#31: StoryDAO - Web3 Meets Film

Alright, welcome to another episode of Cyber Patterns. Today we have JP and Justin Alanis on. They are two brothers working on StoryDAO. StoryDAO is working on decentralizing the creation process for films. Uh, Justin previously built and sold a startup and JP has worked in Hollywood, uh, since graduating from USC and even worked with Tyler Creator on his project Golf Media. So really exciting conversation. Glad I was able to have this and, uh, I hope you enjoy. Justin, you want to go first or—

Sure. Yeah. Well, thanks for having us. My background originally, I got into crypto space in 2018 full time. Before that, I was in tech. I was a founder of a startup. It was a data analytics startup which came out of the idea derived out of my previous role in private equity. I was buying and selling and managing large real estate portfolios. And I had this problem where data was all over the place and I couldn't tell you what was happening across my portfolio at any given time. And so I started a technology company. It was a data analytics platform for large real estate private equity folks. And so our Our software was used by some of the largest private equity folks in the world, Blackstone, BlackRock, Star Capital, folks like that. And in 2018, we were fortunate enough to be acquired by a publicly traded company. And that was really when my crypto journey began. I have a cousin who's in the space, and he looked at me when that time came. He said, well, now you've got opportunity, time, resources to go and really explore the space because I was super curious about it. And I applied to MetaCartel Ventures, which is a venture DAO, one of the kind of OG venture DAOs in the space. With some amazing members that are part of it. And I was accepted and I started getting active in that community and started to be able to meet amazing founders and see really interesting early stage companies that were coming into the MetaCartel Venture Network. And one of the founders that I met through that was a guy named Jess Sloss, who's the founder of Seed Club, which is one of the accelerators in the space, kind of like Y Combinator, but for Web3, and Jess is this amazing human and visionary. And I got started to get really deep in the C-Club ecosystem, became really good friends with Jess and was really fascinated by what they were up to. And so I started getting to see crypto from all these different angles, from an investing perspective, from accelerating and helping Jess accelerate and grow businesses within the C-Club ecosystem. I got to see DAOs and NFTs, and I got to see what social— the future of social tokens was going to look like. And it was about 9 months ago then that I pinged my brother, who has been in Hollywood his whole career. I'll let you tell— I'll let him tell a little bit more about his background. And it was the confluence of our shared experiences, I think, that led us to creating StoryDAO.

Got you, got you. Yeah, I would love to hear about yours, JP.

Yeah, awesome. And, you know, I think I definitely represent the entertainment side of of what we're doing here. I have spent my entire career in, in the entertainment space. You know, graduated USC Film School, excited about being a television development executive, went to go work at Lionsgate where I really got a front row seat into learning how content was being made. We were working on a bunch of stuff there at Lionsgate, really two things that juxtaposed kind of informed the rest of my career. We were working on Orange is the New Black, which was Netflix's second original. And we were working on Nashville on ABC, which is like very much a network TV show through and through. And that was right at the dawn of the age of digital distribution. So streamers just starting to make their own content. And it was— we were working on both of these shows. And I was like, oh my gosh, one of these is the future. And one of these is the past. And just got really fascinated by all the ways that the internet was going to change delivery mechanisms for premium content, and what that had the potential to do for creators, right? I mean, the biggest, the barrier between creators and audience was distribution. And distribution was about to be disrupted in a really big way. So I wanted to be— I wanted to get ahead of that and ended up leaving Lionsgate to go work for Lloyd Braun, who was an amazing just person. But yeah, he's the chairman of WME now. But at the time, he was running this business, which was really a hybrid digital slash production company. And yeah, I mean, Tyler— I mean, sorry, Lloyd, I had known just being around the space, obviously, who was the former chairman of ABC, ran ABC for a while. At ABC, he developed the show that made me want to get into television in the first place, which was Lost. So I was just all in on working for Lloyd. And, you know, with Lloyd, we were really trying to disrupt distribution. We thought creators could have an opportunity to go direct to consumer. And Lloyd had been introduced to Tyler, the Creator. And really, I was in charge of that project with Tyler, the Creator. We Together made a production company and a direct-to-consumer media platform that allowed Tyler to create whatever he wanted to create with no restrictions, no network notes. And his community would pay $5 a month to be a part of the platform and to consume the content. And then we were able to, from there, incubate all of these TV shows that never would have been made had we not made them in this way, had we not like sort of made proof of concepts, built community around those proof of concepts. Golf Media was a DAO before DAOs for sure. Yeah, we started incorporating community feedback into the content that we were creating. You know, this is back in 2014, 2015. So it was very new at that point. And Had a great time doing that, but that's really the ethos of StoryDAO really comes from, I think, everything I learned working with Tyler in this direct-to-consumer space. So that's kind of my big background. Justin can tell you how it is working with his brother.

Yeah, I'm definitely curious as well, working with Tyler. You know, I was at Camp Floggnaw, Tyler's festival. 20s. Oh yeah, yeah, I was there 2017, I want to say. Some of the coolest vibes I've ever been. I've, you know, been a Tyler fan forever. But, uh, yeah, that's amazing. So just curious, when you were seeing that, um, and you were working at Lionsgate, was it obvious to you that this is where things were going? And was it obvious to everyone? And were some people like lying to themselves and trying to resist it, or like What, you know, or is there still a place for, you know, legacy media as well? And it's just like we both interact or—

Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's always this place for legacy media.

I mean, like, you know, the traditional studios have— are still exist, right? You know, and they've been disrupted many times, right? They've been disrupted through the advent of cable. They've been disrupted through the advent of the internet. The piece of the pie that they have, I think, gets smaller and smaller and smaller, but I think they continue to exist. And just to answer your question, Netflix was seen as this kind of weird upstart at that time. I mean, here was this place who was kind of your best friend for traditional Hollywood because all of these studios had all of this content that was kind of just sitting there. You know, they would sell DVDs, of course. They would sell their content to syndication if it was a TV show. But here comes Netflix with a new delivery mechanism saying, hey, I'm going to buy all this content you guys got sitting on the shelves. And I'm going to buy it for a lot of money. I'm going to license it for long windows. And studios were like, hell yeah. This is like a— new revenue source that I did not have a couple of years ago. So they leaned heavy into that. And then I think Netflix kind of understood that they were always— they needed to get into originals because in order— because the distribution problem was going to be solved by all of these legacy companies eventually. And you saw that, right? Like HBO Max, Paramount Plus, right? They all have distribution now. And so Netflix said, you know, if we're not making our own originals, we're not going to survive because we can't survive off of other people's content. And no one really wanted to sell to Netflix initially. But, you know, they came in with a lot of money and were able to get some good creators. And I think some people saw the future of that. But a lot of people in TV just like want to make content and aren't thinking about like the macro stuff that's going on. In terms of where that content is distributed or how. They're just kind of like, I need to make this show and I'm tunnel vision. And so I think there are some people that really see the macro stuff going on in the entertainment industry. And there are some people that are kind of just heads down on like, I'm going to make this show.

Got you. And so question for both you guys now. So just kind of explaining what StoryDAO does, how it's working. What's going on so far, what's, you know, the, the 1-year vision, 5-year vision from, from here, and, um, you know, what's the end goal?

Yeah, I can talk, um, uh, just a little bit about like what our vision is, and I think it'd be great if Justin kind of walked you through, um, maybe where we are right now. Um, but long-term vision, you know, Storied DAO, we want to create a platform where anyone in the world can build the foundation for a new narrative universe. Um, when we say narrative universe, we're thinking like big storytelling franchise universe, right? Uh, a world where lots of stories can be told. Uh, so you think of something like Star Wars, you think of something like, um, Indiana Jones, right? Like those are big storytelling universes or Marvel, right? Uh, where, uh, there's all these offshoots and really expansive IP. So we want to create this platform where anyone can create the foundation for one of those. Sell NFTs that will eventually represent ownership in those universes, and then tap a community of creatives from all around the world to help build that foundation into an expansive storytelling world by building on top of that world in, in different ways. So that's sort of like the big 5-year vision. You know, we're starting that. I'll talk you through the sort of 1-year vision to get there. We need to build this platform, right? And the best way to build this platform is to start with our own IP. And that's what we're doing. So we're partnering with some of the best Hollywood showrunners in the world to create the foundation for these new narrative universes, pairing them with amazing visual artists. They're going to create those NFTs, they're going to tell a story that takes place in that universe. And hopefully that story provides this as a sort of launchpad for creatives from all around the world to sort of start to build on top of and again create this into an expansive universe. So that's the sort of short-term goal of, you know, we want to build the platform out using some of our own IP, really get the rewards and incentive mechanisms really down, create some awesome IP, and then eventually start to make this tooling available to everyone who can and they can start creating their own universes on top of that.

Yeah, got you, got you. That's— I mean, that's exciting. It's, it's been cool to watch how Web3 has completely changed the IP model, uh, so much, you know, whether it's something like Bored Apes or smaller collections as well. And, um, I don't know, I'm excited for it as a writer, as somebody who like has, you know, somewhat of an audience and can develop something like, oh, I don't have to, like, you know, I could do something, you know. It's exactly what you're talking about where it gives creators power. Like, there's, there's a lot of, a lot of hope for that. And, uh, yeah, 100%.

I mean, not only does it give you an opportunity, but it gives you an opportunity to also own an underlying piece of, of what you create, which is totally gone in, uh, the sort of new Hollywood system that we have here.

Is it? Or why do you say that?

Yeah. Yeah, we talked about Netflix coming into the market. They came in with not only a new distribution mechanism, they came in with a new funding model. They came in with a new ownership model. It's a cost-plus model. So basically, you used to make a TV show, right? Let's take Lost, for example. One of my favorites, you know, used to license that. The studio would create it, license it to a distributor. That distributor would get a window to be able to display that content. And then, you know, that studio could go and sell that content to every territory around the world, right? Because, you know, there's all these networks that need content that operate in different countries. And then you would go and sell it into syndication, right? You think of like Friends or The Office, you're seeing that on TBS or all these different channels, right? So you'd sell it into syndication or you'd sell it to Netflix to be part of a library for a certain amount of time. And as a creator, you would see money every time your content made money downstream. But with streaming, that doesn't exist anymore. There are no revenue events that are directly associated with your content anymore when Netflix owns your content in every territory around the world and they own it in perpetuity. So you get a lot of these situations where creators don't get paid much upfront. I mean, Netflix will pay you more upfront than you used to get. That's how they attracted people in the first place. They're going to pay you 10 to 20, maybe 50, maybe 100% more than you used to get on the front end. But that's it. Like once you create it, you never see another dime from it. And so you end up with situations like Squid Game, right? Where Squid Game, you know, huge international smash, right? You know, that the guy who created that, you know, Netflix was the only buyer. So it's not like He had a lot of room to negotiate. They just kind of offered him, you know, probably a couple hundred grand, right, to create that show. You know, obviously paid for the whole thing, but like him himself probably only got, you know, a little bit of money. Squid Game is now worth, I just saw, half a billion dollars to the Netflix ecosystem. And that guy who created that didn't see a dime from that upside. And of course he'll see it on his next project maybe, But that's not fair, right? Like, you created something of enormous value and you should be, um, participating in the underlying ownership of, of what you create.

Yeah, I think that's the power ultimately of what crypto and Web3 can offer, kind of to your point, right? They call it the creator economy for a reason. It's because now creators can own the whole thing or a portion of their work, and they can bring community into that work and start to expand it in really interesting ways. We've started to see early signals parallels of this with all the NFT projects out there, whether it's by a singular artist or whether it's by a collection of artists that do it together. The collection of artists that come together in really interesting ways can create different parts of the thing that needs to, needs to equal the whole. And that ultimately creates a system in which you can easily divvy up the ownership of that thing and also start to bring fans and community into whatever creation it is that you want to get out there to the world. I think we're starting to also that the general kind of attention economy Web 2.0 frameworks are starting to fail creators. Certain creators are rising to the top. You know, you've got this like 0.1% of all the people out there on social media who have the mass amounts of followings and they're able to monetize not directly on the following itself, but they're able to monetize on secondary income as a result of the following from, you know, brand sponsorships and various other things like that, whether it's on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter. And so now with this new system, it allows you to monetize directly. It doesn't force you to have to get this huge massive audience and following in order to monetize as effectively as well. And so you're able to monetize more effectively by going directly to the source of where that monetization happens, cutting out these middlemen that are associated with, you know, traditional distribution. But when you're cutting out the distribution partners, what ends up happening is that the the, the revenue and the value that is housed within that system can go to the people who are creating the value within that system.

Got you. Got you. So I think I minted a producer token. And so if you could explain a little bit about what I meant it because I, I like signed up months ago and then forgot for a while and then all of a sudden got a message and I was like, oh, this is awesome. And then like Web3, everything else gets super busy, distracted, ADHD. And then it's like, oh yeah, I want to talk to these guys. And then what exactly? And then also great for the listeners, does the Producer token allow and will there be more NFTs and kind of being part of the DAO? What is that? What does that actually mean besides just being in a Discord? You know what I'm saying?

For sure. Yeah, we're very focused on making it just not a Discord. So StoryDAO today is a centralized organization. So let's just— I just want to get that out on the table. We are not officially a DAO, but the producer Future token. And so the way that— that's— so backing up a little bit, the way that StoryDAO will work is that StoryDAO is a centralized company. We will eventually decentralize StoryDAO, um, but every universe within our orbit becomes a DAO in and of itself, where the NFTs— where specific NFTs that are related to that story become the governance mechanism within that story for creative decisions, for governance decisions, things like that. And so the producer token was really an idea to create a membership around the core Storied DAO team and the centralized business as this brain trust of amazing creatives and business leaders, producers, writers, animators, novelists. And you were one of the fortunate ones who got a token. We had so many applications, way more than we could even consume or handle, frankly. And we went through a rigorous application process and, and, and ended up coming up with a list of 250 people who we thought would be the most value add to our network. The membership that people bought into, it was 0.1 ETH, so a couple hundred bucks. And it's an amazing token artistically and also in terms of its membership benefits. So the token was created by these famous artists, Shelby and Sandy, who are our buddies and they're amazing. Artists and their real-life collector list is Drake and Margot Robbie and the Kardashians and everybody in between. And they're in the MOCA and they're just, they're just awesome people more than anything. And they create amazing art. And so they did this really amazing animated opening credit scene. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to use that as inspiration for people to come and, and coalesce and align around our, our community. And now what we're doing is we have a Discord. We have, but it's open to everyone. We have specific channels within that Discord so that the Producer Token community can really get together there and talk about all the things that are happening within the Storied DAO ecosystem within that framework. And then we offer membership benefits to all these Producer Token holders as a, as a, as a consideration for all of the effort and work that they're going to do to help promote our ecosystem and promote the network and to rally around the network and help us as a centralized team continue to grow and empower new storytelling models into the future. And so the membership benefits are things like access to future mints within our story universes, access to special rarities, access to special VIP IRL and digital experiences, beta access to the platform. So there's all sorts of things that we're doing to bring this community together. And not only that, but the community is really starting to build itself. We, we took all the funds that came into that community and we established a shared treasury, uh, and that community is now governing that shared treasury. Something like $70,000, I think, now that we have in that treasury. And what we're going to do is we're going to use that treasury, uh, for specific— earmarked for specific things that can be helpful to the Storied Out ecosystem. So one of the ideas that we currently have is to create a unique piece of content that is attached to and related to our first production that we're going, uh, that we're in, in the process of doing right now. We're in pre-production right now, launching in the fall. And so that community will start to think about all the ways that they can be helpful to the StoryDAO ecosystem. We're creating guilds within that ecosystem as well, uh, guilds around marketing and growth on product, on production, on, um, the platform. And And the reason we diversified the applicant pool or the accepted applicant pool was because we wanted people with all these different skill sets to be able to help us.

Yeah, yeah, that's so exciting. So many thoughts from that, just like governance over worlds via the tokens. It's, it's like you're creating these worlds and it's literally the governance over what happens in the world. That's so cool. And then just another thing which I've written about a lot, just the idea of decentralized friendships, like I have so many internet friends who have like become real friends and I, you know, I wouldn't have met them any other way and wouldn't have had these conversations with people with similar interests and stuff. And so for me, not, not going to film school, none of that kind of stuff, like being able to talk to people who are in that, you know, it's just a gift of the internet and it's, it's so cool. Um, and I know you, you said you were involved in Seed Club. Uh, I got my start in Web3 at Cabin DAO, which is, uh, yeah, I know I'm an investor.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Okay.

All right, word. So that was the first time I ever got paid in crypto, ever got paid for writing, really. And so they— always grateful for them. And they kind of had a similar model where it was a bunch of guilds and then you had a treasury that you choose what to do with it. And yeah, that's, that's cool.

And now they're, now they're expanding into different territories. And Jonathan's just one of the, I think, the, the real thought leaders in the DAO space. And they came out of the C-Club ecosystem. So C-Club tends to be, in my opinion, the place where really high-quality DAO and DAO growth conversations are happening and what the best way is to actually facilitate growth for specific DAOs that need to function in various ways. And yeah, you know, within our ecosystem, the idea is that the NFT shouldn't just be a governance mechanism. We think that that brings a healthy amount of utility into the ecosystem, but that these NFTs also become almost like a gameplay mechanism within our universes. The idea here is that we're telling these stories in a really I would say easy to digest way where it's not a huge amount of production value. We're not creating mainstream movies yet. We're not creating TV shows yet. We think that that can happen in the future, but rather how do you weave together the fabric of a story in a multimedia way and then use these NFTs as collaborative experiences so that people can come even closer together? Because I agree with you, the thing that people want within their digital experience and their digital life is to create these friendships. It's why the metaverse is the metaverse, and it's why gaming platforms are gaming platforms and why they're so successful. And it's through these shared experiences that people start to create connection, and they start to create an identity around who they are and what they love in the world. And they also start to learn about the things that maybe they were interested in, but never really tangibly could touch or get their hands on because it felt too distant from them. They didn't know anybody in in the real world who could actually help them do the things that maybe they wanted to do, whether that's, you know, fighting climate change or whether that's producing a, a story franchise. Those are, those are traditionally unreachable because people— there's such high barriers to entry. And so how do you lower the barrier to entry and allow for a system, an egalitarian system, where what you contribute to the ecosystem and the value that you bring to the ecosystem then gets rewarded through ownership of that ecosystem?

Yeah. How big is, uh, the StoryDAO team right now? Like, I know you said it's centralized becoming, but how big is your team?

Yeah, uh, including, uh, the two of us, uh, we're 11 now. Okay.

And that's StoryDAO.

So, um, uh, super— we've, we put a lot of time in the last, uh, 8 months, I think, building, building this core team and and making sure we have the best of the best. I love our team so much. We have a whole bunch of amazing people. We have Taufiq, who is our head of community. Taufiq is a writer himself and a degen, so it's really rare to find both of those in the same human being. But Tao is a working Hollywood writer, right? He's been in the room on every season of Atlanta on FX. He was in the room on Barry on HBO. So some really amazing content that he's contributed to, and he really believes in Web3 and believes in what we're creating and the future of decentralized creation and opening doors for people So we're super happy to have him really in the trenches with our community, hoping our community can really learn from him from a writing standpoint and that he provides a lot to that community. He's going to really be the bridge between like a central creative team for that first story and the community around that, that first story, making sure that, you know, ideas are being exchanged in a really conducive way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Just a follow-up question on that. So I'm starting to like, I'm ghostwriting and freelance writing for a lot right now. So I have ghostwriters for my ghostwriting and it's getting like a lot. And I'm like, how do you manage creatives? You know, that's the question I'm wondering where it's like, you know, I, when I, when editors have like hit my writing and like hit it with a bunch of comments and shit, I'm like, you know, I I get sensitive, I'm a writer, you know? And so how do I do that in a respectful way to writers who like, you know, younger than me who are college kids or just starting and I wanna like encourage, but be like, no, this isn't good enough. You know, like, do you have any advice for just managing creatives in general? That's the question.

I mean, yeah, of course. I mean, I think I've been doing that for a long time. You know, that's what a development executive does. So it's its own, sort of art form, giving notes to writers. But I will say that getting notes from community is always, I think, more— writers will always be more receptive to that. Because at the end of the day, like, whatever they're creating is being consumed by an audience. And what that audience thinks of it is the only thing that really matters. What this sort of intermediary person between me and the audience, if I'm the creator, me and the audience cares about it, I'm a little more— I would be more sensitive to that, right? It's like, well, I know this audience, right? Like, I know what they're going to want. And I don't agree with you, you know, this person that's coming in in the middle. And so I think that's— at StoryDAO, we're trying to get away from, you know, doing those network notes, as it were, right? And if those notes are coming from the community, I think creatives are much more receptive to that because that's their end audience. Like, those are the people that they have to, you know, cater to anyway. So if they're not liking it, the content's not working. And so that's what we're trying to create at StoryDAO is the system where, you know, people can have writing or creation, and then it goes out to, you know, a larger community, which is really your end audience, and they can give feedback, and we can take that feedback as, as much of it as, as we, as they want, and, and bring a larger community to the table. That's all writers' rooms are really, right? Like, they're a group of people who are bringing different ideas to the table, and I think we're trying to increase the size of that writers' room table to include a lot more different and varied perspectives.

Um, I don't know if that totally answers your question, but, uh, I just think that, you know, there's, there's, there's different ways in which I think people can contribute or, um, help with writing or content in general. And you have the model that JP talked about, which is kind of like a writer's room where you're purposefully in, let's call it a guild, and that guild, their job is to edit. Or their job is to provide active feedback on the, the information that's coming into them. And then there's passive feedback, I think. And there's, there's models for both, I think. And for passive feedback, I think you need more of a product-led approach where today these studios go out and they use focus groups and these focus groups cost them millions and millions of dollars and they try to get feedback from these focus groups. And ultimately, where I think DAOs are going to have tremendous leg up on traditional content creation is that if you have an active and engaged community who's able to give this user feedback very quickly and easily without it being harmful to the content creators, or even saying, hey, I think you should change it in this way. Reddit's a great example of this where you have this community of people who are creating content, thoughts, whatever it may be, and the, the signal of whether or not you approve is an upvote, and that's it. And that upvote then gets brought to the surface, and I as a consumer now get to see that more actively as a result of the algorithm that they've created to, to highlight the upvoted posts. And I think the question is, is can you create a product that ultimately blends those two worlds, where the people who are upvoting and giving this passive feedback and consuming, but yet giving this, this feedback to these content creators then get fed up to this more centralized guild of, of teams who are active in their participation. That becomes a really interesting recipe for how content can get created in a way and where it resonates with fans more strongly.

That's a really cool kind of mental model to think about. I know there's— if you guys have heard of Foster, I think they're kind of related to Seed Club in some way. They're uh, decentralized editing or for mostly for essays and books and articles and stuff like that. And I work with the founder and, um, similar. Yeah. It, it makes so much more sense to, yeah, think about it like that. We take the opinion of, you know, 100 person people looking at an essay kind of more serious than one person, you know, and it doesn't hurt as much strangely, even though it's more people cuz it's less personal. Um, yeah. But yeah.

And there's a role for all this data and analytics. I think maybe sometimes Netflix goes a little over the top with how they use data to inform content and, and various other decisions within their model. But there is a role for this kind of product-led data and content to inform, to inform content and to inform various other things within, within your platform ultimately. And so to your point, you use this data. If 100 people are looking at the essay, that's probably a good, a better essay than the essay that only one person's looking at. And so how do you then use these product-led experiences in a very Web2-centric way in order to actually influence how the community is vibing with and what the community is seeing and what they're contributing to and what's being expanded, funded, governed, all of that.

Got you. Yeah. So this has been a pleasure. My dog's getting, getting antsy for dinner, as am I. But no, it's, it's been a great time and I feel like I have some things to write about now and Got some ideas. So, uh, thank you so much for coming on.

Um, is this a, is this a podcast or is this going to be an article or how are you going to do it?

So I'm going to put out a podcast, but like, there's a couple ideas, just what we were talking about that, like, I feel like I'm going to write an essay based off of it. Um, and just like noodle around and we'll reference the podcast in my blog, but yeah, this will be a podcast. And I think, uh, the person I was communicating with via email said there was an embargo on it, uh, potentially, uh, for— honestly, we didn't.

Talk about our story architect here. So we talked about Shelby and Sandy, but we didn't even mention that they're the artists for our first project. So, okay. I think we're good. Right. All right.

Cool. So I will put this out closer to the end of the week. Got another one on wraps that needs to go out.

Is this going to be a Twitter thread or how are you going to do it?

Uh, probably a, uh, just like a single post on Twitter. Um, And I will, like I said, probably, I don't know when an essay referencing it'll come out. I don't, I like, I can't think that far ahead, but yeah, no worries. I'm sure I'll mention it in some way. So, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to get more involved with the Discord. I actually just went full-time freelance, so I—

Nice. Congrats.

Yeah. I'm excited.

I—

So I've been noticing your Twitter threads have been doing really well and thanks for sending me a few. I want to get— we're in fundraise mode right now, and so we've been super heads down, but I really need to get my— I've got like 8,000 followers or maybe 7,000, something like that, followers on Twitter right now, and I really want to get my Twitter presence up.