Don’t predict the future. Create it, w/Net-a-Porter's Natalie Massenet

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An alien spacecraft lands in the Nevada Desert. It kinda just looks like a big industrial lump. Almost like some, you know, Eastern European industrial block landed on Earth. And they open it up. And there's nobody inside.

But it's emitting thousands of terrible blood curdling screams. That's Mac Rogers. And don't worry, you didn't miss a breaking news alert. Mac is a writer.

And the story he's telling us is from his latest sci-fi podcast. Called Give me away. You could theoretically say that it's set right now on sort of Earth Two, or you could say that it's five minutes into the future. In this imagine near future.

Scientists enter the screaming alien ship. Then They learn it's sinister. True. What the ship actually is.

Із компьютер майфрайм да функціоса призна. For the consciousnesses of a large number of extraterrestrial political prisoners. That have been uploaded into it and are in sort of a confined cyberspace. That's an agonizing eternal purgatorial prison experience. In other words, the aliens and max drama.

Have created a gulag in the metaverse. The horrified scientists decide that they want to try to liberate these political prisoners, and they realize the only way to do it is to release them one at a time. By downloading them. Into human minds, which they would then share. with those humans

for the rest of their lives. What sort of people would sign up for something like that? Mack wrote Give me away. To entertain.

But also To ask a question. What if A new ingredient entered modern life that potentially offered a way for the human race to save itself from a worst case scenario in the future. But that involved

Tremendous personal sacrifice. For Mac looking five minutes into the future. instead of five or ten thousand years. Is how he grapples with the thorny issues of today. A lot of the problems of our time can feel intractable. We wake up every day, look at the news, look at social media, and it really just seems unsolvable.

You have to push past that feeling a little bit and try to think, is there a way forward? This is something. That certain science fiction writers and entrepreneurs have in common. Neither.

knows what the future holds. But each works to envision the coming problems. And possible solutions. I would hope that five minutes into the future implied That things could go a couple of ways, and that it doesn't necessarily have to end in Apocalypse, that it could end in Star Trek.

And that's my hope for what that genre can be is sort of like Well, here's the slightly harder thing we could do and maybe survive. I believe That entrepreneurs can also see five minutes into the future. But to deliver that future at scale.

You'll need to push through multiple layers of resistance to change. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy way. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. But well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it.

This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Co founder of LinkedIn. Partner at Greylock.

And your host. And I believe that entrepreneurs can see five minutes into the future. But to deliver that future at scale. You'll need to push through multiple layers of resistance to change. If you know your Greek mythology.

then you may recall the tragic figure of Cassandra. She was the beautiful daughter of King Priam of Troy. The god Apollo. Set up to woo her. And instead of flowers or theater tickets.

He gave her the gift. A prophecy. But when Cassandra turned the god of archery down, He cursed her.

But no one would believe her. Entrepreneurs often find themselves in a similar position as poor Cassandra. Uniquely positioned. To see the future.

But needing to push through resistance and doubt. Fortunately Unlike in the myth. This isn't the curse of the entrepreneur. It's our gift.

I wanted to talk to Natalie Massine about this because she's always had a keen eye. For what's next. First. А за фаширст. Then

as the founder of the luxury e commerce site Neta Porte. Netaporte pioneered online shopping for fashion. At a moment when buying anything online. Was seen as impossibly new. People at the time were

debating whether they would even buy books online. You know, this was like the big talk at dinner parties was Oh, Amazon's gonna kill bookstores and why would I even I need to touch the book and they were like, No one's ever gonna buy fashion online, they need to touch it. Long before such dinner parties, Natalie was interested in what was coming in the near future. She was born in LA to a British fashion model mother. And an American poet and journalist father.

After her parents divorced. She spent time jet setting between them. My mom would buy me these cute clothes in Paris, and I would come back after summer vacation. I'd go to school and my friends were like, What are you wearing? And I'd be like, You laugh now, but you'll all be wearing this in a year's time because the trends just took a long time to get to Los Angeles.

And sure enough, a year later they'd all be wearing the stuff that I'd brought back from Paris. After college, Natalie went into the fashion business herself. As a journalist. For women's wear daily.

She quickly learned the value of spotting trends. Covering an industry. Obsessed. With what's next. If you could see three disparate

indications of something new. It didn't matter if you saw it at a Dinner party or on a bus, but if you saw three things that all pointed in one direction, that you had a trend. And

Then you had to name the trend, predict the trend. Be the first to talk about the trend, and that's how you got scoops as a journalist. But in the course of spotting trends, Natalie found herself wanting to get into the action. So She started mulling the idea of a side hustle.

I was buying a lot of plain candles and burning them in my house. And I thought, you know, if you decorated these and made them really beautiful, you could probably have like a luxury candle business. So I went to Fred Siegel in LA, which was the a big purveyor of luxury goods. And I came with some samples. And I said, Hey, you know, I think candles are gonna be the next big thing. And the buyer said to me, Lady, no one's gonna pay more than a dollar for your candles. And so I was like, okay, well

I don't know anything. She knows everything. Bad idea. Natalie would think back on this moment once luxury candles became a multi billion dollar industry. But Natalie had other ideas too. Like this one. From the mid nineteen nineties.

I thought wouldn't it be amazing if there was a place where we could go get a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and listen to music and hang out like a cafe in in Europe. And I tried to get a friend of mine to do this with me and he said to me No one's ever gonna spend more than a dollar on a cup of coffee. So I thought, Well, he knows what he's talking about. He's got stores up and down Melrose, so What do I know?

This time. Natalie had accurately predicted not just the trend, but But a zeitgeist. But she wasn't in a position to be sure. She had a strong hunch.

But no industry expertise or partners to give it the forward thrusting momentum. And in fact. This is something that we see over and over in entrepreneurship. It's really just One person in the universe having a singular brilliant idea.

The vast majority of ideas. Have a Zeitgeist to them. Imagine multiple soccer players kicking multiple balls into the same net over time. Eventually. One of them is going to hit the sweet spot.

Whether that's you depends on, among other things, your ability to build a team. Get in the trenches and iterate. That's why when Natalie got her third idea. She didn't shrug it off so easily.

I was working for a fashion magazine in London called Tatler. And I noticed that we were photographing all the newest things and telling consumers that they weren't complete human beings unless they owned a particular item. And that the consumer couldn't actually get their hands on it because the merchandisers of stores were filling the shelves based on what sold well the season before. Consumers were ripping out the pages of fashion magazines and then scouring the globe. I would call the brands and the designers and I would say, Okay, where can my readers buy this product? And they would say, Oh, it was never bought. Oh, just caption it stylists own. Stylists own was like this mythical thing of like

Here's a dress that you must have to be everything you ever dreamed of. But by the way, they never made it. Natalie saw a vast disconnect. between the Ford looking fashion brands and backward looking retail. The consumer wanted something new, but the stores were selling something old.

And this is like nineteen ninety-eight, nineteen ninety-nine, the dawn of the internet. And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be amazing if you could combine the impulse And the marketing of what was new. And allow the consumer to just click and magically receive something on their doorstep. Today, of course, this seems obvious. But remember the party conversations Natalie mentioned where people were debating the viability of Amazon.

The internet was still an unproven marketplace. This was a time when you had to unplug your telephone. to get online and you know, it would dial up the modem and it would go, And then the pictures would load from the top to the bottom and you know, you go make a cup of coffee and you come back and the picture's there.

Not only was online shopping slow, but It also wasn't Very glamorous. For a long time, Amazon sold product with a blue underline, hotlink. This was like

Very little investment in photography. At that time. The online shopping experience didn't represent The tactile. Sensory experience of browsing in a department store.

Or boutique. There was no sales attendant or trendy music. No courtesy lemon water. This Could be a sticking point for customers who love shopping high fashion.

As well as for the brands. Being bought. I was like, Okay. We're going to treat the brands the way that they're used to being treated and celebrate them and make them beautiful. In other words, she had to build a bridge for

From the present. To the future. So she committed herself. to making it happen. I was like, I don't wanna be that sad person drinking martinis

Eighty years old going, You know, at the dawn of the internet That was me. I knew it. People would buy clothes online, and I didn't want to be the person watching somebody else live out my dream. Remember. With a zeitgeist idea like online shopping. The provenance is never just one person.

It's many, many soccer players. Kicking a multitude of soccer balls into a net. Natalie knew it wasn't enough to see the opportunity. She wanted to be the one to break through. And this time.

She was well positioned to do it. I just vividly saw it. It was like I was on a moving conveyor belt and I was meant to do it. She started with the building block she needed most. A functioning e commerce platform. And participation.

by major brands. There were a number of different magical acts that I think you pulled off very presciently and very early. But one of them of course is getting brands,'cause brands don't like to innovate. They like to like hold on to the brand, the franchise, the exclusivity, et cetera. So here you are saying

Be part of the dial up modem experience. That must have been a Super difficult conversation. Well, I told them that it was gonna be brand enhancing and that They would reach their customers and they would reach customers that they didn't have. They were used to fashion magazines singing their praises.

And Netaporte was built like a fashion magazine that was shoppable. So I used the iconography, the magic that was built around putting your brand in front of the right audience. Something that they understood, but also something that I intuitively wanted to build the business on. And I was like, Okay. All right. Come with me to the future. Again and again, Natalie's superpower.

has been a lookout to the vanishing point where media And commerce meet. Previously. A fashion magazine's business model. Was to sell ads.

Around all the clothes they showcased. In their pages. But why rely on ads when you can sell the clothes themselves? Natalie describing Netta Porte as a shoppable fashion magazine. as opposed to a super duper futuristic website.

Help luxury brands understand a proposal. Like a science fiction writer setting her story five minutes in the future. She used a familiar framing. To explain a new idea. This is something successful entrepreneurs do constantly.

You keep the circumstances as relatable as possible. So that investors and consumers alike can warm up to a change. The more you do that. The less resistance you'll meet. Once Natalie had convinced

Luxury brands. To bet on her vision. Doors started to open more quickly. I mean, for a long time I thought I had a post it note on my forehead that said be nice to this girl because people kept saying yes. Tamara Mellon, who had Jimmy Chu at the time.

who was the hottest shoe brand on the planet, and I went to her and I said I wanna create a place where women can see a picture of something that they love, like a fashion magazine, and click on it and Voila presto, it's delivered in your front door like magic. And she said, Yes, this is what I want. Ironically, the part that gave Natalie the most trouble was was something that in the future would become a non issue.

Building the web platform itself. There was that little thing where we didn't have Shopify to plug into, so we had to pay and create our own frontend and backend. That crazy. We had to put all the money we raised into building a website. This is the inherent trouble.

With being early in a space. Of course you want to get into a new sector ahead of your competition. But the first one to a new space is the one who needs to create new systems from scratch. It's a lot of work with a lot of just in time learning. Slowly but surely.

Natalie built Netaporte with a small team and a handful of angel investors. We raised I mean, I called thirty people I knew and I asked them for ten thousand pounds each. Headquarters were at Natalie's own London flat. And then On june tenth.

Two thousand. Netaporte launched. Literally the moment when the website went live I excused myself, I walked down the stairs, I looked in the mirror, and I said, No matter what happens from today onwards, You did it.

You saw an opportunity. And you did it in that moment. Is Everything. That moment.

When the ephemeral future you've seen in your mind. First flickers into being. It's a big part of why entrepreneurs Do what they do. It's a moment that feels like the culmination of something.

But it's actually The very first step Of a long journey. The real work. It's still ahead.

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learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable?

How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

There can be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. On my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. We're back. With Natalie Massineet. If you're enjoying the show and want to share it with friends, share the link masterscale.com slash massina.

That's M A S E N E T. And to hear the complete unedited conversation, become a master scale member. Yeah.

Masterscale dot com Slash membership. Before the break, Natalie was telling us about building Netaporte as a shoppable platform. For luxury fashion. It launched in two thousand.

On the cusp. of the dot com bubble bursting. What's that? Korean TV show where where everybody gets eliminated. Squid Game. Two thousand was a little bit like Squid Game.

Two thousand. was like Squid Game. You started with many many contestants trying for the promise of e commerce. And few. We're destined to make it.

During a bubble. There was a mad dash of investors funding dot coms. Any dot coms. The presumption.

was that on a free field of capital. You'll have enough time. To work out the business. But not everyone did. And you get what we refer to in blitz scaling.

as the Glengarry Glen Ross principle. First prize is a Cadillac. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. So I eventually stuck my head up and goes there's no one left, you know.

We could actually win. In this squid game esque landscape. Netta Porte had outlasted the competition. But they weren't quite home free. The world of bits and the world of atoms do not always integrate as seamlessly as we'd like.

And in addition to the website. There was one more cost weighing Netta Porte down. We ran out of money because we were Buying inventory. We were selling everything, but you had to pay sixty days in advance for something that, you know, was high unit value.

So ran out of cash pretty quickly. Natalie knew it was time to shore up their cash. So she went to one of the angel investors she had quartered during her seed round. He was an investor from the luxury goods holding company. We small.

And he had initially warned her against taking on too much financing from the firm. He said if we give you any amount of money, we're gonna crush you, but you know, here's ten thousand pounds and send me your, you know, trading updates. But now that Netaporte was struggling with cash flow. Natalie went back to him. I said, How about uh twenty percent of the company for two million pounds? He said

You got a deal. That moment, I think, was the Achilles heel, the crack in the windshield, the moment that would fifteen years later Come back. Since we're talking about looking into the future.

I asked Natalie what she might do differently. If she could receive a call from her future self. I would definitely say Get a lawyer. That's the one thing.

A lot would be different. Just with that one act. If Natalie could have glimpsed this future. She would have seen that the contract she signed with Richmond as a strategic investor gave them far too much power over Netaporte's future direction. I now spend all my time telling founders, don't take money from strategics.

And make sure that they don't have first right of refusal. This part of Natalie's story is common. Especially for first time entrepreneurs. And I tend to advise new founders there are situations in which you're actually better off dying quickly than taking money from the wrong investors. In those cases, an early bad deal severely limits your future outcomes and upside.

And it can immobilize you. During critical inflection points. It's a brutal decision. Because when you're scaling Every day is about trying to survive.

It's natural. To want to make decisions that keep you alive. Today. You say That's a problem.

Four. Future me. to deal with. But our future selves. Always have a way of becoming our present selves.

And the more entrenched a mistake becomes. The harder it is to undo. Let's leave that idea to simmer for a minute. In the moment. Netaporte surviv their cash flow problems.

And Natalie's talent. For bringing media and commerce together. Flourished. Her business continued to scale. Adding beloved labels that drove more customers to their site.

We got Chloe and Mark Jacobs and Michael Coors and Fendi to come on board and Every new brand that came on board and validated that people would want to buy without seeing or touching. Was a proof point.

In two thousand four, the company became profitable. But Natalie and her team did something crucial as they grew. They kept innovating. As company scale. They start developing antibodies to change.

In general. That's a good thing. These antibodies are necessary for stability. Because the bigger you get, the more you have to lose if you make a bad bet. But

That doesn't mean stop looking out for future trends. If you're not looking out for what's coming. You'll miss it. When it's here. Netta Porte.

kept peering five minutes into the future. And correctly spotting trends that had the potential To disrupt their business. One such trend was the sharp decline in luxury spending after the two thousand and eight financial crisis. You had two thousand and eight and there was a bad season and brand erosion started happening.

Brands had started over distributing to department stores and to stores around the world. And I thought if Netaporte at the first price point is going to survive. We need to make sure that product is still desirable at the secondary level. Netta Porte's answer was to create an online outlet mall. Called.

The outnet. and in two thousand eleven They seized on a rise in men's online fashion buying. Creating the site. Mr. Porter.

But perhaps the most important change they spotted early. was no mere trend. І у зайке лево сфет. Many companies missed. A pivot.

to mobile. Women were trying to check out on their blackberries. I came back to my team and I was like, people wanna shop on their mobile phones. To help realize this future pivot. Natalie found herself pushing against antibodies to change within her own team.

My own team, by this time they were all sitting, you know, across from these big IMAX screens. Designing on like Fully immersive color fifty inch screens. And they're like, you know, no one's gonna want to shop on their phone. Look at how beautiful this desktop experience is.

And I was like, you guys sound just like the department stores. We disrupted department stores and shops. And people used to say to me, you're crazy. People want to go into stores. They want the experience. They want to touch things.

So I was like if consumers want to shop on their mobile phones, we should build for them the best mobile shopping experience that we can possibly do. Today it's horrible and rudimentary, but it's gonna get better. This seismic shift to mobile. was rippling through the entire tech industry. In fact

I spoke about this. with the founder of Care.com. She'll Marcello. During our own episode of Masters of Scale. I didn't read Mobile and On Demand.

And I know in talking to Charles Sandberg this also surprised them in Facebook. But we were in a people service business, so my operations, we could not transition as quickly social media platform. It is actually in fact one of the things that I think is a good general principle for entrepreneurs is say What are the macro trends? Technology trends are a key one. Mobile, cloud.

AI And if we see those coming What would that be? Like actually the world really sort it out between the people who really adjusted the mobile And didn't and was a lot of tech companies. That's right. Because the ones who did Great. And the ones who didn't

Lotta pain. as Netaporte leaned into delivering the future of mobile shopping. They helped build an infrastructure that would support a change Natalie had long seen as inevitable. the rise in shoppable social media. We did visual search, visual aggregation, real time live social shopping where you could see what other people were buying around the world and you could shop along with them.

I think it's very hard to go and shop along with Kate Hudson because she's not gonna shop with you, she doesn't know you. But we set it up so that whatever she liked on Netta Porte would appear in her feed. So you could follow along and see what she liked. Then if she posted a picture of herself at a party through visual recognition software, you basically were able to shop. In many cases those exact items because they were sold on the porte, or something very, very similar. What Natalie is describing, of course, is now a regular part of the social media landscape. Not fueled by Kate Hudson personally, of course.

But today. Social media platforms. are selling platforms. That wasn't always the case. I remember having a conversation with Kevin Systrom.

Kevin Sistrom Co-founder of Instagram Well I was like, hey, why don't you buy us? You know, if you buy Netaporte group, you know, we can make Instagram and instantly shoppable. And he was like, Oh, Natalie, Instagram will never be about shopping. It's uh just an advertising model. And I was like, No, no, no. Content and commerce are always going to be

Blended and every media platform is eventually gonna be a retail platform. Longtime listeners may remember Kevin's own episode of Masters of Scale. We didn't talk about a shoppable Instagram. But we did discuss his passion for keeping scaling platforms

Simple. And that may have been part of the resistance. No matter what future. Natalie foretold. I'd say one of the parts of entrepreneurship is you start and people think you're kind of crazy.

'Cause you're predicting a future and then you work to the point where everyone thinks it was really obvious. Seeing the future is not a one time act. It's a continuous scouting process. So don't get complacent. Because being out ahead on an idea.

only gives you so much lead time. Competitors can always find ways to catch up. It was two thousand fourteen when Natalie started seeing this happen around her. Netaporte had successfully pivoted to mobile. But on the heels of mobile.

comes the inevitable march. toward on demand. Uber was just coming around and food delivery services were just starting to enter our lives. We had three distribution centers and we were able to ship overnight anywhere. But I realize that as a consumer overnight means nothing. I want it now.

Natalie envisioned a world in which a customer Could order a killer dinner outfit. An hour before the dinner. It had the potential. to turn net a port.

Into the Uber. Or Uber Eat. of designer retail. By decentralizing their inventory. And partnering.

With local retailers. Think of it this way. When you order tacos, your food delivery app doesn't ship them to you from a centralized warehouse. It looks for tacos. Closest to you.

That's what Natalie saw. As the next phase of Netta Porte. What's more Natalie knew she wasn't. First to this idea.

She felt as though the competition was getting there first. Notably. A company founded a few years after hers. Named. Far fetch.

We said this is the future of shopping. And we could build this, or we could merge with Far Fetch and we like underlined it three times. Natalie didn't see Netta Porte. winning this race against Far Fetch. Their best chance would be to join forces.

But she wasn't the only decision maker in the room. Remember what Natalie foreshadowed. Earlier in the show. I now spend all my time telling founders don't take money from strategics and make sure that they don't have first right of refusal. Back in 2010.

Natalie had been approached by an outside interest to buy the company. But because of the right of first refusal. Richmond could match it. And match it they did. By twenty and ten I had a great lawyer.

But I had a really bad contract that I'd signed in two thousand and one. Despite the A flood of competing offers. Richmond bought the majority of Netaporte from Natalie. And all was well.

Until two thousand fifteen. when Natalie proposed merging with Farfetch. Unbeknownst to me, on a golf course somewhere in Europe was a deal happening where Netaporte was being sold to Uke. Ugs. An Italian online fashion retailer and competitor.

Which was digging its heels into thinking about centralized distribution Thinking about moving the platform to IBM. I mean, in my view. looking back, not looking forward. I thought this is the wrong business model. Far Fetch has the right business model.

Natalie couldn't convince Richmond. So She didn't look back. She left the company six months after the sale. When the announcement went out that I was no longer

Not a porte. I got the most wonderful notes from people who used to be my competitors, including Far Fetch. You know, we're all competing to the N degree but The minute I left they were all very, very kind and very sympathetic to my situation. And when Jose called

José Neves Founder of Farfetch I was like, Yeah, by the way, you are the future, and your business model is the business model. He was like Hey, well why don't you come on over and play in our sandbox?

In twenty seventeen Natalie became Farfetch's co chair. She also started looking for her next act. I had a little bit of money in my pocket and every female entrepreneur on the planet was calling me for advice and I was very happy to give it back and to make sure that no one made the same mistakes that I made. And I also wanted to invest in their businesses, but I didn't have a thesis. I can never say no to anyone. So having a thesis is like a really good thing.

Having a strong investment thesis. Is a good thing. In fact It's absolutely necessary for the job. It's what distinguishes the professional investor.

From someone playing. high stakes roulette. You know, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a brand builder, but I'm not an investor. Whenever I do anything, I want to do it to the best of my ability. And I thought, Well, who's the best investor in consumer brands out there? Natalie would need an experienced investor to partner with.

And She needed one other thing as well. Because I left Netter Porte, I didn't have my own email address. You know, I had a real identity crisis and I thought I need to have an email address that says what I'm going to do. Natalie decided on one more punny name.

Imaginary ventures. I could have called it. My email address. The Emperor's new clothes, but I thought imagine ventures Said it.

You know, they're imaginary. She registered the domain. Imaginary.co And in the UK they have this thing where they track people. On company's house, and if you register a name, they're like da da and the journalists try to scoop each other by talking about something new. So

They were like, Natalie Massine launches and announces new company. It's imaginary. And I just thought that was the funniest thing ever. As ways to get a new email address go. It was certainly sensational. But out of that fun frenzy. a non-imaginary partner emerged.

An American investor named Nick Brown already had an impressive track record backing companies like Warby Parker. Glossier and Goop. And he wanted to know. What Natalie had planned. And he was like, What are you doing? I'm getting on an airplane. If you're gonna start something new, we're investing on it and I was like, I'm not starting anything new. I can't believe you fell for this, but

He still got on the airplane and came. Nick and Natalie hit it off. And soon become co partners in the now very real. Imaginary ventures. The firm focuses mostly on other e-commerce brands, whose values reflect the modern, socially conscious consumers.

We've backed a large number of companies founded by women. We have diverse group of entrepreneurs, and we definitely take to heart that leaders of companies are experts in old ideas, and we're backing the new generation. Throughout a career. Natalie Massine has succeeded by not just being a devoted futurist, But helping to deliver the future to consumers five minutes ahead of schedule.

So I couldn't resist. Future casting with her for a moment. We're seeing You know, obviously this is the year where Lot of people are talking about the metaverse, digital identity, digital clothing.

NFTs, collectibles. And you're the person Who I would most want to call. And say So

What do you see? in this new frontier. First of all, I wanna have that on a sweatshirt, please. Um Лиса, абитін форис фанг. А ху. bitmojis and representations of ourselves.

And when I talked about this future of where I'd be in my digital outfit having lunch with you in your digital outfit and you'd have the coolest sneakers bought on artifact, we'd be looking good and I'd have my digital Nike and my Gucci on. People were like, Oh, that's such a sad view of the future. And I said, Well You just told Everyone that you know, including your parents, that you just got engaged via text. Or you just had your baby and sent out your birth announcement and shared a birth moment via Instagram, you know, why not make that a much more immersive rich beautiful experience?

And what comes along with that is what you're wearing. What are you gonna wear to the metaverse? Next time we're meeting we should be wearing our digital clothes. Natalie and I continued this conversation about digital product. and branding the metaverse.

It's waiting for you. In the near future. When you become a master scale member. at masterscale dot com slash membership. All of us.

Have the ability To future gaze. In fact. You Maybe uniquely positioned to see something no one else does.

Yet. So don't just predict the future. Create it. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thanks for listening.

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