The Next Big Social Media Network Will Be On the Blockchain. Nader Al-Naji Tells Us Why.

And I was like, wait a minute, Sean. So you're telling me that there's a website that you invest money in, you don't know who made it, it doesn't work a lot of the times, and you can't get the money out, right? And he's like, yeah. I was like, oh, okay, got it. Just making sure we're on the same page here.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

What's up? Uh, Sean here. We have Sam and we got a guest. His name is Nader. I'm— said it right. Cause it's Nata like ladder, but people know you as Diamond Hands. Uh, if they've been following, we did a section on the podcast, I don't know how many months ago where I was like, hey, there's this thing that caught my eye. It's called Bitclout. And it's this crazy idea of a social network where it's almost like a Robinhood meets Twitter. It's like everybody's got their, every profile, every person has their own coin and you can like invest in people. And you could buy their coin and people's prices could go up or down as they get more famous. And, I said, you know, there was a couple, I said, I, I don't know if this is gonna work, but I do hope that someday there's a, like a, a decentralized social network. So a social network that's not, you know, super top-down controlled the way Facebook is, the way Twitter is. And, this was the first credible attempt I had ever seen. I had seen some other experiments, but this is the first credible one where I said, oh, they have a growth hack. And the growth hack is that when I saw my profile, my profile was already created for me. It was a clone of my Twitter profile. And I think it had like $60,000 sitting in the piggy bank and it just said, claim it, verify your account, like claim it and that money's yours. And I said, oh, that's gonna work. People are gonna respond to that kind of incentive. Sam did it too. Sam, you had, I don't know what, $50,000 in your thing. Sam claimed it and withdrew within a month or something like that. He bounced out of there. But, um, so people will remember BitCloud. You were the creator of BitCloud. At the time, you were an anonymous account only known as Diamond Hands. Now BitCloud has been renamed to DeSo, essentially. That's, you know, the new brand. And you've come out in the public, and now you're doing podcasts. So that's where we are. Welcome to the show.

BitCloud's awesome.

That's a great name.

I love that.

Yeah, man. I mean, so just for context, Sam and Sean, thanks for that awesome intro, man. Yeah. I mean, so since early 2019, I've been working really on a blockchain that can power social networks, not just Bitclout, but many other apps. Now there are actually over 100 apps being built on the actual blockchain itself, which we call decentralized social or DeSo. And so Bitclout was actually just the first app that really we launched on the blockchain. And so kind of after working on it for almost 2 years from early 2019, we were like, hey, you know, now let's kind of put all the features together that this blockchain can support into some kind of product. And so that was Bitcloud and it was really just a prototype and it was intended to kind of exercise and test a lot of the functionality. But the biggest one is like the storage and the indexing of posts, which is a very hard problem for blockchains to solve. And I don't think anyone other than DeSo really has has had a good solution to that. Um, but, uh, but yeah, obviously we launched it.

So, so let me give a little, let me give a, let me give a layman, layman explanation of this. So Sam, I don't know if you know this, but, um, there are actually bunch of different types of, of blockchains because the apps that you're building on top of them have different needs. So like, of course, you know, Bitcoin has its blockchain and it's all it's trying to do is, you know, really store value, be super secure. It, it doesn't need to be the fastest. Because Bitcoin's not about speed, it's about security really above all else. And then Ethereum was like, okay, we're gonna make a blockchain that's more programmable. It's gonna have maybe less security than Bitcoin because it's more programmable, but it's gonna be able to do all these other things. And then like these apps came out like on top of Ethereum that were like CryptoKitties and Top Shot, which were basically like the first kind of like NFT projects that got big and they immediately like overwhelmed the Ethereum network. And so the guys who built NBA Top Shot, when they, you know, they were the same crew that built CryptoKitties. So when they went out to build NBA Top Shot, they actually made their own blockchain called Flow. And Flow was optimized for the use case of trading NFTs. And it can do higher volume. And so they all have different trade-offs. And so what you're saying is you made a blockchain that was good at doing one thing, which is social networks are basically about posting photos and videos and containing all that. But today, if you go try to embed a photo and a video on top of the Bitcoin blockchain or Ethereum blockchain, it would be— it's not made for that. And so it would be either too big, too slow to whatever, just to render one like newsfeed. So you guys built your own. So is the name of the blockchain DeSo and the app is Bitcloud? Is that the idea?

And Bitcloud, by the way, Sean, it's really interesting. It's actually just one app. There's actually over 100 now that are built on top of it. So you could like actually see the same data.

Yeah, you say that, but like, does anybody use any of these apps? Like, you know, I got 100 items on my desk, they're all worthless. Does anyone care? Does anyone care about these 100 apps on top of DeSo?

Really?

Yeah. Sean, what's really interesting is diamondapp.com is actually more popular than BitCloud already now. So I think it just passed it even though it launched like a week ago.

Nice.

Polygram.cc is the app that people go to for NFTs. So actually when people share DeSo NFTs, they actually usually share links to Polygram, not BitCloud. Pulse is really good for trading coins, and CloudFeed is actually a mobile app. By the way, CloudFeed, I think, might already have more users than BitCloud as well, which is kind of crazy. Oh, nice.

I use CloudFeed because it's— because there's no mobile app, right? So I think that's one of the challenges. Why isn't there an app? Because you're almost sort of playing with one hand tied behind your back. Twitter, Facebook, they can send you push notifications. They're a normal app. For Cloud Feed, I had to like save something to my home. I had to save a website onto my home screen to make it look like an app, but I still can't do push notifications. So is there a rule that's— that Apple's blocking or Google Play's blocking?

No. Well, there are apps. So there's Cloud Feed and Flick App is actually another one that's actually created by the former CEO of FanDuel. And it's also very, very popular. But really, like, Sean, you're touching on our strategy, which is we actually don't want to build any products.

At all.

I didn't even want to launch Bitcloud ideally. I think that with this kind of next wave of social, I think what we're going to see is kind of a separation of concerns where you have this blockchain, which is the DeSo blockchain that powers, you know, kind of the backend of all these things. And then people who are much better than me at building products actually go out there and build them. Right. And so, for example, if you look at Diamond App or you look at Polygram, you know, again, polygram.cc, you go to them and you're like, well, this looks way better than that crappy Craigslist-like thing that Natter built. You know, which is Bitcloud. And so it's really the strategy for us to not build anything and to let— so we call it the app layer to be owned by other people, to give it away, actually.

So I think we should— I think we should do two things. I think we should explain why this matters, because to most people you're saying like Polygram and Diamond App, and it's like these are things they've never heard of and they should go check it out. But like, I think— I think it's more important to just get— have the idea click in their head first. Which is if I went to Facebook, let's say I was a bad guy, right? I go to Facebook and I wanted to take the most valuable thing I could take.

Yeah.

It wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't be the engineers. It wouldn't be the sign out front. It wouldn't be Mark Zuckerberg. I couldn't even— Mark Zuckerberg is less valuable than the one most important thing, which is basically the database, right? So Facebook would guard with its life access to the database, which is basically a whole bunch of rows that says, Sam Parr. Here's his date of birth. Here's his, his profile picture. Here's who he's friends with. And that information they keep under lock and key. And they give out little tidbits, like when they created a platform, or you could build a Facebook app on top of Facebook, or you can do login with Facebook. They give you a little bit of access because it's so valuable, right? Um, if I'm an app, I don't want to make you go through a full registration form and upload a photo and then ask you to name all your friends and add them. If I could just let you push one button, and boom, I grab your Facebook profile and your Facebook friends. That was a really powerful idea, but Facebook obviously keeps it under lock and key. And what's cool about— this is the same way that, like, you know, what's the most valuable asset that the US government has? It's either the, the guns or the money. It's one of the two. But let's just take the guns out for a second. The money, right? The right to sort of print the money and say, we get to collect taxes in this currency, therefore we have a monopoly on money. And Bitcoin kind of broke that monopoly in a way. It said, hey, here's money without the government. If you like the money part but you don't want the government, you can use Bitcoin. And what you're kind of doing is the same idea, which is you're turning a social network inside out. The thing that Facebook and Twitter would never do, they would never just give you account, uh, root access to its database. What you're saying is, here's a social network and the database is fully open and available to all. If anybody wants to build any app, you can use this database. It is fully transparent and accessible. That's the main reason it exists. And so you're kind of taking a social network and you take the thing they protect at its core and you're turning it inside out. You're putting it right at the surface for other people to use. That's the big idea for this stuff. And what does that mean? That means today, if you don't— people are complaining about the Facebook algorithm, right? Fake news, or I don't like that Facebook censored Donald Trump, or I don't like that Facebook did this. Well, you're shit outta luck. You can't go use Facebook 2. You can't go use Facebook Red, which has a different algorithm. But with, with this idea of DeSo, that's what could happen. Somebody could just make a new app with a new algorithm that says, I'm only gonna show pictures of hot girls. I'm only gonna show— I'm not gonna censor anything, or I'm gonna highlight things that you, you get to decide how your feed is curated. And so you could build another app that people could use without starting all over from scratch. It gives people choice. I think that's the big idea. Did I get it right or did I miss something?

I mean, you nailed it.

Yeah.

And, and maybe just to to put like a slightly different, different take, a way of saying it is today, you know, Facebook, Twitter, uh, you know, they're really about monopolizing content, like you said, keeping it under lock and key so that they can show ads on it. And if they allow anyone else to build an app, like if they allow another company to build an app on that monopolized content, they lose those eyeballs and they can't show ads to them and it impacts their bottom line. So really the fact that their business model is driven by ads is what kind of forces them to say, okay, This content's under lock and key. We're the only ones who can build apps on it. We're the only ones who can curate it and show a feed. And we can't let anyone else aggregate eyeballs other than us. We're the only ones. So really what DSO is about. Yeah, right.

And there's one other component you just mentioned there, which is the users, the people creating all the content, essentially doing all the work. Us, the dancing monkeys that go sit on Twitter all day coming up with interesting ideas, giving them the interesting content. We get zero, right? So like, if I go check my Twitter ad split or my Facebook ad split and Facebook made, I don't know how many tens of billions of dollars on ads this year, um, but I get zero, right? And, and so that's the other component, which is their business model is we gotta keep all the eyeballs and then we wanna keep as much of the rev share as possible. Um, that's their, their natural kind of the game theory would, would lead them to do that. And with, so something like DSO, you know, I can make a post, I can post on there, I can go post on BitCloud and people will literally, I can make money off of it. Basically, if my post goes viral, I will actually benefit from the virality, from the value of my content. And that's the other, if all this shit works, right? Like forget the blockchain, forget about the how it works. If it works, that's one thing that's gonna change that the creators who make all the content will get a much larger share of the revenue. What, what do you think that share ends up being? Is it more like 50/50? Is it 90/10? Is there, is there even a rev share? Like, how much do you as the maker of the DeSo blockchain get?

Yeah, well, that's, that's the funny thing is that today the way Facebook makes money is with ads. And like you said, it doesn't share very much of that with the creators because when you have a monopoly on something, you know, you can be pretty greedy about it. And so DeSo, we're really all about opening up the content. So instead of monopolized content, it's open content. So when you make a post on Bitcloud, for example, it actually shows up in the Diamond app, in Cloudfeed, and all these other apps. Because again, the content is open. It's kind of like a utility rather than a monopoly. And the question then, if you have all the content open, is like, OK, wait, but how does anyone make money if all the content's open? Like, can't show ads when all the content is open. That's why Facebook is the way that it is. But the interesting thing is— when you put all of the content on a blockchain, you actually get two things. You get openness, all the content's open, anyone can build on it, which we've been talking about. But you also get access to kind of a new set of features that involve money in a very direct way. And so, for example, what you were talking about earlier is the fact that someone can have a coin associated with their profile that anyone can buy or sell. That was one of the features that the DeSo blockchain supports. That feature is very difficult to do in a centralized way, both because the traditional financial system is very kludgy. So to have it, for example, be that anyone in any country can throw tens of thousands of dollars around left and right, the traditional financial system isn't really built for that. And then aside from that, it's all open. So people can actually build on it and iterate and create new experiences off of that same kind of money feature set that we haven't even thought of before. And so going back to how does anyone make money, right? The DeSo blockchain has a native coin called DeSo, right? And so by holding it similar to how anyone holds Bitcoin, right, as more usage comes onto that blockchain, the, you know, people, the demand for DeSo should go up, which should cause the price to increase, you know, and then everyone who holds DeSo does very well. But aside from that, you know, because that's how, you know, I and anyone who's bought DeSo makes money. The creator can basically keep the rest. And so there might be small fees charged by the apps that kind of enable the creator to do— like, for example, CloutFeed or Diamond App might charge small fees in order to earn an honest living and to make good money. And so I think we might see basically a splitting of the market by a bunch of different apps that kind of charge small fees to allow the creators to do what they do. But that's competitive as opposed to monopolistic. And will hopefully result in a lot more of the value accruing to the creator as a result. So that's kind of the way to think about it.

I think just a couple of kind of quick questions because Sean is deeper in this world than I am. And I actually think that there's a few more interesting stories here than just the technology. So how many people work there right now as full-time staff?

Yeah, so we have about a dozen people.

How much? Yeah.

And yeah, and what's funny is that team, we're now focusing mainly on the blockchain. And so, but if you count all the people who are working on apps, you know, yeah, but they're not—

we got hundreds, right? And, and totally. Yeah. Only 12 people. That's crazy. So you raised, you raised funding to do this. Yeah. I think $100 million, right?

Yes, it was actually 5,000 Bitcoin, which, you know, has appreciated a bit.

And yeah, and you raised— so you raised money. But besides that money, Can you tell me how much money has been invested? So Dharmesh, who we've had on this pod, I think— I don't— I don't know. But if I had to guess, I wouldn't be surprised if he spent over $1 million buying other people's coins. Roughly.

I think he said it publicly. I think he said it on BitCloud.

So how much money?

Investing over $1 million.

Can you tell me how much has been invested on the platform?

Yeah. Well, so what's really cool is because it's a blockchain, it's open and all of this data is open. So you can go, for example, to prospercloud.com. Or, you know, I think BitCloudPulse.com/stats or like any of these websites and they'll tell you. I think right now there's about $80 million invested in people's coins, which to me is actually really low. I think we actually— yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It's awesome. And all that—

does that count the money you guys invested? Because when I showed up from day one, you guys did a smart growth hack, which is that you sort of pre-bought a bunch of coin from Naval and from Chamath and from Kim Kardashian and whoever. So you kind of bought coins at a very low price for all these so that their accounts had some initial value which would attract those people to come claim their accounts. So does that $80 million count the money that you guys bought?

I think it does, but I don't think it was very, very many coins that we actually put in. It was like maybe tens of thousands of, of DeSo, you know, that went into it. I'd have to look at actually how much of it is that appreciation of that. But, um, yeah, but there's definitely a piece of that for the people.

Wait, let me say one more thing. The people listening now—

sorry, go ahead, Sam.

We're looking at you now. You're in a dark room. You have the shades pulled down. We had, um, Biology on here, um, a while ago, and he had the same thing. It was very dark, and he was like, you know, I don't— and he said on the pod, he's like, I don't really like talking about my location because because he said, I say some crazy— I make crazy predictions. I'll speak out against powerful people. And I'm, you know, I don't want to, like, take unnecessary risk and let them know where I am.

Are—

is this— are you in the same boat?

Okay. Not at all. Well, you know, we're recording in the middle of the day.

It's dark. I wanted to— I was curious, like, are you— are you a—

yeah. Unlike—

do you— do you have security guards?

Unlike most Bond villains.

I—

no, I'm just kidding. Yeah.

No, no.

I'm very open. I'm in L.A. You know, I have a house here.

People come to my house.

Do you have security? I'm a very open person. Well, I don't know if you're supposed to talk about your security because that, you know, there's security through obscurity.

Well, dude, it's like saying, like, I don't kiss and tell when someone asks if you hooked up with someone. Like, you've just acknowledged it by not saying no.

Yeah. But yeah, you know, I'm, you know, I'm safe. I like to think I'm safe.

Sorry, let me ask this last question. This is the last 5 minutes. So you just had a crazy— Love it.

I love it.

So you told me you're 29. I looked at your LinkedIn. You've had some— like, all your jobs have been like fancy, like high-end, really great jobs. So, but like compared to the job that you have now, they were normal. Is working at BitClout at all— or, uh, DSO— is it at all a normal— like, are you gonna run this like a normal company, or are you gonna be, um, a little, uh— like, if you had to explain to your parents, um, like how your staff works and things like that, would it appear as though you do have a normal— a normal company, or are you doing some eccentric stuff? Stuff that would be intriguing.

Yeah, well, that's funny, actually. So just to go into some eccentricities of the project, you know, that 5,000 Bitcoin I mentioned, all that money actually came in before there was any corporate entity set up to do anything. And so essentially the way it worked was the blockchain was running. And if you sent Bitcoin to this treasury wallet, the blockchain would basically watch that treasury wallet and give you Disso coins when it saw that there was a deposit there to like a corresponding key. And so it was all automatic. And so there were over 44,000 purchases. And I don't even know 99% of like, like them who they are because they could just send Bitcoin to that thing and they would get DeSo coins on the DeSo blockchain. And yeah, we, you know, we didn't set up a corporate entity and that was, you know, kind of two reasons. There's a big reason that we don't want people to rely on it, to feel like this is a centralized thing that's going to own everything. When you have equity holders, fiduciary duty forces them to milk everything and to be like, hey, we should close this down at some point and really make money off of it in a different way. So that was important. But yeah, and then just from a regulatory standpoint, there was no issuer of anything. You just kind of threw Bitcoin in and got DeSo back. And so what happened recently is— and obviously, that made it very difficult to hire. That made it very difficult to even talk about who we are. But very recently, the platform, the blockchain has kind of gotten decentralized enough where there are thousands of nodes running things. There's, like I said, over 100 projects, a lot of them pretty legit. And we felt comfortable setting up a corporate entity and kind of more normalizing how we hire and stuff. So now, as of a couple of weeks ago, there's the DeSo Foundation. And so I'm on the board of it. And I'm the only one right now, but we're hoping to basically bring on some really legit people to join me. And so it can actually be this kind of well-governed thing. And everyone's going to work for that entity. And so I think going forward, it will look very normal. And it'll kind of just be an organization that's a nonprofit where people are paid with cash and DeSo, like a combination of the two. And we develop the blockchain and fund other people to build apps. Like I said, we're giving away the app layer. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it.

So, so early on, I remember the story was, uh, nobody knows the creator, but like I heard kind of through back channels, oh, we, we kind of know who it is. 'Cause, 'cause it seemed like you went out fundraising. 'Cause it was like, hey, this is, should I send my Bitcoin to this random ass wallet and, you know, get back this coin back that I don't know if I want it, if what is the value of this coin?

Why would I send my Bitcoin?

It's unknown. and it was, no, no, these are, yeah, site barely worked. It looked like a virus. Um, and then, you know, and it was like, no, no, no, there's, so I texted some people. I said, hey, do you know what's, who's behind this? Is this legit? They said, I think it's legit. The guy behind it's legit. Or the people behind it have, are real builders. And they said, uh, you know, Andreessen and Social Capital and like a few tier 1 VCs have like, are backing it. And so that gave people a lot of comfort. And that's why people like me and others put in money. I sent $100,000 into Bitcloud or whatever to get— it wasn't even called DeSo at the time.

I was getting back cloud or something.

Yeah, different name, same currency. And so are you— but you're saying it now like, oh, I don't know, these strangers on the internet started sending us Bitcoin.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm pretty sure you did some kind of road show or somebody was doing some kind of sales pitch to bridge those two gaps. I don't buy this Dennis thing.

What's that? You're not— No, no, you're way sharper and you're playing us a little.

No, no, no, no. I don't mean to play anyone. No, totally. Just to give a little more detail.

I love it.

I love it. But yeah, just to give a little more detail. Yeah. So what's funny is, you know, I worked on this blockchain for almost 2 years since early 2019, and I met a lot of investors through my last company, which was called Basis, you know, where I raised $140 million and then it didn't work. Wound up giving, you know, deciding to kind of do what I think is the right thing, give all the money back. But so what happened with DeSo is I kind of worked on it for 2 years, you know, alone by myself, brought on a couple of good friends, and then I talked to a bunch of the big names that are now involved. So like Social Capital, Andreessen, Sequoia, all of them. And so what's funny about that is that I, you know, obviously I did— I talked to those people. And so of the 44,000 purchases, it's probably a few hundred where, you know, I kind of told them, hey, this is what it is. And so what's interesting about it is—

but those were the big purchases, right? So they might be a few hundred, but they were millions each. I think like, you know, so it might make up 80% of that.

I think about $30 million worth was that, which is, I think, not a huge percent. And no one has— no one owns more than 5% of the supply. Supply from that. So I actually think, you know, I actually cared a lot about keeping it very well distributed like any good cryptocurrency. But, but yeah, but all of them actually don't own— importantly, they don't own equity in anything. All of their interest is in the same asset that you or I hold, which is DeSo. Some of them used corporate entities to convert dollars to Bitcoin in order to do this weird thing, but they hold DeSo like those entities hold DeSo for them. and they'll like take delivery like, you know, whenever they want.

So, so that's cool. And I think at the beginning you had a bunch of things sort of like we just retraced this story, right? So you do Basis, you, you have this idea for stablecoin, you end up giving back the money when you decide it's not going to work. You, um, you have this new, new idea for, for a decentralized social network. You raise some money from legit hitters, other people pile in. Like you're saying, it's all pretty quote unquote fair, which is that we're all owning the same thing. And, and then you get to the point of the launch, you're— you decide to be anonymous. You try to go the Satoshi route, but it doesn't work. Why didn't that— why did you want to do that? And why didn't that work? Too many people.

Yeah. Well, so, yeah, so basically, you know, I've been working on this blockchain, the DeSo blockchain, for almost 2 years. And we were like, hey, you know, we should really launch kind of a prototype app to start testing it, like in the, in the field, so to speak. And that was Bitcloud. And we wanted to not really like have it go mainstream until at least like the middle of this year, like the middle of 2021. And so, but, you know, obviously launching earlier is better. And so we kind of accelerated, said, OK, in March we're going to start sharing these like password-protected links with some people, just get a few hundred users, kind of see how the blockchain is holding up with like this kind of activity. And so Yeah, so what ended up happening was it kind of went out of control and the links got like way overshared. And to the point where I kind of had to go out there, you know, I had to start, you know, saying, hey, like, this is what this is and this is like, you know, what's going on. But for me personally, you know, I've always been really— I think I've always admired how like Satoshi kind of like launched Bitcoin without creating kind of like a centralized person that everyone kind of relies on or is like, this is our, you know, our guy. So it was really— I wanted to kind of do the same thing there. And so I launched with, you know, a pseudonym, Diamond Hands. And immediately, you know, it was kind of very hard to get press. It was hard to get people to kind of listen to the story that is the real story versus making up their own. And so we had a lot of press saying, hey, like, This is a scam. And by the way, because it was just a prototype, there were a lot of things were missing. So you couldn't cash out your money. You couldn't actually convert your money from DSO into dollars.

And I was like, wait a minute, Sean. So you're telling me that there's a website that you invest money in, you don't know who made it, it doesn't work a lot of the times, and you can't get the money out, right? And he's like, yeah. I was like, oh, okay, got it. Just making sure we're on the same page here.

Yeah, rightfully so. Any other time, I would say that's a complete scam. Also, none of the code was open. So even though it's a blockchain and it was running on a few dozen nodes, like no one could actually audit it or be like, hey, this is a real thing. So we were just not prepared at all.

So let me tell you something. There was a whole bunch of criticisms like what you're talking about, right? The code is not open source. You can't cash out. Oh, they scraped our Twitter profiles. Oh, there's, you know, there's a big pre-buy. People got in super cheap. You know, all this stuff. There was all these criticisms of it. We don't know who the founders are. You know, they're kind of anonymous. But my theory, and you tell, I wanna know what you think about this. So I have this phrase, which is, I think emotion commits the crime and then logic does the coverup. So all these logical complaints I don't think are the real reason why people were so like up in arms about this new project that actually is like a really net, like it would, if something like this existed, it would be a huge net positive in the world and those same people hate Facebook. Well, this is the antidote. If something like this could actually get off the ground and work. And so I was surprised that the emotion was there. And I think I've— at least this is my theory. I think that people don't like when someone gets rich without quote unquote earning it. And I think what people saw is that the insiders, so the people who created it, or maybe the early buyers, they bought so early on the bonding curve, they got so early on. And wow, $100 million has come into this thing. These coins have run up in price, or the profiles have gone up in price. And there was this feeling like, like, I don't know, I don't know how well you did, but here's my guess. I think you've made tens of millions of dollars already liquid without, uh, at the minimum. And your project is like under 10,000 DAU or something like that, right? So, uh, or under 50,000, let's say. So like in Already in the tech world, this tech gets backlash because people will raise at like $100 million valuation and people are like, oh, I've been running this restaurant and laundromat for years. And how does this little app with, you know, with, with no business model be worth $100 million?

Right.

There's already people who get upset about that. But, but the one saving grace is that they're not liquid. So it's not like the founders running around in a Lambo, living in a mansion in L.A., but in crypto you're liquid too. So you, you get the early hype and you get the liquidity, the Lambo and the mansion. And I think that that is actually what triggers people about crypto in general, Bitcoin in general, you know, people who buy an NFT and they get rich, you know, they make $1 million off this random image. I think to other people that feels inherently unfair. And so do you— what do you think is my theory? What do you think of my theory? And then what's your kind of response to the people who do feel that way?

I think there must be some, like, validity to your theory, because if you read— there's a great book called The Infinite Machine about Ethereum, and it catalogs, like, what happened to Ethereum, how it launched, all this stuff. They got major backlash from Bitcoin people because of the way they raised money, where they were like, hey, like, you know, projects aren't supposed to like take Bitcoin for, you know, another shitcoin. Like, you know, this is like bad. I mean, I read that book right after, you know, kind of everything that was happening with BitCloud, and I was like, this is eerily similar. So, so I think part of, part of what you're saying has to be part like, like a factor. You know, dude, look, that said, you know, since then, DeSo is listed on exchanges. You can trade it on Blockchain.com, AscendEX, and a really big one. You know, a couple of big ones are coming soon. And, you know, like the code is all open and people have gotten really passionate about it, you know, contributing to it. The last couple of people we've hired are like open source. They were just contributing to it and we hired them. So I think that, you know, if I saw someone who's very clearly a scammer making lots of money, I would be upset in a way that I would be like, I wouldn't be as upset if I felt like there was a shred of them not being a scammer, which we didn't have because I was anonymous. You couldn't cash out. The app was going down a lot. So whatever, whatever theory there is is probably exacerbated.

Can I give you some feedback? And it's like, it's a compliment. I— when you first launched, I was like, Diamond Hands. Like, when I think of Diamond Hands, I think of finance bros. And, um, I, you know, when I think of this anonymous thing, I was like, I actually, I'm not on board with this. Although I agree, I think it was wise for you to, to launch anonymously. I actually think it's wonderful that you're coming out because your personality, even though we've only known each other for 45 minutes now, your personality, I, for some, you have a very trusting, you, you give off trustworthy vibes. And I actually think it's— it's— you've done the right move by coming out and discussing things. I actually— it makes me like BitCloud more. Before, the way that it looked and the Diamond Hands name, I was like, I don't know if I— if this— if this screams trust. But you— I think it's good to have— like, what's the— like, I'm a pretty big noob, but what's the founder of Ethereum?

What's—

how do you say— yeah. So I follow Vitalik and I watch a lot of his interviews. Scream's trustworthy. Like, I, I, I, I, I, like, I buy what he's saying. I'm like, oh, you're like— he's really young, but he's way wise beyond his years. He, he says a lot of intelligent things that I agree with. He seems good-natured. You have a very similar quality, so I think it's smart that you're doing it.

And let's not lie, Sam, Vitalik looks like a boy genius, like uber nerd, and we're like, oh, let's invest in this guy. He's probably going to make it.

But that, you don't You're the perfect mix of like intelligent nerd, but you also like look pretty slick. You're good looking. Yeah, you're smooth. You've got a good— anyway, this is a compliment. I think it's good that you're doing what you're doing.

You're too kind, man. I appreciate it.

Let's do one like thought exercise because I think most people still aren't going to really fully understand. Okay, if a social network decentralized, blah, blah, blah. So let's think about it from the perspective of the user who doesn't care if a database runs on SQL or the blockchain, and who, you know, they're gonna use something because it provides some new value to them, right? So even the idea of like it not being a monopoly, like I think most people are inherently fairly lazy and they're probably gonna just go with a default app anyways, you know, for a social network, even if there was more choice. So let's just take the actual like fun bit. So, um, on Bitclout, there was this idea that every creator, every user had a coin. And so I had a coin and I, you know, you gimme a number, I want it to go up. I'm, I'm, I'm like a monkey. I'll immediately start playing whatever game is required for that number to go up. And so my coin started at a certain price and I remember it at its peak, it was like $5,000 a coin. My market cap was like half a million dollars. I was on top of the world and now I stopped using it and it's crashed. I'm down 4x and, and all this good stuff. But what is the— aside from the, you know, pure gambling side of speculation and just the joy of seeing money go up, whether as a holder or the owner of the coin, what is the actual purpose? Why should individuals on a social network have their own coin? What would you do with that? Why is that a good idea? And just walk through like a use case. So no theory, but like, here's Joe, here's Sam. Here's why Sam would want this and why that's good for Sam.

Like the idiot of this podcast. I'll take it. He was like, Sam, so do you know that there's different blockchains? Yeah, go ahead, Natter. I'll let you— I'll let you lead into that.

No, I do.

Talk to me like I'm 5.

Totally. Well, like, yeah, I mean, look, it's a great question. I mean, so there's a deeper story to, you know, and so, by the way, the DeSo blockchain supports all kinds of money stuff, right? Not just coins, but also NFTs and diamonds, which are like tips. And people can build other things too. But the coins, having a coin associated with your profile is kind of what I think to be kind of, you know, this wave was about NFTs. I think the next wave is going to be about creator coins, also known as social tokens. And the reason why I got really excited about them as a, as like kind of an asset class is actually a cash flow story. So essentially, you know, with DeSo, when you use any app to access DeSo, you can do a lot of the same things you do on a traditional social network. Like you can post and all that kind of stuff. But you can also do stuff with money. And you have new ways to monetize that kind of arise. And so what's interesting is that essentially you can have creators making money through these other features and then take a percentage of that cash flow and send it back to that creator's coin holders as a dividend long term. And so just to give an example, right, today when you sell an NFT on any DeSo app, you know, like Polygram or Diamond, you can actually set a percentage that's like what we call a creator coin, a coin holder royalty. And so every time that NFT resells, a percentage of that sale goes back to the coin holders. And so I think that essentially the coins, if you play this out, right, and you have like, for example, promoted posts where someone can give you— you can have an inbox of posts that people pay you to like repost to your followers and a percentage of that can go to the coin holders. You know, you kind of have all of these new kind of like money native, you know, blockchain native business models for creators making money. And if you allow a percentage of that to flow to the coins, then suddenly it's kind of like you unbundled the equity of a company like Facebook into like each creator's coin and therefore the fans or the holders of that creator. And so to me, the coins are exciting as a means long term of like democratizing kind of like the cash flows of a social network into the fans of a particular creator. And if you play all of that out, suddenly it makes it a lot easier for really awesome smaller creators to get discovered. Discovered, right? Because when you create that, that kind of loop of like, oh, if they become big, cash flows will flow to their coin from their monetization on the platform, right? And those cash flows will be big if they're popular. Suddenly you want to back the smaller creator who you recognize as awesome, but that nobody else really knows about. And so to me, kind of democratizing the ownership of a social media platform is like what the coins are about and creating that incentive for smaller creators to get discovered, get invested in, have people kind of grow with them is kind of the long term of it. But obviously it's early. So a lot of people don't—

what's it going to look like in 5 or 10 years?

So I think—

what do you think your business will be like?

Yeah, I mean, so even in a couple of years, you know, I mean, you know, let's say we have like, you know, 10 million daily active users, right? There are a lot of ways that we can build monetization for creators into the blockchain. NFTs are already there and creators have made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of that, like tens of thousands. I think for one of them, they had over $100,000 flow to their coin already through the Creator Coin royalties. But there are other features, too. You know, like, for example, that like that pay to promote or pay to repost kind of mechanism where an advertiser can say, hey, repost this to your fans, I'll give you this amount of money. And then a percentage of that can flow to the coins. So basically any way, new ways that we create for creators to monetize on the platform, A percentage of that can flow to the coins. And suddenly the coins kind of become not just about pure speculation, but about, hey, like, what kind of cash flows is this creator going to do? And that it's going to be a lot because not just because the platform is more efficient. You know, like, I do think, you know, things like NFTs, things like, you know, pay-to-repost can be more efficient than the traditional model today where we have kind of a centralized company just showing random ads. But Yeah, but also just because there are so many more things that you can do, right, that could, you know, earn cash flows that end up going to the coin that we haven't even thought about yet.

So you did the thing that I was hoping you wouldn't do, which is you did theory. Sorry. So, you know, anytime— this is the tell in the tech world. Anytime somebody starts talking about democratizing, democratizing, it's the new smart guy way of democratizing.

True.

I can't stand say that word.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, you know, you want your company to be disruptive and democratizing at the same time, right? And, uh, also if they say there's a new asset class, they're probably— it's probably a good idea, but they're giving you kind of like the grandiose Steve Jobs vision. Um, actually I shouldn't say Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs was great at basically saying a thousand songs in your pocket and like just leading with the killer hook. And, and I think for for this, you know, what I was hoping you would say, and so I'm gonna kind of say it here, is, I don't know if you know this, but Sam is an aspiring fitness influencer, a rising fitness influencer. And so those who are, yeah, rising, I should say, not aspiring. He's, he's aspired. Um, yeah. Oh, perfect.

I got my two dollar jeans.

I love it. You wanna plug your other brand? Yeah.

Dude, Bitcoin, my, my, my niche is like guy next door. Your niche could be like— like, love it.

I'll be like the nerd who, you know, started really frail and then made his way. There's definitely a need.

And so, you know, someone like Sam, basically, I know Sam, I say this guy and I see his videos, I'm like, oh, these are great videos. He's only getting, you know, a couple thousand views, let's say, right now. But basically what this world would let me do is as an early believer, I can bet on Sam. I could say, I like this guy's content. I think this guy's gonna blow up. And I can kind of vote for his success. I can give him some— so I can buy his coin, which gives him money to like make better content. It gives him a little boost of morale to keep going. Um, but it also lets me go on the ride with him because I think we've all been there before where we discover a band early or a brand early or an influencer early, and then sure, you're, you're, you believe in them and you're so, you're so right. They actually do take off. They never knew you. They never had a real relationship with you. And you didn't benefit from the fact that, you know, Kim Karda— if you knew Kim Kardashian back when she was just Paris Hilton's closet organizer, uh, and you thought she was great, you missed out on the ride. And, and so this lets your true fans go on the ride with you and it turns your fans into sort of shareholders with you. And so, oh bro, I study this stuff. You know, I, Kim Kardashian, where did this come from? I have to know. I must know. And, uh, and sure enough, there, there's a story. And so, you know, Sam, let's say I would bet on Sam. Sam would get that cash flow. Sam could use that to make a cooler video. And when Sam makes that video and he gets more followers, they have to buy in at a higher price point than I did, cuz now Sam's more established. So my stock is going up. I'm earning instead of just following, right? I own instead of just following, which is the way the world works today with Twitter and Instagram. You just follow, you don't earn. And then this, the, you know, furthermore, Sam could say, hey, you know what? How do I make my coin really valuable to hold? What if I kind of OnlyFans it and I said, I'm gonna do some exclusive stuff with only my coin holders who hold over 100 of my coin. So it's up to him to decide if he wants to make his coin more juicy, more, more enticing to hold, which again, will make my stock go up. If I know Sam's the kind of guy, he connects with his fans, he's gonna put in the effort that's gonna make these coins more valuable. And so it takes this idea that's been around for a long time, The 1,000 true fans, the thing that any artist knows that they need, those real believers, and it turns them into people who actually benefit from your rise. And so that's what I think, that's the good thing that I think will come of this aside from, you know, destroying Facebook and all that good stuff. I think the good thing that will come of this, it'll make being a tastemaker and a curator like a job pretty much. You can actually get paid for having good taste, for following, for believing in somebody early on, which is the way that things should be, I think.

Yeah, Sean, how are you better at explaining this than me also? I, I, I'm kind of, uh, I'm not offended, but, uh, that's awesome. Awesome.

Well, dude, when I first shouted out Bitcloud, I got a lot of shit. I was like, okay, I got to come up with a reason that I like this besides I think this is going to make a lot of money for me. Uh, so I started thinking about what, what is the appeal here, and I had to kind of defend myself. And in doing so, I had to come up with a case of why does this shit matter at all besides just being a gamble.

Yeah, that's true. I did. I, I, I remember it. Uh, but yeah, Sean, just to add, which is really interesting, uh, like you said there's actually never been a way to actually invest in someone when they're small and make money on their rise like in like this easily, this efficiently. And what's really interesting is there's actually yet another interesting kind of like layer on it, which is once you invest in someone, your bias is to be supportive. Your bias is actually to be, hey, I want this guy to succeed. I want this person to be something. And you can align in a way that you can't really on like without that mechanism, like being able to buy into someone, you know, creates kind of an incentive that doesn't exist. And what's crazy is that even Bitclout, you know, Bitclout, Diamond, all these apps, they're actually very positive discourse, a lot of it, even though, you know, there's not really any kind of, you know, there's not like there's less moderation than traditional social media. Right. And the reason I think is basically you're investing in people, right? You're going long. And when you give people the ability to, like, move money around, right, people naturally go long. And when they go long, they actually get aligned and want to support you. And so weirdly enough, like, I love, like, when people say, like, money is like the root of all evil, you know, like money is bad. And I think that's part of why people reacted weirdly to Bitclout because, like, oh, money, prices, whatever. But like, if you just look past that for 2 seconds, you'll see that it's actually being used as an alignment tool. That's making a lot of positive things happen that haven't happened.

What are your— um, let me ask you a couple personal questions real quick. What do your parents do for a living?

Yeah, so, uh, my dad was an engineer and my mom is a social worker.

What city?

Yeah, so my mom was in Virginia where I grew up, uh, for a long time, but she actually moved to San Francisco.

Uh, my dad passed away a few years ago, but yeah, at your LinkedIn You, you, you've always been a freak. You went to Princeton, you know, you, you've all, you, you did computer science and applied math at Princeton. You work. Yeah, it's a compliment. That's a compliment. You worked at J.P. Shaw, famous for, uh, being high frequency trading, but also it's like, that's where I think Jeff Bezos worked. And, uh, the founder, I forget his name.

Shaw.

Is it just Shaw? Uh, David Shaw.

David Shaw. Yeah.

He's, you know, a wizard. You work— you went to Google and you were a software engineer there, and then you raised $125 million for a startup, which is crazy. Or $133 million. You said on this blog post you gave the money back because, you know, it didn't work out so well. What are your— what does your mom think about, like, when you're trying to explain to your mom, who's a social worker— my mom's a teacher, so she doesn't, you know, and I'm in tech too. When you're explaining to your mom what you do for a living or your aunts and uncles or your brother and sister friends who aren't, you know, like you, What do they think about this? The fact that a 29-year-old, although, you know, you were 25, it looks like when you raised $133 million, are they like, what do they think of this life that you have?

Yeah. I mean, so my mom watches every single video that comes out. She's going to watch this and she's going to call me about it and tell me all her thoughts. So, so there's that. But yeah, man, I mean, I just, you know, I live a modest life. You know, I don't think anything really has changed for me personally. And like, look, you know, to your point and to Sean's point earlier, you know, on like, oh, someone made so much money without like having produced something, right? You know, I'm very serious about just mentally, I don't think of myself as having any money, right, until we've really made it. Like, you know, I'm talking millions of users, people really getting value at a large scale, right? So to me, it's very important to not think about, oh, I'm— I've made it when, you know, like, like we have a lot to do, like left to do. And so, yeah. And by the way, you know, funny, funny fact with Basis, my last company where I raised $140 million and returned it, I actually had less money after that in my bank account than when I started it, which is basically about 3 years of runway from my like Google and Groupon savings.

Were you broke or—

No, no, I'm very lucky just because, you know, I mean, I had, you know, like 3 years of runway, like, you know, maybe like a few hundred K or whatever. And I'm very lucky to have had that because if I didn't have that, I would have had to go back immediately to working at Google, which— oh my God, that's so bad. It's the best company in the world. I'm very lucky. Right. But, but yeah, my, my, like, it's funny, like I've been through like very high highs and like, well, the lows aren't very low because I'm very lucky, obviously, but But yeah, after Basis, I was like, I'm going to try and do something else that's really impactful, like not in the context of working at a company. And if I can find something before I run out of money, that's great. But if not, I'm going to go enjoy my life at Google, which I love. You know, I really love being an engineer at Google.

I like to talk about this human shit. And you're— I have a feeling that this— I was not— you heard the last podcast. I was the hater of the two, of Big Cloud. My opinion is likely changed. As of now because of how, you know, Sean's like this. My good friend Neville is like this. You're incredibly emotionally stable. And because of that, I actually think that that can make this business incredibly successful.

Well, I mean, I appreciate it, man. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, I mean, I think it's just really important to keep perspective, right? You know, I mean, and also like, you know, Sam, just to emphasize, you know, I'm really lucky. So it's not like it's a lot easier for me to be emotionally stable, I feel, than like someone who's actually had it pretty hard, you know?

And I think genetic. Yeah, I think it's genetic and I think it's upbringing. I think if you're, if you're surrounded by love when you're growing up and for some genetic stuff, you're just going to be like pretty stable.

It's—

I just like now I understand. Now I want to buy your coin on BitCloud.

Oh, nice. Oh, I'm I, that is like the biggest compliment you can give me in this entire podcast. Uh, I actually own some Sean already, but I don't know, Sam, if I found, what's your handle on, on, uh, on Diamond or it's all Diso. So I don't know if you made your account.

I haven't logged in.

We'll find it after this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think you've converted me now. I, like I said, I, I don't think I was completely a complete hater, but of the two, I was the more of the hater for sure. Sean was like, I probably made fun of Sean because he was like, this is the greatest thing ever. And we'll see who's right, but you convinced me.

Well, I think I kind of— I don't know if I fully said this the first time, but basically I think that whoever can break through and create a decentralized social network, well, that'll be one of the most important changes in the world over the next 20 years. Self-driving cars, I think, is gonna save a bunch of lives. I think AI is gonna introduce a lot of, like, productivity gains and, like, you know, kind of cause some labor— like, changes in the way that labor works. And I think that whoever can take social networking and make it an open— do it the crypto way with the crypto values, I think that that person or that group of people is gonna have done a lot of great in the world. And I think it's gonna be a huge project. I think it is gonna be a multi-trillion-dollar project. When it, whenever it works. And I think I said this early on, which is, I don't, I'm not saying that this one will work. I think there's still probably a sub-5% chance that this works. And I said, but if it works, the payoff is huge. So I, that's the type of bet you make in the tech world. Low probability, high payoff. And when you, when you go at it with an enthusiasm, you're gonna learn about it and you're gonna go for that ride with a bunch of early adopters. And even if it crashes and it doesn't end up working out, we're gonna all have learned a bunch of lessons so that when the right one does come around, you say, Ah, that one makes sense. This solves the problems of the last one, or this feels different. And so I know that this is the real one, but you never know unless you go in with, you know, sort of a belief mentality towards these things. Cause it's easy to just say this is not gonna work and you'll be right. Uh, 99 out of 100 times. It's just that the one that 100 matters, you'll have also said is never gonna work and you wrote it off and therefore you didn't benefit from it in any way. That's like, you know, optimism pays in the tech world. And so, even though I got a lot of shit, you got 10,000 times more shit for, for, for doing the project. Um, I just feel like that's such a misguided way of living and like, you know, again, optimism pays in this business. So I, I find skepticism is useful at certain points, but you know, you want to default to optimism and then go in and find the things that don't smell quite right. And, uh, but, but, you know, even then you'll just have learned a bunch and gotten a bunch of experience. And played with all the new things so that, you know, when the real one—

Yeah, dude. And, and yeah, and I think it's really awesome that, you know, for me, you know, I get to do the thing that I love in the world, which is to build cool shit and, and that's helpful to people. And even though, like you said, like 5%, you know, and you can do that and it actually is something that, you know, at least the expected value can help.

But give us, give us the, the craziest story because I remember I was on Big Cloud and it's like, oh, Pamela Anderson joins and she's a huge fan. And then like, I don't know, Whoever, it was all kinds of crazy characters, you know, that were joining this thing. I was like, I haven't thought about Pamela Anderson in like 20 years. This is amazing. And she's like, you know, good creating all these incentives for her coin holders.

Yeah.

You on the inside every day, you must have just been seeing all the random stuff and getting threats from one side and praise from these random people. Give us a, give us a war story or a crazy story that like is just kind of fun that, that, that's happened.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that it did attract a lot of like pretty famous people to like join or create profiles. You know, I think like Diplo and Blau, Tyga and Antonio Brown are still like posting there and stuff. But I think probably the craziest story is at some point I went to a dinner in L.A. and I don't know if I'm like even allowed to say, but there were like a lot of famous people there and I got to kind of like tell them about it.

Give categories. Like, you're talking like Fast and Furious actors?

Are we talking, yeah, Hollywood?

No, no.

Like, were they the bad hubba stank?

How do I even? There were billionaire tech CEOs, and then also the biggest celebrity, like someone's name who Sean mentioned earlier, who was a closet organizer. Okay.

Shimshark Ash. Yeah.

All of them.

Rhymes with that. Yeah. And so I think, Yeah, just being able to kind of explain our vision to all these people was really awesome. And, and yeah, and I think what's cool is like, you know, when you really get to explain it, everyone gets excited about it, even, even in spite of kind of all the initial like, oh, you can't cash out or like this and that. Like when you're like, hey, like, this is what it is. It's inspiring. And like you said, Sean, if we can actually use these features, these new kind of like money features, like the coins, like the NFTs, like diamonds, all that stuff to decentralize social media, it's going to do a lot of good, you know, independent of the fact that they make creators more money and align with fans.

Did you ever think that when you were in high school in Virginia that you'd be a crypto nerd hanging out in L.A. at a mansion dinner with Kim Kardashian?

I mean, what's funny about it is I was really into Bitcoin in college in like 2013. So I built a miner. I met Mark Karpeles, who's the CEO of Mt. Gox. My friend and I like went to Japan and randomly tweeted him and he was like, come by our office. I met him. So I was really into like Bitcoin and crypto. And, you know, when Bitcoin crashed, I was like, okay, I guess I'm going to go do my hedge fund thing or whatever. But it's funny, I think if you told like college Natter that like this is what he'd be doing, I think he'd be like, Yeah, that's awesome. You know, that's, that's cool. I think that's about right. The Kim Kardashian part, like, you know, maybe not. No, I mean, that's—

um, yeah, I'm gonna— it's like I'm asking you stock tips. I'm on BitCloud, uh, I'm on the site now. What, uh, and I could see this, I mean, I could just go and find it, but what, what creators do you own? And what, what, uh, what— which one are you gonna be making any purchases anytime soon? What do you like?

Yeah, definitely. I own active creators. So if a creator is active and like posting and like doing fun stuff or interesting stuff, I buy them. But really the thing that I, you know, like the hedge fund side of me really likes is NFT artists because for NFT artists, even today, not theoretical, all of them set royalties that go to their coins. And so there's real cash flows there that are often like totally disparate like, you know, like their coins are not like correctly priced for like how much money is going to actually flow to their coins. And so I've been— yeah, I bought like Spookyz and Cloudpunk, you know, early. Illuminati is like another one. And those like just the cash flows are like above what it was when I like, you know, those have made up for what it was when I invested in it. So, so that's kind of like— I think that's a strategy that like just traditional, like I do, like I get it. And then as we create more cash flows going to the coins, there'll be even more. But aside from that, because I know that, you know, creators who get big are going to have ways that cash flows go to the coins, the smaller creators who I think are active and are like going to do cool shit.

Anyone in particular, you know, that you enjoy?

That's like the other one. Oh, there are a bunch. Well, so Dharmesh has been crushing it. He's not a smaller creator, but he's just been super active. He's doing a lot of stuff.

Creator of all time right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's very big on the platform. I'm trying to see, like, there's like Matreshka, who's a woman who's very active there and does a lot of stuff. Tijan is this developer who does a lot of awesome stuff. Yeah, it's Aditya.

You want to know my strategy that, that worked on Bitclout? At least early on, this worked pretty well. I was thinking about, it's like, okay, who do I buy? Do I buy the famous people that are not on yet? There's people building scrapers to try to figure out someone's thinking about it or they tweeted it out and it hasn't gotten verified yet. So go front run that. I figured out there's a very simple way to win. And I said, right now with any early project, I've built a bunch of social networks and I know anytime you build a social network, at first 70% of the conversation on that social network is about the social network. This happened with the stuff I built. It's happened if you go to Clubhouse, 80% of the rooms are just end up, they will end up talking about how great Clubhouse is or what it's gonna be or what's bad about it. They're just always talking about the platform itself. So I knew, okay, if people are gonna be interested in the platform itself, I invested in all of the analysts who could, who could go through the on-chain data and report how, what prices were working, you know, how many, how many new users there were and all that good stuff. And so I bought all the analysts dirt cheap and they went up like crazy cuz again, they were talking about the platform in a way that was differentiated cuz the normal person didn't know how to go analyze the blockchain. And then the other one was basically rich active people. So I saw, I saw Dharmesh was just gonna buy his own coin. And Whale Shark was just gonna buy his own coin. Craig Clemens was gonna buy his own coin. And so it's like a company that does a share buyback. It's like, oh, okay, this person has the— they have enough funds where they could like dramatically move their own coin price. So all I gotta do is just buy them and wait for them to do their buybacks. And sure enough, they did. And Dharmesh even said it publicly. He's like, I'm gonna buy— for every follower I get, I'm gonna buy back my— every coin holder I get, I'm gonna buy back 10x of my own coin or something crazy like that. And I was like, well, that's a Ponzi scheme that I love. That's perfect. Great. Uh, like I'll just hitch onto that ride. This guy's guaranteeing, and I know he's a man of his word. He's gonna buy, he's gonna buy back his own stuff and I could just front run that. So that worked amazingly at the beginning. I don't know if that would still work now. Yeah.

I think, I think the strategy of forecasting what content is gonna be popular and then investing in the people who are producing it. I mean, that's like ex— that's like the name of the game, I think. Um, so I think that's pretty awesome.

Uh, The, like, there was a guy who would do, uh, fake designs, like mockups, like, oh, this is what the client could look like.

Yeah.

Oh, if they added NFTs, this is how it could look. It's just like kind of like design porn. Yeah. Design porn. I was like, oh, that's gonna work. People are, again, it's talking about the platform and in a differentiated way, cuz this guy's a designer and he's gonna just design mockups all the time. This is gonna go viral. Great. Buy this guy's coin.

No, that's genius, honestly. Um, yeah. And it'll be interesting to see how it works at scale. Scale, especially because Diamond App is like so mainstream and I think can actually get like some bigger people to like join and start using it. Yeah, I honestly, I wonder how it's going to play out. By the way, another fun thing we didn't talk about is there's actually an algorithmic feed that's like open source now built into the blockchain. So that would probably play into your strategy where you can look at how the feed works and then try and figure out what, what's going to get to the top. It's pretty hard to game, I think. But, but that's, that's another, like, interesting— Have you talked to Dharmesh?

So for the people listening, Dharmesh is one of the co-founders of HubSpot. As of today, he's probably worth, just off HubSpot stock, it's public, you can go and look, probably like $1.5 billion. So very, very, very successful. He was part of BitCloud very early. I mean, he was telling us very early on that he was buying a lot. And he is— he wasn't an angel investor, but he was an early investor in Coinbase. He was an early investor in crypto. He obviously has HubSpot, wildly successful, and he's like, this is my thing. So have you, have you hung out with him? He, that guy is interesting as hell. Yeah.

Well, what's crazy is I think I met Dharmesh like pretty late in the game. I had like a pretty short call with him where I just kind of, we just talked about, you know, life, what the thing is and what, what Bitcloud and DSO is and all that stuff. Um, So what's funny is I think Dharmesh just like really independently kind of saw, whoa, you know, like, you know, if like you said, Sean, you know, in the 5% where it works or whatever, like this is huge. And so what's funny, yeah, I've had a very short conversation with him. I'd love to hang out with him more. But, you know, he's busy and obviously we have a lot to do here using Big Cloud.

I honestly think, you know, he does post a lot. I think 99% of people they'll say they're not doing it for the money and then they totally are. He's like the one person I believe that is not actually doing it for the money. So I, I genuinely believe he's doing it because he's like, I want this to win. And in order for this to win, we need like economic activity. We need like positive energy in the system. So I'm gonna literally like almost in a philanthropic way, put a bunch of money into just like get kickstart this because it's gonna take some enough people doing that because like I said, right now it's small. It's really small. And like that, you know, there's the— with crypto, there's these hype cycles at the beginning, but there's a vicious other side, which is that if it doesn't just keep magically going up, people get disillusioned for a bit, and then it has to get another thing that like picks it up. And so, um, I think he was genuinely just trying to, you know, kickstart activity and enthusiasm.

Totally. And I mean, another thing to your point, Sean, uh, I, I have I have good news for you with regard to if we can do a social media, decentralized social, it's going to be really awesome, which is that I actually think— I won't say the word it's inevitable, but I think it's actually very asymmetric in favor of decentralized platforms actually winning. The main reason being that I think when all the content is open and anyone can build on it, I think that the speed of iteration that you can have and the caliber of product is just a lot higher. So, you know, just like, you know, on that 5%, you know, it's like if, you know, for example, just because all the content is open, right, we can have like all this over 100 teams that like we didn't even hire just go out there and build way better apps than we were capable of building internally. But then it's even bigger, which is like you get like once you get a little bit bigger, you know, let's say you have like a million users now, you have like traditional publishers basically looking at the open content and being like, hey, like, With one engineer, we could spin up like a feed, like ESPN or something can spin up a sports feed for sports influencers, right? And be like, hey, like, this is cheap. Like, we should do this and get into the social game and make marginal money. And then, you know, in other countries, this is, I think, something that Dharmesh really likes. You know, for example, in a country like India or Russia or something like that, today they use Twitter a lot. They use, they use basically apps built predominantly by people in Silicon Valley. And the reason is that Silicon Valley has a monopoly on the content. And because they have that, you have to use their apps. But when all the content is open, you can actually have people in the native country build the apps that you use and tailor it to their user base. You can read stories about how Facebook was just horrible in Japan for a really long time. And they had to make all these optimizations that were like kludgy, that they were just leaving on the ground. No one was doing them because they're a centrally planned organization. Organization. So I think once you have a blockchain that can actually handle posts and data, which hasn't really— has not existed until DeSo, I think it just kind of opens the floodgates for this, like, number of innovators and amount of energy that wants to build. That is, it just has to beat the central plan model. I just don't see how it doesn't, though.

I know that, like, I— it always works this this way. You make a big splash, um, and then there's like either down— it goes down or it plateaus, and then it needs to go up. Right now you guys had that massive splash, it went away for a minute because as does everything, novelty always goes, goes away. And then you got— you're going to have your comeback up. And so I hope that you could pull this off, and you have to make it so like I want to go there and all of us want to go there on a consistent basis. Because if you can't pull that off, you're not Dick, and I want you to kick ass.

Totally. And I have a funny story for you, actually. So I think on that, the crypto side of things helps us a lot because crypto, it's really hard to kill something that's crypto. I've learned. And so just to give you an example, CryptoKitties was this NFT project that got really, really big and then died or whatever. Right. And what's funny is during the CryptoKitties hype, I gave a talk about my project, Differeent. It's like a stablecoin. But the co-founder of OpenSea, Xander Tala, was at the talk. He came up to me after and was like, hey, man, like, you know, I'm thinking, you know, I like this like NFT thing. We're going to make a marketplace for things like CryptoKitties. And I was like, dude, really? You know, like, what are you doing with your life? This— NFTs are dumb. That was like, that's never going to happen again. But, you know, crypto has a way of like when there's a really interesting concept, which I think NFTs were, right? It kind of plays dead for a while and then people realize it, it comes back, it gets—

and that's crypto, you know, many things.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, so from my standpoint, obviously we're doing a lot of fun stuff. We have actually just today we rolled out a referral program that any one of the apps can use, you know, where if you— someone can share your link they get $25, you get like $5 or something. And so, you know, that's the first money we've invested in growing the user base. And I think that's going to do well. But I really think a big part of it is, you know, when you have a really good concept, which I think Creator Coins alone are interesting, not to even mention like Diamonds and stuff, sometimes just takes some time for the market to figure it out. But yeah, I think the initial hype kind of to me showed me, okay, this is, this is something that, you know, once people maybe get a little bit bored of NFTs, they're going to look at the next thing and this is just going to be waiting, you know. So I don't know, obviously not. It's all 5, whatever, the 5%, like Sean said. I love that. But that's my, you know, that's kind of my view on this.

Awesome, man.

Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on. I think you did great. And I think that for people who, who like trying new stuff, they should go check it out. So what's the best starting point for them now? So is it Is it BitCloud still or—

Yeah, well, in 6 months it might change, but right now diamondapp.com is awesome. You know, the developers basically wanted to make it a 10x of BitCloud and I think they achieved it. So that's great. And then if you like NFTs specifically, polygram.cc is a really awesome place to browse the NFTs. If you're into that, it's just a great, great way to look at them. But yeah, man, thanks for having me. I mean, this is incredible. Like you guys, I, like I said, I'm a little bit like afraid of how well you explained it and how much better it was than me. But yeah, I got to, I got to work on that, I guess.

Just send people like this, like a clip or something. We have Jonathan on the line.

It's okay. When you were in college, when you were in college, like mining Bitcoin, I was just, you know, sitting there trying to— I have no skill, so I'm just sitting there trying to convince people to buy, you know, like random objects in my room. And so, you know, you get good at what you get good at. You got good at something that was extremely valuable.

Yeah, it's something tough.

And I got good at this other thing, like explaining things.

I just, I know, I know, I, I know, like, this is a crazy bet that I'm making on you, but something tells me you're gonna be okay.

Ah, dude, I mean, look, the, the upside of all this is that if DeSo works, it helps a lot of people, man. And honestly, not even DeSo, if Anyone figures out decentralized social, and if we helped in that, like, really, like, my, my mentality is if we instigated something really good, we've done a good thing for the world. And I sleep very well at night knowing that no matter what happens, like, pushing this forward, you know, has helped, you know.

Well, let me ask you one other thing I've always wondered, which is you had all these big people invest in buying, buying the currency before you guys launched. And then you launch and they didn't all use it. Like, where are they? Why? What's up with that? Did you hit them up and you're like, hey, brother, it would be nice if you're the number 1 or 2 person on the network. You own the coin. You invest in this before we launched. Can you go like, you know, use the thing? Like, or did you not pull that card? What's up with that? That must—

No, no, that's actually mostly me. So we have a lot of people who are like really big names, not just in VC, but also like in Hollywood and all that stuff who bought DeSo. And they asked me, like, "Natter, is now the time to really bring this in and do it?" And I just didn't feel like Bitcloud was quite there yet. Now, with Diamond and Polygram, I mean, I think now, you know, I think it's a bit different. But it was mostly me, kind of, because I don't want them to join, bring all their users, and then people are kind of like, "This isn't good enough, this looks weird," and we lose like half of them right out the gate, right? You know, like I said, we're playing the long game here. So the longer we wait to really bring in the big people and tell them, hey, now is the time, I think the better it's going to be and the more users we'll have. So, but we're there, I think, with Diamond. So you'll probably start seeing some of the bigger people using it and being part of it.

Well, thanks for doing this. We're like, our schedule got all screwed up. Sean was late because his house is flooding and we were, we We were tinkering with the timing and you overstayed with us and, and we really appreciate that. So you've been very generous with your time. Um, this is badass, man.

Awesome.

Yeah, this was fun. Good to meet you. Where should people, uh, find, follow you? What's your, so are you still under Diamond Hands or you your own account?

Yeah, @natter now. Uh, you can follow Diamond Hands and Natter. Diamond Hands is gonna still gonna do some fun stuff, but, uh, Natter is where I post from. So.

Yeah.

Awesome. All right. All right. Sounds good. Thank you so much, guys. This is incredible. Just incredible.