E37: Irene Zhao - From Instagram Model to Crypto Queen

30:26They were funny with super cringe. And that's it. And they will make all these ridiculous comments. And, ah, it's so cringe, so cringe, so cringe. Like, they're much less tolerant than people on Instagram. It's a very special type of humor, actually. Yes, it's a very special type of humor. The Twitter shit posting, basically. Yeah, it's such a rare talent. Yeah, the better you shit post, the more smart you are, actually. It shows that you're... And you have to put it all day, at least, like, two or three hours a day to see what's going on. Like what's the latest, funniest thing to talk about? And you have to link it back to crypto.

30:58Yeah. Yeah, that's how you make your account really funny and interesting for people to follow. So at some point you are doing Twitter and Instagram. So how did you balance basically the IG looks from the Twitter brains? And like, I think then you kind of naturally move towards Twitter. You don't do a lot of Instagram stuff anymore, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. So how did this entire thing like... Instagram stuff. Because I just reuse the photos I post on Instagram to Twitter, right? So I can always have a lot of content to post on Twitter. And I start to slow down the posts I made on influencer stuff.

31:35Because if you post to different personas on two different platforms, people will be confused. People think I'm fake on Twitter. Because all I post on Instagram are lifestyle posts. Like, oh, I'm going to the gym. I'm doing yoga. I'm having like very nice brunch And I'm on Twitter I'm talking about crypto I'm talking about DeFi I'm talking about all this professional stuff People are like Are you fake? And a lot of people still think I'm not real Because just like the things I post on Twitter and Instagram Are just way too different Yeah That's why I started to Post less lifestyle content on Instagram I started talking about crypto on Instagram But I think at the time I received a lot of negative comments I see How did people react to that?

32:14They hate crypto I would say like at least 50 % of my original audience that are not on Twitter, they know nothing about crypto. They don't like it. Yeah, they're not there for that. Yeah, they're not there for that. Oh, I was here for your sexy photo, for your bikini photo, for your lifestyle. Why do you keep talking about this con, that con? You know, they get mad. So I was like, okay, cool. I guess post less stuff or more like entrepreneur stuff. That's very neutral. I don't really talk about crypto. I don't really post lifestyle. It's all about how I do startup and everything. Okay. We'll talk about that later.

32:44So it's perfect. Entrepreneurship. are you on TikTok? I'm not actually I should be why? because TikTok is the only way for you to reach a wider audience today yes do you know why? because the algorithm yeah algorithm not and big data not made yet to monetize as much as Instagram I mean for the company itself yeah yeah so TikTok is really the best way for you to reach a much wider audience okay so let's continue with first the thing that your Instagram followers hate and then we'll talk about the thing that they like. Sure. So first we'll talk about the crypto and NFTs. So you said that you started in the DeFi world as part of this economy network.

33:32Yes. How did you get along with this DeFi stuff, especially as a next commodity trader or broker? To be honest, I don't really enjoy DeFi because I don't really like finance and I don't think it's suitable for everybody. And especially for girls, because I am an influencer myself. I have a lot of influence on friends. When I talk to them about DeFi, they don't know what is DeFi at all, right? And I think, yeah, exactly who cares about DeFi. And DeFi, to be honest, it's really hard to understand for like a normal person who don't know anything about finance, right? So it's not really mainstream.

34:02Do you want to explain quickly what decentralized finance is? No, it's okay. Okay. It's all right. It's all right. I'm all right. Yeah. I can see the passion. Anyway, okay, okay. So, okay. But then you were starting to, basically you made this, you're there. Okay, I don't really like that, but there's something else that's really interesting. NFTs went to giga. So how did you get? How did you get into that? I got into that because one of my friends sent me a punk for free. That's how I got into crypto. Crypto punk. Yes, crypto punk. Nice. July 2021. Yeah. That's an amazing time. Yeah, that's what's like.

34:40So that's a nice friend. It's about 50k US dollar at a time. And as peak, it's about like 400 ,000. Yeah. That's a great friendship. Yeah, that's a very great friendship. That's how I got in crypto. That's how I got in NFT because I was checking the price every day. Especially when the floor price broke 100 years. I was like, what? It's like the end of, I think, end of July after the PayPal. Yeah. I think after PayPal bought a punk. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. True, true, true. so yeah it went up like 120 for something like that floor price okay great okay great so so what happens you have this crypto you're like crazy this thing is worth so much money like yeah yeah so god if NFT I realized actually NFT is a very good business for the creators because you can turn everything into NFTs right because there are different kind of creators have like video creators have creators who can dance have creators who can sing you have creators who are like the musicians right you can turn all this content into NFTs.

35:40It's more relevant compared to tokens. Because token is just like fungible. It's all the same. But NFT is like very different in different formats. And for all kinds of creators they can launch their own NFT collections. How quickly did you grasp this? Because I remember for example myself like I mean I love DeFi because I love investing and yield and compounding. But I also understood quickly like most people will never give a fuck about that. It's too like even Bitcoin and all that stuff. But the NFT thing is really interesting. But I needed probably three weeks to understand like how, you know, this is going to change business model.

36:17What for you was the key thing that you understood, like the kind of light bulb moment of like, oh, I can apply this to all this stuff plus the creator economy? I think it's after the Irene Dow. Yes, Irene Dow movement. Because I already have a very existing audience and I don't like doing advertisement. So I'm thinking since I already have a big audience, can I do something with them, right? About them, like create a community around them and we can use NFT as the, you know, like the gated channel for them to assess the exclusive content and get to the inner circle. So the Irene Dao thing is happening when you're still CMO of Konomi?

37:01Influencer or? Yeah, it's happened when I'm still an influencer. I mean, I was still influenced until this day. Sometimes I still take some advertisement if it matches my personal branding. But you were still CMO of Konami or not anymore? I think I was like, you know, half-half. In between. Yeah, in between. So can you tell us about this Irene Dow thing? Like what happened, what it is, and like what it made you realize about this kind of NFT world and what's possible? So as I said, I already have a very big audience and I think I can do something. about it so we launched the iron dog nft collection which is a free mint for for the fans and actually when i when when they launched the nft collection i was swimming i was having swimming lessons and after i finished the lesson it's already minted out but you are part of the yes i am part of it but i wasn't one yes but i wasn't the developer who actually launched the collection okay so um i was actually having swimming lesson and after i i finished i realized oh it's actually on me now and people are talking about it on Twitter I thought oh actually it went viral and people are really interested in that because it's the first ever created NFT in the crypto space and the people at the time they really love something that's new and innovative yeah so but this started as a let's do a test or you had a kind of idea or strategy about I want to test this NFT thing on creator economy or just say I want to do a kind of joke and see like how it takes it's actually started as a meme we want to do a social experiment because we don't expect anything otherwise we will already be charging money yeah exactly maybe the part of the magic is because it was free and the reason like people participate more the NFT was so badly cropped yeah the photo is like it's not even like nicely cropped right it's like all this white white thing like in the photo and people was like how is this worse so much money at the time it's like ridiculous and this is actually how it became viral but it's so ridiculous it's like so funny and people So what happened?

39:01Can you tell us a few timeframes, key numbers? So we launched the collection and minted within 30 minutes. And I started to send my NFT to some of the big, big people in the crypto as a gift. So one of the person I sent the NFT to is Mike Norgrance. Because before I sent it to him, you know, I mean, I started as a Telegram sticker, right? Okay. Sticker set. Yeah. And Mike Norbert actually congratulated me on the sticker set. He said it's very innovative and very interesting. Okay. So I said, oh, thanks. You said it's very interesting. Probably you might like my NFT because my NFT was actually the sticker set.

39:42Okay. So I said, okay, can I send you one NFT? He said, yes, sure. And after I sent it to him, I didn't expect anything. He posted? He posted. Okay. Yeah. He just posted. He's such a nice guy. He just posted. I was like, oh, it's so innovative, so funny. He has posted. And then Logan Paul saw the post. And then he bought, I think, like 30, 29 NFTs. And then the price went up to 5 ETH. 5 X, okay. 5 ETH, 5 ETH. 5 ETH, okay. Yes, at a peak. Okay. He bought like 13, I think. I think the total amount of money he spent is about 230. Okay. 30K, yeah. 200K. Okay. Did you, I mean, for you, it's amazing advertisement.

40:28Yeah. Did you benefit any other way from that? I think it's more like the branding. Yeah. Because people see me as the first one who successfully launched a creative NFT. And after, you know, after Trump launched his own NFT. Yeah. And people are calling Trump's followers a simp. Yeah. But I think I'm the one who actually started all this like simp movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's like how people view it, which is pretty meaningful. So this is the moment where you're like, I'm going to build a company in crypto. And you're going to be around that. Yeah, because, you know, there's like way many girls who are harder and millions of fans.

41:08If I can do it, they can do it too. So I was like, okay, but the thing is, at the time, it was so difficult to launch your own NFT collection because you need to hire a smart contract developer and then you have to have a, your fans have to go to OpenSea to buy it and they have to go to Discord to verify. They have the NFTs to actually assess the community. And then if they want to do any DAO, voting or proposals, they have to go to snapshots, which is just like too complicated even for a cryptonative person. So we want to put everything into one platform, which is super easy for the web typical to use.

41:42That's why we started SoCo. Let's talk about SoCo directly. Yeah. Yes, perfect. What is SoCal? If you have to talk about it, so it means social collectible. Yeah, social collectible. If you have to summarize in a few sentences. Yeah, it's like, it's the platform where we can allow all the creators to launch their own versions of Airindale at the click of a button. Okay. So you just need to press two buttons. Boom, you have your collection. Yeah. What does it make sense for a creator to do that? It makes a lot of sense for them to do that because right now you have your ownership of your content because you can just put all the contents on Instagram into NFTs and then you change the ownership from the...

42:26Because, you know, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, all these centralized social media platforms, they can take down your content, they can take down your account at any time. You don't really own your community, you don't own your content, you don't own your income. but for nft you change the ownership to yourself so you are the one who's on all this content and when you sell all this content to your fans your fans are actually the owners of all this content so it builds a very special relationship into you and the fans and also if you are a grassroots creator it makes much more sense because when you are small and you have all this uh i would say the passion economy right the top 100 fans or top 10 fans who are super crazy about your project they can come and join you and when you grow bigger you can reap the benefits all together so you are like 10 times more powerful than you were before 100 % once you establish this ownership how do I share my success with people who believe in me since the beginning as a person or as a company or as a band or whoever is kind of like funding my projects since the beginning is going to have the same upside I mean an upside that's linked to my it's not only that they contribute like the at your work they also talk about it to their friends they want them to be your support as well it's evangelism on steroids because I mean because you if you love Coldplay for example you'll tell your friends I love Coldplay listen to this music it's amazing oh yeah okay but now if you own a Coldplay NFT where you have maybe a part of their yearly profit or you can have a dinner with Chris Martin or whatever like you're completely you're completely tied to the upside and the success of the...

44:12I have more financial incentives to promote about the creators. Yeah. Another one good thing is probably you are like secret follower of this girl's OnlyFans. Of course, you can't say that, oh, I'm a fan of, I'm a subscriber to this girl's OnlyFans. But if you bought her NFT, you can actually say, oh, it's an investment. And you can probably, you know, share this creator to your friends. Yeah. Great example. how much of that is a concept because this sounds so appealing and makes so much sense but then there is the reality of the world which is everybody still uses Twitter, Instagram, TikTok YouTube it's a crypto bear market most people think NFC's are a scam crypto is dead for the 200th time no one cares about that anymore so was the actual reality and maybe like to make it more practical what are the key challenges that you've faced at Sokol since founding the company and especially now in the bear market?

45:13I think for the creator side that some of the creators are still pretty conservative the problem is not they are conservative it's their fans because the fans have this false perception about NFT that it's always scam it's just like NFT like profile picture like why am I paying like 5k or like 10k for a static photo where you can just download it for free on the internet. So the education barrier is still very high. And also actually, I talked to a lot of like K-pop managers and they said that K-pop fans are the ones who hate NFT the most and who are strongly against this K-pop star if you are into the NFT business.

45:49So these are the challenges we face. You know why? K-pop fans are that against? I think they probably just have this like perception that NFT probably first of all, they think, oh crypto is not environmental friendly and secondly they think oh all the existing NFT projects like launched even launched by the superstar like Jay Chou Edison Chen the floor price actually dropped a lot right so they don't really see the value of why I want my idol to be associated with NFT collections yeah so these are the things the challenges we face right now so we talked a bit and you told me that your kind of like initial vision is B2C yeah now you're doing some B2B stuff yes to kind of like pivot or offer more things because a lot of creators now are not, I mean, probably in a year or two is going to be different.

46:36You're going to be like, oh, yeah, it's going to go crazy. But like right now, like what do you, what do you do? For all this time being, we are doing B2B and B2C at the same time. Okay. And then after the B2C doesn't work, we think, we should continue to work with B2B because a lot of companies, the big companies, they're still key in the NFT business. They still think it's the future and they are very keen to put resources, the money into the NFT collections. So we are working with all these brands who are easier to work with because they already have the belief. Yeah. Yeah, and they do have a specific niche market who also wants to be in the NFT community.

47:11So I think it's a win-win situation for us. What do you do exactly with businesses? Oh, like... The difference with like creators and businesses or it's kind of like similar theme? The left creators is more like individual creators and they are interacting with the fans. But for the business side, we are working with Amber Launch, the biggest F1 of the party. So they're launching the NFT collection as the lifelong membership. So as long as you have the NFT collection, you can get to the Amber Launch at all the locations in the world, like Monaco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and Las Vegas. This is owned by the Amber Launch.

47:49And also you can enjoy different privilege. You don't need to queue at all when you enter into the Amber Launch. Yeah. And it's also, they did World Cup events, like 20 events at the World Cup in Qatar. So they have a lot of events around the year. So this is one benefit. And another NFT product we work with is called Nothing, with a very sleek phone brand. So they are airdropping all the NFTs to the early community members and early supporters and early investors of the phone brand. So they are creating their own NFT community. And once you collect different NFTs, you can redeem these NFTs into something that's more tangible, like physical gadgets everything so they are also exploring the NFT market awesome

48:36how did your life change since you started since you started a business and it's very linked to what you said before you say I thought that when I was posting this picture and I didn't have a thousand likes within 10 minutes yeah I was stressed out because it's going to go viral and then I have the competition now you're in the real business world. Like how is life? How has life changed? Like for you, what are the good things and the bad things? I mean, for the good things is that I don't need to worry about how many likes I got on Instagram anymore. Right? Like if this brand doesn't want to work with me, I was like, okay, it's all right.

49:13It's fine. Yeah. And I can post content that I really enjoy posting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is the good thing. But the bad thing is I have to worry much, much more stuff compared to before. Because last time I was an influencer. All I need to care about is brands, my followers, myself, that's it. But now I have investors, I have the retails, I have all these different projects to work with, all these partners, just a lot of things going on. Yeah. Exchange as well. Talking to different people every day. And then some projects that want to work with you, they want to do partnership, and you have to find what's the angle, the best angle for you to benefit, for both of you to benefit from this partnership.

49:57And you have to, like, some project wanted to promote their coins and to see if there's any conflict of interest with your project. And also, we are still talking to some big business, right, business companies. And we have to find the best angle to promote the NFT collection, even in this bear market. Do you find that the partners or the businesses that approach you, I mean, the companies, are trying to look for a win-win or are trying to make benefit that you're a new entrepreneur? That's the part. We don't know. Nobody knows, right? You don't know. But if you always think that other people want to take advantage of you.

50:32You're not going to do anything. Yeah, you're not going to do anything, right? There's nothing you can do. Yeah. So you have to just keep trying out new stuff and working with different partners to see which one works. And accept that you're going to have a lot of failures. Yeah. As long as you survive is the most important. Last time, when I just started fundraising and I got rejected by some WCs, I was so mad. I was like, why did they reject me? Now I don't even think I'm angry anymore. It's like, okay, just a sub-date and move on. Can you tell us how, I mean, because you are pretty influential in crypto, I mean, very, how easy it was for you in a bull market to raise money, how it is in a bear market, how like the kind of overall experience because you're saying like i got some people who said no obviously in the beginning as an entrepreneur you go you raise money you think my idea is the best and my execution is going to be the best therefore everyone should invest in my business like without even thinking about it then you go and you try and you realize it's actually not that easy yeah so what's your experience with that so at the start we are doing social fire social fire at the time was not popular because nobody has really done it right i mean till now still nobody has by the time it's even harder because people don't believe in social they were like how is web 3 social different from web 2 and it's actually very hard for us to convince the investors for them to invest and luckily we got Animoca as the first investor in the company and they were pretty reputable at the time and that means they're still reputable now that's how we got our first investment we convinced them and they really have a lot of capital at the time so that's how we got our first investment and after that we well we have the actually after I ring down it becomes much more easier because a lot of people heard about it and they actually see with their own eyes how it works and how many how many like how viral it went and they feel like it actually might work in the Taiwan, Japanese and the Asian market pretty much so at the time it was pretty easy to race so we are over we were over subscribed for our seed round She's around, okay.

52:50But then, you know, after the 3R, after Luna, after FTX collapse, everyone has become so conscious and like so nervous about where they should put their money into crypto. And that's where the real crypto winter started. Yeah. Did you see, so you raised more money recently, right? I think like two, three months ago? Yeah, it's more like a token round. Yeah, that was, okay. the first one was an equity? All of them were token round okay but the most recent one is after we launched the tokens so it's different from the previous investors okay okay can you tell us about that actually so most recent one is like bear market started already how easy or difficult is it for someone like you to raise money with tokens because with tokens it's supposed to be easier than with equity in crypto right now because people kind of say they say at least it kind of de-risks a bit of investment I'm going to have access to some liquidity I think it depends on the VC whether they're Web 2 Web 3 or what was their area of focus I think with some Web 2 VCs it's actually much easier to raise with equity because they want investing in equity they believe in the business model and believe in the profit you're going to bring but for some Web 3 native VCs they actually of course they're more interested in tokens yeah I think it's challenging for all the builders unless you're building infrastructure or like layer one or you're building an ecosystem then the narrative is much easier people really believe in the narrative but then if you are building a DApp it's very specific much harder yeah the other thing they can just say the layer one there's going to be value accrues on that so I'm kind of like doing an ETF sort of bet on the future for infrastructure you are just leveraging on all the DApps on their users they can come to your infrastructure but for the DApp you need to attract your own users, which is much more challenging than building the infra.

54:48How important is flexibility as an entrepreneur, especially in the crypto industry? Give us some examples. The narrative changes all the time. Previously, people are doing Bitcoin, NFT, BRC20, and then they move to meme coin. And I think one week later, they're probably going to be attracted to something else. So the narratives keep changing, keep changing, keep changing. And they have to. It's very hard for you to always catch what's popular right now because there's no way for you to develop so fast. So I think you should really be firm about your own thesis, about your own conviction, and then you work around it.

55:24And I think bear market is a good time for you to build because there are much less noise. Let's imagine if this creator platform raised so much money, that creator platform raised so much money, you will be so stressed. You think, oh, I should go and raise more money. But right now, since it's pretty quiet for the Web3 credit economy right now, I think it's a good time for us to build and to really think what kind of trades are more innovative or more useful to the creators. Yeah, I'm asking this question because we have Alex Vanevich from Nansen here and he was actually saying that the thing that did really well to grow that quickly is that they were very flexible in their understanding of the market with DeFi in 2020 and then NFT and the rest is very similar and they also build their platform so they can accommodate very quickly and in a very flexible fashion to these changes but at the same time so this makes a lot of sense but at the same time what you say is also like you don't want there's so much noise so it's what's noise and what's real trend it's very hard exactly to be honest nobody knows what's noise and what is real trend right and when people talk talk about BRC tokens or they were like oh are they here to stay or they just you know we don't know yeah nobody knows who can predict the future nobody can we don't know yeah But that's also very fascinating about crypto because everything is possible.

56:40You can always come up with new narratives and something, just keep trying, keep trying. Probably one day a narrative is just going to be true. Yeah. Or they're going to be popular in the market.

56:51Another example you gave me when we talked, you talked about kind of burn rates, you know, the changes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yes, the burn rate. Yeah, last time our burn rate was like 200K a month. that's when we are rapidly expanding in the United States. Because at the time, which is about April and May, everybody wants to do NFT. Everyone. The people we talk to, the celebrities, all these Netflix shows. 2022, April. Yeah, 2022. When we just started. A year ago, basically. Yeah, when we just started our incubation center in Los Angeles, everyone in Hollywood, they want to do NFT business with us.

57:28And that's why we rapidly expanding because we think it's more important to gain the traction than burning the capital. That's our strategy at the time. So we have the house, we host parties to attract the creators. But after a while, we find out it doesn't really bring much traction. So we start to reflect and think whether it's really important to have so many people in the team. Like, do we really need so many developers? Yeah. That's when we start to cut down all the costs on like marketing, parties, and then start to focus much more on the product itself instead of creating all the hypes.

58:08Yeah. What's the craziest thing that you've seen or experienced in the crypto world? The craziest thing? Yeah. It's the meme coin, right? The meme coin, the pepe. The pepe. I don't know how many times within one month, but actually anything happening in the crypto, it's just crazy. crazy like do you expect ftx to collapse within like one last year was because of one tweet it just crazy that's so crazy like luna it just went to zero within like like four or five days everything was so crazy i remember that i was very very very invested in luna like lost like millions in two days so like i remember it very it's actually one year ago five days ago so i remember it vividly yeah exactly right so these are the crazy things that happen it's almost every that people are immune to the critical things.

59:00But we're still here. Yeah, I'm still here. We are still here. Yeah, we are like the firm believer in crypto. Exactly. And the potential you're going to bring to millions of people. Absolutely. That's interesting now because most people just, that's now that you build or invest or both when no one cares, but people don't do that. And then there's, oh, there's the banking crisis. Oh, there's the recession. Oh, there's this and that and that. And then the people were still there in the trenches, working, building, investing, are the ones who are going to get the reward in one few years. And it's always the same.

59:31You have these cycles. There's still like so many builders in the crypto space. A building product that people really want to use. So crypto is an emotional rollercoaster, especially for builders who can raise at Intel? For everybody in this industry, it's like a rollercoaster. It's crazy. So how do you deal with mental health in this emotional rollercoaster? Sure. Mental health. I just try to tell myself it is what it is. Just accept. I think acceptance is very important. It is what it is. You have to accept the fact that I burned so much money in the bull market. And you have to accept the fact that it is like a winter, right?

1:00:11It's hard to raise money. You have to accept the fact that nowadays probably NFT is too advanced for the creators to use it in daily life. You just have to accept it and keep, like what you said, being flexible. And keep being more mentally strong. I think that's very important. Otherwise, it's going to go insane. And especially, you need to ignore the noise. Because all the people around you seem like everyone's making money. Everybody's making millions of money. That's a big one. From Abitrum, the AirDrop. That's a big one. Then from the meme coins. And then from the BRC tokens, the BRC NFTs.

1:00:46That's a big one. Everybody's making so much money. And of course, the one losing money, they're not going to post online, right? Only the one who make money. And then you feel so, oh, like FOMO. Only when they win money will they post. Yes. That's a big one. And that's a big, for me, it's a big mistake in the last cycle. Because I was like, you always feel like you can have complete life-changing money. Yeah. But you always think like, at some point, I mean, at some point there was a Suzu from Three Hours who says Something like 50 million is You can't even buy A reasonably sized house Really?

1:01:19And you look at that And you're like Yeah You start to First you lose complete control Of like reality You lose touch with reality Because of the amounts And sums But then you always see These people who Are lying Actually they're lying Because they say It's my money But they're actually Taking money Oh true You know Or they always seem Like they're much higher And then you're just like You always feel like You're not enough and I need more and all that stuff. And that's how you get destroyed because you don't have your... Because everybody's lying. And you just compare yourself to people who are lying.

1:01:49Yes. I mean, sometimes people just give fake numbers. Oh, I make so much money so they can get you into their inner circle and sell courses to you. That's how they make money. But people just can't differentiate whether it's real or it's fake. Yeah. The Twitter game, actually. You want to impress so you get more followers and that stuff so you can actually make more money later on. Yes, yes. And especially relevant in crypto because people really make a lot of money in a day or like two days. If they really invest in that coin, it went viral. Yeah. So I think it's actually true that people really experienced that.

1:02:24How did your life change since you launched a token? Because I talked to a bunch of people who, I mean, actually were early investors in a lot of different pre-sales. and some of these they said the day you launch a token you have your own business but you actually almost have a second business because you need to you have these investors but you have this price and your token is kind of your marketing for your company because if the token does well the project is amazing if the token doesn't do well the project is shit in a nutshell they don't care what you do they want to look at the price exactly so how did things change for you since you launched the token I think after I launched token I think it's pretty pretty alright because the investors they understand it's a better market.

1:03:11So they are pretty understandable. They know it's a very difficult situation for most of the builders. And they are very happy that we actually got launched on a centralized exchange, which is Kukon. It's a pretty decent exchange, to be honest. And of course, we are also trying hard to work with different companies, coming up with new projects, new initiatives to bring out more good news so people would have confidence in the coin. Yeah. I wouldn't say change much. I'm still doing the same thing. Okay. That's awesome. I've heard some. I mean, it was people who launched some protocol on the Terra ecosystem.

1:03:51So like, you know, they launched a thing that, I think we did like 80 or 100x at the launch. Then the free deal was like, market cap was like 1.5 billion. So the guys are like, life is amazing. And then everything goes to zero. Yeah. and they didn't sell any token but like everybody tells them Oh you mean the traders? No, the founders themselves Then they get absolutely murdered by investors like you sold tokens and they're like no I sold nothing like the thing went to zero because everything went to zero and then they said never again a token basically Yeah and there's a lot of things that affect token price because you have the exchange you have the air job, the people who had air job, you have all these creators, you have retails, you have like investors and there's so many factors that affect the price and people may just like blame you for selling tokens as a team, right?

1:04:40Yeah. But these are all the compliments we receive all the time. Okay. I'm really getting, trying to get used to the negative comments. Yeah. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? Oh, a bit given is, let me think. I don't really, I wouldn't say any advice, but it's like, I observing people around me who are much more successful and created a much bigger project, but they're still very hardworking. They are very self-disciplined and they are still working every day for the crypto market, for the mass adoption. This is like what inspired me. And I wouldn't say that, oh, I took any advice because advice are all the same, right?

1:05:23You have to be mentally strong. Yeah, you can read all these books. Yeah. But it's like really through the people around you that through their experience and how you interact with them they really learn what is really important to be as a builder you learn all the um i would say the the uh the traits the personal traits from them so the common pattern between these people is they work hard they don't stop they don't care about the money and all that stuff it's not really much they don't care about the money they have a bigger mission yeah but greater mission in life okay what's something you believe in that most people would not agree with something i believe oh i would say that shortcut is actually the longest the longest way the longest road to success okay don't take shortcuts do you have any failures or examples so many too many yeah maybe one favorite that you want to share that's just like way too many times i want to take a shortcut and i realize actually I need to spend much more time trying to fix it because I took a shortcut at the time.

1:06:27Yeah, so you have to build consistently. If there is a key takeaway from today, what would it be? You mean from all these entrepreneurial things? From whatever we talked about today. Oh, from this session? Yeah.

1:06:44Key takeaway that you want people to remember? Key takeaway? let's just try to ignore the noise and do whatever you are doing right now. Yeah, it's really very easy to get lost. I mean, I also get lost when I try to compare myself with other creators or with other builders. Like, oh, why did they create such a successful project and why I'm not, right? I think the only thing is that you have to focus on yourself and just trying to be better day by day. Like, you just compare yourself with the one yesterday. If you're better, if you're stronger, you are mentally tougher that's how you can keep growing and keep moving on never stop never stop growing it's it's much easier to say to to say than to do especially in this world where with all this social media you always see people who show their perfect life and and we're all like that because there is always going to be someone who's more successful or more beautiful or smarter or blah blah blah and you're always going to feel like you're not enough yes because and then you change maybe you become more successful and your circle of friends change or people you hang out with and then you're like, oh man, like these people are so successful and then you're going to go higher and it's never going to be enough and then, so maybe, how do you find, how do you, actually, I'm still trying to cope with this because I met more and more successful people every day and they are also complaining they are not rich enough as their friends.

1:08:10Exactly. When they make millions, billions of dollars and they'll say, actually, I have a friend who invests in this company then the ROI is like 10k times, like 10 ,000 times. It's like, oh, I wish I invested that early. And people were like, oh, you know, even at their age, it was like 50 years, so they're still talking about it. So what do you think is one of the kind of like final question? What do you think is a kind of main driver of happiness if the money and all these goals are never enough for anyone who made it more than enough? Like, what do you think? Or do you talk about them? to talk with them about that like what makes you happy i think it's to never stop growing i mean for me at my age at least stage of life to me it's never stop growing but for i think for people at 50 years old they probably want to spend more time with the family yeah so people at different stage have different definition of happiness but for me right now it's like once i feel like oh i'm improving this area a little bit i feel very satisfied and accomplished and when people telling me that oh actually it inspired me to do my own business or to get into crypto I'm very happy especially when I go around the world and I meet people that some of the arena holders or some they told me that they heard about it and they're really inspired they love it a lot I feel really accomplished that's when I find the true happiness awesome thank you so much for this Irene thank you so much where can people learn more about you and follow you I can follow me on Twitter and Instagram yeah twitter is irene jow oh i don't have a blue tick right now because i don't want to pay eight dollars to elon musk but but she's doing the sorry anti blue tick revolution i'm doing that yes yes um yeah you can find me on twitter and also on instagram uh big instagram oh so many fake accounts of me it's a good life you can find the real me okay it's a good life don't don't get scammed awesome i will never ask you for money never never awesome thank you so much Thank you so much.