Crypto Needs Its iPhone Moment | James Zhang

Why?

I mean, it's not because Western Union is like evil. You could argue maybe this is too value extractive. They just need to run it through a traditional financial rails. And that's expensive, right? Verification, the T+R, all of that. It's not easy to do. You know, you really appreciate what crypto has built in decentralized finance and stablecoins when you travel, when you want to send a wire internationally. It takes days. It's cumbersome. It's difficult. Crypto collapses that. And I've always felt that that's like the killer use case of crypto in many ways. Like, just if you even if you just stop there innovating and you didn't do anything else, we can grow much, much larger than where we are today.

We're just trying to be the on-chain Apple. That's it. I think that's the honestly best comparable to put us at. I'm not even going to say Tencent or WeChat because we don't deal in data in that way. But the Apple, It's very much from hardware to software to how we're owning the stack. It's a big part of what we're trying to do.

All right. Welcome back, everyone, to Empire. We have a returning guest, James, co-founder, CEO of Jambo. Welcome back, James.

Appreciate you, Santi. Appreciate the Empire pod. How you doing, viewers?

This is going to be a very exciting episode for a couple of reasons. I think crypto is entering mainstream. I think there are few but important companies like Jambo that are really just been laser focused on go-to-market. I've been thinking about this a lot from the Inversion side of the house, which is it is time to take crypto mainstream. There are a lot of the blockers, a lot of the reasons why the tech the maturity of that, the regulatory landscape is there. And I think you guys have been on a journey over since I invested so many years ago. You've survived, you've really leaned in, uh, you know, and you're in a position where you've been focused on a market, particularly Africa. And, you know, listeners might be saying, I've heard this before, um, you know, banking the unbanked, crypto's all about that. It hasn't really come to fruition. Everyone's in crypto. It's just a casino. It's all about speculation. I would challenge that. Keep that on the back of your mind because the, the vision of Jambo— it's great to meet companies that since day one had a very clear vision and have executed and not really detracted from that and have been kind of quietly churning the, like, warning, working in the background. And I think it was very surprising to me when I saw your booth at Breakpoint last year. Not only, by the way, I embarrassed myself because I had to do a bunch of push-ups and I, I, you know, I didn't do them in the correct form, but it was just like a very— it was probably the most energizing booth out there. And so I really would love to make this discussion about, one, giving listeners first, starting with what is Jambo? What have you guys been— what did you see back then? You grew up in Africa, so I want you to give your background just to lay that context for people. And then There's a lot of exciting stuff happening, so we're gonna cover, you know, a lot of that. Uh, particularly the theme is how do you go to market and the opportunity that you guys have seen with combining what are, you know, deep in like mobile services with fintech and those lines really blurring is something that I'm really excited about and you guys are really executing that. So all this to say, welcome. Why don't we start with your background and what Jambo is and then we'll go from there.

Awesome. Appreciate it. First of all, I think your form was okay, to be honest, and you did like 20-something pull-ups, now push-ups, because we had a big pull-up challenge at the booth. But I think there was a lot of— I didn't know there were so many fitness influencers in crypto that were looking at the forum. So awesome. I guess let me start my background super quick. James, the co-founder, CEO of Jambo. I'm ethnically Chinese but grew up in Central Africa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Family's third generation from there. Grew up my entire life. This is a big part why I started Jambo. I'm reiterating it and will share. Ended up in New York, studied computer science at NYU. I ran a fund for 4 years before in 2021 was like the reasons I got into crypto are still the same as when I went to the pod 3 years ago, which is cross-border payments, remittances, and banking in bank. And all of that in emerging markets begins and ends with mobile and connectivity. Now, What I will share with viewers right now to, you know, because I listen to a lot of podcasts, especially in crypto, and generally the first 5 minutes, you know whether or not you want to listen to it. We use our phones as a go-to-market strategy, but we're not purely a phone company. To date, we've sold about 750,000 phones. Our app is on the Android Store, your Jambo app, which is your multi-chain wallet that supports 13 chains, along with your questing platform, tells you what to do in other apps in the phone. Is currently over 4.5 million wallets created over 128 countries. Now, these are the 3 main points I wanted to stress because this shows a lot of how we think about distribution and how we disperse and use phone as a go-to-market strategy in Web3. I'll stop there first.

No, that's a— how does that position you in terms of for people that just have context, like relative to like other projects in crypto, like you have, what is it, 4.1 million wallets? 128 countries. I mean, the other project that I can just think of that doesn't get nearly enough credit, that has really evangelized adoption, particularly of Tether, is Tron. I mean, they just have boots on the ground. How have you guys gone to that position? Like, do you just have an army of people that are incentivized to just evangelize and go and acquire customers? Like, what— walk me through, like, how the evolution of getting to that.

100%. I really appreciate that you bring up Tron, you bring up Tether. Honestly, I think Tron, Tether, Jambo, whichever, obviously, they're a lot more baller, have done a lot more adoption. I think we all solve one issue. Like, why it matters is it addresses the choke point of crypto adoption, onboarding and accessibility. Now, if you think about it, if you don't empower users in emerging markets to actually leapfrog the digital economy and bridge the gaps in financial inclusion, like through decentralized tools and education, then you really can't onboard them to crypto. Like even if tomorrow you airdropped a non-custodial digital wallet to the entire of Africa, 1.4 billion people, there's 60%, 50% unbanked, you still will not bridge them to the financial, global financial ecosystem because they don't have access to credit. There are just certain things that lack currently in the global financial ecosystem that you can use Web3 crypto and onboarding tools to onboard. Now, you mentioned Tron and Tether. Tron is probably, I'd say, from what we're seeing, our largest market is Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, followed by Nigeria and Kenya and certain Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Philippines. I say that's probably 85% plus of all stablecoins that people just genuinely use. They use TRX. And the reason is just why you might use it. If it's cheap, it's instantaneous, and it's very easy to understand, and obviously a first mover advantage to a lot of marketing on the ground. Now, how Jombo actually attacked all these markets— so similar to myself, right, third generation in Africa, you've pretty much explored landscape, you know how things work. That's the only way you can reach 128 markets for us, from shipping phones, distributing, and getting it to locals, because it's not purely online. If you want to purely online, be able to reach these markets, that might be plausible. But to ship your actual physical hardware product to these locations, to have communities there, I'll give you an example, like in Congo, right? Congo is the Belgians, I speak French growing up, but it's pretty much useless right now for me in day-to-day for Jumbo because most of our customer base is speaking Spanish and Portuguese, right? In LATAM, in Brazil, et cetera. In Southeast Asia, different languages. So you have to use not only their language to create communities and go-to-market, but also in their local channels. Whereas most of Telegram, I mean, sorry, whereas most of Web3 is on Telegram, most of these emerging markets are WhatsApp. So a lot of what Jambo is actually doing is bridging Next River users, solving that choke point in crypto, but then localizing in the way to do so.

Yeah. Your messaging is, you know, you're building the world's largest on-chain mobile network. And a lot of that is the Jambo phone. So, um, you know, phones, smartphones, feature phones have become, you know, an extension of our body, and it has allowed people to just do so many things and just come online. Um, tell— give us more insight into that, like, that market, that— those dynamics in, in Africa, because as I understand, that, that's been like your primary market. So, um, yeah, maybe just let's spend a minute on, on Jambo Phone and, and what does it mean to like build this like on-chain mobile network?

Awesome. I mean, if I was to use one sentence to describe it, I'd say it's the largest existing hardware network for network within Deepin for crypto. Like as of today, within the Jumbo network of phones, 38 million gigabytes of storage availability, about 650,000+ compute nodes. At the end of the day, what is your foundational infrastructure for any company? In this space with hardware is to handle data storage, compute, communication. And our low cost basis, probably more than anyone else, is $69 a unit out the factory, right? We sell it for $99 'cause from shipping to 128 countries, you gotta give distributor cut, you gotta have shipping tax, customs tax, solve all of that. And we do that within the margin of still selling it for $99. So yeah, I think it's just very important when you're building out this network to think not, hey, how many phones can I get to this year? Which is honestly intuitive, right, for any phone company because that's what your main product is. But from what I'm referring to is Jombo, if I was to not even say a phone, if I was like, imagine an all-in-one infrastructure that provides connectivity to users that don't have it, that can't send money across border, that are in emerging markets that are unbanked, right? That need stablecoins to receive their payment or their salaries to hedge against hyperinflation. This user base, which is honestly the 1 billion users everyone in crypto talks about onboarding, you have to have that infrastructure that encapsulates it where as a 19-year-old in Lagos, Nigeria, At 10:00 AM you can buy this product, right, for a very affordable price. And by 10:00 PM you can be already earning money. Like our slogan, a big part of the phone for Granny is the phone that pays you, right? You have a phone, you have a job, you spend your time, we tap in the labor market, you earn. So that's a lot of sort of part of our onboarding process is using the phone and a lot of the quests and apps that are inside.

Got it. So let's walk through that. So like, so you buy the phone for $99. That is available in many countries. Access to internet services, you're not providing through like a deep-end type of service like Helium. You are relying on local infrastructure like mobile carriers to provide that data plan or mobile plan. Is that correct?

Exactly. So a lot of our messaging, honestly, in the beginning of Jambo was straight up all Africa because that's where I'm from, right? Like, you know, you look at me like, how's this guy from Africa? It is. And there's a lot of Chinese.

There's a lot of Chinese in Africa, by the way.

A huge amount of Chinese. Not a lot that have been there for 3 generations, but a lot. And a big part, I think I mentioned before as well, is the monopoly in Africa on telcos, where there's 9 guys that just built everything out—Safaricom, Vodacom, Orange, etc. And that's why when you call between like Vodacom and Vodacom, it might be $0.10. But if you call between Vodacom and Safaricom, it might be like $5. And the reason for that is why is they want to monopolize it. And that's why people in Africa, you might be surprised, they actually have multiple phones in order to solve a lot of these issues. I've definitely seen that.

Yeah. And by the way, the book I'm— I read a book called China's Second Continent, and it's all about the Chinese presence in Africa, uh, and it's, it's a fascinating, eye-opening kind of book. Um, so anyways, so, so you— these folks buy the phone and they're gonna have to rely on their you know, pay for a mobile service. Have you, have you thought about going kind of the extra step of deploying a network like Helium in these particular places to structurally like lower the costs? Um, now mobile plan costs are like, they're all over the place. I've looked at it kind of like for what I'm doing, like everywhere. Uh, and, and they're cheap, but you could run it cheaper if you run a deep-end network. Like Helium in a particular country? Like, is that in the roadmap? Have you thought about that?

Yup. First of all, I think it's amazing what Helium is doing for that particular set of users, right? They service the US at the moment. So when I live in the US, I use Helium, honestly. I don't run a hotspot and all that, but I use their data plan. So honestly, it works, like just flat out test it. Now, for Africa, for LATAM, for Southeast Asia, it's just a little bit different. And there might be why Helium isn't servicing all these countries because it's very, I say the data plans, the network, and the telcos are owned all by sort of the top, like say families or say the top people in those countries. And the reason why I'm actually really glad you brought this up, I wasn't thinking about sharing too much, but a big announcement of Jombo that actually has coming out is we're launching our own satellite network to connect all the Jombo phones that are around the world, provide connectivity so they don't need to rely on Web2 telco providers and they can tap into Web3 network effects. So I'll just share that first here.

So any, any Jumbo Phone in the world will be able to use a satellite and like just create this network of like connectivity. Exactly.

So explicitly, as we are launching our own satellite into space, whether it's Starlink, whether it's working with another company, please stay tuned to the announcement. But it's been a project that we've been developing. Jumbo started 2021. That's when we did our seed round. I think we met our Series A in like early '22. We've been developing this for more than a year. So like it's about a lot of different partnerships and Web2 to string together to make this happen. But the writing was on the wall. Last year we did a bit under like a million phones, right? This year we're thinking about doing a few million phones, whether from the contracts we have directly to businesses, to telcos that are buying it for their users, because everything we did last year was retail. Every phone sold was retail. It was not to direct tell because it takes a lot of time to set those contracts up. Now this year we're looking at a few mil in phones being sold. And why not have that huge component? What is the phone going to do? What, like, what is your phone going to do for you if it's not connected to the internet, right? Whether you're using iPhone, Samsung, or anything, or a Solana Saga even. So you need that connectivity. And honestly, that's one of the biggest base cases we're trying to solve.

Wow, that's amazing. Uh, I'm, well, really excited to see that. I mean, I've, I've been tracking Starlink's progress for a long time and, you know, I, you know, I think most recently they kind of announced, I'm trying to, I'm trying to pull it up, like they're, um, like venturing more into mobile. Of course, like, you know, their ability to, like, uh, would this be, I guess, like more redundant? Like you're still gonna rely on local telcos, but this might just be like, you know, if a particular user's traveling or, offering like a layer on top of that for more redundancy or just cheaper for a particular use case if you're roaming and stuff like that?

Oh, I mean, for sure. I mean, even when I travel like these days, I use Airalo, right? Which is a very Web2 format. And now I switched to Roam. Ava, I think, does a really great job, you know, so you can directly tap in using crypto, buy airtime credits around the world, especially how many conferences we travel to in Web3. With our satellite, Again, literally before hopping on the pod, our legal and our marketing team was like, bro, please, if you say more than this, like, this is how it works. So I'm not going to share too much, but just know if you have a Jamba phone anywhere in the world, you can— you will be able to use internet through our site. That's amazing.

Um, well, excited to see that. So, so back to the thesis of phone, like, like it's super interesting because Solana did the Saga phone And their whole thing was like, the phone can act as your hardware security module, like a cold, like a, like a, you know, you could use that for signing, right? So like nothing really stops you from using an HSM, like that becoming an HSM, like the secure enclave in the phone acts as like, you know, pretty robust, like security mechanism to sign and all that. Not only that, but like presumably in your phone, I'm looking at, you know, and we'll probably like maybe link to this in the show notes, but like you have some apps loaded in there, right, where the user can, to your point, start earning or start, you know, get activated in crypto through this DApp store. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that journey looks like and what you've observed a lot of these users that have bought the phone? A, how many phones have been sold? What is a typical journey for the user and how does he get activated into, into this world of Web3?

100%. Um, so just off the bat is As a user, whether you're in Nigeria, our largest market, whether you're in São Paulo, Brazil, you buy the phone, say at 10 AM, right? You're chilling at home. You buy the phone from your local provider, distributor arrives, you log in. There's 20 apps pre-installed in the Jumbo phone. Only one of those apps is the Jumbo app, which is your multi-chain wallet and your questing platform. Now, after— oh, by the way, I think it's on share screen.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, so I started sharing this. So like here, kind of have a glimpse of the phone, right? Like this particular like Jumbo, JumboGPT app. Yeah, exactly.

So you come into the phone. So this is actually the Jumbo Phone 2, some graphics we made just for users to share the JumboGPT. But essentially, say Matrix Fire is one of the 20 apps pre-installed, um, Web3 FPS game pre-installed, uh, it's on Bybit, it's on OKX. It's fully liquid token. You get to level X on Matrix Fire, you earn X amount of tokens. And you might say, Santi, you might say, hey, James, like as a 19-year-old in Lagos, Nigeria, I don't care if I have MAX or FIRE tokens for Matrix Fire. I need, you know, Nigeria, like local cash. Well, then we provide you the on-ramp off-ramp in the local jurisdiction. And that was a big part of what Jambo does and why 128 countries. When we say ship to these 128 countries, we don't, we can't say we offer on-ramp off-ramp and all of them because we don't. What we do in pretty much more than 100 at the moment. Now, I want to also address the first part, Solana Saga. We're actually huge fans of the Solana Saga and the Secret Phone that's coming out. I think what Toly is doing, literally changed his, on Twitter to a phone salesman of selling phones, is that he's trying to disrupt the App Store. Like who doesn't want to disrupt the App Store? Anyone that has built anything for Google Play or for iOS understands how annoying the processes from the 30%, 40%, whatever fees you gotta pay to—

Yeah, value extract, huge value extract. Like Fortnite got into this, like they've been trying to—

Roblox, Fortnite, especially in gaming against it to all this, 'cause within gaming it's your own whole virtual ecosystem and those are your users. And especially in crypto, we talk about the fat protocol thesis and multiple theses about how to own the end user. So we truly believe in what they are doing and we are trying to do the same thing. But you might say, James, then why is your phone Android system if you're trying to disrupt that? It's because when we ship to 128 countries and millions of phones, it's impossible to work with those local distributors unless you're Android or iOS system. Like you're not even in play to get to those numbers to work with those guys. So that's one. But two, we also have our DApp store where we have a bunch of dApps right now, progressive web apps that are not on Android, not on iOS that we've made into accessible format for mobile for our users. Yeah.

So I'm looking here, like, uh, for folks that are viewing this video, I highly encourage you to do that. Like, so you have the, the phone itself, the hardware. So that's important, by the way. It's very competitive at like $99. That's the— I actually have a phone that I— you guys were so kind of give me one, actually two, the first one in Token24/9 Dubai and then in, in Singapore. Beautiful phone. Um, and, um, you have now, so you buy that $99, that's fairly competitive with other You would call this a smartphone, not a feature phone. It's like a full-on smartphone.

Is that correct? If you look at iPhone 11 specs, how much RAM they have, 12, we have 12. If you look at storage, storage, 128 gigs. The only thing I'll say don't look at that we really fall behind for any phone you might be holding right now is the camera. But that's honestly just how much money you put into the camera is how much you're going to get back. So we really found it hard to— make that better. But everything else, like, you can play Genshin Impact, FPS games, no lag.

Yeah, I mean, truthfully, like, just as a side anecdote, like, like Mark Zuckerberg in his most recent interview with Joe Rogan was talking about like Apple really has not innovated that much for their phones. Like, the new app, the new photo, um, like app and the calendar, they're just like really falling behind, it sounds like. So I could see the tides turning. But I hear you on the camera. So the phone itself is very competitive, both from a price standpoint, feature standpoint, for a lot of these folks. What about the flow? Like, so once they buy the phone, like, what have you observed in terms of metrics? Like, do you have— and people seeing here in the video, like, you have the Jambo app, which encompasses Jambo Earn. You know, you can, as you coined it, turn time into money one tap at a time, gamify quests and start earning immediately. I wanna learn more about that. I also wanna learn more about Gambo, Jambo Play. You know, these digital adventures, casual games to immersive experiences. Jambo Play brings the universe of mobile gaming right in your fingerprints. And then the wallet, which allows you to connect, transact, and manage your digital assets seamlessly in a safe, secure, and incredibly user-friendly manner. Along with the ecosystem, kind of the Web3 or DApp store. Let's just call it an app store. I hate the DApp. Just drop the D kind of thing. Um, but let me go through a couple of these, but, uh, back it up with what you've actually observed in real usage interaction.

Yep. Let me just throw some numbers out there. Uh, 5 hours DAU on the phone, not just on our Jumbo app. So we can actually track the amount of time that our users use. So most of our power users is around 5 hours. Um, airdrop stuff we'll get to, so I won't share too much how we're rewarding our users through, uh, whether Jumbo Earn or Jumbo Play. But end of the day, all of the quests that you see on Jumbo, they're not by Jumbo. They're by all of our partners. They're by SEI, they're by Avalanche, they're by Solana, they're by Aptos. We have multiple L1 partners that have their apps pre-installed on the Jumbo phone. We have multiple games from Call of the Void to Matrix Fire, et cetera, multiple different geographies. But end of the day, we're not going to dilute our brand. We're going to keep 20 apps on the phone that's pre-installed. And we're gonna keep changing them out based on a merit system of what we see of how users are spending time. Like for example, even though I love X company that's pre-installed in the Jumbo Phone, but we just see out of the 20 apps, well 19 because one of them is a Jumbo app, we'll never move. Out of the 19, this one is just not doing very well in its category. The DAU is very low. We find why, we might de-install it. We might put in another app that we think will work very well. The last thing we wanna do is play like app maker god and say, hey, you have to use XYZ. That is why we partner with so many L1s because in various regions, like he's brought up Tron, he brought ETC, it's huge. But from what we are seeing and why we actually chose Solana to launch our own token and everything that we are doing is because all the KOLs, all of the local people in the jurisdictions that we're talking to is using Solana, whether that's from buying meme coins on Liquidity or whether that's from having Fantom or some YouTuber that they watch, right? In Brazil, YouTube is huge and not as much Twitter uses it, so they're on it. So it's not really like Jumbo is saying, hey, well, obviously we 100% believe in Solana and everything that we're doing. But more so, we did our due diligence. And in over 100 countries around the world, you see local people that are not on crypto Twitter. It's not the people that you're looking at every day, but they're on Solana and they're not on the other chains. It's like, okay, there might be a reason there. We should probably be pushing it.

That's interesting you mentioned that. Like, one, the user that comes in through your phone doesn't— has no infrastructure loyalty, you know what I mean? Like, they don't care about Ethereum, all the different flavors of L2s or all the different networks. But you mentioned like, is it because of the low fees or why are they, or are they just a, they learn about maybe from their friends or just the internet? Like, hey, there's a whole meme coin phenomenon happening in Solana. Well, they just like go there, right? They want to, and it's not so much they think about Solana. It's like, I want to buy Bonk or, you know, what flavor of the month token. Most of that, the cycle has been Solana. Is that the case or is there another reason why maybe from your side where you push Solana because it's just easier to integrate, it's easier to, you know, how do you think about like that?

So to give everyone credit, Santi, I'm going to say most of the L1s actually have done events or some sort of something with someone in the regions that we are in. Like we've seen it. right? We've seen certain L1s be in these regions, do a lot of things locally. But the only L1 that we've seen caught on where when you go to an event locally with like just everyone trying to pour in is Solana. And I'm really not, I don't know how to come off objective here because we are launching SPL on Solana, but it's a mix from what you see on crypto Twitter, the writing on the wall of meme coins, of liquidity, of low fees, Dex Screener plus Phantom plus PumpFund plus everything that just happened. We all know that the AI trenches have been on Solana and BASE, I'll put it that way. But I think it's just, I don't know what they've done. They're just there. Like, we go to, forget São Paulo, we go to like Rio, anywhere, like it's just Solana being talked about by the influencers and everything. And I was like, okay, understood.

Yeah. How much activity are you seeing on earn, play, wallet?

So from, I'll say this, from our TGE campaign with our lead exchange that happened, because we just announced our token launch a few days ago, we've got more than a million submissions for some of our campaign, like one campaign quest on just one exchange. I think that's a, and that's countered with a lot of the data that we've seen from the exchange. I think it's a lot of emerging market users that have never done a campaign on these exchanges. It's sort of a lot of feedback that we're seeing, that this is the first time they're coming to these exchanges, they're making an account, and they're adding in the exchange ID and their Jumbo ID, and they're getting bonuses. And that's a big part of their incentive to come in. And this is really not me trying to shill our phone, having gone to a token or anything. I think this is just showing around the world there are just that many people that are using crypto every day, but that's just not connected to the resources that we are connected to and tap in and use every day because they have different use cases and in different regions.

Right. How's this, you know, for a skeptic listening, it's like, oh, this is great. The phone sounds like it's feature parity, particularly for the audience and market you're going after. $900 seems like an attractive price point. The ecosystem of apps looks, you know, you know, a lot of gamification here. You could see, you know, a lot of traction. How sustainable is it? And that's where they might be like, okay, well, right. You know, how does this actually really scale to, you know, hundreds of millions and who's actually incentivizing kind of on the backend, like these claimable rewards and journeys and quests. And, and how do you think about that from a go-to-market standpoint and really just scaling this out to hundreds of millions of users?

Great, great question. Great question. I'll say this. Let me clarify this. Jambo, we are also creating new users that have never heard of crypto to come in. But most importantly, I think 90% of what we're doing is funneling users around the world that are already using crypto, just not in the sense that you use it every day, to actually come into our center. Let me give an example. I went to school in New York. I grew up in Africa. My friends in New York use crypto every day. NYU. My friends from Africa that grew up will use crypto every day. In New York is for trading, in Africa is for paying their supplier when they run a furniture business in Congo and they get paid for wood in Senegal, uh, when they need to be banked and they need to hedge against inflation. Now these users are already spread out. They already see the use cases. You look at El Salvador using Bitcoin as a, you know, treasury, you look at around the world, LATAM, Africa, et cetera, using that. For us, all we are doing is enabling these users like, look, instead of just buying Bitcoin, stablecoins, holding onto it, or using this to send to your friend as a transaction, you can actually access a whole world of Web3 from our device. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like just expanding what they already know to use a crypto, but they don't actually know like one mainstream crypto that me and you look at on crypto Twitter. They're not on, you know, buying Cerebro. They're not on DAOs.fund buying a16z or pledging into etc. things. They're using it, you know, for their families and for themselves and for their livelihoods. Now, if you— what do they have and what they don't have? What they don't have is money. Most people around the world, you just don't have money. Everyone needs more money. But what you do have is time. Now, you can trade that time to earn more money, isn't that a very, like how it should be to be rewarded for using a different company, a different network, a different protocol? So all we are doing is sort of building that bridge between.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm looking at the Dune dashboard here just to kind of put finer points on this go-to-market. So you have sold all time, like over a little over 700,000 phones. There have been 5.8 million wallets created, of which you seem to think 4 are active. 4.1?

My apologies. The data I was using earlier is still from a month ago, I think.

All right. Well, look at that. Yeah. A lot— you see here the regional kind of footprint. A lot of it is Africa and Middle East, although you have presence kind of pretty much everywhere. You mentioned that like 128 countries, give or take. Um, seems like your largest market is like Vietnam, China, uh, at least by sales, Philippines, India. This overlaps, by the way, closely with, I think, crypto adoption and, and, and, you know, in the particular countries. Latin America is also important. You know, you have Brazil, you met, to your point, Argentina, Mexico. Obviously, just geographically, these countries are largest. What else is relevant here? Rewards by region, Asia is just dominating there. I think they're just like more digitally native, savvy, active. You saw a lot of that with play-to-earn, right? Like Philippines and Vietnam, just like really, really dominant markets. Is there anything to that that you like observe? Like why is it that Asia just, is it just like sheer number of users and just like, just that's just a population thing or is there anything particular about the Asian consumer, more young, digitally savvy, that just gets it?

So from the time that we are recording right now, or even to when a viewer listens to this in probably a few days, or currently, it's Chinese New Year's. And I don't know if everyone around the world knows what Chinese New Year's is, but basically Chinese, right, stereotype, works very hard, doesn't even take weekends, like works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The only time, there's no Christmas, there's no New Year's, there's no nothing for Chinese. The only time they take a break is that one week of Chinese New Year's. Everyone goes home. Beijing, Shanghai are ghost towns, the biggest cities in China. Everyone goes back to where they are from in China and you don't do any work. All of China's off work. All you do is drink and gamble. So I say all of this to say, I just believe our ethnicity, the Chinese and Asia are very, very, risk-takers. And yeah, so probably a lot of volume is from risk-taking in many regards.

Now that you mentioned that, perhaps more of a broader conversation around why are people really incentivized to use Jambo? Is it more the speculation? Like, hey, I've heard about this meme coin mania, or just crypto as a whole is like, you know, a lot of speculation. Does it start like that, or is a big part of the user base coming because they're like, hey, this can actually be my bank, I can earn, it's, it's sort of like a— could, could become an important form of livelihood for people. And same with that, Uber, Airbnb's, you know, provided alternative sources of income for many people. And then like they really discover— or is it like just the pure idea of just having a stablecoin and saying, God, I just want a digital dollar and I can do this through this phone? And I want to talk about on and off ramps if that's relevant. But across all those three, how do you think about like why a user, A, how do they hear about Jambo or why are they really interested in it? Like what's the primary motivation? I know it's kind of hard, but just like anecdotally, like why do you think that is?

100%. I think it's, this is actually, so I'll say that our team wakes up and goes to sleep with just one word in mind, distribution. That's it. Like we realize distribution is king, but product is very much coming right after it. So I would like to think that when a user wants to buy a jumbo phone, they see what's on the market. Like forget Web3, right? Say you're just a normal guy, you in wherever, you're like, let me buy a phone. The cheapest phone you can find is $120. It might be Oppo, Vivo, right? You go up $10 to $20, it might be a Samsung. You go up $10, $20, it might be a Huawei. Another few hundred, you get an iPhone, and there's a lot between. That's why hardware is very hard to scale and not a lot of people just start off with hardware. We break even. We don't make a single dollar on our phones. The phone sells for $99. So already you save 20% margin on buying this hardware device if you wanted to buy a phone. Then you will realize actually a lot of the specs in the phone are better than even the $150 to $200 phones we see because this company is not trying to make a profit on the phone, rather trying to get as many out as possible for the platform, onboard more users, and make their users happy. That's why users buy the phone. Now, why they will stay after they buy the phone is actually to spend their time to earn money as a job. I don't know if you know, but like, in— keep using Africa example, let's just stick to Africa. In Africa, typical African household, you might have, say, 10 people. Maybe there's 1 or 2 that are working. Right? Emerging markets, there's not as much job opportunities. And if you talk about danger level of the jobs that people do as well, very widely different from the US or anywhere else. So with Jambo, you spend your time inside this phone, which is very explanatory. You don't need previous set skills. You don't need to know crypto. All you need to do is, hey, you play this game, or hey, you come into this app and you do XYZ, which you already see the instructions in Jambo. App. Um, so I'll say that's two of the main reasons. They, they come into the phone for the, the pricing and the tech, and then they stay for earning opportunities. Yeah, absolutely.

And by the way, that the user experience, it's like, you know, when people have strong motivation, like, they'll figure it out kind of thing. There's like a great experiment, uh, done in India where they installed like behind concrete wall like a computer screen. Oh really? And kids— yeah, people should go look at that— and kids just without any knowledge. They just installed them without telling anyone. These kids just— you'd see the video of them, like, you know, looking at it, and then within like a day, within weeks, they were like going on YouTube, learning stuff, playing games. Like, people just figure stuff out, right? And so that's always been like in the back of my mind when people say, oh, crypto, the UI/UX is hard. I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. Like, you know, like the biggest bottleneck is the on and off ramping, which is, okay, people get rewards in this Jambo phone and the app, How do you cash out? How do you use that in the real economy?

Yeah, we have essentially our own on and off-ramp setup around the world in jurisdictions, but also most places that you might be targeting have licensing and other things involved. So you work with a third party, right? So we might be working with Transact, we might be working with Yellowcard, we might be working with honestly even like big centralized platforms. So it's just a matter of having a big BD team that can actually reach out to all these other businesses that be like, "How do you do your on and off ramps?" Number one, can I tap into that network? Because I'm not trying to, my business isn't predicated on— Yeah, you're not trying to build that, yeah. It's a service that we provide, but it's super integral. Our second is, should I be doing this myself if I have the ability to? So a lot of what we do is actually tap into other companies' networks locally. To provide this to our users. Yeah, absolutely.

That's fascinating. Look, I mean, I, I've come to the conclusion that there is no better platform business than a mobile carrier, particularly, uh, what are called MVNOs, mobile virtual network operators, which is you don't need to have the physical infrastructure. You're relying on local partners that have physical infrastructure and tapping into that, or you're building it yourself in a kind of a deepened manner with hotspots and incentivizing people like Helium has done in the US. It's just a massive opportunity to, to really just do that. Why? Because you're living with the customer 24/7, right? But do you—

is it like the margins that's amazing on those MVNOs, or is there some other part?

No, no, see, this is the thing. Traditional MVNOs are dogshit businesses. They have like less than 10% EBITDA margin. Why? Because their biggest costs are buying the data from people that have the physical infrastructure. And, um, you know, they can have some sort of like arrangements. A lot of traditional carriers have MVNOs. It's just like— but, and the second component, so like anywhere between 50 and 60% of the cost structure is how much are you paying per gigabyte. And so you have 100,000 subscribers, 100, you know, million or 50 million subscribers. A lot of them consume 5, 10, 20, 30 gigabytes per month. You give unlimited data plan, well, you're gonna have to buy a lot of gigabytes, right, to service that customer base. And so you're gonna have to go and buy that data from someone that has the physical infrastructure. That can be very expensive. In the US, $2, $3, $4. So that is the biggest cost structure for MVNOs because again, they don't own the physical infrastructure. And then the second cost is customer acquisition. And Of course, across those two buckets, my thesis is, and the conclusion that I've come is, you can really transform and become a very best-in-class MVNO. Why? Because you can use what, what makes Helium Helium is in the US they have 27,000 hotspots. That has created sufficient density in the US to be able to offer the mobile, the Helium mobile plan, $20, $30 unlimited. And then you can actually provide feature parity, right? What you don't want is users to buy your phone. They're like, oh great, the phone's great. The plan is $20, but shit, I don't have coverage anywhere other than New York and Miami.

Well, you know, I didn't know they had 27,000—

27,000 hotspots. Yeah, so they, they've been able to all position themselves to actually where carriers are offloading data to the mobile— to the Helium network, uh, sometimes 20, 40, 60% I've seen. And that started last year, and that's what's so exciting that you've created this decentralized infrastructure network. Like, deploying infrastructure is very, very expensive, even in the US. Forget about Africa and these more rural areas like India, like super underdeveloped, right? You need to have a player that just deploys the infrastructure. A lot of times it's government, a lot of times it's a consortium of governments and large enterprises, or Chinese, like, you know, state-owned kind of companies. Nonetheless, um, Helium comes in and says, I'm going to incentivize this network of people to buy a hotspot and provide that. You need to have internet, right? An ISP. But anyways, which you don't, may not even have in these rural countries or places. Sorry. But anyways, the MVNO, yeah, like you can really take that MVNO from 5% margin to like a 20% margin just by, by instead of buying those gigabyte, that data packets that you need to service your customer base from a large telco, you can go and buy it from this Helium network, like this decentralized network of hotspots, right? Uh, for like 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% cheaper. And that's very material. Not only that, because you've saved so much on that, you can then offer incentives to acquire customers. So your customer acquisition game becomes stronger and more efficient and more organic and sustainable. You can offer rewards like you see in the Jumbo Phone, right? Um, and so Yeah, I think crypto is really good, obviously, at offering incentives and acquiring customers. The key to your point, this overall discussion, is how do you retain them? And that's where you have to have— that's where I think the second leg of truly— I think one of these companies will become the largest company in the world. Seriously, like what Tencent did in China, you can really take that playbook and transform it. Why? Because everyone needs mobile services, right? It's essential. It's like a— it's a human right now, almost.

It's the middle of everything that everyone needs.

Then you can extend it. Everything. You live with a customer 24/7. Why are you going to stop there? Well, offer them fintech services. Oh, I don't know, we've built an entire infrastructure to offer those services in a faster, better, cheaper manner just with stablecoins, right? Run that playbook in every country, and you literally will create— like, the lines of like a mobile carrier and a fintech company are blurring. You have companies like Nubank that started in Brazil with a— as a fintech and are now layering mobile. You have companies like Walmart in Mexico. They have a huge distribution network. Hey, why am I not capturing more wallet share from the customer? I can— the customer leaves my store. Well, why don't I offer mobile, offer my MVNO? I'm going to acquire these customers super easily. I can probably negotiate really good pricing because I'm a behemoth. I want to live with a customer 24/7, not just when he's in the store. So you met Walmart Mexico's MVNO, uh, has become the largest MVNO in Mexico in like a matter of 1 or 2 years. Of course, because every Mexican walks into Walmart, you're going to sell them your mobile carrier plan, not the competitors. Now, where none of these guys— not Nubank, not Walmart, not an MVNO in the US— None of them are offering stablecoins. Why not? Like, you already have Robinhood, you already have Revolut, you already have PayPal, you already have Stripe. It's going to happen, right? It's like you're seeing it happen. So, I mean, I think I didn't fully, candidly appreciate this thesis until I kind of went through it and saying, okay, which business do I want to own? How do we activate and solve crypto's biggest problem, which is go-to-market? Like, no one really cares if you've built fantastic tech. You need to get in the hands of people. Oh, well, what do they really want?

Hey, fácil, your phone. I mean, Santi, you're touching upon this right now, by the way. I 100% agree. You should have just done this pod yourself, you know, to be honest. But stablecoins, like, I know there's a bunch of people that are big advocates for stablecoins on crypto Twitter and just around in general, but I still think it's just so underrated. It's like one of those things where your trad fi friend is like, hey, Why can't crypto do XYZ? And you're like, wait, this is what stablecoins do. Like, oh, like literally your transaction costs reduce from like 5 to 10% in EMs to like 1 bit. And you get access to USD-denominated savings, which is important for high inflation countries, which you might not understand as a viewer because you're probably viewing it.

You grew up in DR, Congo. I grew up in Mexico. No one— you can always— anytime you travel, there's only one currency that's accepted worldwide. This is only one. You can always whip out a Benjamin and they will take it gladly. You will pay anywhere. And so I think that, that's it. Like, just stop there. We don't need to reinvent anything else. So then, like, the key though is, like, once you get into the weeds, like, how do you do on and off ramping easily, right? Wow. If you have a store, you can deploy ATMs there. You can work with local banks. Like, once you have a cash flowing machine, like, uh, MVNO or a distribution partner, like convenience stores, even local, like mom and pop, like bodegas or like that are very popular in, you know, India or in Africa. Like you don't have these massive like supermarket, like convenience stores. Like they're more like small convenience stores, but those can be like this company Zahr that I invested in and that is focusing on Pakistan. You guys should like talk to them because they, they're basically their whole MO is, hey, building a new bank is pretty hard. On and off ramping in crypto is really hard. The founder, um, Brian, was like inspired by, um, like taking the deep end component and saying, um, here, let me see.

I think, I think, uh, I agree with both of those points. Building both of those is very hard. Yes. Yeah.

And so what he's done is saying, hey, there's all these network of mom and pop shops where people go and buy like not only food, grain, whatever, reload their mobile plan. Why not have them be, you know, the on and off ramp for crypto, right? And then you have, obviously you need to have a whole host of like, there's a lot of that goes into that. That's what makes like Zar Zar. It's Brandon, by the way, who's building Zar. But yeah, I think that will be a really interesting proof point of saying, can you take an existing network of convenience stores or, you know, any other distribution partner, can that be a mechanism to onboard these people into the digital economy? And you hit them with a stablecoin. Once you have them with stablecoin, it's— you're off to the races, right? And a lot of crypto projects, to your point, you make it a sustainable business, right? Because you, as you've built with Jumbo, you have a whole suite of projects in crypto that are going to want to offer incentives to acquire that customer, right? You don't have to pay for that. You become a very— you just become a conduit for them and in a more equitable manner, right? You're not charging 30, 40% like the App Store. Like, I think that's what the thesis that Solana had with the Saga and still has, right? Which is someone's going to disrupt this monopoly. And I think it is a stablecoin. Like, it's just that's the wedge that you truly break this because everyone in the world wants to have that. And so, yeah, it's really exciting to see what you guys are doing. Like, I think, I mean, what is stopping you from becoming not only do phones, like, you know, there's storage here, there's, you know, you can do a lot of things that, you know, crypto, like even, you know, inference and like what ExaLabs is doing, right? You run like an AI, you know, you know, inference on your phone kind of thing, right? So this access to like the, the, you know, additional income opportunities for so many people at a world scale, you know, becomes so important. But like, what is stopping Jambo from being a massive fintech, the same way that Nubank did it in Brazil. Like nothing structurally, right?

You're exactly right.

You can capture the remittance flow, you can capture swap flow, you can capture— you can offer insurance, you can offer credit. By the way, you can offer credit. By the way, civil resistance, huge problem in crypto. Oh, by the way, you have KYC on every fucking customer.

Exactly. Civil resistance, something underrated as well, not talked about. But I will say this though, like Wazar, probably only Brandon can do this because of his connections and how well he understands that geography and the payment structure that work there. Yeah. Yeah.

You would partner with someone like ZAR and tap into their network in Pakistan.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm not even embarrassed to say this, like we're not really in India or Pakistan right now. It's such a tough market. I don't have that distributor connection and I don't have that ability to find that right now. Like I'm not scared to like, I might, after this pod, ask you for an intro to Brandon.

Yeah, absolutely. Brandon, are you listening? Yeah, I'll hit you up.

Yeah. I think what I'm trying to say is it's so tough. Like, where are you right now? What country are we in, right? You're in Monaco, you know, like Hong Kong, etc. But wherever you are, trust me, not everyone has that knowledge of how those payment systems locally work. And that is why there's all this arbitrage. Why it needs to be fixed.

Yeah, you're just providing a better connectivity layer, like a conduit. Um, but yeah, look, I mean, obviously I'm, I'm very focused on doing it in Latin America. I want to become the largest telecom business in Latin America, and there's a way to do that. And once I do that, once I do that, then, you know, hey, what's up? You know, I need a phone, right? So I'll use a Jumbo Phone. Once I have a Jumbo Phone, like, you've already built a whole suite of products and services to make it super easy for my users to, you know, interact in this world in a safe manner too, right? Because you can, you know, control, like, there's not like, you're going to like whitelist apps, you're going to like provide only safe apps. Uh, you're going to provide all of that experience and walk that consumer through their Web3 journey without calling it Web3. This is just a digital economy. It works. Uh, don't call it crypto. Just drop all of that nonsense. Digital economy. Um, yeah, digital economy, real products and services and make it fun, right? Gaming. And the lines are really blowing. I think Tencent did it in a way 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And it really just, you would, you could have looked at that and said, this is where finance and just digital services are going.

By the way, not to cut you off, but you said Tencent twice already in the last 10 minutes. Would you mind explaining for the users? And I can add in as well too. Oh yeah, why not? What Tencent is. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's— it started as social, right? Um, a social app. Um, and then it just grew into the everything app. Um, you know, it offers in the whole— like, you don't leave Tencent for anything else, right? You can order food, you can stream—

in China, everyone, by the way, no one leaves Tencent. Tencent is the only app you use in China, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a great book, by the way, um, I forget which one. Tencent, uh, that people should read. There's a few, but I think it's Influence Empire, or there's a couple, but I'll link it in the show notes anyways. But you're right, like, it started as social. Why, why did you start in social? Because everyone wants to communicate, and social is just that thing. And once you have that attention, why not monetize in hundreds of different ways, right? And, and I think, I mean, feel free to layer on here, like your, your insight being in China and having, you know, relatives there, but I mean, it's a dominant app. Uh, it's hugely profitable. Um, and they offer a whole suite of just products. I mean, their, their whole MO, I think, is we have all this attention. We never want our user to leave. What else can we continue to add so that that never happens and we continue to monetize and have a higher wallet share for that user? And I mean that you've executed on that.

No better way to put it. Yeah. You're at home in Shanghai, you need to pay your electricity, goes out, WeChat. Yeah. You need to text your friends, WeChat. You need to buy your airplane ticket to see your girlfriend in Beijing, WeChat. Pay phone bills, top-up credits, WeChat. I think this is what it evolves to in a real super app in Web3. Sorry, not to say Web3, in the digital economy. Because honestly, when people hear Web3, they're like, oh, this is a whole other sector. I don't know. Not. It's the digital economy. It's what you're tapped into already, just trying to enable you to do it better and more efficiently through new rails. Um, exactly. I really enjoy this.

So like, yeah, like I think that's, that's the, that's the comp, that's a playbook that you want to run. And, and the conduit here is just stablecoins. They're just a killer, killer product. And, and you have that mobile and stablecoins. I won't like— I'll just keep hammering home that. So anyways, what I'm doing is, is just that, right? Latin America, again, prime, prime. Everyone wants to hold dollars. The remittance corridor in Mexico is the largest in the world.

The remittance corridor in Mexico, Mexico-US.

Mexican— a lot of Mexicans have relatives that emigrate and go to the US. They're earning dollars, they want to send it back to their families in Mexico. That flow, remittance flow from the US to Mexico, is the largest in the world. Those people get charged 6 to 8% by the Western Unions of the world to move that money.

Plus 5 days. Insane. Why?

I mean, it's not because Western Union is like evil. You could argue maybe this is about too value extractive. They just need to run it through a traditional financial rails, and that's expensive, right? Verification, the T+, uh, all of that. The— and so it's not easy to do, you know. You really appreciate what crypto is built in, decentralized finance and stablecoins. When you travel, when you want to send a wire internationally, it takes days. It's cumbersome, it's difficult. Crypto collapses that. And I've always felt that that's like the killer use case of crypto in many ways. Um, like, just if even if you just stopped there innovating and you didn't do anything else, we can grow much, much larger than where we are today. Uh, but someone needs to do it, right? Someone like you guys When I first met you, you were like, we need boots on the ground, we need local evangelizers, local people to run to these villages, towns, convince people, show them how to do it. And, and a lot of times in crypto you see this very idealistic founders that don't have that appreciation, they don't want to get their hands dirty. It's like, you got to go in there, you got— you have to just— either it's you or working with a local partner that really gets it Well, I don't know if you know how Tron did it, but I mean, they have boots on the ground, right? They're just pushing adoption. They likely always have the strongest presence in crypto conference, but I'll give them credit. I mean, they've just run that playbook better than anyone, and they're doing it in a local manner. This whole idea of like doing things that don't scale, you know, everyone in crypto and tech is always like, oh, you know, that's not scalable. It's like, no, man, but like you have to do things that don't scale, quote unquote, to really get to scale. And I would do them in a cost-effective way, right? And so I think there's just a lot of opportunity. I'm very excited what's going on. So what's next for you guys? Like, what does success look like for you in the next, you know, 5, 10 years? Where do you want to get? Where do you see the biggest opportunities? Like, what's your focus? Because you can literally go anywhere. Like, there's just so much to cover. So how do you stay focused and what are your main priorities?

Honestly, Santi, we're just trying to be the on-chain Apple. That's it. I think that's the honestly best comparable to put us at. I'm not even going to say Tencent or WeChat because we don't deal in data in that way. But the Apple, it's very much from the market cap perspective to the tech, from hardware to software to how we're owning the stack. It's a big part of what we're trying to do. And I know that's a crazy statement, right? Hey, what are you trying to do in the next 5, 10 years? On-chain Apple. What? But hopefully we prove it to everyone one step of the way. Like literally when we started in end of '21, early '22, yeah, boots on the ground, right? Like Alibaba, we call it Tie Jing, iron warfare for Alibaba back in the day where you literally have thousands of people army on the ground going through every street, every city. Like the cities that the listeners might be listening to that knows Asia is Beijing, Shanghai, Shanghai, you know, maybe a few others, Hong Kong. You've never heard of the tier 2, tier 3, tier 4, tier 5 cities, right? In a country of 1.4 billion people, those are huge. That's where most of the population is. And what they did is you can literally go to each street in each of these cities, put your advertisements, sell those owners, and get those users onto yours. Now I think with the digital age, this is not as feasible today. So honestly, what we are trying to do is make sure we have a loyal user base, fan base that we reward, that we do a lot with, that every campaign that we do, we have them in mind for Jumbo. And that is like owning an iPhone 1, iPhone 2, iPhone 3. Like today we on iPhone, what, 16 Pro Max? If you go back and Apple says, hey, everyone that owns an Apple 1 to Apple 6, these 6 phones, our most loyal users, you get X amount of airdrop of Apple tokens. right? That would be pretty amazing, right? If you were a big supporter of Apple back in the day. Well, as of today, this is something that's actually feasible in the digital economy and what we're trying to do. So honestly, the next 5 to 10 years, if we can onboard millions of users and be that, then we'll be very proud.

I mean, just drop the on-chain Apple, just become Apple.

Yes, sir. But if you become Apple, you're going to have your own app store. You're going to have a lot of different middleman-gated things. And that's obviously—

no, no, no, no, no. But the next Apple doesn't look like Apple today. The next Apple looks like how you're building it, which is open, more equitable for partners. Like, someone's going to disrupt that monopoly. They stopped innovating. Like, you know, like, I don't know how best to describe it. Like, it's obviously the iPhone is just a killer product, but there are reasons. Like, is it, is it too far-fetched to actually believe that that monopoly is going to be disrupted in the next 20 years? I'll almost place that bet.

Forget what is going to be disrupted in the next 10 years. It's what isn't going to be disrupted. Not to be the cliché guy to quote Jeff Bezos, but I'll go gig along stablecoins.

I'll go gig along the blurred lines between these disjointed services, which is mobile essential services, mobile and finance. Then they get to the core of the two most fundamental things that a human wants after they, you know, feed themselves, which is connectivity and access to a digital economy that is becoming only more important. And for that, you need to have a mobile service, which, because it walks with you, and access to financial services. The combination— you're more and more will see MVNOs and fintech services that those lines are blurring, and that will be the bank of the future. That's the next— that's the next JP Morgan. Doesn't look like JP Morgan, it looks like an MVNO with, um, fintech services layered on top of them. One experience, one app. Don't ever give a reason to the customer to go to a local branch. Make it all natively digitally integrated. There's only one way to do that, and the answer is crypto. That's it. Like, you can't do that with the current financial system. Now, we've been trying to evangelize and push crypto in so many different vectors and ways. The way to do it, and the way you hack your, your way to do that in a, like, date, like today, is with a phone, right? Yes, sir. So like, you have, you have 700,000 phones, 5-point-something million wallets. Uh, why can't you be at 100 million phones, 100 million wallets, like, in the next 2 years?

Honestly, I don't even want to put those price targets and sales targets up there because I hate it when companies do that.

No, I But it's not crazy.

No, no, Santi, that's what I'm saying. Last year was 715,000 phones. This year, I can promise you there's minimum 7 figures plus of phones, minimum. The year after that, we'll probably do 8 figures plus. So it's not crazy at all.

There's 2.6 billion people don't have a phone. Damn. Today. Okay? You offer that phone, you could offer that phone for free. 'Cause you're gonna pay back— this is the challenge with hardware, is never where you make the most amount of money. Hardware has dogshit margins, but you need to get the hardware for distribution. You make real money in software. Like GoPro and Polaroid, companies just offered hardware, they go to zero eventually because you can only sell so many units. Replacement of those units is like every so many years, right? Not everyone buys an iPhone as soon as it comes out, then they, you know, but you can monetize on the App Store. That's where the money is. You have a lot of opportunity. Crypto is really good at incentives and sharing value back to the consumer. If you're a creator, if you're sharing your unused storage space, like that whole coordination layer just opens up a whole new way of earning in a sustainable manner. And it's not just airdrops and, you know, airdrop campaigns that aren't sustainable. There is a whole element of, can we become better as an industry to create incentive programs that are far more sustainable? Absolutely. We're kind of in the early days of design experimentation. A lot of it's just because we haven't really been able to play in that area because of regulatory constraints. Once that goes away, you can really start sharing fees back to the customer. The equitable distribution between creators and owners just becomes far better because you map that with a token and you can create this more equitable distribution, right? You know, if you're a YouTube creator influencer, you get hosed by YouTube. No, exactly. I mean, like Spotify, you get hosed unless you're Taylor Swift and call Spotify and say, hey guys, fuck you, I'm not gonna put my new album unless you share more, more of the percentage. If you're, uh, uh, less than Taylor Swift, you don't have any bargaining power. You don't have any ability to negotiate those fees. It's so lopsided to the owners. And a lot of the value in the internet has been concentrated in owners— Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. No, I don't have any problem with that. It's just there, there wasn't a way. It wasn't a way to like push back a bit and you can go along, like, you know, content creation has gone, has decentralized. It has gone from movie studios in LA to people that are on TikTok. Like the attention meta and game has gone to these platforms. People are watching less and less full on to our movies. They're watching TikTok every day. The amount of hours consumers spend on a daily basis is just on this fast format games, fast casual games, streams, user-generated content has blown up to become the largest media category in the world. But how is it that the percentage that we share to these creators hasn't moved? That will move. Crypto will move it because you allow for these new protocols that share value back to the contributor. And so when people ask, how is this sustainable? It is sustainable. You pay them with stablecoins, you lower the fees to— and your token allows you to map those contributions. You cut out the middleman. You cut out the middleman. You have a service that maps out contribution and ownership in a more equitable manner. The relationship between the service provider and the user is more fair. And, and I think I'll go along that any day of the week. I'll go along stablecoin adoption, I'll go along, uh, smartphone adoption and blurred lines between mobile carriers and stablecoins. Like that to me is going to be the biggest area of opportunity. I'm building one myself. Wait, in a region that I understand. Yeah, I'm doing it myself with Inversion. This is like after 4 years I left ParaFi, I'm like, okay, where can I really— I want to build something. I want to really take— and it's just been frustrating because I've invested in like 130+ companies officially. More than that. And every problem, every company that has folded in my portfolio, it's go-to-market. You look at other protocols, the biggest criticism crypto has is we haven't gone mainstream. You know, all this is speculation. I'm like, you can't really argue against that. We do have a go-to-market problem as an industry. I want to get to— we have 20 to, per A16Z, 30 to 60 million active monthly wallets, users, real in crypto. A lot of that, most of that's just speculation. I don't have a problem with speculation. Speculation fuels adoption. It was true for the internet. It was true for every major railroads, right? People want the same for the Gold Rush. At some point, you have to layer that with real services. And the frustrating part of that is they are, they exist. It's just you need to like open the floodgates for people. And in that evolution of my thinking was, oh, maybe I want to acquire a bank. Well, too difficult. I'm never going to compete, and you're never going to outperform Robinhood. Like, my insight was distribution is essential. I never want to build it. You never want to build distribution. You just said it. You want to partner with people that have distribution and share that value. And so in that evolution of thinking, I was like, well, what business would I own? What's the best platform distribution business that I can buy for an attractive price and then transform that? And I came to the realization that was a mobile carrier that doesn't own infrastructure. And so I'm very focused on Latin America. It's a market that I understand, that I grew up in, and has a lot of connectivity. It's a user base that has a low ARPU. It's just, like, just ready to be activated.

All right, after this podcast, uh, let me ping you on, uh, that real quick because that's amazing. And honestly, with your background like that. That might be one of the most exciting ideas I've heard. I, I think most of the, the listeners need to just realize this: everyone, every product, every company needs a Red Lobster unlimited shrimps on a Tuesday. Absolutely. You hear about Red Lobster because you hear about the unlimited shrimp option. I heard about that, I was like, damn, you know, it's not like I'm short on money, but I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go there and eat as much shrimp as I can. That's luxurious. But at the end of the day, what they really make money on is the beer or the wine or the alcohol that you're going to order when you're sitting there. I think that has so many analogies to what's going on in crypto and going on in the world today that we need that Red Lobster unlimited shrimp option to get users in. And then we offer them all of the other alcohol and availabilities there are to bring them really into the ecosystem. But you need them to have that distribution, to have a step into the door first.

Absolutely. I don't know. No, I love that. I mean, goddamn, I'm Red Lobster telco. That's absolutely right. Uh, you could give them a phone for a subsidy. You, you might not— you're definitely not looking to make a ton of profits on, on the hardware, but I, I do— the money really comes from tapping into an essential service where you live with the customer 24/7. Then you— then, then that customer, you know, is going to love stablecoins and it's going to love earning, um, yield on their, on their deposits. A lot of them don't even have financial services. Even in the US, most customers, you know, have most of their money in checking accounts earning zero when they can move it one click to a money market account. They're in— fine, they don't finance. People don't like to think about money. They're not educated. Enough. Like, unfortunately, the educational system doesn't focus on that. They'll teach you Shakespeare, but fucking, they won't teach you how to, like, you know, the difference between a checking money market account.

And that is the US, where you have at least the option for a money market account between checking.

Imagine you in— exactly, I'm a— you can collapse that. The distinction and the fragmentation in finance, it's not a, it's not a bug, it's a feature, because that's where banks make money on the float, right? You collapse that You— the distinction between a checking account and a, um, a money market account that allows you to earn 5% or 4% on your money collapses with crypto. By the way, introduce an AI agent that is constantly there to optimize your money where it earns it and protects your deposit without you ever thinking about that. You want to watch a movie, you want to order food, you want to talk to your friends, you don't want to think about what your money's doing. And people don't check their bank account 24/7. We shouldn't expect that. We should just automate that. And the intersection of AI and crypto, AI agents, all of that, you keep coming back to— it starts with the phone and it then activates with the stablecoin. My suspicion or my thesis is that AI agents will really facilitate and abstract away the complexity of how to optimize your money, how to manage it in the best way possible. And how to earn the most amount in a safe manner, right? Without taking crazy risks like Terra, right? Unsuspecting people, you know, the agent would say, hey, wait a minute, like something's wrong. And then just immediately respond to that, react to that in real time. And I think that that's the upshot here, which is AI agents will just protect your money, but also optimize it in the— and optimize for like in a risk-adjusted basis. And I think that's really exciting.

By the way, I know I'm not the host here, but there's one question I'm actually really curious. I wanted to ask. And this is the perfect segment with your thoughts is, do you think the top KOLs in like not even 5 years, 2 years, like Ansem, etc., will be replaced by the AI expertise? Oh, that's a great question. That respond 24/7, they don't need to sleep and they are objective. Probably. Probably.

I think that humans will always I guess, um, the analogy that I'll draw is like, um, luxury watches. You know, when the Apple Watch came out, everyone's like, oh, it's a death of Switzerland. Luxury watches are going to go to die because I actually don't know. I, I don't really— yeah, when the Apple Watch launched, it was like, oh, this is gonna like bury to the ground all the luxury watchmakers, like analog, not digital. Why? Because digital, like your smartphone, your smartwatch provides time. Like, you don't buy a luxury watch to tell time, you know what I mean?

No, probably not.

No one ever buys a Patek because it tells time. You use your phone to tell time. The lunar calendar? Yeah, you don't buy a perpetual calendar because you want to understand the moon phase, the moon lunar phase, or leap year indication, or all this stuff. Definitely not. I mean, you buy it for other reasons. And, and the point I'm trying to make here is the watch industry has actually grown more as a result of the rise of smartwatches and digital because it creates this nostalgia effect for— and I think AI will allow us to really offload a lot of, call it distractions, right, friction points in our life, and allow us to covet and really focus on the things that give us meaning and value and sense of fulfillment. That will always be a human interaction. I don't think AIs will— AI companions are, I think, a very important service that will allow people that struggle with anxiety, that struggle with, of course, integrating into society. But the human touch, I think, is going to be very real. Now, you could argue the counter to that is the human brain doesn't really know the distinction between an AI agent and a human. If the AI creates art that you love, doesn't matter. Music that you love, doesn't matter. Interacts and chats with you, it doesn't matter. A lot of our interactions right now, you don't really know if it's human or bot. Like, Turing completeness is a thing. But I do think that, um, real world— I'll go real, like, real world events. I'll go along, you know, that those type of interactions. Um, but I do think that, like, unfortunately, the life of the influencer is short-lived. It's just, you know, but, uh, yeah, I mean, the AI agent's constantly like, you're not gonna beat the productivity of an AI agent, so to speak. But I don't think it totally replaces influencers, like, as we see them, or just KOLs, call them that. Um, you know, there's some value into going to a real event to go watch Taylor Swift in concert, for sure. You know, I don't think that ever goes away because at the end of the day, we are humans. I don't know, do you?

Productivity, you can't argue it. If you believe that AI agents are more productive and if you believe that they can learn more constantly, then yeah, maybe. But at the end of the day, I think what makes like a true, like for example, the influencers that I look at, okay, don't take this the wrong way, but not that you're replaceable, but like you are one of the guys that I actually look at a lot. Oh, sorry, the video's off. Yeah, you're actually one of the influencers that I look at a lot on Twitter along with Ansem and maybe a few others. So yeah, I hope it doesn't get replaced because I don't think if the AI agent works harder than you, like Santi AI agent, I'll listen to him more than you. But you know.

Yeah, well, how do you know that this is not in? That's what I'm getting to.

Like, imagine if we get to that age. Yeah, yeah. This handsome guy out here.

Yeah, well, you could always— well, you could always come visit me where I live, and you will— you know, that, that I don't think goes away. But I think we'll enhance our productivity. Well, I hope that one day we— that the, the most optimistic case about AI is that we can go back to like Athenian times where like people get paid to think, not to do work, and it frees us. AI robots really free up, create a lot of abundance, solve a lot of issues like food productivity. You know, this idea of like owning your time, you said time's the most valuable construct. I definitely agree with that. But you know, where these AI robots, agents can really just work for us, empower and just free up ourselves from, you know, the sort of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, right? Once you transcend the first two, you know, life becomes, you know, amazing. And so I think if we can get to a place where everyone does that, I think that's great. But I think anyways, just tying it all together, I'm very excited. I mean, I think you guys are doing a very differentiated, unique approach. I think there's only very few people in crypto that really appreciate how to win and have a very strong appreciation for the day-to-day, the focus, and, and, and the go-to-market strategy and the way that you guys have done it. It took me decade-plus to come to the conclusion that mobile was the premier platform to do this. And, you know, you guys came to that earlier. I benefited because I invested in you guys early on, but you, you always had the phone in mind. You always said, hey, listen, this is going to be a key gateway for people in crypto. And it's really impressive what you guys have done. I'm very excited to see where you take this. Um, you know, 700,000 phones is not nothing. 5 million wallets is not nothing. But yeah, this whole satellite thing is exciting. Anything else that you want to leave us with for our listeners? Anything that we haven't covered that you think is relevant?

For sure. First of all, I appreciate the kind words, Santi. I've known you since I began this journey and you've always been supportive, no matter how much I see that you're busy and everywhere. I'll just leave this to the users. Like, look, we're not reinventing the wheel here. You know, I'm not some sort of a genius that is, you know, have come up with a revolutionary idea that we're doing. End of the day, every day when you wake up, when you go to sleep, it's just about execution. And we've been doing this for 3 to 4 years and we're gonna keep doing it for the next 5 to 10 years, you know. And if you wanna— you're like, oh, James is bullshitting. Sorry, I don't know if I can swear. On this podcast. Of course, you love Trang. Oh, for real? Okay. So Jason's BSing. And look at our vesting contracts and everything. No one touches any tokens or anything until years down the line. Like, it's just so evident for us that mobile is the future, internet connectivity in these emerging markets. And third, this is probably the most important thing, is that who has connections— when I say connections, I mean who has visibility into the region and also is able to make an impact. Will change the dynamic so much. One company will literally own all of the value because right now it's so fragmented and we just haven't caught up to it yet. And that is what Jambo is trying to do. So we're not really trying to, you know, beat Apple. We're not really trying to beat Tron and stablecoins, but we are trying to use both of their most successful playbooks to do one thing: onboard more and more and more and more users and people in this world to crypto into our software and platform. Absolutely.

I love that. You know, I'm very much focused like that. Like, we need to get to 100, 200, 300, 500 million users. The tech is ready. I believe it. There's enough proof points. Uh, the regulatory landscape is clearing up. Nothing holds us back now. But we have— we don't have 12 years to prove this shit. We have 4 years to get our shit together. We definitely don't. There is a sense of urgency and And I just want to get to a state of the world where you show it to the world and said, I became the largest mobile carrier in Africa and the largest fintech maybe in the world. And people are going to be like, oh wait, what'd you do? Did you create this crazy phone? Did you— I said, to your point, it's not rocket science, but I just leveraged an entire infrastructure that runs faster, better, cheaper. But you didn't believe me because I was sitting on this chair for 12 years. I just had to fucking go do it. And then I created the best-in-class products and services for so many people that have been overlooked. Not just people that are unbanked, just normal people. You run that playbook and you become the largest telecom, you become the largest bank in the world. You can't. No more. Like, I'm convinced of that. I want to run that playbook. You're running that playbook. We should chat after this pod. But, uh, this is great, man. Thanks for coming on. Congrats on all the, all the progress. It's just getting started. Truly, I mean, you're just scratching the surface. It's so exciting to see you guys. And honestly, I mean, it hasn't been easy the last couple years, um, as an industry, but it's so rewarding to see folks that just have never changed their tune and have just doubled down and just continue to execute day by day. And, and, and, you know, I can imagine, you know, maybe another— for another podcast, but like, the day-to-day is not easy, right? Like, I heard it yesterday, it was so— even Olympic athletes wake up at 6 AM and they grunt and they struggle and they don't want to get out of bed, but they just do. And they do that more than others. And that's the difference between a gold medalist and a no medalist. So anyways, man, you know, really exciting. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story. Uh, really excited to see this, uh, satellite announcement. And, uh, yeah, are you sending like a— maybe as a— are you sending it like, like a capsule if aliens like see it? Are you sending something else in the satellite or is it just like—

yeah, you know, we, we just, uh, tapping into Elon Musk. You know, he's an alien. Itself. Trust me, the announcements are coming sooner than you think and, uh, definitely more than you would even want. So we're very excited to share with you the satellite part. But, uh, honestly, guys, yeah, Lockwood Empire, pause. Santi, Jason Yanowitz, thank you guys for having us on and giving us a platform to share because, uh, I know it's not every day that you can share with so many viewers together. No, amazing.

No, really, uh, treat having you on it. People should go follow you, uh, um, we'll link it in the show notes as well as, uh, the best way to learn is the Jombo Twitter. Yes, @JamboTechnology on Twitter, please. Okay. And for listeners that don't know, Jambo is what? In which language?

Remind me. Jambo. So in Swahili, it's like, like imagine you in the States going to school. Like, yo, what's up? You good? Yeah, what's up? In Africa, in Swahili, you say Jambo. Jambo sana. It's like Hakuna Matata, where as long as we are alive, everything will be okay. So it's like a formal greeting. Yes, sir. All right.

Well, jambo. Jambo, James.

Jambo sana. Awesome. Cheers.