come here and keep 100% of your economics if you choose to get compensated in crypto. We also offer credit card and traditional ways to get paid as well, but that's the super high level. The other thing is we're offering equity. We've actually carved out about a quarter of the company to offer a quarter of the company's equity to offer to what we're calling the founding creators. And the idea is that we want them to be owner operators of the platform so that if I'm a creator, again, I can own a portion of the distribution arm of my own content.

As far as we know, again, that's a first. So own your platform, own your distribution platform, earn 100% of what you produce and get it instantly. These are the starting value propositions. There's a lot more to it, but basically, hopefully that kind of made some sense. It's a content platform where people can come and watch their favorite stuff and also do financial services in the background. - Now it doesn't have to be prerecorded or can it also be live content? - So right now it's actually primarily live streaming.

And so we've actually, I'm happy to say, so we just launched in like actually October 31st on Halloween with our first partner, Jack Doherty, who's an internet personality. - Big name. - So thank you. And it sounds like you've heard of him. He's got 20 million or so followers, I believe, across socials. And he's now live streaming all of his content on party. He's been a great partner for us. And then people hear about him and they say, "Oh, Jack Doherty's on party? What's party? I gotta go check it out." And then to Douglas's point, who doesn't like a party? It's just an emotional thing. People wanna check it out.

And we're now starting to see like just viral and explosive growth. We've had some clips that have gone, got tens of millions of views already. And it's just starting to, word is getting out that party is this place where you can go if you're a creator, keep more of your economics, get it instantly. And then there's a bunch more coming beyond that, but that's the general gist of it. The other thing I'll say is I'll give a shout out to he who's the drummer for this rapper named G-Eazy, who's also got tens of millions of followers. And he's been able to set up a camera at his drumming station.

And you see the entire concert live as it's happening with concert quality audio coming through live on party.com. You can actually watch full concerts. So we're just, we're coming out with a bang here and hopefully we'll be able to keep putting our foot on the gas pedal. - And what was his name again? - So the drummer is named Blizzy, B-L-I-Z-Y. - And he's with G-Eazy. - G-Eazy is the rapper, yeah. - Gotcha, gotcha. Listen, it sounds outside of the soft launch. Sounds like this is, maybe we should claim that this is the official announcement publicly of party on the podcast sector. - This is the first time that I'm announcing it in this way.

So absolutely, we'll take it. - Great, listen, this is fantastic. You've given us a lot here and we really appreciate your time. - My pleasure, thank you for having me guys. - My friend, fantastic interview, fantastic.