Co-creation is the name of the game in Web3, and Entertainmint is one of the most vigorous players out there that are revolutionizing the cocreation process in the creator economy. Entertainmint is leading the way in the world of Web3 for independent creators through collaborative storytelling. Its unique vision is to revolutionize the traditional streaming model by fostering a collaborative community around indie content. This innovative marketplace empowers creators to connect directly with fans enabling collective world building and the co-creation of new, exciting projects. In this episode of Edge of NFT, CEO Genevieve Thiers explains how Entertainmint is positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for creating and fostering community around indie content and what projects they have in store for the near future. Speaking of co-creation, we’re also joined by Linus Chee of Netvrk on our special topics section to talk about the hot projects they have coming up. Tune in for all of these exciting developments right on the outer edge of innovation!
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Genevieve Thiers Of Entertainmint — The One-Stop-Shop For Creating And Fostering Community Around Indie Content, Plus: Linus Chee Of Netvrk, And More…
This is Genevieve Thiers of Entertainmint, the one-stop shop for creating a fostering community in Web3 film. This is Edge of NFT, the community movement that everyone cool is a part of. Keep tuning in.
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Stay tuned for this episode and learn how Entertainmint is revolutionizing fan-creator connections in films with their Web 2.5 bridge. Plus, how this guest truly feels about the joy of baking a cake. Finally, discover how Netvrk is using Unreal Engine 5 to bring customizable NFT avatars to the metaverse. All this and more on this episode. Before we get started, don't forget that our Outer Edge LA event returned to Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. You can catch up on all the discussions, presentations, and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and registering with only your email address. You'll then have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge watchers are welcome. See you inside.
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This episode features Genevieve Thiers, the accomplished CEO of Entertainmint.com. It's leading the way in the world of Web3 for independent creators through collaborative storytelling. With an impressive track record as a tech founder, most notably with SitterCity.com which serves millions of users and raises substantial capital before its acquisition, Thiers brings her entrepreneurial spirit to the creative realm. She has penned numerous screenplays and theatrical plays, including her renowned TV project Run the Series, available on Amazon Prime.
Moreover, she hosts the insightful crypto podcast, Byte Size Crypto, which is available on Spotify. She is an active investor in creative projects across multiple platforms. Thiers and her companies have earned recognition from numerous media outlets, including notable appearances on the Today Show, The View, Ellen, and the CBS Early Show, as well as features in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Marie Claire. This recognition extends to over 20 major awards, among them the prestigious Inc. 500 list twice, the SBA Small Business Young Entrepreneur of the Year, which was awarded in the White House in 2006, the CEC Momentum Award, and the WBDC Rising Star Award.
At the heart of Entertainmint.com is a unique vision to revolutionize the traditional streaming model by fostering a collaborative community around indie content. This innovative marketplace empowers creators to connect directly with fans, enabling collective world-building, and the co-creation of new exciting projects. Genevieve, welcome to the show.
What a bio. I forgot that I wrote all that down somewhere. It makes me seem insane.
It’s missing a couple of things. For those at home that weren't part of the VIP part of Outer Edge, Genevieve also has a very operatic voice that she can bring out when needed to hush a crowd and get some attention.
My original training is opera. I meant to go into it and it never worked out. I didn't want to wait tables and fell into tech. It's been wild.
Opera is a niche market like Web3, but Web3 has a lot more flexibility with where you can go with things.
It seems to have about the same amount of drama or more, so we got that.
It’s more. I'm the least amount of diva I've ever met, especially in Web3. In my life, I'm really lucky. Sittercity did great. We raised $56 million and served 10 million users and thousands of companies, and then we sold to Bright Horizons in 2020. That went well. I got to sing after that. I did get to do some leading roles at Carnegie Hall and Chicago Lyric Opera and sang with Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson. I honestly thought I was going to stay there. I'm still wondering how I ended up back in tech. Web3 is fascinating, but I'm still wondering how I ended up back here, in a good way.
We've all had these very interesting journeys that brought us to Web3. My background is in food technology. How did I end up here? I don't know. At the end of the day, that was about co-creating too with chefs, restaurants, and consumers. Web3 has this fascinating ability to allow people to see possibilities that they don't otherwise see and converge technology.
You guys are building something so cool at Entertainmint. It is this Web3 one-stop shop for cultivating a thriving community around indie content. There's this independent cowboy-esque and cowgirl component to Web3. It fits that vibe. You started to get us there. How did this happen? How did we go from Entertainmint mogul to Broadway performer to this initiative?
I ended up first building Sittercity. There's a through line though, which is that I'm very much a disruptor. I like to blow things up. A lot of people look at Sittercity and they think I must be knitting baby hats in my spare time. I live in a hard hat. I like to detonate things and blow them up and build bridges over the carnage to the new thing. I didn't know I was an entrepreneur, but I'm probably most set in this role. I am loving the creative sides of things, and that has accentuated stuff, but I enjoy disruption.
Here is how I got into Web3. After Sittercity, we sold to Bright Horizons. It was a Fortune 500. I was like, “Yay.” I never thought I was going back to tech. I was straight shot out of tech. I ended up singing opera and performing. I've written some screenplays and stuff, so I ended up doing some TV work. Some of that was investing in a film Bill Macy did.
I bopped around. One of those things was a show called Run the Series, which was great. We were running around and won a million awards. We shot a beautiful pilot. It was three women producers. We had this great queer-eye style where we were helping women run for office and win. I was the tech trainer on the show. It was a really good show. We had 50,000-plus fans.
We ended up running it in 2019 through the festival circuit. I got one of the co-founders of MTV as an agent. We were doing everything right. I was like, “I can be a creator.” You see where this is going, I'm sure. We ended up in the offices of Lifetime, a television for women, right before the pandemic. We got about ten minutes into the pitch and were told, “This would be great if it were quirkier. What if it were strippers running for office?” I thought, “I don't think so.” It became this bizarre moment in my life where I thought, “This world is a mess too.” You think you've cleaned up one mess.
The bizarreness of that statement ten years ago would be exponentially higher than today. Now, I'm like, “That could happen.”
Stormy Daniels should run. She has my vote. Seriously though, when you are sitting there presenting this show of fascinating women where one is an astronaut, one is this and one is that, you don't say that. I'm sorry. Another person in the room questioned whether women should be in power at all. I was like, “You guys are idiots. We're going to go and remake this.”
I had a Stoner Cat around that time. I was so involved in Calladita, Project Dice Man, and some of these awesome amazing projects where you could buy the NFT and then you're in the writer's room. You could cast your character in the animated series as your best friend, and name and dress it. I thought, “This is beautiful. I can build out the Web 2.5 bridge to translate this to the world and bring them over that bridge into Web3.” About 84% of people have no idea what we're talking about. They don't have a wallet. They're on this traditional path, which is quite dark for creators.
Your describing how this all got started is reflective of the bio. All the different things that come in here and there, and the craziness of it all, which you clearly crave. I'm sure Josh, Richard, and I can identify with this falling into things. You ask yourself how you got here and you go, “I know how I got here. It’s what I'm into.” That’s cool stuff. You guys have been around this thing which we've seen quite a bit in Web3 around empowering creators. Can you talk about how the entertainment ecosystem operates and the impact on the creative community?
I'll talk first about the problem and then how were the solutions. We all see the writers’ strike going on. There is wild stuff going on and has been for a while in the streaming world. In 2022, a lot of us probably remember right before Terra Luna depegged, Netflix took a stock hit. It was a pretty sizable stock hit. Up into that point all the way through the pandemic, all five of the top streamers were bashing away at each other with spending to try and rule this model. The spending was quite outsized compared to what was coming in, but they were swinging for the fences.
Traditionally, creators have had a hard time ever getting their work past Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube into anything more. It got even worse in 2022 when the stock hit happened because a lot of these streamers started cutting off their spending entirely and doing almost their own stuff. Traditionally, before 2022, only 6% of films, series, or any kind of long-form video ever got any meaningful distribution. When I say meaningful, it could be Tubi, Pluto, or something like that. Less than 1.2% ever ended up on a big five streamer, which is HBO, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+.
It's a rough world. It got worse in 2022. You're now seeing games like, “We're not spending anymore. We're doing our own stuff.” Shows are going up for a week and vanishing. They'll go up, and then the network wants to avoid paying residuals or they want to keep tax credit and then the show vanishes forever. It's a nightmare. Creators are tired. Even if they make it into the 0.8% that make it on a big five, they're offered breakeven. They are sometimes paying to get their show on the air. They're thrown off their own sets. They're living with the acts being canceled. Fans are sick too. They don't have any power. We're just eyeballs. Something has got to give.
What I was seeing and what we all see is that if you take this top-down model or this siloed model where eight people, and as we can see from our experience, they're not that smart sometimes. Eight people decide what we're watching. If we flip that entire model and allow the creator to go direct to the fan, the fan can vote with their eyeballs and their wallets on what they want. It's exciting. It's a good thing. Entertainmint does that using some of the best of what we've seen these previous creators like Calladita and Stoner Cats do, but we've taken it a lot further as well and added our own innovations on top.
It's extremely cool and awesome that you're breaking down what the main challenge is for a lot of your end consumers. When I saw the writers had gone on strike, I have a friend who is a sound producer. He let me know, “This is probably happening soon, so I'm personally getting ready for this.” People who are watching and consuming all this content via Netflix and everything else don't necessarily get to know how much of a struggle it is to get to the point where it's at production, what's being fought for, and the strength of being able to have something like Entertainmint. You spoke at our event. You started to tell us about not only these challenges but what you're doing in this industry. We're anticipating the launch of Entertainmint. Could you share some expected timelines and what people can expect with this? Can you dive into that a little bit more?
We're in beta. We've raised about $1.5 million. We're moving from a pre-seed to a seed. Here's how we work. When you go to Entertainmint.com, it looks very Netflix-y. It looks very much like Netflix. There's a streamer. You can take a look and stream many of our content. We also have distribution. We can help you get your show on. What's different is the very beginning of our process, the project tab.
When you click into the project tab, you'll see a whole bunch of shows that have tickets associated with them. These tickets on the backend are utility NFTs that allow you into the show in some way. We call them tickets. We use a very 2.5 language. These tickets might allow you to be an extra in a crowd scene. It can CGI you in if you're across the country or whatever. You can be an extra in a crowd scene. You can join the writer's room and vote on the arc of an episode or a character. You can be a co-producer.
The creator sets the parameters. That might be two cast meetings and a team photo. You set the parameters as the creator, but the exciting thing is that we take it all the way through on a co-creation aspect. Unlike Kickstarter and Indiegogo where you buy the ticket and you're in the credits and you get a t-shirt, we go all the way through and attach a royalty to what you do. It's pure co-creation. For your $75 ticket, you might be an extra in a crowd scene, and receive over the next 3 years 0.2% of residuals. Since we have all your wallets, it happens instantaneously.
We're breaking the wall between creator and fan. This is a wild disruption. It's going to take a while to get this one through because that wall between creator and fan has traditionally been inviolate. You do not screw with that wall. To be honest, we need to screw with that wall because it's way too high. If you let fans in, even for levels of light co-creation, it acts almost like a brilliant pre-sales where you can raise anywhere from 20% to 50% of your funding off the bat. You retain control and make the majority of what comes in.
The way that we work is our creators sell tickets into the making of their work with a residual on the end. The entire thing, soup to nuts, happens through Entertainmint. Once you've done the work, be it a pilot or a series, you can drop it on our streamer, but we'll help you drop it on ten more, even into a metaverse. We've redesigned the whole process. We started deeper than anywhere that Netflix, Hulu, or any of those have started. We had gone to the source of, “Let's make a show together.” We tried to break that wall there so that it was not such a high barrier to get in.
When you say drop it into a streamer, are you referring to like Netflix? I want to make sure I'm understanding.
There are about 120 streamers out there. If you go to a Filmhub or Quiver model and you have a piece of content you want to show, there's the well-known big five. There's also Tubi, Pluto, Roku, and all the other streamers that you could theoretically want to stream on. Your average creator streams on 4 to 6 streamers within 5 years of releasing their content.
In today’s world, it used to be that you would stream on one. You were a Hulu show, and then you were gone. The name of the game now is surface area. You want to stream on as many streamers as you possibly can. Since we're on the bridge to the metaverse, you want to have as many extensions of your IP as you possibly can. You want to have your show with an NFT drop. It could be a possible game and development AR/VR extension. You want all that going on, as well as being on six streamers.
The main thing I would say is that this is a big play. When I say we, it's me and my three co-founders. We all tend to have a formula for how we do our builds. We do two-sided marketplaces in areas that have extreme pain. They are very badly built right now. What we do is we go in and do a mass pivot. Ten years of my life before was spent at Sittercity convincing moms it was safer to go online to find a caregiver than to use the girl next door. We did that. There are 76 copies of us around the world. Moving forward, we can do it again. This time, it's about breaking the wall or lowering the wall between creators and fans and letting fans in. If you do, more power to you and more funding to you. It's a good situation.
It’s cool. This is a trend that we're excited about. There is a lot of similarity in terms of the direction that you're describing. It is like the origins of podcasting. You create a podcast and then you stream it everywhere. We're on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other services like Stitcher. They're all available to our content. This might be one of our first shows on Sling TV. You might not have realized that.
There you go.
Thanks to our partnership with DeFiance Media, you can see our content on Sling TV. We're excited about that.
That's awesome. Everybody is starting to understand the distribution game is quite a big game. There's a reason that a16z dropped millions into Filmhub with Quiver following fast behind. That's a piece of what we're doing. I find that in this kind of build, you can't just fix a little piece. You got to go all the way down the chain. I love that there are all these incredible projects out there, like being able to jump from Red Ape Family to Stoner Cats to whatever.
In the end, most of the world is going to need an aggregator. The secondary movers are going to need somewhere to go that looks a little bit like something that they understand with a twist. That's what we're offering. That's what Sittercity was too. It was Match.com for parents. We're taking this model. We're a little bit more like an Amazon of content.
When we launched our beta, we have about twelve shows, and those are going great. The next step in our launch is we're releasing token gating. You'll be able to do pay-per-view. Slap the cost of watching a video. You can do full live-streaming premiers through our site and put a ticket on that too. We're opening the doors to creators to bring them in.
We've got all sorts of coalition partners. We have 6 festivals and 10 studios that are all starting to come in. That's leading to what we're launching in the fall, which is our channel partnerships. Studios, festivals, and influencers can have channels on Entertainmint. They can follow all the way down the revenue chain as creators from their channels and go through it.
As long as everyone has a wallet, 300 transactions can happen in a minute. It's easy. We need to hook it all in quickly and put the percentages in. By the fall of 2024, we'll have 100 channels. They'll all be overlaid over Entertainmint, like an aggregated Netflix model. On top of all of that, we will help you with a place to park your content and then distro.
With this aggregated streamer thing, everyone is like, "Oh." They think we're acting like Netflix. They think it's our job to go get the next Mrs. Maisel. I would rather have 40 different newbie producers that each have twenty excited family members. I would rather have them because that's what our model is doing. It's flattening everything. It's part of the beauty of Web3. You flip the whole thing on its head. We'll then grow from there into big IPs.
That's not the only thing you're flipping on its head. The other element of this is this collaborative storytelling, which we started to talk about. We've had shows with proponents of this like Seth Green and Strauss, both also pioneering in this way. It's an exciting trend that has been forward thought in the Web3 space.
Neil co-published one of his books about aliens at some point. You look at what Jenkins has elated. There is this progress in this area that we see and have talked about at Outer Edge. You guys are doing some major pioneering in this area as well. Could you delve into the nuances of this emerging trend a little bit more and maybe what your perspective is on the significance?
I can talk a little bit about our lens on everything. I am in awe of most Web3 creators. We were at CES handing out a 70-page report about the space we're in, which is this video creator economy space. There are a lot of different players. There are at least 40 that we've counted and we've been charting. A lot of them are sophisticated. They did tokenomics so they're sitting on $2.2 million or they're DAO. That's all wonderful.
What I will say is that I know we can be the bridge. I know that the bridge is important. We're a Web2 team. We understand a bridge. We love Web3 and we're in it, but I can't build a chain. I can't do any of that stuff. Our place is here, doing translation and bridging people in. For that reason, you'll see when you come to our site, you can join our site with an email. We use Paper.io and Magic.xyz on the backend.
You can join with an email. We make you an invisible wallet, and then you can pay with a credit card. You don't need to do wallet connect for any of this or have a wallet. We use all vernacular language that people would understand. For the royalty payouts, we say vouchers. For the initial buy-in, we say tickets. There's a way to do this that we can do living here in 2023 that makes a lot of sense to the twenty years I have in building tech.
I have great admiration as well for the other group of Web3 players I know of, most of whom are living in 2040. I don't quite understand everything they're talking about, but I do know that somebody has to bridge everyone into all of that. Right now, it's too bifurcated. The money that was there in Web3 to get because Bitcoin has no money. It has pretty much been spent. Let's bridge everyone else in and stop playing in one little sandpit. Let's get everyone in the game. That is my theory.
I love it. As we continue to get the co-creators involved and the fans involved, can you share how you're facilitating the dynamic interaction there? As we do that, where do you see the transformations occurring here in the near future? Are any things within your vision or foresight where you say, “Once we get this groundwork going, this is the thing we'll see in five years.”
Two-sided marketplaces are very hard. They're all about balance. Luckily, we're good at that. That's the other thing we've done for twenty years. With Sittercity, what I would do is I would show up with a backpack and flyers to six colleges in Boston. I would then go find a mother's group and stand them together. You have 400 sitters and get 20 moms, and then the thing started to blow up. It was a network effect.
This is the same thing. We got to get the creator faucet turned on before we can turn on the other faucet for the fans. Everything has to be slowly shooshed up together in the beginning. Plus, we also have welcomed both creators out of Web2 and Web3. Our very first creator was Grace Ng. She had this beautiful collection on the Bitcoin stack chain called CrashPunks. She said, “My users want something to do with these characters.” We raised $27,000. She sold 79 NFTs and five layers. She made this beautiful animated short on her site.
We're not discriminating either if you come from Web3 or Web2. Most of what you'll see is more traditional content on Entertainmint, but we're not discriminating there either. You have to set up wide in the beginning and then slowly fill both sides of the tank so that neither side leaves you. The creators are coming in first. In 2022, we deployed over $150,000 in development grants to bring them in. We have eight great projects. One of them got over the line, which is Fairytale Fallout. It is finished. It raised for season two. It's happening. It's exciting. We sold over 100 tickets in two months for over $25,000. It's working. It's just small.
Everything has to start somewhere. While we are slowly working on this beta, we're prepping to open the doors to all creators with a Q&A process in July. At the same time, I got off a coalition call with six festivals because they're part of the faucet that we're building with these channel partnerships that we're going to turn on. It's nonstop. I've got studios that we're meeting with. Everything has to be prepped ahead of time, so you press the button. That's the creator's side.
The fan side is a little bit different. The fan side is going to look a bit like a cameo. In fact, we've been working with some amazing people who have been associated with that team on an advisory level. There's this element of this as a great birthday gift. Instead of getting a happy birthday video from Jane Fonda, what if you're in the show with her? How cool is that? CGI’d in or a picture on the wall, what if you're in the show with her?
You haven't mentioned it. With AI developing beyond even CGI, there's an amazing potential that's going to come in here to be in things. It probably looks very much like you without even showing up to filming or anything.
Exactly. When you look at the writers’ strike, it's halfway aimed at AI. Sadly, AI is better than we think it is at making a story. If you give it six episodes of The Simpsons, it can make a seventh. I think that writers will still be needed. I am a screenwriter. We will still be needed to do the seeding of a world and teach the AI how to build the world out, but it's a different role.
You've got half of the creators yelling at the AI in a rush, which I don't blame them. It's a bit terrifying. The other half of what they're yelling about though is this mistreatment from the standard industry as a whole. The streamers were supposed to make everything amazing for creators. They were supposed to make it all great, and that did not happen. If anything, the opposite happened.
The other half of the complaint is, “This is awful. You promised us something wonderful as the upstarts fifteen years ago like Netflix. Where is it?” I was saying this. We had a panel at South by Southwest. We are the new upstart. We're going to do our best as creators to make something that's a bit fairer. We'll get parts right and parts wrong. You can't go small with this thing. You have to go quite big.
You definitely do. At the top of this conversation, we talked about the commitment to empowering creators. You've been quadrupling down on that through the course of this conversation between having your $150,000 grants that people can go and apply for and having other great ways to onboard both your creators and then those cool experiences for the fans as well. Having that two-sided element of bringing this all together is going to be very cohesive and empowering for everyone involved.
You've been mentioning it. You've been talking through a lot of cool things that are on the horizon. What are some other things within the roadmap that you think people should be excited about, whether it's some partnerships, some cool artists that are coming on, or some other cool features that are coming out? Tease a little bit of those.
I wish I could tease three, but we can't. With big IP, sometimes, you end up under NDA, and we are with three. Two are very big Web3 properties. One is a very big IP from Web2. Let me say this. It's not quiet. Everyone understands we're positioning big. We've done it before. That's helping a lot. People understand that when the doors open, they're going to open pretty quickly.
I'm excited for the floodgates of creators to open in July. We've already trained 650 of them on opening a wallet, but we've only served twelve. There's so much there. I want to see the machine fire up. Does that make sense? I'm almost not worried about big IPs. That's going to be fine. We'll get big IP. It's no big deal. That's the easy part.
The hard part is this new machinery. The fact that we're Ethereum-based and we've got all this other stuff we've built in, it's still new. Ethereum gas fees are insane. It was $130 for me to put a second-year mint live on our site and to do that through my wallet. Using Paper.io and Magic.xyz, that's hard too. I would say 16 out of 20 transactions work, and about 4 don't because of chain congestion or some issue that hits. It stinks.
I remember twenty years ago at the beginning of Web 2, it can be nasty at the beginning as everyone gets this new tech fired up and working together. I am excited mostly to see the machine fire up. All the fun frou-frou on the front of the packaging will be a blast. I like machines. I'm excited. This is a beautiful one. We got so many creators interested at this point. Fans as well are starting to come in. There's this general seeding of the property that I'm excited about. We’ll then start to work both sides into the right ratios. I hope that wasn't a boring answer but I like machines. It's fun.
You're building a good one. I understand with big tech and the types of partnerships that you're putting in place, you can't necessarily tease it all. Building the machine takes a lot of work. It takes being able to have these incremental milestones that are reached to get to that big payoff. It sounds like you're taking those steps. With doing that though, I'm sure there are a ton of projects that have your ear. With ETH and unfortunately, the high gas, I'm sure there are other projects within the Web3 space that you're looking at. What are some of those projects that you're monitoring in the space?
I was blown away by the fabulous work that Atrium did around the new animated series for nouns. That's very cool. We know Atrium. We think they're fabulous. They are a group of incredible graphic designers that have all gotten together that love to animate. They work in everything from Unreal Engine to DAO. That was cool. Atrium is a very good place for them to bring that.
I also have been talking a lot with Virtue Animation and watching the evolution there. I have tickets for Jenkins the Valet and StoryCo. I'm watching all of it. If anything, the stuff I'm eyeing is I'm interested in the immersive space. I've been fascinated by Atomverse with Atom McGillicuddy and all that work. He's doing writer's rooms. I've been jumping into them as fast as I can. The different ones I've seen, be it Hidden Ones or Story Loom, they're all interesting.
I'm not sure what that world is going to look like immediately in the short term before the metaverse is a thing, but it's very powerful. Everyone being able to make a character and control that character within the IP of all the other characters, that's the launch of metaverse worlds. It is these beautiful immersive shows. There's this siloing problem where if you don't happen to stumble over Jenkins the Valet, you're not in the world. It's still these collections around a particular NFT or world. I'm curious to see what this looks like when it fires up around metaverse creation where a writer's room can do something one day and then the metaverse is made by the following week. How does that interactivity work? How exciting.
It’s cool stuff. Clearly, you're paying attention. It's great to hear someone who got their head down clearly on their own project and has a lot of insight into what else is going on in the landscape. I have to ask this last question because it would be fascinating to hear how things have gone for you, and then we'll get to Quick Hitters. You said this previously. Interestingly, you did start the Sittercity site from nothing. It was from your own trying to get a sitter. Am I correct in that's how that started?
I was the sitter the whole time.
You were the sitter. That's right.
I have twins. They're eleven. For the first ten years of Sittercity, I was CEO. I ran it up over $10 million and then moved up to the board level because I wanted to perform a bit. I was a sitter.
Talk about an ambitious babysitter.
I was the queen of babysitting. I went on the Today Show five times with Al Roker as their childcare expert at one point. I was like, “This is funny, a babysitting industry magnet.” I like things that are ignored. For women, particularly, our problem is getting ignored a lot. There was a whole issue I kept facing in the early days of Sittercity where, first of all, I was saying the web wouldn't work and that we couldn't use the word dot com. All this sound familiar. It’s all nutty.
I also heard a lot, “Is this something women figure out?” Women figure this out. We’re like, “Go figure it out in the corner.” That was fun because I was able to be like, “It's a billion-dollar industry.” The idea of being able to show that to a whole bunch of people that are idiots about it was fun. I enjoy that crazy reveal. This is a very different one. This company is Web2 and Web3.
What’s similar is both the creators and women can learn that if they can solve their own problems, there's a huge market to be served. It is interesting. One question I had was have you brought any of the same team forward that you utilized on the past project? How much overlap has there been, if any, in terms of team members that you brought forward?
I have the same CTO. He's brilliant. His name is Dan Ratner. He was in the Obama 2012 campaign. He has amazing credentials on the tech side. They were on the cover of Time. That's why I mentioned that. He came along. He's a part-founder as well. We snapped on two more co-founders, which are AJ Salmen and Mark Vadik. AJ Salmen is a wizard at distribution. He brought in all the relationships with Tubi and similar. Mark is an IP lawyer and has directed movies. This team is good.
This one feels different because it truly is an Army that we're making. Web3 is about building a wave or a movement versus building a solution. Sittercity was a solution. This is a movement. It's wild. It feels appropriate to have 50 advisory board members and have 4 co-founders. This one, the bigger it lines up, the more it feels. I'm talking to these studios and festivals. If this works, it will be because millions of creators drive it forward along with hundreds of studios and hundreds of festivals. It cannot work otherwise. The pain is so great. I truly think it will work.
Web3 is really about building a movement instead of just building a solution. Click to tweet
We could talk all day. I love hearing about all this stuff in your ambition and your ability to achieve. Let's dive into our Quick Hitter segment. This is going to be fun. Edge Quick Hitters is a fun and quick way to get to know you a bit better. There are ten questions. We're looking for short, single, or few-word responses, but feel to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready?
No, but okay. Let's go.
It's all about consent here. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
I remember when I was six. Maybe it was deliberate. I shoplifted Rainbow Brite shampoo from ShopRite in New Jersey. I was very little. My mom made me bring it back and apologize to this confused cashier. I remember really wanting this shampoo so much. I didn't buy it and I had to give it back, but I liked that shampoo.
This is a story for another day, but I have to admit I did shoplift a Dave Brubeck CD from a Walmart at one point. We'll get into that story later while we're sharing our shameful experiences. Number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
I was always a babysitter, but I do remember things got more creative in college. I was really broke. At one point, I remember being in a jewelry shop. Do you know how they sell the coil of wire that you can string beads on? I got the coil of wire and was like, “This is a nice bracelet,” and wrapped the ends. I ended up starting a bracelet company and selling hundreds of those.
Low overhead. That’s perfect. I love that.
I thought it was nice. It was 5X on each one.
There you go. Those are good returns. You weren't sure if you are an entrepreneur, but you are clearly an entrepreneur.
I might be.
It starts young as we've learned with that question. What is the most recent thing you've purchased?
I need to get a new Apple watch because I seem to have lost mine. It's driving me mad. Otherwise, it would've been a Cadbury Creme Egg from Walgreens. There you go.
They probably had some lying around from Easter and they're still fresh. They last a while.
I love a Creme Egg.
I've been reconciling my Oura ring versus my Apple Watch. I’m like, “Which one do I wear? Do I wear both? How hyper-aware of my own breathing and sleep do I want to be?” What is the most recent thing you sold?
It was a $500 ticket into one of our confessions. I was telling a friend about the project and they were like, “Whoa.” They love TV and film, so they bought a ticket to Evetter Vargas; Confessions on Entertainmint. I’m very proud. We don't usually sell the $500s. The $50s and $75 go fast as you can imagine.
Great job selling that. What would you consider your most prized possession?
My piano. Whenever I learn a new opera role, I find it soothing to do that learning piece. I'll sit at it and learn something. Whether or not I'm on stage with it. Sometimes, I'll learn stuff because I want to learn it, sing it, and look impressive. I sing it and it's never as impressive as I hoped. It’s my piano.
You're on the call here with a trained piano tuner. I’ll talk more about pianos on another day. What's the next one, Richard?
I must say that one of my first loves was piano, so I understand where you're coming from. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that is for sale, what would it be?
I would buy five more developers that ideally know both React and JavaScript and can work with an environment that's already made. We have a great team, but it's too small. Post-FTX, the funding world has been weird. We'll be fine. We opened our seed round this 2023 to tread water while we were building out the last pieces. When the venture pitches start to go, I hope it happens fast because I've done this. I shouldn't have to do hundreds of these. I should have to do maybe 40. At this point, I hope it's only that much.
You got to think bigger here. You can get five developers. If you’re going for 50 and some other staff, I'm sure you could go big if you want. Five is a modest request.
I want them all.
Here’s the next question. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
I have a very good survival instinct. They're going to need it. I learned during the pandemic that I'm a bit of a prepper. I didn't realize it, but apparently, I'm also very soothed by a lot of things. You can tell I'm a bit of a manic personality. I was very soothed by counting the food. It got a little nuts when I started counting the individual noodles. My husband was like, “You're done.”
You’re figuring out how many days we can last in our bunker and whatnot.
He's not great either. He keeps buying those straws that you can put into the purified water that goes out of the stream. None of us are okay over here. We're still recovering.
It's a tough world to live in. I agree. Let’s go to the next question. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, which is the flip side of that, what would it be?
I would like to be happy baking a cake. I don't know if anyone has ever been happy baking a cake.
That's interesting that you say that you don't know if anyone's ever happy. They are. That reflects that you would like to get rid of your ability to enjoy sitting still or something. Is that what you're talking about?
I start baking a cake and it turns into a company. I have a problem with an empowering ambition that needs to be curved, to be frank.
Besides baking a cake, what did you do before joining us on the show?
My kid had his last two baby teeth removed. It was the first time we've had the application of laughing gas to one of our two 11-year-old twins. He was funny. I was videotaping him to get some stuff for posterity. He was funny. He was drooling like chicken sauce out of the side of his mouth.
That sounds like a new show in the making. What are you going to do next after the show?
Probably pretend I'm working, but watch TikTok, if we're being honest. I am tie-tie. I've got to send one email that is going to go through a couple of channels, and then I'm going to maybe give myself a little break.
To wrap it all up, this is the final question, your bonus question. What's your favorite content genre or your favorite all-time show in that genre?
It's comedy. It's the only thing that has kept me alive this long. Particularly vicious female comedy. Anything Tina Fey has ever written is for me. I adore her. There are so many brilliant women creators out there. I'll stop with her because if I get into the names, I'll be talking for an hour.
Agreed. That's some good stuff.
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Let's hit this next segment. It is a relatively new one. It is a sponsored one that's super fun where we get to be the owners of a basketball team and live out our fantasies of having full control over a sports team and watching ourselves win the glory and everything like that, hopefully.
It's a lot more fun than watching a team at home not do what you want them to do and potentially even lose or wreck themselves in the playoffs, not to get specific.
It’s a random team that shall remain nameless. This is a recurring segment. We own and manage our own Web3 digital basketball team. It's brought to us by Swoops. Swoops is a blockchain-powered basketball simulation game that allows users like you and me to own and operate a 100% unique team. There are real money contests that you can enter with your squads. You can win daily cash prizes. We want to give folks a fun update on what's going on here. First of all and probably most importantly, you got to mark your calendar. There is an SSN1 mint coming up. Their SSN0 mint sold out very quickly. They've been posting about this on Twitter. Richard, tell us more about this mint coming out. What's going on?
We got some really cool stuff. We're going to start with day one, which is on May 17th, 2023 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time, only the owners are going to have exclusive mints for that day. The Swoops owners only are going to be able to mint on day one. Day two is going to be the next day at 11:00 AM Eastern. That's going to be an early mint day for pre-sale signups. If you want to sign up for that pre-sale to be able to be a part of this mint, this is your chance. On day three, you have the public mint that's at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. Any remaining supplies are open to everyone. In case they sell out, if you're not already an owner, try to get into that pre-sale and be a part of this mint.
The Swoops team has decided relatively to sweeten the deal here, so pay attention to this next part. Vec&Swoop is a bonus. On day 1 and day 2, there are a couple of limited edition players, which we're going to dive into discussing in a minute. They'll be randomly hidden among the day 1 and day 2 total mint supply. By simply getting involved, you could have a chance to score one of these awesome players. We'll explain what those are all about in a minute.
Also, they added the sixth-man special. Instead of day 1 and day 2, that's on day 2 and day 3. It means if you max out and you buy 5 Swoopsters on either of those days, you can get a 6th one for free. You must buy five during the same mint day to earn the free Swoopster, but that means you could get a full two extra players by minting out on both of those days. Good luck with that one.
The price of these is 0.05 ETH. It has a 1,500 total supply. There are some limitations on how many you can get per wallet. On day 1, it's 2 per wallet. Day 2 and 3 is 5 per wallet in terms of what you mint personally. Those extras aren't included in the limitations. Let's check out those Vec&Swoop limited edition players and see what's going on. These are inspired by some of the amazing actual NBA draft picks. The first one is Swoop Renderson. Josh, tell us about Swoop Renderson.
He is a hustler. He's got some longevity. He's very coachable. He is the sort of guy that you want around for a long time. He is great at passing. This is a five-star guard. This is the type of player that's going to make everyone else on the team that much better and flow traffic throughout the court.
How about the next one? We've got Vector Wembotyama.
He's strong in his two-point shooting. He's good at free throws. He's got some defensive rebounding games. He is pretty well-rounded as well. His past defense is off the charts at 75. He's playing the forward center position. He's going to get there in the paint and stop the action on the other side. He is going to also deliver the paint on the offensive side. He is a very well-rounded dude.
They're both five-star players within their domains. It is very exciting stuff. Good luck to all those out there. Make sure that when you go to sign up that you use your code Edge Of NFT to get into the possibility of getting these free players. Let's do a little bit of a check-in. We're naming one of our players. We've already named one of our players. We got Tron Stockton.
We've chosen another one to put out there on the socials and get your input. This was Swoopster 868. We put the word out there and gave a few options. Let's check in on how things are looking. We had our ideas which were Chris Polytron, James Helium, and Magic Eden Johnson. I did personally vote for Chris Polytron, and that is by far our highest preferred name. Did you guys root for another one or are we on the same page here?
With Magic Eden Johnson, I thought that was pretty clever personally, but Chris isn't a bad name either.
It was a little too on the nose for me. It was too obvious.
I got to say everyone likes a little magic in their life. I was surprised that one didn't get more love. Chris Polytron is a solid name. I'm not complaining there. He fits into our team energy pretty well with that name.
The dye is cast. I don't know that we're going to get much more changes out of this before we close that out. We can call it Chris Polytron, so that's exciting. Make sure you go out and sign up for that SSN1 presale. If you want to take on our squad but don't own a Swoopster, your chance to build a team is coming up. Swoops is introducing that brand new batch of players in that pre-sale event we mentioned. Make sure you get your hands on one of those never before seen players. Go to PlaySwoops.com/Referral/EdgeOfNFT and get in the mix.
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Let's hit this Hot Topic segment coming up here. This is a sponsored Hot Topic featuring Linus Chee of Netvrk. It is a very exciting new project. Linus brings over ten years of design, art direction, software development, and business and finance experience to Netvrk. Prior to his pursuits in art, he was a fund manager for a private entity sharpening his skillset as a broker, leading to a deepened understanding of finance and market strategy.
With his financial experience coupled with expert tutelage at the Gnomon School of VFX in Hollywood and Brainstorm School in California, he has been positioned as a thought leader in virtual reality and emerging markets, priming him and his team for bleeding-edge developments in the Web3 space. Linus, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It has been a minute since we saw you at the Outer Edge. It was great to have you in LA, talking about all this exciting stuff happening in the world of Netvrk. Here we are. You got these avatars coming up. We'll get into that story a little bit more. We'd love to start with a little bit of background. This show has been all about co-creation, the future of entertainment and gaming, and the power of Web3. I know that's something you're so passionate about. Tell us about how Netvrk began and how you guys got to this point.
I met my partner, the Co-founder of Netvrk as well, Michael Katseli. Back when I stopped working in the finance field, I started thinking, “What do I really want to do?” I love movies, video games, entertainment, and art. I always would have these video game-concept art books. It would be a picture book for me, honestly, but I have a whole collection of them from my favorite games.
I thought maybe I'd jump back into what I did as a kid, which was drawing, painting, and things like that. I found Gnomon, the school in Hollywood. They have this one-year entry-level program. I went there early for my first day. I signed up impulsively half an hour early. The first person I met on campus was my partner in this project.
That’s nice. It was fate.
He's a super charismatic guy. We instantly clicked. He started telling me his whole life story. That's the kind of guy he is. We were chatting for half an hour and talked about our love for different games, different movies, and also different art as well. We both have our favorite artists and things like that. We go through that whole program. You learn so much about design, art, and content creation tools like game engines and 3D software. That's where our experience in this field began.
Let me not take credit away from him. He has been doing different projects for longer than that actually. He's a little older than me. He's been more of that entrepreneurial type. He loves technology, and he loved virtual reality. He has been trying to start his own projects left and right. We went to school together. After a year, he went off again to start some sort of virtual reality project. I continued studying for the next 3 or 4 years and working in the industry.
He messages me out of nowhere and says, “I have this idea of Netvrk. Come to my house and let's talk about it.” I go over and he tells me the idea. It was amazing. This is years before metaverses, Facebook changed their name to Meta, and Crypto and NFTs were even popular at all. Mike already had this whole idea in his head, which was amazing actually.
Break that idea down for us. It seems like you guys have put so much thought, time, and passion into this project. What exactly is Netvrk?
Our vision for Netvrk at a high level is the way to transform the way people and brands connect and express themselves with each other in a digital world. More specifically, I and Mike have all this experience with content creation tools. We develop them for virtual reality. We develop mobile games and tools for that.
Our thoughts were, “Look at all these 3D software and creation engines out there. They're so hard for people to use. You need to learn to code.” Even on platforms like Roblox, you need to learn how to code. You need to be a 3D modeler. We want to make a creation engine where anyone without any technical background could create amazing virtual experiences and even games. That's how it all started.
With the coming of metaverses and things like that, you can see the real demand for people seeing that there's a huge opportunity of having this 3D digital presence. Even in first-person shooter games, people are in there talking to each other and emoting and connecting in ways the game wasn't designed for specifically.
It's a powerful vision. We've talked a lot on the show about no-code solutions for making blockchain more scalable and buildable. Developers are expensive and precious. It's a lot of schooling and education. The idea from a creator's perspective or from an end user to be able to create their own destiny in the metaverse is such a powerful concept that you guys have leaned into. That’s pretty cool.
I honestly don't know all these metaverse projects out there. How are you going to populate a whole world or a whole universe? I feel it makes the most sense to make the tools so the community and users can populate that world. With Netvrk, we partnered with studios of 1,500 artists and things like that, but that's not what we want. We want to empower everyone else to realize their imagination not just on the art side. With Web3 and blockchain, there are so many things you could do for monetization. How are you guys familiar with projects like Second Life?
That's where it all began.
People were doing services for each other, charging each other different things, and being creative with how they monetized whatever they did in that world. With blockchain, you could do that. It's perfect, in my opinion.
Tell us a little bit more about what you guys are releasing here. You've got the Netvrk Alpha releases and this social spaces and desert biome thing going. Can you tell us a little bit more about that stuff?
With the Alpha release, the Alpha is the first chance to experience our world and everything that our art team and design team has been building. We have a ton of landowners already that are excited and waiting to build. They get a little taste of that. They get a taste of the social systems that we've put in there. They could come in and voice chat, text chat, drive around, hit each other, race, and have fun. That's the first step. With every experience we make, let's say there's this driving experience from the desert biome that we have, that will translate to our own creation engine in the future. Users themselves can create their own racing experience.
That’s very cool. If you're going to be in a dope metaverse, you have to have a dope avatar. That's, going back to the lore, the story behind Netvrk. We've got this archetype avatar sale coming up. What are the details?
This avatar sale is highly inspired by Carl Jung. He has something like twelve archetypes that are used very frequently in things like entertainment and marketing. We're starting with three of them. We're starting with the hero, the ruler, and the jester. They look amazing. They're generative 3D avatars that are instantly playable in Unreal Engine 5. We are the first metaverse project to ever do that, so it’s super exciting.
If you're tuning in, jump to our YouTube channel and check out these bad boys because they're something very special.
Carl Jung is one of the godfathers of modern psychology theory and a huge player. He worked with the big one. I can't think of his name.
Freud?
Yes. That's cool. I love the strong historical foundation of all of this. It makes a lot of sense. Thanks for giving us an overview of everything that's going on. It's exciting. Clearly, you’ve put a lot of deep thought into the structure behind it and how it fits into the larger ecosystem. If people want to learn more about what's going on, where should they go online?
It is mainly our website, Netvrk.co. You can find our socials and everything else from there. The store on Netvrk.co will go straight to the avatar sale page. You can see mint days and things like that and those faces and how it's structured. We're also having a giveaway with Travala. Travala adopted our token. You can purchase travel packages, fly around the world, and stay in hotels and stuff. We have $7,500 of trips that Travala credits. You could enter the raffle for free. The more avatars you mint, the more raffle tickets you get.
There you go. We're doing a giveaway too for our audience. Look for details on socials soon. We're going to be giving away three of these beautiful avatars to our community as well. I appreciate your generosity there.
Thanks for having me here.
Thanks a lot. I appreciate you joining us. We'll see you again soon.
I’ll see you guys. Thanks.
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Our next segment here is going to be our Shout Out segment, which should be pretty fun. It used to be new, but we've been doing it for a few months. It's always fun to hear what people bring up here. We'd like to hand it over to you, Gen, to give a little bit of a shout-out to anybody that you like or any projects or folks. What do you have in mind?
I have three. We did a Twitter space and 930 people showed up. It was because we had these three incredible creators. One is @LurkLovesYou. He is behind Goblintown and similar. He's amazing. He came on and was talking about his latest drop, which is some of the most beautiful and dolliest art I've seen in a while.
On the same show, we had Emily Lazar of September Mourning. It was incredible. We gave away one of her NFTs as well. We also had Lucky Ducky. We had a clean sweep of three Web3 rockstars. Lucky Ducky is doing secondary on Entertainmint. You can buy their ducks. I wanted to shout out all of them because before them, we had maybe 300 max in our Twitter spaces, and then it blew up. It's over 1,000 views at this point for that.
Lucky Ducky has been on the program. That's nice. People can check out the previous episode. They were also present at the Outer Edge event in Los Angeles, so we know them well.
I met them there.
I didn't realize that's how that happened. I thought it maybe had been the reverse. That's awesome. We're making deals. We're making relationships. Things are working. I appreciate the shout-out. We'll move it to our outro here. Before we go, where can the audience go to learn more about you and your projects?
Check out Entertainmint.com. If you go to @EntertainmintCo on any of our channels, it could be TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter, you'll be able to see lots about us. I will shout out again our Twitter spaces. They're every Tuesday at 7:00 PM Eastern. They are 90 minutes of awesomeness. Don't miss those if you like more collaborative social.
I've been on 1 or 2 as a guest. They're a lot of fun.
Thank you. We think so too.
Before we wrap, I want to mention you have generously sponsored a little bit of a giveaway for us featuring the Neon Pass NFT. If you have anything else to say about that, you can. Otherwise, folks will hear about that on our socials as well. Do you have anything else to say about that?
It's a really fun NFT. We did a free mint in 2022 and it sold out in a few hours. It was great. We only did about 5,000. It's beta access. You get a priority white list. Eventually, you'll be able to use it similarly as you would a streamer to get access to viewing our shows. It's a nice fun pass to have. I’d say it is $36 in value, but with the extra stuff like the beta stuff, it might be more like $50 or $60.
Thank you so much. We have officially reached the outer limit of the Edge of NFT for today. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on the 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 Web3 content. Thanks for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Entertainmint
- Watch.OuterEdge.live
- SitterCity.com
- Byte Size Crypto – Spotify
- Google Podcasts – Edge of NFT Podcast
- Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
- Stitcher – Edge of NFT Podcast
- Match.com
- PlaySwoops.com/Referral/EdgeOfNFT
- Netvrk
- YouTube – Edge of NFT & Outer Edge
- @LurkLovesYou - Twitter
- Lucky Ducky – Dave Broome of Orange Comet – The Platform That is Pioneering NFTs in Entertainment and Virtual Worlds, Plus: Lucky Ducky Stop Animation NFT, Candy Digital Sale, and More
- TikTok - Entertainmint
- Instagram – Entertainmint
- Twitter - Entertainmint
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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