Zora & The Future Of Crypto Media | Weekly Roundup

the reason why you're able to attract all that flow is because you fundamentally change the economic nature of the relationship with the content creator. And so is there going to be a $100 billion YouTube editor on-chain? Maybe not, probably not, because it's just not going to generate as much fees. Because in the classical sense of Bezos, your margin is my opportunity— that margin evaporates to the plot, doesn't exist, it just gets distributed to the cons— to the creator.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. Thanks to SKALE for making today's episode possible.

Quick shout out to Permissionless 4 coming this summer to New York, June 24th through June 26th. We'll have speakers from all across the industry including Hayden Adams, Kyle Samani, Guy Young, and more. Get your tickets today by following the link in today's show notes and make sure to use code BEL10 to save 10% on your purchase. See you there. All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Empire. You got me and Santi today mixing it up here. Santi, how you doing, man?

I'm doing great. How are you? Happy Friday. We're recording on Friday. This might go out tomorrow.

I think it'll go out later today, actually. So shout out, Mark, you're a real one. And yeah, we're down some men today. We're still down Iaino and Michael and Vance. We had to do some last-minute rescheduling, but it's good to see you, man.

How's the week been?

Very busy, very good. You know, what's not to like? The markets are, you know, the VIX is now down. You know, markets seem to have stabilized. So we are, you know, beef is back on the menu. Know, the extra guac on the Chipotle order. Who knows? I mean, for context, like, we recorded last weekend, you know, Vance did something that really stuck with me. He says, like, they're buying it, like, they're buying a lot of alts. I think he mentioned, like, it has been the, like, they haven't bought as much alts as they have had, like, historically, as last week, which I thought was interesting.

Yeah, I agree. Um, yeah, I'm surprised to hear that it's not in fact the end of the world and, uh, we might end up being okay here. And I do think that, you know, one of the things actually, you just start to see pattern matching stuff. And I actually remember, I'm blanking on his name actually, but he's the CEO of that logistics-based company. Uh, you know, he kind of did a thread around, and actually there's a guy on our board who is a media, huh?

Ron Peterson, Flexport guy.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Describing how Logistics have ground to a halt similar to COVID, and just got pattern matching here. And I think it's a good reminder that the market can look through not only the now but even the next couple quarters of data, even if it's particularly horrendous. If you start to see a sign of things turning around, and you've gotten basically every bullish headline that you could possibly get from Trump on everything from he's not going to fire Powell to signaling that he's open to trade talks with China. So yeah, it's been a pretty quick turnaround.

I mean, here's the thing, like, I recorded a podcast yesterday with, um, Jeff Dorman from Arca, who is— I would prizes, like a contrarian, like, uh, sober take and fundamental guy. We were talking about Coinbase and Robinhood, and just that was the kind of the exercise that we used to just think about what— how do you value these things? Like, what is fundamental analysis? What is, you know, fun— you know, fundamentals in crypto actually mean? Um, and I always remind myself, it's like, it's not so much what you know about a particular company, it's like, it's what is already priced in and thinking about what do you know incremental to that, you know. And it's, it's always that exercise which is like, you know, uh, buy what you like and understand. It's like, fine, like you can buy a great asset at a terrible price, or you can buy a terrible asset at a great price. And so it's almost— it is, it's a million-dollar question, honestly. That is where the skill actually entails, which is like understanding what's already priced in, into the market. And, you know, Uh, it's a very difficult thing to do because you could have sat there last week and said, oh my God, the world's coming to an end. Yeah, the picture is bleak. Yeah, tariffs. Yeah, inflation, all this other stuff. But it's like, yeah, but does the price already reflect all of that expectation and recalibration? And it's really hard exercise. It's not— there's not like one clear-cut thing to, to do to understand what has already been priced in.

Santi, can we talk a little bit about how you think about valuation of these assets and I'm not sure what you covered with Jeff, but I was looking at, and we were talking a little bit before we got on the show here, Vance was going back and forth with 0xngmi at DeFi Llama and they were poking at each other on the TL. I can get this exchange up, but basically—

huh? Let's get that exchange up because it was a reference to like that point too.

I know.

Okay.

So, well, the, here, let me, yeah.

Let me pull it up here.

But maybe to set the stage a little bit, obviously there's been a transparency problem around crypto for a long time and kind of a metrics, how do we value this? How do we value this problem in crypto for a long time? And part of this comes from the fact that obviously we grew up with Bitcoin and Ethereum, etc., first. And so those things don't neatly fit into the bucket of how do you value like an equity or a company or something like that, right?

Here, let me actually—

I can't find this. Okay. On that point, I would say it's an excellent point you make around Bitcoin because Bitcoin is vastly different than every other asset in the crypto space, by and large. Bitcoin is a commodity. How do you value a commodity, whether it be gold, aluminum, rare earth minerals, Bitcoin? It's supply and demand. It truly is just that. And no different than Bitcoin, uh, than gold, uh, which has been doing really well as of late. You, you say, okay, it's just a flows game. It's like, what's— what's global liquidity? What's— what are the drivers of demand? What are the drivers of supply? We know supply, we understand it very well for Bitcoin, different than other commodities where you're kind of gonna have a rough approximation of what this total supply of gold is, right? You have some sense that there's X units of gold in existence, so to speak, and geologists can confirm that. And what makes gold interesting is that 90-plus percent of all gold that we think exists in the, in the surface of the earth has been mined. Yeah. And so it's a hard asset in the classical Austrian economics. So there are scarce resources. And then you say, what are the drivers of demand for something like copper, aluminum? It's all tied to construction and infrastructure and A lot of it is tied to macro and economy and what China is doing. Are they building? Are they not? All this stuff. For gold, it's classically just do people believe that this thing has any store of value? And then think about is that demand going to continue to grow? But Bitcoin is very different than other crypto assets. Totally different. Something like— and then you could say, okay, base layers like Ethereum and Solana and L2s and other L1s. Well, how do you value that? We had a really good episode with Kyle from Multicoin to talk about, okay, how do you value an asset like Solana, which is similar to Ethereum. Ethereum now has some noise with the L1, L2 dynamics, but by and large, you just have to believe, okay, L1s produce fees that are tied to demand for block space. And then you think about, okay, well, what are the drivers of demand for block space? And then are they monetizing and pricing that block space?

Appropriately.

Yeah.

And Santi, actually, if I could, there is a really great episode, by the way, if people want to get a sense of kind of the zeitgeist of how your average person thinks about crypto, or even your average person who's a little bit more well-informed, probably than the average person on finance. I listened to Joe Weisenthal, who was just on the Chopping Block, and he was asking exactly what you're getting at there, which is actually the question they asked was, hey, I kind of believe in stablecoins. I'm surprised that Ethereum hasn't benefited from all of these stablecoins being issued on Ethereum. And there was kind of an interesting, you know, replay of the history and some of the more commercial decisions that Ethereum made, maybe relative to, you know, Polkadot and some of the other chains back there. But it is interesting to ask, right? Just because there's activity doesn't necessarily mean that translates into fees or something that investors would use to value the token.

Yeah. And that's really it, which is, are you pricing block space correctly? And I I've held this belief for a long time, which is I don't think a single blockchain has priced block space correctly. It's hard. Ethereum codified it, then it went to EIP-1559 and just thinking about different mechanisms to price block space correctly. And it's kind of a hard exercise to do. But it is something that I think should be constantly top of mind if you're a protocol developer within a protocol like Solana or Ethereum, you know, or an L2. But anyways, so what are the fees? The way you can think about simplistically something like Ethereum, it's like the internet superhighway. You have all these transactions and demand for block space that is, a lot of it is drive-by meme coin trading and swaps and stablecoin issuance and mints and NFT collections and all these different, basically you're filling up block space. And there's a lot of different, it might be very concentrated. Like Hyperliquid, it's just purely perp activity and, you know, that's fine, it's very robust. Or it could be a composition of many different things, you know, you could be a very generalized blockchain, which is like Ethereum that has, you know, gaming and Uniswap and all these different protocols that are on top of it. And so that gives you some real, you know, assessment, okay, okay, I believe that people think about, okay, where are the developers building? There are more apps in a chain, that there's more activity for those type of products, hopefully. And then there's two, just to get to the point, there are two main fee streams of blockchain like Ethereum or Solana that drives for the demand for SOL or ETH, the kind of the substrate of the chain. And that is like fee streams, which is the base fee, call it. And then there are like more people pay a premium to be included for block inclusion. And that might be tips to validators. That might be an incremental tip on EIP-1559. $1.59.

Um, is it like priority access to state?

Priority access to state is a great example of that. It's like, uh, you're paying for the super— for the fast lane in California or whatever, free EV, electric vehicles. Uh, but yeah, you know, and then, um, so there's— you got to believe there's like heterogeneous activity and that drives MEV, mineable extractable value. There are two kinds of MEV, one which is not sustainable and actually illegal, which is toxic MEV. Sandwich attacks and front running and all that stuff, which has been an issue for every chain. And then there's non-toxic MEV. And that is, again, I would characterize all the tips and all the premium that you're paying. That's like you paying a validator for block inclusion because you see a flash loan or whatever. That is that's fine. And then that drives most of the fees for the chains, right? I think you guys have a really good chart on Solana fees, for instance, or Ethereum fees. Yeah.

We, there's also, I mean, just backrunning is another really good example of non-toxic MEV. One thing it would actually be good, maybe we could at some point get someone from a more traditional market making shop on the show or like a CitSec or something like that, because You know, my understanding is that there's a very— these things are very complicated to measure, right? Like a lot of this stuff, even in crypto today, happens off-chain. Like SECSDEX arbitrage is a huge bucket of where MEV happens. It's very difficult to actually get granular information on that. And there are kind of these games that market makers will play, even in TradFi, that it's complicated how they're extracting value from the system. And obviously, there's— if you kind of think about where the regulators are and where the market makers are, The market makers are, you know, complicated or sophisticated players in the system that extract, provide liquidity and extract value. They're always kind of up here and then the market makers catch up and it's a constant game of whack-a-mole. But it's difficult to ever fully tamp that down. So I think that, you know, people love to say that MEV is going to trend to zero. And I just don't think that it possibly could. I don't know what evidence that you'd look at to suggest that.

No, it's some chains say we have MEV protection and whatnot. You have like you know, D-Flows of the world trying to— it's a common problem that I think people are trying to address. I think it's a toxic MEV that is like not— definitely should go away and trend to zero because it's, you know, A, illegal, and B, like, you know, should get solved. But there's multiple kinds of MEV. I don't want to make this an entire episode, but, you know, we can link resources. You know, there's general front-running, there's back-running, there's Sandwich attacks. You know, MEV is one of those terms that people hear and have a very visceral reaction to. There is like, I think of it as it can definitely degrade the user experience. Like if you, if you, if I basically the way it works is I, I learned because it's public, right? And you're proposing a transaction in the block, you say, oh, Mike, you want to buy 100 units of asset X or swap it. I might say, oh, wait a minute, I'm going to do that first. And I'm going to tip the validator to be included first. And then that drives the price. And then I can profit from that. And that, that, that are, you know, is, goes away in large part.

Yeah.

But anyways. Okay.

So Santi, this is a little bit of a follow-up point to what you were just describing. But one thing that people at Blockworks were talking about this week was here was a, this is a post from Storm. So this is one of the data guys at Paradigm. And I'm just going to read from this post here, which is epic actual data on how much the gas limit can be raised. I think this work was actually done by the folks on the Nethermind team. So I wanna give credit here to Kamil Chodula. Sorry, Kamil, if I totally butchered your name there. But basically the idea is that, you know, over the course of the last year or two, we've obviously had an enormous amount of debates about how much can we actually scale the L1. And initial results from this data that got collected here is that actually all 5 node clients can support a substantially higher gas limit that already exists. from 80x to 280x times, uh, sort of the current status quo. Um, and so now that I'm reading here from Storm's post, now that we have actual data instead of flying blind and performing vibes-based optimization, the client teams can precisely identify bottlenecks and raise their performance even higher. So I know this is something that Georgios as well has been, uh, talking about for quite a while. Um, actually putting some data, uh, around the, the decisions that are being made here from the Ethereum Foundation and the various client teams. But fascinating, uh, when you collect on-chain data and use that to actually inform your product roadmap and decisions. And I find it super exciting. So not sure if you have any thoughts on that.

No, nothing really other than what you said. I think we should go back to the Vans thing.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at Skale Network. That's Skale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market, with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions for both DeFi and traditional finance, use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimized delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes.

Okay, so, um, this was, uh, okay, so I'm gonna— let me pull up on my screen here this exchange between Vance and 0xNGMI. And this is, um, if I just set the stage here for what we're looking at, uh, one, this was, uh, I think Vance was originally complaining that, hey, there's still a hole in terms of, um, analytics, uh, providers here, um, and the The core pain point seems to be, you know, we kind of have our own ways of describing fees and revenue in crypto, which doesn't necessarily translate one-to-one in terms of how TradFi wants to think about this. Right. So the urge being, yeah, TradFi puts things in revenue and earnings and price-to-earnings ratios and things like that. And there's a little bit of a critique here of some of the DeFi llama imagery. Which is so expenses, maybe not 100%. And I'm going to defend 0xNGMI here as well, a little bit like they're a really crack team and they do great work. But there is, I think, a meaningful discussion on revenue and how do you actually calculate revenue versus fees. But then there's also terminology as well. So like using terminology like REV versus just, hey, this is just revenue and fees, right? So I'm curious what you think about this, Santi. And I, I think one thing that has messed a lot of people's, uh, frameworks up, including mine, is when you have— when you look at traditional markets, you have private startups and then you have public companies. And, you know, depending on where you are in your stage, there are certain metrics that people like to use, right? So if you're a public company, people like to look at things like price-to-earnings ratio, price-to-sales, book value, more traditional sort of metrics.

And everyone has their way that they like to slice and dice the data, right?

And then in private companies, you also have your metrics that you like to look at. So VCs will run, look at unit economics, they'll look at things like ARR, they'll look at things like growth rate, all of that type of stuff. And so, you know, now we have this weird, we're kind of blending these two worlds because tokens go public much, essentially start trading in a liquid way much, much earlier in a company's lifecycle. And so the question is, well, is the metrics that we use when we were assessing private companies originally still the right metrics to use? Should we use different ones because they're trading in a public way now? You know, how do you think about the valuation methodologies now that we're kind of blurring these two worlds of public and private and companies are essentially going public sooner?

Or, or yeah, exactly. And there are protocols that might not necessarily have a token, but you're seeing the amount of activity. I look, I mean, it's not a perfect science. There's a lot of discussion here between, you know, clearly like your research team, then DeFi Llama and then Vance and I'll just categorically say you still have this type of debate among public, like in the public markets, right? Yeah, people have discussions around how to classify revenue, uh, how to think about like capitalize R&D, uh, you know, lease adjustments, um, adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA. And there's like all these different valuation methodologies and like every company For instance, if you're looking at a software company and all you want to focus on is churn, well, companies— not all— their version of churn is different. And so, and so a lot of what you do as an analyst, or like, uh, you know, uh, when I'm back with the JPMorgan or in, in, uh, a growth equity shop trying to understand things, is you, you basically, um, assume and agree that you just are going to run the same data and calculate churn in, in your way. Um, that might not be how the rest of the market looks at it, but you might say, okay, I'm going to take as much data and then restructure it so that my, my definition of churn is the same for every company that I'm looking at, my concept, and therefore I can compare a company apples to apples, you know. But that's not the to say that my calculation— I mean, I can't tell how many times I've been in calls with management teams. I'm like, guys, your churn I think is much higher than what you report because of X and Y and Z. They're like, yes, but we actually don't treat churn from involuntary, which, yeah, these are customers that went out of business. I'm like, I don't care, man. Like, this is churn. Like, you are operating and you're serving software to restaurants. All right, well, restaurants have a high failure rate. That's just, that needs to be calculated in churn. Yes, it's involuntary. Okay, fine, I hear your point. But they're out there reporting the public markets that, you know, churn is like much lower than what it is because they do these adjustments. So crypto, I think the, if I were to just think about a protocol like Aave, where I think people get very confused is, and I'm making a general statement is, what is, okay, you have TVL and then a protocol like Aave has a lot of deposits and then there's interest that is being paid for those deposits, right? The protocol, so what you look at, okay, you have the depositor base is say 1,000. All right, that's TVL. It's all the deposits. That's a, there's not a lot of noise in that metric, right? People can just categorically say, okay, well, that's depositor deposits. TVL is TVL. And then you say, all right, well, then there's that, that would be like GMV, gross merchandise value. That would be like Amazon has a huge GMV, which is all the volume that gets paid at Amazon. That's not Amazon's revenue, that's gross merchandise value. So that's GMV. And then revenue is the fee that Amazon charges, right? Because if you're selling, if you're buying a, widget on Amazon that's $1,000, that's not Amazon's revenue. They charge a fee to the whoever's selling that in their marketplace. Or, you know, we— and that's where I think you guys are normalizing this, which is a lot of people make that confusion, which is revenue is not GMV, right? You've got— it's like gross revenue, net revenue. Marketing companies have this thing, marketplaces have this thing, protocols have this issue.

Airbnb has this, has this thing too, right? This is just, uh, there—

and there is There are some ins—

yeah, yeah. Bookings are grow— are the equivalent of GMB, which is— that's not Airbnb's revenue, ladies and gentlemen. It is the total transactions that get passed through in Bookings at Airbnb, and then Airbnb clips a fee on that, and that's their revenue, right?

And also, it's like, at the end of the day, right, it all comes out in the wash in earnings.

Because no matter— do you want a really high revenue and a very low profit margin, or do you just want like a lower— and by the way, just for people following along, that would be what we're talking about here, just to put it in plain English, is imagine you book an Airbnb for $1,000 and you have to pay Airbnb $150. Is the revenue for Airbnb $1,000 or $150?

So what I would look at, and I did this math a ton because I looked at Uber's private round and Airbnb in the public market, so what do you do? What you want to understand is what is the relationship between GMV and revenue. Because that tells you how sustainable is that fee that Airbnb is charging, uh, what's the take rate, the commission rate. And if it's a really valuable service, that percentage— say they charge 10% for every transaction that happens in their fee— that's their take rate, that's their commission, however you want to charge it. The value is really service. You look at it over time. And I say over time because this, this is something that is really useful, uh, for any investor, which is you can't look at it of point in time. Certainly if you're looking at point in time of the comp group, you're like, if I want to compare AAVE with Compound with all these different like lending markets and I would compare Uniswap with all the AMMs or DEXs, then you're looking at maybe a point in time, which is okay, what's the revenue, what's the fees or whatever, or let's see, you know, are they distributing that to token holders and whatnot, right? You can compare them point in time, but more importantly, you look at a specific company, you look at the evolution of these things because You know, I think, say for instance, if DeFi Llama is wrong, the way they classify revenue is different than the way you guys classify revenue. That's fine. Okay. But look at the historical trend line for DeFi Llama and how that's been trending for a particular protocol, or look at your dashboard. And as long as the methodology hasn't changed, that still is useful because you might not agree in certain adjustments or how it's classified, but you always want to look at any abnormalities in the data. Just like, wait a minute, why did it go from 5 to 20 or 5 to 10? Clearly something just like—

something happened.

Something happened, or there was a misclassification. There was a maybe a protocol upgrade. The fees got, you know, token holders, there's fee switch or whatever, you know what I mean? So it's good to like just take a long term, like look at it longitudinally and say, okay, what are the changes? Have there been real modifications. And then, and then that's where you start probing, which is like, all right, what happened here?

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. That's Skale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards, and optimize delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes.

Well, the other thing too, Sandhya, I'm curious to get your perspective is like I roughly think that, you know, the whole point of a company, right, is to generate profits and then return that to investors over the lifecycle of the company. And so the way that most of the metrics, from my understanding, right, of like early stage companies is how fast are you growing?

right?

Like, it makes sense to be more forward-looking, right? So generally, and this is, this is historically lined up to when companies are still private, they're not public yet. So that's why a lot of the metrics tend to be around how quickly are you growing, right? Like, ARR is kind of this metric that people want to look at in terms of how sticky is this revenue going to be that eventually you can return to me. And then the unit economics analysis is, okay, you're growing, but is there a line of sight into profitable growth, right? Or are you just spending more Are you putting $2 in to get $1 out and you're never going to be able to change that? So that's like what all of those metrics are kind of trying to measure and tell you. And then as the companies get older and more mature, it's like, okay, you're probably not going to be growing as much as you are not going to be growing as much as you were when you were a young company.

So how do I know that you can return this value to me? And so that's, I think that if you look at, you know, a lot of, I think people tend to get overexcited when like, oh my gosh, these companies are public and I can look at price to earnings ratios, et cetera.

But I mean, you've invested in tons of early-stage companies. Like, how often do you look at price-to-earnings of a 2-year-old company, right? It's completely irrelevant. Just because you can look at it doesn't mean that's relevant to the, the stage of growth that a company is at. And I think that's still messing a lot of people up because even the oldest, quote unquote, of these companies are like 4, 4 or 5 years old, right?

I mean, look, I mean, there's a lot of— there's a very One, I have a couple of views here. One, the market doesn't think about it in fundamentals because categorical— like, this entire asset class is a pure option value on some crazy assumption that we transform so many different industries, right? There are pockets within the crypto universe of crypto assets that have very interesting cash flow dynamics and buy and burn dynamics of distribution to token holders. That are trading at quite reasonable valuations. Maker, Hyperliquid. There are a number of protocols that looked at on a what is the total, you know, transaction volume revenue, and then what is made distributed to token holders via buy and burn, or just mostly buy and burn. Then that that's interesting. But there are a few, few companies like that, particularly mostly in DeFi, that have really interesting, um, valuation. Like, if you look at it from a, like, a cash flow perspective, they're, they're cranking out cash and then they're buying and burning— they're buying, burning the token, like Maker and Hyperliquid. And so that's quite interesting. I think the market generally understands, like, Hyperliquid— I mean, I haven't looked at most recently, but just rough, rough math, how much are they burning, um, this quarter, for instance. Yeah, I think I've seen some assumptions there, but it's, it's, it's fairly priced, so to speak. It's not like 100x, you know, it's like in the 20s or 30, maybe even 10 to 20 range, which again, if you look at, okay, what's Coinbase trading at, give you some perspective. The way I think about Coinbase, right, Coinbase is a $50 billion business, enterprise value business. $1.5 trillion. That's equity value plus debt. They're trading at enterprise value to EBITDA. EBITDA is kind of like a clean measure of like profitability, sort of operating profitability. 15 times. 15 times. You might argue, is that reasonable or not? Well, you look at Robinhood. Robinhood has a 35 times enterprise value to EBITDA. And so the question is, that's like, what EBITDA is that? That's trailing 12 months EBITDA.

Okay.

What's going to happen in the next 12 months, in the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years? Because your point around growth is a really good one, which is someone might say— a Warren Buffett of the world's fundamental analysis might say, wait a minute, 35 times and 15 times, it's really expensive.

P—

like, the P of Coinbase is 20 times, Robinhood is 27 times. But then you say, okay, you might have discussions if it's fairly priced or not. And they say, okay, what if I told you that Coinbase was not going to grow next year but Robinhood is going to double growth on a forward-looking basis. That EV-to-EBITDA for, for Hood is, you know, 18 times, 17.5 times, and then their PE goes to 13 times, which is near distress. And if Coinbase stays the same, then, then so sort of like you have to bake in what is the future expectation. And by the way, Coinbase is generating $7 billion of revenue, $3 billion of EBITDA. Robinhood is generating roughly half of that. So, so you're saying, okay, well, Coinbase, maybe Coinbase has saturated its market. And you do it, then you would do market analysis. Okay, what is the addressable market for something like Coinbase? How does that impact their profitability when you have more stablecoin issues, when you have State Streets and BlackRocks and prime brokers of the world entering the market in crypto? Well, are they going to be able to defend their position? What's their take rate? On commissions. Retail is really high. Is that going to sustain itself? Are they going to be able to offer institutions? Are they— if the next 1,000 institutions that come on to crypto, are they all going to use Coinbase or are they going to use their custodian that they use for the brokerage account? If you tokenize stocks, who's going to have better edge there, Hood or Coinbase? You could argue Robinhood because people are already buying equities from Robinhood. Yeah, you know what you're reminding me of too is, you know, it's again, there's not one simple measure. I do agree with your fundamental point, which is cash flow is king. If a company— the company could do all these adjustments and financial wizardry in a particular point in time and have their accountant sign off on the garbage. But if after 1 or 2 or 3 years they're not producing cash flow, then you can't lie. Go look at the cash flow, how much hard cash is being produced. And, and that's just, um, very simple to understand. Yeah.

You know what you're reminding me of as well? Even with something like, uh, PE, there's CAPE, right? Cyclically adjusted price to earnings. There's PEG, price to earnings to growth. The investors love to slice this in a million different ways, right?

Yeah. Uh, I will say one thing, which is I think for most of the industry, including protocols, especially base layer protocols, you can justify their current valuations. If you run any 10-year discounted cash flow you can't get to any reason, not even 10% of their valuation. Okay, what's the terminal growth after 10 years? And most of the value of a company, like in a classical, like, valuation framework, you would say what percentage of the company, of the valuation, enterprise value company, is in the first couple years if you do a discounted cash flow? And most of the time you want to see 50, 60, 70%. Good, decent, right? There's a lot of noise in what could happen as you, as you forecast your forecast a year out is more likely to be precise than a forecast 5 to 10 years out, I think. Even though overlaying the Bill Gates, you overestimate what happens in 1 year, underestimate what happens in 10. So maybe that's actually a wrong statement that I made. But reasonably speaking, if there's a lot of history to a company like Airbnb, Uber, or Coinbase, you know, they've been in— they've been operating for many years. And so if there's a material deviation in the forecast you know, oftentimes management sends you their forecast and it's like that, and you're like, okay guys, you've been growing like this, flat, and then you're telling me you're gonna double growth. What sort of wizardry do you have cooked up there that is going to lead to that? And so you discount that heavily, right? But most of the valuations of these protocols are very much— I struggle with them. I don't think the market ever thinks about in a fundamental analysis. A lot of it is just social value. Ripple, Social, a lot of social value, made a lot of money for a lot of people. It is synonymous among non-crypto natives. Ripple is the easiest narrative to understand, and Brad and team have done a phenomenal job of convincing the market that they are the bet if you want to express how long crypto transforming DeFi. The DeFi bet for normies is Ripple, it's not Aave.

Yeah, Santi, can I get your take on, uh, I want to switch tax here and talk a little bit about Zora. That launched this week.

Quite a baby.

Yeah, quite a baby. All right. So Zora launched this week, I would say, to a decent bit of controversy. So Zora is— they started off as an NFT platform on the OP stack. They actually have their own chain. And I guess the whole genesis of this was they originally had a slightly different take on NFTs, which was instead of the Pudgy Penguins or the Punks, very limited number of supply, very high value. They basically had a more mass market approach to NFTs in general, which eventually they pivoted into something like meme coins. They— we've talked about it on other pods, I believe. But basically the idea of XOR is that it's a social app. So they relaunched as an app that's trading on or that's built on Base. And it's a social feed that looks actually something like Instagram if you were to go on it today. Maybe a little bit of PumpFun in there. But basically the idea is that when you post on Zora, every single post is a, is a coin. So you're doing a mint when you mint a new post. There's a bit, I believe a billion coins that are associated with that post. You as the creator get 1% and then you dump that into a single-sided LP pool on Doppler, which is a UniV4 hook. Which is built by Austin Adams of Whetstone. He's one of the original designers of UniB4 itself. And so, and then basically those coins trade. So people buy and sell your token and you as the creator, you obviously do well if the overall value of the coin goes up. So your 1% appreciates. You also get some of the trading fees there as well. And you as a user of Zora, depending on what people are buying and selling, you see it more or less, right? So it's kind of replacing the social algorithm your feed algorithm of Facebook or Instagram with a more market-based algorithm.

They also did their airdrop this week.

And I think a lot of people were one, maybe a little bit disappointed with the amount of Zora tokens that they got. But also they were disappointed with that there was one particular line that the Zora token is just for fun. And so I think people were a little bit upset about kind of this idea that, all right, like, what do I get as you know, people I think are fed up a little bit with the current status of what you as a token holder, the kind of rights that you actually get. So I'm curious, Santi, you know, I think a lot of people had a little bit of an allergic reaction to this because they see it as kind of pump fun. And I think some people didn't necessarily appreciate the marketing of Jesse and BASE in general. And they view it as kind of pump fun, like a more ThoughtBoy version of pump fun. So pump fun with extra strings attached. I have a slightly different view, but I'm curious to get your take on just this idea that Zora is taking a whack at in general, and then also some of the more like just the mechanics of the token launch and how they described it.

Yeah, I mean, look, I've met a lot of creators that have used Zora over the years. I think many of them got rewarded, you know, in the best way possible, which is they were using a platform that they thought was interesting. and then they got a reward because they were active users. I think that that's really interesting, uh, and fair if you're using a platform. You know, that's the nice thing about crypto, which is you reward your investors, your team contributors, and also users, and you give them some sort of ownership in, in the company by way of the token. Um, the market never likes— or I guess said differently, I've never heard of a launch that has gone flawless. People always complain. They either get— some people got too many, too much tokens, and some people got too little, and then dynamics are off, and the vesting, not vesting, can team lock. So you're never going to get it perfect. Zora as a platform is interesting, I think. Uh, I am not an active user. I don't think I qualify for an airdrop, maybe in some old wallet. But, um, yeah, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting. The, the thing that makes me do wonder generally, because I looked at Zora in the earlier rounds, I thought it was like an interesting experiment. Like, this was before NFT craziness. Yeah. Is the IP stuff, because I think that was like my biggest concern with Zora is like, if you coin something, you might not have the IP attached to that. So it actually becomes like, my main question to the team was like, what if I steal someone's IP and then I just like coin it?

Yeah.

And that's a challenge, right? That's not like a, maybe AI can solve that. But anyways. Uh, it's still trading, uh, just to get to the point of it, it's like it's still trading at like $211 million fully diluted valuation, $60 million market cap. Is that fair or reasonable? I have no idea. Not something that I, I guess like I don't even know how Zorro makes money. Do you?

Um, probably some percentage of the trading fees, I would guess, of all these coins.

Yeah, yeah, probably. Um, but if we were to run through the exercise of how do you value something like Sora, is you have to maybe comp it to like a Sotheby's of the world, which is like an auction house, or like an art gallery, which is, uh, I get— I guess like Pinterest maybe is probably the more close comparison in the public markets. Um, but in this case, Sora is clipping fees, I guess, to your point, activity. Is that fee sustainable? Are there going to be competing marketplaces? Is this the place where the best artists or users come to? I don't know. I don't have many thoughts because I don't like to speak of things that I don't use much. I did end up passing on this when A16z invested in it way back in the day. They didn't want to take my money and that's totally fine. Probably the right choice.

I, yeah, I mean, I haven't really looked at any of the their rounds or anything like that. But I do, I think it's a, I mean, I understand why people have an allergic reaction to it. I mean, people are kind of sick of the meme coins in general. And I obviously understand why. I do though, I have a, I think a lot of people have approached Zora through the lens of PumpFun because that's the most salient example that they have that looks something like this. And so they're slotting a lot of this and saying, wait a second, this thing looks exactly like PumpFun, but now you've slammed it into something that looks a little bit like an Instagram feed and you know, this is— and I do understand, right, there's a big— there, there is an incentive here for Jesse and Brian Armstrong, etc., to have bring some of that meme coin activity that's been trading on Solana over to Base. And I totally understand that, right? But on the— I, I look at this more from the perspective of having been an operator of a media company for a while. And, um, I think that this solves some really interesting challenges in media. And to me, this is an extension of the big mega trends of media in general. So yeah, first of all, I think that the big challenge that Zora, if it were to actually work, that it solves is it's a neater redistribution mechanism for value from a social platform to creators. So the analogy I would give people is Twitter is starting to do this. Elon is trying to reward creators, but how much do you get rewarded?

I don't know.

You just get, you know, $75 per month, right, that Elon sends you and you're like, great, but I have no access to the methodology. This is— you could actually track, hey, I understand exactly how much I'm making because I see the fees that my posts are trading, etc., etc. The other thing too is that I think this solves a kind of a cold start problem and it's a better business model for a new generation of potential content creators. I know people are going to roll their eyes and be like, content coins are the biggest scam in crypto. I get it.

But I think that every single time media shifts mediums, you get a new generation of content creators.

So like Brian Williams wasn't the biggest YouTube star, right? That's MrBeast. And MrBeast was, you know, young and he was a hustler and he saw this new medium of YouTube and he figured out how to exploit it and how to grow massively.

And I think that there will be a generation of on-chain social media. And it's not going to be Dave.

You shouldn't be buying Dave Portnoy's coin. You shouldn't be buying Kanye West's coin.

You should be—

some young entrepreneur is going to be like, wait a second, I can post everything on-chain. I can track the cash flows from that. And that can actually accrue value back to my own coin and equity. And that makes a huge amount of sense to me.

And the last thing I'll say is, too, one of the—

the reason why the Substack revolution, quote, kind of fails is because eventually, if you're a creator, what you really love doing is creating content. But then once you get to a certain point of Substack, you have to do all this like off-chain stuff and deal with advertisers and things like that. Um, and that's where people flame out and burn out because that's anathema to being a really good content creator. This is a much cleaner way in my mind of monetizing where I do a post, I get rewarded based on how viral or how many people see that post, and then that accrues value directly back to my coin. That to me makes a ton of sense.

I've heard, I totally agree there. I mean, let's think about platforms like, we're in a world where most of the content is user generated, but the economic relationship is very lopsided towards platforms and not content creators.

Yeah.

The value of any platform like YouTube, Substack is derived from user activity and content. But TikTok or YouTube, they don't distribute as much fees to these content creators, you know, and that will fundamentally change over the next 10 years. And crypto is going to be a big part of that. Zora, you know, what is it, OpenSea, you can think about NFT collections, all of that, like Mirror too. But so I definitely agree with you. It's in theory, you should continue to attract more artists and content creators to come over to a platform like Zora that basically generates far more— the distribution of fees is way more towards creators than it is to the platform. So I just like simplistically looked at, okay, what's the fee structure to give people some perspective here? Zora charges 1% fee on all trades that happen directly on the platform. And the fee is kind of split in a couple of ways. 0.5% is creator rewards, 0.15% is trade referral rewards, The other 0.15% is to create referral rewards. And Zora itself, the protocol takes 0.2%, which is kind of like 20 basis points. It's kind of in line with other protocols, right?

Yeah.

But the 1% fee on trades, you could argue is fair. And then you believe, okay, there's a lot of trading activity because people want to collect these things and they're trading them, they're speculating, you know, fine. And then you have I'm not sure how accurate this is, but DeFi Llama reports that Zora Marketplace is currently generating about 1,200 in annualized fees, which seems very low, but, and Token Terminal reports approximately 300 in fees over the last 30 days. And then cumulative revenue, Dune Analytics and DeFi Llama indicate that Zora's cumulative revenue is about $5 million since inception. Um, however, this is the point that I think stands, which is Zora has distributed over $27 million in earnings to creators from secondary sales. Uh, and now that I think that, that's the point that I'm trying to make here, which is most of the value is being distributed back to the people that are generating value, which is the creator. So then how, what is the right valuation for Zora? And this is, I think, an example that, again, I just said Zora as a platform is where a lot of people have uploaded content and there's fees that are attached to buying that particular piece of content and then trading on it. And you have initial fees and then secondary market fees. And then that's all great for creators that distributed $30 million. Zora hasn't, isn't keeping much. Right, um, in the classical sense, 1% trading fee, they take 20% of that. So that's like the inverse of what YouTube— YouTube I think takes 80% and they distribute 20%. Now again, in this case, YouTube is making far more money on advertisers, and that's not included in any of this analysis. It's just trading fees. Um, but the point I'm trying to make is I think one of the big mistakes we're doing in crypto is saying look at YouTube and these content platforms like TikTok, and they are worth hundreds of billions. That doesn't mean that if you create a competitor to that, that value is going to flow to your protocol. Because on the contrary, you're going to just— the reason why you're able to attract all that flow is because you fundamentally change the economic nature of the relationship with the content creator. And so is there going to be a $100 billion YouTube editor on-chain?

Maybe not.

Probably not, because it's just not going to generate as much fees. Because in the classical sense of Bezos, your margin is my opportunity. That margin evaporates to the plot, doesn't exist. It just gets distributed to the, to the creator. Yeah, I, you, there's like, there's air. Uber, for instance, when I looked at the secondary, uh, the pre-IPO round that TPG led, the unit economics were not there. Like, most cities were not profitable. Profitable. Only San Francisco was profitable. And in fact, I don't think Uber would have gotten nearly off the ground if it weren't because it create— it was created under record low interest rate environment where you could pump liquidity into these companies until they maybe, maybe broke profitability in some of these markets. But it takes a long time. Uh, what I'm trying to say is, um, like, the unit economics of a platform like Zora is like, you can have a great service but terrible business. Uber, great service, but I don't know, like, I, I wasn't comfortable investing that round.

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The other thing too that Sanjay, I'm curious to get your take on is one of the things like on the Jeff Bezos, your margin is my opportunity. Um, you also, the thing that is difficult to understand, um, in the fullness of time is if you make it a better service for creators, how much do you expand the total market? Um, and that's, look, that's hard to make that argument with someone like YouTube, right? Because how many billions of people exist in the world, right? I'm not really sure, uh, but well, actually I'm sure it's like 8 billion people. But, uh, but that's—

yeah, YouTube, it's a centralization of a platform. Like, we have now the two most popular artists in our generation were discovered on YouTube— Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. It's created the Logan Pauls of the world and, you know, the all the influencers of the world. You know, it's— YouTube has created a lot of value for creators for sure, but it is capturing their business model is very different than Zora's, I think.

Yeah. So we'll have to see here. I think, you know, from, from my perspective, I think it— one of the things that I think is one of the more interesting experiments that's being run in crypto and a challenge that I see on— if you just look at industries that are ripe to be disrupted, media, I think everyone would agree, right? Like mainstream media is ripe for disruption. I think disruption is already happening. And then the next question is, is social media right for disruption? Which I'm not 100% sure it is. But one of the things that you get from— I'm curious what you think about this, because I don't know. I mean, one of these things that you've seen time and time again in crypto is this desire to speculate. Right. So it was back in like 2011 and 2013, it was like Feathercoin and colored coins and stuff like that. And then it was ICOs in 2017, and then it was originally DeFi summer and, you know, food farms like YAM Finance, etc. And then it was NFTs, right, and meme coins. And we've seen this movie over and over and over again. And it seems like each of these predicts something actually valuable over time. It's just you kind of get the hype-iest version and the stupidest funhouse version of it in the beginning. And then it takes a number of years for the market to understand what actually happened and to put more, you know, guardrails and more professional capital formation around it. And I think if you look at something like NFTs and meme coins, you don't have to like it. You can say that, yeah, retail is getting fleeced. You can say there's a lot of toxic MEV. You can say that gambling is not good. And I would agree with basically all of that. But I would also say I think you'd be foolish to completely write it off as if it's not a persistent phenomenon because it obviously is.

Oh, trust me, like newspapers have to reinvent the way they made money, right? Uh, you know, it was mostly, what is it, uh, periodical, like, uh, what is it, the, the fee, like the, what do you call this, it wasn't periodicals, like at the end of the paper they would have all these different classified ads, classified, yeah, yeah. And so like you have to change, you have to adapt. Is Zora a good business? It's a good service. I'm not sure it's a good business. Now I go back to when I, I think I mentioned in the prior episode, when Facebook went public, most of, um, the market didn't really understand how, how you could make money off of a social media network. In the Western investors didn't know that because it was all like, uh, they didn't turn on the fee, they weren't bringing on advertisers. I think there's a if you go read like The Social Network, uh, and, and a number of accounts that document the evolution of Facebook, is at the board level, Zuckerberg and folks like Peter Thiel and others like really resisted and pushed off the turning ad revenue on because they didn't want to degrade the service. They said, let's just, let's just grow a number of users. Like, we're on this hyperdrive growth, we're becoming the main social media network. Let's not distract. Let's not compromise the platform experience by turning on advertisers. And then, of course, now, I mean, I can't even remember the last time I went on Facebook because my feed looks like Times Square. And yeah, you're so right. You know, like their saving grace was WhatsApp and Instagram. And your point's a really good one, which is the evolution of these platforms is at some point they capture all— it's organic, it's a great service. Like, content creation is pristine. It's like you become really popular because you're posting really genuine stuff, and then you get somewhat co-opted, corrupted, and they're varying forms because you, you just sort of need to make more money, and then you— the advertising game changes, changes it. Um, but again, like, when Facebook went public, it, it wasn't really making that much money on ad revenue. Revenue. But I think if you were there, if you were like DST of the world, Yurney Miller— Yurney Miller backed up the truck on Facebook, I think Series B, because he had invested in Yandex and some other social media networks in Europe that have far more along. And he said he understood something that the market was not appreciating, which is if you own the user attention, you can— you have a great product to then monetize the shit out of that user. And he was like, Facebook's going to do this. They're not doing it now. They're going to eventually do it. And he put in a billion-dollar valuation. I think he was like, fine, I'm willing to invest like $2-3 billion. This thing's going to be huge. But he had the insight of investing in Yandex and some of these Eastern European social media networks. What I'm trying to say is like, I think that might be what ends up happening on Web3, which is you get to a point where Zora as a platform maybe, or OpenSea or whatever, become these places where they create really good content and the best content creators are there because they're making more money and that drives a flywheel of great content. And if you're at a point, I don't think, by the way, you're ever going to make that much money given the current fee dynamics. Yeah. Be on volume. It needs to be on something else. And what is that something else? I think to your point, is it going to be the same story of just turning on ad revenue? Maybe it is, maybe in some creative way that I— we just haven't figured out.

You know what, I— you know what, I— okay, so I've been trying to come up with a word for what I see as related concepts, and I would actually put Azora in the same bucket as prediction markets. Like Polymarket. And here's the connection that I see is media is moving. The big question of media is what mechanism do you use to show information to people? And historically, that mechanism has been a very small group of editors in a room using their intuition and saying, I think this would be interesting to people. And what that's moving towards, what crypto has done is they have made that a more market-based pricing for information in the same way that, like, if you're a trader, what service are you providing? You're providing price discovery to financial assets. I think crypto has lowered the friction of issuing assets to such a point where you can take that price discovery method that has been applied only to financial assets in the past, to actual information. And that, I think, is the interesting thing here. So to me, that feels like something that over time is just going to end up happening. Um, and it's going to happen at the prediction market level, and it's going to happen at the social, like, the content that you consume every single day level. Um, so I don't really know how that's going to manifest. I don't know what these businesses are going to look like. I will say there are some— I'm, I'm sharing our, uh, uh, our Zora dashboard that we've got, and some of these metrics are promising. The amount of platform, uh, of posts that are going on the platform is moving up. Existing accounts are growing. This is a good daily active users over weekly active users, which is basically a user retention metric, um, is going up. So there's stuff that's moving in the right direction for Zora here for sure, although they did just launch. So this is—

we'll see how that behaves.

We'll see how that behaves over the coming months.

Look, by and large, I mean, I kind of agree with you. When I, when I invest in you guys, you have an opportunity to kind of transform media. I don't know what, how that looks like, but you're there and I believe, like, your point around Polymarket, and you're going to see the tokenization of everything. And why is that interesting? Because in a world where money moves more seamless in these rails that are connected, like truly a settlement layer of the internet, you create markets on everything. And why is that interesting? Because markets are arbiters of truth.

Yeah.

And they surface the truth in very interesting ways. And I think that's really powerful. It's really powerful because then you are able to discover artists or creators because they're like, oh, wait a minute, like they're actually generating a lot of content. And that the alternative is content creators and a platform like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram that are trying to game the algorithm. And they're obsessed around that. And some people, I would argue that the edge is more so understanding like what the algorithm and how it's what's gonna— the titles and the imagery and all this stuff. Does that make it good content? No, but the virality, it might be high, and you know, and that's what you get served on the feed. But I would place a far more— like, you can't do that with markets unless you're in the business of burning money. And markets, markets just— which some people do, but markets are really, um, far more— they're not perfect, but they're arbiters of truth. And, and I think if you really want to discover pristine, genuine content the market is willing to put a dollar behind, not a click, a dollar behind, that's very powerful. And I think that's really the upside here, which is you might be able to discover so many different artists in the same way that, you know, OpenSea allowed for many different artists like People Pleaser and whatnot to be discovered. I think we're gonna see a panacea of user-generated content and the discoverability of that user-generated content be perhaps more pristine because it is tokenized and then financialized in the best way possible, which is if you're not— my view is if you're not transacting value, it doesn't fucking matter. If you can't, and again, if you can't monetize that attention, you've done something fundamentally wrong. Your business is not right. Your platform's not right. Facebook was able to turn on and monetize that user in a very interesting way because the product was great until it wasn't. But, you know, they had Instagram and WhatsApp and maybe they'll have some other stuff. In the AI space. But it all comes down to an attention game. And ultimately, like, I would be— if you're Zora, I guess you're sitting there and saying, okay, we've distributed a lot of really good value to the creator. How can we monetize that? Imagine Zora does end up becoming this place where you have amazing user-generated content. Oftentimes when I was an investor in we would do these expert calls and you'd call customers. And I'll tell you, we ended up investing only in companies where we heard customers say one thing and they said this, we would be willing to pay 2, 3 more times for this product. And it was a common thing, like pricing a product is really, really hard. And I don't think founders are not necessarily well equipped to price their product because they come at it from a more emotional standpoint. It is, I mean, there's people that truly consultants that just all they focus on pricing analysis. And the nice thing about crypto too is because it's so financialized and in real time, you can tweak these things and then see how the market responds. And look, the hallmark of a good product is you can increase prices. And maintain retention. In fact, there's a private equity fund out there that just buys businesses, jacks up price, and their math is basically, if we double the price and we only lose 10% of the customers, we would have made this business— we've created so much value. And it's under this idea that most businesses are not valuable products. If you believe it's a valuable product, then you believe that you can raise prices and not lose as much customers.

Yeah, it's, it's a really difficult, uh, analysis to do also.

Yeah, the pricing stuff is, I would argue that in the private equity fund, they didn't necessarily create value, they successfully extracted value.

But, but, well, they created more value for sure, for shareholders and for the employees that built a great product. Yeah, it's completely true.

Santi, I think we've got to, oh, by the way, just one thing on the Zora stuff, because people make it about, I have no idea if Zora is the final form.

One thing that I would say as well is we're just in the era of crypto where we're starting to get more product expertise and discipline and engineering expertise and discipline. It still took social media or like Web2, the first version, 10 years, right, to find the final form factor. And then in year 15 or whatever, we get TikTok and ByteDance and it's been disruptive.

Like these things take a long, long time to iterate on. I have no perspective whether or not Zora is the final form factor here.

I think history would tell you it's probably not.

It's just, you know, I'm trying to zoom out and say, is this an interesting experiment to run?

Um, because a lot of people have had a super allergic reaction to it in general.

I don't think so at all. I think a lot of the creators out there might very much disagree with anyone that is purely just speculating on the token. Yeah, basically use these projects, use them because you get value out of them and have no expectation of an airdrop. And if you still use the product without an airdrop, like Uniswap, you know, something didn't have that It was a great product. Yeah. There's a— I want to plug this book that I just read yesterday. Phenomenal. Because it talks about product. And it is called— it's written by the guy who built the keyboard for the iPhone. And like the haptic feedback and like, and then he built the keyboard for the iPad and just really was very much front and center in building product, like product in the golden days of Apple when Steve Jobs was still there. It's called Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, and it's written by Ken Cossienda. Phenomenal book, man. It's just a front row seat in like how he, you know, all these crazy stories of how he went to Steve and was like, hey, should we have this keyboard or this keyboard and it was like pretty awesome. Uh, if you're— it ties into are you building a good product and cutting kind of groundbreaking, uh, uh, stuff. And I think it's— I, I really enjoyed it.

Yeah. Um, there's also a really interesting—

I mean, uh, different companies with different people have approached product differently.

There's kind of— Apple has great taste, right? Like they have this sort of, um, a little bit— there's an art and a science when it comes to product. And then Facebook or Meta, I think, has been an example of a company which, no offense to Zuck, maybe had a little bit less taste, but it felt very data-driven and analytical in their approach to improving product too. And you see that culturally in different companies. But Santi, I think that's all the time we've got today, man. This was, uh, this was a ton of fun. I think Yano will be back next week, so, uh, yeah, we'll—

but I don't know, man, we keep doing this, we're going forever.

I know, I was gonna say, I feel a little sparkier. Uh, yeah, this is, uh, we about to switch it up, um, do a little swinging.

Yeah, really, really fun, man. Thanks for hosting, and, uh, yeah, hopefully people enjoyed it. And, uh, yeah, have a good weekend.

All right, partner, you too.

Talk soon. Bye.