EP 4: State of Venture Market, Crypto Ads, ETHDenver, Razzlekhan Revisited and Nikita’s G-Wagon Disloyalty

Foreign.

Welcome to the fourth episode of Three Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I'm joined today by my esteemed co hosts, Nikita Beer and Zach Kukoff. How are we doing, guys?

Not too good.

Oh, wow.

Not too good.

Already a dour start to the pod where. Nikita, you look like you're back in. Back in L. A. Zach, where are you?

I am in New York, but I will be. I will be in L. A very soon, enjoying the warmth.

I'll be ignoring your text the entire time.

I did just ask for listeners at home. I just asked Nikita before the pod started for a list of sceney restaurants. So I'm looking forward to being the worst person in the city of Los Angeles for the next seven days.

Well, I am actually down in Florida for a 90 year old birthday party this weekend, which I've heard is. I heard can get pretty wild. Zach, you'll probably know some people here given it's the geriatric crew you hang

with, but I love my old shoes in Florida. God's waiting room. I'm excited.

That's right. That's right. So I'm really looking forward to this 90th birthday party, but. Good. Well, I'm glad we're able to do this while on the road. Nikita, I think first. First we have something important we want to discuss. For those that aren't aware, Nikita posted a picture on Twitter this week with a car that wasn't a G Wagon. So, Nikita, I think we need to hear the story. Are you cheating on G Wagons or what's the backstory here?

I did buy an Aston Martin. I've always wanted one. I got a great deal on it, but. This might sound ridiculous, but both the G Wagon and the Aston have been investments. Uh, you know, most people think of cars as something that totally depreciate, but there's two categories of cars that don't depreciate. Recreational vehicles like a Jeep or exotic cars. Um, and if you. If you just look at their depreciation curves, they. They flatten out way earlier than. Than other, like, other brands. So, I mean, I got really lucky with the G Wagon because the month after I bought it, Mercedes announced that they are not making them in the next year. And. And the price went up 100 grand. So, I mean, it's outperformed the S&P 500.

Yes, you're right. Cars as investments. It does sound a little ridiculous, but I'm glad to hear that it's actually outperforming the S and P. That's Great.

Cool.

All right, well, let's do a quick update here on. So last week, a favorite topic of ours, Razzlecon. So a quick update from what happened since we recorded. So a judge in Washington, D.C. denied bail for Dut ilya Lichtenstein and actually allowed Heather Morgan out, I think on about $3 million bail. The judge said the evidence strongly suggests that Mr. Lichtenstein has more facility and skill at the heist business. I don't know if you guys have any. Any thoughts or opinions on this. Another L delivered to Razzle Con here this week.

Yeah, it really feels like the hits just keep on coming for Heather Morgan. Right? Like, imagine you're this badass rapper, you're laundering billions of dollars, and the judge at the end of all that is still like, actually, you're no threat to anybody. Just go home, get an ice cream, hang out.

Yeah. The biggest risk is that she gets to post another Forbes article. I think that was what they were actually concerned about.

Honestly. I'm just disappointed that we got to wait longer for the Razzle Khan Prison album.

I would say, who's going to have the better prison album? Do we think Razzle Khan or Wu Tang?

Does Wu Tang?

I just kind of shot. I just kind of shot from the hip on that joke. I actually have no idea if there is a Wu Tang Prison album.

Here's a rapper I know. Yeah, Wu Tang Prison album. I think it plays actually well with your branding of like the 90s geriatric. Like, what about this hippity hop music you got here? So a topic that we've touched on a little bit here, but it's just valuations generally in the private markets. Obviously it's been. It's been impacted over the course of the last six weeks since the public market started selling off. And so we thought one thing that would be interesting to cover is a little bit of anecdotal data based on or anecdotal information based on what we're actually seeing at the stages that we invest and I guess set the stage that people are trying to force feed Nikita uncapped notes or whatever. I'm sure you have some interesting stories about being courted currently in this early stage environment. Zach, maybe you lead off on what you're seeing in the early stage stage markets. As this happened over, I guess, six weeks ago, it probably started selling off. And have you seen any flow through on the early stage side of the house?

I feel like we expected to see so much more flow through. But if you think about the dynamic on the early stage for a second on the zoom out, you have basically every top fund who has raised more capital than ever before because you either had to stay boutique and stay at the 500 million mark or below, or you've had to get really big really fast.

Right.

We've grown Index Sequoia, obviously Andreessen goes without saying like the platform funds have become bigger platforms and all of them have raised at this point either dedicated seed or early stage funds or are effectively acting like they have dedicated seed early stage funds. So the net net of all this is to say like you have a bunch of people who have a lot of dry powder and most venture funds only have a few deals that are huge exit out of your fund. I think there are folks who are thinking to themselves, well what does it matter if I get in at 70 or 150 pre if this is the one that goes to 10 billion. Right.

Are they accounting for risk, like the uncertainty? Like, I mean these are still series A deals.

Who is day in this? The founders or the investors?

The investors.

This is the challenging thing which is if you want to be in that's like, let's say there are, you know, 15 or 20 deals every year that are competed for among like every tier one fund where they're all going to put in term sheets to the best of their ability or they'd like to put in term sheets if they're able to. Right. Those are founders who historically have named their price.

I mean, does this also translate to the seed deals that are pre launch?

Yeah, specifically the ones based in Culver City, Los Angeles, out of curiosity.

I mean a lot of these funds from a, from a structure standpoint are viewing early stage investing in my mind as out of the money call options. Right. And it's like it's an optionality on future funding. And so the delta between what? The delta between 150 versus 130 versus 100. At the end of the day, you're trying to internalize all these probabilities of success and also weight what the outcome can be at the back end. Which are all pretty abstract concepts to figure out. Right. And so to some extent, what I've seen anchoring a lot of these prices is the founders having the discipline to say, hey, we have to keep our 409A down to recruit sophisticated engineers or to recruit executives. It's actually not the discipline that exists on the private side. Like I've seen deals where I had a company that, that I know really well that had an option from a tier one, a firm at like 2 billion and they had an offer from a hedge fund at 6 billion and then they had everyone in between, right. And so that spread was basically, hey, you know, you're probably never going to touch this capital, right, if. If things go well. And so it's really just like, hey, let's fix the dilution and, and give you some 409A right? Across this spectrum of prices, what do you want? What's the brand that you want? What's the partner that you want? What's the service you want? And like they get a Chinese menu of these options. And if you want the highest price, then that's out there, right? If you want the best brand, that's out there. And if you want something in between, that's there. And so it's fascinating. This dynamic has existed for a while now. That was pre this correction, right? And so I think there is this kind of YOLO part in the market that goes up to a certain price. And it was. I was seeing deals at 1.5 billion getting done with like a ton of open source traction or whatever, but very little revenue. Right. I remember having a conversation with a buddy and I was like, what. How did you think about this on a. On our basis? This is so astronomical. And he goes, ARR. Wrong metric to look at. And it's like, it's funny, I get it because it's kind of like open source signups or open source downloads and all that. But it was such a funny. It actually ended up being close to the top of the market. Right. And so that YOLO price had been pushed up from a billion to one and a half. And now I've seen it retrench back down where people are looking at revenue multiples again at a certain threshold evaluation. Right. And as you go lower and lower, it starts to be more and more of that YOLO mindset. And I don't know where that crossover point was. It was like five years ago, it was around 100. Then it got up to like 200. It was, we've seen it go crazy up to one and a half ish. It feels like maybe it settled out between 300 and 600 now, but we're definitely in this price discovery phase. I think that's why you're seeing these rounds take longer is because no one really knows what a series A or B or C should be priced at.

Well, this feels like the difference to me in some ways between the classic DNA difference of early stage and growth investors even to have a sense of here's where we yolo vs not yolo on price feels like a growthy kind of thing to say versus the early stage. Like I would wonder, there's some portion of firms who started as late stage firms, right, who have gone into privates and gone earlier. And there's some portion of firms who have started as early stage investors and have scaled up in size, right? And like a lot of this, I think I'd be curious how much of the difference here comes down to, hey, we started by doing small series A or seed checks and, and getting much bigger over time. And I wonder how much of it then instead is, you know, traditionally late stage investors who are looking at it as a call option because the truth, to your point earlier, like a lot of the funds who started early, I actually don't think are looking at these seed deals or series A's as call options. Like they're trying to buy their ownership in those first two rounds, even if they have the dry powder to go later.

I think that's probably right. And I actually heard a crazy story. So we talked about retrading and all the stuff that the hedge funds had done in the last, whatever, three weeks. And the information article that came out, I heard a crazy story about one of the hedge funds that had been mentioned as a reputation for retrading. They had put in a term sheet recently and the founder called them out and said, hey, I've heard you've done this recently. How are we going to know you're actually going to close? And the fund said, we'll wire this afternoon. That was their response was like, give us the wires and we'll send it this afternoon if that's actually a concern. And so it's interesting. Like, it's crazy, right? And so it's interesting. Now that course correction of I feel like there's some discovery going on in the hedge fund world that this was kind of a first correction from a price standpoint. And now it's actually a pretty compelling offer. Like, hey, if you don't believe us, we'll send you the money tonight. But it's interesting to see how precious the brand protection was. And then now that it's swung back to retrading, people are trying to paper over some of those mistakes.

Well, to your point earlier about like, what do people pick on, right? And Nikita, like, actually, you're the one who should, who has probably the clearest point of view here, given you're the only one who is picking an investor out of the three of us. But Like Logan, to your point about what do people pick on, they're picking on even later stage, they're picking still on brand and relationship in a lot of ways, if you assume that cost of capital is relatively equalized, certainly not equal. And so if you are somebody who's retraded, even if it's totally standard in your world, right. You are, I think, smart enough to know you have to judiciously protect your reputation, otherwise you're going to have a real problem.

Now, Nikita, what, I mean, to that point, what would you actually, if you were to raise at some point in the next little bit, besides friendly podcast hosts, what would you, as you're sort of thinking through all this, I mean, maybe take us through what the world was like when you originally raised like what your original found kind of construct came together. And then you've obviously had a ton of people beating down your door. You've had people starting podcasts just trying to curry favor with you. And so, so like maybe what would your prior priority or criteria be today versus what it was then?

I'm sending Nikita every E girl I know right now, just trying to get around.

When I was starting out, I mean, it took, it took me about a year to close my first seed round.

How big was it?

It was 700k at, I think it was like 3.5.

I mean, oh my God. And what year was this?

This was 2013 and it was tons of tiny checks. It was a party round. It was, it was terrible. I mean a year later we were able to close around in like a month for 1.5. But I think today what's crazy is like you don't even need like back, back when I was raising those rounds, you just, you needed a prototype or some kind of traction. But today you really just need a notion, doc, you don't even need a deck. It's, it's wild. And, and you're also getting like 10 times as much money at way less dilution. And I see people closing rounds like in a weekend and if they really don't want dilution, they, they can raise at whatever price they want from no name investors. But I think most people want to optimize for signaling long term and so they pick strong names that either, you know, help them with hiring, help them with future investors, make it seem like they have like institutional buy in. So like they're a legitimate brand. So I think that's generally where, where founders optimize for. I did hear like a good kind of breakdown was kind of older founders go for the partners that they have relationships with, younger founders choose based on the firm brand. I think that makes a lot of sense and I've seen it where you have like a seasoned founder who could raise from, you know, Sequoia Benchmark, but they choose a, maybe a lower point

general catalyst

for a lower tier firm like General Catalyst.

Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, Nikita. To that, to that point. I mean, is this true of. Obviously for you, you've done this before, you have the credibility, you have an amazing Twitter following. But is that true for like all types of founders? What group are we talking about here? Obviously the random person sitting on their couch in, you know, some, some city that hasn't had any tech experience isn't able to do that. Like what caliber a person are we talking about that are seeing these notion doc only rounds.

So I mean I have these seed rounds come in my DMs like all the time. And it seems like the people that are willing to just play the game and go on Twitter and generate the hype, make the connections, They can get the hype train going and raise these seed rounds. I think capital has become much more accessible across the board. Regardless of your pedigree. Certainly pedigree helps, but my whole philosophy is pedigree could be a actual negative signal because I mean, if you've been kind of infanticized at Google for the last five years of your career, are you really going to grind it out? And I think a lot of investors have sort of adopted a similar philosophy at the seed stage that you shouldn't discriminate based on what school they went to or what, what big tech company they worked at. And I mean at the seed stage I think it's critically important because going zero to one is a painful process.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. By the way, much love to all of my Google APM friends, but the truth is that if you look at the distribution of where really successful startup founders come from, they're far more likely to be first generation, immigrant, scrappy background, grew up in abject poverty rather than like went to Stanford and then was an APM at Google and worked four hours a day and got a massage every Thursday on campus and yada yada yada. Like that is just not like the Google APM program has just not produced multibillion dollar plus outcomes with any sort of regularity. And that's not to knock on Google apm, which I think you're right. It's sort of like the new McKinsey, right? Or the new sort of Goldman in a lot of ways. And the kind of folks who are drawn to doing an APM program, I think are actually not the kind of folks who want work, you know, 20 hours a day for very little money for ultimate payoff.

Yeah, I think the job of PM in big tech is so fundamentally different than being a founder because ultimately you're operating in a system of so many constraints and a startup is just pure uncertainty. Yeah, there, there is no easy answers to every, to all your decisions with Google. Like, oh, I go to legal, then I go here and then I do that, and it's just all charted out on how to solve problems. So I don't even see how it translates. And I'm actually generally shocked with how easy it is for those types of founders to get funded because essentially they've had their sort of experience for creating startups on pause during that period of their career.

And I think to some extent, like, we've seen a bunch of these guys and girls coming out of Google that have deep, unique infrastructure ML experience that you only get at the scale of operating at Google. Right. And so I think it kind of comes down to how ubiquitous the insight is and what you're going after now there is this level of grit that I think is universal. And like, is your default to fall back to a cushy job or is your default just to make this successful no matter what? I mean, Nikita, how many companies did you guys go through with tbh before that was a hit?

I mean, we built 15 apps. It was like a five year slogan.

And you would have quit if you had a default back job of being a VC or being EVP or SVP at Google and making 500 grand, a million in cash a year, it would have been an irrational decision. But these people that have the default, this has to succeed. I think in most markets that's going to be who's going to win.

Yeah, I agree.

Hey, so we also just want to take a break to say we thank everyone that's beared with us for four weeks here. We're trying to get better, hopefully entertaining you guys along the way.

Yes, thank you to all 12 listeners,

the entire Kukoff extended family. Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to leave a review.

Yes. And so if you're enjoying this podcast and our ability to actually talk about the tech news, we really appreciate it if you could share with other people that you think might also find this interesting. And if you're so inclined, rating on Apple and Spotify, I'm told that's important as well. And so yeah, we, we definitely do this because we enjoy hopefully entertaining people and so your ability or willingness to share is super appreciated.

I do it because I'm a masochist and like getting dunked on, but I think the other two definitely do it because they enjoy entertaining. So please do a review for

the other thing this week was the crypto seems to dominate culture these days, and I didn't expect that we would start a pod that was somewhat focused on crypto and P? Marka and Ryan Breslow, but here we are. So on Sunday the Super bowl was played and a number of crypto ads ran. I think the irony wasn't lost that the same thing happened right before the dot com crash that pets.com and a bunch of other folks ran super bowl ads. So the three that stood out or the three big crypto ones were crypto.com. so that was Fortune Favors the Brave and it was current LeBron talking to high schooler LeBron. There was FTX, which was Larry David, skeptical of technologies over the years, so going through everything from the wheel to the fork to the toilet to the light bulb and ultimately landing on crypto as something that he doesn't believe in. And the last one was Coinbase, which had the QR code bouncing around the screen like the old DVD icons way back in the day. So I don't know guys, what did you have any favorites of these ads or anything that stood out among these three for you guys?

I actually like, like at a content level, I thought Larry David's was FTX's was was the funniest because. And I thought it had the most like, impact because Larry David's probably the most like trusted guy for that 30 plus age cohort because, you know, he's just this brutally honest character in Curb. And having him essentially concede that crypto might be the next big thing was a way to kind of buy trust in that older, older cohort that I think probably FTX is trying to win right now.

Yeah, I am with you, Nikita. I thought that the FTX Larry David ad was by far my favorite. Now, admittedly as the resident 95 year old on the podcast, that was exactly the target demographic for me. But I did really like I thought it was super effective. I was a little bit surprised, like somebody had a great take on this, which was clearly there's no such thing as having too much money. If Larry David is still shilling for crypto at the end of all of this, I was a little bit shocked that like, he did it. I couldn't believe they got him.

But to be fair, like, Larry's commercial was pretty much on brand and he never said that he supported crypto. It was like he stayed a skeptic. So he never, he never really gave his sign off on it.

It kind of feels like the new version of like 20 years ago you would do the commercial in Japan and assume that nobody would see it. And now you're like, oh, I can do the crypto. Although obviously people are going to see it. But there's still the same like laissez faire attitude to doing it, despite the image consciousness that we know so many of these people have.

Now it's like all these crypto companies are hiring like tier one celebrities to pump their coins or exchanges. I mean, last week you guys probably saw on everyone's Instagram story was Justin Bieber and Drake performing in la. That was from like an NFT company called Places. And then Tiesto is performing this week at ETH Denver. It's, it's kind of great. Like, I think it shows that like these crypto companies have a lot of money to spend and it's worth it to degrade, like it's worth it to these celebrities to degrade their brand.

I think for Tiesto performing at East Denver, you know, he performs at so many different random events and so him going to, I don't think he was that discerning probably about what the actual event was, but it's fascinating. Just like, do you think Larry David and Tom Brady and Matt Damon and LeBron actually did work to understand like the nuances of these different brands? I can't imagine, like even the most sophisticated person in crypto, you're kind of slicing hairs for what each of these companies stand for. And so it's just interesting how ethereal and potentially risky these brand propositions are to be diving in full on in that way, like these guys have.

I will say, what was the stat? We all heard that like they had seven and a half hours of footage they had to record for effectively a one minute video, right? Like, I'll tell you, it's sort of crazy to me that they did 80 scripts, seven and a half hours of footage, by the way, for a guy who is best known for improvising a show and at the end of it they paid him whatever, 5 million bucks and he still didn't endorse crypto like you would think at the end of all of that, the least he could do is say a nice thing about all the crypto. He's being paid to do this.

Yeah. And just a little backdrop on that. So seven and a half hours of footage on the Larry David, the Larry David shot. And so that was all distilled down into a minute long thing. I think online maybe there's a two and a half minute thing, but yeah, it's wild. I thought what was interesting in all of this is I don't really understand crypto.com's brand. Right. I know they bought the Staples Arenas branding there and I know they went through a name change at some point in the last two years. Like, I don't really understand where they fit into all of this. They obviously got roasted for that Matt Damon article and really marking the top of the crypto cycle with the original Fortune Favors the Brave. I actually liked at a literal level, like seeing old LeBron and young LeBron together. It was actually just like kind of an interesting optical thing. But I thought what was really interesting was, so the difference between FTX was clearly trying to do some top of funnel brand marketing, right. It's only a two year old company, they're trying to pull in the skeptics and get awareness. And they did very much the traditional style of advertising for the Super Bowl. Right. Which is like you get a celebrity, you get some funny bits, you do a slow build to it and then potentially a reveal at the end. And I thought, I actually really enjoyed it. I like Larry David. I thought it was clever, all the skepticism and it got you believing. All right, so all these other things have been doubted at some point.

Right.

The coinbase one was super interesting because it actually drove a cta. It was kind of like a growth engagement hack and they didn't spend. I mean, if Larry David cost $5 million for that footage, getting a bouncing QR code couldn't have cost more than ten hundred thousand dollars. And it actually drove a, a tangible outcome. Right. And so Nikita, I don't know your perspective on like thinking through what the growth hacking mechanisms are to really drive engagement installs. Did you guys do anything like that at tbh? Do you have any perspective? Obviously Coinbase crashed as well, so that's, you know, it can't be the best outcome for them. But any thoughts?

Yeah, I think the, you know, the site crashing certainly hurt its impact. I mean, contrary to all the chatter that we heard on Twitter, which is like, oh, it was a good thing. Now everyone's talking about it, I mean, because their whole brand is like, you can trust us with your digital money. And then here they run this ad, the $7 million ad spend that says this website doesn't work. But I think to be fair to them, the concept was smarter than people give them credit for the actual QR code because as a product developer, your aim is to minimize friction for the signup funnel as much as possible. And scanning a QR code is much EAS easier than typing in a URL and having nothing else on the screen. Like minimize any distractions. And second, the problem often with marketing that isn't digital is the biggest drop off is always that step where people need to take out their phones. And I think all of us, after two years of looking at QR codes, like our gut instinct is to pull out our phones when we see them. And so I think they actually close the gap in that like IRL to like phone gap as tight as possible. And they did it in a way where they didn't have to spend for a celebrity appearance or, or some high production video.

I don't know if you guys saw though, after it was done, FTX quickly launched a bouncing head of spf. Their CEO has like a big fro and they did it in the, in the DVD bouncing thing and they had his. It was like a Super bowl ad they ran after which I thought was pretty, pretty clever being able to respond that quickly.

They actually ran an ad in that same two hours.

I think they pulled it together for like a YouTube promo or something. Like obviously they had done all the buys, but they posted an outline of SPF's head bouncing around the screen on YouTube, which I thought was a pretty clever response between the two of them. Yeah. Okay, so what has taken over my Twitter feed this week as well as some Instagram is eth Denver. So I don't know if you guys have anyone at your employer, Zach or Nikita, anyone that you know that's there, but it was the first time I had ever heard of it. We actually have four people on the ground in Denver right now for it. It's apparently the longest running Ethereum event in the world. For people that don't know, Ethereum's the second most popular cryptocurrency. It's a community run event in Denver that's one of the blue chip crypto conferences along with nft, nyc, Mainnet and then a bunch of other ecosystem specific ones like nearcon, Break Point. I think FTX is doing a big one this year. Deadmau5 performed last night. Tiesto is performing at some point this week. I don't know if you guys have any People that are there that you know, or any opinions on the conference itself.

I'm just surprised how much the crypto community parties. It's, it's like you have, they bring together like the, the smartest people and the dumbest people bonding on this common interest of wanting to rage. And it's funny because it also, like, you have a lot of whales showing up with huge amounts of money and then like 19 year olds who are like solidity engineers. So I saw like a, someone posted a McLaren that had the Doge face painted all over it. It's a crazy time to be alive.

It kind of has big, I don't know if you guys ever did like, band or whatever growing up. It has like big band camp energy to me. You know what I mean? Like, just like the nerdiest people who like maybe grew up not partying a ton now just like want to recapture and kind of let loose a little bit when they're able to do so.

I don't know how much of this is the people that are actually interested in this community. Right. Versus it's actually been the most persistent group to continue to have events through the pandemic. And so I, I, you know, when, when Art Basel on, like, that was just totally a party for everyone that had an excuse or wanted an excuse to go to Miami. And so crypto, it feels like, is just kind of powering ahead with conferences over the last year. And it's hard for me to say, like, is this just. They're ahead of the curve on the, on people's desires to get back out and, and go to these events and party and all of that, or if it's unique to this community, it feels like maybe it's a mix of both.

There was some great tweet that was like, women of Denver, sorry, you're about to have the worst week on dating apps of your entire life. Like, it does feel like there's something specific about this community that loves to party. And I, I, I'm coming back to my band camp Thesis. Like, I think this is the delayed band camp crowd coming out.

When, when I was in Miami, everyone was asking me, are you going to eat Denver? As if it's like, you know, going to Burning man where everyone, like, it's all on their calendars and, and they all see each other at the next conference.

I mean, I had to ask internally, I was asking what this was. You know, we were planning and there was four people on our team that were going to be there. And I kept asking what it was. And I was like, no, no, no. Like I kept going back to more. Like I'm sorry, I need more detail. They're like, oh, it's the longest running ETH conference in the world. I'm like, okay, let's go a higher level. So Ethereum got that and who's going to be there? Right. I just needed it very elementally explained to me, like everyone back up to the kernel of, of truth. But Nikita, were you actually at Art Basel or was this when you were there two weeks ago or whatever?

It was when I was there two weeks ago. But I mean I've, I've always thought of conferences as like the, the summer camp for adults.

Yeah.

But it seems like the, the crypto conferences really take it seriously. Like this is when like we've all been grinding away, you know, doing degen stuff in discord chat rooms. And now it's our time to actually let loose.

Now it's our time to grind away and do degen stuff in real life. I think Nikita's point was, was really apps, right? There is a group of people for whom this does replace their social life. And they go from NFT NYC to Basel to East Denver to Burning man and probably mix in like some actual festivals, Coachella, Sundance, whatever, kind of sprinkled all throughout that too. And you could really replace having an active social life with just going to a conference every month and, and being exhausted, I suppose all the time.

I think it's like binging social. You know, it's they, they work hard and they play hard.

A friend of mine in Miami described it that way actually. He was like, in Miami there are weeks where no one is around and I get a ton of work done and there's like a four day period where everybody I know is in town and I see all of my friends that I'm like sated for another six weeks.

It is interesting like to some extent in defense of, of these conferences and also these festivals and all that. Like, like I'm gonna be the one really grandstanding on behalf of these days

long, the oppressed people, the Google APMs and conference attendees of the world, these

day long just benders that everyone goes on. But it's interesting like as people have kind of fettered out from cities, right. And a bunch of people have moved into different towns and different distances from wherever they lived. Right. You one still have a lot of friends that maybe you made in San Francisco or New York, but now they've moved to some other suburban area or they're living in Montana or something. And so those people have left. And two, you're making more and more friends online than ever before, right? And so you're meeting people and you're in these discord groups or you're in group chats or whatever. And so. And all those people are going to be spread across the United States. And so these do kind of serve as a way, like a natural nexus of hey, let's all get together and go to this one thing, right? Rather than saying, hey, I'm going to host people in New York, Zach's in Boston, Nikita's in la, let's find a weekend that all of us are going to go somewhere where one of us lives. Instead. It's like, okay, around one of these events, we'll be there and you'll get to kill a bunch of birds with one stone. And so, I don't know, I feel like this is maybe the social dynamic, the in person social dynamic that we're going to have going forward.

And obviously that's so much more true even for crypto.

You could say it's decentralized.

Yes, yes.

But like if you're, if all of your friends are on discord and that's where your community is, right? Then you have to go to these conferences to see folks. And even, you know, for probably the three of us, like when I was at Hereticon, that was a huge portion of my SF friend group who I haven't seen in some cases since COVID started, who got back together again.

Well, I will say, I mean, all these pseudonymous pseudonyms. Pseudonymous.

Pseudonymous.

Pseudonymous. And I will say all these pseudonymous people.

That's how you say that word?

How do you say it?

Well, now I'm not confident.

Pseudonymous.

That's definitely not it. It's definitely not pseudonymous.

Pseudonymous.

Pseudo pseudonymous. Pseudonymous. Anonymous. Like anonymous.

Why? Can I just say anonymous?

Just say anonymous.

So all these anonymous, all these people that are like going behind usernames, right, that are actually pretty influential in the crypto community. Like, I don't know, how do they just sit this one out, right when everyone's getting together that like is willing to reveal their identity, but the board Ape Yacht Club guys don't want to be revealed, do they? Just go in, blend in the scene. But then you've earned all this social clout and so isn't being cool and influential like sort of what you've, you've done this for? And so I don't know how that's going to play out. With. With live events and stuff. Is it going to be like. Is it going to be like, the guys from. Who are the guys with the helmets?

Daft Punk.

Daft Punk. Is it going to be like Daft Punk where people are just walking around with, like, their bored ape on their head or something?

I went to a party in la. There's a guy who owns a famous cryptopunk. His username is Seed Phrase. And he actually got a light up nft of the crypto punk for his head. And the nft of the cryptopunk had a cigarette coming from it, and smoke came out of the helmet. It was pretty cool, actually. And he was deejaying while wearing the helmet.

I was like, oh, my God.

But he said it got really hot in there. He eventually took it off, so his identity was revealed.

That was how he was doxxed.

Was.

Was the cigarette smoke and the helmet just ended up being too much for him.

Do you guys feel like you have the same problem with being anonymous? Like, first of all, we've all discussed the fact that Nikita and I not exactly doppelgangers for our cartoon pictures. And even Logan, I don't know how much credit I'll give you for being an accurate representation either. Like, before I was a cartoon, I used to go to stuff people be like, oh, we've talked online. I recognize you and would say, hi. And now that I'm a cartoon, no one knows I'm a dog online. But, like, now that I'm a cartoon, people don't do that quite as much. Maybe I will have an NFT made of my cartoon face that I'll wear as a helmet at upfront.

I. I've actually preferred not to use my real face, you know, on Twitter, because I know eventually I'm gonna get, like, quote tweeted in the New York Times, and they're gonna say, look at this terrible thing. Nikita said, but. And then it'll just be this avatar and be like, no one's gonna take that seriously.

Look at this terrible Aston Martin Nikita just bought on the New York Times. That's gonna be part of the style section, a roundup of, like, you only have, like, Jay Leno garage of cars. There's going to be, like, the Twitter version of that is Nikita's garage of G Wagons and Aston Martins.

I will say, Zach, to your point on this, like, it is. It's an interesting thing. Like, the identification with this PFP thing. Like, we don't have. We don't have NFTs, right? But it is a representation of ourselves, that people know it. And so when I switch across different. When I switch across different mediums, right from Instagram to Twitter to whatever, and having that consistency, there is some, like, subtle recognition that people have of, like, who you are. And so whenever I've switched, I switched at one point my Twitter profile picture, and everyone just immediately, like, all my comments were like, hey, what? You know, what are you doing? This is weird. And so now it's. I changed my shirt at one point just to make it, like, a little less WASP y looking, and still it was like, more subtle. But people were like, wait, this is off. Like, what's off? And Nikita, I know at one point you actually changed your. To your face, and that lasted like 12 hours or something.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I immediately change it back because I was looking at my tweets and I'm like, I look so much dumber with my illustrated photo that the tweets just look funnier. So I immediately went back.

I still need to update mine. Like, I. I am a little bit egregious. There's, I would say, perhaps a little bit of false advertising on the hair. No hair situation. The Costanza. Not Costanza situation on Twitter.

Could you ease into it a little bit? Like, we could go through some, like, six month progression. Yeah, exactly. It's like. It's like.

Yeah.

Do you remember Chia Pets? It's like a reverse Chia Pet where we just have, like, your hair disappearing down as you go.

He'll go through the same thing I went through in real life, which was it started as normal hair, and then I got sort of like a Jew fro right before it all went out. And so I'll. Maybe I'll give him, like, a little bit of an aggressive Jew fro before I cut it off fully.

I like that. Maybe we can do, like, a time lapse over time of like, your little cartoon going bald over the years.

Poor guy. Somebody recently said to me, they were like, why'd you shave your head? And I was like, really?

Well, thank you for joining our fourth episode of three Cartoon Avatars. We'll be here next Saturday morning as well. And Nikita, as usual, I think we need. We need to let the listeners hear what you're actually building. We can't keep dragging this out.

I mean, eventually they're gonna find out. But I. I did actually, actually let it slip and Zach found out.

I'm excited to tell everybody that what Nikita's building is Sam.