E89: Blockworks Founder - How To Build A $135M Crypto Empire From Scratch (Formula Revealed)

27:09It's low risk. Give me cash. And it's, I think this word IP can be very, you can feel like when you're young, like this sounds like a big thing, right? I don't know how to do that thing. So I'll just help other people do something, right? Here's the thing that we didn't understand. All cash and revenue is not treated equally by the market. So we looked at a dollar and said, that's a dollar. But the market doesn't say a dollar is a dollar. The market says that$1 of conference revenue is worth$2. $1 of podcast revenue is worth$5. $1 of analytics revenue is worth$15. Right? But we had no concept of that.

27:58So we just wanted cash. We said, host the Multicoin Summit for$15 ,000. that's as good as selling a$15 ,000 advertisement which is as good as selling$15 ,000 in tickets it's all cash what do you mean exactly so when you say a dollar is worth$5 for a podcast or$15 for a data company it means in terms of valuation in terms of valuation for the business in terms of valuation exactly so I think when you sit down to build something you I don't think you can plan your product out longer than three months. I don't think you can plan. I think there's a lot of things that happen in sprints and you kind of end up pivoting several times along the way.

28:40But one thing that I think you should think about is what is the end state of this type of business? So let's take maybe not media as an example, because we're talking a lot about media. But if you look at all these crypto businesses that got created in 2018, 2019, 2020, BlockFi, Nexo, Celsius, Coinbase, Kraken, all of them. Some of them started as lending platforms, BitGo. Some of them started as custodians. Some of them started as brokerages. Some of them started as exchanges. The end state of all of those businesses looks identical. And it's the same thing with media, right? Some people start with newsletters.

29:15Some start with podcasts. Some start with conferences. Some start with analytics. The end state is a media and information platform. It's a media and information business. But we didn't know that at the time. So I think it is helpful to think about what is the end state. And yeah, to your question, it's like, what is the market value that revenue at? So when we raised money, we bootstrapped for the first six years. We were just profitable and the cash flow paid for everything. In May of 2023, we raised$12 million. And it was at$135 million post-money valuation. And so what our investors, the lead investor, 10T, now 1RT, did was they took our revenue.

29:5810X. And they didn't, no, they didn't do that. They took our revenue and they sliced it into three buckets. They said there's conference revenue, digital revenue, like podcasts and newsletters, and subscription revenue. And they said, okay, the conference revenue gets this multiple. The digital revenue gets this multiple. And the analytics revenue gets this multiple. Right? So what you start to see is like, hey, maybe$20 million of conference revenue is identical to$2 million of subscription revenue. Whether I think that is the right thing or not, I think the market is mispricing these assets.

30:33But that is how the market treats it right now. Hey, when shift happens, family. Time to toast our partner, Devin. They're taking luxury wine to the blockchain with their super fun concept called Uncorked to Earn. Buy your favorite wines, enjoy unique experiences, and get an airdrop each time you open a bottle with your friends. Cheers to Divin for bringing transparency, authenticity, and exclusivity to the fine wines industry. You said you had a 7 million revenue business that you basically kind of broke down or stopped because you were not having any IP. Yeah. How do you make this decision? Incredibly hard.

31:15It was part of a larger pivot, I would say, where we basically just said we have to, there have been a few moments in time where we said we have to bet the house here. So the first, and I'll get to, I'll answer your question in a second. But the first moment was when we decided to go from these happy hour events to large conferences. The cost of a happy hour is$5 ,000, maybe$10 ,000. Cost of a large conference is$250 ,000. So when we, in May of 2019, we hosted our first large conference called DAS, Digital Assets Summit, which we still do today. That event cost about$250 ,000. We had$270 ,000 in the bank account.

31:56So if that, or no, excuse me, we had$230 ,000 in the bank account and the event cost$250 ,000. So if that event didn't work, if we fell$1 under, if we, you know, if we didn't make any money, if we lost even$10 ,000, we were out of business. The whole block works would be over. There'd be no block works today if that event didn't work. And there have been a couple of bet the farm moments like that. And in COVID, that was a bet the farm moment. So what happened is we had revenue from conferences and we had revenue from podcasts. And those are our two revenue streams, conferences and podcasts. The conferences were like our DAS events, the podcasts where we hosted these podcasts for other people.

32:35We'd sell ads, we'd produce the shows, all that kind of stuff. um in 20 in in march of 2019 covet covet hits we were hosting a big event may 2020 82 percent of our revenue at that point in time came from conferences so overnight 82 percent of our conference gets wiped 82 percent of our revenue overnight gets wiped out what in in like one wake-up call basically with covet the rest of the podcast revenue so we so we basically said what are we what are we doing we have to start doing more digital revenue more digital stuff and we We would come into the city with our masks and stuff and basically whiteboard Julie, who was our head of events at the time, and Mike and me.

33:12And we would just whiteboard out what the business was. And we're like, should we build a morning brew for crypto? Should we do all video and compete with CNBC? Should we pivot? We talked about pivoting to cannabis. We talked about everything. And the idea that we came to was we, there's Coindesk and Cointelegraph and The Block and Decrypt, but nobody is doing news and media and newsletters and podcasts the way that we want to receive it. Nobody's doing it the way we want to receive it. And no one's doing, everyone's doing kind of a six out of 10 job, not a 10 out of 10 job. So we said, look, let's bet the farm again.

33:49We got to change over some of the staff, right? We got to get new staff in and let's become a media business. So we spent nine months building a media website, like an editorial site. We were, our name was Blockworks Group at the time. We cut the group and we became Blockworks. We rebranded. We hired new people. We hired reporters and journalists. And we, part of that was to answer your question. Part of that meant cutting off one of our arms to kind of save the body. and one of the arms was all of these outsourced podcasts. So we went to all of them in one fell swoop and basically cut the podcasts.

34:25And we said, we have to start over. We have to build the shows in-house. We have to own the shows. We have to have the leverage. We have to have the IP. So I launched our first podcast called Empire. Then Mike launched on the margin. We said, if we are asking other people to do it, we have to figure out if we can do it ourselves. And we launched the newsletter that quarter. We launched the website that quarter. We launched everything in Q1 of 2021. And if it didn't work, it was, yeah, Blockworks was going to end. But thankfully, it's worked out. So the first podcast we launched was Empire. First podcast was Empire.

34:59And originally the idea was, you know, I have to give you a lot of credit with this show because the original idea was there's all these people in crypto. My favorite podcast at the time was How I Built This. And there's all these people in crypto and everyone focuses on their companies and no one focuses on the person. and that was the original idea. The reason I think it, we tried that for a year and nothing happened. And the reason I think it wasn't actually a good idea for the podcast at the time was the industry was too small so people didn't care about the people. Like it was like talking to kind of no-name people.

35:33The other, the real reason was it was all virtual and you just can't get under like very deep with someone. So we ended up pivoting that to just try to become the best podcast in the industry and we launched on the margin and other things. So, yeah. Can you give us an idea of what a podcast like Empire brings in annually? Yeah, our podcast business as a whole will bring in several million dollars. So today, and Empire is one of the big shows. The reason I'm asking that is, why can a podcast be so valuable? So for one reason or another, the industry has coalesced around three mediums. Twitter, podcasts, and conferences.

36:17And all of the information and the flow of information and how narratives are built and customer acquisition, it all happens through those three channels, conferences, podcasts, and Twitter. And we right now own the largest podcast network in the industry with 1000X and Xerox Research and Expansion and On the Margin and Forward Guidance and all these Lightspeed and Empire and all these shows. Podcasts are essentially the way that I see it. they're the most intimate form of advertising and, and the most intimate form of content consumption. Therefore they're the most intimate form of advertising.

36:55So if you compare like a newsletter ad, a display ad on a website, on a social, an ad on Instagram, it's all something that you see with your eyes, but things that you hear, if you like really think about the process of listening to a podcast, most people have their AirPods in. That means the host is deep in your ears for a full hour, right? A newsletter ad or maybe a social ad, they're scrolling right past it. A podcast, you're in your ear for an hour and you start to think of the podcast host, if done right, as friends and as like trusted confidants. And the way that I think about it is you remember influencer marketing?

37:35The last several years got really big. I think that podcasts are kind of crypto's form of influencer marketing, right? Because if you buy ads, let's say you buy, we sell other things, newsletter ads, display ads, all these other things, all these other ad forms. You're buying it from Blockworks. There's no human behind it. But if you buy ads on Empire, Jason and Santiago are now talking about your product. and I think that's a very very very powerful form of maybe not customer like maybe not direct response advertising but brand awareness advertising how much do you think businesses value brand awareness versus customer acquisition not as much as they should not as much as they should why I mean if you look at what's happening with Nike for example so Nike one of the best brands in the world.

38:26They got a new CEO a couple of years ago and his directive was to cut all brand marketing and to only do performance marketing. And you look at their last earnings report, they're down, I think 30 % in the last couple of weeks or month or year or something like that. It is a direct result of like, of, of moving away from brand advertising into, into just performance marketing. Uh, the reason to get, to tie that into crypto, All these things are commoditized at this point. Not entirely, and I'll get a bunch of pushback for saying that, but like, you know, this L2 versus this L2 versus this L1 versus this L1, it all comes back to the brand.

39:05It is only about the brand and the vibe and the community. And that all ties back to the, I think the brand directly ties back to the founder most times. But you need to do whatever you can if you're a marketer in crypto to get the brand out there instead of just like, hey, go submit this lead form on our website. Absolutely. It's all about brand awareness and association, right? And you want to be, if there is a cool podcaster, for example, like you want to be probably associated to the cool podcaster because everything is a commodity completely. Absolutely. Getting back to conference, the conference business, right?

39:43Because now we talked about the podcast side. So I want to talk about the event side and then about the data side. What are the hidden economics of a conference business? The hidden economics. So we got a lot of... Someone was coming after... Someone shared our sponsorship deck on Twitter the other day. And we charge a lot of money, right? There's packages for a million dollars or$500 ,000. And, you know, all these Twitter trolls were kind of coming after us. What I think people who haven't ever hosted a conference don't understand is... There are a couple dynamics at play. So one is the work that it takes to host a medium-sized conference is very similar to the work that it takes to host a large conference.

40:24You're still grinding away. You still have to get speakers. It's just maybe the difference of getting 1 ,000 attendees instead of 7 ,000 attendees. But the work that it takes is very, very similar. So the economics push you into doing large conferences. Now, then the question becomes, well, why doesn't everyone do these large conferences? Kind of feels like they do, ETH Denver and token and stuff like that. But there really aren't actually that many, like very large scale conferences. It's probably Permissionless, Token 2049, Consensus, ETH Denver. There really aren't that many. And the reason for it is the hidden economics is that there's a boatload of upfront costs to a conference.

41:04So the only thing that could kill our business, if we miss on podcasts, we miss on podcast revenue by 50%. I have to tell our board that and they might not be happy, but that's okay. We miss on newsletter revenue. That's okay. We miss on webinars. We miss on anything else. That's okay. If you miss on conferences, that can put the business at risk. So because of the upfront costs, right? It's the most cost intensive part of the business and therefore the largest amount of risk. So what conferences and media and sponsorships and ad revenue in crypto lags the market by six to nine months. So when the, for example, when, let's say, market goes up, like in 2017, that market, the biggest consensus that CoinDesk ever hosted was not in 2017 when the market was ripping.

41:57It was actually in May of 2018. It was the largest, right? The thing that becomes very tough to do is you have to plan conferences very far out in advance. So you have to book your venues. You have to kind of predict how big the event is going to be. So we just booked our venue for 2026, not 25. And we were fighting against another crypto conference for that venue in 2026. And now our events team is pushing us to figure out where we're hosting it in 2027. So then, and it's not just where it's, well, are we going to have 3 ,000 people? Are we going to have 10 ,000 people? Are we going to have 20 ,000 people?

42:31And if you do too small, you're going to leave a lot of money on the table. So that's like, there's a lot of, it's the least, my least favorite part of the business of like predicting what this stuff will look like. Because it's always very scary. But it also is a, if you can get it right, it can fund a lot of the other parts of the business. So, yeah. Very, very difficult, especially in your cyclical market like crypto, right? It's extremely difficult. So like in 20, in 2026, should we have a huge conference? A medium conference? A small conference? Well, let's say you think the market is going to go, we're going to go into a bull market in 2025.

43:10If the bull market ends in fall of 2025, you could still host a massive conference in the first half of 2026. But if that conference is in the later half of, the latter half of 2026, you're going to get caught on the other, you're going to get caught in the depths of a bear market. So it becomes very, very difficult. So what was your decision for 2026?

43:33I can't share yet. I can't share yet. But we're optimistic about like... Okay. Yeah, we're very optimistic right now. Knowing all what you know after seven years in the media business, if you could start Bookworks again from scratch, how would you go about it? I would have bet on ourselves earlier with our own content earlier. Again, we wasted a couple of years not doing that. Here's what I think is happening in media today. So what's happening in media is you had all of these venture-backed businesses. Media is dying. I don't know if anyone pays attention to the BuzzFeeds and Voxes and Vices of the world and Coindesk sold to bullish and the block was taking money under the table from SBF, right, to like, you know, fund themselves and stuff.

44:21Like media is a very, very, very tough business. The model for media, I think, in today's world has to be B2B media. So not B2C, it has to be B2B media with a product that sits at the bottom of the funnel. So if you look at what has happened over the last like 10 years with media, you had media was basically all just an attention game. So you had all of these BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Huffington Post, Complex, all of these people raise hundreds of millions of dollars to try to sprint and create more content. And they were built on the back of these platforms. They're built on the back of social networks.

44:57And that actually worked for a while. Like BuzzFeed's funding deck said, a media company built on Facebook, right? Optimized for Facebook. What happened was, and that was working really, really well. In 2015 and 2016, everything basically changed. And what changed was back before then, you saw a link on social media and you just kind of clicked it. You remember the surveys, BuzzFeed surveys from friends and you just, social media was relatively new and you would kind of just click something if you saw it. And then, uh, fake news, the fake news media kind of thing started happening and people started trusting these links less and less.

45:38And there was all this talk about Russia kind of planting the election with Facebook and Trump getting elected and all that kind of stuff. And that really changed the game. That was one element that changed the game for media companies is people stopped just clicking random links, they started focusing on the underlying brand behind the link. So that was one change. The second change was what BuzzFeed and Vox and Vice and all these people failed to understand is that you can raise a lot of money for a software business or an AI company today and actually build much faster and have more success than someone who raises less money, right?

46:14There's actually a correlation with how much money you raise. with media, media is just a trust and reputation game. And if I had to circle one of those words, it's just a trust game. And what those companies fail to understand is that you can't spend money to buy trust. So they bought page views, they bought clicks, they bought subscribers, but they didn't buy trust. And so when we moved from a world of clicks and just how big is your audience into a world of trust and reputation building and affinity with a brand, it's a peak up. And then 2016 is a peak down for those companies. And they all started to get crushed.

46:56So as that relates to building a media company today, I think you really have to focus on building this top of funnel that is an owned, not a rented audience. So it's a audience that podcast downloads and newsletter subscribers, not focused on web traffic or social media followers. And then you need a product that sits at the bottom of the funnel so that you can build this kind of like negative customer acquisition cost model into the SaaS product. There's a lot there, but hopefully that's kind of my like thesis on how I think the best media companies will be built today. How important is the data business in there?

47:34The data part of the business. So the data business is incredibly important. It is, you can think of our business like a funnel. So top of funnel is the website traffic and social followers and stuff like that. I don't even pay attention to those numbers, really. A little lower on the funnel is newsletter subscribers and podcast downloads. That's where you start getting into top of funnel, but the owned audience. Then you go lower on the funnel and you have conferences, Digital Asset Summit and Permissionless. The whole thing functions because there's a subscription business at the bottom. We all know SaaS is a beautiful business model.

48:08The problem with SaaS companies is they were built on this fallacy that you could raise a bunch of money, spend half of that on product and engineering, and half of that on sales and marketing and customer acquisition. And what we've learned by seeing the failure of a lot of these SaaS companies is that the customer acquisition part of that equation, companies were spending far too much money to acquire customers. So SaaS, in and of itself, as a business model, is a beautiful business model. You get these recurring revenue and all that. Very sticky customers and stuff like that. What's broken about it is the customer acquisition part of that equation.

48:44So our business is, we have this nice, actually negative customer acquisition cost model where we own the relationship with the audience. And we're getting paid to have that audience and to have the customers that then funnel into the research platform. So let's say Blockworks Analytics and research and stuff existed by itself. What we have to do is build a massive sales team and a massive marketing team and go spend a bunch of money sponsoring conferences and sponsoring podcasts and driving inbound leads and the brand awareness stuff that all these other brands have to do. We don't, we've never spent a dollar marketing BlockWorks research and analytics.

49:19We've been around for two years. The inbound leads basically come to us and they're not even coming from elsewhere. They're coming from our newsletters and our podcasts and our webinars and things like that. So it's this very nice like kind of funnel that we've built. And the last thing I'd say on this is there are a lot of businesses in crypto that do a similar thing. There's data businesses and analytics businesses. There's conferences. There's podcasts and newsletters. There's news businesses. The thing that I kind of talk about internally is, like we refer to it as our unfair advantage internally, is nobody has the combination of all four of those, right?

49:55The news business builds trust. The podcasts and newsletters build distribution and audience. the conference business spits off the cash flow and the research and data business is helps us with the enterprise valuation of the company right you said before you raised 12 million dollars right how did raising 12 million dollar operate the change the way you operate the company it raised the stakes it um we were we, you know, we bootstrapped for the first six years. Like we, we just had, we, we had to be profitable. And so we did things, we played it a little safer. We took those big risks that I talked about, but we played it a little safer.

50:41And the, the kind of exit, if we ever sold or went public or anything, it was, you know, it was probably no shot of going public. If we didn't have this other side of the business, it was just a nice, like kind of cash flowing business. When we raised money, we immediately, what that does is it's a promise to someone else that you're going to get them a return on their capital. And this isn't a one-to-one return, right? This is a large, there's an expectation of a large return here. And we talked for a long time, we talked for years about if we should do it. And we didn't do it for years because we weren't confident that that would, honestly, that that would come.

51:19And it was only once we got extreme confidence in ourselves and in the business that we could have a extremely outsized potential outcome at some point in the probably not near future, but long term future, did we raise capital. So the stakes got increased and it made the business. We now focus a lot more on the analytics and research and data side of the business, because that's where a lot of the enterprise valuation of the company will come from. And the conferences and the podcasts and newsletters are growing incredibly nicely. but it's no longer just the core focus anymore there's now these there's there's there's a lot of different things to kind of make sure that the that the whole plan works how do you stay kind of true and authentic to the initial kind of brand and vibe that you wanted to give once you raise capital right because now you're saying we are focusing on the business more maybe this has or might have affected even the way you do podcasting right or charge for podcasting because at the moment you start to the moment you raise money you kind of owe as you said right you owe to someone and you need to probably make some changes that might affect the brand itself right yeah so there are things you could do if you wanted to generate short-term cash flow look good on a board deck or go raise another round.

52:40And that I think is the, maybe that would be tempting to do if we hadn't seen so many failures in that bucket. So let's say an example, like you, you know, we could take payment for someone to come on our podcast. Like someone probably pay, like, I don't know, probably, I'm sure you get this all the time. Like someone could pay$10 ,000 or 20 might offer$20 ,000 to be a guest on the podcast. But the second you start doing that, you lose the one word that we circled earlier, which is trust. Yeah. Right. So if we were trying to absolutely sprint and sell the company, let's say we're trying to sprint and sell the company next year or something.

53:17I mean, we're, we're taking all those deals. We're doing all those things, but we don't do a single one of those things because yeah, I think that, I mean, blockers can get a hundred times larger than it is today, but it only works like that if we, if it's built on trust. So it just depends, I think, for the game that, the game you're trying to play and the outcome you're trying to make. How do you deal with the pressure that comes with raising money? Thankfully, so we made a very conscious decision not to go do a large raise. We only raised 12 million and we only did it from three investors who we had extreme trust in.

53:47So a lot of people do these party rounds and they raise from 40 people. We raised from Santiago, who's the co-host of the Empire podcast. We raised from Framework, Michael and Vance, who at the time were co-hosting, actually they still are co-hosting our Bell Curve podcast. So we had deep amounts of trust with them. And then we raised from Dan Tapiero, who's the founder of Pentee and OneRT, who has been coming and speaking at our events for five years. And so, you know, we had had people want to invest over the years, but no one who we really, really, really deeply trusted. And I don't actually feel a lot more pressure.

54:21I had these, I mean, the day after we closed the raise, went and had these pretty extreme things called cluster headaches, which we can talk about if you're interested, which I think came from the stress. But right now, I don't feel like it adds an extreme amount of extra pressure because Mike and I put enough pressure on ourselves already, I think. So you just shared with me something you've been afraid to share publicly until now. It's called cluster headaches, right? Cluster headaches is a very painful type of headache. It usually occurs in periods of frequent attacks known as clusters. These headaches cause intense pain in or around one eye on one side of the head.

55:07when did you first experience these cluster headaches? So, yeah, for context, so yeah, they're called, it's trigeminal autocephalalgia, I think is the name. They're known as suicide headaches, or some people call them cluster attacks. I started having them undiagnosed my junior year of college. So the first time I got them was junior year of college. And then they started coming roughly every couple of years. And then it became every year. And then it became twice a year. And what they are is basically a series of, they're called cluster attacks because they come, the kind of attacks come in like a cluster, basically, for lack of a better word.

55:59And they'll come for about a month and I'll have two or three a day and then they go away. So, yeah, I can talk more about the experience if it's interesting. I don't know if it's interesting for people. Why is it called suicide headache? The rate of suicide in people with cluster attacks is, depending on the study and the data, between 9 to 11 times higher than the average population. And it's not because people want to—what happens in a lot of these suicides is it's not the—it's not that people want to kill themselves or that they don't like their life. It's that they—or they're not depressed or anything like that.

56:41It's that they want to get rid of the pain in the moment. So there's a pain scale that neurologists and pain doctors use. And it goes something like this. It's like, I think arthritis is maybe a 3 out of 10 or a 4 out of 10. Fractured bone is, I think, a 5.2 out of 10.

57:04Migraines are maybe a 6.5 or a 7 out of 10 for some really bad ones. trying to think of other examples on the pain scale. A childbirth is a 9.1 or a 9.3 out of 10. And cluster attacks are a 10 out of 10 on that pain scale. There's a doctor, a neurologist in, and I think in Houston, his name is Mark Burish. He's kind of the leading like pain guy, neurologist in the US right now. His words, not mine, are that cluster attacks are the most painful physical feeling a human can endure. that he knows of and so i think this yeah this the suicide element of that just comes from trying to get the pain away i can completely understand when you say it's not because they're depressed but it's because they want you know in that moment you have something that happens in your mind that you want for example taking the pain away because i was actually suicidal for like a couple of months many years ago when i had like for three years i had really terrible health issues and at some point something switched in my mind right and i couldn't even sleep alone anymore i had to sleep with friends because i couldn't trust myself right and it's not it sounds so weird to talk about that but like it's not and i've been pretty open about it but it's it's not like i'm so sad i need attention everybody's thinking like someone who commits suicide is because the lack of attention or i'm so depressed no no it's like you have literally something like an impulse i always call it kind of a sneeze right if you sneeze you're dead like you have to hold yourself from sneezing so so when you say that i really understand it in terms of so what what changed i know this is your podcast not mine but i'm uh like what what happened how did you get out of that uh i had to do like very kind of intense protocols not like nine days water fasting go on like one year like off this could be an entire podcast okay next time i discovered biohacking fasting i mean biohacking is a word very used by too many people but like i discovered basically ayurvedic and chinese herbs uh water fasting i did probably 30 different things all at the same time that i tested for actually three years until i found a problem to a solution to my problem anyways when you have this uh cluster headache how do you deal with them um so sometimes i can kind of so i fighting through the pain is impossible um there's there's no possible way to cope with the pain i would say so i have a um an injection called i'm i basically get loaded up with a i get nerve blockers to basically block the pain from touch from like there's there's nerve there's nerves in your brain uh that go into your brain.

59:54You have all these nerves, right, that go into your head. The occipital nerve, trigeminal nerve. This is a mind, the cluster attacks basically pound on the trigeminal nerve. So I get nerve blocker injections to block the feeling to the trigeminal nerve. I get, I go on a calcium channel blocker called verapamil. I get hooked up to an oxygen tank when I'm on it. And then I have sumatriptin injections, which are basically like a rescue medication. And then every month I get three injections of a thing called mGality. Because there's different things that happen when you're, so right now, if you take all my levels, and you take all my testosterone and serotonin and dopamine and all of my levels and melatonin, it's all normal right now.

1:00:39When I enter a cluster period, there are different things that light up. So one is my, one is there's like CGRP. Basically, I get neurological inflammation from like a calcium gene receptor peptide or something like that. I get all of my hormones and all of that stuff gets pretty out of whack. So serotonin and dopamine and melatonin and all of that stuff gets kind of out of whack. And then my hypothalamus starts lighting up, basically. So there's Western medication, which is all the things I just mentioned. and then there's uh psilocybin is basically the most studied you know you know we spoke with yale we spoke with princeton we spoke with uh uh hugh some uh hugh i forget the university in houston or maybe it was university of austin we spoke with johns hopkins uh the places that are doing cholesterol headache research and they said look there's there's mgallity there's verapamil there's sumatriptin there's all these things that you're taking but we've had really good studies that are showing that psilocybin is uh is just is just as effective or nearly as effective as or maybe even more effective than some of these other things so and the reason for that is psilocybin breaks psychedelics break down into I'm forgetting the scientific name for them, but it's like, there's the, there's one bucket, which is like psilocybin.

1:02:16There's psilocybin, LSDs, LSAs, things like that. And then DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, things like that. And then there's another bucket, which is more like, I'm forgetting that ayahuasca and what is it, mezclean, whatever the name is. the first bucket breaks down into lsas lsd things like that the first bucket is those are known as tryptans and tryptans are psilocybin so if you actually look at the molecule of psilocybin next to the molecule of the rescue medication i get called sumatriptan right my rescue medication is literally called sumatriptan psilocybin is a tryptan the molecule nearly looks identical so they've started yeah doing a lot of studies with psilocybin and there's been some pretty amazing results as well so the my current neurologist is is is pushing me to yeah do like basically like experiment with that haven't done it yet i have i the worst cluster period i ever experienced was last summer um was july it usually lasts for about four to six weeks this lasted for three or four months.

1:03:27It was July, August, July, August, September, and October. And basically entered a period I had to take a couple weeks off of work. I couldn't, I couldn't respond to slacks. I couldn't be on the phone. I just kind of sat on the couch and like watch TV and just couldn't. And just two or three times a day would, I'd get my cluster. I, my wife would give me an injection. I'd wait for a couple hours. I'd feel like crap from the injection. And then I'd get another cluster and then I have that and I'd be hooked up to the oxygen tank and that lasted for a couple of weeks and I just basically entered this period of like extreme desperation and so I that was the first time experimenting with psilocybin for as a way to hopefully kind of cure and fix the the cluster attacks.

1:04:15What was the result? The result honestly was that the first time was great the second time I ended up getting a horrible cluster attack while on psilocybin and And it was such a terrifying experience that I didn't end up doing it again. Yeah. But my neurologist is optimistic that I should keep doing this. Yeah. Yeah. It was. I mean, it was. I mean, it was. It was pretty horrifying. Yeah. It's crazy, though. Like, I have such a good support system. And like, you know, I've got a team at Blockworks that knows about this and steps up when it happens. I've got a wife who's extremely supportive. I've got a co-founder who's extremely supportive.

1:04:57I've got the financial means to pay for any of these drugs that insurance doesn't cover. And as you go through this, like you just realize how messed up the health care system is and how horrendous. I mean, there was just a psilocybin. MDMA was supposed to be approved for vets last week and it got denied. And you just like everything from the like approval of these drugs all the way to, you know, I'd have to spend. Kennedy, my wife would spend it during this time, like three or four hours on the phone, just trying to get the oxygen tank refilled. And it's, you know, I've got everything in the world you could ask for from a support level and from a naturally very happy guy and from financial means.

1:05:38and even for even for me it's extremely tough just dealing with the the i'd put quotes around like the system or the bureaucracy of of getting help around this time it makes you think absolutely yeah i remember when i was being so actually i got fucked by the healthcare system itself i was taking a pill that's supposed to help me and it destroyed me even more and then you're supposed to take even more pills which i didn't that's why i went the kind of uh alternative medicine way and fasting and all that stuff right but what i realized was and thank god i was building my first company so i mean i was sort of but i was spending probably half of the time in bed looking at the the ceiling right but and and then selling for the rest of the time and i was a bit lucky to to to manage a few of these sales so i had i had enough money to pay for again as you say right for all these you know psychologists cbt treatments everything but i was just realizing man is really a vicious circle, right?

1:06:40Because first, no one understands anything. Second, no one really seems to care. Like everybody's too caught up, even like doctors and the whole system, right? Then they try to sell some pills, but these pills have negative side effects. They don't really think about it or they don't really know about it. And then you're just there, you feel completely alone. And if you don't have the means, what the fuck do you even do? Because if you don't have the means, you're already feeling like you're being fucked by everything and you don't even have money, right? to take care of your health is really, it's so fucked up.

1:07:10Yeah. It's so fucked up. It's horrible. I mean, there's a really good organization called Cluster Busters. I don't know if, maybe one person listening to this might also have cluster attacks, but there's an organization called Cluster Busters and they, yeah, my wife and I give a lot to them because they're the only, they're like an advocacy organization, like just trying to help, like, yeah, just help folks with cluster headaches. It's, rare diseases are tough, right? because the money is in cancer and alzheimer's it's in cancer because because so many people get cancer and so many people get alzheimer's um and uh and i understand and the way that the economics work is the money should go into the thing that has the biggest outcome there's no so therefore there's there's no money that goes into like trying to fix a cluster headache because so few people have it so it's tough why did you wait so long to talk about it publicly yeah my My wife has been pushing me to talk about it or write an op-ed or there's like National Cluster Headache Day.

1:08:09And I think it makes you feel seem a little weak in the eyes of let's say we were ever to go raise another round or try to sell the company or something. I think there is a perception that it has this person have a problem. Are they are they not healthy? Are they are they psychologically weak? And even if people won't consciously admit it, I think there is a subconscious that happens there. And I remember, so I got these clusters in July and August and stuff like that. But I was just coming off the back of another period of clusters in February and March. And this is when we were in the heart of fundraising in the beginning of 2023.

1:08:45And the market was like the depths of the bear market. And so I was in another period of clusters. And I remember being on a fundraising call with Mike and they weren't our investors at the time. and I'm on the call and I get a cluster headache on the call and my right eye starts shutting and Mike can see it because you start crying, like tearing at your right eye shuts. My whole face starts to droop and I text Dana and she comes in the room and she like kind of kneels down so she's not on the camera during this fundraising call and she gives me a shot in my thigh. And I'm just like, I mean, it's intense.

1:09:21So I think I wanted to talk about it on here just because, you know, I think so many founders, the job of a founder is basically enduring pain 24-7. And if at any given point in your company building, you don't feel pain, I think it's the natural reaction of the founder. I'm not talking about physical pain. I'm talking about like mental pain. It is the natural reaction to take on more pain. So I'm not feeling enough pain. There's more I could take on. There's more this company could take on. And so you're kind of in a state of pain. And there's this book, I haven't even read it, but some friends have told me about it.

1:09:59It's called The Body Where's the Pain or The Body Keeps the Score or something like that. And I think the gist is something like a lot of your maybe mental pain or stress or whatever anxiety ends up exerting itself in physical form. And I've just seen, and even in just block works, like I've got these clusters. Mike had, you know, Mike was out. Mike had to stay in bed for two weeks because of pretty debilitating back pain. Like that shouldn't be happening to a 30-year-old. And I think it comes from stress and anxiety and stuff. And there's so many founders in crypto that go through this. I mean, I have friends and they're rapidly losing their hair or they have extreme back pain or they have cluster attacks as well.

1:10:43There's another founder who has these cluster attacks, but nobody feels comfortable talking about it. So I'm wondering if by talking about it publicly, it gets other people more comfortable talking about it. could be a mistake might really regret this we'll find out I understand what you're saying because when I was feeling terrible I was also thinking oh man if I talk about I mean there's some people you can openly share right then there's some people you can't especially when it comes to money are you investing in me etc or you're going to be a customer etc but what I realized the more I shared the more vulnerability is a superpower because it's very likely when you share, even if it's like that big investor that you've always seen as someone who is like super successful or famous or, you know, intimidating, this person is very likely to either himself or herself have some sort of issues or know someone very close to them who have some sort of issues, right?

1:11:48And the moment you open, obviously you need to be, you need to be functionable, kind of prove, hey, look, I can still do this thing, right? But the moment you open up, you get connected so much faster and so much closer because either you make them think of themselves, either about their wife or their kids, and then you start to talk about that, right? And what I realized is that actually, it's actually, I don't want to say I used it as a tactic to get closer and faster, but actually the more, because as you said, so many people are so scared to talk about whether mental health issues or burnout or other type of issues, the more when you do it, actually, even if your condition is rare, many people suffer from, it's almost impossible to have like a perfect life without any problem.

1:12:35And what I realized is it's actually very helpful to create a deeper relationship very fast, even with people who you might think are the goats or you need to look perfect too, right? Yeah. Yeah, most people struggle from some sort of physical ailment or mental ailment and rarely talk about it. So I think crypto is such a violent industry in the emotional swings that people go through and the 24-7 nature of the industry and just the volatility. it um i think it takes a toll on people that if i think if you some of the stuff i'm like just just deal with it other things i'm like i think if people did talk about it a little bit more it would be helpful so we'll see what comes of this uh we'll see what comes of mentioning that i have held back on talking about it for several years i think people will love it i appreciate it a lot and i really appreciate that you shared it here yeah

1:13:36back to the founder's life as a founder you how do you see it between execution and thinking right because we tend to be so focused in the execution but sometimes you need to take a step back and think um the way that i tend to operate not because and this isn't a conscious decision it's a subconscious decision i think or just the way that my body works or maybe they're tied to these cluster attacks or whatever, I don't know why, is I go through these periods of extreme

1:14:08exertion where I'm working what feels like 24-7. You know, I'm at the office till 11 last night. I'm up at 6 a.m., go to the gym. I'm stay at the office till 11 again tonight. I'm up at 5 a.m. for the gym and working on 12 hours on Sunday. And like that is that those time periods are times, I think, when I know what the work that needs to be done is. and we just have to sprint and do the work. And that's not just me, it's the whole company. It's we just have to sprint and do the work. Then at some period of time, let's say a couple months of doing that, I think there's a natural pullback that ends up happening either personally, where I start to feel tired or I start to say, yeah, this 11 or midnight at the office every night is not working.

1:14:53And the early mornings at the gym are not working. I got to pull back a little bit. Or it's driven by, hey, look, we were trying to push this massive boulder up a hill. it's at the top of the hill now we have to go find the next hill to go push this boulder up that tends to drive back this period of like a little more reflection a little more learning so an example of this could be i don't know figuring out the like data and analytics business like there's a period at which you have to sprint and you have to ship product and you have to build product and you have to go get your data customers and you have to get the marketing page lined up and you have to launch it and you have to do all those things and that's a period of sprinting And then there's a period of learning, which is, hey, how does the API business really work?

1:15:33Hey, there's all these Keiko and Amber data and Flipside and Dune and API. Do we want to be one of them? Do we like their business model? That's a period of learning and reflection. So I think I ebb and flow through these natural cycles. That's how I think about that. You talk about the heel and then the next heel, right? And then the next heel. Do you feel like it's never enough? Yeah, but I think that's associated with a bad thing. And like, I've never had more fun. And I think it's a cliche thing to say, but like, have never had more fun than like just what I do at Blockworks. Like I've never had Sunday scaries in seven years.

1:16:11I've never like, I mean, it's easily the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but I've never, you know, I love the hills. Like, I think that's, you can have a really easy life if you don't contribute much to society?

1:16:29And for me, I think that the thing that ends up bringing me fulfillment, I think there's happiness in fulfillment. I think I'm extremely fulfilled by pushing the boulder up the hill. On a day-to-day basis, does it make me happy dealing with, let's say, people problems or sales issues it doesn't make me happy but it makes me extremely fulfilled and there's like nothing else in this life i would rather do are you aiming for happiness at some point i feel i am i am actually an extremely happy person i do like i do you know i get crap from my friend i wake up on the right side of the bed every day like i'm not i'm not a very stressed out person um i don't really have much anxiety like i am i feel very blessed that like i am actually everyone who knows me i think would say i'm a very happy person um i would be i could be i'm not sure it's even happiness is the right word i could have a much easier life if i went and took a nine-to-five job or something but you'll be much less fulfilled and much less happy absolutely and one of the key point things i mean also very cliche but i realized in the last couple of years is actually happiness comes from struggling sounds so cliche It's what Gary Vee always says, right?

1:17:44But it's never, I don't know, raising the 12 million or getting valued that much or getting on the top of this hill. It's actually the struggle to get there that actually makes you happy every day because it's, I mean, I think it's Andrew Tate who said that. He says like, you're never happier than when you know that you're trying your best, right? Basically, you don't have unfulfilled potential. It doesn't mean that you're going to be successful at the thing, right? but it means you know man i've tried my best right like for example i came here to the u.s to record some podcasts i was like okay i'll just line up a few podcasts and then for the other ones i'll just see who is down and like with introduction i might end up taking planes 19 hours 15 hours time difference spending a couple of weeks spending quite a lot of money a lot of time i could have done something else etc and maybe have a lot of these podcasts canceled or nothing happening or whatever but like at least when something doesn't happen right i've tried my best i came here i did the thing right and then you're like yeah the thing that leads to like i think frustration in my mind is when i feel like i am not exerting a hundred percent of my effort and um i don't know you like i have a lot of friends and you know family members who don't run their own business, obviously.

1:19:03And, um, you know, like this past Sunday, I worked from nine, 9am until 9pm. And then I went to the gym at 930. And that does not look like happiness. Someone looks at that and they're like, that sounds miserable. That sounds awful. I loved, I had the best day Sunday. I had the best day. So it's not always like hard work and happiness aren't always like a one-to-one thing, you know, uh, either inverse or, or, actually correlated it's basically the there is nothing else i'd rather be doing right now even if it's 2 a.m than what i'm doing right now that's happiness right even if it's like working on the next pitch deck or next so like my so my co-founder and i sit down at the end of every quarter and we we have a review session for each other and we sit down and we say what what are what do i think you're doing a good job at what do i think you're doing a bad job at what do I think I'm doing a good job at?

1:19:58What do I think I'm doing a bad job at? And what am I loving doing? And what am I really disliking right now? And there have been times in Blockworks' history, many times actually, where there are things that maybe the business would be best if we kept doing that thing. Like Mike is amazing at content and crap. Like what should this podcast look like? And what should we be covering in the news? And what should this research report? Well, let's say there's a day when Mike is really burned out. Maybe I'll take that off his plate and I'll probably do 80 % of as good of a job or 50 % of as good of a job as Mike at that.

1:20:35But we'll be able to build this business for 20 years because we just keep loving it and enjoying it. So there's this trade-off. Where I see other founders fail is they just, they're like, I fucking hate this thing, but I just have to do it to make the business work when there are options to get that off their plate. you know the burnout never comes from uh overworking or working a lot it comes from working on things that are not meaningful yeah not doing things that you enjoy doing absolutely very underrated actually a hundred percent yeah but burnout rarely maybe never from in my life has come from overworking it's not it's not working too much it's it's yeah it's doing things that like you said don't that you don't enjoy and that don't bring you fulfillment and that you don't, I think there's two types of people in the world.

1:21:22There are people who they end every day and you ask them, how was your day? And they said, it was a great day. I got so much done. I accomplished so much today. And there are people who you say, how was your day? And they said, it was a great day. I had the most interesting conversations. I learned the most interesting things. There's this new idea that popped into my head. there are burnout oftentimes comes from when people who get fulfillment in life from achievements and accomplishing things and checking things off to-do lists are stuck in the conversations and ideas bucket and the ideas people get burnt out when they're trying to do things that are just like trying to achieve and to-do lists and pushing a boulder up the hill so that's i'm i'm a end the day i got so much done mike is a end the day i learned so many new things so we try to separate our work kind of into those buckets there are many good books on web 2 right about the soft side of building companies which is not enough talked about in crypto so let's talk about it okay how is a company going from zero to one uh from zero to ten employees or one to ten employees different from a company going from 10 to 50 employees?

1:22:43There have been different moments in Blockworks where we got stuck at a certain employee size. And at the time, I thought it was because of sales issues or product issues, the product wasn't good enough, or maybe the brand wasn't strong enough, whatever it may be. Looking back, I think it was all because of almost organizational setup. And what I mean by that is I think if you look at companies, they tend to, like one to 10, there's a system that works. The founder is extremely involved in everything. And the people that you hire are kind of jack of all trades. Then what starts to happen between like 10 to 50 is you start to, people start to specialize in things, but you don't really need like a leadership team or an exec team.

1:23:30You can still have a bunch of like jack knives and jack of all trades and Swiss army knives and things like that. But around 50 people, you need leaders inside your company. And so we kind of woke up at around 50 employees. I think we got stuck at 50 employees for maybe two years. We said, I mean, this business just feels so damn hard. Why is this business feel so hard to run? And, you know, we talked to a lot of people about it. And the thing that we realized was we didn't have like a leadership team. We didn't have a, we didn't have like extremely, we didn't have people to kind of help us run the business.

1:24:11It was just Mike and I and like a bunch of, I mean, a bunch of like, I don't know, younger, younger folks, I guess. And they were amazing, like hustlers and stuff like that. But there was no kind of structure. So at 50 people, we started to, the thing that kind of helped us burst past that, and around 75 today is we got the most amazing, you know, the person who leads our editorial team joined Coindesk in 2013 and then helped build the block, right? The woman leading our events has built and sold two event businesses and has been in the events world for 20 years. Our CTO is like an absolute wizard.

1:24:48We've got a head of people who, you know, just like could could not have asked for a better person there. We've got a VP of research and the information side who was at Anchorage and Bloomberg for several years and head of listings at Binance and just like a wonderful human. And we've got all these like amazing people who are now taking us from 50 to, I would guess we probably hit 150 people and the system that we've created is going to completely crumble. So yeah, when I look out at other founders, oftentimes I see them saying this is something at the company broke, but I don't know what. Something stopped working.

1:25:25Our products stopped working. Users stopped liking it. And usually it doesn't actually come from that. Oftentimes it comes from an organizational thing that is broken, that is trickling all the way down through the front end of your platform into the users. But maybe it's not a product thing that's broken. It's an organizational thing that's broken. One of the most important things to do to go from 1 to 10 or 10 to 50 is obviously hiring people. How do you maximize the chances of hiring the right people at the first shot? We got this wrong so many times, I would say. So the first is, I think you need your non-negotiables.

1:26:05So the non-negotiables that we have are we need curious people. So the trait that we need is curious people. And the reason for that is because we've had people join BlockWorks. They're the best engineers in the world or the best salespeople in the world, But the industry moves too quickly for you not to be curious. So we need naturally very curious people, the types of people who go down Wikipedia rabbit holes at 2 a.m. in the morning. So you have to have your non-negotiables. For us, that's curiosity. And then that's the airport test. And the airport test is just, if I was traveling with this person and our flight got delayed and we were stuck at the airport bar for eight hours, am I going to text my friend and say, oh my God, I'm stuck at the airport with this person for eight hours.

1:26:47What do I do? or am I going to say, oh my God, that's so cool. I get to have some beers with this person. So, you know, we're at 75 people today. 75 out of 75 are naturally curious and they pass the airport test. From there, I think you can start to get into all the more like kind of cliche, classic advice around hiring. The last step of, the thing we got wrong a lot was when we were hiring the leadership team and hiring executives at the company was we ran them through the standard interview process. but what we missed was for that group of people, it becomes a lot more about how you think than how do you do your work?

1:27:26There's how do you do your work? And that's all important. And can you get shit done? Obviously, but what we started doing is these in-person, we'll fly someone into New York and we basically will send them the things that we'll just brain dump on a Google doc, the problems at the business in their line of business, right? Here are the three or four things that we're thinking about. here are the metrics around this business. Here's the context that you need. How would you solve these things? And we'll spend an entire day. We do breakfast, then we whiteboard, then we do lunch, then we whiteboard, go for some drinks, have dinner, talk more about the problems.

1:28:00Because if you are misaligned on how you think about things, it will never work. If you're aligned on how you think about things, you can let them figure out how to do the work, but it needs to come from an alignment around how to think about the problem. but aren't you supposed to hire people especially key people to tell you how to do something right tell you how to do something yes but we have a core they have to the how i let the how is up to them the like what to do the like should we here's a here's an example should we expand blockworks conferences into asia it's a real question we've thought about so once we make that decision totally on them to execute and figure out how we do that how do we get a partner on the ground and if we're going to you know hong kong or something the how is they can figure that out they're the they're the owner of that pnl basically the what is i need to see how do you come to the conclusion and what is your logic as you're starting to like problem solve around that and if i just can't follow your logic and i can't start to like understand how you think about a problem like this it's going to be really tricky to work together how does the cyclicality of the crypto market affect how hard it is to build a company in the space especially when it comes to people?

1:29:32There's the obvious thing around like financials and making sure you don't get over your skis and have to do big layoffs and stuff like that. But I think that's a relatively obvious answer. The tough thing that people don't talk about enough is the people management gets very tricky in cycles because it's basically a big game of setting people's expectations. So I think you have three jobs as a founder. you have to set the vision if the basically set the strategy set the set the vision you have to get everyone to row together and then you have to determine the speed at which they are rowing those are like the only jobs in my mind of a founder early days you have other jobs sales marketing but like as the company grows those are the three rules set the strategy set the speed set the like getting everyone synced up together call it the three s's or something um that all starts to break down if you're not, with these violent cycles up and down, if you're not really clearly setting expectations.

1:30:37So here's an example of something that's going to happen. Actually, here are two examples. It was the heart of the bear market. And every company was struggling in crypto. This is probably July of 2023. And Mike and I said, it's time to start turning on the gas. Maybe this is October or November, 2023. said it's time to start hiring again time to turn on the gas and i think people basically looked at us like we were like we're lunatics like you know like like you know we're in the two-year bear market right now in 2022 almost 2023 is over why would we start hiring and it's because of an expectation around how these cycles work and i think the same thing will be happening will happen again, let's say it's Bitcoin's at 150, Sol just hit a thousand, ETH is at 8K or 10K or whatever, like, and it's, you know, fall of 2025.

1:31:31Mike and I are going to have to go to the company and say, let's slow things down. Let's stop hiring. And the reaction we'll get from every single person is that that's insane. Like we're leaving so much growth on the table, but you start to have to like, I think plan for these yeah you have to it makes business planning very very tricky it's the same as investing actually actually in the coins when do I get in and when do I get out or when do I accumulate and when do I I mean you start to see the world in the older I get the more I see the world in just markets right so like the talent market is an interesting market in crypto because in the bear market you can hire the most amazing people for relative, like for what I'd call normal prices or like, you know, that's their salary we're talking about.

1:32:22But like, if it was a market, like prices, like when the bull market comes, I mean, we had, we had people getting, they were making X amount and they were getting offers for not 20 % increase or 30 % increase, but 2.5 X offers. So, you know, you have someone making a hundred K who gets an offer for two 20. How did you deal with that? we dealt with it the complete wrong way at the time, which was, oh, we, we, we did some things right. We, you know, I mean, you just can't entertain those because what ends up happening is like those people join those companies, but I know the, I know the market rate for all of these roles.

1:33:05And if it gets out ahead of its skis, those companies might have that person for a year, but when the market turns, they're unfortunately going to be the first to get laid off because their comp is out of whack. Let's say you have a team of five marketers and everyone makes 150K, but then you have one marketer who makes 250K because they got higher in the Pico bull market. Who's getting laid off when things turn? The person who makes 250. So I think you can't really succumb to those pressures when that happens. And you just have to make sure you have a good rotation bench of people. But even like the advertising market works the same.

1:33:38I started seeing it just as a market. It's no different than the stock market. When everyone's panicked and freaked out, like advertising rates go down. And if you think about the marketer as a portfolio manager, who's allocating capital to get a return, no different than a portfolio manager and investor, they should be buying advertising in the bear markets. Now, Blockworks' ad rates are expensive. They're high because we're sold out through, I think, November right now for a lot of our digital inventory. So now they're paying a premium on the advertising, no different than if you're buying a stock in a in a bull market so it's i've started seeing all these things as just markets but most people don't think that way right they don't they invest the wrong way whether in stocks crypto or in advertising or in anything right you look at well it's fear right yeah absolutely you make fear-based decisions which is easy and sometimes there's other variables it's like maybe if you're an investor you ran out of dry powder maybe if you're a marketer you've got a budget you have to work around but uh the savvy thing is to double down on hiring double down on marketing, double down on all of this stuff.

1:34:44I mean, Rolex, right? How did Rolex get so big in the US? They're primarily European brand. Rolex got, was decently large in the US. When did they like take off and become Rolex? In 2008, the global financial crisis, all the watch brands stopped advertising in 2008 and 2009. Rolex 3X their marketing budget in 2008 in the United States. So I think there's some good lessons there. You talked about 150k Bitcoin, 8 to 10k ETH, a thousand sol. I like that one. Something that's potentially bullish for crypto are the elections coming, right? Bitcoin and crypto are now part of the US elections. And you guys got into a lot of hits because of an article Blockworks posted, which starts by the following.

1:35:38Only a fool would vote on crypto alone. Americans should not prioritize their own selfish financial interests over broader societal and ethical concerns. Isn't it in human nature to be a free rider when it comes to personal financial interests? I don't think that article is necessarily about being a free rider. I think Molly James, the writer of that op-ed, her take on this was essentially vote how you want to vote. Vote for Trump or for, at that time, Biden or whoever you want to vote for. It doesn't really matter to me. But she said there's a lot of other things to consider outside of just your monetary interests and that there's a lot of other things at stake and on the table.

1:36:31But that's what I say. When I mean free rider, I'm more saying yes people should think that way but probably most most people think ah i need to think personally right oh definitely i mean most people who are getting angry are free are free riders basically right yeah and so i i mean i don't think they're necessarily free like so maybe free riders the word here but like the pushback we got was, who are you to say that we shouldn't vote for our livelihood? And for, I think there's a real concern right now that Trump equals full market, regulatory clarity, massive boom for crypto, especially in the US and the Democrats winning.

1:37:26And I think this is the concern right now that people have on Twitter is that Kamala means four years of the same of maybe it's not Gary Gensler anymore, but the SEC cracking down and lack of regulatory clarity. And that's been really hard for operators and crypto ourselves included. So I don't maybe, maybe the word is free riders, but the main pushback we got was who do you think you are to call me a fool? The word fool there was pretty intense. And, but it definitely, what I think it did, that article did, was people weren't comfortable having that conversation. So nobody was open about talking about their politics on Twitter, unless you're maybe like a selkist or something like that.

1:38:07Nobody was. And when I think of like one of the things that Blockworks needs to do before successful, it's move the conversation about crypto forward in a responsible way and to always sit at the cutting edge of crypto. And at that point in time, we accomplished both of those things. It was the talking about the intersection of politics and crypto was kind of the cutting edge. No one was really talking about it yet. Now everyone's talking about it. And we moved the conversation forward because people weren't willing to talk about it publicly. We published that and you had hundreds of people, I think maybe thousands of people saying, I love Molly's take.

1:38:41I hate Molly's take. And it got the conversation going. Who are you voting for? oh tough tough there's a long there is a that is a that is a uh longer question here's what i'd say actually it's not a longer question it's obviously a simple question i could say trump or kamala um i think it's very obvious at this point that trump would be much better for crypto in the united states um and i think it's also obvious that Kamala would be better for other things. Definitely not crypto, right? She came out with her advisors. It's like Bharat and people like that. Like, it's not the thing that if you're optimizing solely for what is going to make crypto, specifically in the US, go much higher, it's a very easy choice, which is, I think, Trump.

1:39:42That's my like very PR-y answer. And you want, obviously, like you are a crypto guy, you have a company in crypto, like you, so you, you are kind of thinking like these people kind of get angry online. Right. When, for example, you might think about, I don't know, you organize a conference, you say, okay, we're gonna have maybe some politicians. We're gonna have some Republicans and we're gonna have some Democrats. And then people get super angry because why would you have some Democrats that are against crypto, right? Right, right. I mean, we have this conference coming up in October, Permissionless, and we've got all the L1 founders and L2 founders and the BlackRock CIO and Chris Dixon and Balaji.

1:40:18But we also have both Republicans and Democrats who we've invited to come speak. And I think there was a take on Twitter that I actually vehemently disagree with, which is, why are you platforming the Democrats? Why are you inviting the Democrats to come speak at your conference? Why do you let Wiley Nickel and Richie Torres and Ro Khanna, who are clearly associated with the bad guys, come speak at this event? And, you know, I can understand people saying, like, you should vote for Trump because he'll be better for crypto. I just can't get behind the take of like you should blackball the Dems and only platform the Republicans.

1:40:59Especially if you're a media company. Your role is to be unbiased, right? Yeah, exactly. If you want to be a media company that stays alive in the long run and that is not part of those that are dying, right? It's absolutely that. So it makes a lot of sense. So, and it's fair if people push back, but I do think like one of the problems with crypto Twitter having all of the attention is that, I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a senator or a congressman, you get on Twitter and you see angry Twitter people, crypto people who are supposedly, you know, executives at these big crypto companies coming after you.

1:41:35And I mean, that doesn't make you like them more. So my thought is if you can bring some of these people and sit them down with the, you know, Jeremy Allaire's of Circle and the Anatoly of Solana and Chris Dixon at Andreessen, like only good things will come of that, I think. And if we don't trust that good things will come from a congressman meeting with a, you know, with a founder of an L1 or of Chris Dixon or something, like, that's probably a bigger issue right there. But I do think those people are impressive enough and have a clear enough vision of the future and can articulate what crypto needs in the US that it's only beneficial to put those people together.

1:42:10Absolutely. You're a crypto nerd, but you're also a history nerd, right? Yeah, yeah. You told me you were reading three books about history at any point in time, what particular aspect of the American history fascinates you the most?

1:42:31I think the best founders in history are probably the founding fathers.

1:42:38Right, whether it's... I mean, all of them in their own respective right. Like, I think the founding fathers are the best founders in history. I think that it's the two things that are the most interesting is how democracy has been able to thrive for so long, right? How the US dollar has been able to thrive for so long and how capitalism isn't a perfect system, but seems to be the best system that we've got. And I just think when you read history, there's so many overlaps with crypto, right? Specifically like booms and busts and people talk about bubbles and cycles. Like if you go read history and I just got, I just finished reading, spending too much time reading about the Gilded Age and kind of the like 1840 to let's call it like 1910.

1:43:31And there's kind of the Civil War and through the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 80s through the like early 1900s when, you know, they started cracking down on a lot of the big monopolies and standard oil and things like that. and United Fruit and those kind of companies.

1:43:50The booms and busts and the cycles and the bubbles of those times make crypto bubbles look microscopic. And I just love hearing these stories. I think there's a lot of overlap. This is like more kind of a financial take, right? If you think about the normal people who are maybe less into finance, why should everyone have some good general knowledge about the history of the country they live in because i think it will give you pride in what's been built so far um there's a lot of i think anti-americ like you know the american flag has been now associated with like like trump i think and like kind of like the south and there's uh there's like a lot of like i don't know sitting with a friend watching the Olympics and he's like, yeah, you know, I'm rooting for Brazil.

1:44:43I'm not even rooting for the U.S. here. And there's a, it's really easy to get caught up in the noise of what's happening today. And, you know, there's things I don't like, like cancel culture and this like woke politics and like all of that kind of stuff. I really think it's detrimental. But if you zoom out and just like read and learn about the history of the U.S., it is the most, I think, impressive thing that's, I mean, you could say the Roman empire and the British empire and all these empires, but like, it's the most impressive thing, like living organism, there's 350 million people here.

1:45:19Like the most impressive thing that's been built in the last couple of hundred years is the United States and just how it's been able to endure. So I think when you read about, whether you're reading about the railroads in the 1840s and 50s and 60s, or just like enduring, I mean, we endured a crazy civil war or the oil, like how, you know, the oil booms and busts in the 1870s or World War I or World War II or just, you know, the Revolutionary War. Like, I just think there's a resilience that the United States has had that is very tough to say any other country has had. And I think it gives you, when you learn about this stuff, it gives you a lot of pride in the US.

1:45:59What's something that you believe in that most people would not agree with? Is this the Peter Thiel question? I'm not sure if it comes from there, but I like to ask it as one of the last questions because people are like... It's a good question. Well, maybe there's a couple of buckets. Like one thing I believe with company building is that... Here are the first two things that come to mind. I should have prepped for this question. I should have thought about this ahead of time. The two things that come to mind are one is build for a niche audience as long as humanly possible, no matter what you're building, whether it's a podcast or a product or a SaaS product or a data company, whatever, build for a niche product as long as humanly possible.

1:46:45I think there's a common belief that you go raise money and then you go try to get a ton of customers. I think that the longer you can build for a cult following and a core niche audience is valuable. The other thing that I really strongly believe that I don't see other people doing, so maybe they disagree with me, I don't know, is the easiest way for a small company to look big is with world-class design. And I think that founders oftentimes think of designers as something that comes much later in a company. But, you know, I remember when we launched the Blockworks website, people said, oh, you guys are like the Bloomberg of crypto.

1:47:24We had never published an article in our life. I said, you guys like the Bloomberg of crypto? Because the website felt and looked, we copied Bloomberg. And I think if you're a two-person company, the fastest way to look like a 10-person company is with good design. If you're a 10-person company, the easiest way to look like a 100-person company is with a beautiful front end and a beautiful website. And I think people, especially in crypto, think that design is overrated, but I would really strongly push back on that. First impression matters. Yeah. It's the only thing that matters. Nobody reads copy on a website.

1:48:01Nobody reads your marketing materials. They just look at how nice is the design. Do they look legitimate or not? 100%. Yeah. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? I think we are going to go into

1:48:19a bull market that people can't really wrap their heads around. the if you there's all this you know it's funny like you know prices were going down the other day a month ago or something or a couple weeks ago and everyone's panicking if you just zoom like okay so just zoom out and think about this for a second bitcoin hit an all-time high with interest rates being yanked higher to five percent what starts happening when we are just starting to enter a dollar bear market so we're entering a dollar bear market so the dollar's turning over and interest rates are getting pulled down and we're going into election season.

1:48:58I just think that people are really severely caught up in the, it's end of August, you know, it's summertime, the market's going to consolidate for a little while. I don't think people understand how violent to the upside a bull market can get until they really see it. And you've got, like my belief in crypto and my like conviction in this industry and the asset class, like as of today has never, has really never been stronger for so many elements. Like the ETFs are extremely underrated. Like the, you know, if you're a venture firm, like I think you could call crypto the last investable vertical right now.

1:49:42Like consumer, there hasn't been a consumer hit in 10 years, maybe TikTok, but that's it. FinTech, we've maxed out what we can build on ACH rails. AI, extremely centralizing force. Maybe there's Anthropic and perplexity and ChatGPT that make it, but it's all that power will go to Google and Amazon and Facebook and stuff. there's American dynamism, right? Like Anderil and like these like kind of hard tech companies, defense companies, you need maybe one in a hundred venture firms can invest in those because they're so capital intensive. And we don't even know what the valuations of those will look like.

1:50:17I think that like what will become really obvious in 2025 is that every venture firm in the world will need again, some sort of crypto strategy. And every institution will be able to finally get off zero and make some allocations, whether that's to the Bitcoin ETF, the ETH ETF, whether they start playing on chain. I mean, BlackRock's got half a billion dollars on chain right now. So I think my biggest conviction is that we're going into a pretty colossal bull market and people seem to be really underestimating that right now. Love it. Asked the same question to Meltem this morning and she just answered, she said, up only.

1:50:57That's, I mean, much more eloquent than I could Meltem. Then I said, can you please explain? She was like, no, no, I don't. And now I have the explanation. There's my explanation. Thank you so much for doing that, man. That was an amazing conversation. Thank you. It was great. I really enjoyed it. Awesome.