Unleashing Community Power with Collab.Land

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Millie Yearley, AKA Tim, AKA I have a lot of cats and they're all very scared right now because I just did that. And I'm here with Anjali and James from Collabland and from Abridged. So thanks for being here with the Pull Together community for our podcast, you two.

Thank you. GM, GM, everyone that's in the audience and everyone listening. So happy to be here with James today. It's a rare day that we get to be on a podcast together, so I'm going to enjoy it.

Same here. Glad to be here. GM, everyone. And looking forward to this.

I mean, you two, it's great to have 2 people on the podcast. Usually it's one-on-one, but it's great to have this, like the trifecta here. Also, you guys sound great. You guys got those podcast voices, you know? So, uh, it's exciting to, to talk to you for the next 30 minutes or so, but let me hear your origin stories. As all heroes, you don't want to be the main character in crypto. I know that, but you can always be a hero in crypto. So how'd you get into it? What's your origin story?

I'm going to let James start and then I will finish off.

Okay, let me begin. I started in 2016 in crypto. The first foray into Ethereum specifically was the World Computer meme. And I came from game development and I created, or not created, but helped launch a game called FarmVille. This is many years ago, and we had stumbled into AWS, which was Amazon Web Services. And when I looked at the success of the game, this was very early on in social gaming. The success of the game was really due to the infrastructure. So when I heard this, because I was in Bitcoin, I was like, wait, the world computer? Like, I don't have to manage servers. I was really excited from a technical perspective, which is not the common, I guess, origin story here when it comes to crypto. But really, as a developer, I didn't want to have to maintain or manage infrastructure. And that was really my draw into Ethereum. And then went down the rabbit hole of smart contracts and went into scalability. That got me into organizations and DAOs. And that led to developing tools for developers, which Abridge initially with its SDK was a dev tooling provider. And Collabland was a reference implementation to the no-code dev tooling that we had initially launched. And then people were like, oh, we'd love Collabland, but we don't want to have to do this dev tooling stuff. We don't want our own bot. We just want this bot that already works. And then Collabland was born. I initially thought this is going to be a great tool for DAOs. And then Anjali was like, wait a second here. There is a world beyond just DAOs. There's this thing called NFTs. And so we said, okay, maybe this could be a more generalized tool for community building in general rather than just for, for DAO tooling or what we were coining the term DAO Ops at the time. And then I'll let Angeli continue on.

Yeah, that's kind of where I fit in. I started in early 2021. It was still very much like we're going up the DAO stack here with Abridged and even with Collabland, like, oh great, a community or DAOs are starting to use Collabland. This is wonderful. You know, James said it was an experiment. It was a reference implementation. of our no-code tooling, one of dozens of experiments that we tried. You know, so that's really a message out there for anyone who's like, what do I do and how do I do it? Just keep going and keep experimenting and keep trying. There were lots of failures along the way. And what we thought Abridged was going to be, which started as a contract wallet and then moved into no-code tooling and then DAO ops, is now a community management tool that is supporting 50,000 communities. over Telegram and Discord and token-gated websites. So you never know where you're going to end up. Just keep going and keep being curious. So my first, what I call like thumbprint on this industry would be just that. Like James and Raymond, who are the other co-founders, were like, you know, we want to go up the DAO tooling stack, build more and more robust, intricate tools just for DAOs. And for me, I'm coming in with like, wait a minute, NFTs, this is incredible. This is art, this is community, this is something that can be something so special and bring in people that maybe aren't just interested in the DAO governance aspect, but that are interested in like collecting, just collecting beautiful things, collecting beautiful pictures. And now why don't we service them? Why don't we give them an opportunity to have, say, hey, everyone that just collected my picture of this project that I just put out, let's all get into a club together. And so that was my first real thumbprint on the industry. And I was literally DMing everybody from every single new project I saw coming up on Twitter. I would DM them from the Collabland account, which you can— that sounds crazy now, but, you know, in the summer of 2021, it made perfect sense. I was like, hey, do you want to try this new tool? It's called Collabland. You can get everyone that just bought your NFT into a group together. So that was when I started, which was, I think my first official day was like March 8th, 2021.

Wow. Wow. March 8th, 2021. That's like, it seems so long ago, but it's not so long ago, but it is in crypto. It's like a decade. I have a FarmVille story that I will insert real quick. My, one of my first, I've only had a couple viral videos in my personal YouTube account. One of them was back in iPhone 3G days. There was like a mount for your dashboard for your car. And this is like even pre— like, I guess they didn't even— like, that's when the App Store came out. So Google Maps and all of that, uh, was just coming around. But I drilled a hole in it so that I could have a dash cam, and I made a video and it got like tons of views. And then— but I used Animal Collective song, and so YouTube wouldn't let me show ads, so I didn't make any money off of it. But my other famous video was how to remove FarmVille notifications from Facebook. So

I apologize for spamming the newsfeed back then. I mean, it was, we were notorious for that. Yeah.

I mean, that's growth hacking, right? Like you were the first to do it. At least that. Yeah. I think on Facebook, that was the first one that I was just like, how do I do this? I'm going to make a piece of content. And it blew. It actually still got views. And I was like, I don't think they do this anymore. I think it's anyway. But I love how—

But how are you going to know about your lost sheep?

You got to know. You got to know about the sheep, Bibi.

But there is a— I mean, there's a connection between FarmVille and Clubland as well, which is like FarmVille was a game on Facebook, right? It's not like it was a third-party standalone platform, standalone app. It was a game that was launched on Facebook. And I think that informed a lot about Clubland and how Clubland started. I don't know, James, you want to bring that up at all?

Yes, I think that was the key. So when we first started this reference implementation of Collabland, it was all on Telegram, and that's where crypto is still. But initially everyone was just on Telegram, and you had the TON token. We didn't know what was going to happen. Because of my gaming roots, I know Jason Stichron. We worked at the same studio. He's a Jason, CEO of Discord. And I was like, hey, I don't know about just this bot on Telegram. Can I get onto Discord? And what I wanted to make sure was that there was some kind of relationship with the platform. And Jason was like, you know what? If I wasn't doing this Discord thing, I'd be all into crypto. And I don't know if the viewers or anyone remember, there was like a little bit of a hubbub about a wallet being in Discord. I cannot confirm or deny that I helped out with any of that. But that said, in Discord, there were no Web3 communities. And when it comes to starting out, right, you see a lot of Web3 chat platforms that you log in with your wallet and all that. We wanted to see just, hey, can we just bring an audience to Discord? And I would say we successfully did. And you don't have to necessarily build the whole stack yourselves. And so just kind of a lesson here for those that are getting into development, crypto, even AI, all this. You don't have to have your own platform. You can actually build on top of others. And we've seen that successfully with Zynga and FarmVille. And you see that also with a bunch of apps in the Apple App Store as well. And I think that there is definitely a lesson there, is that you don't have to build everything from scratch. You don't have to boil the ocean day one. You can start small, and then once you get some momentum, you continue to grow. That allowed us now to have our own Collabland marketplace. Now you can, as a third-party developer, you can just extend the Collabland bot yourself. And we have turned Collabland from this token gating into a distribution platform. We have over 50,000 tokenized communities that have installed the bot. And so I think for us, it's that lesson coming from Facebook extended through Apple and the App Store. And now we are trying to pay it forward by allowing third-party developers to just extend the Collabland bot and make it really easy to get your app

Well, and like, let the people who are doing the thing do it best. So here it's like Discord does it best, and they've spent, I mean, how many billions of dollars perfecting this platform? And so what do you want to do? Like, for us, it was like having a place for tokenized communities to meet. We don't need to create the entire platform. And how long would it take and how much money would it take? when there are these platforms that people are already comfortable with, already know how to use, and the service is already being provided by a third party. So it's— if you can get into that kind of thinking, which is like interoperability and building together, that's really how to elevate yourself in this space.

I remember I was an admissions counselor for a university in South Florida. And this was like in the MySpace days when, and then I had like the, the plastic iBook that came out with the, with the iChat cam that they called it, like the webcam built in. And so I used that to make content on MySpace to try to recruit students because they wouldn't answer my phone calls. They wouldn't return my emails. But when I put stuff up on MySpace and message them, they would immediately respond. And so that actually got me into social media marketing, which I didn't even know it was a thing. That's what you did. But then I started helping businesses sell on Facebook and nonprofits and what is, you know, and then Squarespace websites came out. There's a lot of no-code solutions and ways to do business in tech that was that, that did, you don't have to be technical to do that. So I was really excited about it and I felt like a pioneer of sorts. I felt like I was on the frontier of technology. The problem with it, and I was always in the back of my head scared about some, about this, I didn't like to build a business on something I didn't control. And so you're also seeing this in, in Web3. And I would assume, I know this happens in Discord as well, when you're building on someone else's platform and you're constrained, that's also helpful for scope creep because you're constrained by their platform. But at the same time, you could have a super successful product and then you're kind of like, boxed in by the platform that you're on. Now, maybe this is not happening to you in Discord, but I know like in speaking with Decentral Games, like they're very much Decentraland project, but they also wanna be on mobile. And there's a lot of like different things that they have to jump through. So I would love to know about like using Discord and Telegram as creative constraint in, in what you wanna do. And how does that work as far as feature building, product building?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I do think that the constraints provide creativity. And when we were solely on Telegram, there was that existential issue of, like, what if the platform shuts you down? The great thing about what we're doing in Web3 is those that are owning a token that form a community around a shared collection of assets, or a shared governance contract or model is that they can hop around, right? So you— we've seen Telegram communities, token communities move within like hours into Discord once available, right? And if you have that, that infrastructure from an asset perspective, the core community is not based on the platform. It's based on that shared ownership so that you can then move from Telegram to Discord to other places. We actually are in the midst of refining a Collabland SDK so that you can actually use the same rules that you have in Telegram, Discord, and apply them to a website. And so now you can have website gating. And so I think that Web3 crypto, the shared ownership that changes the game a bit. And actually, it's critical so that now these communities can leverage the platform instead of just being leveraged by the platform. And I think also in this kind of major tech wave that we're seeing, I do believe there is this future where AI and crypto Have this collision course where we're going to, with the no-code tools, redefine what it means to be a developer. And so we're lowering the bar and AI is going to help that. AI is helping itself where current versions of AI are generating and making the next version of itself. It's this weird kind of space that we're in now where there's just so much empowerment. And I think that we're going to need AI. I think that it's going to unlock a lot of great things. But I also do think there's a dark side to AI. Actually, this literally took me 10 minutes to make, was I uploaded a photo of myself and I uploaded a sample audio of myself, and it generated the video and it generated the audio. It was completely 100%. Synthesized. I'll find the link and I'll put it in the Pull Together chat here after this call or this podcast. And it was pretty amazing. And what I think is going to happen in the short term is that it's going to be hard to know if you're talking to a real person online or a synth AI-generated character. And I think this is where Crypto again will meet AI, where your decentralized ID is going to be how you can verify, like you verify a transaction or verify by signing a message, who you are. And you're going to need that ID. That this decentralized ID concept has been around for over a decade, but really didn't have a use case. So I think that You know, we are going to see this future, and I don't mean to take this off topic. I guess I'm suffering from a bit of ADHD as well, but I think it's relevant here when it comes to like the constraints of a platform lead to actually empowerment because you have shared ownership of an asset and the community now is in control, not no longer the platform, but what we're going to need to do with these constraints and no-code tooling with AI, we're going to lower the barrier. We're going to have more developers. You don't have to be this high priest of technology to have to learn a programming language and go to school and all this stuff. You're going to be able to just speak in regular natural language to an AI, and you're going to be able to make apps. But on the flip side, we're going to also need to protect ourselves. And this is where decentralized IDs come in. So I think it's all in this next cycle as we you know, get out of this bear, there's going to be something there. And this is kind of where we're trying to really empower communities and take them to the next level and go beyond just token gating. Token gating is the first fundamental step, but it's just the beginning.

Right. And just to add on to what James has said, I think there is a way to get back to Collabland from that. Yes, he is very bullish on AI and using AI for the future of Collabland, and that could be its whole other podcast. Milli-yearly. So think about that. If you want to talk about that again, absolutely. James is your guy because we're talking about that. Yes, please. He can be on for many hours talking about that. But as far as your initial question is like existential crisis, we don't see that as an existential crisis for Collabland. When we think about Collabland, we think about all the communities that we support and working together with everyone else in this crypto community space. Space in order to help communities thrive and survive. So yes, we don't want there to be a limitation on where crypto communities go. Like James mentioned about our— we also have a token-gated website product, and we also have the SDK that's going to be open. So if you've ever connected with Collabland on Telegram or on Discord, then you'll be able to move your community anywhere you want. And that is open for everybody. You can move your— anyone can create a website and have everyone be able to move their community. That's the beauty of this space, not just thinking about how specifically Collabland is going to survive. We're going to be surviving. You know, you know that we have a Collabland co-op that we launched this year. We have a token now. We're inviting everyone to participate and build together. We have this marketplace so we can have developers come and join in. Like, I think less about specifically about Collabland and how Collabland will survive, but more about how do we make sure crypto communities survive and what can we all do to help crypto communities survive and thrive. And that's because we've seen through Collabland that this has been a way for adoption in the last bear market or in the last bull market. This is where the most people came into crypto. And so we really need to keep that precious. How do we keep community at the core of what we're doing and make sure that it always has a seat at the table? And so it's more when we talk about what are we going to do with Collabland, and now we have our whole community to help us, guide us. But it's how do we make sure that crypto communities can survive moving forward and keeping them at really the heart of what we're doing. And we do. So that's where we're headed.

I love that. Also with the website, and that's kind of getting to the future of Collabland, right? Like new features, that sort of thing. I do remember going to ETH Denver for the first time. I went— I've been to the last 2. So what was that, 2023? So 2022 was my first ETH Denver. And I remember being on the plane and somebody came up to me like, oh yeah, we should connect. What's your Telegram? And I was like, I have Discord. Like, what's this Telegram stuff? Like, do I have to have another platform? And that's really cool to hear, like the origin, like moving communities to this gamer platform to where I communicate with my friends who are in like Web2 companies or other things. And they're all slacking and they hear that I work in Discord and they're like, what are you, are you playing Call of Duty every day? Why are you in Discord? M. But if you could speak to the future of Collabland, just paint, show us the vision. And, you know, for that, 'cause it sounds like, I know there's Discord, there's Telegram, there's websites, but I know your core audience is community. So, and we know about communities, they're fickle beasts, they're cats herding cats. So you kind of have to be where the communities are. So if you could speak to that.

Yes, you have to be where communities are and you need to serve your communities. So the future of Collabland is serving communities. And how are we gonna do that? One, we are going to be activating— so with Collabland, like James mentioned, we have 50,000 active communities. Actually, that's not the number of communities that have ever installed Collabland. That number is like 75,000 and up. But our active communities right now sit at 50,000. And within those 50,000 communities, we have 8.8 million wallet connections, which translates to 2.6 million unique Discord IDs. However, we have about another 90 million Discord IDs within those 50,000 communities. And what do we do with these people that are number one? So there's a couple of different approaches. One, how do we activate the people that are sitting on the sidelines waiting to get involved with crypto? How do we show them like there's an opportunity here and get your feet wet? And once you get your feet wet, we know that time to token is the hardest part, that 0 to 1 part. But once you get to 1, once you have your first crypto token, once you're— engaged in that way, activated in that way, then sky's the limit. Everyone's going to start engaging in a whole bunch of different ways. And we saw that with NBA Top Shots, where it's like they were on Flow and it's a closed blockchain. It's a closed system. You know, they're not out there in the world. But about 10% of the people that were in NBA Top Shots moved out of NBA Top Shots and moved into other projects. And so now we have this 90 million group of people that are just sitting on the sidelines waiting to be activated. How do we activate them? So that's what we're doing right there, which is engaging them. And we have a lot of plans for how to engage them. And then James spoke a little bit about decentralized ID and building reputation. Now it's okay, we're in a bear market. This is tough. It's tough for everybody right now. But what we're going to do is provide reputation and showing proof of your contribution. Once we help people that are in the space right now show what they're doing and get credit for what they're doing, that's kind of the next 2 different approaches for Collab.Led, which is activating the people that are sitting on the sidelines and also giving reputation and helping our community members right now build a reputation. So that way they have— there is evidence that they— what they were doing while they were here. And so when the next bull market comes around, they're going to be able to show evidence of that. So really we're in the service business and that's what we want to do is serve our communities. And help people get into crypto. Like James and I personally and our whole team believe this is the way to solve a lot of the issues that we have. Global coordination is key for this next part of what's happening, even for the rest of my life. We have hunger, we have water, we have global warming. There are so many— war. We're in a war state right now. There's so many issues that are going on globally. that would be solved with human global coordination. And so that's kind of like the North Star for both of us, which is getting more people into this space, and then also giving the people that are in this space right now a reputation that they can take with them.

And just to kind of bring it back a little bit to AI as well, I don't mean to be that guy, but there's this kind of threat as well when it comes to general artificial intelligence, AGI or ASI. artificial superintelligence, and how are we going to coordinate the entire world and make sure that this AI doesn't kind of take over? I think it's going to happen one DAO at a time, and you'll have coordination within DAOs. These DAOs will start to network, and I think that's kind of how we can practically approach this. But it all is driven by communities. And then from the communities, it goes down to the individual, as Anjali was saying. And so we have a lot of products that are in the works that we're going to announce and super excited by the ability to have reputation. So we turn crypto from which people think of just purely financial into an identity play where people can verify and build up their reputation online. And that then leads to things that you can do financially. So part of that unlock will be undercollateralized or noncollateralized loans as well, because that's basically what your credit score is, is how creditworthy are you? It's just your reputation. Why can't we have this be democratized and decentralized? So now we can pay it forward when it comes to people that are wanting to be part of the system but are locked out because for whatever disadvantage or whatever non-privilege they were born into or have. I think that decentralized IDs and reputation based off of that gives everyone that foothold, and that's super inspiring to us. And I think that will be kind of this next unlock.

Well, I love that. And I love how you tie the mission of Collabland to existential threats. I mean, I read the Three-Body Problem trilogy. We have to join forces. We have to work together globally against those sorts of things. And I love that about uniting communities and uniting DAOs. But listen, this was a constant— this is orange juice concentrate podcast. That's what this was. But I want to let you go, but we got to do this again soon. But Pull Together community loves Collabland. We use it in our community calls. Thank you so much for making PoAP claiming so easy. But then also there's so much more that Collabland does. And I love that the store or like the, you know, the developer tools and the websites gating, all of that stuff. So We'll put that— we'll put links in the podcast description. So thank you both, James and Anjali, for being here. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much. It's been a delight. I hope we get to see you again, and thanks for doing this.

Awesome. All right, thanks. We're done.

Thank you.

All right.

All right, hopping off. Thank you so much, Tim. That was really delightful. I'm so sorry we only had 30 minutes.

Oh, no worries.

Today, but we really appreciate it.

Yeah, Anjali, thank you so much. And then, and then we'll have this out next week. Okay, wonderful. We'll tweet it and tag you.

Awesome. And I'm not kidding about AI. If you want James to come back and talk, if you want to just nerd out, we're already doing

it.

Yeah, let's do it. Keep him constrained.

Yes.

So yeah, if you want to— okay, perfect. You're gonna do it. It's gonna be awesome. And then, and then we'll see you again. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody in the audience. I see Cheeky and I see And Darby and Bab and Denicio and 3S Cava, thank you so much for hopping in and listening. I really, really appreciate everyone in the audience as well. Okay, bye-bye.

All right, bye. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode, so visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.