Meet the Drapers Season 6 Episode 10: Paris

Tesla, Skype, Hotmail, Coinbase. What do these revolutionary companies have in common? Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper, who invests in big ideas before they become the next big thing. Now he's traveling the globe to find game-changing startups. Entrepreneurs from 10 countries and 6 continents will share their ideas for changing the world.

There are some entrepreneurs everywhere, and they all have a different approach, and those cultures bring more creativity.

Then 12 finalists will fly to Silicon Valley to compete for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to launch their company on a global scale.

100,000 units?

But only one can walk away with the grand prize— $1 million.

It's go time.

This is a true entrepreneur here.

Meet groundbreaking technology.

We've built Denmark's first flying car.

Meet rejection.

I've seen 15 of these. How are you going to be better?

Meet innovation.

The blockchain is built for trust.

The sky's the limit.

Meet the Drapers.

Hey, we're here at Paris Blockchain Week and we're meeting a bunch of the entrepreneurs here. I just gave a talk and sang, which was like mixed reviews. You've started this snowball from the top of the hill. We really are seeing a lot of great entrepreneurs here.

My name is Anthony and I'm the co-founder and CEO of SneakMart. It's a token-gated experience leading to physical, sneakers and streetwear drops.

Alexandra Mikhituk, I'm the founder and CEO of Stacks. It's a very unique Web3-based identity protocol.

My name is Cameron and I'm the CMO of Bubble Maps.

Hello, my name is Nick, co-founder and CEO of Bubble Maps.

We've created a brand new vision for blockchain data.

Yann Schmeichel from Xverse. We're a digital wallet that is specifically built for Bitcoin.

Ilan Nabe and Playmakers. Allowing the players to submit content from their games.

There is a need for on-chain data that is easy to understand and accessible.

I think SneakMart I eat Snick Mart. I sleep Snick Mart. I love Snick Mart.

I just enjoy working with people that are sharing this vision.

The world is changing, right? You need companies like us.

For me, it was really important to just turn the industry upside down. What would it mean to you if you won this million dollars? Of course, I would be proud of winning that, but I know it's just the first—that's the first step.

For me, it means having somebody. As part of my vision, my team that is very forward-thinking, very supportive.

I think my dad will probably be the most proud.

Potentially having the opportunity to work alongside Tim, to be able to get advice from him, I mean, that's even more valuable than a million dollars.

We would be super proud actually to go through that whole process, and it would be a superb and fantastic opportunity for us.

Clearly, I'm going to have a very big day. Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers live from Paris Blockchain Week. It's great to have you all here. We have some amazing entrepreneurs here for you to hear from. But before we talk about the entrepreneurs, we have some amazing guest judges. We always adopt The guest judges into the Draper family. First, on my right, I would like to introduce Lars Seer Christensen. He's the CEO of Seer Capital and co-founder of Saxo Bank, but he is also the owner of— get this— the number one restaurant in the world. Geranium was just ranked number one restaurant in the world. Welcome to the show, Lars Seer Christensen Draper.

Thank you.

What are you going to be looking for as you interview these entrepreneurs?

Absolutely critical is who are the people? Do they complement each other? And then of course it's the scalability, which is so great about this particular industry that if you get it right, it's very scalable. And I like that.

Now to my far left, we have Michael Amar, and Michael is the chairman of Paris Blockchain Week, and it's an enormous success. Now, Michael Amar Draper, tell us a little bit about Why Paris Blockchain Week has been such a success at this particular moment.

I think it's a moment where we need to regroup, restart, and try to think big and how we can get from the 25 million wallets to a billion wallets in a few years from now.

And to my immediate left is Samantha Bobat, and she is the Chief Growth Officer and Investor at Rockaway X.

I'm looking for commercial instinct, and I think the first part of that is the team really understands their user, and especially if they're competing with someone bigger, that they understand their users better than the competition.

So with that, let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

Are you telling me?

No.

Check. Okay, so none of these are relevant for me. I always wanted to do something different, you know, I always wanted to kind of stand out of the crowd. I was attending this university, everybody had kind of the path lined up. Something inside of me, maybe coming from a small town, small village in Czech Republic, was always like, hey, I want to be a little bit different, I'm a little bit more entrepreneurial, you know, I'm looking for personal challenges all the time. And so I just wanted to be different. Right after college, I moved out of my country. Many people thought I'm crazy. I went to China. You know, I was 21 years old, 22 years old, and I moved into a different country. I didn't speak the language. And so you're basically going through the challenge of just surviving every single day. I think this kind of experience really shaped me, and I think it's very beneficial for me as an entrepreneur. I've always struggled to explain what I do in my life to my parents and to the people close to me. There has been a lot of situations where I wanted to give up. If you really believe that what you're doing is long-term relevant and it's kind of your North Star, then the persistence is very important. Even though sometimes it can be hard, I kind of like tell myself, hey, I really believe in this long term. I think what we're building is really needed. And so it's just a matter of time before people realize that as well. If we do a good enough job, if we build good enough product. This is the very first conference after COVID that I've been actually able to go pitch live to the live audience. I don't know, just the room and everything. And, you know, I like Tim. I think he has great energy. So everything just, you know, fit into place. So my name is Jan. I'm Chief Strategy Officer at Xverse. We're number one Bitcoin super wallet. Problem with traditional Bitcoin wallets is that They're built by developers for developers. And so the user experience for the day-to-day user or somebody new to Bitcoin is actually not great. Meet Exodus. Not only you can do everything what you can do with the traditional Bitcoin wallet in a non-custodial way, but you can do so much more. Manage your Bitcoin, other tokens, manage your Bitcoin NFTs, Ordinals, earn Bitcoin. We also just recently launched very first Bitcoin wallet API. This is the very first API of its kind on the market. You can sign into applications, create confirmed transactions, all with just a few clicks. Today we have 120,000+ users. We're growing pretty rapidly every single day, and we're also number one Bitcoin wallet as rated by the users. We have developed relationships and launched integrations with all major companies building on Bitcoin over the past 12 months, and we're not stopping there. Thanks to the API launch, we're actually just about to announce 2 major partnerships with 2 leading NFT marketplaces that are getting into Bitcoin Ordinals. And at the same time, we have 2 dozen other partnerships in the pipeline. And our rockstar team of 10 has collective experience, 10+ years in crypto.

This is great, and we need this kind of a platform, and we need people to do APIs, but you need to attract engineers. So how many engineers have you attracted to the platform, and has anyone built an interesting application yet?

I felt like they're focusing too much on the API. The core experience is the wallet itself, and the API is just one of the tools how to get to more users and to more partnerships, etc. So we launched the API just about a week ago. In an essence, we're a wallet. This API is basically just extension. We're bringing the MetaMask-like experience to Bitcoin.

How are you going to make money?

So we partner with Binance, MoonPay, Transact, and we take a small fee of that service. The next step would be Trustless B2C swaps. There is going to be a need for this service that you need to swap in between different tokens. And so that's basically the business model of MetaMask, for instance. So we can adopt exactly the same thing.

So you can replace MetaMask? Because that's a horrible experience.

I mean, we're focusing on Bitcoin and MetaMask is focusing on Ethereum, and we don't see them anytime soon getting into Bitcoin. But we're trying to— trying to get better.

And are you building the capability for smart contracts or are you assuming your Yeah.

So we actually partner with companies that are doing that. So we are the wallet. We focus on that. We're the best at that. But we want to support every single great use case for Bitcoin.

You have 10 professionals with a collective experience of 10+ admittedly years.

In crypto. Yeah, in crypto.

Do they really only have 1 year on average experience or?

Basically 10+ year experience in crypto because not every single developer, for instance, worked in crypto. Most of them worked in TradFi. I am more on the growth side, business development side as well.

Well, maybe we're Reading this wrong, but it says ten professionals with a collective ten years in crypto.

Yeah, it's just the crypto. They've only had a year on average each. It was ten plus years crypto experience, specifically crypto-related experience. That was kind of something that that you know made me feel a little bit nervous. You know, basically our founder, myself, that we we have been working in crypto for basically I guess eight years. Some of them Basically just started with us working in crypto.

That experience from TradFi, I mean, how important is that when you're actually building for this type of new industry?

I think it's super important because obviously for all of these TradFi companies, security is very important. And so this experience being able to create these secure systems at scale is extremely important.

So 1,000 new users a day. What is the primary channel they're coming from?

How we acquire users before Ordinals, most of them are actually through Stacks and then Through Ordinals, basically, I would say we captured the majority of the market.

For the other blockchains, I think the number one priority for them is to make it seamless, right? Yes. Are you going this direction?

There's always a balance. If we make things too easy, then people can easily make mistakes and maybe transfer their assets to a different wallet that they're not supposed to do. Obviously, we want to be as user-friendly as possible, but we also want to make sure that people really understand what they're doing and that there are some safeguards before you can Terrific, Jan.

Thank you so much for coming on Meet the Drapers. Well done.

Thank you.

Good job.

Make it happen.

I definitely think that I, I gave it my best in a sense in that moment. You know, I don't think that there is something that I could do differently because I really practiced for this quite a bit. But after hearing, you know, that feedback from the judges, maybe the pitch wasn't done in a way that they understood 100%. And so, so that's definitely something that I need to keep working on.

What did each of you think?

I'm wondering if many people that have wallets don't actually want to have more items on their wallet. On the other hand, the flip side is maybe you do a really great Bitcoin service that differentiates you.

I think it's interesting that you guys both probed on the team, but I also had the same maybe simple reaction of like they have such traditional background. Why not target the institutional side out of the gate?

I like Bitcoin, but I have the same flag that you guys raised with the team and the experience, and I think you need a lot more engineers.

Terrific. Let's bring on the next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's move our eyebrows up and down and see what's going on behind the scenes.

We as women in this area have to prove ourselves. I needed to work, I would say, double the time to be heard, to be at the table with my male colleagues. One of my co-workers that I worked with, he told me, you know, you also have to create these communities because men are sticking together, we're helping each other. You have to leverage this power for the female community. And this is where I also myself in Stacks, we have 50% female founders and coworkers today, which I'm very proud of. And this is what I remind myself every day, how hard it was for me so that we have to support each other and help each other. I think that every entrepreneur has their own way. I got to this after an extensive experience within the corporate environment. So I also, I guess my challenge was to jump from this safe life to the very unknown entrepreneurial world. This jump was tough because I had a lot of self-doubt. So I'm not doing this for money. I discovered something within me, and this is what drives me every day. This jump, I think I never regretted, and I— it was the best decision that I made in my life. I learned so much in the last years. I really want to inspire people to follow their dreams, so I really want to put it out there and I, I really enjoy the journey.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers. Give me exactly what your customer does with your application. Welcome back to Meet the Drapers.

This is my first time in Paris. A lot of incredible people, a lot of great entrepreneurs. Super excited to be here and understand, you know, what the ecosystem is like here.

The startup ecosystem here in France is pretty exciting. It's probably the most exciting entrepreneurship space in Europe.

Paris is growing like crazy, attracting very, very talented people. Venture capital funds are also getting bigger and bigger here in France. So I feel like we are like equal compared to London and to Berlin, which have been more advanced in terms of startups in the last few years now. And that's only meant to keep growing in the next years.

The entrepreneurship ecosystem is amazing, especially here in Station F, which is one of the world's biggest startup campuses.

It's an amazing space. I recommend anyone check it out. It's great.

So I definitely felt the warmth of the audience. I was very elevated, I guess. So the problem that we are addressing as a team, it's that today we have absolutely no reliable machine data infrastructure. So with the amount of machines reaching the point of 40 billion by 2030, we're going to run into huge problems in hands of hackers because everything that moves can be turned into a weapon. Drones, robots, autonomous vehicles. So that's why we created Stacks. It's a very unique Web3-based identity protocol that provides cloud-like functions to machine manufacturers today and also connects these machines to the Web3 protocols providing micropayments. So today customers choose us because we're the most secure and reliable platform. We also are the smallest software on the market because we run directly on the machine and it's important for battery-driven devices. And last but not least, on top of that, we have 70% savings for the customers. Also, to the milestones, this summer we're planning to launch the first Web3-operated drone delivery corridor. And by the end of this year, we want to enable the first blockchain payments between the car and electric charger so that you can really see the payment on your dashboard within the car. We have a team that is united by the mission to provide safer future for humanity.

This is an infrastructure that you're building From machine to machine, so that payments are clear, legal documents are clear between machines. This is correct. Are you going to get paid as the machines send money across, or are you just going to get paid project by project?

They basically pay a monthly fee, which includes 50 machines, and then as they scale, they pay money on top with the amount of machine scaling. As soon as they are really transacting over blockchain, we take a percentage from this transaction.

Down the road, will it be mainly from sort of continuous subscriptions or is it more about delivering more projects?

I was taking more time to explain how we made it last year and why we're changing now more to subscription model. I felt they asked it 2 times, so I was like, okay, I should be better. I should explain it better so that we are definitely looking into something recurring. This will be about subscriptions. The projects was a better model for the last year because we were working with a communal provider in Germany. So we tried to make it as simple for our customers as it gets.

And what is a typical customer that you would go for?

We have direct sales, which are our early adopters, and this is really running around and selling. And also the second approach, we, as you see, we have great partners, and this is how we sell through these channels. with integrators and also bigger companies. So we have this double-sided approach today.

First off, congratulations on, on the management buyout with Deutsche Telekom. Management buyouts are pretty heroic. I feel like in this vision of the car as almost the App Store, I would think driverless cars would be like the once-in-a-generation tailwind for something like this. How are you thinking about that?

Automakers, they don't have decided today Because they have really long cycles of production. We want to say, listen, you have stocks, it provides you flexibility. So this is our strategy how to get into this market.

You're planning to raise €3.7 million at what valuation?

It's €18.3 million and we are opening the round in April.

How much equity has DT?

This is not the actual shares. This is the virtual ownership that is directly made with founders. Tell me about your team. So Paxi is actually award-winning entrepreneur. She IPO'd a networking company in Silicon Valley. Alex delivered a multitude of projects for automotive companies in Germany and scaled huge teams. Myself, I led a blockchain team in Deutsche Telekom, and I got there because I was doing a PhD in security at Technical University of Berlin, and I was working on wallet security.

Give me exactly what your best customer to date. does with your application.

And I got a little bit confused because I needed some time to get what he said. So the best customer provides an off-grid charging infrastructure, mobile chargers that they are placing cross-country. Whatever happens, the system doesn't go off. So the hackers will have to take down all of the stations so that nothing works. That's why they've chosen us.

Terrific, Alex. Thanks so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you.

Well done. Good job.

We like to say in our company, we get what we need, not what we want. So I'm really excited to be on the show, to be promoted already. So I thought it's already a win. So I was very, very chilled. I just really enjoyed the experience.

What did we all think of Alex?

It's all really dependable and more durable as long as the blockchain works. And so she said, you're going off cloud, so you don't have the cloud risks, but sort of how are they making sure that this indeed always stays on?

It's obviously a fairly small operation, I assume. So I'm wondering a little bit how much competition you're going to get from— for this in the longer run from some of the really, really big players in these industries.

A lot of people are trying to blockchainize IoT, and that has not Worked so far, but that's just a matter of time. Let's bring on the next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

I can't compete with that.

I think your eyebrows are quite impressive.

Thank you. Thank you. Sneaker and streetwear culture is my passion since I'm a kid. Started buying, selling, collecting sneakers when I was. 12 years old. Today everyone loves sneakers. It's important that you realize it's gonna be a big part of future in the fashion, and it's already a big part of fashion today. I got into entrepreneurship thanks to my dad. I've seen my dad's success, so I was like, wow, I want to be like this. I want to be able to be successful. And I think this is why and how I got an idea to create a business. The main lesson Never give up. You have something that you can really create, build in an industry, and it's relevant. Never give up. I want to be part of the big names of this industry. So yeah, for me, it's really the passion, true passion and love for sneakers and streetwear culture. I was a bit stressed, but also confident because I'm passionate about sneakers, streetwear. I know my product. I know the markets. I have a mission and I know how to explain this mission. Hi guys, my name is Anthony and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sneak Mart. And as you can see maybe on my feet, I am a big sneaker fan. And now I am nearly homeless because my mom wants to kick me out of the house because I own too many sneakers. The global sneaker market in 2022 is worth $85 billion. To realize that traditional sneakers and streetwear drops mechanisms are broken. That is why we decided to involve our existing community members to create MetaKicks. MetaKicks is a token-gated experience leading to physical sneakers and streetwear drops involving Web3 technology and most precisely NFTs. The MetaKicks are 3D animated sneakers we are creating with their own animations, rarity, storytelling. They are the tokens. Thanks to these tokens, you can unlock access to physical sneakers and streetwear drops. The first Metakicks drop we did was sold out in 30 minutes, generating $85,000, sold as a private drop exclusively to the SneakMart community members. We first launched the SneakMart app in 2021 on the French market as the first community streetwear app where members can join the community, exchange thanks to some key social features, but also buy and sell streetwear goods, brand new and used ones. We are paving a brand new way to consume, collect, access streetwear goods through a fun and unique token-gated experience. We did €100K revenue in 2022. We are now growing and raising a €1.5 million round to scale our design, tech, and marketing team.

It says €600K. Is that revenue yours or is that just the community has bought $600,000 worth of NFTs.

So this part is not linked to the NFT side of things. It's the volume generated by our members on the peer-to-peer marketplace that we've built for them on the SNKMRRT app, because one of the features on our app is that you can buy—

Selling sneakers, physical sneakers, streetwear goods, clothing.

Can you tell us a little about the tools to help other people like on the periphery, other sneakerheads who aren't as tech savvy become creators?

I think we can definitely bring more people in. And one thing super important is that within this whole creative process, as for the designs and even from the feature crafting at the beginning, it was co-created with an existing community. So we're always involving members and building a product that they truly want to kind of eliminate this frustration.

Now, if I buy one of these NFTs, does that entitle me to a pair of sneakers?

There is maybe like a small confusion. Are the NFTs visually linked to a physical product or it's like just a token, like a pass or something? That would be great to clarify this point, actually. At the beginning, the Metakicks tokens are not linked to a specific sneaker. It's like a membership. You can get access to exclusive drops. Secondly, we are onboarding brands and artists on specific type of drops. The buyers of this drop The physical sneaker, they customized online with 2D animations, but they also buy the MetaKicks version. So here you have something that is linked to a specific—

Which do they pay more for, the sneakers or the virtual?

It was within the same price point, so they paid one price.

Roughly, you paid double for your sneakers.

Not double, because it was a fair price, honestly.

Yeah, of course.

Part of your go-to-market strategy to work with brands and help them bridge the phygital question?

At the end of the day, what we're doing is creating a membership club of streetwear and sneaker consumers. It's just that the membership card is fun. It's animated. It has a story, a rarity. You want to share it with your friends. You want to resell it. You want to buy more. And we are also super focused on making it super mainstream and accessible.

Tell me about the team.

In the team, we have Paul. We met together when we were like 12 years old. He's the CTO. Then we have Martin. He's like the tech lead, and then we have Atabak, and he's the creative genius behind everything you can see: the assets, the UX, the UI, everything. So we have like a killer team.

Terrific! And this show actually might sell some of these NFTs. Well, Anthony, thanks so much for coming, being on Meet the Drapers. Thank you very much. Great job.

Pleasure to meet you. It was a stressful day because there was not only this pitch, but another pitch. So a bit stressful, and I was like, all right, it's almost done. You didn't say some weird things, so you can be proud. And yeah.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers. Have you even done market sizing? Welcome back to Meet the Drapers.

I'm from Paris, and Paris is an amazing city to build a startup. Paris is getting more and more structured in terms of startups. We have like super talented people joining the startup ecosystem—

engineers, developers. There's plenty of companies building there for a reason, because there's plenty of help and there's plenty of initiatives, and it's a very dynamic ecosystem.

Thanks to Station F and this type of hub and ecosystems, A lot of tech startups are now based in Paris.

Pitching and connecting with investors and people building exciting stuff, you know, it's just the cherry on top for us.

So super happy to be in Paris and start building something ambitious alongside like-minded entrepreneurs as well.

So what did you all think of Anthony and Sneak Mart? Is it a trend or is it trendy?

I have a friend in Denmark that resells classic sneakers and people pay serious money. Also, opportunity, of course, is anything that logically can be built on top of this if you have that interest anyway. But I mean, if it's a— did he say an $85 billion market? I guess that's big enough if you get it right.

17-year-old entrepreneur initially. I like it a lot. I think one key to scale is how capable they will be to partner with brands, because that will be a huge accelerator.

I guess I wonder with something like this, just, it's just hard to get people to change their workflow or to change their platform. You're competing for their browser space.

Let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, we see what's going on behind the scenes.

We met online. We met online.

We were calling every day for hours without knowing my name, nor my face, nor nothing.

He said, look, we've advanced enough now for you to meet me in person.

The weirdest date ever.

The weirdest date ever. It's kind of like being catfished, but in a good— in a good way. In a good way. And he said, come to Paris and I hopped in my camper van. My mum was like, are you sure you want to do this? I drove over to Paris and then he tapped me on the shoulder. I looked behind me and I was like, you're shorter in real life. And since then we've been working closely together and developing Bubble Maps.

There was this weird fuzzy moment in my life where I was super uncertain on where should I go, and Bubble Maps kind of came in And now it's been 4 years. If today I was really offered the best possible job in a company with a tremendous salary, whatever, I would say no because I'm so good where I am right now.

That's good to hear because I don't think, I don't think I could do it alone. Around 6 months ago, I struggled massively with my own mental health. To kind of work and operate every day, I found quite tricky because working remotely can be great, but you are online You know, Nick's been super supportive and a mentor, if anything. So that was the main thing that held me back, I think, my own mental health. But to find a balance between the two, which I have done recently— if there's an issue, we raise it together, we talk about it, we talk through it. If there's a mental health issue, we talk about it, we go through it, and we're stronger than ever. And we have such a strong unit between us all, which I think helps massively.

I think it's really important I agree. This is a wonderful team.

Yeah.

Let's bring on the next entrepreneur.

Well, I have to admit I was a bit nervous before coming on stage. This is my very first time on TV.

To see the interaction from the VCs themselves, the audience, the environment, oh, it was incredible. Hello everyone, my name is Cameron and I'm the co-founder of Bubble Maps. And we've created a brand new vision for blockchain data. Look, analytical tools can be complex and intimidating, so that's why we've gamified on-chain data in a fun, interactive, colorful, and playful way. Nic, if you wouldn't mind, please go into detail.

Let's dive deeper by analyzing Uniswap. So what you can see on screen are the top holders of UNI, each bubble corresponding to a wallet holding their token. But the best part about it, if there's been any transfer of Ethereum between those wallets, their bubbles are going to be linked together. There's a small cluster here on Uniswap, and you can see why those wallets are connected. Wallet 30 in the middle sending 2 Ethereum respectively to the 3 wallets below. This looks like a healthy distribution at first glance, but if you switch from Ethereum to UNI transfers, suddenly it gets more interesting. The orange cluster in the middle is Particularly important because all those connected wallets belong to a16z and Ruslan Horowitz, one of the biggest investment funds in the world. And with 4% of the supply split amongst 10 wallets, they have enough power and influence to control any vote.

This is but one of many, many use cases for Bubble Maps. Wash trading, wallet manipulation, wallet splitting, private sales, presales, marketing wallets, team wallets. The list is truly endless.

So this is great. Is it more of a reactive thing like, hey, we think we've got a problem, or is it more of a proactive thing like, hey, I want this data ongoing for a long time?

Oh man, that's such a good question because it works in both ways because tokens want to prove how transparent they are. If they have a distribution which is healthy and, and it supports growth, you know, there's no large transfers or anything like that, then it's amazing. So tokens like that. But also, you know, tokens are afraid and scared because suddenly they can see their distribution in a way they couldn't before.

How big is the market for something like this? Or have you even done market sizing?

Do you know that there is more people playing badminton worldwide than people in DeFi? So that goes a long way to tell you how—

How did you know that?

It's one of the things I know.

How did you know that information?

One of the things I know.

Where do you read that from?

I read it on Wikipedia. Anyway, and so that goes a long way to tell you how there is still a big margin, how this market can become so more mainstream. We're targeting not only pure Web3 players, but we have also been working with, as I said, traditional brands, gaming industry, automotive industry. They're all testing Web3 and they need on-chain data that it's easy to understand. And that's where we come in.

So what you don't know is that Some VCs selected for the first portion of the competition from the 800 decks to the 100, and then the 100 to the 10, right? And you guys kept being 1, 2, 3 above all rankings all the time.

How many startups were there in the end? 800. 800 startups?

I think the reason why we come up in the top 3 is because we have such a new approach with our colorful bubbles. Just in itself, we're changing the game.

I was like, okay, everybody's doing chain, off-chain data? Why them? Is it big enough as a moat, as a competitive advantage?

I think we've got it just right because we're the only product on the market that offers these kinds of visuals, easy to read, easy to understand.

Are you planning to go beyond that and make it digestible for my day-to-day business, for example? Absolutely.

And I want to mention, if I may, some part of our roadmap that I didn't have the time to cover yet. So there are 3 things that we want to implement: comprehensive historical data. You'll be able to see the distribution from day one. Second, the ability to create your own bubble map. And lastly, we're adding some AI models on top of this. We now have a library in our minds of, all right, these patterns correspond to this on-chain behavior. With a good enough training model, we can really give this information directly to our users.

When you said other people can make their bubble map, that sounds like tools for data scientists versus the other side that's more just provision of data. Exactly. Do you think these 2 businesses are complementary? Like, can they sit under one roof?

I do agree that building your own bubble map from the start is more for advanced users, but by allowing users to build their own bubble map and then share their own bubble map to their communities, to their friends, to their investors, suddenly I think we can see an explosion of use cases.

I mean, I spent most of my life servicing traders, right? People that wanted to trade foreign exchange derivatives. I think there could be a very large market for that if it had any significant information value for a trader.

That's really something that we want to add into the Pro Reporting because this Pro Reporting is going to be the next generation of on-chain analytics. You've seen only the Bubble Map so far as it is pure and bubbly, but we're adding many metrics as we progress to add an even deeper layer of information on top of what we've built.

Terrific. Well, thank you so much, Nicholas and Cameron, for being on Meet the Drapers. Thank you so much, Mr. Drake. Thank you. Good job. Well done. I like the spirit, the energy.

Being on Meet the Drapers was an absolute dream come true. To us, Bubble Maps means so much, and we want to take this to the next level.

This was an incredible journey to participate in the Drapers, and we'd love to push it more. We'd love to go in the in the U.S.

I'll see you over. Soon on my motorbike.

How about that? That's good.

Let's go.

So what did we think of bubble maps?

It makes it more digestible. You cannot live without Google Analytics. You won't be able to live without these tools in Web3.

I love the visuals and I'm a data science nerd, so it hit home.

I guess I wonder how many of those VCs have invested before in a data company that makes When I was trading foreign exchange with hedge funds and investment banks and big traders, you know, you were always trying to guess what people's hands were, right? And if this is the equivalent of knowing all the positions in, in the foreign exchange market, I can at least tell you in FX I could have made a lot of money by having that information, right?

I'm a little concerned about the market size. I'm a little with Samantha on this, where if it grows It will grow to a certain size and then flatten out unless it does have this retail interest. With that, we have one more entrepreneur.

My father was pushing video games to me when I was very young, so I didn't even know how to play and how to use, you know, the controller. Over the years, I just started playing regularly. A lot of different types of games on console and on PC, and really felt like that was a very cool type of entertainment compared to movies, compared to books. I would love to try to create something huge and share that success with him. He's basically the person I'm going to when I have like any business question. I would be super proud to have some success and share it with him specifically. I had like the deep will to change the gaming industry, and one of the first steps as a founder is getting surrounded with the right people. People bringing complementary skills, having the same mindset, the same vision as you. And that's something that's hard to do. In the very first few months, I was just working alone, trying to build stuff myself, trying to learn as much as possible, and trying to convince people. If you want to really achieve that vision of transforming the gaming industry, there is a ton of stuff to do.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers. We are torn. It's torn. It turns out it's— Welcome back to Meet the Drapers.

I've been living in Paris my whole life, so it is my hometown. I love the atmosphere.

Paris to me is the most romantic city in the world.

I just Paris is very different, I would say, in terms of lifestyle and city. It attracts a lot of talent. Personally, like, every time I walk in Paris, I'm just in awe looking at the buildings and the monuments. Paris is just like a very, very cool place to live, and so I'm not surprised that it's attracting the best talent in the world today. The city is just beautiful.

Paris is definitely a romantic city. It's a fantastic city, capital of fashion.

So Paris is fantastic. Fantastic, really beautiful museums and nice parts of the city.

The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, all these events, all these places, the people, the community. It's quite a friendly place to be.

There is just a bit too much traffic, but apart from this, it's amazing.

I've been amazed by driving so far. I guess it took an extra, a couple of extra skills to drive in Paris.

It's a city with a lot of scooters and bikes.

Welcome. Tell us who you are and give us your pitch.

So we were super excited and surprised when we learned that we would be the 5th company pitching on stage. There was supposed to be only 4 companies. People came to me and told me, hey man, you need to get ready because you will be on stage in a couple of minutes. To pitch in front of everyone and on TV. So a lot of excitement, I would say, being able to share my story and what we have been building for the past few months. Playmakers, we are a team that scaled games to over 600 million downloads. We worked with over 200+ game development studios, and today we are really excited about one big opportunity in the gaming market: user-generated content. Today, 30 million gamers are creating content for for their favorite games. They are doing it in their free time and because they are passionate. With the rise of generative AI, more and more players will turn into creators. That content is super valuable for game development studios. Yet all that content, it just goes into the trash because it's very hard to do from a technical perspective. Secondly, the studios don't have any legal framework to be able to acquire the intellectual property of thousands and thousands of contributions. Lastly, They struggle to put in place a fair reward system to turn their players into creators. We built a platform to help game development teams to capture user-generated content from their game automatically and implement it in a super easy way. How does it work? Basically, we are allowing the players to submit content from their games. That way, contributing becomes part of the gaming experience for any games. In the backstage, what's interesting is that We're able to audit the contribution from a technical perspective. As the last step, the studio can get the asset on its game engine via an API call, and they can reward the creators financially via the blockchain by acquiring the intellectual property. This basically means that we're allowing studios to release more content at a faster rate, at a lower cost. We're on track to release 2 games for the next quarter. We're building the foundation of a new game creation workflow.

How can you curate the content so it's not just A bunch of garbage.

So what I didn't mention is that Playmakers, there was also a social layer. So when you are submitting that content, Samantha could upvote or downvote it if she likes it. And at the end of the month, the studio can check what's the top 10% of the contribution that the community liked. So you eliminate already all the garbage. Then there is, I would say, a human filter. The studio decides if that fits with their artistic direction or the gameplay direction as well, et cetera.

And I guess if people use ChatGPT to create the That's still probably good for you because if anybody buys it, then you get some commission on that.

I think Tim was very on point with his question. He was the first one asking questions about UGC, and it was a great showcase of experience. We are providing our tech to game development studios, taking a profit share on the revenues generated by the game. The value proposition is so strong that we didn't have any issues to lead game development studios to give us some revenues that they are generating from their games. So we are not dependent on the amount of contributions that are really implemented in the title. We are more dependent on the success of the game and how fast it will get growing with the help of UGC.

I don't know much about gaming, so I've asked very big Japanese gaming companies. It was interesting, the feedback. They say, we tried this in Web2. They were mentioning that it was only 5% of the creators who actually make it. Do you think people will keep trying if their art is never selected?

I think that's the role of the studio to try to motivate the audience. So what we're supporting with Playmakers is that the studio can give you some fixed payment of money like USDC for the work that you have done, or in-game currencies as well. Maybe that's just a way to turn you not only as a creator, but also as an ambassador and avoid frustration even if your content is not implemented in the title.

Is there only revenues for you? Because you're right, in many platforms, vast majority of people actually do it because it's fun or they want to show their friends. But do you only make money if there's transaction happening, or do people pay something for using it?

They are paying for using it. I think all the investors were really on point with their questions. They all had a good understanding of user-generated content and how that could change the whole industry.

Fast forward in 5 years, how big the proportion of the content would have been created by external users versus employees of a studio, for example?

If I talk as a player, something I would love to see in gaming is that every time that I connect, I would love to discover a new character, new skin, new weapons, new animations, etc., etc. The social media companies understood that well. When you connect, you discover something new every time, and that's why you are so hooked. While in gaming, even if you take Fortnite, you need to wait 4 months before being able to discover new content. That's game-changing in the industry, in my opinion.

Why are you doing this?

As players, we are frustrated how creators are treated. So we know well the gaming industry. We know well the frustration of being a creator that is not listened to. And today we are in a unique position to create Playmakers.

Terrific. Ilan, thank you so much for coming on Meet the Drapers.

So we were the last one passing. I felt all that extra motivation, but also like all the stress, you know, like going up and up as the other candidates were passing as well. I just wanted to go do my pitch, try to convince the investors. And when I just get off the stage, I had a chance just to appreciate the moment after doing all the hard work, I would say, on stage.

So what did everyone think of Elon and Playmakers?

I think it has legs, but it would also be interesting to know what is the traction. Does it have a viral effect, or do you sort of have to go by marketing to people to get them in. So, you know, more questions.

The lifecycle is long of game creation. It usually takes like years to get your first thing that makes money because that's the first moment that the game developer launched it. Yeah, I just wonder about like how they'll have cohorts of games that come up with these.

Yeah, there's a tech question and there is the, you know, if they can sign even second-tier games pretty soon, it can really change While we will be moving one of these entrepreneurs to the semifinals, you can go in there and vote and move one of your favorites that we may not have chosen up to the finale. They can jump past the semifinals and go right to the finale. Everyone is gonna have to give entire mental energy, and the crystal ball will come up somehow with an answer. Answer. Okay, well, let's start with UX first. We really definitely need an API for Bitcoin. There is no question in my mind this is really important. You have competition that might be coming, and you've got to get designers to Stacks, Alexandra, we were really impressed with your presentation. The machine-to-machine opportunity is a big one, but a lot of people have tried this and they have not succeeded. Sneak Mart, you've got great energy. You love sneakers. It's clear this is exactly where you were meant to go. We're all a little concerned about how big your market is. Market is, but it's kind of an interesting opportunity, and you might have been a fan favorite here. Bubble Maps— the opportunity seems sort of an, like, an obvious one. I know other people are working toward this, but you do have a clear market that you're going after. I'm still concerned personally about the market size. Elon: The Game— we know that this is coming. The concern is that you might be able to get the small games, but it might be difficult to get the big games because they might want to do it themselves. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be up to me. We're going to find out from this very strange and very unusual crystal ball.

Wah!

Send your vibes. Send your vibes. We are torn. It's torn. It turns out it's Stacks and Xverse. You two are going to the semifinals. Congratulations. Well done.

After their feedback, I was like, uh, maybe we didn't make the cut, you know? And so obviously I was kind of surprised and excited, and it's just a good match.

It gets sometimes really tough for women in this space, so this is really cool, and I hope that we can set this example to a lot of little girls out there. This is— this was amazing.

Tim, your kids Grandkids are gonna wear sneakers and streetwear for the rest of your life, so you should invest in the company.

I currently live in a camper van, so to take that to America, just go and explore America, would be a dream of mine.

Would you take me in your van though?

Uh, maybe I'll think about it.

Maybe an extension at the back?

Of course, of course.

The value proposition that we have, like, is very strong. So if you want to build the future of gaming and and of entertainment, well, just vote for us, for Playmakers.

See you next time on Meet the Drapers! We're funding heroes, heroes, future shapers. We're funding heroes, heroes on Meet the Drapers.

We're funding heroes, heroes, We do all need the Drapers!