Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en if you told me that it makes him personally 30 million dollars spread evenly over the next 10 years i wouldn’t be surprised i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right what up uh sean here we got sam and then we got special guest dan held the dan held from the bitcoin space and on twitter you’ve probably seen him around i told my brother-in-law um that you were on the podium he was very excited i’ve told him about every guest so far and you got one of the biggest reactions he was a i think he’s a paid subscriber to your newsletter or something like that so he’s he’s very into you and on the other hand i think sam has no [ ] clue who you are so i think it’s the perfect mix i know some stuff about you sam knows nothing about you and i think it’ll be fun i only know that sean says that you’re cool and you’re in bitcoin i know nothing about you um we got an hour to figure it out whenever one of us proposes a guest it’s like you put that guest it’s like you have to go take the stand and have an oath that this person’s gonna be good and then you better be able to lawyer up and defend why this person’s a guest and so he’ll every time any time he mentions the name to me i’m like why the [ ] are we having that person on and then he’ll like defend it and then same here i was like no no this is gonna be gonna be interesting because couple i think a couple reasons we should talk about crypto and then we should talk about i think like kind of like building your personal brand because you’ve done a really good job of that and so we’ll we’ll do both of those during this during this convo but i want to start with like give people the like what’s the one minute story of who the heck you are and yeah yeah and i don’t know like give us the one-minute story of dan held yeah the elevator pitch yeah so i from texas originally i grew up in dallas 25 years in dallas i studied finance and undergrad stumbled and bumbled my way into tech i didn’t know what i was doing when i first built my my first software product in the space it was successful from there learned how to formalize some of my skills around product management and marketing um worked at a couple different early stage crypto companies so i was at some of the first crypto companies i worked at like blockchain.com i’ve had two exits in the crypto space so i’ve sold two of my products and then i’ve also worked at uber where i was on writer growth led by andrew chen so one of his directs and the growth marketing team so i’ve had big company classic uh tech experience but also a lot of kind of that startup hustle and early stage crypto which early stage crypto is kind of wild west um yeah which i guess fits my my texas attitude so and so tell people the source you got into crypto bitcoin uh bitcoin specifically you’re a bitcoin guy i should i shouldn’t keep saying crypto too much um bitcoin back in i think 2012 or so bitcoin was maybe 10 bucks back then um what you know what caught your interest how did you hear about it what’s the origin story for you yeah so i got back in 2012 uh my buddy paid me back for a beer with something called a cassatious coin a cassatious coin are those gold coins that you see in all those news articles where they talk about bitcoin they were physical bitcoins essentially and that was a good time and in that 2012 era bitcoin is so new and weird and different that that was like a good bridge from the physical fiat paper money world to the to the digital bitcoin world uh from there my background is in finance i really dug the 21 million hard cap as a solution to bad central banking policies i i mean i was in undergrad during the 2008 financial crisis studying finance and i’m like my professors don’t know [ ] right either to the people on tv and neither do these books that i’m reading and that’s what kind of kind of shook my foundational uh trust and belief in the existing financial system and that’s when bitcoin came around when i saw that i was like this is a good new way to be rebuild the financial system without having to trust these institutions and sam i don’t know if you know this sam do you know when uh satoshi signed the first block he put a he put a message in there do you know do you have you ever heard what this is no but i i love that guy’s stories i mean the the myth or if it’s real i don’t know what the truth is but i love the story behind it and dan i don’t know if you know it off top of your head but but do you know what it is yeah so satoshi was a really crazy character in terms of his expertise i mean he understood like human game he understood game theory encryption all sorts of different other topics and wove this all together to build bitcoin bitcoin isn’t just software it it wraps itself around understanding human lovers to press like greed of how the price cycles as the price goes up people become more aware of it and by an expectation of the price going higher um so satoshi you know really understood humans intimately and part of this that he wove into the first block was the genesis block message and it said uk chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks so that was the only message that satoshi ever put into the bitcoin blockchain and so it’s a very clear signal that bitcoin wasn’t here to disrupt a visa or paypal bitcoin is here to disrupt the existing financial system in central banking right and so there’s like a the mission the mission was sort of like i don’t know cleverly baked in which i just i just love i’m like you sam where i’m like the more i learn about the origins the more this [ ] seems like it’s out of a movie uh it doesn’t seem like real life it’s like oh this anonymous creator is like how’s anything anonymous nowadays right like there’s there’s like way you know like the way they caught the silk road guy was like his the way he was typing or whatever matched some review he left on a movie message board or so you know there’s always something like that there’s always a breadcrumb trail actually is it still anonymous i mean obviously no one’s come out could it been the the the guy who had als and died i mean what what’s what do you what do smart people who know what’s dancing what’s dan’s theory uh the uh everyone’s got their own favorite satoshi tale all right so one is hell fenny the one that you just described he had als and died i think in 2012 or 2013. uh hal finney is a classic favorite because he ghost wrote pgp encryption and bitcoin’s proof of work system is based on his early reusable proof-of-work system that he created earlier bitcoin wasn’t a new innovation it just kind of frankenstein all these other innovations together and that’s how satoshi built bitcoin hal finney has the demeanor of bitcoin he was also the first recipient of a bitcoin transaction or he was sending it to himself right which is what by the way if you ever work with developers that’s what they do when they’re testing [ ] out the first thing they do is they send it to my account a to my account to sean sean but the ghost writing pgp encryption back in that era with phil zimmerman pgp encryption was considered a weapon by the defense uh by by the department of defense so when he goes through pgp he knew that he was potentially going to be convicted for like illegal uh arms trafficking wow so he understood what it meant to take on a government at this scale and so he and when he when i say ghost wrote he goes toward it because his name isn’t officially on it so same with bitcoin he was one of the few people to that would have built bitcoin in that fashion uh you know hiding behind a pseudonym of satoshi and using that because that was critical that the project had no face to it had no central weak point because if you could find satoshi and he’s sort of a weak point in the governance structure and in the ownership structure that could undermine the the the long-term success of the protocol so yeah hal is a classic favorite died around the same time that satoshi stopped doing anything we haven’t seen a mess a flare from satoshi’s sense right that’s right satoshi hasn’t signed a message with his private key which would concretely determine that that is satoshi or give us a strong determination that that is satoshi so so that timeline makes sense that’s theory one what’s the two 32 is the nsa so 32 is that it’s the nsa because the nsa builds weapons and bitcoin is a financial weapon it could destabilize countries and destabilize their currencies and so this is just a more fun i mean totally off the wall sort of thinking but so let’s say a group of cryptographers which some of the best in the world work at the nsa come up with bitcoin because they’re tasked with building a weapon and after they build it they go wait a second maybe we should just release this into the wild because we do believe that this is good for humankind right and they release it as kind of like it’s like a frankenstein experiment let out of the lab uh so i think that one’s kind of fun i mean there’s no there’s no facts behind where would you put your lab leak hypothesis for for the pandemic basically that’s that’s what you’re saying i think one’s more realistic than the other maybe what uh would you bet your money on one of those dan probably more of the health anyone i feel that it’s an individual so that’s always a question too is it an individual or a group of people i cube more individual designed by committee is really hard to do with something as niche and like incredible like an incredible breakthrough like bitcoin right so i think that one person just had that genius to take all these elements and put them together to create bitcoin versus a group of developers trying to figure out how to build this thing and and there’s also the other thing which is like it’s just somebody else so if you were gonna apply your percentages what percent is half any nsa or other uh this is super tough but maybe like 50 hellfini uh 30 nixabo and 20 nsa [Laughter] all right i like that um okay so you discover bitcoin because some guy gives you a coin uh and you don’t you’re not just like dude what is this like can i have my 10 bucks please and and so you go you read about it uh what happens that night so you go and you what you read the white paper you join the forums you just start reading about it online and then like i guess like take us through the thought process of you going from where you were then to like where you are now where bitcoin is like you know a pretty major part of your life yeah and i can kind of weave in my early entrepreneurship like in tech part of that too because it’s all kind of intertwined together so i start to read about it the 21 million hardcap the monetary policy i see this as a huge breakthrough because if you remove the subjectivity of choosing what an appropriate rate of inflation is you’ve solved the problem of monetary theory so like satoshi solved the problem of like going hey we shouldn’t constantly figure out what the rate of inflation should be we should fix it and the economy can reorient around that genius breakthrough so that got me really hooked um i worked at a small investment firm in dallas nothing anyone would know it’s a really tiny one wasn’t prestigious or anything like that they relocated me to san francisco to open up their west coast portfolio out in san francisco i during the uh it was the april bitcoin run up from 10 to 260 back down to 100. i was going to the bitcoin meetups in san francisco this is where like brian and fred from coinbase were hanging out and same with jared kenneth from trade hill and jesse powell from kraken mike the company now i mean there’s only what were those like because we were just in miami uh when the bitcoin conference was happening and it was kind of like a like a bunch of fools act in the fool i thought i didn’t attend but just through what you what was coming out on social media i guess and everything every community changes from like when it’s the outsiders and um you know just the true believers to like you know 10 years later 11 years later what what it looks like is is very very different every community changes all of my friend my roommate was buying i was mining in 11 and 12. and they were just hardcore devs and nerds so what were those like so i remember i was still working at a small investment firm so i’m rolling up in [ ] business casual to a developer intuitive bitcoin there’s only a dozen of us i mean it was tiny and actually i put pictures on twitter where you can see pictures from the old meetup i mean it’s just a it’s a cooler of pbrs and a bunch of people kind of geeking out on this thing called bitcoin right march april 2013 hit price goes to 260. boom you’ve got like vcs slanging out business cards everyone’s excited there’s 150 people that come to the meetup you know there’s this energy this palpable energy and then the may 2013 conference happens the winklevi announced they’ve been they’ve been they’ve bought bitcoin they’re involved the the conference had like a few hundred people which was kind of wild if you see coinbase’s booth from videos from back then they printed out like an eight and a half by eleven that just had coinbase on it like they just printed it off their computer in the office or their printer in the office and taped it on their booth and brian and fred were the guys manning the booth so like that’s how early it was super super early in the space and during that moment that’s when i found a problem a problem that needed to be solved which was finding the real-time price of bitcoin on your mobile device at that time there was no app in the app store that gave you real-time market data which is crazy because bitcoin fluctuates a lot and people you know were constantly opening up their phone to check the price of bitcoin all the other developers before then just refresh the price every 15 minutes or so so me and a buddy put it together now i didn’t know what i was doing i was a finance guy you know trying to figure out how to make a product and so i just became really obsessed with solving this problem and so i knew enough in photoshop to where i could design the app so i just looked at apps that i liked took elements from that to design zeroblock which was this product and designed it and we designed it really really simply because i couldn’t design anything more complex back in that day skeuomorphism was the popular design aesthetic and we did flat ui because i couldn’t design bevels and stuff so i just became obsessed with solving this problem for myself turns out a lot of other people had that problem too and that’s where it kind of like stumbled my way into some product fundamentals of like it’s all about solving a problem for your customer and then i got into a tinge of growth marketing where i found how to hack my way to the number two spot for the word bitcoin in the app store so we got most of our installs you know how did you do that what was the hack yeah so apple at the time when they really originally built the app store they forked it from itunes and so there’s an old character limit that they had for titles of songs which is 255 characters but they also allowed that character limit for app titles it was truncated after 60 words basically but you can fill it in words in the top in the core title old school keyword stuffing yeah i learned old school growth hacking technique of just keyword stuffing but it worked now it was sort of a crapshoot to see if the app store reviewers would approve it one out of five would and if you did you could clinch that spot right so that kind of started my fascination with both products and with growth marketing kind of on the more hacky side of things and yeah that was my that was my initial foray into tech and then we sold serial block at the end of the year to blockchain.com uh blockchain.com is still around today it’s a really popular wallet i was the first product manager there and so kind of that’s what i mean by stumbled and bumbled my way into tech is specific yeah i didn’t have any formal background i just kind of was really empathetic with solving a problem for my customer wanted to propagate the the message of my product and that’s how i learned those two skills all right let’s talk about some ideas sean shall we yeah so dan i don’t know if you know but this is the ideas podcast where we basically say okay that like i’m interested in the past but to the extent that i learned cool things and then i’m like all right let’s get to the future what’s the future look like so so idea so i think there’s really like i guess like let’s start in the bitcoin crypto space what problems do you see today that you think somebody needs to solve like back then there was no real-time price data that was a problem that needed solving sure what are you seeing today as a problem that needs solving yeah there’s one idea that’s particularly fascinating but it’s not very sexy now there’s a lot of really good intersections there where you find value and like this new idea because not a lot of people are looking at it it’s around private wealth management for crypto holders imagine a current crypto billionaire walks into a family office multi-family office and they’re like hey i’d like you to help manage my portfolio and they sit down five suits in front of this guy with a hoodie and they say hey well uh first of all we’d like to take you know a two percent management fee of all your holdings and they’re like well i said i self-custody my coin right and they’d be like i don’t even know what that means right you know and then they would go well how much how much of your net worth is in crypto and they would say 90 and the first thing they would say is diversify right the existing uh private wealth managers and multi-family offices have no idea of how to service crypto wealthy crypto folks i mean you can’t even you can i i told mike at the bank today let’s buy some ethereum and they were like oh we we can’t it’s ridiculous i mean it’s absolutely ridiculous it’s it’s so antiquated they just don’t talk don’t even talk the same language as all these crypto folks right like i’m a more bitcoin guy but if you go down like the ethereum rabbit hole there’s a whole i mean there’s so much complexity and how those defy and smart contracts work it’s where you need like a full tax team to solve that problem too but these i mean i’ve been in this space for almost nine years i know more billionaires on this planet than probably anyone else because of because of crypto because crypto has created so many and not institutions but individuals who have billions to where bitcoin is probably bitcoin plus ethereum has probably created more individual billionaires than any other project right exactly i think that’s got to be true which is kind of insane like more than microsoft more than amazon more more than any of those projects how many crypto billionaires do you know how many billionaires do you know um i would say off the top my head at least at least ten ten how many crypto how about um a hundred million on up oh man i mean i would assume i at least know 100 or so folks that probably have that much doubt look bitcoin people don’t tell you how much they have right but you can kind of assume based on how long they’ve been in this space and what companies they worked at and how much their net worth was back then and probably yeah i mean it’s a general assumption but how much of your personal money were you putting into this before your bitcoin started like making sense like were you putting like a hundred grand into this in 2012 when it was like who the [ ] knows if this is gonna work because 100 grand to you at you’re like i wish well you could do it i wish you were really young that would have been a lot of money yeah i didn’t have that much money man i mean look i was like uh 25 26 just out of co and i was in i you know my first job was in dallas i was making 45k a year it wasn’t like a ton of money yeah and then i got into tech eventually and of course that went up quite a bit but that was in 2013 2014. now um my average cost basis was 10 to 100 but there’s a bunch of coins i got from in the hundreds to thousands right so i think a lot of people look at like crypto ogs like myself and they assume we had like a million dollars sitting around that we all dumped in at five dollars a bitcoin and also i wasn’t a perfect toddler i day traded i traded litecoin i traded a bunch of other stuff just for fun i even mined primecoin so i’m not you know on my bitcoin journey i’ve touched a bunch of other coins as well um so no one’s a perfect toddler psychologically are you able to buy the dip when the dip is like 30 000 and it’s like well my cost basis is 192 and uh you know or like whatever it’s five even even if it’s three thousand even my cost basis is three thousand buying at thirty so buy the dip great so are you able to psychologically do that or are you just like hey my position is set i hope the rest of you suckers by the dip so that uh you know we keep this upward momentum yeah so technically i’m over 100 of my net worth in bitcoin because i took a small levered position back when bitcoin was seven thousand dollars at the bottom of the cycle uh because i believe that bitcoin you know in a bull run obviously appreciates so right i uh technically over 100 my net worth is in bitcoin uh also i do something where i lend out my bitcoin to earn a yield yeah that yield is like kind of a day-to-day stacking mechanism to add more sats to add more and you’re using what like uh kraken block file would you use them so crack it doesn’t have you’re at cracker now so i put them first but i don’t think they offer this as a service i appreciate the shout out but no we don’t offer that yet yeah so we’ve got like block five let in and uh genesis trading agendas is trading you have to have like a minimum of 20 bitcoin to be a customer so by the way i bought some secondary and kraken so i’m i’m with you on on the christmas train let’s go all the way to the top how the hell when you’re so kraken how many people at kraken do you think have more than 15 million dollars how do you employ people when they’re all [ ] yeah that’s what i want to know like how often they tell you like you know what dad go [ ] yourself i’m out next week it’s like dan i’m bored you got a spot for me yeah you know it’s a particular challenge for crypto i mean crypto it’s the hardest industry to build a business in think about it this way too like you’ve got monsoon seas in the bull run and you want to capture all of that revenue potential but if you start to spend and deploy capital through hiring and building offices and whatnot by the time that the bull runs over like when do you turn off the spigot like when you turn off all that cash flow going out and then how much do you cut back and i think that’s really really tricky like how do you predict these cycles no one knows if we did we’d all be trillionaires and so i think like that’s the most difficult part of this is like how do you build a business with those fluctuations in demand and how do you match expenses to meet that but yeah i mean you know in terms of in terms of employee churn it’s super tricky i actually put in my job descriptions for my growth marketing team no crypto experience required i first find it really refreshing when folks come in and challenge language that we use in our ads home page app store page etc on how we describe crypto because i’m i’ve been in too long it’s hard for me to zoom all the way out and see what it looks like from a newbie right and so one i like that perspective and two to the motivational issue i think um you know folks who are new to crypto are much hungrier uh than ones who haven’t been there um okay so let’s do this private wealth manager so what would you actually build here would it be a services company would it be a software company what would be the how would you attack this problem yeah it’s a services company and you can’t take bips on aum that’s like an old way to do it you’d have to figure out some sort of new model that’s maybe more subscription or something like that the first and foremost problems you’re tackling taxes taxes are incredibly complicated for crypto trades especially if you’re going to defy things yeah one would be taxes two uh so taxes not only cover trades but also covers future tax minimization strategies for example there’s a trust called a grat a grat is a great way to pass on your crypto to your son daughter et cetera a partner without any taxable events occurring so there’s all sorts of very advanced structures that exist for very wealthy folks that most crypto people have no idea you know that there was it wasn’t institutional wealth they didn’t they didn’t work at goldman they were in their basement mining bitcoin or mining ethereum you know like it’s a whole different world right right and that’s we’re going to trust different things in fact i think yeah what you did where you built your brand and you’re like oh build a big audience i think you have a few hundred thousand followers on twitter for bitcoin i think that’s what you would do if you come out and you’re like hey i’m the bitcoin tax guy and i’m gonna talk every day about how to like deal with the tax problem of bitcoin and wealth management for wealthy bitcoiners and i’m gonna my sales is all gonna happen through content and then whoever and then you’ll probably get billionaires coming inbound saying hey will you manage my stuff um that’s how you would do this i’ve known these billionaires personally for eight years so i actually dm’d a bunch of them and asked them if they used multi-family offices and no i did right i already know that it’s a problem that they’re not currently solving uh they went they went to some traditional financial folks and they talked to me about their experiences and i was like wow that sounds terrible right so for me i’m very happy at kraken i love the team i’m working with i love the team i’ve built um also they acquired my company so i’m very incentivized to stick around but i couldn’t be more excited in terms of a rocket ship in this space kraken’s a great spot to be at and i’m a growth guy so it’s all about that like hyper growth and kraken’s like a perfect perfect spot but this is more for fun on the side of thinking like what we’re all we’re all tinker tinker with stuff and think through stuff and this is kind of my recent fascination so sam do you know about the like the tether uh question mark have you heard this sam no okay so uh i’ll i’ll ask dan to kind of explain it so dan i’m gonna ask you to do two things one is explain what people are what some people are afraid of with tether and why that might be like you know people call it oh is this the black swan that’s gonna crash all of crypto et cetera et cetera and then how you sleep at night being 100 of your net worth in bitcoin knowing that this potential question mark exists with tether so so explain the potential problem and then how you think about it sure so tether is called a stable coin a stable coin is a representation of a fiat currency so tether represents us dollars and it’s called usdt so usdt is created by companies wiring money in to a cayman island entity and they wire it in there and then tethers are minted and created and those are put on blockchains uh tether has existed on the bitcoin blockchain ethereum blockchain and tron blockchain amongst others i think as well so what that tether represents is a one-to-one backing of a dollar now the company that issues these uh which is like tether united like tether limited plus uh bitfinex which is an exchange there were concerns over if they were truly backed one to one and there were moments when it wasn’t but they’ve recently reached a settlement with a believe the new york district attorney i think is who they i forget exactly who they settled with this attorney general new york attorney general i think there’s so many regulators i forget who who settled with who but um yeah they essentially settled and agreed to do audited to perform audits and come out with exactly how much they had in reserve so the controversy and the worry is that tethers are i so there’s a couple worries one is that tethers um you know first and foremost aren’t backed and that could lead to a kind of like a classic run on the bank situation where more people try to redeem tethers and that there’s none of tet there’s not enough dollars in the bank to be able to redeem to be able to be redeemed and that would cause structural problems at the crypto ecosystem number two i think is like the idea that usdt is being used in smart contracts and defy and it’s completely centralized because usdt like usdc these stable coins that are centrally issued by companies like tether and circle they can be reversed or or frozen or paused and that truly decentralized and a lot of this a lot of the defy space i think a lot of the contracts for example like maker dao so so maker dow is like a uh like an algorithmic stable coin almost 50 percent of its collateral is centralized stable coins so it represents a systemic risk to defy and centralized finance aka the exchange base so the fear is basically if the tether people are not being on the up and up so you have to trust people which is like kind of the anti-crypto way um if they’re ju they could just be printing tethers um or be holding not one to one dollar assets so they could be like a bank fractionally reserving saying oh for every dollar we have we have five tethers um and basically using that to buy and that’s being used by bitcoin so it’s like artificially it’s not that bitcoin has any issue with it but that’s what’s driving up run-ups in price is there’s a huge amount of bitcoin that’s bought with and so that’s the question the concern now how legitimate is the concern so if we dig into it i wrote about this uh and the held report my newsletter if you dig into this there it isn’t as bad as people say um there’s all sorts of moments when tether wasn’t fully collateralized as in there wasn’t enough tether to be redeemed to dollars and the industry was fine um also we’re talking about exchanges don’t hold tethers the users hold tethers so tether is just like any other crypto asset so there’s been tons of times when multi-billion dollar crypto assets have gone to zero and the structural problems in the space have been okay we’ve also suffered much more egregious moments in the crypto space like malcox now gox represented 90 of trading volume this would be like binance coinbase and kraken all going down at the same time you know these are hugely stressful moments for the um for the marketplace and so bitcoin has been through a lot worse bitcoin inherently doesn’t need tether tethers being used to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but for example like um different other government fiat currencies are used to buy bitcoin but that doesn’t mean that bitcoin is dependent on the dollar it’s not dependent on usdt and then i think you know another concern that i forgot to bring up earlier people hypothesize like tether is being used to pump bitcoin i think that’s completely unfounded it was based on a university of texas research report which i don’t even know if you could call it [ ] research but it was like a research report where they basically said that correlation is causation right which is absurd it’s like saying that like you know uh umbrellas cause rain because they’re correlated so it’s really ridiculous that’s where the core root of some of the concerns that like others being used to pump bitcoin come from completely unfounded there’s no data that supports that and also there’s moments when tethers are printed when bitcoin goes down but of course the people who buy into this whole theory ignore those moments right and uh okay so so that’s a great answer so you um i want to switch to basically talking about uh other bitcoin or other other let’s say crypto ideas that you see that uh the average person is either not knowing about you know it’s an interesting idea that you’re not that that’s not as well known yet or you see the opportunity for somebody to go build do you see any other opportunities besides the private wealth management space the private wealth management one for me is one that’s just really sticky that one’s like super interesting other ones that would be good as well i just think simplicity is the ultimate way to go build product it means that folks find value in your product much more quickly you can convey the value prop people discover the value prop they could activate it at a higher rate so i think like simplistic a very very simple very very simple mobile experience for wallets i think is still like very underappreciated i think the wallet spaces still has horrid user experience like for example let’s say when you send a bitcoin transaction bitcoin transactions have two states unconfirmed and confirmed and to a lame a layperson like what does that even mean yeah you know and all wallets default to this language and i would disagree that they should even default to that language i mean you should add a layer in the layer above that and the gui of something much more understandable wallets are kind of fundamental the core ethos of the system and there’s a lot of things you can do now where you layer in trading capabilities built in there etc so i think that what the space still doesn’t have great great to use wallets i think like exodus wallet is really good but other than them i haven’t seen like an experience around the core experience of holding your crypto that was just mind-blowingly amazing do you have a security team like a physical security team do we like guards and [ ] no you um well i’m in texas so obviously i own a few guns um so it’s a come and take it sort of attitude at conferences i do have security who do you hire um it’s it’s uh you know provided to me by uh through the company how much do they spend each year on on these security security guards you know i’m not sure but uh but kraken is constantly focused about security they’re kind of nuts when it comes to security at crack and it’s in terms of like how you control like where your laptop is and everything else they’re in exchange right kraken’s been around for 10 years and has never been hacked so for us like they’re constantly paranoid about that and the human attack vector is the weak point in any text system so they’re very conscious about like different executives and high-profile individuals like where they are um you know if they’re at events with a lot of people they got to think about physical security so it’s something that they think they think about all the time i have no idea how much that cost though i would be curious to hear about that because whenever i see i mean i i don’t have i i’m in a different friend group as you maybe i’ve got a few friends that have tens of millions of bitcoin but um i am always curious as to how like the the actual security because i would think that when it comes to hacking i would think it would be just like stealing like kidnapping someone stealing stealing the person as opposed to trying to break into the thing totally yeah and that’s actually classically called the wrench attack in the bitcoin world is that someone could come to you and just crack you over the head with the wrench right now at the same time you know sam you’ve done very well and st michonne like you guys have both done very well and we see you guys know billionaires that walk around the streets of san francisco and they’re not getting mugged and and kidnapped for ransom so in in with bitcoin yeah bitcoin is easily transferable but let’s say that let’s say this person is not into bitcoin at all they can easily take their liquid assets buy bitcoin and then transfer it to the kidnapper so whether or not you hold bitcoin if that makes you more or less susceptible to getting attacked i don’t think it does well that doesn’t necessarily seem fair like but that said i’m not uh i’m not entirely educated on it so i’m not sticking by this quite hardly or i’m not sticking to this entirely but like when i when i have money in a variety of different places there’s a pretty large amount of checks and balances that go into transferring it so i just try to transfer money to a another bank today and there was like a hard cut off whereas with a lot of crypto stuff you can literally have it in a uh in like a store like some type of store like physical i could fat finger the number i’m putting in and i could transfer you know instead of five i could transfer five thousand you know yeah and i also and there’s no getting it back and like credit cards do a pretty good job of doing fraud protection um um usually is it what’s it called what’s the the 250 000 of checking accounts are uh our insurer fda yeah it’s also a big problem of like death right so uh so i think there’s a startup opportunity here too which is what happens to your bitcoin when you die and um and and how do you how do you manage that so on one hand you can leave instructions to your spouse or whatever which is like hey to get all to get access to all of our private keys here’s what you do but now you have instructions to get all your private keys that’s you know somewhere uh you have to protect that and so you have to have multiple layers you’re starting to go down the rabbit hole you’re starting to yeah yeah you get you kind of get in the circular logic loop of like well i can’t trust anyone else with my money so i need to manage my private key and it’s like well if i want to pass it on i have to trust with them yeah exactly and then actually and then you also have the like i do the problem of like actually like property uh you know property transfer when you die is like it goes through either probate or you have a will and i just think that there’s probably a lot there that if you if you look at this group of crypto wealthy as just a new customer that exists and they’re gonna it’s i have this framework this two by two which is like you know um is it an old problem or a new problem and then is there an old solution or new solution right and so this is a case where it’s it’s a bunch of old problems but we need a new solution because it’s a new type of customer it goes back to the private wealth management exactly there’s actually a way to solve this too it’s called multi-signature which means that your bitcoin isn’t controlled by one key that opens up the vault there’s three keys and you need two out of three keys to open up the vault and there’s all sorts of like there’s three out of five key structures so those would be how you do this through time as you give like your your your cpa one your wife wife or husband one day yeah and then you give the other two to whomever else or you keep three on your own so there’s a lot of elegant ways to do that multisig i think is the only way that’s like but the thing is now you have to educate your there’s no cpa in the world that knows private key management well right that’s where this entity would for example be one of the key holders they would know very good private key management practices and only sign as for under certain conditions which would also help against the kidnapping vector and where they would have like a velocity limit you’ve dm me before about stuff that’s in the creator kind of like audience space um i don’t know where you want to go with that i’ll kind of leave it open but uh you seem to have like a theory or a framework of like where the puck is going when it comes to the creator thing or like i don’t know you’ve successfully built your personal brand and you know like i don’t know how many years ago nobody knew who the [ ] dan hell is and today you’re known by a bunch of you know crypto nerds so like what is the what is you you give me your thought process around either one of those two like generally where it’s going are for you specifically how you think about it yeah so i’m like i’m a growth product growth marketing guy so when i find like a vein of gold where i find like engagement or i find user acquisition it just fascinates me right so the creator economy is about you know for the i think or most folks on the show i’d say up to speed with creator economy stuff okay cool so um you know i built an audience in the crypto space in the bitcoin space my main message is just bitcoin though so i’m straight to the bitcoin ethos i’ve been in a long time so and my last name is a pun on the favorite meme hoddle right so my last name actually is real though my last name truly is hell it’s actually a german last name um which and so uh with that i decided to lean into that and i just started to write i wrote long form articles i started to tweet and those got traction and i found over time that there’s a certain way that these gain traction it’s it’s not it’s not by random circumstance there are ways to understand the engagement algorithm and use that to propagate your message for me i really love bitcoin what’s an example well it’s an example of something you saw that was working sure well you can do twitter advanced search and search for the most popular tweets from any account filter though but filter those by the most popular and then actually take a format of what they’ve tweeted and just take an iteration of that right you already know it’s probably going to work and you just take a small tweak and that’s that almost always works yep you could also do a quote tweet where like let’s say let’s say like a novel tweet you can just copy paste neval’s quote with quotes and tag neval and you’ll get almost as much engagement of all those yeah even if you’re a really tiny account so little things like that there’s a whole bunch of those that are discovered um because yeah again i’m a growth marketing guy so i’m digging in and i’m like oh man this this engagement tactic really worked i’ve done some things like if you see auto playing videos you can build those in the media center in twitter which you have to have an ads account to do those but they’re not an ad it’s organic so little little tips and tricks like that um consistency i think is the number one thing that people forget i have not missed tweeting a day in three years if you do you lose your spot in the relevancy engine with twitter so twitter every day uh there’s there’s like 90 of consumers and 10 of us creators well the creators create content for the board consumers the consumer session and the product and twitter needs to figure out how to hook them immediately and so twitter goes to all their previous engaged content and they go well who do they engage with every day and if they’ve built up a habit of engaging with myself then they’re like well let’s give them a damn hell tweet but if i don’t tweet that day then there may be like oh let’s give them a chris tweet or someone else’s tweet because they need to go hook them immediately and then if that engagement loop gets built with them over time then also slowly start to lose relevancy with them so consistency is absolutely the most important thing on twitter and most of these channels i think that was like the really big breakthroughs for me it’s not quality it’s quantity it’s about always having content there for them to consume and building that habit and then you over time you focus on quality where i think i’ve gotten a little bit more high quality over time especially like i’ve stood up a youtube channel i’ve got 25 000 subs in six months and i just shoot one continuous shot i don’t i don’t even edit it i just do one continuous shot even if i like sneeze or something i just kind of like keep going because i don’t have enough time to spend in post-production and doing cuts you guys have great video content i just don’t have time to go do that how they’re doing it’s all about like does my audience does my audience like will they engage with the content well it’s an mvp right it’s an mvp if people like it then you go spend time you you pay for an editor or something to go help out um but yeah it’s been a it’s been an incredible journey going down this rabbit hole and then you know monetization-wise too just seeing all the different ways that folks you know tipping on on twitch you’ve got like tipping on twitter now you’ve got subscription products you’ve got swag three years from now audience keeps growing and the money the monetization things get more baked out for you how much do you think an individual creator in your niche like how much do you think you can make three years from now just on the personal brand side of things forget the job and investigating and other stuff have you guys talked to pomp yet yeah we’ve heard a couple times yeah and we both know him well i don’t we i mean i mean ask him that but that question yeah but if i if i have we i can but we can guess okay so out not let’s not include investment revenue which i think investment revenue in the next uh so we’re talking about like paid newsletter sponsorships uh recurring revenue i think we should throw in there because that’s kind of like part of the personal brand stuff courses now courses yeah but let’s just say though his his investment revenue if you told me that it makes him personally 30 million dollars spread evenly over the next 10 years i wouldn’t be surprised is that crazy john did you hear are you talking about 30 total sorry 30 total spread out evenly over 10 years yeah i don’t know how big this fund is so i’m just going to take that out for a second i think yeah just the personal brand which is two and a half to an hour i would say three and a half what would you have guessed dan two to four million is my best guess as of how much revenue he’s making and that’s based on like my best knowledge right maybe five people on staff so maybe half a million in costs yeah very very little overhead so very high margins right um these are all value of creative too like if someone gets gets a job through pomp they might be really inclined to sign up to his newsletter right these are like mutually exclusive sales right um but by far i think like so he he’s got the so pomp is the biggest pomp is so this is our upper bound limit and that’s why i chose pomp right is the biggest what about uh in the bitcoin in the crypto space you’re what about uh my guy uh ralph powell or is that his name brow power yeah ralph powell he’s more of like uh macro finally i mean i guess we could call him krypto now because he’s like there are these even though like let’s say like a guy who’s kind of a troll even though i love him like a james dalton like a james altucher i bet you makes 30 million dollars a year in crypto newsletters dude i don’t i don’t think james i’ll teach you that guys from like 2017 era he’s a friend of mine dude he sold his new new his crypto newsletter for 60 million dollars wow wow yes holy [ __ ] i didn’t even know that you know motley fool yeah motley fool does close to 100 million a month in revenue um so i i think that pomp is the popular poppy one but i think they’re i bet you i guarantee you there’s guys who have newsletters that they charge 20 000 a year well you guys have uh you guys did the breakdown of agora right that like crazy newsletter thing they bought james yeah oh okay yeah i mean i got the i got the you know after you guys did the breakdown of it i actually talked to someone who worked there yeah and got the breakdown so like that back-end newsletter the one that’s a really high markup like the thousand dollars a month that’s where they make all the money yeah it’s like you got your twenty thirty dollar a month up front one and you get the thousand dollar back and one i couldn’t personally do it i just feel kind of weird doing it personally were we wrong by the way were we wrong on our guesses for agora in terms of like uh the revenue i didn’t do any revenue back at the envelope revenue stuff i just want to know tactically like how do they think about it i’m with you dan there is something to that like oh this like weird slippery slope where you end up with these like you know this small one percent of these like whales who you’ve just milked their whole life savings because they think they’re getting this thing no no thanks i’d rather build longer term value to like deliver something i think is truly worth that amount of money that’s where i’ve experimented with courses so i’ve got my newsletter i’ve got my newsletter i’ve got ads which one is the best the best combination of like effort fun and money like if you combine those right you want a low effort high five high money like what is the best one so far you’ve experimented as a creator of these tools in your tool belt probably youtube because i it’s kind of fun showing a product that you really so i only represent products that i personally use right it’s an ethical standard that i have for myself so which means that i have eliminated a lot of the potential advertisers that would pay me a lot more right for me it’s the only way that i feel like it’d be appropriate for me to you know represent this product um then the youtube is fun because i get to like have like a little skit with it where i like i bring it up i talk about it i represent it the newsletter it’s a lot of work um that i mean writing an article a week doesn’t sound like a lot it’s a ton of work and you take pride in it but when it’s paid there’s a bar of these people paid for this information so the information that better be different and unique and awesome everybody i know i’m a i’m a you know classic growth guy so i have a survey at the end of each one to get like a raw mps score i get feedback on what the next article they want written that way i write the best most relevant content which means that they’re satisfied but it’s tough you know like it it’s really hard to where i don’t know how pomp does it daily i think he’s got a guy i i would bet that he’s got about two young guys he says he doesn’t he says he sits down he writes it in one take um well i i went out to me and my wife and him and his wife all went out to lunch one day and just hung out and uh paulina his wife was teasing him like she was like it takes me forever to wipe write my weekly thing he just sits down and he does it in 15 minutes and he’s done i mean i’ve i’ve had some that have like cruised through like a straight like stream of consciousness but it’s tough some of them i do a lot of research for like i wrote one on bitcoin defy and that was a ton of like actually i tried to try out a couple different apps it was a lot of work so fun and roi would be youtube channel where like i do these pre-world mid-roll ads they’re kind of fun to do i can visually show off the product in a more fun compelling way like the products i’m representing uh versus like the newsletter which i have to sit down really think through hard and it’s something that you know i want to make sure i represent really really well by the way your um i’ve said that this bitcoin laser eyes thing is one of the most genius kind of like decentralized marketing tactics i’ve ever seen um what is the origin story is there an organization i’m saying do you know he knows more people than i do where did this come from and who are the geniuses that came up with this yeah so i wrote about bitcoin’s decentralized marketing team before where like bitcoin has no central marketing org there’s no propaganda arm of bitcoin it’s like me and pomp and everyone else who talks about bitcoin i don’t know who originated it it’s like the origin of memes i mean sometimes you can find where a meme came from but sometimes it just kind of like it came from nowhere i’m not sure who the first person was and no one i know has claimed it which is insane because somebody should and uh and you could you could be the first person who did this right that’s not like uh that’s not like a wild thing and but it’s genius it is like bitcoin in so many ways is a religion and um and this is just yet another like you know religious mark basically you know this is the yamaka this is this is the thing you wear that that says hey i’m a part of this religion and um you know putting it in the profile picture having it be slightly mysterious so people don’t know what it’s for and then they ask and then making it memeable where we can all do it i think is it was just brilliant brilliant brilliant really yeah this basis i mean memes are such an incredible part of how stuff is communicated nowadays right like i mean we saw like elections that can people can be elected based on memes like memes aren’t just these funny things on like 4chan or reddit anymore like memes are the memes are like the main trend like my mom uses memes now she does it on my facebook but you know it’s it’s crazy like it’s narrative compression at its finest it’s taking a whole narrative and compressing it into one image and i think that’s why it’s so powerful as a transmission it’s the most shareable viral thing you can do right on the internet and so it’s what you know memes are the packaging for ideas if you want to most efficiently package an idea a meme is the best way so i’ve joked about uh we saw this thing called i think was called like meme university or lol university or something like that and basically they took the website of lambda school and they just remade it for a school that would teach you how to do memes it was a joke website that was not like a real course behind it but i was like you know if there really should be a course that somebody should take this is it um people but people if you could learn this it’s learning you know the native tongue of the internet um and and you know it’s pretty important to be fluent in internet nowadays and so i think i think that’s one where i’m like if somebody really should create this i have this slack channel that me and ben do where we basically put out a challenge where we said every day for 50 days we’re gonna make a new meme um because you know it’s easy to spread these but the act of actually making one is hard it’s telling it you know telling a story telling a joke in the most efficient form and it’s been so challenging to just do this every day for 50 days well what’s kind of fun is um my buddies over at etoro brad mitchelson really really smart marketing guy him and i buddies and what they did is they started to create gifs on so on giphy and giphy like that that’s a good that gets pulled into like facebook messenger search engine twitter gifs so i started to make i saw their strategy for etoro and i made that for myself so i took like the most popular bitcoin memes and then wrapped it in my own black and white design to where you could search like dan held and you’d see a bunch of black and white gifs and have my my logo watermarked on there so like you can kind of create meme factories is what i learned from that like you can create like a meme factory to use that to propagate content and giphy was a really great way of doing it because it’s plugged into so many different platforms versus like if you you know each one individually like trying to create like an emoji with each social platform would be tough but like giphy gets pulled into all of them yeah that’s smart i like that all right we’re about at the top of the hour uh do we want to go over one more idea or what sean um i don’t know if you have if you have one that’s burning you can do it otherwise i think we should uh wrap it up cool well yeah i mean just my i think like closing thought on like the creator economy stuff um i’ve been in bitcoin for nine years and that has been a huge fascination for me i would say the creator economy is not an equal fascination but quickly becoming something very interesting um i think about it as like the monetization of all and human information right like creators are just taking whatever knowledge they have locally putting that on the internet distributing it and then monetizing that and what is the value of all of that combined i mean it’s tens of trillions 100 trillion i don’t know what it’s worth but like for me i just kind of see this huge i mean there’s so many niche things that someone could write about like there’s a million things and it’s very low very low effort to find your mvp versus before you had to go buy a warehouse and start producing things you just produce content and if that content resonates and people click and want to figure out what products you’d recommend for them then you can go build your own products so i see kind of like a whole the economy kind of reorienting around content marketing and that being the top of funnel in in like idea generation for all future products great well what do you think sean yeah let’s wrap it up i like that one that that’s uh i like the way you explained that because i think it it aligns with something i believe which is when when there’s never been more information it’s all about who actually has attention and the person who’s gonna have attention is whoever is putting out great content consistently so great content once we’ll get your attention once and then great content consistently will build trust which just says look it’s too noisy i’m just gonna go to my sources i and um and then those people then hold the keys and you know up till now that’s been captured by the platform so that’s been true but youtube still captured way more value and twitch captured way more value and twitter captured way more value than the people on it and that seems to be flipping uh where where either new platforms are going to come out where the creators own it or the the value is going to accrue off platform in a bigger way than it did originally when it was like i think the value accrued like 99 1. um 99 to the platform 1 to the creators and i think that’s that’s gonna flip uh closer to 50 50 over time i think twitter has recognized this right with the super follows where you can have like subscription followers where people subscribe to like a premium set of tweets you have i mean twitter i think sees this coming they see the exodus of folks building an audience on twitter and then the exodus of all that monetization going to sub stack you’re trying to bring that back in yeah i think that’s sort of just trading one master for another though in a way where it’s like as long as twitter will put super follows there and then they’ll take the cut they want and then as long as they’re they’re the button to pay for stuff they can they’ll just inch that cut from 10 to 15 to 20 to 50 over time and um and so i think you know the real answer here is is how do you build this independently and i think basically that that’s the part of crypto i’m most excited about is people who are building uh you know a social network that is open source um that if it can get adoption and this is why i was interested in big cloud is if it can get adoption then uh that ratio will flip the the all the value will accrue to the creators and not to the core platform or protocol underneath um so so that’s what i’m excited about is like that’s the real disruption there well we appreciate you coming on dan um it’s uh i’ve been following you on twitter now for a couple weeks since uh uh sean’s been talking about you and he’s been saying that you were the guy to speak to and and we appreciate it yeah so go go give him a follow he’s at dan held on twitter and uh yeah all right we’ll see you we’ll see you later what i want to never looking back