#182 - DARIYA KHOJASTEH

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Thank you, Dariya Khojasteh, for coming on the podcast. Appreciate you taking the time. We met, um, probably a little, a little under a year ago now, I guess. I think last October. We both showed up at Coinbase Ventures Summit, which was a super cool event. And we were like, I don't know if we were like the first ones there, but we got there like the same time. We were like in the lobby. And it's one of those things where like, you don't know if like the other guy is like at the same thing that you're at or whatever. Like you have no idea what you're showing up to. One of us broke the ice. I don't remember who it was. And we ended up like not only like hanging out for a couple hours, I think at the beginning, and then like the first event everyone like went back up to their rooms, was like getting ready for the first event, and you and I like showed up downstairs at the same exact time again or something. And so like we ended up hanging out like a good portion of this, uh, 2 or 3-day thing, which like I said was like a ton of fun, great event by Coinbase. And, uh, and it was great, you know, being able to meet you there, and we've kept in touch a little bit since. And now I'm using, you know, your, your company, or, uh, I'm a user, I guess, of your company, or whatever you want to call it, of, of your company, that, uh, layer 3 that sort of helps people reach people in crypto to go and, you know, get, get involved with their projects. I'm using it for my project Base Colors and might use it for my podcast as well if I'm minting it on-chain. So anyway, everything's come full circle, feels like a super small world, and I've been wanting to do a podcast with you for a while, so it's great to finally be able to do that. I think, um, you know, before we dive too deep into anything in particular, it would be great for those who don't know you, for you to, uh, kind of tell your story from as early as you're willing to start to where you are today and, you know, talk about some of the decisions you made along the way.

Yeah, totally. I, first of all, I appreciate you having me on. Honestly, it's very, very full circle. I remember being in that lobby and just bonding over the next few days over our love for good steaks and golf and relaxing nights just with your friends. So I can give a quick overview of my childhood because I've been at this internet stuff for quite some time. So I mean, I like to put my experience in the perspective of I've just been trying to get people to click buttons on the internet for the last, you know, 14 years. And it starts like honestly when I was really into Pokémon growing up and, you know, I was just like fascinated by this game and this was in like 2010 or 2011 when, you know, just like consumed my life. I would like, you know, do school. I was in elementary school and then I would just get home and be obsessed with the Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon, just Pokémon video games. And ultimately I had this like want, I wanted an Xbox so badly and my parents just would not buy this Xbox for me. And, you know, I had to figure out, well, how do I combine this, this love for this thing that I have at the time, which was Pokémon, and, you know, use that to get me to some towards this goal that I had, which was at the time getting an Xbox. And so I had all these Pokémon cards and I, you know, created a PayPal account and created an eBay account and under a fake age, I started selling Pokémon cards on eBay. And what I would do is I'd package them into mystery boxes or sell them, you know, just buy rare cards and sell them for a slightly higher margin. And I did that for, you know, a few months until, you know, at the end of the summer I had bought and sold and traded my way to around $10,000 to, you know, ultimately like buy an Xbox.

And how old was this roughly?

Man, I was 11.

Wow, that's a lot of money for an 11-year-old.

It was quite a bit of money. Yeah, for an 11-year-old. And it was all just sitting in a PayPal account. And I was like, it was, A really weird experience because the entire summer I was just like playing, like, you know, clicking buttons on the internet and getting folks to, to buy my Pokémon cards via either, you know, mystery packs or, you know, buying just rare EX cards or X cards at the time and, and selling them for slightly, slightly higher. So it was, it was definitely a grind, but it was really interesting to make my first dollar online via something that I loved so deeply and combining just like my love of Pokémon at the time with learning how to, you know, be kind of an entrepreneur or be entrepreneurial and reaching this material goal that I had at the time, which was, you know, buying an Xbox.

So yeah, it's kind of, if I could just interject for a second, it's kind of interesting. Like that's a, You know, I talked, I talked, we were talking before we started rolling that, you know, I've had a bunch of founders on the podcast. I love to hear their stories and like everyone's got these like early entrepreneurial stories, but like 11 years old making like $10,000 in a summer is like pretty unusual even across the people that I've, I've talked to. Did you have even earlier experiences that like weren't as, you know, successful as that of like, you know, I don't know, like shoveling snow or like any other idea that you would be entrepreneurial before the Pokémon cards?

You know, I, um, it's a, yeah, I guess I jumped a little bit. Um, the, my whole life I'd been trying to, you know, make a dollar from like, uh, whatever means I could. Um, and I wasn't really shoveling, so I mean, I would cut the roses in my backyard instead of my parents like hiring some landscaper to do that. And so I'd make like, they'd pay me minimum wage to do that. I had like a lemonade set, you know, just the typical things that folks try.

Pokémon was like the first product market fit.

Yeah, Pokémon was the first product market fit. I didn't really have, you know, the door-to-door, you know, Mark Cuban selling trash bags or, you know, shoveling snow and operationalizing that around the neighborhood. You know, I tried like selling candy at school, but I went to a school where they quickly shut that down and were like, You can't be selling candy at school. So I felt like my creativity was a little stifled from that. And I really was just fascinated by this idea that I had this global economy at my fingertips versus being constrained by this like real world, what I could do with my muscle versus like my will, doing something online, my will and my creativity versus like you know, just it felt like a lot more efficient and attractive to go the online route.

Right. No, it makes total sense. So what was, what was after that? You have a summer, you make it big on Pokémon cards.

Make it big on Pokémon cards. Absolutely love Pokémon cards. So after that, I went to, I started middle school and I remember just like I had several instances in my, in my life that almost like broke the, my understanding of the world at the time. And those, those instances usually took some formula of, I see someone who, you know, I am like very close to as far as like maybe intelligence level or experience or geographically, I see them do something amazing. And then I just ask myself the question, why can't I also do that really amazing thing? And the next time that happened was when I saw this kid build iPhone apps and he was like 12. And I was like, there's no, like just the idea of programming something, getting it into other people's hands was just such an insanely large, insanely like out of reach concept to me that I was fascinated by it. The fact that it felt so out of reach meant that I had to have it. At that point. And so the next thing that I started doing was learning how to just program. And I started by learning in Java because I was playing Minecraft at the time and I wanted to create mods. And I think that's actually how a lot of folks that I've met, you know, started coding was just, you know, they love playing games and ultimately wanted to, you know, change those games a little bit. And I just started Java and I kind of went through that iOS programming at the time was pretty hard. Objective-C was like a very difficult language to learn. So I started with Java, started with Android, and I realized that Android just was not really something that I enjoyed. I didn't even own it, or I had an Android at the time, but I like hated it. I like really hate— like, the iPhone was like this coveted, this coveted phone, this coveted ecosystem to be a part of. So I learned how to program in Java, tried building, uh, Android apps, and it didn't really really go anywhere. But then I was, you know, this kind of takes a little winding turn. I saw someone on Instagram and Instagram had really just come out at the time. This was probably 2012 now. And I saw people building these themed Instagram pages and they were just like posting movie scenes or posting pranks or posting memes, whatever it was. And I just thought the idea of having a large audience was so fascinating. And so I found this, you know, girl who ran a page called Best Scenes, which was just movie scenes. And I was like, hey, I'll give you $200 if you get my account, which is a Big Bang Theory account, um, to 30,000 followers. And she's like, yeah, done. And at the time, like, that wasn't that many. I mean, I guess it was a lot of followers. But that was like nothing. I like paid $200 to get to one of the most active accounts on Instagram at the time. And this was when the popular page still existed. So, you know, you could kind of, success really begets success in that time as well. When it was, you know, you get on Instagram, you get a large following, and then you just get on the popular page, which increases discoverability, which increases your following, which increases you doing this. Like again, and you ultimately just build a big account and well, what can you do with a big account? Well, you can build other big accounts with that big account and then you can sell stuff to those accounts. And that's actually what brought me back to iPhone app development when I was 13, which was, you know, I had these big accounts with like audiences that I, you know, knew a lot about, right? If I built an account around Big Bang Theory, well, what demographic likes Big Bang Theory? If I built an account around like teenage memes, what, what account or what, what kinds of people like teenage memes? And then you just build like very like Nikita Beer, you know, a level below Nikita Beer style iPhone apps and you sell those to those audiences and then you're able to generate, you know, quite a bit of revenue from it because paid apps, like people will not pay a dollar for apps today, but people were paying, you know, a few bucks for apps in the past. iTunes gift cards were still things. That's actually like what brought me to my next larger, you know, project was seeing, okay, someone's building apps. How do I actually get people to download these things? Built the Instagram accounts just out of fascination, kind of accruing an audience, and then built products to then serve to those, those, uh, those Instagram accounts.

Yeah. So a couple of things. So, uh, you didn't build the Instagram accounts to sell apps to. You built the Instagram accounts because like that was interesting. You felt like that was the move. And then Later you sort of tied the, like speaking, you know, in retrospect, you can realize I found this interest in apps and I sort of quit on it a little bit after like, you know, working with the Android a little bit. And then I did the Instagram thing and then they came together, but you didn't realize at the time you weren't building a big Instagram account to sell an app.

Right. Right. No, exactly. What I, you know, what brought me to Instagram was just the fascination with apps and I was just always trying out new apps and Instagram was a new app at the time and I mean, the way that thing grew was absurd. I just, like, I had to try and figure out, like, why it was growing so much. And, uh, I mean, it was so addicting and I loved it. Like, I, you know, had, I mean, if you go to my Instagram now, you'll see I deleted everything. I have no profile picture. I have nothing on it because I had a legitimate Instagram addiction for many years. It was like my whole life was just Instagram. So I, I hate it now. I delete it. Like, I don't, I don't ever touch Instagram anymore. Yeah, um, because I did this. But yeah, no, I developed this interest in apps. It led me to trying out a bunch of new apps, including Instagram. Started, you know, building these Instagram accounts and then realized, well, I should get back into apps. Yeah, and that's, that's how I got to the next step.

Yeah, this is this common thread that I like, just sort of doing a bunch of these. I sort of, you know, there's like some pattern matching that's like sort of subconscious that's like kind of hard to explain, but then there's others that are like a little easier to maybe like verbalize. And like one of them is that I've realized in, in my own life as well, is that like some of the best sort of things that you do in life, not to say that, you know, uh, certainly you've done better things since and, and you didn't peak at, uh, you know, like 12 or 13 or whatever, but like some of these things that like, that was, uh, you know, you're talking about it now. That was like sort of a core stepping stone. On your journey. And these things like, often happen very like, unintentionally. Like, part of it might be intentional, but the way that things come together was not planned. And so like, you know, you can— it's like the old Steve Jobs quote about how like, you can connect the dots looking backward, but you can't foresee those connections. And so you just sort of have to like, trust your gut and like, follow, you know, whatever that is, intuition. And like, I see that in your story because it's like, it's not like, you know, building a big Instagram was like building a big Instagram, excuse me, was like some, you know, strategy for like selling these apps that you weren't even really building anymore. It's like you just followed your gut. You went for the Instagram thing. You got involved early. You benefited from the network effects of getting involved early. And then you tied in this thing from your past, which was like, hey, wait, now I can bring the apps thing back and I have like a specific demographic to sell to. And I just think that's like really worth calling out because people are always trying to like, you know, sort of do the prediction of like how things are going to tie together and like, is this worth my time? Like this doesn't make sense to go for, or this makes sense. Like this ties in very cleanly into like what I'm doing. But like, I think a lot of times it doesn't tie in that cleanly or obviously. And sure, you could have predicted like, hey, I can go on Instagram and build a big thing and like sell this app. But it's just not the way it often goes. So I just thought that was kind of interesting. But another question I sort of had on the Instagram thing is like, were you abnormally early to Instagram or you were just early and sort of able to very quickly get that big audience through messaging whoever that was and then benefited from that? Like, were you just kind of like regular early or like really early? And if If it's the latter, I'm curious like sort of how you got into it and recognized it as something that you wanted to like get involved with.

You know, it's actually a great question. Also, I really appreciate your point around connecting the dots retrospectively because I mean, yeah, I think we all go through that, right? Like we just, we ultimately see how some like minor decision that we made 5 years ago ultimately led to a chain of events that, you know, led to me sitting in my chair on this Thursday afternoon in the way that I am. But yeah, so on Instagram, I was the last of my friends to get on Instagram, which is actually kind of funny. Like I was regular early, I'd say, like just like had, you know, I was an early adopter the same way we all were in the early 2010s. But I was definitely, I was the last of my friends to do it. And I just like, I quickly realized that there was this economy. Playing out on Instagram and folks were making money by selling shoutouts or building products and then selling them to those audiences. And this was like right at the time that Facebook had acquired it. So Facebook hadn't ruined it, you know, with Facebook ads yet. And so, you know, folks were running their own, you know, Instagram ads with their own accounts. But I actually forgot to mention in that connecting the dots retrospectively, My first account, um, I built it to like 10,000 followers alone, uh, just by like commenting and like getting people to follow it. And then I met someone online who I wanted to share the account with to help grow the account, and they just took the account like that. It was like the most painful lesson I'd ever learned up until that point in my life. I was crying. I was like, you know, 12, 13, whatever it was, crying, like Googling, like, can the police get involved? All these things. And it was super painful. But that's what led to me to then say, okay, I have to like get back to where I was. Who can I find who has leverage that I can, you know, pay to basically give me a portion to rent some of their leverage for a little bit of time to get me back on my feet to some extent. And ultimately if I had like, yeah, if I had, I probably would, you know, this would've gone significantly differently if I stuck with that account. 'Cause I had to like restart at one point. So yeah, definitely.

It's a chip on the shoulder for sure. You get your 10,000 followers taken away from you overnight by some random person on Instagram. And it's another, I don't, I'm not, I promise I'm not gonna like sort of insert these like life philosophies along like the entire way, but What you just said brings to mind this other thing of like, you would have never in advance wanted to have your Instagram account stolen. And even when it just happened, you know, you're crying like afterwards, you're probably devastated by this. Like, you never would have wanted that to happen. That was like an objectively awful thing. Like, obviously so. But then in retrospect, now you're, you know, you can probably look back and be like, well, you know, that was probably for the best because to your point, like, that is why you're sitting here now. That is why you're working on the company you're working on now. That is why you went back and got a different account to 30,000 followers much quick— much more quickly. And then, like, you know, who knows what the alternative path would have been, basically. But, like, I don't think it's very useful to imagine that path as having been potentially better because you can never know. And why torture yourself?

Um, So yeah, it's the most painful lesson. It's the most painful lesson. I think everyone probably has, you know, 10 or 15 stories about like these like really, really painful things that ultimately led them to greater things. You know, by the time I stopped doing this Instagram stuff, I had a few million followers over 6 accounts. So it was, I don't, I do not think it would have gone that way if I had just, I probably would have thought very small or it would have taken me a lot longer to learn this game if, you know, I hadn't been like shocked so, so hard.

So did you like sell these Instagram accounts when you were kind of through with it or?

At the end, yeah, there was this guy, I'm not gonna dox him. He was basically running a large performance marketing agency where he'd work with app developers and basically get them a ton of downloads on their apps and, or on, sorry, on games. Games drove a ton of the, you know, ad spend in the mid-2010s.

Like freemium games.

Yeah, they're super high LTV and Instagram was the best way to do this was just like farming downloads for these folks. And this guy came in with like a million bucks and just bought in, bought a ton of accounts and just overnight essentially controlled the largest network of Instagram accounts. And I honestly like kind of came in like a private equity, like someone rolling, he was rolling up Instagram accounts essentially, which is pretty funny. But that, I didn't stop that by the time until I was, you know, 17. So it was a few years of my life building apps and building these Instagram accounts and ultimately had a nice, you know, quote unquote exit from that. But yeah, I mean, some of it was a really, really fun period in my life and I I built games. I built honestly something that kind of resembles what we're doing now with Layer 3 and just like this idea of symbiotic growth and gimmicky apps, just like, oh, change your background, customize your wallpaper, stuff like just really like quick hit dopamine centric, just iTunes gift card targeting apps.

Was there any, was there any that was like more, um, that you were like more excited about than just like, oh, I think this will hit, like be a quick hit, like you said, like on this demographic or whatever was like, it sounds like an earlier version of Layer 3 might have been a bigger idea than like, you know, some of these quick hits.

I was excited about, you know, two apps that I built. Ultimately, both of them failed for different reasons. And One of them was called WeLike, which was essentially you trade Instagram likes with someone. So every time you like someone's photo, you get a coin that you can then redeem for, you know, a like on your own photo. And this was because I'd realized, okay, Instagram is incredibly toxic in the sense that your self-worth is basically your likes and your followers. And so just monetize, like just building an app to feed that. That I found interesting and ultimately was successful until the Instagram API went private in 2016, I want to say. So you couldn't build apps like this anymore. And that worked until it didn't. It worked until the platform decided to shut it down, essentially. And so I learned a lot about centralization risk or platform risk.

Right.

And that's partially why I'm in crypto today, is I was just fascinated by the lack of platform risk that exists in crypto. But the second one that I was really excited about was this one called Mastermind. And when I was 16, I, you know, became obsessed with cold emailing because I used to game, like basically like thought of this as a game, like who can I talk to that I really have no business speaking to?

Yeah.

Like, can I just say something?

That's my full podcast. Yeah, go ahead.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, it really is like, it's almost like a chip on your shoulder or something where it's like, I should— like, there's no difference between me and insert billionaire's name, you know, at a human level. So why wouldn't they respond to my email thread? And why can't I have a conversation with this person? I think a lot of people in life, like, forget that they deserve the absolute best. And maybe I was just unnervingly arrogant, and I think my mom would agree. I was just incredibly hard-headed and arrogant. And the fact that like, I should be able to email a billionaire and they should respond. And if they don't, well, that's weird. Obviously 90% of them didn't respond, but the few that did, it was like very fun. And you know, the best dopamine hit I'd ever had. And some of the best advice I ever received was in those conversations. I wish I, you know, really like brought some of that to to today. And if I could cite who said what, I'd have to do some, some, uh, some good remembering to, um, to do that. But I was fascinated by this idea that there's this generational knowledge gap that really only gets transferred to a very small number of people in any very successful person's life. And so I started an app called Mastermind to enable those folks who had reached like very, very incredible levels of success to mentor, to be able to do these AMAs, to be able to speak directly to folks who would, you know, froth just to have like a second with them and just pick their brain for an absolute second and do that in a public forum. It was also, you know, a social network. I think everyone was just obsessed with building the next social network after The Social Network, you know, the movie came out and that, you know, app could not have failed more spectacularly. We just could not solve the chicken and egg problem. It was, to the folks who I wanted to be on the platform, if they were, you know, someone seeking, you know, a mentor or seeking like access to these folks, these billionaires or these very successful tech founders, it was, well, how many of them are on the platform? And for the tech founders, it was how many mentors or mentees are there? How many folks can I actually access from this? So I just could not solve the chicken and egg problem. It was a great idea, one that I'm still passionate about. I think there's many iterations of this being attempted now, things intro that like you see folks charging like, you know, $1,000 an hour for mentorship. I think there still is this desire for a connection to folks who figured it out, but I just, I didn't figure it out. Yeah. And ultimately shut the app down.

I feel like you're just your interest somehow, like, you know, this concept of like attention is obviously core to what you're doing now, which we can talk about a little bit later. But It seems like through various different sort of vantage points, a lot of your interests just sort of triangulate on attention. So like, they're very different things, but those two ideas you just talked about is like, one is like sort of a market for likes and engagement, and the other is mentorship, which is like, um, at the end of the day, you know, also an attention economy to some extent, uh, from, you know, these high-powered people's giving some of their time to a larger number of people who are willing to pay for it. You mentioned Intro, it's sort of a recent iteration on this, and there's others as well. I used one called Superpeer a few years ago. It's kind of a similar thing to Intro. They're sort of like spinoffs— not spinoffs, but tangents from Cameo, which people might be familiar with, which is like, you pay however much for Shaquille O'Neal, that'll probably be an expensive one, but like someone to go and like record a happy birthday video. And then I think what people realized is like, okay, you know, we can do more than like a celebrity doing a 60-second happy birthday video. We can do like an actual consulting session or we can do, you know, this, that, or the other thing and pay them for their time doing that thing. We can pay people to respond to an email. We can pay for, you know, all these different things. So, um, it's just interesting, you know, It seems that you've been thinking about the type of stuff that you're now, you know, benefit greatly from thinking deeply about and having thought about deeply about for a very long time. Like you've been, these things have been sort of naturally interesting to you since you were, you know, in your teens basically.

It's actually the first time that I've connected those dots backwards, you know, too. I am, I didn't realize that this whole game that I've been playing my whole life, or sorry, seeking to understand, not necessarily playing, is an attention game. It's an attention economy game. Maybe you could distill a lot of internet business models to that, but I mean, Instagram, more so apps.

Yeah, more so with like with these specific examples, I think like to your point, it is like all attention at the end of the day, but not as directly like you're directly monetizing the attention, you know what I mean?

Yeah. God, that is— this is almost like a therapy session. I feel like, you know, I'd have to pay someone for, uh, for teaching me that, uh, you know, you know what's interesting is, um, it's funny you brought that up, you know.

Hopefully this doesn't, like, uh, you know, get me into any sort of trouble in the future or, like, uh, mess, mess anything up. But, uh, I've always— there's this interesting thing I was I was recording a podcast the other day. I forget what the context was, but it made me think of it as well, which is like sometimes you see a deal, this will make sense in a second, but like you see a deal and you're like, who's paying who? Like just fundamentally, like who is like, okay, I understand. Like, but like who is paying who? And like, so a good example of that is OpenAI and Apple made that deal recently. I think I actually don't remember who's paying who, but I don't even know if one of them's paying each other. It might be sort of like some mutual thing or whatever. But in a lot of deals with like, especially with this like sort of attention economy stuff, it's the value is not tangible or at least it's not priced and there's no market for it. And so a great example of that in my view, which, you know, I hope it stays this way because It's certainly been great for me, but like there's no payments with podcasts. And actually I think there are, like some, some people might do that. I don't know, you know, you get paid to speak on a podcast or you pay for a guest. I guess that exists, but it's like, I don't think that's the norm. Certainly I've never done it one way or the other, but it's, you know, there's a ton of value here and it's like, I'm not saying it should be priced. Like I just said, I kind of hope in the podcasting realm that it It doesn't to some extent, but like, you know, you're a great founder. I have you on my podcast. I get to share your perspective with my audience. That's value. Hopefully I'm doing a decent job of like doing a host interview and, you know, you got some value out of that, you know, attention point or whatever. And so like that's some value to you. And it's like there's all this value that's going around that isn't tangible or priced or whatever you want to call it. And I actually think that crypto, one of the most interesting things about crypto to me is that it takes a lot of this intangible value and prices it and it, because it turns it into a market, it turns like everything into a market. And so suddenly you have, you know, these meme coins, which are like kind of a joke, but it's like, you know, how much is Dogecoin worth if it's like the first meme coin and it has like sort of that first prize and then like, Oh, like how much is literally like Dogwifhat worth if it's like, you know, the first alt of that on Solana. And it's like all of these things are subjective, but at the end of the day, some people think that they're valuable and like the market will sort of rest wherever they think it's valuable. And for like almost anything, like it's not, it doesn't matter like Dogecoin or Dogwifhat or whatever, but just like anything, there's so many things that are valuable that we just don't trade, like they're not priced. And I think one of the things about crypto that's hard for me to wrap my head around is like in the context of like inflation and, and stuff like this, but it's like crypto may not, you know, give us like sort of the efficiency in the economy or something like that, that like AI might do or like nuclear energy or like something like that. But it might take a bunch of intangible values and like make them tangible. And like, what does that mean for like GDP, like what does that mean for like inflation or like stuff like that? So anyway, huge tangent. I don't know. I don't know where I was going to land there, but maybe you have some thoughts.

No, not, not a tangent at all. I actually think it's a really important point because I mean, even the way that these podcasts set out, it's, or partnerships, right? An OpenAI and Apple deal. When I was building Instagram accounts, you do shout out for shout out. You would grow someone's account, they would grow yours by basically posting. Oh, you should go follow this account. You should go follow this account. And attention was the currency in that regard. I'm sure the OpenAI and Apple deal has some like very, very tangible financial benefits, but I think that's how many of these partnerships work or even podcast appearances, right? Like, or even, you know, my favorite example that kind of broke the matrix for me a little bit recently was paparazzi and celebrities are on the same you know, team to some extent, right? Like paparazzi are the ones who are photographing Kim Kardashian at a restaurant, uh, and that gives Kim Kardashian attention and it gives paparazzi, you know, revenue. And it's like, uh, it's like a very, like attention is the currency at the center of a lot of this. And crypto really does price these assets. And it's unfortunate the way that, uh, Bitcloud, you know, you know, went, but Bitcloud was like the perfect example of it. Right? You were pricing these items that basically every creator wanted to figure out how to create like some derivative or like pricing mechanism for. And it was just the momentum that any creator had. Can you give that a market cap? And it worked for a while and it was very, very interesting. And crypto does present like a unique way to give a market to any asset to 8 billion people, right? You can take any asset, and give that to 8 billion people who can trade this at any given time. And it's, it's crazy because we've never seen a market do that before. We've only seen very localized markets within very, very strict trading bounds, you know, 9 AM to 4:30 every day. And what if— yeah, I mean, the fact that you can trade like momentum on social media, if you could tokenize that you know, trade momentum on social media accounts to 8 billion people in the world. It is, it is wild. The fact that this industry actually does that.

Yeah. I guess the, to a good like distillation of what I was trying to get across and what you, you know, have sort of summarized there as well. Like my summary attempt is basically like, you know, you talk, there's always talk about with businesses that you create value and you capture value, right? So like Amazon has like created all of this value and they've sort of notoriously been very conservative with how much they capture. They're always lowering their prices instead of hiring them where they very well could hire them and like not lose a lot of business, but they're just trying to make it a better and better experience for the customer and charge less and less over the years. And for like the sort of the long-term benefit. And so I think with crypto on like a global scale, what's kind of interesting about this, what we're talking about is you don't, to increase like sort of the amount of value in the world, if we're talking about like value boiling down to money or like assets more broadly, you might not have to increase the, the amount of value in the world. You might just capture a lot more of it in sort of a tangible form. And so like where AI or nuclear energy might like skyrocket the actual amount of value sort of like created in the world, crypto might capture a whole lot more of it. And that might be just as significant of sort of a, increase as creating a bunch more. So I think that's, I don't know, it's sort of the, it's very like fuzzy to see that because it's, for me at least, 'cause it's pretty different. Like I also think another thing that's kind of fuzzy is like the future of money. Like it's pretty easy to make the parallel from like, you know, like gold to Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin is digital gold and everything. There's not as clear of a parallel for like Ethereum and people are like, you know, Ethereum's money and like, you know, Solana's money, whatever. Like, and that's fine. Like, I'm not really getting too wrapped up in definitions here, but it's like, what is the future? You know, does the future of money have to be what the past of money was? Like store value, medium of exchange, and, you know, unit of account or whatever is like sort of the standard definition. Like maybe money is fundamentally different. Maybe we use many more monies than we have previously used. Like I pretty much before crypto, at least, you know, I only interact with dollars and then I, there's certain assets, but I'm not like using a bunch of things as money. But maybe that's not the case anymore. So it's just crypto. I think it's, you know, for people like you and I who are like pretty deep in it, it's changing things at like a very fundamental level that are very difficult to understand. You can always understand something where there's like a precedent for it and there's like, you know, this is that, but like, you know, there's always an app that I was talking to a guy the other day who was like, we're building the Goodreads but for movies. And it's like always easy when you have like, you know, the Airbnb for this or the Uber for that or whatever. But like when there's not really as clear of a precedent, I think that happens when it's a fundamental shift. And I think crypto, you and I probably both agree, is fundamental shift.

Yeah, no, I, I mean, I totally agree. I, I think that, um, the word money, at least moving forward because of this industry, will mean something very different than it did to, you know, our grandparents. Uh, our kids will probably think of money very differently than even we grew up, uh, thinking of money. And, you know, ideally we both have a large hand in that.

So anyway, how'd you— I realized I went like super conceptual for us. Let's come back to earth a little bit. How did you actually get into crypto in the first place?

Yeah, you know, the way I like to describe it is I was a nerd on the internet and hanging out with other nerds on the internet. And when that happens, you naturally find out about crypto. And so I was building these apps. And first found out about Bitcoin, but wrote it off entirely. And I think a lot of folks have maybe a story where they heard this concept for this like digital gold and they were like, this is nothing. Like, I'm going to ignore this for now. Obviously very regretfully. But then, you know, I learned about Ethereum and I downloaded Coinbase when I think the only 2 things you could buy on Coinbase were Bitcoin and Ethereum. And Bitcoin was, you know, 30 or 40 times the price of 1 ETH. And so ETH just seemed like a much more attractive investment for my, for my, for my, you know, risk tolerance at that point. And it was just, this idea that there was someone or some group of people trying to buck the trend with something as ambitious as the monetary system, just the financial system, felt so— I didn't understand it, which meant I had to run straight towards it. And that's why I initially became fascinated with crypto. And it wasn't until, I think, 2017 when happened and when this idea that you saw the idea of tokens on just ETH like starting to proliferate in the years following that, I realized, okay, this is like a different type of internet where data and value accrual actually disproportionately benefits users instead of you know, a company or a, you know, centralized counterparty. And at that point, that's when things like really, really started to interest me in this idea that, okay, when you build something, you can create ideally a forever app with a self-sustaining ecosystem with your native ad spend as your own token that you can then, you know, use to build something great and serve that to an audience of 8 billion 24/7 for the rest of time. And that, those like, those 3 statements just meant I had to sprint towards this industry.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, there's a few times we've already, I'm sure there's many others, but a few that we've discussed, like you just see something and you just know you have to go for it. And I respect the conviction each step of the way because these are not like obvious things at the time that you're you're doing them. It's a good thing, I think, like, as silly as it sounds, some people just like don't recognize, they're not even like paying attention. I'm not trying to like talk poorly on people or whatever, but it's like some people just like don't even pay attention to what they're interested in. They're just like doing whatever, you know, other people are doing. And it's like you're not only paying attention and have your sort of antenna up, but you're seeing these things, whether it's like early days Instagram, or, you know, in this case crypto and just like running directly at it regardless of, you know, too many concerns around, you know, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that or whatever. So what time is this like in your life? Are you like just graduating college or what's like set the stage in your life personally when you came across crypto? You still doing the Instagram thing?

Yeah. So I was still doing Instagram and apps when I first found out about crypto. I was still in high school And I bought my first Bitcoin, used that to get a fake ID and gamble online and do all of the typical Bitcoin activities.

You needed the fake ID when you were 11 to sell the Pokémon cards.

You should have bought them first. Right, to get the PayPal account. Yeah. Well, actually an interesting thing. I think a lot of folks were in the same boat as I was and had a PayPal account shut down when they found out that you were underage. And like, there's a few folks on Twitter who like ended up getting into crypto. My, my, that didn't directly get me into crypto, but it was definitely something that I realized was uncensorable money. Great. That's better than fucking PayPal shutting down my account, locking my funds up. But yeah, so I was, I was still in high school when I found out about crypto and just, you know, did the, you know, illicit activity, you know, circuit that you do on with, with, uh, this new financial, these new financial rails. And then, uh, it wasn't until like I really started learning about Ethereum that I started to take it more seriously. And I, you know, spent probably too many Bitcoin on online gambling, unfortunately, now looking at the, uh, the, the price of it. But, um, Yeah, so I was— I was— this was right before college. When I went to college, this was like ICO mania, and everyone was a genius. If you put a dollar into crypto, you made, you know, $10, as long as you did that before this fall, like, bull run that we had. Um, and then it all kind of came crashing down while I was in college. And so I like to say I was just an observer. And like, I, you know, I wasn't building anything in crypto. I was just moving money around in different ways and buying and trading these tokens on Binance when you could still do that, when it was, you know, still open to US residents. And ultimately just like playing the PvP crypto game that I think a lot of people were at the time through sentiment lows in 2018, 2019. I remember checking every single day like clockwork. I'd wake up, I'd open my portfolio tracking app, and I'd just like look at the price of Bitcoin and ETH. And man, watching that $1,500 to $90, like slow grind down, was pretty, it's pretty tough to do because I remember I got a lot of my college friends to buy crypto and we all— I looked like a genius for a little bit of time and then I looked like the biggest idiot in the world. As I'm sure, you know, everyone, everyone in crypto probably has a similar story. You know, the Thanksgiving Day meme, it's like, so how's this? How's my— it's never good. It's good. It's good once every 4 years. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, this is— so when I went to college, I closed the chapter of apps and social media because I just felt like I just like wanted to close every chapter and I probably could have made more money if I didn't close, you know, sell the Instagram accounts and sell the apps. But it just felt like natural to restart with, along with, you know, a new set of friends, a new set of interests, a new set of hobbies, a new, you know, location.

Yeah.

But that's ultimately when I got into crypto was really when I went to college.

Nice. Yeah, I think the reset makes a ton of sense. I definitely like can understand what you're talking about. It's just, even though it might, you know, there's no reason to give up like the one particular thing on its own, just in the context of everything else, it's like the difference between a fresh start and a fresh start with one legacy sort of thing that's like grabbing you or like sort of holding your attention is like not the same. It's like, so the difference between zero to one basically. And So being able to leave that behind, I think makes a lot of sense. And you might not have sort of gone down the crypto rabbit hole without sort of turning that chapter. And then, so, you know, feel free to touch on anything you want throughout college, but I'm curious, you know, having dabbled with like apps, building apps as a, you know, teenager, young teenager, and then for several years. And now you're into crypto and you've always been entrepreneurial. I think you— did you study like computer science in college or, or no?

Yeah, yeah, I studied computer science in college.

Yeah. And so I'm curious, like, I think with, with both that and early on in your teenage years, it seems like despite all of that, you didn't really— correct me if I'm wrong, but like you didn't sort of like come out of all of that as like a big like technical guy, like that's not really the part that you like.

No, I really don't like programming at all. And I was moderately good at programming and much better at designing things. And, you know, I designed all my apps. I—

Did you learn that formally in any way or just self-taught?

No, just self-taught. I started in Sketch and Photoshop. Well, I guess I started in Photoshop, which sucked. And I moved to Sketch when that came out, and then I moved to Figma when that ate Sketch's launch. I just found a lot of— I found that I could express my creativity a lot better in, you know, design than I could in code. I think some folks are, you know, the reverse of that, right? They feel like when they code is like their maximal expression of creativity, but I just felt like Creating and understanding good design was where I shined a lot, and I just found a lot of energy in it. And I've designed more projects than I can count just to design them, just to like learn about how to create great shadows or something like that. I've been a moderately good programmer in a past life and a much better designer.

Do you have any like principles that you keep in mind that are like sort of power law principles, if you will, that are like things that sort of a lot falls under them when it comes to design or not really things that are like sort of top of mind for you?

There is one that I think is so often overlooked by basically everyone in consumer. Well, okay, maybe not basically everyone in consumer, but It's so often overlooked when you just look at a consumer product and it's, we use things that make us feel good. And if something fails to make us feel good, we will forget about it and stop using it. And at the end of the day, if you're designing something for consumers, you're selling emotions and just make sure your designs really hit the emotions you want them to. And that's like kind of the recipe for success in consumer. And it's like, it truly is a power law. Like, thank you. You could have a kind of a beautiful design, but it really makes the user feel like incredible or the emotion that you intend them to feel, and it will work. Like, it will 100% work. And yeah, that's a massive parallel principle that I, we use it a lot at Layer 3. There's a reason if you look at the top 200 users, they've come back 800 days in a row. It's 'cause we've made them feel exactly how they wanna feel. Right. Same thing with TikTok, right? Like you, every incremental scroll is the pull of a slot machine lever and they're making you feel exactly how you want to feel. You want some new experience, you get it every single time you move your finger.

Yeah. And it's not, you know, people I think think about design as like sort of what it looks like, but it's design is such a high level concept that like I think about you know, I've never been like trained in design or anything like that. And I think the idea that you should or need to be trained in design, maybe I'm biased as someone who wasn't, but like, it seems, I'm sure you can learn a lot, but I think a lot of people could be really good designers without ever learning anything formal, just based on sort of like these guiding principles, like what you said. And, you know, some people who just don't really care about it or don't think about it, it's like, They just think about it as like, oh, does the website like look pretty or something? And it's like, it's so much more. It's about how, you know, it's about that interaction with it and like how the different, how the experiences and everything like this. And, um, yeah, I don't know. It's, it's interesting. I actually, myself, I don't think I had really thought about like what makes people feel good. Like that's obviously it's super core. And when you say it, it's like very obvious, but it's like, I actually probably latch more onto easy and clean. So like, what, what will be the easiest thing for the user to do? Um, I want to remove— I honestly, actually, I guess I do think about it. I just think about it as the inverse of what makes them feel good. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's like, what— anything that will make the user feel bad. I try to get out, or anything that will make them confused or complicate or feel that things are overcomplicated. You have to get all that out. And then what you're left with, I guess I would hope, is something that is easy, that makes them feel good.

You know, I think, yeah, I mean, the process of elimination like that, I think generally works. And probably the best product that, you know, one can look to when studying, you know, how can you make someone feel good with like a goal, for example, that, or a product that historically is very difficult to make someone feel good in is Duolingo because, you know, they're in the business of edutainment, right? They're keeping you entertained more than they are teaching you a language. And so they've reverse engineered, how can I make this person feel like they're progressing towards a language regardless of if they're actually, you know, getting better at it? Like learning the language is a symptom of, you know, their app and not necessarily the end goal. And like, it's like, it's a beautiful case study in design and in simplicity and in removing the things that make someone feel bad. But actually, you know, I mean, they embrace the things that sometimes make people feel bad in a way to drive monetization, right? Like if you lose your hearts, you have to pay to get Duolingo Premium to move forward that day. And so you're unable to progress towards your goal. There's this barrier that they've put there so that you can't get closer to your goal no matter how much you want to. And so they've very deliberately placed emotions at different parts of this, this user journey and use that to basically build up what I think is the most compelling example of edutainment and just like, you know, wrapping something historically very difficult in like a great design experience.

Yeah, it's interesting. I've like always heard like Duolingo gets a sort of outsized reference for not exactly for design, but just in general for being like a great compelling app. Um, and I actually haven't used it. I maybe I downloaded it like at some point over the years, but I not materially have I used it. Um, and now I'm sort of intrigued too. I, I'm not a big language guy. I always, I thought in college that by the time I was like 30, that there would, uh, you know, I would have like basically AirPods that would live translate any language for me. And, uh, that hasn't really happened yet. But the re— I didn't just like come up with that outta nowhere. I thought that was like a really good idea. Like to potentially like build that. And then I looked it up and I think it was like Google had like a patent for like this exact thing. And I was like, well, they'll probably, you know, take care of that. And it just, it's not really here yet. Like we have great translation, but we just don't have that. Like I can't go walk around in Japan with AirPods in and have someone speak like all the technologies there, the noise canceling to hear from their real voice, the translation in real time. I should be able to hear them. Almost in sync with how their mouth is moving in English. And it doesn't really matter if it's exactly in sync because they're not speaking English anyway. But it doesn't exist yet, but I think it'll be here. So I'm, I'm not that interested in other languages. That's probably why I haven't used it.

The—

I will say, I think I'm sympathetic to the idea that I'm missing something with languages because I think more than understanding or being able to communicate in practical terms, there's probably a lot just going from knowing one language to knowing two probably expands your sort of perspective on culture quite a bit to understand that. And you know, I, I've dabbled in Spanish and Italian, but I don't know either of them well enough, just in school and stuff. I, I don't know either of them well enough that it sort of did that for me. So I'm not like total anti-language guy, but maybe Duolingo is the thing that I need that I, I can, I can get into it.

It'll, it'll definitely give you a self-confidence boost around like getting, you know, you'll be able to say the alphabet or learn the numbers or something. But I've, you know, one of the things I wish I did when I was younger was learn a couple languages just because that is my parents always told me I'd wish that I learned, you know, multiple languages because they speak multiple languages and I was, I tried to buck the trend there, unfortunately.

Yeah, well, it is what it is. So anyway, I know, you know, we've gone over time, but I don't want to end without talking a little bit about what you're doing now and more so, you know, how you got into it in the first place. Like, obviously we had the backdrop of these, you know, entrepreneurial experiences earlier, the entry into crypto. When and how did you finally decide to, you know, start a real company? And get into crypto formally by starting Layer 3?

Yeah, so 2021, I'm graduating college. I have a job lined up, I guess a summer internship because I was still doing a product design. I was— it started a product design master's that I was going to do from 2021 to 2023. I had an internship lined up at GoDaddy. And the past couple months I've been thinking of, okay, there's all these like DAOs with a ton of capital and all of them need to grow. All of them need to figure out how to deploy this capital and grow their protocols. But there's really nobody tackling, you know, the Facebook or Google style business model for growth for these builders. And there's users on the other side who are confused and don't really know where to go to use these products and basically why they should even care about them. And the day I was supposed to start that job, I called the manager and I said, I'm not, I'm not doing it. It was like 30 minutes before I was, you know, set to sign in for the first time. And ultimately that was to start Layer 3. And I really haven't looked back since. It was I was just fascinated by this idea that crypto teams just did not have any of the distribution efficiency that regular internet builders get from Facebook and Google. And each of these builders has to rebuild that strategy from the ground up every single time using the same exact Legos. So it's the same Legos, just a different brand associated with them every single time. And this inefficiency just really stalls progress, confuses users, hampers growth. And ultimately, Layer 3 is just the full-stack crypto-native solution to optimize these protocols and users around long-term growth and over short-term speculation. I view this as a very, very important problem for the industry to solve, for us to really grow and exist over a decades-long time horizon. I mean, you know, people get— people can only trade assets for, you know, that ultimately go down for so long. And we have to create something that actually persists over many, many, many years. And I think that's what, you know, a lot of fine folks are doing today. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do as well.

And did you start— did you end up starting— first of all, it's a great story, the calling of the boss, literally the day of the first day of work. I haven't heard that one before. That's great. So were you starting Layer 3 like during the heat of the market or by the time you sort of got rolling, was that price to sort of come down on everything and you've sort of just been building in the bear? I know that like, I don't believe that I was aware of Layer 3 until, you know, it's been a while at this point, but it was like, I think, you know, past the last hype cycle basically. So I'm curious how the timing played because it's tough if you start a company when, you know, things are super hot and then right out of the gates, like things kind of come crashing down, nothing to do with your company, it's just like the market. So I don't know if that happened or if things came down and then you kind of started.

Yeah, no, so started it definitely while things were on the up and I'd say we, We, so I first started working on the idea in July of 2021 and incorporated, fundraised, et cetera, September of 2021. And then like, I mean, we had a product in July and ultimately, yeah, I mean, it went up, the market went up and then it went down and all of these, these protocols had much less money to spend. And we weren't— we didn't generate any revenue until late 2022. And that's when we really started generating revenue off of this idea that we can help connect users and protocols. And yeah, it was definitely not— I mean, I don't think anyone had an easy time at that moment. We were all on top of the world. When, you know, November 2021, I remember like very distinctly looking or being at a party, looking around and being like, oh my God, is this, this is how it's always gonna be, right? That could not have been further from the truth. But it was definitely like an interesting time to start a company. I think we're one of a few companies that really like made it out of our vintage and, you know, could generate revenue. The way we have since we started the company in, you know, call it September, October of 2021. And we've been building ever since and continue to, continue to build.

Right. So for people who are listening who aren't really familiar, can you describe like Layer 3 in sort of the most like down-the-middle terms of, you know, sort of like the vanilla use case for how people are interacting with Layer 3 and maybe separately from that or related, like what sort of like the business model is for you guys that you're able to start generating that revenue in 2022?

Yeah, totally. So pretty, pretty down the fairway here. Layer3 is a full-stack solution that helps crypto protocols and users connect. And we do this by building what we view as the best consumer platform for using crypto. And by, on the other side of that, building open source tools for things like identity targeting and incentive distribution. And all of those things are bucketed into just the Layer 3 protocols. So over the past 3 years, we've generated close to $10 million in revenue. And that's as a result of fees on incentive distributions. It's on a the result of just monetizing the front end at the, the protocol level. So for protocols who want to get featured on the Layer 3 front end, we may charge them a fee and use that to either fund operations, fund rewards, contests, etc. for, for our users and the credentials that the Layer 3 protocol mints at the end of a given campaign or experience have a nominal mint fee, but they do so much volume that it's really added up over time. And so these credentials are what protocols are able to use to target users based on their activity across all chains. These credentials are called cubes because they're credentials to unify blockchain events across chains. And this is the first time you can see what someone's done on Base in the same Query is what they've done on, you know, Optimism, Arbitrum, and ETH mainnet. And, you know, we're seeing 1,000 new chains, you know, probably this year. And so every single time there's a new chain deployed, this protocol gets deployed on it. We immediately have a new business model on that chain. We immediately are, you know, basically able to serve users and serve protocols on that chain. And so it scales nicely as the industry scales because there will always be the need for, call it attention or distribution in crypto. And it's only getting more fragmented over time. And what we aim to do is just be that glue that makes it, you know, that makes distribution strategies not get fragmented as this industry, you know, kind of basically launches all of these different layers for users to participate in.

Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. And it's, I think I read somewhere that you guys have like over 100 million completions, basically like 100 million actions people can think of that as. It's not an action so minuscule as like clicking a button, but actually doing the required action to sort of like complete an event, complete a quest basically. And then going and claiming the rewards. Like, 100 million is just like a massive number. And so when you take like 10 million, you know, in, in the, in the context of 100 million completions, it's like, okay, you can start to put it together. It's like, okay, it's like maybe it's not, you know, the revenue is coming from different places. Some people pay to be on the front page or whatever it might be. But like, you're talking about like 10 cents per completion here. That's, you know, it's nothing. You're talking about like an industry that up until, a year or two ago, it cost $40 to do any transaction in crypto or whatever it was. And so like 10-cent fee, like no one's blinking an eye. And now, of course, you know, fees are much lower and things are generally getting much cheaper. And I'm sure you guys have lower sort of, you know, nominal cuts on those sorts of things. But it's a model where, you know, after years of, you know, plugging into the attention economy in like various different ways, you now find, find yourself, I feel like running the hub, sort of the multi-chain, chain agnostic hub for attention in the crypto economy, which as we talked about earlier, can create a market for anything. So it's really interesting, I guess in closing, I would be curious to hear sort of like where you're at today, what, what you guys are thinking about and, you know, any like basically priorities for, for where Layer 3's at now, how it's evolved and you know, what could be next, or at least what's next sort of in your, you know, purview? What are you focused on?

Yeah, totally. So for the next few bets that we have, I don't want to reveal exactly what they are, but they mainly revolve around doing things 100 times larger than we've ever done before. I just, I think incremental progress is The time for incremental progress is over and now it's the time for incredibly large swings that could make everything else that we've ever done look like just a footnote. Right. And also just serving general user desires to ensure that, you know, our users are happy every time they come back to the front end is deploying on, you know, non-EVM chains like TON or Solana or any of these upcoming Move-based layer 2s. And those are the big two. I think like what we will announce over the next few months will probably surprise a lot of people that we were able to create something this impactful. And I'm really excited to share the partners who've signed on to be a part of these next few bets because there are things that I think crypto has learned a lot of. Crypto's developed a few naughty habits that we're trying to maybe have the industry unlearn, and we'll do so in a uniquely Layer 3 way. And, you know, I'll share, you know, offline what those are, but I think specifically around token launches and where those tokens go, I think we'll see some really, really cool stuff come out of Layer 3.

Interesting. Well, uh, I think that's a perfect place to leave people wanting more. I know we talked about, you know, everyone should feel good in the design, but feeling like you want to want more is also, uh, probably a pretty good sort of outcome. Uh, so, and I'm certainly excited to hear about it offline, but, uh, understand not wanting to share publicly. And for what it's worth, I'm kind of, uh, I'm a fan of not talking too much about what's in the future and just delivering and talking about what exists and what you've done in the past. And, you know, pointing people towards that. So I dig the answer and I'll look forward to hearing the details. But Dariya, thanks again so much for the time. It's been a pleasure as always, and excited to get this out there and share it with people. I guess last thing, anywhere you want to send people, we've got Layer3.xyz, right?

Yeah, sign up. Let me know what you think of the product, the platform, the docs, everything. And then you can follow me on Twitter at Dariya Khojasteh. So my first name and then K-H-O.

Awesome. Well, uh, thanks again, man. It's been a pleasure.

Yeah, thanks, Jake. Thanks for having me.