Episode w Nick deWilde (Co-Founder of Invisible College)

Hello everybody. Welcome to Building Public Podcast, and I'm your host KP. And today I'm joined by an exciting guest, someone whose work, whose publishing work, and I've been following for a long time on Twitter, his long-form writing, and especially as he made a pretty significant pivot into Web3 and has been following his journey in the Web3 space. And then we'll talk a little bit more about that. But without further ado, I just wanted to welcome Nik. I'm gonna butcher your last name once again, man. You put me on pressure.

That's okay. It's, it's, it's De Wilder, uh, but, but, uh, a lot of people say De Wilder. It's, it's a Dutch name. It's a very hard one to pronounce.

For some reason I thought it was South African, but good to know that it's Dutch. Um, De Wilder. All right. And this is so funny because coming from an Indian guy whose last name has been just as hard to pronounce,

but maybe I should just go

by ND the

way you do TP.

Just get a cartoon avatar and go by ND on Twitter. Anyway, welcome to Building Public Podcast.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, KP. Of

course. Appreciate it. We were jamming on a few topics that I know the audience would be very curious to learn more about just before we got started. And the 3 themes that I wanna touch today is one, Web3. We have never done a Web3 dedicated deep dive on the podcast, so I'm really excited to, you know, do that with you. And number 2 is your journey as, you know, you kind of quit your job. You quit your job last year and you kind of went independent. I know you call it, The jetpack moment. I want to talk about that. It's a pretty significant step, you know, in someone's career to go independent on top of a great, you know, tech career that you had before. So we're going to talk about that. And then the third thing is, of course, you run a very popular newsletter called The Jungle Gym. I've been reading it way before I joined On Deck, and it's frequently quoted, including by our CEO, David Booth, who loves your work. So personally, I have a lot of questions I want to ask you. And, you know, this is going to be a great conversation. Really excited to do this.

Let's dive in. I love it. All those topics are fun.

Let's go in the reverse order. And so let's talk about the Web3 moment. You have a great launch coming up. If we can time this episode really well to your public mint for your project, I think I'll be happy and my team will be happy to do that. But can you give us a little intro into this latest Web3 project? It's a DAO, I know, and you're working on it. Give a little background about it. And also please give a place where people can go find out more or go mint their NFT.

Sure. Yeah. So Invisible College is a learning DAO for sort of Web3 curious builders and creators, basically people who want to of who are watching Web3 happen and want to get involved, who want to contribute, who want to invest, who want to build in the space. And we really wanted to make a space for those people to just immerse themselves. I think all of the folks who, who are founders of Invisible College, we've all built education programs before. We all got into Web3 together by kind of doing screen shares, by sort of just learning together. Right. And, and I think with Web3, that is really the way to learn. It's a little bit opposite of Web2, right? With Web2, you start out a builder. And then if things go well over time, you become maybe an angel investor. In Web3, that flips. So you start out actually an investor and then you sort of get immersed. You understand how to use a wallet, you understand how to participate in a blockchain game, mint an NFT, all these things. And then suddenly you just get pulled in and become a builder. So we're kind of taking people along that journey, right, where, where we're showing them, you know, interesting investment opportunities. Some of those are actually bubbling up from in Invisible College. And then actually, like, we're going to all work together to build courses to be able to help empower builders to be able to launch their own things. And so that's kind of the ethos of IC. And we are launching it and powering it with an NFT project called the Decentralians. And so Invisible College has kind of its own crazy lore. It's sort of easier to see than it is to just hear.

But you got a whole storyline there, right?

Yeah, exactly. So the Decentralians are this 10K NFT project on Solana, which really we think of as like it's a really quality standalone project. We didn't want this to be like a kind of afterthought as a way to build the treasury. It's like really we actually started with this NFT project and then built the school around it. And so the Decentralians are sort of the founders of Invisible College. The lore behind it is they escaped their repressive home planet to found a community on the basis of free expression and creative exploration, all these fun things. So we're minting that. The presale starts February 17th. And then for those who weren't able to register in time, the public sale will start on February 21st. That's a Monday. So exciting. It's coming up super fast. And yeah, it's been great. You know, I think, I think for us, it really mattered to us that we create a really high-quality community where we're really trying to be very intentional about who those people are. But we're also trying to be pretty inclusive of people who are just excited and enthusiastic to get involved. So it's been a really cool experience.

For those who are probably very new to Invisible College, is it a 2-way relationship? Like, do you have to have Decentraland NFT to participate in your Discord for Invisible College and contribute and vice So

eventually it will be NFT-gated. At the moment, we haven't minted any Decentraland, so the Discord is open, but you will eventually need to have a Decentraland in order to participate in the community. What we may end up doing is actually also selling subscriptions so that people who want to be able to try it out before, who maybe have never minted before, or who are really new to Web3, can sort of do it in a sort of traditional Web2 way where they can test it out, do a monthly subscription until they feel comfortable, and then they can buy a Decentraland and sort of get this all-access pass for as long as they're a And we think pairing an NFT with a school has this really neat kind of impact on both assets. With an NFT, one of the big reasons why I think a lot of people are hesitant to purchase their first is you don't want that NFT to sink in price and then have to be able to tell your significant other that you can't go on vacation because you minted too many toads and penguins and they all tanked in price. And so by pairing an NFT with value, with a school that you can actually be a member of, we think that there's just It sort of sets this nice floor on the price of the NFT. And so we like that. And then if you look at it the other way, we're like, hey, okay, I'm going to mint this NFT. It gives me access to all these courses. But if let's say at some point, the community, the courses, the events, they're sort of no longer serving you, right? It's no longer where you are. You can sell that membership to somebody else and recoup. You can at least recoup your costs, maybe even make more than when you bought it, right? So there's something really powerful that, right? Imagine if you could sell access to your alma mater. Your college would probably be not hitting you up for donations all the time. They'd be working harder to serve you. And so we think it aligns incentives in a nice way.

I'm sure there are some who went to Stanford. Go ahead. I'm curious. I'm sure the experience of being an alumni, Stanford grad school, correct? Is fresh in your mind.

Yes. So undergrad and grad school.

Yeah. So I went to Vanderbilt. So I have a little bit of resonance to what you just said about alumni feeling like we're hit up only when you know, they need money or they're doing a fundraising round for the next round. But I feel bad too. Like, it's just, I just don't know how else to contribute, you know. And then the only way I think about is just like, you know, maybe you just can give them some money, etc. But if there's a way schools can tap into alumni for expertise, you know, for example, if Vanderbilt invited me to do a 30-minute session on Build in Public, I would have— I could do that in my sleep. And I would be way more joyful feeling like I'm contributing and really doing something. And like, there's a direct linkage between me and the current batch. As opposed to when I went to school, I don't know, 10 years ago, and feeling like I'm still part of the ongoing narrative about the school, as opposed to just one time I just went to school and then there's not much of an ongoing relationship both ways. And I think, yeah.

Totally. I mean, I think when we think about that, the magic of Web3 is you collapse this definition between owner and customer, right? And by giving people, by building this DAO where everyone feels like they have ownership of it, you can actually have a school that's owned by the students. What they own is they own these NFTs, which should go up in value or down in value depending on what the school ends up producing as an organization. But you end up with ownership. And it turns out actually all the things that result in real learning come from creating, come from building, come from writing, come from doing things, being active. And the consumer mindset of education is, I'm purchasing MasterClass. I'm going to sit back and consume educational content. Passively. Passively. And very few people cite that like content consumption as their most impactful learning experience. It's usually like work. Like work for most people is where they learned the most. And so DAOs sort of make it easy and Web3 sort of makes it easier for people to do the kind of work that results in real learning.

I love that. You know, so if I don't know how much you know about my no-code journey, but to kind of recap, I was on the sidelines for years and I was on product teams, you know, and was a product manager. So I was watching other people like engineers build stuff and I was always feeling like frustrated that my ideas were not coming to life or I wanted to do something on my own, never got the tools or the skillset to do that until I realized some of this is my own limiting belief that maybe, you know, there are other tools out there in the market. And this is 2018. So no-code was brimming at the right time. And I just lunged and then just jumped into it. And then I said, I'm going to go learn no-code. But I remember specifically my most learning came from actually building and shipping things. But also, I mean, at some point I drew a triangle and I should publish a blog post on this, but like it came from actually asking great questions, specific, you know, questions, not just general stuff. So the asking led to doing because I was so curious and I was asking the right questions and I was like enamored by the doers and what they were doing and how they were going through the motions of building stuff and then becoming a builder. Right. And once you become a builder, you're in the doing part. You're like thinking about, you know, all the pros and cons of certain things and like you get into the nitty-gritty and then actually the trifecta. The third thing is teaching. And, you know, in James Clear's famous words where he talks about, you know, when you teach, do people learn? Because you're also revising what you've internalized along the way. And I wonder, this is a random riff on top of what you already shared. I wonder how much of these trifecta, how much of these triangle spots are being covered by learning DAOs today? You know, and I think that should be a great flywheel or engine.

Yeah. I think one of the really interesting things is if you ask somebody who's the best teacher, Right. They'll usually cite somebody who's like, oh, well, I'd want to learn from a master, right? Someone who's been doing this for 20 years. Right. But in reality, that's actually not the person you want to learn from. You want to learn from the person who's currently like, like on the mastery journey, who's maybe 2 to 3 steps ahead of you. Right. And that's sort of the magic we see in this moment in Web3. Right. So all the courses we're going to do right in Invisible College are stuff that we've literally just been doing. So like, so, so the folks on our, on our faculty, we just launched a blockchain gaming guild and we just did the crowdfunding. crowdfund for it and all sorts of stuff like that. And so, we learned how to build a DeFi protocol. We've got folks who are learning how to build games. We've got folks who are— we've launched an NFT collection, right? So, all these things we're going to turn around and now build the course on, right? And that's what we want other folks in IC to do also. And so, it's— and like, sure, you could say, hey, I want the master at this, teach me how to— but actually, that person can't occupy the beginner's mind anymore. Yeah. So, you really need someone who can— who's just been in your shoes, But knows enough to be able to get you to the next step.

Practitioner teacher, right? So one other— actually, I want to hear from you around on this topic of DAOs in general. If you can broaden the scope beyond just the IC, what's going on? Like, what's the— give us the state of the union of DAOs as of today. Like, where are we? How many? I know there are some other examples. There's LynxDAO, I think the one that's raising money to buy golf courses. And so give us some examples. Give us like where the trends are going.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's DAOs really trying to do all sorts of things, right? There's ConstitutionDAO, which came together to try to buy the Constitution. There's LynxDAO, which is trying to build a private membership club. There's Bankless that's building a media empire, right? There are all of these different sorts of decentralized organizations and they're coming together in order to kind of sit at the intersection of kind of community and company, right? There's a space in between those 2 things that really just seems to motivate people, right? Like people sort of dread going to their company, but they love going to their And so there's this sort of space in between where can you get a community that is more focused on a really specific purpose where you could actually earn a living or at least part of a living by contributing to that organization where work is a little bit more flexible, where you can assemble a few different things together. One of the interesting things that we've found is there's more than one Learning DAO. And a lot of people who are contributors to ours are in other Learning DAOs. DAOs, which is awesome because we actually get like to— our ideas go there, their ideas go to us. And it's— I've sort of likened it to like, it's kind of a similar feel to like polyamory, right? Like, you know, in the way that most people can't imagine having one of their employees going to work for whether it's a competitor or not, right? Like for another company. It's a different space. Right. There was a whole, you know, there was all this, all these articles, I think over 2021 about, you know, people who had 2 jobs and how horrible that was. Right. But it's like in DAOs, that's expected, right? You contribute to multiple different places. Your allegiances lie in many places, and there's something really kind of freeing and interesting about it. And so it's a really exciting kind of white space to explore. It's also a space where we have to be a little bit realistic, right? If there were a bunch of practices that really worked for companies, they would be doing them right. And it's not that there isn't any white space to find or there aren't, there aren't cool things you can do with Web3 technology that give you a big advantage. But it's— I think the important thing is, are— does your DAO get people excited and enthusiastic? Does it capture and harness and create energy? And if it does create energy and contributors, then you'll succeed. If you're just sort of bogged down in governance all the time and you're just trying to get everyone to vote on everything, you'll put yourself in a space where you're much less effective as an organization. And talented people want to work for effective organizations. So I think we'll relearn a lot of the lessons about what makes good governance and a lot of people will Run a lot of experiments that we— that— and make mistakes. But like, I think overall it's a really cool white space for people to build things.

So what, from your experience of doing this for a little while now, what do you think are the components that make it feel magical? Like what motivates talented people to come, one, join the DAO, second, contribute to it, and then be— see, third is be a loyal member. I think the retention is where I'm seeing A lot of struggle for some DAOs.

Totally. And it's especially challenging when the Web3 and crypto markets are variable. Right. And so the more they're going up, the more excited people will be, the more that the token is going up. Right. So there are a lot of ways where it's challenging, sort of in the way it's challenging to retain community members, but they're also contributing and doing work. So you have to give people jobs that are exciting to them, that are somewhat flexible, where they really can sort of do the kind of work they're excited about, the jobs where they can kind of stretch So, I think that's kind of the key in order to make it successful. And then you have to give them a vision that's really exciting and something to be able to work for that they sort of naturally want to geek out on and get excited about. I think DAOs to some degree can be like side projects or open source projects for non-technical people. Now, they can also be side projects for technical people, but that's always sort of existed. So, I think it represents sort of a natural nice different kind of break from work where you don't necessarily have to be launching your own thing. You can be collaborating and building community with people as you're working on something on the side.

It reminds me of, you know, Homebrew Club Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had back, back in the day. They were members of it and people would just come and tinker and they would just, you know, hack away for a day or 2 days or 6 months, you know, if they wanted to. And there was really no company-like agenda for those. Like there was no like Q2, Q3 quarterly goals. It was mostly curiosity-driven experimental things that they built, you know, like the famous black blue box or whatever they built, you know, with the telecommunication systems back in the day. So do you see that happening in your, in your community where there's a lot of people who are just tinkering and they're just like having fun, they're learning, and maybe they're challenging themselves, you know, on a certain topic, but there's really not a grand motive behind everything?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're in that moment. Like, everyone has their own kind of Web3 journey, right? Like, when you first get in, it's really just like, hey, there are all these cool projects I want to explore. And then, and then you, you get this kind of itch to something of your own, right? And when you do that, you start looking around for other people who might be excited about the same stuff that you are, right? You look at a DAO, should I build an NFT collection, right? Like, and then, and then you start just sort of exploring and tinkering. And that's a really kind of, it's a powerful process. And everyone in our community is at a different stage of that. And so, you know, it's really like the community is kind of the place where they meet up and collide and be able to talk about what they're working on. We've got some groups that are sort of building in public within the community, right? We, they have their own channel, right, that where they, where they talk about what they're doing, they talk about their struggles, they talk about their successes and their fundraise, and our members get to watch what they're doing and get to see if like, hey, do I want to invest in this? Because a lot of these Web3 organizations, they'll have an NFT or a token or something that they can launch at the end. And so there's a really kind of powerful pull and, and by sort of getting those people on board and getting them excited, then you can ultimately kind of, you know, really kind of build out this cool community.

Is there an opportunity to systematize some of the NFT project creation? And, you know, kind of maybe like incubate some of these projects. Like I'm looking at OpenSea and, you know, if you see some of these, even Solana art for an extent, I know you're more Solana friendly, but like a lot of these project creators are going through the same motions, right? Like if you go on OpenSea today, like there's 8,000 of them on the homepage and pretty much they all had to go through similar steps. The art per se may have been different and value/utility that's attached to those may have been different, but essentially it's the same process. And I think, I wonder if there is a YC-like incubator or Techstars or 0DX, whatever you want to call it, something that produces something that first of all is a breeding ground for great ideas and great talent to first come in and shares these best practices and systematizes some of the journey so that more people can, you know, go ahead and have their own NFT collections so that there's not a lot of friction in the process.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're dead on there. There are so many pieces about it that are standardized. And I think what you're seeing is you're seeing more tools coming out. like Third Web that sort of make that process much more seamless, that sort of abstract away the need to build smart contracts and learn Solidity, or in Solana's case, Rust. It'll definitely get easier over time. Now, you know, we say that, but we've just been like wrestling with our mint site and trying to handle a bunch of these rules that we made for different parts that we don't want to appear on the same NFT. So, you know, there are I think on the face of it, it seems like a simple kind of straightforward set of steps. And then, you know, like all things, kind of once you get underneath, it gets, it gets more tricky, especially if you want to do something that is a little bit more of like a complex, rich project.

Awesome. So, so give us a couple ideas on your roadmap. Like, what do you have coming up next for this DAO and the NFT project?

Yeah, so I think once we mint the Decentralians, then we really want to get to building the school and getting it into a steady state. And so we want to start working on our first course together. We want to start getting the first companies out of our launchpad. We had one, but that was coming from the faculty. And you can actually see there's— we put— so we're at invisiblecollege.xyz and we built a whole campus map and talking about the educational media that we'll produce and the events that we'll have and the launchpad that we want to build. And so it's really about executing that. And then in the meanwhile, we're still building the Decentraland franchise, right? Like there's, there's other drops we want to do. We sort of think of ourselves as tinkerers and builders who want to just like keep messing around as we're building this sandbox to be able to build in.

Very exciting. I can't wait to see all of that unfold and, you know, be as closely involved as possible. So let's switch gears and talk about creator economy for a second, because I think that's what brought you to Web3, in my view. And you shared with me privately this amazing article that you wrote, which I actually, I read when you published it about going independent. And I think the phrase you used was going from rocket ship to a jetpack or something like that. So can you give us the quick summary of that article? And I have a couple of specific questions on that.

Sure. Yeah. You know, I think in September of 2021, I made the decision to leave my company, which was— I was in product marketing there. And it was, you know, growing like crazy, or really called Guild Education, a wonderful place to be that I like wholeheartedly recommend to tons of people to join. I think they're, they're both doing well and doing good. And because I think the— I think I recognized something in myself that like, you know, Being on a rocket ship is phenomenal. There's a real camaraderie and excitement to it. But I kind of recognized I was in more of like an exploratory mode. I was loving getting my hands dirty in Web3, loving publishing the newsletter and like really wanted to— I think Packy wrote a great article called The Great Online Game. And I felt myself being more drawn to being an independent player and playing that and really being able to not sort of operate under the system that a company had sort of set out. Right. You sort of can advance in a linear promotion path. You can get raises at a set time and date, and that makes a ton of sense for companies. But I think for me, I was just so enthusiastic and excited about being able to explore all this white space in Web3 that it just felt clear to me that I needed to be on my own and strap on a jetpack.

And you listed a series of experiments that you wanted to do. Can you give us an update on How those experiments are going? Have you done some, many, all of them?

Yeah, I started out right when I went independent, I did too many things at once. So I had 2 different consulting gigs. I was starting a kind of talent matching service and then working on Invisible College, this kind of Web3 learning DAO, and was kind of able to juggle a lot of those things for some time. And then Invisible College kind of had a really positive, explosive launch. And suddenly the level of overwhelm, like, I just kind of hit my And so starting in January, I sort of stepped back from some of the contracts that I'd signed and decided to actually go and really go kind of full-time on Invisible College. Because what I recognized was the hard thing about going independent is like when you're at a company, you have a manager and that manager can give you a good sense for how to make sure that you're using your time in the best way possible, right? And they can make sure if you're overwhelmed with too many things, they take one thing off your plate and give it to your coworker. When you're independent, That doesn't happen, right? That's you. And so, I think when I first initially started, I was interested in so many things, but I also sort of had a— there's some kind of level of fear in me of wanting to have a lot of things that I could potentially jump into. So, I think that was kind of my mode. And then, when something really kind of started to work, I decided I really wanted to double down on that and turn it into something special. And so that was kind of my choice that I made in 2022, and it's been a really good one. But I think even before I went independent, I was sort of thinking about, hey, should I build a course? Should I— I was dreaming up with one of my co-founders of Invisible College starting an NFT collection, right? There are all these things that we were messing around with, and a lot of them kind of came to fruition in Invisible College. But yeah, it's been a real journey and just a lot of kind of learning every day.

In terms In terms of the article, again, I read a piece— I mean, I read a section there where you cover this topic of zone of genius, and I love that. And I think I read, you know, a couple months ago Justin Kahn wrote about it or talked about it, and something— it's been looming on as a thing that I've been thinking about lately. So how do you describe that, right? If you want to share, how do you— what's your perspective on zone of genius, and are you currently doing as many things as you can in the zone of your It's a

great question. So I think the zone of genius comes from a book called 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which I love. And I think it sounds like Justin probably recommends it too, but I know plenty of people who've gotten a lot out of that book. And zone of genius is one of those ideas where I may butcher it, but it's basically there are things that you specifically are excellent at and there are things that you're not so good at and there are things you love to do and there are things you don't love to do, right? Doing those things that you're great at and love to do, that's your zone of genius. And the more time you can spend in that area, the better your endeavors will be. And so I really made sure to sort of team up with people who complement me and have other zones of genius outside of the ones that I have so that we can, when we build together, we can really complement each other versus walking all over each other. And so that was kind of one of the important things when our team assembled for Invisible College. We had someone who was great in engineering, someone who was great at product, someone who was great at art. And someone who's great at ops. And so, like, you know, the things that I tend to be good at are community building, marketing, writing, you know, sales, all sorts of things like that. And so those are the places where I try to spend as much time as possible. And luckily, you know, having partners that sort of balance you out that way, that's really great. I think when you're operating independently and sort of before Invisible College, it's really finding opportunities and projects to work on that demand that zone of genius out of you versus demand things that you aren't good at or don't like to do.

I think the part that confuses a lot of people is one where they actually are good at it, but they don't like to do. That's the part that I think— and I made a tweet about this recently where like, don't let competence get in the way of your greatness, you know? And it happens all the time, right? Where you're just good at something. And so people keep coming back to you because of, you know, that thing that you're good at, but you're not great at it. And there are other things that you're so great at, but you don't even have enough time to dedicate to those because you're just so busy being the person who's always doing the things that you're good at, right? And I, for me, I mean, just as reflecting within public. For me, it took me 30 years. I tweeted about this early this morning. It took me 30 years to realize that I'm actually good at community. Actually not good, great at community. And when I say good versus great, I mean, it's not necessarily my own self-assessment. I'm saying what makes me jump up out of my— like jump out of my chair and what makes me like, oh my God, I could talk about this for hours and I love this and it shines in my work. And it took me 30 years and all the things that I was good at were in my way to get to the part that where I finally was great at. And same thing with podcasting, same thing with like hosting events. I just love that. And somebody had to tell me that, you know what, you actually are great at this. You don't Prepping. You don't need nothing. You just, and I was like, oh my God, that's so true. But there are other things I was good at, and I thought that was my identity. You know, just good enough.

Isn't that powerful? You just you just sort of need one person to like like see you for who you are and say like, hey, you know you know K K P, you're you're excellent at this. You should you know why aren't you doing this?

But I'll tell you like two specific incidents. One was like in Atlanta, I was hosting a meetup. Shout out to Cortland Allen, you know founder of Indie Hackers. He came to visit Atlanta, and you know I was doing it. Atlanta chapter of Indie Hackers meetup. And we— it was not really planned much. He just came to just make a visit. And we had like a bunch of people who were doing demos and stuff. And suddenly I pulled 2 chairs and I said, uh, since you're here in Portland anyway, why don't you just like reflect on being acquired by Stripe and like Indie Hackers journey and stuff like that? And I'm gonna just ask you— there was no microphone, there was nothing. It was just him and me looking at each other. And then there was like 8 people in the audience. And he walked away after that saying, KP, you should start a podcast. I still— first of all, I was like, I thought he was nuts. Second of all, I still didn't develop the conviction to go to take a shot of starting a podcast until after I joined On Deck and watched Eric Thornberg and a bunch of people. And I'm like, oh, this is what it is like. And yeah, I can do a podcast. But it took me a long time to really, you know, believe in myself. It's the same thing with self-doubt, right? Like it takes a while to believe in something and it takes one person or two people to really like—

Yeah, it's the other thing you hit on, right? It's like, it's like first you need to know I'm good at this, right? Someone has to sort of validate and someone ideally, you know, who you look up to, right? Validate, say you're good at this and you see somebody who you want to be like or who you are like who does that thing. And that also sort of inspires you and says, oh, like, you know, this person figured out how to do it, like, I can figure out how to do it, right? And that's a— those are 2 kind of really powerful pivotal moments that help you sort of recognize your confidence.

I wonder, this is a great segue to my 3rd topic, which is the art of creating and writing and publishing. And, you know, you're so great at that long form. I love your long-form articles. I wonder how much— is there anything that kind of made you— that kind of inspired you to start the Jungle Gym, you know? And also give us a little sense of what it takes to write that, you the newsletter? Because it's— I know, I'm sure it has to be a significant amount of time or energy.

Yeah, thanks for saying that. So I started the Jungle Gym in, I want to say it was 2019. And really just, you know, I'd been writing on Medium since maybe 2013 or something. And, you know, was sort of tired of like renting my audience, right? And so like the idea of just like capturing emails and having sort of this direct communication and this permission to be able to bother them in their inbox was very enticing. And you know, when I commit to doing something, I just kind of do it, right? Like it's the idea of like letting even if my audience doesn't feel let down if they don't get it in their inbox. Like I feel like I'm letting them down. And so you know, I it's really important to me to like to like follow through on that. And so it's just kind of pushed me to really want to make the jungle gym something special. I just noticed there's so many people who you know who their careers just feel like a mystery, right? And it's it's this weird thing, right? Where career has become so important. It's become so defining for people's sense of self. But also, we're just in this moment where you may no longer need a company to have a great career. There's so much new white space and so many things changing all the time that it felt useful to have someone who's building their career in public to a certain degree, but also talking about it and reflecting on it in a human way. So it's not just how to get a promotion and how to— it's a little bit more of the soulful questions of Like, you know, where should career fit into the good life? And is being independent, does that make sense, right? Like, should I let HR determine my career ambition? So I think writing about things like that just sort of came naturally to me. It was an audience that I sort of had some credibility with from being in education and career education for a while. And so really have just— and then I think there was good, you know, just like I think you probably got great feedback from what you do on Twitter and from what you do on your podcast. Like, I got great feedback from writing the newsletter, right? And that feedback is so powerful because it says, hey, you're doing the right thing. Like somebody's getting benefit from this and they're, you know, they're in my inbox saying thank you. Right. And that makes all the difference. And I was seeing other people do it who, you know, it's like if this person can do it, I can do it. Right. And then seeing some audience growth. And so those things together just really kind of inspired me and made me want to push forward.

You've been consistent at it, right? Do you do weekly or biweekly? What's your cadence?

I do it every other week. And you're talking to me at a point of stress because we have this— the presale for our mint coming up. coming up and then public sale on Monday. And in my timeline for the newsletter, I have an issue that's due to my readers on Sunday. And this is like the moment that I have to decide if I am going to pull the trigger and do my Sunday newsletter or if I'm going to let it lapse a week, which I am not sure where I will come out on this because it's just 2 things that I care about a ton.

As a subscriber, as a reader, as my friend, I would love a paragraph, not an essay, given what's going on. And I would have the rest of the page blank, almost like a joke, or let the rest of it say, you know, like, this is what's going on. And because it would still show the sheer commitment that you have. Because like I said, like, there's— I admire people. Like, I have a lot of, you know, I have a lot of great qualities, I think. And but the thing that I don't have is this consistency streak. But also, I look at it as a way to like indicate whether I'm super— is this my personal monopoly or not? And if it's not, then, you know, I mean, I don't worry about it. Like my Twitter, I've been on a streak for 460 days. I can't even believe it. And I don't even— I don't even think about it. I just do it, right? But with you, what I loved about your story is that you've been so consistent in presenting information, you know, writing the newsletter, that as a reader, I would be happy taking 1/4 of what I would normally get, you know. But the truth of it is that you're having a crazy week, you know. So, that's true.

You know, you've inspired me, and that actually may be exactly what I do, is just like, hey, this— you're finding me at this crazy week. I care about you, this audience, enough that I really want to write you, but I do not have enough to give you the full quality.

And it's such a— so much more vulnerable, so much more honest, you know. And it's so easy also for somebody else to advise this. I wish I could take my own advice that I need. So Nick, this is an open invitation for you. If I ever skip on something, you know, please knock on my DMs and say, KP, you know, just ship something. But one— so one other tangent that I know you covered in your articles and I really loved was this notion of building an audience as a career moat. And I think it's something that people don't really actively think about, you know, when they start in the— when they start their careers. And I think by the way, they're halfway through, they're like, yeah, it's too late now. Or like, why do I need an audience? I'm on this exact ladder chain or whatever. Yeah. Whatever their ambition is. And so I just gave a talk at On Deck last Friday. That was the topic was— it's funny because you wrote an article like a year ago and the topic that I gave was like building an audience in tech as a career superpower. Similar essence of it. And it was well received. People loved it. And then I tried to not enforce too much of building public into it because it's— my building public stories are mostly for founders. I think this is for operators, for employees, you know, and what I was trying to say was like, if you're able to somehow be relevant in your niche, in your vertical, You know, inevitably it's a great thing. It's a great win for you in the long run. You can carry that audience from wherever company you go to or wherever DAO you end up in. But also even for the company, goes back to your article about platform brands. It's a great win because you can galvanize an audience and some of them could be customers. I'm not saying everybody, but some of them could be customers. So I want to unpack both of these topics with you. Like, can you summarize the first article around— actually, I don't know if it's an article or a section, but the topic around building an audience as a moat?

Yeah, I think ultimately when you look at— it was kind of inspired by watching GPT-4 GPT-3, right? And, and like, and you had this skill copywriting, right? Which, which at one point was this like 6-figure skill set, right? That you could, you could learn and suddenly you had a career set out in front of you. And with GPT-3, like, look, copywriting is not dead, but what it shows us is that it's probably not long for this world, right? Now copywriting is, it's art, it's science, but like, but if we can get artificial intelligence to be able to finish, you know, a Slate Star Codex post, we can probably get it to do marketing copywriting. And so it really made me wonder, okay, what are these skills that are sort of future-proof, as people say? And I think one of them, one thing that is very hard for machines to replicate is influence. Like, humans are really, really good at being able to spot other humans that they should take cues from and make decisions off of. Wow. And so, you know, I think that having an audience is ultimately like, it's a superpower and it's a very hard thing to be able to, You know, for a machine to replicate. And so I think of, you know, it giving you a lot of flexibility to be able to like chart your own path, right? Like, I wouldn't have been able to start Invisible College without the audience that I built from Substack or on Twitter. And that's a really powerful thing. You know, you can be friends with people who have big audiences, that can also help too. But like, but in general, you just have a lot more direction and control over what you do with your life. And so that to me was pretty important. So I do think of it as this kind of career moat that It helps protect you against, you know, whatever future shocks the world may bring.

You want to hear my favorite part about having an audience? And I wish I knew this. I knew, I'm sure like you, like as you were writing stuff or producing stuff, as you were creating content, at some point a switch goes off and you know you're inevitably going to build an audience because it's working. You get the feedback loop and you're like, oh, I need to get better at these things. But over time, with mastery and skills and, you know, reps and sets, I'm getting there, right? And I felt that many times. I started at 414 followers on Twitter. Now I'm over 30K. And many times in this journey at 1K, 2K, 3K, I kept feeling that, yes, I'm on My way. My favorite part, though, is what scaled so well is the ability to crowdsource for solutions and ideas. Mind-blowing, right? You have, especially on Twitter, you have really great smart people around you and working at these great startups, you know, around you. And like, let's say you have this itch and you're like figuring out, oh, I'm trying to do XYZ on a project or whatever. And instead of trying to ask your best friend or DM like, you know, 4 other people that you know, if you put it on Twitter, there's nothing that ticks off smart people than seeing an incorrect Answer. This is something Eric Turner taught me. He said, "If you want to say something, if you want to get the right answer, publish the wrong answer first, because they'll jump into your thread, they'll jump into your DMs and say that was wrong, KP. Here's the right answer, and here's the eight-minute Loom video on why I'm right." And I'm like, "Thank you. You saved me eight hours of Google search." But in a good way, like there's so many smart people out there, and you know you can leverage the collective brain trust when you have an audience. And that's something that I really didn't know how powerful it was when I was like you know four hundred people. And as you scale, like you can do a lot of things. You can do market research. You know you can do a lot of. like demand testing, validation, and also like, you know, restaurant recommendations and everything. So there's so many pros. Of course, you know, there's cons. But so let's talk a little

bit on— For you, what number followers did you find where you could ask a question and reliably get maybe 3 useful answers?

I think it was around 1,000, at about 1K. That's why I actually, my hot take is that after you hit like 10K, unless you hit a million people on On Twitter, it's the same. I'm 100% sure my experience with 30K, I don't know how many you have. And Sahil Lavingia said the same thing when I chatted with him at 200K and like 500K. Until you hit a million, it's almost similar. You probably get like data points in the dataset, but directionally it's the same experience. At 10K, I started experiencing what I'm experiencing right now, which is this, there's this 10% of audience who are always going to like take what I'm saying out of context and they twist things and all that. But there's this collective brain trust that I see. Yeah. Said that are happy to help and they will promote, you know, my stuff. But after like, again, after 10K, whatever you do, no matter what you do, they think that you're promoting stuff, right? Because you have that big of an audience. And so you have to really humble and you have to like align your expectations around when you launch a new— when I launch a new no-code project or announce something at Undec or whatever, I don't ever think that, oh, now we have 30K, hence 5% of 30K conversion. I don't think that. I just think, are there going to be 100 people who care about this? So you always have to remember that there'll only be 100, maybe 150 people who care about whatever you say at each checkpoint. So you remain happy and retain the inner peace. Otherwise you're going to go bonkers that, man, I, you know, what am I doing wrong at 30K? Why are people not liking my stuff? Or, you know, right. But yeah, I mean, the quality has been from about 1,000 to 5,000. I've had amazing friendships, like, you know, Drew Riley became a great friend and so on. And we were all, you know, in the same league at the time. So let's unpack a little bit more on the platforms, platform brands. I think that's something that was Very, very smart that you published. And why should more startups think about that or consider that? First of all, what is it? And then why should people care about it?

Yeah, I think the fundamental change is that social media works very differently than broadcast media. In general, actually, the first insight is that humans pay attention to other humans. It is the thing that sets us apart. It is this watch-and-see memetic cultural learning. We pay attention to other humans. And so in broadcast media, human beings, like individuals, aren't able to buy ads. I mean, maybe really rich ones, but that just doesn't happen. The Super Bowl is filled with company commercials. And so companies just compete with other companies for attention, but that's actually not that intense of competition. If you go on Twitter, I don't follow any companies. Maybe a few, but very few. Most of my feed is individuals. And because individuals are just more interesting, right? I can take cues from individuals. I can, I like, people are just fascinating. And so what you're, and when it comes to marketing a product, right? People take cues from other people, right? People are looking at what other people do who are similar to them but prestigious. And they're saying, should I do this? Well, it's hard to do first principles analysis. So I'll take the mental heuristic shortcut of saying like, hey, does, you know, does KP do this, right? If KP does this, KP's got 30,000 followers, he must know something. Something, I'll do it. And so there's something really powerful for that. So, so in this world where it's harder for a company to get their message out through their own channels and their own voice, it's really powerful to have a bunch of allied people who can get those messages out for them. Influencers tend to be kind of pay-to-play, right? And in general, people just sort of know that, right? Yeah, they're just influencers. Like, you see Kylie Jenner, you know, promoting something, it's like maybe she likes it, but like maybe she just got paid a bunch. I think there's something really powerful about helping your employees build Audiences because your employee has made a really significant decision, which is to spend their time and talent working for your company. Right? So On Deck is great at this. On Deck has has all of these these really talented people who have devoted you know time and talent to On Deck. Right? And that should say something about On Deck. And so the more that that those people can sort of build audiences like you and and Eric and and David, right? The better On Deck does. Right? And because those They have credibility by just the fact that they're working for On Deck, right? And I think the same is true for Gong, for Morning Brew, right? Like, there are these brands where, like, they're, you know, sometimes it's the founders, but often it's the employees build these audiences and have this crazy reach. Now, yes, some of those people will get big and leave, but, like, frankly, there's almost no better advertisement for your company than being able to send successful people off on to do their next thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And also the long-term play there is that they come back They become advocates. They become— they talk to other early talent, you know, when they're applying for the jobs. Like, my favorite part about— so I was never into chatbots. I didn't give a shit about chatbots, but I was into David Cancel and Dave Gardot and their podcast, you know? And because of that content and what they did, I cared about Drift. So this is another famous example. I don't want— I didn't even know what Drift was. I didn't care about Drift until I heard about them. I liked them. I see, like you said, like there's a similarity and there's a mimetic, oh my God, they think like how I think. They're open-minded, so on and so. And then, oh yeah, then I care. A lot of my current audience are just like that, right? I don't think a lot of them are— they don't give a shit about ODNC or no-code or whatever that I do. They're like, let's explore what KP is, what journey is KP on, you know, what journey is Nick on? And then they're like, oh, and once in a while you say, oh, here's what I'm doing. And here's— if this makes sense to you where you are in your life, please do this. Otherwise, totally fine. And it's paid off so much in many ways I can measure, that I can measure. And I think it's a tactic that a lot of companies are sleeping on because they're still playing the zero are some Web2 games. They're still thinking like your output should be measured on your time in the company as opposed to your performance and your impact.

They're scared to a certain degree, right? They're scared if the employee at their company builds a big enough audience, it subverts the HR-created status hierarchy, right? So every HR department creates a level titling compensation system and that's supposed to say, hey, this person's a senior This person's a VP. This person is a lowly analyst, right? And but when the analyst has you know 100,000 Twitter followers, right? The the power differential changes slightly. And we we're also now living in this world where you know people are like Twitter is a it's a water cooler, right? It is it is sort of the if you are an independent worker or you or even are just a remote worker, right? Like like no matter what company you're in, like you're spending time on Twitter as like the place. to banter about what's going on at work. Right. And so the kind of status hierarchies that every company has kind of invented are breaking down. And so, you know, better to sort of take advantage of that than to just, you know, let it steamroll you.

As we go forward into the world where I think this is inevitable, where there will be people who will be doing multiple gigs, you know, like the multi-hyphenate, like the polywork thing we discussed at the beginning, whether it's in multiple DAOs or multiple consultants to multiple companies, it's inevitable that some of these ambitious successful talent, they can't be contained in one box like back in the '90s or whatever. So you might as well just embrace it because you're better off that way in the long run. So, all right, this is awesome. I mean, I could go on for another hour with you, Nick. Thank you so much. And I mean, I just want to say, you're in this stressful week, and hopefully when the episode comes out, hopefully you will be less stressed and you'll be relieved. What are you most excited about, and what kind of impact do you want to create with this Learning DAO?

Thanks, KP. It's been a blast talking with you. And yeah, this is our first actual conversation. off Twitter. So, so fun to get to meet you this way. You know, it's a— there is stress this week, but it's also— I like stopped, you know, earlier this week. I was kind of like, you know, our something in our mint site, there was a bug in our mint site or something like that. And I was like, you know, telling my wife, I was like, ah, it's, you know, one thing after another. And then, you know, I just kind of realized like, man, we live in 2022, we get to go mint an NFT collection. And like, like in the first, you know, couple years of this technology's existence and get to have our Discord community pop up with a whole bunch of these avatars we created and then build a school together. What a special, amazing thing. And I think I have these moments of reframe which are just so magical and powerful. And then you sort of realize you're doing this thing that's exciting and special. And so when I think about Invisible College, I think there's this magical experiment I want to run, which is what happens when you give students ownership of the school. And luckily, we've got a community of almost 4,000 people who are just jazzed to try to run this. And some of those people will end up buying NFTs and coming along for the full journey. Right. And it's just we live in this moment of experimentation, and I think this experiment is one that I'm just really excited to run and change some lives, give some people sort of these really energizing livelihoods and jobs that get them really jazzed. So there's I think a lot of cool stuff that's ahead. So that's what I'm excited about.

Awesome. I just want to wish you all the best and wish the entire Invisible community, DAO, and the team all the best. And hopefully I'll catch you on your Discord and maybe we'll do something for Invisible College Inside. All right, that's it. Thanks, everybody. See ya, Nick.

Thanks, KP.