Vibhu Norby - Solana Spaces founder and CEO, Ep 11

Episode Notes:

Solana Spaces founder and CEO Vibhu Norby sits down with Brian Friel to talk about creating crypto’s first interactive retail experience that aims to onboard the next wave of users to web3.

Show Notes:

Brian Friel (00:06):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist. The show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers for pushing the Web3 space. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Vibhu Norby. Vibhu is The founder and CEO of Solana Spaces. The first in real life crypto retail experience. Vibhu, welcome to the show.

Vibhu Norby (00:27):

Thanks Brian.

Brian Friel (00:28):

Real excited to talk to you today. I think of all our guests, you have some of the most unique backgrounds of somebody who's now full-time in crypto. If you don't mind, could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your journey to what is now launching Solana Spaces?

Vibhu Norby (00:41):

Yeah, I definitely do. Our team is a different type of team from what you mostly see. I used to be a respectable tech entrepreneur raising VC from tier one firms and building cool companies, writing code for Google. And then sometime over the last two years, like everybody else, I became a degenerate crypto guy. Pretty much my whole life, I have been writing code since I was a kid, and my first job was at Roblox. Funnily enough, I built their collectable system back in 2009.

Brian Friel (01:08):

Wow.

Vibhu Norby (01:08):

This was a long time ago.

Brian Friel (01:09):

Sneak peak to NFTs.

Vibhu Norby (01:11):

Yeah. I worked at MySpace. My big break came when I joined a startup called Nest, which was the smart learning thermostat company that Google acquired while I was there, and I was still writing code there, but I kind of got interested in what we were doing with retail. I got exposed to a couple of projects that the company Google was doing to build out an experience inside a Best Buy and Target an Apple stores and so on. And I fell in love with the idea of building a physical store for hardware products.

Vibhu Norby (01:43):

So I left Google with a bunch of other people, and directly prior to Solana Spaces for seven years, I built this national retail chain called B8ta. We opened stores all over the country. Japan, Middle East, at some point we owned Toys R Us for a good six months, which was a very interesting project.

Vibhu Norby (02:00):

And then a lot of people during Covid started getting interested in crypto. First Ethereum and then Solana, and at some point B8ta, this was a physical retailer that was super affected by Covid. So I started thinking about what I want to do next and I was pretty convinced that I want to get into this space. And I tossed around a bunch of software ideas. I'm not really, by my nature, a physical retail person, but by chance, met Raj in November last year. Although we had talked a long time prior to that, at that moment we connected around building a IRL Solana store. Both thought it was an interesting enough and weird idea that had a very small chance of being important, and those are kind of the best ideas to build. So between November and March we figured out a deal with the Solana Foundation and created Solana Spaces.

Brian Friel (02:53):

That's awesome. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you guys are already live in New York. You're planning a store in Miami, is that correct?

Vibhu Norby (03:00):

Yeah. We opened Solana Spaces at Hudson Yards at the end of July and that was our first store, and the next location opens the first or second week of October in Miami. And these are two very different spaces. The first one is a 1500 square foot retail space, very much a store in a major shopping mall. The location in Miami, we call the Solana Embassy, because it is the craziest store on planet Earth I believe. It is a store, it's a coworking lounge, it's a nightclub, it's the best events venue in Wynwood, and it's all dedicated to teaching people about Solana.

Brian Friel (03:38):

That's awesome. So like me as an end user, let's say I was walking through Hudson Yards, I see this store, can you paint a picture and walk us through what can I expect when I walk into one of these stores?

Vibhu Norby (03:48):

The store is modeled around being your first crypto friend. That was how we designed it. And we asked for ourselves, how do people get crypto pilled in the first place? And pretty much everyone will share a story of someone in their life or someone they knew that got them a Phantom wallet and gave them NFT or gave them some tokens. So we wanted to build that kind of experience for people that maybe don't have a crypto friend yet.

Vibhu Norby (04:13):

So when you walk in, first of all, the space looks unlike anything you've seen in a typical shopping center because it's full of NFT artwork. And we have this crazy immersion screen that shows you what's happening on Solana in real time. And then we've got amazing merch products everywhere. So it's got this stunning welcoming look. And when you come in, there's two paths you take.

Vibhu Norby (04:37):

One path is, you can come and learn about how blockchains work, if you have more time. If you have less time, which is the average person, your first step is going into the Phantom Seed Phrase booth, which is a privacy pod where in three minutes you learn about how to keep your seed phrase safe and you get little cards you can write it down on, and then we drop you a PO App for completing that. And after you exit the seed phrase booth, you can walk around the store and scan your phone at all these different tutorial displays, and each one of those will open the DApp Browser in Phantom Mobile, and walk you through a tutorial about Orca, about Step'n, about MetaPlex, about Degenerate Ape Academy, about Form Function, or any number of our other partners. And once you've completed those learning materials, we give you another NFT. It's all gas list, no transaction fees.

Vibhu Norby (05:30):

Once you've collected enough of those badges, you show our store ambassador and we'll give you USDC. So basically we are paying people to learn about crypto in the store. And this is literally a micro version of what a good friend is supposed to do, right? Give you their wallet, give you some NFTs, give you some money.

Brian Friel (05:49):

Right.

Vibhu Norby (05:50):

And of course if you want to, if you're a degenerate like me, you can also spend that money immediately on the merch in the store.

Brian Friel (05:56):

The shoes. I want the Solana shoes. I see those on Twitter and I'm pretty jealous.

Vibhu Norby (06:01):

Yeah. We've got the Solana shoes, we've got the best socks in crypto, we've got hats and designer wear. And everything in the store is something that we designed and is exclusively available there, so you can only get it in the store. So it's kind of worth your time to come out of your way and try this.

Brian Friel (06:17):

That's super cool. And was there anything in particular from your experience founding B8ta, that impacted this vision that you had for Solana stores?

Vibhu Norby (06:24):

Yeah. If you know what we kind of did at B8ta, this is in many ways a direct descendant. It's a more fleshed out version of some of the big ideas that we were on to. B8ta was a... and my team hates that I'm always talking about it, but it was important part of my life. I started it when I was 27 and kind of grew up with it. We raised a hundred million dollars of venture capital, we opened stores everywhere and we had quite a large team and made a big impact on industry. We were the National Retail Federations retailer of the year. And the thing that made B8ta very innovative at the time was we had re-engineered the store business model to basically run auctions on top of space, like physical space, and we'd sell the space to the highest bidder. And so it was a more accessible way for newer brands to enter into a store.

Vibhu Norby (07:07):

And what we did here was we fixed a bunch of the things that we didn't like about that model, and benefit from everything from the rewards layer that crypto can offer companies to some very, very wild things that we're doing that we have not announced yet that we will soon. But in fact, the whole business model of this company we have not revealed yet to the public. And that business model is going to blow people's minds. That is probably the thing that is the most built on top of the learnings of my previous venture, and it's really a big idea on how quickly could you grow a retail business.

Brian Friel (07:42):

That's really cool. That's quite the cliff hanger. I'm tempted to press you on that but I won't because we have a ton of stuff to get through already on this. But I am curious, switching back to, you show up to this store, you walk in for the first time. I'm sure you're seeing both people are completely new to crypto who just think this store is interesting and they want to walk in, then you know have the crypto native degenerates like yourself, me and people listening to this podcast. But for the folks who are new to crypto specifically and they're coming into the spaces, what do you find that is resonating with them the most and maybe what is giving them the most friction about this crypto experience?

Vibhu Norby (08:13):

I think the hardest part has been teaching people about how the blockchain works. I think I was a bit more optimistic that people will be interested in the technology, but what clearly resonates to me is without a doubt, NFTs is one thing to kind of read the news about NFTs and write them off as write click saving, why would you need this? I'll just save this image to my computer. But it's another thing for someone to open up a wallet and see that this is something that's theirs. Even if it's a worthless NFT, people connect with those. And there's something called the endowment effect in retail, which is why most stores are loosely optimized around getting you to put your hands on the products, because once you feel a shirt in an apparel store or you pick up a video game, and nobody buys video games in real life anymore, but at GameStop, there's like a little part of your brain that doesn't want to give it back.

Vibhu Norby (09:11):

So our job in the space is give you things, tell you that you own them and get that endowment effect started. We've had some really cool experiences that have been shared with us. We had a guy that came from Ethereum and he walked into the store, this was a couple weeks ago, and he maybe had heard about it, but he didn't have any of the Solana tooling and didn't have a Solana wallet, and all of a sudden he was telling us on Twitter that he was investigating all the NFT projects and Solana and he had applied for y00t lists, and I feel like he was fully down the rabbit hole, right?

Brian Friel (09:45):

One of us. Yeah, that's awesome.

Vibhu Norby (09:47):

That story we've heard a bunch of times. So I think NFTs and then the merch, I cannot tell you how surprised we were how much people love merch. I don't know, it doesn't matter whether you know about crypto or not, you know about Solana or not, people are coming in and buying the gear. And that's a beautiful thing because I think what it says to me is crypto is really a community building tool, and one of the ways to be part of the community is to wear the stuff that community wears, and that's another way to kind of participate. So we really do focus on making high quality stuff that people want that's eye catching and interesting. And if you walked in and you didn't understand the crypto stuff but you like the products, that's a win. We'll take it.

Brian Friel (10:30):

Yeah, that's cool. And I guess taking that a little bit further, the store is really highlighting the whole Solana ecosystem, but for a given crypto project, say there's a crypto project that's building on Solana right now listening to the podcast, should they be thinking about in real life retail experiences? I think this is something that has been basically on no one's radar in the crypto space for a really long time and you're showing that there might actually be a reason for individual projects to pay attention to this.

Vibhu Norby (10:53):

I think there has been a lot of theory. I mean we can talk about payments for example. Payments are theoretically the very best use case of crypto, whether that's like remittances or that's paying a vendor, and not to shill Solana, but I do love me Solana.

Brian Friel (11:10):

I will note real quick, you're not actually part of Solana even though it's called Solana Spaces, it's a separate organization. Just to make that clear.

Vibhu Norby (11:18):

Yes. But we did call the company Solana Spaces and it's pretty hard to go back at this point.

Brian Friel (11:22):

Yeah, right.

Vibhu Norby (11:24):

Yeah, I think Solana particularly should be an awesome tool for payments because the fees are basically zero and that certainly isn't true with even credit cards. So I think that was a hypothesis, but making that come to life for somebody and building a mental model for other businesses has yet to happen. So I think if you're a store or you're a cafe, you absolutely should be looking at Solana pay. The question on that side is, how does it benefit the consumer and how do you overcome that acquisition cost and time of getting someone to download Phantom and fund it and swap it over to USDC and all that kind of stuff. It's a lot of steps today.

Vibhu Norby (12:00):

The two areas I think that are interesting, one is merch, and I have to talk about that, but I think every NFT community should be thinking very hard about what experiences they can build that represent and amplify their brand and their ethos.

Vibhu Norby (12:14):

If the first month of the store taught us anything, it was that there's an intense passion for these projects and I would love to see that problem space explored. In the Embassy, we have a Degenerate Ape Cafe, and it's an NFT coffee shop. We'll serve you hot coffee. It's all a roast made by a community member and it's got the monolith designer coffee bags and-

Brian Friel (12:35):

Nice.

Vibhu Norby (12:35):

... it's designed out of crates. And we have these cool branded cups. I don't know if this made it into production, but at the bottom of the cup there was going to be a QR code that you could scan and get a proof of caffeine NFT.

Brian Friel (12:47):

Oh, that's a cool little Easter egg. Yeah, finish your drink and get that.

Vibhu Norby (12:50):

It kind of starts that way, but then you can imagine that maybe you can take your proof of caffeine badge and next time you come back you get a discount on it. So you start to build the rails of loyalty. I was sitting there waiting for NFT collections to break into IRO experiences, but at this point, we're just going to build all of them for the Solana community. Whatever they want to build, IRL, they need to come talk to us because we are very much interested in setting examples for what this space will look like in the future.

Brian Friel (13:19):

So thinking five to 10 years out, I know that's a really big ask in crypto, but how do you see these two worlds converging? Right now, I'd say that most of crypto culture lives on Twitter and you guys are making really big inroads into the retail space. Do you see you guys really catalyzing that and most projects going through you? Do you see individual NFT collections spinning up their own entities to handle in real life venues? How do you see about five, 10 years out in the retail space playing out?

Vibhu Norby (13:48):

I'm going to confess, I'm pretty much a token MAXI. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that every IRL business in... Five or 10 years is way too short. But if you fast forward it a hundred years, I think every IRL business, every fashion brand that matters, every coffee shop, it will have started digitally and we'll start with digital assets. Why not five to 10 years? Because everything physically just takes forever to be disrupted. It's just not even possible to move that fast. But over a long period of time, I do think that it's inevitable. The reason being, that every talented creative person on earth right now is either exploring NFTs, creating them, dabbling in them, and maybe it can extend to not just NFTs, but I think NFTs and token AMEX and all of the kind of interesting combinations of those things. Crypto is an incredible creative sandbox for entrepreneurs. And it's also the most accessible way for entrepreneurs to get started. The composability of the ecosystem and the tooling.

Vibhu Norby (14:50):

Great entrepreneurs are attracted to things that are accessible because it's so hard to build a business in the first place, that if someone else is out there offering a tool that makes life easy or makes it easier to monetize, they're going to find it. So you're seeing it right now. I think digital art... What's happening right now with NFTs on Solana is a historical thing. It is mind blowing how many NFTs are minted every day on Solana. It's actually crazy. And that's coming from still a very small audience. We're at a hundred-thousand plus a day. I think there was a day the other week that was like 300K in a single day. So not a stretch of the imagination to say that the next great coffee entrepreneur, the next great fashion designer, the next great retail entrepreneur, is going to start with an NFT collection, with digital art, with digital assets.

Vibhu Norby (15:40):

And what happens when you have a sandbox that's accessible to the greatest entrepreneurs, things are going to come out of that that are incredibly disruptive. Of course the hit rate will be very small, but there aren't that many massive businesses in the world. And so I think it's pretty likely that we're going to start seeing crypto companies picking off certain use cases and industries, obviously creating new ones as well. And you're going to see this fastest in the things that are most simple on the sensory side, that's why I think art. Art has already been massively disruptive. I've dabbled in traditional art collecting and that whole world has been turned over in the last two years completely. And to me, it makes sense that that was the first thing to go because I think from a form perspective, it's the simplest to represent digitally. I think the latest adopting things will be hard physical assets, things like commercial office buildings in real estate, these things are very, very difficult to bring on chain, but it will happen and there are smart entrepreneurs working on it today.

Vibhu Norby (16:42):

So I think if you think five to 10 years... Maybe it will happen faster than we think. But the whole tree of ideas around IRL is going to be explored in that time period. The question is just, how long does it take for those things to become very meaningful and very large. I think that's a much longer process. Starbucks was in obscurity for 20 years before they figured out the formula for scaling. So maybe Solana Spaces, is that right? You never know over a long enough period of time. But I just think that the greatest creatives are working in crypto. So I'm just very excited to see what kinds of ideas these people create and how we can support them.

Brian Friel (17:17):

That's awesome. Yeah, this is a very exciting future you paint. And you say you are a Token MAXI. I'm curious though, do you have any contrarian views on the current state of crypto?

Vibhu Norby (17:27):

Yes.

Brian Friel (17:28):

Do you have anything in particular that you think the space should be focusing on that it's not?

Vibhu Norby (17:33):

How many people do I want to offend?

Brian Friel (17:37):

I'd say go big.

Vibhu Norby (17:38):

This is going to piss everybody off that listens to this show, but so be it. I think token going up and going down is very bad. I think if Solana... We never talk about price by the way. We never talk about it as an investment vehicle and I very much think that that's caused a lot of problems. But I think if Solana never changed where it was, I think if it became a USDC level of stability, this would be the greatest boon for the ecosystem. Because I think that you have within every interesting crypto project, it's flooded with speculation from the very get go, and these teams get obsessed with the price instead of the experience. And in the earliest days of a company, you just want the founders to be obsessively focused on the product and just making the product really good.

Vibhu Norby (18:21):

And I've seen a lot of communities, they won't say it necessarily, but I think I've seen a lot of projects get focused on how these things perform as an investment, not just as a product experience. So stability in this arena would be very good. People will be mad at that because obviously everyone wants the tokens to go up, but the best companies will be built when the founders are able to focus on building great things only. So that's one thought there.

Vibhu Norby (18:45):

I think some of the ideas we've shared around fashion are kind of contrarian. I think it's the next thing to go. I think after art, because the fashion world effectively was built for NFTs. You have limited supply items, you have great design wins, you have provenance, you have intense loyalty and identity formed around fashion products, products from runway level stuff to the things that make into Macy's. You see the same thing with collections. They do collection one, becomes very expensive, they do collection two, they do collection three, and it becomes more accessible over time. That's basically how the fashion world works.

Vibhu Norby (19:19):

And we tweeted recently that fashion designers today, they don't go to the fabric store and select fabrics and then go home and put them in front of a sewing machine. They open up Blender, they open up 3D modeling software and build the fashion that way. So by default, the fashion world is already moving to a 3D and digitally native format. Definitely in the next five or 10 years, that category is going to be completely disrupted by NFTs. What I see and what the ecosystem talks about as merch, this is not merch, this is actually about modern fashion and it's about people connecting with the things that they own in a deeper sense. And so crypto merch is going to take over the world. Merch is how a hundred, 200 million people are going to find out about Web3. And we're not going to call it merch, it's just going to be fashion. I really believe that and I'm seeing that on the ground level in the store every day to be honest.

Brian Friel (20:12):

That's super cool. One last question we ask all our guests. You paint a great picture here of the future blending in real life experiences with crypto, how crypto and entities are taking over the art scene and then soon to be fashion. But looking ahead, I guess one last question we ask everyone is, who is a builder that you admire in the Salona ecosystem?

Vibhu Norby (20:33):

I don't know if this is a unique answer, I'm going to give you two people that are totally different ends of the spectrum. One is. I'm obsessed with Frank DeGods.

Brian Friel (20:41):

DeGods. Yeah.

Vibhu Norby (20:42):

I just don't think there's another person like him, like another entrepreneur out there like him. He's just a unique marketing machine that the world has never seen before. He basically broke the Twitter algorithm for millions of people for two weeks straight. And it's not unintentional. He's maniacal about understanding how people are going to react to things. And I know he's been taking a break recently, but I'm definitely a Frank Maxi. I don't own DeGods by the way. I don't have any financial interest in it. I just think that he's an awesome builder. I wish more people in crypto would be thinking about marketing the way he is because it is making a real impact. His fervor single handedly brought over so many people for me to take a look at Solana.

Brian Friel (21:25):

The y00t list has passed, so we know this is a genuine recommendation. There's nothing at stake here.

Vibhu Norby (21:31):

No, no, nothing at stake. No y00t list. And then number two is Akshay BD from Superteam.

Brian Friel (21:37):

Yeah, Superteam.

Vibhu Norby (21:38):

He's brilliant, but I don't think anybody else thinks like him. I've been observing how he's building Superteam Dow and very closely because, well I can't really share why I'm looking at that, but they are building the first truly decentralized entity. Every detail of how they built that company is just different from a typical company. To how you get employed, how they pay people, where the people are, I think is a much bigger deal than they get credit for. I'll give an example, they just launched this product called Earn the other day, and I posted a bounty on there and I swear, I had 25 people who just did the work and sent it to me without even asking. That's pretty dope. And I'm a big fan of his. He knows that.

Brian Friel (22:19):

Yeah, we saw something similar. Just to plug that if it's further. When I was first getting started on Solana, we started this Solana cookbook to help engineers share resources and Superteam Dow just took that and ran with it. And I'd say most of the heavy contributors were tied into that in some way. And it's really cool to see them organizing and leveling up the whole space. I couldn't agree more.

Vibhu Norby (22:37):

Both he and Frank, they're both cult leaders of different flavors. Akshay much more understated but true visionary, and Frank, completely the opposite. More obviously cult leader. But yeah, thanks for the question.

Brian Friel (22:50):

Yeah, that's awesome. Well Vibhu, this has been an awesome discussion. Really appreciate you taking the time to jump on, share your background and also your vision for the future of crypto and in real life experiences. If people want to learn more about Solana Spaces, where can they go?

Vibhu Norby (23:04):

You already know, at Solana Spaces on Twitter. It's the best Twitter account in Solana, if I do say so myself.

Brian Friel (23:10):

Beautiful. Yeah, I actually spent more than I'd like to share on Sunday trying to figure out your seed phrase like crossword puzzle. That was awesome that you guys did.

Vibhu Norby (23:18):

We do it every week. I have another one dropping this Sunday. I have another one dropping Sunday after. We're going to do a crossword pretty soon. Yeah, Sunday puzzles.

Brian Friel (23:26):

Super cool. Well keep us posted on when you guys are opening a store on the west coast. I'm pretty jealous of all our east coast friends who get to do what you're doing. But thanks for coming on. Definitely want to have you back at some point.

Vibhu Norby (23:36):

Thanks Brian.