HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow

Hey, so before we get to this brand new episode of How I Built This Lab. I wanted to make sure that you all knew about the how I built this shop, where you can find t shirts, hats, mugs. Tons of other merch for you or Any trailblazing entrepreneur or builder or innovator or just fan of the show, we created a collection of how I built this apparel, accessories, drink wear, and more. Just for you. It's currently available

at wonderyshop.com so go check it out. Right now. Okay. Onto the show. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab.

I'm Guy Raz. In February of twenty twenty one, four friends decided to start an NFT project. One night, one of the friends, a guy named Greg Solano, registered an LLC on LegalZoom and called it Yuga Labs. That was the company, a few documents in a file folder. Two months later, the Friends launched their project.

It was called Board Ape Yacht Club, or B A Y C for short. On april twenty third, twenty twenty one. BAYC went live. That day. Ten thousand digital profile pictures of apes.

Wearing different clothing and different facial expressions, Went up for sale. and the cost for each ape. was.08 Ethereum, or roughly$220 a pop at the time. About a year later, in March of twenty twenty two,

Uga Labs attracted four hundred and fifty million dollars from investors at a valuation of four. billion dollars. So How did a group of friends who made digital profile pictures of cartoon apes go from a company worth nothing.

to one valued at over four billion dollars in a year. Well, that's what we're gonna find out today on the show. Greg Solano and Wiley Erno created Ford 8 Piotr Club, and you'll hear from them in a moment. These guys rarely give interviews, not because they're too cool to do it, they're just super private and aren't really seeking attention. Neither Greg nor Wiley are technical, in fact they both have backgrounds in literature. It's how they first bonded.

but they were also steeped in the culture around cryptocurrency and NFTs. Non fungible tokens. Now I'm not gonna spend too much time explaining NFTs because even though I own a few, I don't fulfill them myself. But basically in the context of this interview, An NFT is a unique Verifiable digital object.

a piece of art or music or a domain name or a ticket that gives you access to an event. Something whose ownership can be verified on the digital ledger known as the blockchain. And whatever you might think of people spending the crypto equivalent of thousands or even millions of dollars on NFTs, The fact of the matter is They do.

In twenty twenty one Our fellow human beings spent over$22 billion on these digital products. And even with a recent market correction The cheapest you can buy a board ape avatar on the secondary market right now? is around eighty five Ethereum.

or over a hundred and thirty thousand dollars at the time of this recording. And Wiley and Greg have big ambitions for Yugolabs. With the$450 million they raised, the founders have plans to build a massive virtual world. A metaverse where anyone can hang out and create things. and even buy and sell digital assets.

Wiley and Greg are with me now, and I guess uh I guess that the two of you met at a At a bar on spring break in Miami, is is that right? Yeah, I mean we we hit it off pretty much right away. I mean it was a little bit like the very first conversation we ever had was about um David Foster Wallace. I had just read Infinite Jess and I was like super obsessed, which is a bit of a stereotype, I think, for a guy at that age. And I was uh

I was like sort of proselytizing this at the bar. I was like, Oh, you know, everyone needs to go read infinite chest. There's this guy, David Frostwalls, he's incredible. And uh Greg immediately was like, Oh, I hate that guy. Oh, really? Greg. So you've been studying literature, right, Greg? Yeah, exactly. I I was studying comparative literature, I was doing a minor in creative writing, you know. We we both had designs of of being writers and and spent all of our like weekends and free time like writing short stories and and poems and stuff.

Um so we we gravitated fighting about, you know Immediately talking about books, and I was You know, if you're in creative writing classes in the you know Two thousand eight, two thousand nine.

Everybody's talking about David Foster Wallace and I took that as like a an impetus to run in the opposite direction away from kind of the the f what felt like the flavor of the moment and uh Wiley took that as a personal attack. All right. And do you stay in touch after that? After that first meeting? We did, yeah. We stayed in touch, um through text messages and group chats through our friends in Miami and our friendship kind of blossomed from there. We had more in common. We were both obsessed with MMORPGs or massive multiplayer online role playing games.

We ended up playing World of Warcraft together for a while. And Wiley, what did you do after you graduated from college? I actually didn't graduate. I uh You didn't. No, I got sick, dropped out. Um And then honestly I I spent like the next ten years really ill. I had a chronic illness.

And I was just, you know, travelling all around the country. Going to different doctors, basically just like Bankrupting my family trying to heal my illness. I mean I was you know nearly bed bound for many of those years.

Ultimately it was resolved? I mean do you still have health issues? Yeah, I'd still do, but I'm you know, I'd say eighty percent better and good enough to work like hell anyway. So All right, Craig, you graduate uh w what, in two thousand nine or ten from college? Two thousand eleven. Yeah, I graduated from NYU in twenty eleven and then I I immediately jumped over to uh A master's in fine arts and creative writing at the University of Virginia. And so w what did you think you wanted to do? Yeah, I I

found out about this crazy world where you could get an MFA in writing and basically get paid a stipend to sit around all day and and read books and and try your hand at writing and go to workshops and that kind of stuff, and that sounded like the the dream thing to do for a couple years there. Um but I didn't really, you know.

Y there's not a whole lot of money in poetry as like, you know Yeah. Um I got a job out in California at a small publishing house and I worked for years as a Editorial assistant all the way up, you know, to a senior editor. And so I was working on uh licensed books. So basically

anything with certain video game studios or movie studios are the people kind of telling the stories behind Games Films, other things, you know, really kind of lush illustrated coffee table books. Okay. And Wiley, you hadn't really worked at all. Before the two of you guys got together.

No, really not. I I like to joke that this was my first job, although of course I'd, you know, worked retail jobs and things like that when I was younger. I mean, when we started Yuga Labs, I was approximately forty thousand dollars in medical debt mostly. Wow. Um and my family was just struggling to support me as they just watched me, you know, get sicker and sicker over a decade. Wow. That must have been um incredibly frustrating. Oh yeah. I mean, you know, the first time you know someone gets sick and they go to a doctor and the doctor's like, Yeah, I don't know what's wrong with you it's like the first time for a lot of people that they start to lose faith in the system and then it just begins this whole process of like okay, well

Fine let's find another doctor and then let's find another and you know just Yeah, I traveled. all over the country, six months at a time going from city to city. 'Cause you know, that was the next doctor that was gonna fix me or whatever, you know. Yeah.

Well, um and Greg were you were you following up with Wiley, were you keeping in touch with him during that time? Yeah, we had a kind of a group. Ch With some other friends from Miami and people just kinda be

Posting memes throughout the day. And uh occasionally why and I would would play like World of Warcraft for stints at a time. And actually it was in twenty seventeen. that I texted him like hey, I just you know, I bought a little bit of this thing called Ethereum

You know, Ether, you should do this with me. Um, and so it was really around like Playing games kind of beating up literary ideas and talking about books and And eventually getting into crypto that that are

Friendship was formed around yeah. And that was really like the perfect thing that happened for me because it was like I had all this time on my hands. I had just been sitting around, you know, either meditating or reading books or playing online games and suddenly There was like this whole other world I could dive into. I had like previously traded a little bit, like penny stocks and things like that.

um and gotten into technical analysis and then Here was like a whole world I could dive into that, you know started to have culture built around it, like on crypto, Twitter and things like that. And we just kinda fell into that world. Greg, uh did you and Wiley see each other much between the time you you finish your MFA and the time that you would eventually the project that we're gonna talk about. Did you physically see each other much?

Uh no. Again. Well like almost not at all, like four or five times, I almost wanna say. I don't I don't think it would be an exaggeration over like Ten years. So really your your relationship was through like playing games together and just Kind of text conversations and things like that.

Yeah, I mean we started talking a lot more on the phone in two thousand seventeen when we both got into crypto and You know, that was like just another tie for us to come together. And how did you get into cryptocurrencies? So I first heard about Bitcoin and like

Two thousand nine or something like that, from somebody who was mining it off of a a laptop. And I just thought this is kinda crazy. I don't I don't get it. You know, not interested, basically. And

It wasn't until twenty seventeen where I think It was kind of a bull run back then. Bitcoin had had doubled or tripled in value over a period of time, so all of a sudden it was in the news and People were talking about it, thinking about it. And

You know, I bought a little bit of Bitcoin, I bought a little bit of Ethereum. I bought a little bit of Ripple. And um what really struck me though was was Ethereum. It was this you know You could You could kinda read everything you you could

Care to know it felt like About Bitcoin on a On a couple pieces of paper. Ethereum felt like this really rich ecosystem, incredibly rich with

With possibility. At the time I think much more just possibility than than actual like utility. But In any case it felt like this thing that you know would just really captured your attention and you could just dive into crypto twitter

spend all day, every day reading about it and feel like you're only scratching the surface. And it was it was really exciting. So Um that's kind of what what unlocked it for For me, I think. And Wiley, you were you were battling. this m this health condition and

You know trying to kinda get through it, but it sounds like you were also dabbling in like some small investments or or should the stock market. How did you how did you get into crypto? Yeah, I mean and so Uh, going back as far as college, I was like, you know, trading penny stocks and things like that. And I was just kind of generally interested in the markets.

Um, and then Yeah, when Greg, you know, reached out about cryptocurrency and I was like, you know, he has this great story where it's like, you know, the first time you hear about crypurrency, you're like, that's stupid. Uh and the second time you heard about it, it's because like a friend of a friend of a friend made a gazillion dollars and you're like, Oh, had I paid attention when the first time I heard about it, I would also be a gazillionaire. So um kind of a similar story where it's like I heard about cryptocurrency back in 2015. ignored it, thought it was dumb, because I just didn't do my due diligence, didn't read into it. And then by the time Greg reached out to me, I'd seen, you know, the markets were uh suddenly exciting. It was like the bull run was starting in 2017.

And yeah, it just seemed like an amazing opportunity and I was able to sort of translate some of the skills that I'd learned from trading when I was younger into crypto. And back then I think the markets were a little bit easier to trade from like a technical analysis perspective. And so I started really just uh investing a lot of time reading about um more TA. um learning pattern analysis. I just kind of like kind of fell into that world and I love crypto Twitter and uh watching other traders share their charts and their thoughts and their opinions on, you know, what direction the market was heading.

uh new coins c coming on the market every day. Back then it was like, you know, just a really like vibrant and exciting place. And it was also like ridiculously funny. uh on Twitter especially, you know, it's'cause this was a lot of young people training it. So it was just like a lot of memes and a lot of inside baseball jokes and it just became Really fun to be a part of. So the two of you were were both part of this kind of text chain of friends, but also independently got into crypto and presumably the two of you started to kind of exchange ideas and thoughts on it.

Yeah. Yeah, which was kind of what we we do, you know, in the in the wider group everyone would just kinda joke around and post memes, but Um Wyatt and I develop this relationship of kind of like a It was almost like a little bit of like a writer's room for us. You know, I'd call him or he'd call me and and with an idea for a short story or a potential novel or

Or anything, and then we just had this kind of relationship where we could bat around an idea for hours and and pick it apart and And Find good nuggets in what the other person was saying and

I think that's really core to our our DNA as friends and and how we been successful as founders as well. So initially you were not talking about, hey, let's start a business together. It was like oh I'm doing this thing and I'm using Coinbase or whatever it was and I'm buying like Bits of crypto. Yeah, it was like you know.

a thousand dollars was I think what I put into the markets in twenty seventeen, which was like Yeah. Half my paycheck, so it's a pretty big deal. This was twenty seventeen when you started.

But between that time and the time the two of you decide to start a business It was really just kind of talking about cryptocurrency. There was no conversation around hey, let's do something together. Yeah, so we would have ideas for projects that We

dream about launching together or s start writing something or a or a literary magazine that we were developing. Kind of these like So like hobbies that never quite got off the ground. And in twenty seventeen, you know, we we got into crypto together, but you know, we weren't building in the space. And by the time the bottom fell out of the crypto market in say March of

twenty eighteen. You know, it just felt like a lot of people left the space There weren't interesting projects being launched. It felt like everything went quiet. You know, it's it's not even just cryptocurrencies itself, but ways of using crypto and adoption and Just people even theorizing and talking about these things.

Frankly, even just people on the internet. you know, on crypto Twitter making memes, you know. Everybody just kinda left the building, it felt like for a bit there. Alright, so March of twenty eighteen. And mean time.

You were batting around potential ideas, but before we get to this idea that you land on Greg, why did you think you wanted to work with Wiley? I mean, it's it's actually amazing because the two of you had really only met in person a few times, but There was some connection in this desire to maybe work with him. I think we have a very strong kind of Yin and Yang relationship. Is that we like to talk about it?

You know, there's a there's a boldness To Wiley. That's incredibly powerful in how he like approaches things. And a willingness to keep

Focused On an idea for a long Period of time. I liken it to if you wanna get really fit and you gotta find the right gym buddy who's gonna push you And go as hard as you and not call in

you know, sick and be like, No, I can't go today or whatever it is, make other plans. And when I had an idea I was extremely passionate about. You know, he was down to to work through that idea and and I think vice versa. And where he is kind of a maximalist and wants to

Pile on more. complexity and ambition and Um just more to a project. He's a maximalist in that way. You know, I was a literally an an editor

and a poet and I'm always about simplifying things down to their core. And what's the like most viable minimal thing that then other people can take and run with. And I think the process of working together has been really fruitful and and meeting somewhere in the middle.

And You know. I ri I rein him back and and he pushes me into the pool. Um whiley From your perspective, did you think when you when you started dabbling in crypto and

You and Greg were kind of Exchanging ideas. Did you think yeah, I think I might uh Start selling with this guy at some point. No, I I think he mentioned at one point we had like dreamt of starting a literary journal together or something like that.

Just'cause we both love poetry and short stories and But no, beyond that I we I hadn't ever imagined that this would be, you know One of the most important people of my life. Um To some extent.

Um When he reached out Literally uh just texted randomly out of the blue one day. you know, hey, let's make an NFT. Um

I don't think Craig was really prepared for just how much fire in my belly I had. Um You know I mean I Again, I had been very, very ill for ten years and just sitting around meditating, reading books, trading online, playing online games. Yeah.

You know, this was a a friend, someone I trusted artistically coming to me saying, you know, I have a I have a creative project in mind. Um, well, we didn't know what the idea was then. We had to come up with that later, but you know, hey, I want to work on something with you, and it was like Okay. Let's go. When did you first

Get exposure to NFTs. So in twenty seventeen you kind of couldn't have been involved in crypto Without hearing about a a project called Crypto Kitties. You know, it was it felt like it was clogging up the Ethereum network at one point with

how many people were out there collecting these digital cats and breeding them. And playing with them. Did you think it was nonsense, or what did you think? It it was interesting to me in that like you could actually do something like here is a is a token this something that's living on the blockchain.

That's not just like a quote unquote store of value. This isn't meant to Transact with this isn't money. It's you know, a digital cat. But what was strange that time was

I couldn't understand the end goal there. Like you could just k keep breeding'em and breeding them. There there's no scarcity. I it was difficult to understand like what cat could you really want. Um it felt like a game where the stakes weren't Clear. Yeah.

The model just felt a little dilutive. It didn't feel like a true collectible. My first NFT was a crypto kitty, actually. And And I bought a couple of them. I thought, Oh, these are so cool, but like ultimately the game wasn't that fleshed out. the rarity didn't make a lot of sense. At the I mean, it's extremely innovative what they did, and it was, you know, they were basically pioneers, uh, along with Matt and John over at Larva Labs who created crypto punks. But

Yeah, it didn't feel like it didn't capture my attention beyond a week or something. Right. And and it was I mean, at the time th it was like digital art you could buy and you would The concept was essentially what it is today. It's it was a bit different in our opinion. Number one, the on ramp to Buying a crypto kitty, understanding what one was and how to use it was

frankly much more difficult than it is today, I think. And The real precursor to what we've done and that we've built on was a project called Crypto Punk that came out a bit later. Um That

Was a collection of ten thousand Pixelated Punks. Um and It's like a profile picture. Some have three D glasses.

Some are like smoking cigarettes or other things. It just felt like this really strange cool project. And there was only ten thousand of them. You weren't gonna breed'em and make more It's just you could have one of the ten thousand or not. So both of you are intrigued by these crypto kitties and the crypks projects, and and both of you started to kind of dabble in it, like buy buy a few of these things?

Yeah, my my again, my first NFT was the Crypto Kitty's. Um I didn't buy a punk. I didn't even buy a crypto kitty. Um I found out about crypto punks a little later when I you know had kind of stepped away from from crypto and foolishly didn't didn't pick one up back then. Um so like Wiley said, it was really in in twenty twenty one In um

late January, early February where There is this Inflection point where there's these projects being release or at least one in particular called hash masks. That felt like

This isn't um this isn't really a technical Project. creative technologist in a lab like put this together in the way that kind of crypto kitties or crypto punks felt back then. This was just an an art project that was using blockchain As a medium. And like any medium could open up the space of possibility.

So That's when we got all of a sudden. way more interested because of our our backgrounds as as storytellers. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious about this project hash mask. It it was released in early twenty twenty one, I guess, and that Flipped a switch on for both of you. Tell me about that project. What is Hashmask? Why was it different from anything before it?

Yeah, so it's um It was this Projects where Each one is kind of this painting and each of these characters is wearing a mask.

And there was a lot of kind of intrigue. To the project. Um Ideas about how you You know, if you

looked at the collection as a whole, kind of mapping up, you know, putting certain mass side by side that the backgrounds would connect and maybe tell you something. It felt kind of cryptic and and fascinating. And more than anything, it really captured like You know, it's it's not just us that

that we're intrigued by this project. I mean Everybody on crypto Twitter when when this was released was talking about it. You know, all the biggest accounts were We're buying them.

Talking about them. Excited about like what this was. Some something that particularly made it exciting was you know, by the time we had heard about it, it was already unaffordable to us it'cause the project had made like ten million dollars. Wow. You know, imagine that like NFTs.

You know, post crypto kitties are basically something that No one is taking that seriously, and suddenly you're hearing about a project that just made ten million dollars overnight, essentially, and we're like, What is this? What is going on? And then the more you look at it, the like, Oh, this is like artful. The thing that we'd always wanted to contribute to be a part of this ecosystem in a way that didn't require us to be engineers or super skillful traders or even investors, frankly. We could potentially Use our artistic background. And come up with something that was in the same vein.

We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, more from Wiley Arno and Greg Solano, co-founders of Yugolabs and the Board API Club. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Greg Solano and Wiley Arenault, creators of the Board Ape Yacht Club NFT collection.

Okay, so you guys were looking at things like crypto kitties, crypto punks and hash masks What was a spark that had one of you Save the other one. Hey, you know, let's do one of these NFT projects. I think our relationship came

Out of Being obsessed with MMRPGs where we're, you know, frankly, the pursuit of digital assets is everything. And out of the fascination with cryptocurrency and with The

culture that we saw on crypto twitter. And the idea of wanting to make something But kind of always falling out like you know, we We'd work on a a literary magazine together. But you know, uh well, this is this actually gonna be that big, is this gonna be that special? There's already McSweeney's in Paris Review and these other things, or has it felt like this unique moment where

We actually know more deeply, perhaps that The crypto space than a lot of people uh with our storytelling backgrounds and it felt like, you know, maybe this is our our moment to make something together that's special and really just contribute finally to this space. In a way other than as spectators, frankly.

So what happened? Did one of you like say to the other, Hey, let's let's start a project? Yeah, I mean so Greg, you know, reached out and said, Hey, let's let's make an NFT. I was in I think within seconds responding back with ideas and Um We were kinda off to the races. I think

We the first step was kind of looking at What was already being done. In NFTs and seeing where we can improve upon the model. At the time there was um kind of like predatory pricing structures to one degree or another. People were using like quote unquote bonding curves where the first NFT you bought in the collection would be cheaper than the last NFT in the collection. And that didn't feel

like good for creating a community. That was the thing that we saw as missing from the ecosystem was, you know, Basically if you bought an NFT In a ten thousand collection. the people who got in later were being dunked on by the people who got on earlier and it was like, Oh, this isn't Like a very egalitarian vibe.

in those discords. And in those days it just felt Like everyone was Trying to take advantage of one another. And when we released the board API Club. We were like, No, you know, we're gonna price this two hundred dollars an ape.

And that way. No one feels like they've got an advantage over someone else and we can try and create a club around this, a community. So um did you have a vision for what that project was going to be? Did you think it was gonna be Like

hash masks where you would release I don't know, five thousand or ten thousand individual Images. workshopping process of trying to figure out what You want it to do and make. We spent a long time

batting around different ideas. And frankly, some of the times thinking more along the lines of what what do we think people would like? Rather than you know. What what do we think is cool and what what do we think would be fun and strange.

I think the first thing that unlocked for us was the idea of hey, this NFT, this non fungible token that lives on a blockchain. And anyone in the world can basically audit who owns this token. Like How do we create Uh. A piece of our a piece of storytelling, essentially.

That embraces that aspect of the medium. And to us that was well if If I can say that this token One of ten thousand Can never be confused with any other

Then we can have like a part of our website that's gated only to people in this community. This can be kind of A strange little exclusive club there can be utility associated with this token. Um And so our first idea there was

Hey, maybe it's a What's behind this this wall, basically, this door. Um that you can only get in with the NFT. Perhaps it's a Like an artboard. Where

Every fifteen minutes, you can put a pixel down on this kind of Or the screen. With the idea being that you essentially have this collaborative art piece that's being created. Pixel by pixel.

By ten thousand people in this weird little club on the internet. That if you owned if you owned one of these images one of these pieces of art, you had access to this private room where you could You could Collaborate on an art project.

That's right. And there was like a really high flutant idea, you know. Like we imagined the the profile pictures for that being Mirot or Mondrian esque. Um and it really wasn't our bag at all, but we were like, Oh, this is what we think people would like. Um, but what ended up happening was Over the course of sort of ideating that, um The NFT market started to die out.

Projects weren't selling out anymore. And it suddenly felt like This would be inauthentic and when we Talked with Uh one of my oldest friends in the world, uh someone named Nicole Muniz, who later became our CEO, incidentally.

I remember telling her the idea for this art board, this collaborative art experiment. And she goes, you know The fact that you're imagining this as like And comparing it to Moreau or Or Mondrian.

Um is hilarious because th this is the internet and the very first thing someone's gonna draw on that board is going to be a penis. Um And

Ha. She was absolutely right, by the way. But when she said that It made us stop in our tracks and start to think about, okay. She's right. This is the internet. The first thing Is either gonna be an expletive or a penis or something, and we're like okay.

Where do people draw penises? And then that's when it sort of dawned on us that this wasn't a fancy collaborative artboard. This was a bathroom wall and from the bathroom wall We started thinking, okay. Well bathroom bar like maybe the first dive bar that we ever met.

And then we started sort of imagining this as a A club in the Everglades and then who goes to that club in the Everglades and you know, being an ape in crypto was something that uh Had been popular for many years. It was sort of an affectionate term. To ape into a a coin, you know. It meant to not really do your due diligence and just go hard, you know, to to buy a lot of stuff, throwing caution to the wind. It was it's an affectionate term within, you know, every trading community out there, I think. Everything from Reddit to to Twitter. Um

And we started to think about the crypto twitter personalities that we were particularly fond of on on crypto twitter and Um You know, these were people with a cat profile picture who you could cryptographically verify were worth, you know, um sometimes a hundred million dollars or something in crypto. And these were people who Uh

you know, weren't screwing off to the south of France. They were you know, posting on Twitter late at night going, Who wants to play League of Legends? I'm bored as hell. Uh. And we thought that was particularly funny. This is like, you know uh a strange cultural moment that uh people who had made it rich

Young just weren't traditional in any way whatsoever. And we started to think of them as board apes. So we designed the club and and the collection around the idea of Well You know, let's give it a little bit of a narrative. The year is twenty thirty five.

And anyone who aped into crypto has made it beyond their wildest dreams and Now they all what do you want to do? Well, you just wanna play League of Legends with your friends late at night, or you wanna go hang out maybe at a A weird little swamp bar in the Everglades with all your fellow board apes and so We started designing and thinking about the exterior of the club, the interior of the club, and then the aesthetics of the apes around this idea that This was a strange, weird, and very punk rock world.

And so but the thing is both of you guys are like literature guys. Like that's your background. And yeah, you had some experience in crypto now that you had dabbled in that space and really got into it and immersed yourself in in it. But From what I understand, neither of you are like technical, right? You're not coders. You're not um You know programmers. That's correct. Yeah. And isn't that a barrier to entry in in starting an NFT project? Don't you have to know how to do some of that? Absolutely. So the first thing we did, you know, after I texted Wiley, let's make an NFT.

He was all in immediately. And to kind of ensure that this new Covid Side project wouldn't just Flounder as a side project. The next day I file the A legal Zoom.

L L C that was my my way of kinda burning the ships. It's like really you're gonna form an LC and then give up on this? Like no. And we started working with Krem and C Sean, our other two co founders who are engineers to sort of figure out how to make all this work. Yeah, so after filing the first, you know, LLC paperwork, I essentially got on the phone and called everybody I'd ever known that studied computer science. Yeah. Um, you know, it wasn't it wasn't very much more artful than that. I called Carem and was like, hey, do you know any JavaScript?

And he was like, Yeah, it's that's like a huge part of my job. And I was like, Great, let's make an NFT like here, look at what these things are. And like an hour later, he's like, This has nothing to do with JavaScript. Like, where did you even hear that? Yeah, so so then what happened? I mean,'cause you're still like, I wanna do this, but there's a barrier to entry, which is like somebody who knows how to You know Type this stuff into a computer.

Yeah, so Creme was not crypto native. Um I think he probably bought crypto a little bit in the past, but but certainly not really paid attention to space in the same way that Wiley and I had. But we were basically come on, come you know, come be part of the team and he was like, Okay, like Sure.

Um, I'd also called my our friend Z Sean, who's a you know actually studied computer science with Karim He was a little timid about jumping in too, but I think the idea that they would both have each other on on their side of things to kinda lean on and get the technical part of the project done. They were like, Okay, if we if we're all in it together, we'll We're in and so You know, we added them to the LLC and and we were off to the races. And did you need a whole lot of money to make this happen? I mean, did were those guys just this was their side project that they pr also had day jobs?

And you had a day job, Greg. Yeah, we all had day jobs, uh except for Wiley. So we were just Nights and weekends. Putting things together.

there were certainly parts of it that we needed to hire out for, um, you know, like even just like neither of them were much good at like Websites uh for example, they're they're you know more like back end stuff. Um for a lot of what they were doing. And so I think At the end of the day it was some somewhere around like thirty thousand dollars is what

Yeah, it's Spending to do this. And I just almost near miraculously started to get better probably three months before Greg reached out to me. So uh when I told my mom about this, I was like

You know, hey, I know I'm bankrupting the family from the past ten years, but I need a little bit more money to start this L C and to get this artwork done and uh figure out how we're gonna you know, host this stuff and everything. And uh And she was just so ecstatic for me. I mean, she was so happy because it was like, you know, she had her son back for the first time in in ten ten years, and she was just like You know, whatever you need, let's make it work because I want to see you do something with your life. All right. So

You start to work on this. in in February of twenty twenty one. And The idea was you would m put these these apes up for sale on an N F T marketplace and Y if you bought it, you owned this

piece of art, but you also had access to the to this Bathroom wall, basically. Right. W that that was the i initial concept? Yeah. We tried to lay the groundwork a little bit. Firmer than that in the sense was unlike a lot of other NFT collections where it felt like

You know, the the projects say selling out or or minting out. uh was kind of the thing in itself. And then you know, now this was fully in the hands of the community and and you know, we'll see what happens, or it's just a collectible. We started to think about like hey, this is a This is the board a Yacht Club.

There's these ten thousand apes, but there's also this like kind of painting towards this lifestyle brand maybe. Like, you know, it it has this weird logo. It has this like brand identity that we wanted to Ten power. And so and and the other aspect that we we baked in here was the idea that if you owned a board ape.

Um And could prove that on the smart contract level. You had it in your Ethereum wallet. Then you also had By virtue of the terms.

A full license uh to the commercial rights to use that aid. 'Cause that made a lot of sense to us, because it was like this could be your your identity on the internet, you could use it as your quote unquote the metaverse here.

Then You know, you should Be able to Use it how you wish. Now this is really interesting because you know, we we put that in because we had seen, I don't know, a handful of other projects have those terms. Uh, the first time I'd ever seen it done was in hash masks and

We're like, this just makes sense. Let's definitely include this as part of the project. What we didn't realize was that because it was You know, one of the first projects to do that that took off. how much the community was almost going to instantaneously um start using that intellectual property. Got it. Okay. So on April twenty third you launch this website, Board Apeat Club.

How did you even get the word out? Who would have known about it at the time? That that was the uphill battle. And Typically a collection in those days would either immediately catch fire, it seemed like, and sell out immediately? Or

W kinda never. Happen to them. And so We Try

to be very clever about ways of drumming up interests. We had a a treasure hunt on our website saying, hey, somebody was on an airboat ride and a in a crypto wallet with one Ethereum which would have been worth I don't know, two thousand dollars or something like that at the time. You know, I'd fallen out and if you solve these puzzles you can you can win this Two thousand dollars basically. But how did you even get people to the website? There's tens, hundreds of millions of websites.

Yeah, so we were just on Twitter. Following tagging anyone we could to get attention. And then what we also did is we We thought, you know, wouldn't it be funny to make kind of honorary border. So like

You know, ones in the likeness of certain influencers or something like that. You know, like Vicy on on crypto Twitter whereas his like Bitcoin glasses, what if we put w put those on a board ape and and tweeted it at him and tried to get him to like laugh at it how ridiculous this was. Um And so we did a lot of that. We've you know, for a week there we were trying to, you know

Guerrilla market this thing in any way we could. What was interesting, there wasn't a lot of excitement about board apes during the pre sale. You could go to the website, you could see the honoraries that we had made, but on the website you could only see, I don't know, maybe four or eight uh or or so Board eight images. The rest of the collection was unrevealed. Um so in our Discord and those like in that first week Um

We only s pre sold, I don't know, something like three hundred to five hundred. Of the NFTs. And how many people were were on your Discord server? Uh not a lot. And and most of them were there to try and win the the two thousand dollars Ethereum and had no interest in spending any money on the project. And the price that you were selling them for was.

ETH, at the time that was roughly two hundred and twenty dollars, I think, right? That sounds about right. Yeah. And and every single one, all ten thousand, that was the price. There was no dynamic pricing. That was it. Point zero eight. That's correct. Okay. And so

How do they sell?'Cause I think For a week or so very few sold. But then Uh like uh May first. They sold out like the rest of them sold out almost

Immediately what happened? Yeah, that was a pretty magical night. What had happened, I think, was the collection revealed. And people saw the apes and they fell in love with the art and people started tweeting about it. And then one influencer led to another. And then over the course of

One night. Um They all sold out. And and this is because there were just there weren't that many projects coming out at that point, or because you had been really aggressive about tweeting and tweeting at other People in the space or

Actually there were a bunch of collecti there were a bunch of collections coming out around that time and they weren't selling out around then. Um what explains how you got the visibility? I I get that it's cool and interesting, but Sometimes that's not enough. You gotta get people to to be aware. I think it was actually that number one It was cheaper. than almost everything out there.

Number two is a flat price, so it wasn't getting more expensive, which is what was happening to a lot of these collections where like Cool, the first round of NFTs say Five hundred or two thousand or one price, but now the next batch is more expensive and and nobody wants to pay that. And the other thing was that, you know

there was something that you could do with this. There was idea that this was kind of a mysterious club and that you could get access to this like bathroom wall. Like there was a direct utility around A token that I think Kind of was exciting and

And I think some of what we were trying to do from a storytelling perspective and just frankly the sheer effort of The website. kind of shine through to people that once we got eyeballs on it. And all the on the treasure hunt and what we're you know, the IP rights and everything else that we could do. It just felt like hey, maybe these guys are doing it right. Let's take a chance on that. But your sort of thinking was or you knew there was a community of people out there

Who would be interested in this for one of several reasons. Maybe they just they thought hey could be a good investment. Maybe they just liked the apes and they were like, two hundred twenty bucks, who you know, that's nothing. they were people who like the idea of having access to this digital bathroom wall and Then there were some people who thought, Hey, this is cool. I I I'm gonna own this IP and I could do whatever I want with it.

I'd say that that sounds about right. was a community. I think that that something that had been missing from a lot of NFT projects, frankly. before the board API Club. And I think it was this club nature to it that made people feel Welcome. And

You know, when people bought an ape, it was the first time I had ever seen it in an NFT Discord where people were excited for them to join the Discord and and the rest of the community would celebrate it. Welcome, welcome, you know. Yeah, let's let's hang in the club together. What's so Interesting is right. To sell ten thousand of anything, especially when you are not a known quantity is very hard. I mean this is the story of every business on how I built this. It's like how do you get the first

Yeah. It I mean you're talking about it so casually now, but were was any part of you surprised that you sold them so quickly, or were you pretty sure this is What was gonna happen. So to to frame it even more, you know. That week I was kinda despondent almost. Like you know, I I was sure that like it it didn't work.

Because When this when project succeeded, they succeeded almost immediately. And if they didn't That was it. And Wiley was

pure fire at at wanting to push through and and brought me along and we we Hustled. But I will say I think The maybe the part that you're missing

There is A lot of the the people who minted these We're crypto native to some extent or another. And We're excited about something that

maybe felt like it was pushing the space forward. That was Doing things right. offering like a interesting take. On

This thing that they'd seen before. If if you work hard to try and build things for the crypto ecosystem, then I think it's a rewarding feedback loop if you're opening up the space of possibility. And and by the way you know, you're selling out ten thousand of these at essentially v the value at the time was two hundred twenty dollars. So you're making money off that, but that wasn't how you were gonna make money.

Part of how you were gonna make money, aside from when they were resold, was if your apes that you held on to increased in value, presumably. That's actually not that wasn't our model. We we actually decided to go Opposite that. You know. Matt and John, the creators of Crypto Punk.

Their monetization strategy, if they even thought that far, was around Hey, well let's hold A bunch of punks ourselves, and if these are worth money later, we'll sell them. Or ethos was how do we make a club that's egalitarian

Where you just want one membership, one membership is equal to any other membership. And so to be faithful to the spirit of the club. You know, Wiley and I were like, No, we've only ever owned one eight. We didn't even choose our apes, you know, and frankly, obviously we're never going to sell them. So Um, it was really about actually

Building the club. treating this like a startup. And If we could make money off the secondary trading because other people are, you know Um making money selling the rapes. Cool. Then we take a small piece of that and and

Can keep building as well. So that was your entire revenue model. It was like, we're not gonna just keep a bunch of these apes, we're gonna sell'em all. We'll we'll each get one. And if they if other people resell them, we'll get a cut every time they're resold and that's how we'll make money. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, on kind of the the eB of NFTs, say like OpenSea or Looks Rare, these marketplaces. you can put on there a Creator royalty. Of Typically is anywhere between two and a half percent to

all the way up to like ten percent for some collections. Um and then any time one of these things trades the creator The idea being You know, there's a whole history in the art world of Someone creating something.

selling it to someone else and then you know, Sudbees or Christie's picks it up and it sells for a hundred X that and and you know the the original artist maybe doesn't get a piece of that. So w we do actually hit collect a two and a half percent royalty on on the B O Y C collection on OpenC. Got it. Okay. All right. So get into the club. In May of tw twenty twenty one.

It was two hundred twenty bucks. And with that Ape You could do whatever you want. Would be like if Marvel. Said.

Hey, we've got ten thousand superheroes. And you want to buy one? And and you get it, it's yours. You could do whatever you want with it. I could uh make art out of it and sell it. I could put it on the roof of my car and drive around and sell popsicles. I can make a cartoon out of it. I can turn it into a p a movie, I have to pay you anything. Once I pay that two twenty Or that point oh eight of ETH.

It's mine. That's it. Yeah. I feel like all the examples you just gave are actually either ha have happened or are happening uh right now. That's right. Yeah, I mean that that's that was basically the idea here where If we're embracing the technology if we're properly embracing the medium. That we're distributing this stuff on.

Then that means that embracing the fact that Anyone can prove that they own this on the smart contract. And so what you know How can we attach certain privileges or rights to that?

Permissionlessly. You know They don't need to come to us with a separate agreement to to prove that, you know, that the smart contract can be the thing in itself. And I think what we've found Is that when you do that

You're really empowering creators. And the hive mind and the the network effects and all of the benefits that you get from that are so much more powerful. Like you You get to Disney levels of empathy and belovedness for a brand. Much sooner when somebody can own a little piece of Mickey Mouse.

We're gonna take another quick break, we'll be right back, you're listening to how I built this lab. Stay with us. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guests today are Wiley Arno and Greg Solano, co-founders of Yuga Labs, the company behind Borde Piot Club. They first conceived the idea for BAYC in February 2021. and launched the project in April of that year. Selling each Borde NFT for 0.08 ETH.

or about the equivalent of two hundred dollars at the time. But now, at the time of this recording Ford Apes are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You essentially have created a club that is so exclusive, like initially the whole point was to make it cheap that anybody, you know, had a spare two hundred dollars worth of ETH,

And now it's not accessible anymore. And I wonder if part of you is conflicted about that in any way. I would say I think You know, number one That's part of the inspiration, let's say, behind the mutant ape yacht club. Which was essentially this is like a lower tier

membership. For the club. No one would ever confuse an M A Y C for a B A Y C that's like a wild collection. And it it's it's interesting. I mean, like you said, we you know Bored apes were sold for for two hundred twenty dollars, and frankly, we are not in control whatsoever of the price of these things.

The reality is a lot of what's happened here. You know We can't really take credit for. What we can kinda take credit for is that we we set the circumstances in the right way. We thought hard on how to make things more egalitarian, how to empower creators and that kind of stuff. But it's really the kind of

growth that's being fueled by the community. And what they're creating What they're doing. That's created this incredibly powerful feedback loop. So

Um, all we can do is try and create as loving, welcoming, fun, strange, cool of community as we can and and kind of keep our heads down and do that. Yeah, we're also you know building out ways to join the Yuga ecosystem in other ways. More broadly speaking, you know, we've just launched other side. our um metaverse that we're uh building. And we're trying to think of other ways to go more broad, but we we don't wanna, you know, touch the The exclusivity and the nature of the club.

Yeah, like if if we're focused on just what we have been, which is Taking this thing. That lives on the blockchain and making it more accessible and more fun. It translating into real world experiences. real world consumer goods that you can touch.

There's a lot of opportunity in the world for people to actually own their digital assets and be able to use them. Like our our whole philosophy here is that like There's a ton of digital assets in the world and web two that you know we're kinda just renting. And so as long as you know the the value proposition of truly owning your assets is already there. And if we support that and innovate across that, everything else is gonna figure itself out. And the other thing we're trying to figure out uh on the Uga side is you know, we're we're

hyper focus now on how to onboard the next million people into crypto. Something that we like talk about, Greg and I at least all the time. Is sort of like how do we get this to pass the mom test to one extent? And that started because Greg's mom couldn't and neither could my mom, for instance, uh, have bought a board ape a year and a half ago. uh we would have had to sit down and explain to them. It's not that they're, you know Stupid people. They're both very intelligent people. It's just that you had to be crypto native in order to do it. And so we're thinking, okay.

We need to get crypto to pass the mom test to a large degree. Um so that our own mothers can uh Yeah. uh join the ecosystem and start having fun with everybody else. Um and I think by virtue of that, we think we can Onboard, you know.

the next million, two million, five million people into crypto. What is it about board ape that makes it more appealing. I mean I'm just curious in your view, like Just just other projects where it's profiles of, I don't know, cats or robots or whatever that just don't do as well, don't sell as much. What is what explains it in your view? Why

Why this one? Yeah, I think You know Hidden in your in your question is I think the answer, which is just the community in itself. Like

Uh that's what propels it forward. And that's what like the the the power and the net f network effects and the you know the belovedness of the brand comes from. It's like it it's that it was in actuality A grass roots thing that sprung up. magically on one day in May of last year. And has kept building on that, and so somebody trying to mimic that.

you know, uh copy it or whatever it is will never have kind of that, you know. Immaculate conception of that moment. Also, I just gotta say, guy I I I honestly believe that we're not gonna be the last web three company to do this well. No. Um there's gonna be a lot more web three companies down the road that make it onto your show. This is, you know. Some something important is happening here. I I I think so too. You're the first one. As you as you know, how I built this is a show about how companies were built. And this is very different because you you are you are architecting in in Incredible detail.

A virtual club, a virtual space, like and and you're kind of workshopping this idea. The other thing about High Built this that everyone who listens to the show knows is that in every case the founders built it physically in the same space. I mean Was this all happening just like through the phone and email and like text and stuff, or or did you at this point while he say, You know, I'll I'll go out to V Virginia or wherever, like and and let's start working in a room together?

Well. I mean, Greg, you can speak more to this, but you know, this was born during Covid. I mean, you know, we were Basically still on lockdown. And you know, I was in Asheville, North Carolina, Greg was in Virginia. Yeah, this was all by phone, by text, by Zoom.

Well For six hours on the phone together. Almost every day since this whole thing started, you know, rarely in the same place. So you uh brought in some outside funding from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the biggest, most famous Venture firms in the world.

I gotta back up there, guy,'cause what had happened was we got The Through a mutual connection, a guy named Beeple Uh who's a really celebrated NFT artist, he's incredible. One of his paintings was sixty nine million dollars. That's right. And he c we didn't know him at the time, of course, you know, but we followed each other on Twitter.

And uh he reached out to us and uh Greg, you tell his story so so perfectly. Yeah, I mean he's like incredibly energetic and likes to text in like all caps and all that. And so he just was like Hey, what's your phone number, what's your name? At this point, you know We were it was just like an anonymous like board API club. Twitter that he was even DMing and I was like oh okay, I guess I'll tell him. Like

Here's my number, and then he connected us. Over text uh with with a guy Gusiri, who he introduces as um In all caps, Israel's sexiest man alive and the the the manager to to Red Hot Chili Peppers and and U two and Madonna. So he wants to be work with you in some capacity, and does that and that's what leads to to you bringing in outside investors? Well, so yeah, I think guy saw us as a band, and to some extent that's true, the four of us, Krems, Ishaan, Greg, and I, we did feel like a band. Um, you know, because we were not, you know, tech bros, we weren't crypto bros, we didn't come from business, you know, we were just kind of creatives and weirdos, and we had sort of a band like energy in the way we sort of interacted with one another, I think. And he saw that and he saw it Maybe we could use a manager and then

Ultimately what we realized was that Guy was so insightful, strategic, and which is, you know, hang around with an idea. And box it out with me and Greg and Krem and Zhawn for hours and hours every night, they realize, you know, let's just make this guy a partner. Let's get him in the building and let's build this together. And that's what we ended up doing. And Guy took the lead with Nicole, our CEO. on the rays and just did an incredible job, connected us with

Amazing, amazing people like Andreessen Horowitz. who've just been like invaluable. I mean, at the time we were so wildly profitable that like we didn't really need to raise, but we started thinking, okay, well, there's a couple of reasons to do this. One, These people, as we began got to know them, these these investors are incredible strategists. um and they are incredible resources. So we don't like to take an idea and build it in isolation. We like to take an idea and then go around you know, I learned this from my dad when I was growing up, but you know, when he had an idea, he would just go around to everybody Didn't matter if you're a cashier or the guy at the bank. He's just like what do you think about this idea?

And I think that's very valuable. And so we took that strategy to the smartest people we could find, which happened to be Venture capitalists and Um just really wanted to use that strategically. The other thing we were thinking of was, okay, well, we've been around in 2017, we know that, you know, these market cycles happen. Let's make sure that we're extraordinarily well capitalized, well funded, have this huge war chest. So that way if the worst were to happen, we can continue building incredible utility and continue to expand this ecosystem.

So I mean it's s it's remarkable'cause here we are talking in the summer of twenty twenty two and you launched really in the spring of twenty twenty one, which is Just unbelievable. That four hundred fifty million dollar

valued Ups at four billion dollars. So Tell me about your plans. I mean now you've got this war chest, you've got sixty people working for you, so you're more than well capitalizing. You could you could have a thousand people working for you and still have plenty of money. Tell me the vision now. Where do you do? Where are you going?

Yeah, I mean there's a there's a lot of uh tentacles to go into here. I mean, you know, we immediately start thinking, well, that was another uh Gaioseri moment. When he came to us and sort of led the charge on our first major acquisition, which was uh Crypto Punk and Me Bits from Matt and John over at Larva Labs. One of these projects that kind of originally inspired you. Oh the the project that inspired us the most. Yeah, they're they're basically like the Mona Lisa of of NFTs in our opinion. These were like two visionary geniuses who wanted to see the communities grow within the the art that they had created. And we were just up to the task and we got along kind of famously. And

And we were able to work it out thanks to Guy. And Um that was the first sort of you know major move outside of you know things that we had done within the board API Club, like the mutant API Club. Um and the Borde Kennel Club, which were the companion dogs uh that we gave for free to everybody uh who had a board ape. Um and then

We started thinking Bigger and bigger and Greg and I started go into our little sort of Yeah. hobbit hole and started thinking about what we really wanted to do in this space beyond B A Y C and with Eagle Labs and

we started kind of going back to our roots and we started thinking about our experience playing MMORPGs growing up, massive multiplayer online role playing games. Then we started to look at like what was going on with the metaverse and we started to look at what Meta was building. And we started to look at what Decentral and Sandbox and you know, these are the two other major crypto based metaverses. And we were looking at them and going, You know I think we have our own spin on this, and I think we we could be a major competitor and I think we have sort of a a vision for interoperability and ownership in a way that

I don't think a lot of other people had. And so we then we started thinking, why don't we build our own metaverse? And that kind of led to other side. Which is the metaverse we launched only a few months ago. Walk me through the experience of being in other side. What does that actually mean? So

Our vision of what the metaverse is, you know, at the at the base level You think about a virtual world. A world where you have a character And you're jumping into a space. You're wearing goggles, right? You're standing in a room or sitting down, you're wearing goggles. You don't need to wear goggles. You could be on your phone. You can be on your computer. I think the the important parts for us

Or The interaction You you know, it's not a metaverse if you're playing Skyrim by yourself, you're playing Super Mario by yourself. What makes it the metaverse is You're in a virtual world.

That the community that people are helping Kind of. Co create. That it's maybe more akin to

Minecraft or Roblox than some of these other virtual worlds. And Actually owning your digital assets Is a super important. part of this whole experience for us. As

Kids who grew up obsessed with MMRPGs. We really value the idea of Hey that we can make The gamified

Interoperable fun metaverse of our dreams. this virtual world that anyone can participate in permissionlessly. And where there's not like a Really stringent. terms and conditions that gates all your items. Like if you were to get some item as your warlock in World of Warcraft.

then you can actually take that thing off platform. When I grew up playing Everquest, the best gift I ever got when I was like ten years old. was my my buddy gift me a A sword that he got from like a dungeon. You could just you could Give it to somebody.

You know, it was like you actually own the asset in some sense. That said, once you know the the servers were all sunseted off on on that old game and everything like that. That all stopped existing. The idea that you can actually own your assets and trade them and do what you want with them is is I think incredibly powerful.

And much more akin to how we think about, you know. trading card games and all that with Magic the Gathering where you can actually own your collectibles And you can trade them as you wish. I mean watching my kids play Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever with their friends who are not physically in the same room, I get it, I understand. that this is where kids are socializing. I wonder, is this the future? Is this like the future of where

humans will spend time I think there's like this weird dystopian vision of the metaverse that exists in like culture. Like if I ever go to a party and I tell you, Yeah, I'm co-developing a metaverse with the community or whatever, they'll be like Oh God, you know, that sounds terrible. There's a there's like there's a subset of I think people who think that, right? Because it's like are we gonna be sending our kids to like the Neurolink meta verse school, you know, like you just put on your headset and you go off. I don't think that that's really what the metaverse will end up being, frankly. When you ask if humanity is gonna be spending more and more time in these online worlds, for sure, but I think primarily it'll be for the purpose of gaming and exploration and fun.

I don't think it's the dystopian vision some people think it might be. I think there's another framing here as well, which is the simple fact that we already spend a huge amount of our lives Digitally. And then actually finding kind of Richer ways to interact with each other.

For the times that we are spending digitally is is incredibly powerful. You know. When I grew up playing Everquest Me and my my best friend from elementary school were playing this online game And we met some people

You know. characters. They they to us on the screen they look like a a dwarf and a half elf and, you know An ogre. And we got to chatting with them. It turned out they were around our age, they had our same humor.

My mom at the time was like, How do you know that's not a forty year old guy in in the basement somewhere who's like Trying to Find something out about you or whatever. And I was like, I I don't think that's the case really. Um, you know, I don't think they would have the same sense of humor. And lo and behold, you know, they lived in Virginia.

We met them in person. And so we've already lived the experience of having incredibly rich Digital lives translate into our real ones. And I think setting up, you know, the standards for things to be kind of more egalitarian, more fair.

More transparent. Allowing users more sovereignty over their assets. This stuff is just inherently better. than doing it on a on a database somewhere else. And we're we're constantly thinking of ways to like incentivise cooperation, like I I love the

you know, the way you meet people in these MMRPGs or or even like in something like Minecraft. Like I love Minecraft creative mode. Um But ultimately, like once you're done building the castle in the sky, it can be a little bit boring, at least for me. And I love the idea that like What actually incentivizes you to like do something is okay, you walk outside your castle, you turn on survival mode, and now you gotta club a a rat on the head and gain one experience point. And okay, eventually you're gonna come across a a big baddie or whatever.

that you need help taking down. And it's that kind of like purpose that makes you Want to interact with someone else. in an online space, particularly online games. Is your idea to continue to make products, both physical and digital products that

People will uh maybe buy from you and then trade and then you will you will you know, perpetually get a share of those sales. I'd say that, you know, there is the aspect of consumer goods associated with BOYC that's a like a strong vertical.

But really I think the the vertical that we're most bullish in and that we think is most ripe for disruption is in the the games industry like we're talking about, where there's already single companies that are doing billions in digital assets that um you know, are essentially renting these things to the end user rather than having them own them. And so it's actually much more ripe for disruption. With actually thinner margins than than what's happening in the space already.

What does the future of this space look like? Like if if somebody wanted to to get into the space now. Is it even harder? now, like just even a year and a half later, since the time you guys launched, to create something that's gonna take off in the same way? I'd say it's actually a a richer opportunity. To build

a lot of the the tools Yeah. Communities need. And want. When we threw an event

our eight fest event. It's not actually the smoothest process at this moment to to token gate uh an in person event in a safe and secure way. to someone with an NFT. And so

an enterprising startup that had been working on a Uh actually it was a Covid vaccine app, you know, for verifying that you had a uh your vaccine card. pivoted to being an NFT authenticated for a an event like this. It's brilliant. Loved it. They're called Token Proof. It was a great success. Yeah, I mean we're very excited about the future. Our community feels like unmatched

The Yuga community itself, you know, I think it's only gonna grow. I think we're very focused right now on scaling the company. That's something that, you know, we're learning for the first time. Um, but we're doing really well and We have an amazing team at Yiga. The sixty people here are are absolutely incredible. We've been hiring from within the community itself. Some of the first employees we had actually came from the Board API Club. They were people who were just being super helpful. in our Discord and they are just amazing people. And yeah, we just wanna, you know, build a good culture in the company, build a good culture and be good stewards for the rest of the ecosystem.

There's a lot of people Building in this space, and if you become an authentic part of it, you get involved in Discords, you have to use it is the secret. and then you'll find plenty of itches that you can join into scratch. That's Greg Solano and Wiley Areno, co-founders of Yuga Labs and Board A Piat Club. Miley, Greg?

Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guy. Take care. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab.

please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at how I built this, and mine is at guy. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.Roz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson and edited by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramteen Arablui. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell.

Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Massini, Elaine Coates, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Carla Esteves, Catherine Seifer, and Carrie Thompson. Viva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening. How I built this.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.