CrassKitty - Degenerate Ape Academy Co-Founder

Degenerate Ape Academy made history as the first major project to kickoff the Solana NFT phenomenon. Co-founder and head of product, CrassKitty joins Brian Friel to talk eggs, The Hatchening, and what to expect next in The Degeniverse.

Show Notes:

01:01 - Origin Story                     

04:45 - Why she changed her mind of crypto

06:27 - What is special about DAA?       

08:12 - The early days at DAA            

10:51 - Future of NFTs                   

11:52 - Projects DAA been working on     

15:31 - Bridging the digital and physical world

19:53 - Advice to new projects / Challenges in the space

21:52 - The vision for the future of DAA 

22:46 - A builder that she admires       

24:09 - Info / Contact           

Full Transcript:     

Brian: (00:05)

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer of relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest today, Crass Kitty. Crass Kitty is the co-founder and head of product at Degenerate Ape Academy, one of the earliest and most well-known NFT collections on Solana. Crass Kitty, welcome to the show.

Crass Kitty: (00:28)

Hello, Brian. Nice to see you again. I hope you're doing well.

Brian: (00:32)

Likewise. Great to see you too. For those who don't know, Crass Kitty graced us with her presence at our Solana Summer Camp Hackathon in San Francisco. We'll be posting some of the workshops that she did to YouTube, but it's great to see you again. I'm really excited about this episode. For those of you who were around Solana last year in August 2021, Degen Ape Academy I think really kicked off the whole Solana NFT boom that we all know and love today. You guys have a ton of interesting projects in the works today as well, but before we dive into all that, it would be really great to learn a little bit about you. Who are you and how did you get started with Degenerate Ape Academy?

Crass Kitty: (01:07)

Man, who am I? I'm a product nerd who loves the color pink. You guys can't see me, but Brian can, and my office is mostly pink, including my headphones. Other than that, I jived a little bit into product after that with a company called Bebo, which was later acquired by Twitch to become Twitch rivals, using their machine learning to detect if you make kills on-screen. And from there, I worked at FetLife and later at NEAR Protocol, which is where I got my first venture into crypto.

Crass Kitty: (01:35)

I actually thought crypto was totally a scam. When I first was joining NEAR, I was like, "This is a scam. There's no way. This has to be a scam." And I was one of the first 10 team members at NEAR and towards two weeks into my contract, there was this pivotal moment and I realized that like, "Oh, shit. It's not a scam." Sorry. Am I allowed to curse on this podcast?

Brian: (01:55)

You are. Don't hold back. You're good.

Crass Kitty: (01:57)

Okay, cool. Good. Thank goodness. I am Crass Kitty after all. For those that don't know, crass means inappropriate, uncouth, likely to curse. Anyways, yeah. I worked at NEAR, launched an NFT marketplace called Pluminite, which was the first open-source NFT marketplace on NEAR. And when I left NEAR, I took a little hiatus, then started looking for my next role. And I knew I wanted to be in crypto. I had found a really deep passion here for product work in crypto and so I reached out to Solana. Got an interview with Stephen Hess who was head of product at Solana at the time and things were going great. Great interviews. And then I took a vacation and he took a vacation and three months rolled by and I was like, "All right. This has been a while."

Crass Kitty: (02:43)

So, I hit him up and I was like, "Yo, Stephen, what's up here?" And he was like, "We're taking a while because it looks like I'm going to be starting this thing called Metaplex." And I was like, "Oh, cool. Sick." And he's like, "Yeah, but there's these guys who need you." And I was like, "Oh." And he's like, "Yeah, they're called Degenerate Ape Academy." And I was like, "All right. Sounds fun. Can you tell me more? Is there a salary? Is there insurance?" He's like, "Nah, there's none of that." And I'm like, "Risky. I'm into it. Let's go." And so I get on a call with Monoliff. Monoliff and I have one call before I joined as a co-founder and a team member and head of product.

Crass Kitty: (03:13)

On this call, he's talking to me about all this. And I'm just like, "This sounds like the riskiest thing I've ever heard of." He's like, "Yeah, we basically just minted out on our second mint because we messed up our first mint" and I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, that's scary." And then he's like, "And I promised him this 3D academy" and I'm like, "That sounds cool." And he is like, "But also we made duplicates in the NFT collection." I'm like, "That does not sound as cool." And he's like, "So, we have to create lore and tell them that they get to earn extra perks for having these duplicates." And I'm like, "Okay, I like the story spinning." Anyways, this call is very enlightening for me.

Crass Kitty: (03:45)

I think a more sane person probably would've walked away at that point but, like I said, I'm not risk-averse and maybe a little bit less sane than other people. And I was like, "Yeah, sure. This sounds fun. Why not?" And so I joined and I don't think fun is the right word to describe my job. I think it is organized chaos in the best possible way and as somebody who has always described themselves as somebody who sits in the eye of a hurricane and coordinates it, it works really well for me. Product managers typically herd cats. I herd apes. It goes well-ish or as well as I can expect. So, that is me. That's how I got here, and yeah. That's my story.

Brian: (04:20)

I love that line, herding apes instead of cats. There's a lot of really cool stuff we can dive into with DAA but maybe before we get into all that, you have a really interesting journey. You hit on starting as a Twitch partner, getting into everything at Twitch and the gaming side of things, and then being really early to building NFT marketplaces, but you did mention at one point you thought crypto was a scam. What changed your mind on all that? And it seems like you pretty early gravitated to NFTs, maybe before a lot of the mainstream did. Was that related to you changing your mind on why crypto's a scam?

Crass Kitty: (04:51)

I've talked about this in other interviews. So, before I was a Twitch partner, I was actually a stripper and a cam girl. This is full disclosure here. And one of the biggest struggles that I've seen in that industry is that Visa and MasterCard limit who can get paid. They just say, "You can't get paid if you're a sex worker." Basically, if you get paid in PayPal and somebody charges back and says it was for camgirling, PayPal will freeze all your accounts and freeze your whole assets. So, I know that's 18-plus, but my moment for knowing it wasn't a scam was when I was talking to engineers at NEAR about what censorship-resistant payments meant and realizing that it meant that creators like adult content creators but also Twitch partners, anybody who is a creator in the creator ecosystem, would be able to get paid safely, ethically, and also without limitation.

Crass Kitty: (05:37)

And that blew my mind. It was just like, "Wait a minute. There's a solution to this problem that I've known about for literally a decade? What?" And so, that was really phenomenal to me. That's like ... I don't know, very near and dear to my heart. It's like the reason I joined crypto. It also feels like it ties the beginning of my origin story to the end or to the point where I'm reaching the hero arc, and that feels cool.

Brian: (05:58)

That's awesome. Yeah. That's a really unique perspective on the space. Diving now into NFTs, you started your own marketplace, I presume on NEAR. Then, you get involved with DAA at a time when they're trying to carve their own path. They're one of the first major NFT collections on Solana. Everyone's figuring this out. I think at this time Metaplex maybe was just getting started.

Crass Kitty: (06:19)

Oh yeah, barely.

Brian: (06:20)

You mentioned Steven Hess who's now the CEO of Metaplex, but at the time he was at Solana. So, in your own words, what is Degenerate Ape Academy? What makes you guys unique in the NFT space?

Crass Kitty: (06:33)

If you go to our website, it says our mission is simple and that is to fuck shit up. Put 10,000 degenerates on this planet and let them fuck shit up. And I wish I could say as a product nerd, that was not the case internally as well, but it's totally the case internally. Constantly as a product nerd, as a product person, it's my job to organize all the chaos. Probably some of the hardest organizational work I've ever worked on in terms of making sure that we've literally scoped out, probably, I don't know, eight different theories since we released the eggs in January of what we were going to do next. And we'll be in the middle of building it or in the middle of scoping it, and then a wrecking ball comes through that is in the form of a team member, and it'll be like, "Okay, this is cool. But what if we did like this?"

Crass Kitty: (07:17)

So, lots of fucking shit up basically. Degenerate apes though, as a culture, as a brand, as a project, as a company, I think ultimately, we're a place for those that maybe have always been a little bit on the edge of life. Maybe you are a cool person who gets along with everybody but have a more degenerate side. I think we're a home for everybody who identifies with that. And I think that's something that is a testament to our success is the fact that we not only are a home to that, but we lean into it.

Crass Kitty: (07:45)

I worked at FetLife. For those that know what that is, you don't have to dox yourself, but it's kinky Facebook basically. It's BDSM Facebook. I am a degenerate at heart and being able to work on a project that leans into, owns, and accepts their own degeneracies has just been an absolute delight.

Brian: (08:00)

So, what was it like in those early days when you guys were just getting started? There was basically no tools out there for NFT creators like yourselves. Like I said earlier, you guys were pioneers in this space. For those who weren't there in August 2021, walk us through those early days, what you guys had to get through.

Crass Kitty: (08:18)

So, we had just minted our second mint successfully-ish, but the first mint was kind of a mess up. Some apes snuck through, as we say, and those became the exiled apes. So, we basically in those early days were trying to figure it out internally while also trying to make sure externally that a story was always told. So, Monoliff was really good at spinning lore and spinning our mistakes into lore. So, in those early days, I would say our work from the product perspective was very reactive. So, it was like, "Okay, we have exiles. Now we have to create a dow so that they can vote on what to do with these exiles. Do we let them in the collection? Do we not? Let's put that into a decentralized autonomous organization organization." Which is the DAOO if you don't know. Organization organization twice is a personal enjoyment of mine that we wrote in a product requirement document.

Crass Kitty: (09:04)

Anyways, that was a thing. And then figuring out what to do with twins, because we had duplicated some of these apes in this 10002nd collection. And so how do we make those twins more valuable while also making sure that people don't feel like they got gypped because they got the same ape as somebody else? We pulled that off, but like I said, a lot of it was very reactionary work. I would say, as a company, as a product team, we are now very proactive, which has been an interesting shift.

Crass Kitty: (09:31)

If you've ever worked at a startup and gone from being reactionary to proactive, there's usually a rough patch there where you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I not react to and what do I be proactive for?" We did have that rough patch. It's like we're in a horse race and the horse that was in the middle front was slowing down a little bit and then found a new burst of energy and rushed to the front. That's literally where I feel like right now as a product cycle. We're at this point where we're literally shipping things every couple of days right now internally for testing, things are coming along really quickly.

Crass Kitty: (10:01)

We've figured out our marketing strategy. There's something called love bombing that I don't even know if I'm supposed to talk about, but we're doing this where we give these teasers, give these moments, give these loving attention moments to our community, and then leave them with a little bit of chaos and wondering, "Why don't they love me now?" And so, we've identified this as our strategy and that's working for us. Moving forward with this proactive approach, it means that as we build products, I now actually get to share screenshots or progress pieces, and instead of delivering this perfect thing as a reaction to something that we fucked up before. Does that make sense?

Brian: (10:35)

Yeah. No. I'd love to dive into a lot of that now, too. I think we covered the early days, the wild west of the NFT space, but let's bring it forward to today. How do you see the current state of NFTs broadly? What's in the future for NFTs? And then, what are you excited about both maybe across the ecosystem and specifically with DAA and some of these upcoming product releases that you guys are working on?

Crass Kitty: (10:57)

Well, we are in a bear market. I think we can all acknowledge we're in probably one of the worst bear markets to be in because previous bear markets have existed, but there weren't a ton of builders at that time and so there weren't a ton of consumers of products that were being built. So, the disappointment for a bear market before, while big, was also not I think as widely spread on Twitter and social media and people you talk to in real life if you're lucky enough to know people in real life who know about crypto. So, now I think the reason I say it's one of the worst bear markets is not just the financial implication, but also the social implication.

Crass Kitty: (11:29)

We're in this really interesting period where people are aware of what's going on and they're aware of crypto and they're aware of NFTs and there's so many builders in the space and a lot of people are feeling scared and worried about the state of the world and also the state of the crypto market. And I think that's fair. Yeah. I think that's the current state of the market.

Brian: (11:49)

And then, I guess diving a little bit into DAA and some of the guys you were building throughout this bear, can you shed a little bit of light on some of those projects, what you guys have been up to?

Crass Kitty: (11:58)

Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, because it is a bear, pay attention to the builders in this space, pay attention to the people who are still here in five months, six months, a year. Those are the people who are building sustainable products and that's what we've really focused on. I think previously our methodology for income was based on royalties and secondary sales. That is not a sustainable method of income for a business at any point, including a bear market, and so we've recently done these crate auctions, which had been really fun to work on. Full disclosure, I think we had three, maybe two and a half weeks lead-up to the first auction on product and development life cycle including design. That was fun. But we pulled it off and we actually pulled it off with no bugs so I'm pretty stoked about that. Go Veritas and Dev Lock. My developer is really proud of them there.

Crass Kitty: (12:43)

But that being said, we've done these crate auctions, which are these one-of-one auctions for these crates that hold our eggs. And I mentioned the eggs previously as these things that the twins got to get when they bred in the bathroom. Long story. Anyways, eggs have been a thing that people have been waiting for us to hatch so we're releasing these eggs inside of crates that are more elite eggs is the way I would describe them. They're even better eggs than the other eggs, and the other eggs have tiers anyways. There's regular eggs and inbred eggs, which inbred eggs are for twins if you didn't catch that. But anyways, my point being, all of this is leading up, these auctions, these eggs, these crates. By the time this podcast is released, we'll be really close to the Hatchening, which is very exciting. It's so exciting. I'm so excited.

Crass Kitty: (13:30)

I mean, we've basically just been building, finding other revenue streams, and also working really hard on, like I said, being proactive in the bear versus reactive to the state of the market or our own mistakes in the past.

Brian: (13:41)

That's really cool. I love the creativity there of trying to spin things and keep users engaged. For an end user who maybe owns a Degen Ape, maybe they were lucky or unlucky enough to get one of these duplicates, maybe they have an egg, what can they expect from this? Will they be having to interact with these kind of things? How should they be thinking about some of these hints that you're dropping so far?

Crass Kitty: (14:03)

So, twins have a higher floor price than our non-twins, which is kind of wild. Because like I said, they're duplicate NFTs, which is really funny from a product perspective, but I own a twin and I bred my twin and I got an inbred egg from that twin. And so twins got free eggs. They didn't have to pay anything to get an egg and they got a guaranteed egg. If you entered your twin into the bathroom stall, you got an egg. Congratulations. And you got a guaranteed inbred egg, which inbred eggs I believe ... I need to double check the price, but I believe inbred eggs are actually much higher than regular eggs. I want to say the floor for them is around 200 SOL and a regular egg is like 69 last I checked. Going to double-check that in my numbers really fast.

Crass Kitty: (14:42)

So, these eggs are going to hatch and on the Hatchening, as I said, which is a much more dark and sinister way of saying what's happening. Basically, inbred eggs have 175 floor and regular eggs have a 66 floor, but inbred eggs are going to have very different attributes than regular eggs when they hatch. Also, this is still in discussion, but I'm hoping it's going to lean towards what I say. We are actively discussing and I'm currently pushing for the idea that you can choose if you hatch your egg or not. So, it doesn't mean it's mandatory. I'm working towards this. No promises. If this gets uploaded and I'm wrong later on, don't quote me on it. You never heard this.

Brian: (15:22)

Love that. And so, are all of these experiences going to be things that live within the Degen Ape website? I see you guys have also been doing a lot of I guess in-real-life marketing pushes as well. How do you see blending maybe the physical world with what's digital so far? Where have you guys been focusing your efforts there?

Crass Kitty: (15:40)

Yeah. So, we have something coming out called homeroom and it'll be coming out a couple of days after this podcast does if everything goes according to plan. Nothing ever goes according to plan, so again, don't quote me on that, but homeroom is going to be your hub or your central place for your degenerate NFTs. That includes the eggs, what they hatch into, the apes, and the trash pandas. So, you'll be able to go into this homeroom experience and you're going to be able to do a lot of things that are coming soon. Namely, gold stars are going to be our new economy. They're not related to any real-life value. There's no US dollar that is equated to them. They're an inflationary asset. We don't believe in tying them to US dollars at all. But these gold stars are basically these really cool things that we're going to use to gamify our universe.

Crass Kitty: (16:27)

They're SFTS. They stack in your wallet. You get them in three different ways basically. Number one is roll call, which is where we check if your NFTs are listed. If they're not listed at random points in the year, we don't give you any warning, we don't tell you it's coming, it's just like, "Boom. We did a snapshot." If you're not listed at that point, randomly, we will award you gold stars that you can claim. If you don't want to claim them and you sell your NFT later, they go with the NFT as you sell them. Think Ape coin or Trash panda's rain token. It's kind of like that.

Crass Kitty: (16:59)

The second way you can earn gold stars is through homework. Homework is the idea of you pay attention and you get to earn things. So, if you see our Twitter and we maybe hinted the fact that homework is active somewhere in one of our comic book strips on our website that are coming and we tweet out the pizza emoji and a comic book gif, you may go look for a piece of pizza in the comic book on our website, click that pizza and then magically there's gold stars that are awarded to you for you finding that Easter egg.

Crass Kitty: (17:30)

These are active Easter egg hunts that we're putting all over our site and we're tweeting out, discording, and sharing information about stealthily. These are for people who pay attention and do their homework. And the last one answers your question of how we see physical and digital world interacting. It won't be coming for a while until after homeroom launches, but it will be hinted at in homeroom. Field trips. What's a field trip? I just saw your face light up there.

Brian: (17:52)

Yeah. I love the leaning into the mic for the name drops there.

Crass Kitty: (17:55)

Yeah. So, field trips are, if you've heard of Cupcake Protocol, it is the idea of NFTs being attached to NFC technology, which means you can tap your phone to it. Not scanning it with your camera, but literally tap the physical phone to a sticker or a card, and you can claim gold stars by tapping your phone to these digital scavenger hunts. Think Pokemon Go mixed with geocaching.

Brian: (18:19)

Yeah.

Crass Kitty: (18:20)

But for the Degenaverse.

Brian: (18:21)

That's super cool. I've always wondered who's going to make the first Pokemon Go experience in NFT Land. That totally took over San Francisco where I am for a couple of weeks. Super, super fun experience, so I'm really glad that you guys are thinking along those lines.

Crass Kitty: (18:34)

The really cool part about field trips is, if you have a friend who doesn't have a Degenaverse NFT, but you want to take them on a field trip, they are also able to claim gold stars. So, you do not have to have one of our NFTs to claim them on these field trip encounters. I'm really excited to be working on this and building this and able to show this to you guys soon. It's going to be probably a little bit after homeroom releases. I want to say between two to three months after the initial rollout of homeroom, we'll have field trips ready. This is the biggest alpha that I think I've released ever, and a preliminary call or anything, so I think I might get killed over this, so don't quote me on anything that changes.

Brian: (19:09)

I love it. The alpha here on the Zeitgeist Podcast.

Crass Kitty: (19:12)

It's like alpha of alpha, because a lot of it hasn't been fully finished if you know what I mean or committed to. So, like I said, if things change in the meantime, know that the vision is leading towards these things, but the implementation may be different.

Brian: (19:24)

Totally. Yeah. Now you covered a lot there. I think it's really cool that you guys are thinking about bridging those two worlds, the physical and the digital. You guys have been around the Solana space now for over a year or about a year now. I'd say there's a lot of NFT projects that are maybe just starting up. They're trying to build a community, emulating something like you guys have. Sitting in your position now where you have this large community, you've been through the ups and downs, now you're thinking about all these really cool projects, what would you say to maybe newer projects that are trying to find their feet in the ecosystem and what are some of the unique challenges that you guys face as a more established project in the space?

Crass Kitty: (20:01)

If you're new to the space, find yourself a damn good tax accountant because it's hard. It's a nightmare doing taxes in an NFT project and incorporate or form an LLC as soon as you can. We did not immediately do that and we did our taxes as a joint partnership. You don't want to do your taxes as a joint partnership if you're an NFT project. Just pro tip there. So, I know that's kind of a boring answer, but logistics matter, and I think we're so caught up in crypto sometimes that we feel like, "Oh, it's all decentralized. It's all cutting-edge tech. It's all gray areas. We can avoid being logistical."

Crass Kitty: (20:38)

Don't avoid being logistical. Set your early foundations to be structurally sound so that you can grow in a structurally sound way. It's like if you're building a house or any product, even digital, but you have a minimum viable product, which is the bare bones of what you're going to build on top of. If you look at your company that you're forming in crypto or the NFT space at this point, think about what your bones look like as a company. So, imagine your company is a product or is a house or is whatever it is that you're used to building, and if you're an engineer, maybe that's the structure of the code and your libraries and how you're setting them up.

Crass Kitty: (21:12)

You got to look at your company the same way, and I think this is where I see the most projects make the mistake is that they don't look at it like a company. They look at it like a project and they don't realize that they're going to get taxed like it's a company, they're going to get affected like it's a company, and they're going to get legal implication like it's a company. So, give yourself that foundation. And that's really important. I can't stress how important that is. I know it's a boring answer, but it's the realest answer I can give.

Brian: (21:36)

Yeah. No. I mean, that's sage advice having been through it. From where you guys sit today, we touched on it a little bit with your guys' plans for all these great projects, but how do you envision maybe years from now? What is the essence of DAA? Is multi-chain something in your future? Do you guys envision continuing to cross the physical and the digital worlds? Basically, what is your grand vision for Degenerate Ape Academy?

Crass Kitty: (22:02)

We're going to keep fucking shit up. And that can be a good thing and a bad thing. Fucking shit up could also mean fucking up the status quo or fucking up the way that things are traditionally done, and I think that's exactly what we're aiming to do. We're trying to be on the cutting edge, to change things as they're changing, and to push the boundaries of what's possible.

Crass Kitty: (22:17)

That being said, years from now, it's impossible for me to predict what we're going to be building because the market and the conditions and the state of the ecosystem changes so rapidly. Six months ago, I would not have told you that we were doing something like field trips because Cupcake didn't exist. So, as new technology comes out, we will adapt, we will build, we will innovate on top of it, and we will always aim to be one of the first builders that you're going to see in that space doing those things.

Brian: (22:41)

That's super cool. I got to say that Solana space is really appreciative of you guys being trailblazers here. I know there's a lot of NFT builders who look up to you guys. Maybe from where you sit, we ask this question to all of our guests, but who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Crass Kitty: (22:56)

So, I mentioned him earlier in this interview. I interviewed with him. Now we're really good friends. I've invited him to my wedding. Stephen Hess, CEO of Metaplex, is one of my favorite builders in this space. Having a conversation with Stephen when there's a mutual NDA in place and we can both be very transparent is incredibly invigorating. It's just talking to a fellow product nerd and being able to talk to somebody who thinks so expansively about what we're building, what we're all building, and someone who believes in open source technology the way that he does and providing solutions to builders the way that he does.

Crass Kitty: (23:30)

Every conversation I have with Stephen has me walking away with a giant smile on my face and an energy that usually keeps me up until about 4:00 AM writing product documents. So, if you ever get a chance to talk to Stephen at an event or anything, he's a very friendly dude. He's like seven feet tall or something. He's a giant. Looks scarier than he is in the sense that he's very tall. If you're short, it's kind of intimidating, but he is the gentle most wonderful, also very intelligent person I've ever encountered in this space, and just a delight.

Brian: (23:58)

That's really cool to hear. That's Stephen Hess, former head of product at Solana Labs, now CEO of Metaplex, which is basically the metadata company for all tokens on Solana. Crass kitty, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time sharing with us your vision, where things are going for DAA. Where can people go to learn more about all these crazy projects that you guys are up to?

Crass Kitty: (24:19)

Yeah. You can go to DegenApe.academy is our website. That's where homeroom will be deploying. You can go to our Twitter, which is twitter.com/i think it's Degen Ape Academy as well. Or discord, you can join that from our website. I mean, not to plug, but you can totally follow Crass Kitty on Twitter, Crass Kitty everywhere really. I've claimed stake to that name. My DMs are always open for a reason, and that is that if anybody ever has any questions about anything that I'm building or things that they're building and need help, if I have time, if I have bandwidth, I will absolutely give it, and if you just want to be onboarded in any general sense of the word to anything Solana or crypto, I do that passionately and also, as often as I can.

Brian: (24:57)

I love to hear it. Yeah. That's definitely been the spirit that I've seen from everyone thus far on Solana. Really appreciate you continuing to carry the torch there. Well, Crass Kitty, this has been really great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll have to have you back out in San Francisco again for another branding workshop soon.

Crass Kitty: (25:12)

Looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you for this.

Brian: (25:14)

Take care.