What happens when you mix fashion, authenticity, and fearlessness into a woman on a rocket ship to the metaverse? That’s what Cathy Hackl is and more. Known as the Godmother Of The Metaverse, Cathy has built a career and amassed a ton of experience that gives her unique insight into the business opportunities of the metaverse and Web3. In this episode, she shares how she and her team at Journey’s Metaverse Studio are reimagining the physical and helping brands s with their Web3 strategies, NFTs, gaming, and virtual couture. She also talks about the latest book on her series of thought leadership works on the metaverse and the direct to avatar trend. Stay tuned for what Cathy has to say about the future. Plus, learn how Republic Crypto takes a conservative and thoughtful approach to the Web3 future that can give cutting edge projects the support they need with Bryan Myint.
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Cathy Hackl Of Journey: Reimagining The Physical, Plus: Bryan Myint Of Republic Crypto, And More…
It's Cathy Hackl, popularly known as the godmother of the metaverse, guiding brands into virtual worlds. You're reading the Edge of NFT. They are not the mother goose of Web3 but they sure are delivering the greatest stories evolving.
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NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn how our guest has built a career of experience that gives her unique insight into the business opportunities of the metaverse and Web3, what happens when you mix fashion, authenticity and fearlessness into a woman on a rocketship into the metaverse and how Republic Crypto takes a conservative and thoughtful approach to the Web3 future that can give cutting-edge projects the support they need. All this and more on this episode.
Finally, NFT LA 2022 was a blast. It was also a blastoff in a giant plume of bright burning rocket fuel. Web3, NFTs, blockchain, decentralization and a suite of immersive new tech developments have exploded onto the canvas of life. Outer Edge is the theme of 2023's event dedicated to those of you building with us at the outer edges making the future happen.
The community-centric gathering returns to Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023 to uplift creators and technologies through interactive experiences, a wide variety of discussions and presentations and entertaining surprises that transport participants to the outer edge of what's possible when we co-create a new paradigm, embracing the decentralized web, artificial intelligence, extended reality and more. To register to attend or learn how to co-create and experience on the Outer Edge, head over to OuterEdge.live. The event is being organized by the Edge of Company and us founders of the show.
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In this episode, we're thrilled to welcome Cathy Hackl, Founder and Chief Metaverse Officer at Journey, a globally recognized executive and futurist. Cathy has worked with leading tech companies such as HTC VIVE, Magic Leap and AWS and leads Journey's Metaverse Studio where she and her team help brands with their Web3 strategies, NFTs, gaming and virtual couture. With impressive projects like Walmart Land and Universe of Play in Roblox, Electric Fest and upcoming luxury fashion collections, Cathy has established herself as a thought leader in virtual fashion and immersive experiences.
She has been writing and speaking about the metaverse and direct-to-avatar trend since 2020 and chaired the inaugural Metaverse Fashion Week. Her new book Into the Metaverse: The Essential Guide to the Business Opportunities of the Web3 Era is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of business and technology. We are excited to dive into Cathy's insights and perspective as the godmother of the metaverse and host of Adweek's Metaverse Marketing Podcast. Cathy, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. My world is the fashion space. I'm ready to tackle it with you here.
Thank you.
That's awesome. This has been one I've been excited about, Cathy. There's so much the tap into over the last few years. You've been on the front line there. I would love to rewind though and go back to that first a-ha moment that led you to focus on the metaverse field and working with big companies like Amazon and Walmart.
I've been in the space for several years. People were like, "That has been around." I started in virtual reality. I worked with HTC VIVE, for example, went over to Magic Leap, went to AWS and then launched off on my own but my a-ha moment is a mix of different things. I was working in the live video space very way back with Meerkat and Periscope before you could go live on Instagram. It took a long time ago. I was working on live videos. That's why I started to get connected to tech in Silicon Valley.
I was invited to a conference. I put on a VR headset and went into a solitary confinement cell in virtual reality. Within a couple of minutes, I felt claustrophobic. I took the headset off and said, "This is the future of something. This is the future of storytelling or whatever it is. I don't know what it is but this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life." I made a decision right then and there that I was going to get on this rocket and ride the rocket.
It started in VR. It took me to Spatial Computing and Magic Leap. When I was there, we thought it was the next Apple. Neal Stephenson was there in AWS and stuff. It has been crazy. That was my initial a-ha moment. My second a-ha moment was when I worked at Magic Leap. For those of you that don't know Magic Leap, it's a company that does spatial computing glasses or augmented reality glasses for ease of understanding. When I was there, our Chief Futurist was Neal Stephenson, the person that coined the term metaverse.
On the first day when I went to work there, we thought it was the next Apple. In the training for the employees, they talked about the four North Stars of the company and one of those North Stars was called the Magicverse. They branded it but in essence, it's the metaverse. I've been in this metaverse space, thinking through it and talking to executives for a very long time. It has been a mix of different a-ha moments. I'm still on the rocket. I'm going to ride it with you to the top.
All the way to the Outer Edge.
We love the rocketship metaphor. We fully embraced it and expounded upon it. We realized after the fiery blaze that has been the past couple of years that we also like the metaphor of the fuel tanks of the rocketship blasting everything off. We're moving into outer orbit and getting heads down working. We're going to land on some far-off planet at Outer Edge LA. We will see people there to do that. It's all very exciting stuff.
You've led Journey's Metaverse Studio. In that role, you get to work with top brands there, extending their reach in the virtual world specifically. There are many top brands that you work with. I'm curious about how you can tailor the strategies that you use to work with multiple needs and goals from multiple stakeholders. What do you think about that?
The brands I work with are very different. You've got Walmart over here but then you've got a luxury brand over here and then a beauty brand. These are all different. One of the things that we have done well is sit down with the brands, try to understand their world and also try to understand where their younger consumers are. In a lot of the work that you're going to see me do, I'm going to be doing a lot of work around Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha for those that don't follow those demographic groups, you've got Gen Z, which everyone is talking about.
Everyone is on TikTok with Gen Z. With Gen Alpha, you're talking about kids that are twelve and still being born. Gen Alpha is still being born. I've got three kids that are all Gen Alpha. I've got a front-row seat to see what they're doing. Looking at Gen Alpha, what Gen Alpha is doing and what Gen Alpha wants, we're creating journeys for future consumers.
We're helping the brands understand these future consumers both in virtual spaces and physical spaces but always with that lens of what are these younger consumers going to want. I don't even like the word consumers. What are these younger audiences going to want? How are they going to engage with brands? Each brand has a different approach. Even some of the brands that we work with are conglomerates. Within those conglomerates, there are a million other brands. It's not easy but you start to look at the younger consumers. What are they interested in? What are they looking for?
Here's a follow-up there. I have a five-year-old son. Our library has all this cool stuff you can check out. They have a Google Cardboard-level VR headset where you can put your phone in. It's very cool. We picked it up and used it. It was fun. He's going through outer space, what's it like to be a firefighter and all this cool stuff. I was looking it up. The companies that make the VR goggles explicitly will say, "Be careful with kids below thirteen," or something like that.
As someone who studied neuroscience, I understand there's the visual system developing that stuff but I'm curious about how you think about that in terms of how we are onboarding these younger folks. It's exciting for them to be able to do this stuff but there are impactful things. We're not sure how they're going to affect kids and their development. What do you think about that?
Even with my kids, I'm very cautious. They have demoed a little VR and done a little spatial computing and stuff like that but very minimal. Most of their interaction is with regular screens 2D. Even with that, I still have them wear sometimes blue light glasses. I do think that we have to be cautious. It's up to the parents. The corporations have to put an age gate. I'm all for that but as parents, we need to be careful what they're doing right within that. My kids don't have free-range access to a VR headset as they don't have free-range access to the internet for everything that they want.
It's got all the precautions I can put in there. We do have to take care of kids in that sense. Even with the precautions I have in place, they will run into stuff they shouldn't be seeing in Roblox or other platforms. The only thing there I can say is I have an open door with my kids. We talk all the time. They come to me sometimes when they see stuff that shouldn't be there and then we do our best to report it or do whatever we can. These tools are thirteen and up. I remember I had Magic Leap was fourteen and up.
There's this need out there to bridge folks into what this next evolution of technology is into the metaverse and whatnot. You've done a ton in this space. You look at your resume. You've been in almost every aspect of it. What was it that you saw that led to the formation of Journey? What role do you think you will play here, at least in the immediate term? I know things evolve very quickly.
To me, it was a very critical moment. I had been laid off from Magic Leap. I went through a layoff as a lot of people are hurting and going through that. I went to AWS. I was there but I felt that cloud computing wasn't my passion. I was still writing at Forbes. I wrote an article in 2020. Ryan Gill brought the term to me. He said direct-to-avatar. Something clicked in my brain. I wrote an article and asked the question, "Is direct-to-avatar the next direct-to-consumer?" This is 2020, a long time ago.
I remember that article in Forbes sparked something in the fashion community because I got so many messages from C-Suite. C-Suite at a fashion brand was saying, "You put into words what we have been seeing. We didn't know how to express it." I started working with a lot of brands. My first client was, for example, the Ralph Lauren company. They said, "Come help us understand the space. What's happening? What's direct-to-avatar? What's the metaverse? What are NFTs?"
That was a moment for me when I started to see there's so much need for education. There's so much hunger for change and understanding of the virtual side that we're heading into. That was the moment of, "I'm leaving AWS. I'm launching my company," which got acquired by Journey in ten months, mind you. As an entrepreneur, I'm very happy about that. That bleeds into the ethos of what Journey is, which is merging physical, digital and virtual and making these journeys for these new customers. I always say my path has never been straight. There have been lots of twists and turns. It all starts to make sense eventually.
You had this unique position, especially having spent so much time under the hood at Magic Leap to see what the hardware application is that can move us further along the path here with the metaverse and Web3 collectively but, in particular, in the metaverse, no matter what your definition is. What's your perspective on where we're at with hardware and what that inflection point is? How far off are we from having something that gets us all into it?
Hardware is hard. It's very hard to do. We oversimplify it. As humans, we want to obsess about the hardware because it's what we can see but it's hard. I had this discussion with a lot of people. We're talking about putting a supercomputer on someone's face. That in itself, moving from phone to glasses, is extremely hard. We're going to get there. That's what all the tech companies are planning for. I always get asked that. Whenever Apple brings whatever it is that they're going to bring to market, whenever that happens, that will be a watershed moment. Will it be the perfect glasses that we're all dreaming of? No. The first iPhone wasn't perfect. It's going to be a progression.
I don't know if it will be 2023, to be honest. They might announce something in 2023 but I don't think we're going to have a product until 2024 or 2025. I don't think the full-fledged glasses that we dream of will be here. We will probably need five years or more for that level of true connectedness. Hardware is easy for humans to understand because we can touch it. I'm interested also in all the content, the infrastructure and everything that's behind it where a lot of the creators that you talk to play. Hardware is harder than people realize.
We appreciate your perspective there. Another topic we wanted to dive into with you is fashion. We have talked about fashion on the show fairly often. I remember Emma-Jane MacKinnon, Lukso and Faith Tribe coming on the show. I know you have some personal projects in the fashion space. I would love to better understand your perspective on how you see luxury fashion evolving in the metaverse and where virtual fashion plays into the future of style and couture. There was a metaverse fashion event. I would love your perspective there.
I was there. Watching Vivienne Tam's metaverse fashion runway was fantastic. It was fun. @SwanSit and a whole bunch of other folks worked on that.
Here's a shout-out to Swan who gave us the heads-up about that one.
It's amazing work. The role of fashion is poetic here. Web1 was focused on the enterprise and universities. Web2 was pushing innovation. It was social media but let's be honest. It was also adult entertainment pushing the boundaries of what could be done. With Web3 and as we head into this future, it's poetic that it's fashion, luxury, art and architecture. That in itself says a lot about who we are. I love that fashion is a first mover. I love that there's fearlessness and courage from some of the fashion brands jumping in. Some things are going to go well. Some things are going to fail. That's the reality of it. Understand that it's tough. I give a lot of kudos to the brands that are doing great stuff.
Fashion is a natural space in the sense that culture is being created in gaming and virtual spaces. Fashion understands that. Streetwear and sneaker culture impacted fashion in ways that I don't think they understood. They look at gaming and they're like, "This is making culture. This is impacting what people are going to wear." I love that. What are the job and the role of virtual fashion? I'm hopefully optimistic that it will potentially help us not have so much fast fashion. Buying the item to wear in a picture and then throwing it away is heartbreaking. We all do it from time to time.
Potentially, fast fashion can help with that. If you've had the Lukso team and some of the other folks here, they have probably talked about how we can potentially solve fast fashion. It will also unlock creativity and let us design things that we can never imagine. I have a phrase that I said a long time ago, "The world's next Coco Chanel is probably a ten-year-old girl designing skins in Roblox." I wholeheartedly believe that. Fashion has a big role to play as we head into the future, how we dress or avatars and even how we dress through augmented reality in the future.
It's also interesting from a sustainability perspective because that's such a big topic in fashion. You can create something, have a one-of-one and maybe create clothing based on a predefined amount of need and a pre-purchase experience. Jeff and I have dabbled in the world of sustainable fashion. It's disappointing how difficult it is to create an item in one place that has a lower carbon footprint. You're shipping things all around the world to get certain fabrics combined. With the challenges that COVID caused to shipping and everything, it's challenging. There's an interesting element of digital fashion supporting the sustainable fashion economy.
Where I do get excited since you're asking about fashion and that's my thing, is connected fashion. Some people use phygital. Phygital is not my favorite word. I use connected fashion. It's starting to connect physical items to virtual items and create that seamless connection between them. There's something there, especially when you talk about luxury goods, luxury markets, the provenance and all those sorts of things. For example, gmoney has done a lot of work with networked products. That's what he uses. I use connected fashion. I'm doing a lot of work around NFC chips that become physical NFTs and putting them into different jewelry collections. There's something there as well to be able to trace those items.
We're doing this fun collab with CryptoJeweler for Outer Edge LA where all of our VIPs are going to get this beautiful silver bracelet. There's going to be a QR code connected to the gift. They will be able to have a digital version of that bracelet. He's great. If you don't know Michael, CryptoJeweler, he's an awesome human being.
I would love to connect. I've been working with Simone Faurschou who's a jewelry designer on a jewelry collection as well but it's not QR codes. It's actual NFC chips inside the jewelry. We have to figure out how much keep can the chip take and all these sorts of things. What can you cover it with? Can you cover it with metal? Can you cover it with this and that? It has been an interesting process designing the jewelry.
He's going down that path too. This was a little bit more of an impromptu thing for the event. That is the connectedness that I get excited about too. That's awesome that you're working on that.
I keep thinking back to my PhD when I was studying neuroscience, particularly in a lab where we studied birds and bird songs. I got a lot of exposure to the studies of cultural evolution. Watching what's happening with the metaverse and fashion is interesting. It's almost like an experiment. You throw this at humans. What do they do? Birds are a wonderful place to look at the evolution of culture like taking songs and how they evolve.
Some people don't even notice that birds are fashionistas in and of themselves. You've got the peacock, which is the quintessential example but you can look at the bowerbird who goes and builds these wonderful structures made in beautiful colors and things that they gather. It's all fascinating to me on the level of our society evolving into more culture and less functional work. There's something beautiful about being alive, being a human, celebrating the beauty around us, creating and participating. It's an interesting point that you make there about fashion leading the way. That makes a lot of sense.
To that point, with generative AI and everything that's happening, people are freaking out but to me, in some ways, there are some negatives and positives. I view it as an abundance of technology. Maybe it will unleash levels of creativity we would never have seen or had a chance to do. You're a neuroscientist and everything. There's a whole other level. If you had generative AI and break computer interfaces, it's the exponential level of what we can do with our brains and minds.
I ran into a neurosurgeon at a coffee shop. He introduced me to the idea that there's this thing called Stentrode. They can take an electrode array and insert it in a vein through the lower part of your body. It goes up into your motor cortex and implants a set of electrodes that can be used to interface with the motor cortex, meaning this is a very low-impact surgery. They don't have to cut the skull open or anything like this. It's going to be fascinating. I want to dive into your contribution to the literature on what's going on here. You've written a book, Into the Metaverse. Tell us some of the key takeaways that readers could expect to get. It's a wonderful topic to address. We hit it right in the zeitgeist. Tell us a little bit more.
This is my fourth book. I did two books that I self-published with great co-authors. One of my co-authors, Sam Wolfe, has a new book out. Another co-author of mine, John Buzzell, works at Epic. They're amazing people. This fourth book is just me. This is my first time being a sole author of a book. It has been exciting. It's focused on the business opportunities of the metaverse and Web3. It's not about defining it. There is a chapter about defining it because we will still need help defining it or thinking about how to try to define it. It's focused on business opportunities. It's for those people that want to leave metaverse and Web3 within their brands organizations, startups or whatever it is.
It's got a lot of great nuggets in there. It's not highly technical as some of the other books are going more into technologies. This one is about business opportunities, "What does this mean? What can we do? What does it mean now? What does it mean tomorrow for our businesses?" It has gotten great feedback. I was very lucky weirdly enough that it all happened. I was able to launch the book at Davos. I was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It happened to be around the time I was launching my book. Not everyone gets to say that. It's an exciting moment. It has been well-received. I hope more people see the value in it.
We love Davos. We were there in Davos. It would have been super fun.
You went to the summer Davos.
We got to enjoy warm breezes and all this amazing green grass. It was a little chilly when you were there.
It's very different.
Yat was there. It was funny. He came on the show at midnight after a whole day of networking in Davos. Maybe he was at a part of you were at and then he came on the show.
I probably ran into him. I saw him in several things. How funny.
Let's draw from your expertise as one of the top tech voices out there. For brands that are looking to enter the metaverse and dip their toes into it, what advice do you have for them to get started?
My advice has evolved. Most brands have done something or started to do something. Take those learnings. What did you learn? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? What did you have to do better? Keep trying. A lot of brands that had some failures felt deterred. They don't want to do anything. They don't want to touch anything. Keep trying. Sometimes I let them know, "Not everything has to be a PR play. Not everything has to be this big giant launch with a PR release. You can still experiment in private. There are ways to do that and test assumptions."
One of the biggest changes I've had is to work with more creators and partner with more endemic platform creators and people that understand where you're going. That's incredibly important. It doesn't have to always be the usual suspects. Look for those creators that get you, the ones that understand your culture and the ones that align with your values.
It's focusing on that and not necessarily focusing on the creators that have a million followers. That doesn't necessarily translate into much anymore but look for the right fit and keep trying. It's hard. All of us here are in the trenches. It's hard, especially with everything that happened and is happening. It's hard to be in the trenches but we're learning a lot. Sometimes you will get amazing knowledge from someone that might have a smaller audience and is doing a lot of these things and learning them firsthand.
Get after it.
This is the time to build. We would love to better understand your roadmap going forward, partnerships, artist collaborations and features that we should look out for. Maybe in addressing that question, you can speak to some of the things on the roadmap of your clients that you're excited about. I'm curious about what's next with Walmart and some of the other projects that you're working on.
I cannot share that. There are too many NDAs signed.
We warmed you up for almost an hour and we still couldn't get it. I see how it is.
You're going to continue to see a lot of brands doing interesting things and things that are not obvious. We will continue to see more entertainment and concerts done differently. We will continue to see fashion shows evolving beyond the virtual and merging physical and digital. I'm excited about September 2023. New York Fashion Week in September is going to be exciting, at least for me.
From a roadmap perspective, I'm going to keep running Journey and doing amazing work there. We're doing a lot of work both in the physical and the virtual spaces. Our physical studio for example is working on TSX Broadway, which is going to be the world's first Web3 building in Times Square. It's an amazing project. Our virtual side is doing a lot of amazing work as well. I'll continue to run Journey and do great work there.
On a personal level, I'm doing a lot of projects like the jewelry collection. I've got a few other luxury fashion collections dropping. I'm launching my community. It's time for me. I've been holding back and I don't know what is holding me back but I'm a little less fearful. I'm a little fearless. I'm launching People of the Metaverse Community, which is focused on the philosophers, thinkers, doers and creatives to come together and create collective intelligence to solve our problems. People of the Metaverse Community is also going to feature metaverse salons and these exciting physical events. It's going to culminate with what I'm calling the metaverse and Web3's most interesting cocktail party.
Let us know how we can help with that when that launches. It sounds like a great community to be part of.
Thank you.
Wait until my computer spits out a cocktail from my metaverse party for me to drink. That will be fun.
We still need a couple of years for that.
It's a beer. There's a straw that comes in. You could attach that to the VR goggles. That would be pretty cool. Before we get to Quick Hitters, which would be fun with you, what are a couple of projects that you've been following in the Web3 space aside from your own that you find interesting or you think the readers might like to know about?
I love what MAVION World is doing. I'm always looking at Deadfellaz and what Betty is doing over there. I did a collaboration with Boss Beauties. They did something with NARS, which I'm very excited to see. There are lots of different projects. I've got Bored Ape, CLONEX and all those. I love all those teams but there are some fun projects.
There are lots of amazing stuff you've been working on, Cathy. I can't wait to see what's coming up next with all these amazing clients, as well as your amazing network. We want to shift gears a little bit and get some answers to our Quick Hitters, which is pretty much a fun and quick way for us to get to know you personally a little bit better. There are ten questions. We're looking for short, single-word or few-word responses but we may dive a little deeper here or there. Question number one, what's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
I don't remember a specific thing. The biggest thing that made an impact because I love luxury fashion was when I was twelve years old and I got my first Louis Vuitton bag. That was one of those moments. I still remember it. I didn't buy it. My parents did. It marked my path forward to luxury.
Question number two, what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Tchotchkes. I was twelve. I had a little summer job at a little store called La Parisienne, which sold these little French knick-knacks. I have no idea what I sold but I sold something. I don't even know what it was. It had a French angle to it.
I realized it's Girl Scout Cookies season in my neighborhood. We went out to breakfast. These girls were incredible salespeople, "Girl Scout Cookies." They had this chant that they made up. They had a sign they were shaking around. These girls are probably 7 or 8 years old. I was like, "Do you want a job?" The girl was like, "Yeah." I was proud. She's ready to work.
You have to break through the noise.
We need some VD people. Maybe you get a card or something.
I took my six-year-old. She's a Girl Scout. I was never a Girl Scout but she's a Girl Scout. They sold 100 boxes. We were in front of a GNC. They kept saying, "Do-si-dos have protein." They were in all these places trying to sell to everyone that was going to GNC. It was hilarious. They sold 100 boxes. I'm like, "You go, girls."
Question number three, what's the most recent thing you purchased?
A beautiful dress for a trip to Paris.
Question four, what's the most recent thing you sold?
Does it count if I sold it through Journey? I sold some consulting.
Number five, what's your most prized possession?
I used to say my passport but it's my kids' pictures. It's anything for my kids. I live for them.
Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world something digital, physical, service or experience that's currently for sale, what would it be?
I would love to buy a house in Costa Rica because my parents live down there and have something on the beach so that the kids can go down. It would be nice for them to have that connection. It's a beach house in Costa Rica if I could.
Have you been out surfing in Costa Rica?
I cannot surf for the life of me but my kids are learning whenever we go down.
It sounds like you've tried if you know that you can't.
It's not for me. I have balance as a dancer but I cannot surf.
Dominical is the big surfing spot in Costa Rica. It has been a minute but I love Costa Rica.
Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Fearlessness, being authentically yourself and not caring, especially the girls. I'll stick with this one. I feel like over the last few years when I've been in tech, I've been trying to fit into a box of whom I thought I had to be. I had to be a tech bro. I'm not a tech bro, never been. Eventually, I started to embrace my femininity and say, "I don't have to look like a robot in my headshots. I can be me. I can embrace being me." Being authentic has catapulted me as a person and a professional. I want that for more women and more BIPOC folks.
Be authentic. Be fearless. Click To Tweet
Let's flip that one on its head though and go to question eight. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
I'm highly competitive, which is getting worse. Sometimes it can be bad when you're too competitive.
Do you have any good examples of where it's going sideways for you?
If you're too competitive and you track your competitors way too much, you can obsess over it. It can be a little too much. I'm like, "Take a step back."
I was thinking of my son. He's only four and a half. He's playing Candy Land and Trouble and overcoming losing in those. You don't want to lose the competitive spirit but you could see where it can go sideways. It can be a drag. There has to be a balance.
You made me think of two things. One, my son was going to play Uno. It was fun to let him win. He had so much fun winning. He's set up, "You won again. I can't believe it." He played with this kid that was his age that wanted to seriously play. It was devastating when he lost. It was so sad. What I wanted to bring up is I've been listening to the Broken Record podcast. It's one of my favorites lately where they talk about music. It's got Rick Rubin as one of the hosts and Malcolm Gladwell as well.
There's a conversation on there about competitiveness in music when Rick Rubin was saying, "It doesn't even make sense." Rick Rubin put out a book. He is saying, "I wrote a book. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book. Malcolm Gladwell is not going to write a better Rick Rubin book than Rick Rubin. Malcolm Gladwell is not going to write a better Malcolm Gladwell book." Each person needs to express what they can in the best way possible. The best competition is with yourself.
The best competition is with yourself. Click To Tweet
Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was getting my hair dried. It's makeup and hair.
The last one is question ten. What are you doing next after the show?
I am meeting my two assistants to go over my speaking calendar because my travel schedule is insane. I have a meeting after this.
That's Quick Hitters. We appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Thank you. That was fun.
Our guest for Hot Topics is Bryan Myint. He's a Cofounder and Head of Advisory at Republic Crypto where he empowers and partners with people creating the foundations of Web3. Prior to Republic, Bryan was a founding member of Taureon, a digital asset hedge fund. Bryan entered the blockchain space in 2016 as an investor, miner and researcher after serving as a strategy consultant focusing on Fortune 100 companies. He began his career as a biomedical engineer. Bryan, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome. I love your background there too. It's like a command central there. You're doing something important.
I wish. It's great to be here. Thank you, Eathan. I used to be into gaming. Once I started working in Web3, my free time dwindled but I hope to get back into it.
The extra monitors helped you monitor different tokens that you were training.
Productivity.
Sometimes we have a chance to introduce our co-guests to each other but in this case, you and Cathy have some history in some interesting intersections.
At Republic, we're very close to the Mirror World and Everyrealm team because they spun out. Cathy, you're familiar with that team due to your presence there. It's good to be here with you. I'm very grateful that I'm on this one.
I was the dean of the first academy you had. That was sometime in 2022.
Let's dive in here, Bryan. We heard that you hold some strong opinions about which brands are excelling and faltering in Web3. Share some of your perspectives and elaborate. We love a little bit of opinionatedness.
That's so funny. I'm curious whom you heard that from because we do hold strong views but, generally, our stance is that we try to be pretty agnostic to people in this space, especially in the building season. Everybody that's building and sticking around is probably worth talking to and worth staying connected to because my closest friends in Web3 were the ones that were with me through the 2017 and 2018 crypto winter, which all of you remember.
I do think we hold some pretty strong views in terms of where we are in the tech stack of building as all of us are looking to see the future where you can drink beer out of your goggles through your VR headset. We want to see that future but we have to be very realistic about where we are. At Republic Crypto, we see founders of all types. We very strongly think we're still in the infrastructure phase of Web3 in terms of the tech stack.
The implication here is that for projects that I'm looking to build a very application-forward project where they're like, "Social media for Web3," my general response is that's a great idea but we're too early to even entertain that type of conversation with that founder. We are picky. We have a pretty strong view on what type of projects we would like to work with and the type of projects we like to support in Republic Crypto based on where they're trying to build and if we think that it's realistic for them to be there. I hope that helps a little bit.
You can be the person that says, "I was the first one to do that but it didn't work." Is that exciting or not? It's hard to play the timing of all of these things when it comes to evolving technology.
It's a double-edged sword because I don't want to disincentivize people from building stuff. Think of CryptoKitties. I have a lot of CryptoKitties. They were the ones that forced people to think harder about Ethereum's capabilities. Someone had to do it. It's not that they were wrong and that someone had to do it. It's just that you have to also be realistic about how far you want to take your project based on the technical limitations.
Part of that is understanding where you are. It's situational awareness and an honest perspective on it. Depending on your capabilities and your willingness to stay the course is continuing to build while that infrastructure forms around you and being in a position to take advantage of it when you cross that threshold. You don't know exactly when that is but we talk about that a lot.
It's the chasm or something like that. As much as everybody here on this show, I do want to live in the future where I can have all of my NFTs talk to each other, get liquidity and have awesome graphics and a decentralized platform. I have zero idea how long it's going to take to get there but I support people building to get there. That is what I'm here for. I want to hold back my optimism because it can be very easy to read the next Neal Stephenson book or watch a cool movie and be like, "This is going to happen in our lifetime." For the record, I do think it will happen while we are alive but I don't know how old we will be when it happens.
You do have this NFT advisory vertical as part of your business. I'm curious. How does that function or work within your company? It sounds like you have a relatively conservative perspective on timing and the evolution of the tech. Tell us a little bit about it.
The reason why we have somewhat of a conservative approach to this is we have our roots in regulatory compliance. We are a regulated company. We mainly facilitate investments for people and allow people to invest in private securities in a way that's fully compliant with the laws here in the United States and internationally. With that, we do have a team that's focused on Web3. I'm the co-founder. We have many different arms that help different product lines.
With the NFT advisory, we are narrowing down this subset of entertainment and media for NFT applications. There are many other applications of NFTs as we all know but something passionate for us is how it reaches the mass adoption level. I live in LA. We have team members here in LA as well. We're seeing that people in Hollywood and a lot of the agencies are dipping their toes into Web3. NFTs are probably the primary way to think of digital merch for the IP that they're going to launch.
With our experience in building, we have done all sorts of advisory from Layer-1 to Layer-2 to DeFi and other types of metaverse projects as well. We try to keep that expertise and help shepherd these traditional entertainment companies that are looking to add NFTs the right way to incentivize the viewers of their content or even the creators of their content to do what they want people to do.
With these tokens and NFTs, you can build incentive mechanisms that disrupt the way people ingest content. That's a common denominator across all of these IP creators and agencies that are trying to think, "How do I use Web3 to change the way people interact with my content?" It's not just that they watch the movie and the TV and go on to the next episode. They're somewhat invested in this character because they own the NFT or they are somewhat aligned with the success of this franchise.
"How do I exploit that to make it fun for everybody?" Our NFT advisory team thinks about these different types of incentive mechanisms from a strategy standpoint but we also think about it from the implementation standpoint. What blockchain should they use? What type of NFT standard should they use? Where is their front end? What does the backend look like? It's things like that.
Cathy, I see your head nodding. It sounds like you resonate with some of these aspects of providing thoughtful advisory services.
Whether it's IP holders, talent, brands or whatever it is, they're all asking those questions and trying to figure out, "What does this mean for me?" Even with pullback and everything, they're thinking about it forward.
If you're competing for advisory clients though, Cathy is going to win the clients because she's very competitive.
The strategy here is to be friends.
There's enough for everyone.
Stuff that's near and dear to our hearts is content creators and also folks working on technology to help bridge that gap between consumers of content and creators of content.
I get excited about use cases that feel like the metaverse and Web3 are natural extensions of a brand's core identity. Maybe they didn't even realize it until they unpacked what Web3 offers them. I remember when I was in Seoul going to the Hashed office. They've got this K-pop reality show Web3 thing going. I'm not a K-pop historian but a lot of these groups formed through voting and gamification. Why wouldn't turning that into an on-chain voting experience and on-chain performance be a logical next step? I was surprised that the Hashed headquarters is this K-pop reality show and giant Luma screens. It was pretty fun to see. K-pop constantly comes up in conversations. I don't know about you.
We see that a lot, especially in K-pop. The thing that, to me, differentiates K-pop is the fervor of their community because the people that are gathering around a specific member of each K-pop group are so passionate and active that the moment you set up any voting or engagement possibility with the creator, their fans go crazy. That's exactly what you need to get people to adopt new technology. They're willing to go through the hurdles necessary to set up a wallet, register X and download this so they can have a chance to meet or engage with their favorite K-pop artists. That makes K-pop a strong candidate for these types of voting DAO activities so that the fans can have a say in what their favorite group is doing.
To touch on another aspect of entertainment, film is a major topic of Outer Edge LA and something you've been thinking about a lot over at Republic and what the future of film financing looks like. How do you see fans helping to create the projects they want to see on the big screen? What are the bumpers there from a regulatory perspective?
The film financing aspect is a conversation that we typically have hand in hand with the NFT conversation because a lot of these media execs and entertainment companies are like, "How do we launch an NFT for this upcoming IP that we have? How do we use the community that we have built with these NFTs to fundraise in a way that is complimentary to existing typical Hollywood fundraising styles?" You have the traditional angel, venture and lending that they do but there's this whole other element of raising from your community.
With film financing, we do offer and we are trying to pair a tokenized film offering with an NFT offering so that these two types of security tokens that the film raises off of as well as the NFT can interact in some way or the other. That's the promise of Web3 where you have these Lego blocks that can build off of each other and have conditional logic so that the fans can receive certain benefits based on actions that they do.
We are very careful about the regulation for this because you want to make sure whenever you dive into securities territory for those that are new to securities if you're looking to invest in something with the expectation of upside, it's highly likely that it will be a security. People that invest in films are investing in these private securities. We are offering what's called a security token offering for films, which is a security token that represents a stake in a film, IP or something of the franchise. People that invest can also receive perks and benefits related to the NFTs that correspond to that film.
That has been interesting because it then gives these movie creators and producers an alternative way to fundraise. They're also able to get liquidity on their security tokens through a secondary exchange. There are a few out there. I recognize that the liquidity is not very great but there's a lot of building happening in that space. Last but not least, a community that you get by raising on a more public platform like Republic tied with NFTs is huge for entertainment.
With the continued evolution of entertainment, we will see how it all comes together. It's interesting, especially the reset with COVID around entertainment and how it shifted things in a little bit of a different trajectory overall. I'm curious as to how that plays out but it's going to be a little time still.
On the COVID note, two forks came out of our conversation so far. There are the streaming services that everyone has been watching at home but then there's also the return to theatrical. Theatrical seems like it might be an outdated way of doing things but that's precisely what NFTs can provide like proof-of-attendance or ways to incentivize people to go back into the theaters. Maybe there's an NFT QR code that you scan at the credits to prove that you were at the movie so you can get some other benefits down the road for watching it. There are a lot of levers that people are playing with to get the consumers to do certain things in the space.
I'm excited about a world where you've got this cool movie with some dope fashion. You can click on it or do something with a little wink. All of a sudden, you can buy some digital fashion. One of Cathy's amazing couture dresses is in some dope movie that Republic helps to finance. That's my prediction for this episode. Sometime in the next years, that's going to happen.
I'm so down.
In the next twenty years something like that is going to come.
Bryan, we're looking forward to having you over at Outer Edge LA and doing some fun stuff together but meanwhile, where can folks go to learn more about you and Republic Crypto?
We have our main website, which is Republic.com. We also have RepublicCrypto.com, which goes into more detail about our Web3-native offerings. Take a look at both of them. Republic.com is where people will be able to see a lot of our investment opportunities where anybody, whether they're accredited or not, can invest in private startups. If you work specifically in Web3, then RepublicCrypto.com is probably more relevant to you.
Thanks so much for hanging out with us.
It's good to be here.
Catch you on the flip side. It has been awesome.
Bryan, much appreciated.
Moving on, our next item on the agenda has been a fun one as of late. We get to do a reciprocal historical connection thing here. We're doing a shout-out segment. Cathy, you were someone's shout-out on a previous episode. I believe it was our Unstoppable Domains episode. You get to shout someone out. Here's your chance. Who are you thinking?
I'm shouting out Lindsey McInerney. She's the CEO of Armored Kingdom. She used to be at AB InBev. She has been in this space for a while. She's a brilliant thinker. You need to have Lindsey Mac on the show one day. She's amazing.
We have had Lisa Sterbakov and her partner on the show. It sounds inevitable that we also have to have Lindsey on. We appreciate that shout-out. I'm a big fan of what that whole crew is doing to evolve the entertainment and Web3 space.
Keep your eye out for what they're doing. They're amazing.
It's great energy. I'm in that group also. Before we wrap the episode, we have to make sure folks know where to go to follow you and all of your fun happenings with Journey, your book and everything. Where should we send them?
You can go to CathyHackl.com or find me on LinkedIn. I also have a metaverse and Web3 news alert group in WhatsApp. That has been blowing up lately. We almost have 3,000 members. I know it's WhatsApp. Some people in Web3 don't like it but it's working well for the business community folk that are not fully Web3.
How can people join that group?
They can find the code on my Instagram or LinkedIn.
Cathy has generously offered to give our audiences a few copies of her amazing book. Cathy, thank you so much for that. We will run a little contest and make sure people spread the word about your latest book.
I'll mail you the copies and maybe you can distribute them at the event.
How many copies should we give away?
I'll send you five copies signed.
There we go. We're getting it done and co-creating in real time. Thanks so much, Cathy, for that generosity.
We appreciate it. Keep an eye out on our socials for all the details on how to score one of those books. That's amazing stuff.
We have reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Journey
- Republic Crypto
- OuterEdge.live
- Into the Metaverse: The Essential Guide to the Business Opportunities of the Web3 Era
- Metaverse Marketing Podcast
- Emma-Jane MacKinnon - Previous episode
- Lukso - Previous episode
- Faith Tribe - Previous episode
- Vivienne Tam
- @SwanSit - Twitter
- gmoney - Previous episode
- CryptoJeweler - Previous episode
- Simone Faurschou
- Davos - Previous episode
- Yat Siu - Previous episode
- TSX Broadway
- MAVION World
- Deadfellaz
- Boss Beauties
- Broken Record
- Mirror World
- Everyrealm
- Hashed
- CryptoKitties
- Republic.com
- Unstoppable Domains - Previous episode
- Armored Kingdom
- Lisa Sterbakov - Previous episode
- CathyHackl.com
- LinkedIn - Cathy Hackl
- Instagram - Cathy Hackl
- Spotify - Edge of NFT
- iTunes - Edge of NFT
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