i agree yep and i'm someone who spends most of my time with founders of product led growth companies, which is the go to market you would assume would not need marketing because it's fundamentally built around the product that I can tell you, every one of those founders is trying to figure out how to build a marketing team. And I really feel if you are truly great at marketing, you will always earn a lot of money because it's really a critical piece of every successful business. Two other quick things. The next one I just really wanted to touch on, which I thought was kind of fascinating because it speaks to the topic we're going to kind of go into is why stories are so important. Netflix is F1 show. I don't know if you guys watch F1. I do not

watch F1. I don't know, but I know that show has been huge for them.

Right. 50% increase in viewers in the US because of the show. I think one of the things it speaks to is just the value of creating a story brand around something that is a sport or whatever that may be. But when you add in actual stories and get to know the people involved and get to know the teams and get to know the actual drivers, it just shows you how much more impactful that can be. Stories really are just the lifeblood of every great success story. And I think more so and more so as we get into some of the stats I have to show that all of the other parts of marketing are fundamentally declining in impact, the skill to be able to tell a story is only going to increase over time.

Okay. I want to give people a free idea out there because if you are an investor, you're an entrepreneur, you're looking for something, I think there is just a no-brainer idea of going out buying small ownership stakes in tertiary sports like lacrosse, spike ball, all that stuff. Just buying small percentage ownership stakes because live sports is one of the most important things in the streaming world. Just like at ESPN, they used to show Australian rules football in the 80s because they needed something to fill the airtime. Well, now we're going to see communities transform and the communities around all these niche sports get bigger and bigger. So what I would do if I was out there, I would start some type of investment fund to invest in non-popular live sports. So examples, water polo, lacrosse, archery, dodgeball, pick all of this stuff. And I'd buy small investment stakes in all those leagues because you're just going to have a natural demand of streaming increase dramatically where people are going to buy up those rights and revenue share is going to be higher. Then I would go and I'd pay Ross to do the Netflix play where I'd be like, cool, Ross, can you help me package a remarkable story around the league and the players in a way that the major sports leagues don't have to do? Very cool. And F1, it was just an international to domestic play here in the States. I think there's a way to take all emerging sports, package them in this really cool documentary format and completely change the community and the growth trajectory of almost any of these sports. And so I think that's what should happen. I

think it can go even beyond sports. Think about the Queen's Gambit movie, right? Remember the chess movie that made chess kits like go to stock on the internet, the chess.com, like their sales went through the roof. The documentary model works really, really well, if you can tell a good story. And if you can convey a story in a great way, and if you can tap into culture a little bit, it goes through the moon, Like even The Last Dance, like Jordan's sold out when The Last Dance came out because it was so deeply rooted in like everybody's thoughts. Like everybody's like The Last Dance, oh, what Jordans did he wear when he made that shot? Oh, I need to get those. You look at even music when Beyonce comes out with the Coachella, her albums, all of the streaming hits, like it goes to the moon every single time. Like there is truly something interesting about leveraging this documentary style format that I think our culture just loves that if you can find a good story, you can apply that to almost anything. And if the story's right, it will resonate with people, like F1 racing. What? What? It's on the surface super obscure right but it's gotten the attention of so many people exactly it's just like chess no one was talking about chess but then queen's gamut comes out and it's like just blows up you

had a chess.com obsession kieran the audience should know i

play a lot of chess uh i had other podcasts at some point and i try to speak to their cmo because they're a fascinating brand yeah

they are they're

a tiny company that do something like 300 million visits a month i started to break down all their data and that that company are amazing what they do now is they run sponsored chess events like they did one for mr beast and they're doing like it's it's pretty cool what that brand do the other reason it works so well for sports like stories and that idea k, is because like every great story is the hero's journey. And sport is inherently, that is sport, right? It is the hero's journey. One company that's done an amazing job of what you said and as a Goliath now is the UFC. Buying that company for $4 million, selling for $4 billion. They're

the case study. And

how did they do that? They made fighters the story. They put the shine on the fighters. Now they don't pay their fighters enough, but that's a whole other thing. You want to talk about Yuga Labs?

Okay, Ross, I want to get your take on Yuga Labs, which is the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club. They bought CryptoPunks and all the CryptoPunks IP from Larva Labs. I'll give you my take on it first. I want to hear what you're saying. My take is this is one of the key tentpole moments in the businessification of IP. IP used to be comic book movies and just relegated to the entertainment industry. Now we're seeing intellectual property be core to everything we've done. And if you're a marketer today, if you were not thinking about intellectual property long-term, building or acquiring it, you were going to lose. And the example I would give you is that most marketing out there today is either really evergreen, programmatic answers to basic how-to questions or very campaign-based. Oh, we're launching this thing and it's kind of done and it dies. There's nothing where you're building this endurable intellectual property where it's, oh, here's this thing that we're going to make you familiar with, and we're going to extend it and extend it and extend it month after month, year after year, to where it has such resonance in the market that the value of this IP is actually directly correlated to the value of our brand. Do you agree or disagree? What's your take, Ross?

I agree. There's a major shift happening with IP. And I think it's kind of going to present a lot of new opportunities for brands around how you mobilize your communities to take the IP and turn it into something for them, by them in many ways. If the IP is essentially given to the community, the community now has an incentive to see that IP kind of become more and more valuable, right? Like the Marvels of the world, their value is rooted directly in the success of just Marvel, right? Like if Marvel's successful, Marvel's successful. I don't become more successful because I happen to have a stake in Gambit or some other random character. But if I have a stake in the character's success, guess who's going to share their story? Guess who's going to try to come up with ways to tell that story a little bit more uniquely? Guess who's going to go into the Watt pads of the world and write their own fan fiction about Gambit because they want the Gambit story, in essence, to reach more people? I am. I think the IP opportunities have just become deeper and stronger now because people can now control them and the incentives are now being more aligned with the opportunity to kind of do this together. So there's a lot of controversy around like, is this the way that things should be by people? Like people are like, should people be incentivized to be able to get a kickback off of IP, blah, blah, blah. Isn't that kind of a pyramid? In reality, it's just a complete shift in the way of doing business that has never really happened before. So I'm excited by it. The acquisition play was genius. I think the game is still so long from where traditional brands need to be to be thinking about this stuff. I saw, I believe it was Bud Light that rolled out their own NFT a while back, and they haven't done much with it since. I don't think the organizations have caught up with the culture to even know the rate in which they need to move cannot be the rate in which they've moved in the past.

Well, let's break down a bunch of what you just said in there for everybody listening, Ross, because first of all, the next couple of years are going to be littered with companies that fail at this.

Yes.

And to be a company that succeeds, you first have to understand the macro. We are moving to an era of the decentralized web. Yeah. And the decentralized web does a couple of really important things. The first is it changes the incentive structure, just like Ross was outlining. And I thought you did a great job articulating that, where the incentive goes from just solely being with the project or the brand to the whole community, inclusive of the project or brand, but inclusive of everybody in that community. Great. What that does, though, is it decentralizes everything else. Where you used to have a room full of writers who told a story, now you have a community that tells the story. Like that's a great example of like the storytelling is even completely decentralized. And so once you realize that you have a community driven story play versus kind of a brand driven story play, it changes completely. One, you have to get the incentives and the incentive sharing with your community. Right. And that's something that most people don't do. One of the things that the Yoga Labs folks behind Board Ape have done really well is sharing that incentive with the community. Whether it be through the Mutant Ape drop, whether it be through the drop of Ape coin, airdrop to all holders. There are people going out and buying Teslas and yachts and stuff with just their Ape coin drop from just holding an NFT for a year. Which is like a whole different thing. But that is the power of what incentives have to offer. And then once you realize the power of those incentives, you have to build for the long term, not the short term. You just can't do a quick little NFT project. You have to say, hey, I am building a community and I'm building a long, durable set of IP that is going to have this huge extension and roadmap that's going to take me years to deliver. But at every point I deliver on that, my community is going to get 5, 10x the value than they had before that shift and that drop. And I think if you are thinking about out there about how you would apply this to your business, those are kind of the principles you want to keep in mind. I don't know. What do you think?

Yeah, that long term view is the biggest piece, right? Because here's the thing that throws people off. They see the fact that, okay, NFTs had a major spike and then it started to dwindle in terms of like the organic search traffic for NFTs. And they see all of these reports and then everybody's like, oh, it's a fad. I need to step back. I need to go back into traditional, I can't do this thing. Like you have to be truly in it. And I think companies are still fearful, but the opportunity is still there. And you have to be able to be okay with a little bit of that FUD, fear, uncertainty, and dope. You have to be okay with that as a part of your investment into this type of a space.

Yeah. Most of the NFTs that will fail are going to fail because they have a more campaign mindset where they're like, hey, this is going to be the thing for a month, generate as much revenue as it can. But the thing that Google Labs has done is continue to build upon the value. And there are books where, I think there's ones called Flip the Funnel, written about Web2, where you'd kind of flip the funnel, the marketing funnel, turn delight into an acquisition channel. That's not really true in Web2. Like it's really hard to do that. I think referrals and virality and stuff can help. But Web3 actually does truly flip the funnel because it changes the incentives. You start with your customers and community, you incentivize those, and then they build out. And I think that is going to be really disruptive for how we grow businesses, but truly great for people who are users and customers of that. If you take the most extreme version of companies who don't do that, it's like broadband companies, right? You sign up for a broadband company, then they come out and say, hey, we're going to give free TVs and money to you customers. And you ring them up and you say, can I have this stuff? I'm a customer. No, you don't get anything but bad internet service and terrible customer support.

That

is

going to be disruptive for every other business who doesn't take that path. One last thing on this is the talent side of this and the brand building side of this. So there are a couple of unique things. Can you tell me the name of the people who actually own Yuga Labs? No. No, you can't. You can't, which is really, really interesting. Think about it. Even Yuga Labs, most people don't even know what Yuga Labs is. It's just a holding company for these projects, right? that is completely the antithesis of how brands work. It's like, oh, here's the CEO of this company. Here's the brand of the company. Oh, wow. This is very decentralized. It's a very different shift. And to me, it's a great signal of if you're going to build a great community, you can't start with this ego driven right i'm the person who runs this thing you have to start with we are the people who do this thing the other thing that they did that was really smart that flies very under the radar that a lot of people don't know is they brought in guy o siri who's like madonna's manager and youtube's manager and they brought it in this like really heavy hitter to basically extend that IP and to help them play the long game and drive value for their community, which I think has been very underrated. One of the things I also saw is that there's apparently a new HBS, Harvard Business School case study on board Ape Yacht Club. Hot off the presses, only being taught at HBS, not syndicated in the other schools yet. think we need to get a copy of that and have a follow-up episode with the three of us where we dive we dive into it because i think it would be cool i know some people we might we can probably get a hold of it but what you're seeing here is a real case study of how to build a more decentralized brand and intellectual property over time what do you all think i'm

here for it like when you even think about what's happening with a lot of celebrities with their own brands now, and they're rolling out like these ghost kitchens, you see Mr. Beast with his various chocolate bars and things like that. Tyga has like chicken nuggets. There's so many different things that you can do now with IP. Like imagine now you have your own board ape and you're now able to set up a partnership with a local restaurant where it's going to be pizza with your ape. That's where we're going. And it's going to be fascinating to see. Some people just never had the creativity opportunities in front of them. Now they're like, oh, I've got this asset. I've got this IP. I control it. I can now release and unleash board games with this. I can release new coffee shops, pop-ups, events, etc. The opportunities are just going to be wild. I

think you bring up a really good point. We are in the point of a transition. It used to be we monetized distribution because distribution was the easier thing because it cost a bunch of money to make custom coffee cups or custom restaurant experiences. used to be really hard. Now that the barrier to do those things is much less expensive, we are now monetizing identity more than we are distribution. Identity is now the thing because we can now replicate identity across whether it be NFTs or whether it be anything at a more exponential rate than ever before in human history. And so that makes it actually an easier thing to monetize than just the raw distribution itself, which is why we're seeing all these trends happen. That is like the first principle for everybody listening that's underpinning all of this. And so if you have a campaign, a brand, anything that doesn't have identity, you're not going to be able to be successful long term.