Jesse Tevelow Of Praise On Gamifying Digital Currency

||Tokens Of Appreciation: Art is so popular right now in the NFT space because at its core, it is a unique piece of content anyone would love to own.|Tokens Of Appreciation: Building currency with a conscience can make any form of transaction enjoyable and fulfilling instead of simply for capitalistic reasons.|The Connection Algorithm: Take Risks, Defy the Status Quo, and Live Your Passions|Tokens Of Appreciation: Crowdfunding is now a thing where you can actually get investment from regular people. They don't have to be an official or accredited investor to contribute to your project. ||||

 

NFTs have been sweeping the internet scene these days, turning almost every piece of digital content into a potential art collectible. But instead of simply making these transactions purely capitalistic, why not turn them into an opportunity to spread tokens of appreciation? Wanting to make the (online) world a better place, Jesse Tevelow started Praise, a gamified digital currency that makes NFT trading more human and enjoyable. He joins Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley, and Josh Kriger to share his work in making currency valuable to everyone again by giving more attention to its conscience side. Jesse also talks about how cryptocurrency gives birth to collaborative work, the financial transparency when doing business with NFTs, and the advantages of launching crowdfunding projects.

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Jesse Tevelow Of Praise On Gamifying Digital Currency

This episode features Jesse Tevelow, Founder of Praise, a gamified digital currency platform that makes money feel more fun and more human. They partner with celebrities, thought leaders and top brands to mint limited edition collectible NFTs which are then tradable on the platform. Jesse is an investor, international speaker, a three-time number one bestselling author and the founder of two international marketing agencies. He also founded LaunchTeam, a distributed network of go-to-market experts who help remarkable people launch remarkable things. Beyond the Praise product itself, Jesse’s passion lies in developing an organization that fosters curiosity, growth and happiness in everyday life. Jesse, welcome.

Thank you. What an incredible introduction. I appreciate it. I’m happy to be here.

Jesse, it’s great to see you again. It’s great to run into you at that fun NFT party that turned out a little wilder than we all thought it would.

It was good. For people reading who don’t know, Josh and I have known each other and been running around in the blockchain space all over the globe for a long time. It was great to see you back in LA at the party. I didn’t know exactly what you were working on. When I heard about this, I was like, “We got to get together.” I’m excited.

This is a special sponsored episode of a project that we find interesting but this is not financial advice. Certainly consult your local lawyer, jurisdiction and tax accountants, all those good, important people before making any decision with your money. This is something we thought was cool and we wanted everyone to know about it so here we are.

I’d also like to say for my purposes that anything I say is also not financial advice.

It’s great to have you, Jesse. I’m privileged to have also met you in person at that event in Hollywood. That was great. You’ve been around in the crypto and blockchain world for several years now, both individually and collaborating and running around with folks like Josh and Jeff. I want to know how you first come across NFTs. Were you all in immediately? Was this something gradual that you had to get used to?

I’m going to go back in time on a lot of these questions because I’m an old man when it comes to this stuff. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token for people who don’t know. That’s what it means. Essentially what that means is it’s a token. You probably know Bitcoin if you’re following this show. It’s a token or coin but the difference is if I have a Bitcoin and Josh has a Bitcoin, I give him a Bitcoin and he gives me a Bitcoin, nothing happened because it’s the same amount of value there. With an NFT, it’s different because it’s unique. That’s the non-fungible part of the title. Non-fungible means that it’s essentially unique or not exchangeable. It’s got its own value. It’s a 1 of 1.

Even when you hear these NFT collections where there are 100, each 1 of those 100 is still unique. That’s the value. That’s why you hear collectibles a lot with NFTs. That’s why art is so popular in the NFT space. If you think about it, what is art at the core? It’s a unique piece of content that we call art. That’s why if you print a million Mona Lisas and nobody knows who the original is then that wouldn’t be as exciting to people. We’re able to do that with technology with NFTs. That’s the quick context and background.

I had a game company. That was my first company when I was 23 years old and that company did well. We were making millions of dollars in digital currency with games. We were launching games on the Facebook platform and then on mobile. We had a virtual world game called MiniPlanet and it did millions of dollars. It’s like a lot of these games like Second Life or if you saw Ready Player One. Virtual world people come in and have an avatar. Ours was real cartoony. We had people spending thousands of dollars on all kinds of digital pieces of art, a couch, a trophy or something to put into your virtual home. It’s been happening for decades.

Anyone from the gaming industry will tell you it’s billions and billions of dollars. That’s why you see companies like WAX or other gaming veterans that jumped on this early because they understand what it is fundamentally. There’s been an economy there. We have a new technology called blockchain and a new concept called NFTs to make it better. That was my first time getting into NFTs. It just wasn’t called NFTs.

I’ve been in blockchain before blockchain. I’ve been into Bitcoin before Bitcoin. I’ve been into NFTs before NFTs because it’s just new names for the same stuff with a new technology layered into it. That’s what gets me excited about NFTs. When did I get into the next phase of it? Right at the beginning. We were already running around. Josh and I were doing stuff. We had companies that were coming to us talking about NFTs back in 2016 or 2017. It’s been here. We’re talking to the founder of VeVe a few years ago. It was called ECOMI back then.

NFT 35 | Tokens Of Appreciation

Tokens Of Appreciation: Art is so popular right now in the NFT space because at its core, it is a unique piece of content anyone would love to own.

 

It’s rare that we get to speak to somebody that’s been thinking about it for so long. I’ve been fascinated with digital assets and ultimately what was the name for NFTs back in 2003 when Second Life first came out, the Linden Dollar and all that stuff. Everything happened in that virtual world back then.

Think about the Linden Dollar. They had a cryptocurrency. It just wasn’t cryptocurrency because you couldn’t take it outside of the platform. Those were NFTs. They were non-fungible inside the platform.

That was the foundation. Let’s fast forward then though. Let’s get to what you’re working on Praise. What is Praise? How does it relate to NFTs and the world that’s exploded?

Praise is the culmination of my entire career. It starts back then with the game company, which was digital currency. That was over fifteen years ago. What happened since then is I exited out of that company. That company is still flying high. I got some cash and became an author. I wrote three books and learned how to market those books and then we started marketing everything. It’s like the Amazon model. You start with books and then you got everything.

Now we launch all kinds of things with my agency called LaunchTeam. That company has helped over 50 companies go to market. We understand digital currency, gamification, going to market and marketing. Something that’s important in a space that’s emerging, that has not yet reached mainstream adoption. You need marketers to come in. I’m also a product and design guy. I design games so I understand the front end.

What’s the final piece? Understanding blockchain, the technology that can power this and why are that important in this equation. As you guys know, it’s core to changing and having a paradigm shift in the total financial strategy of the world. We have all the pieces. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for over a decade now and it’s finally the right time to do it. We had a term sheet a few years ago for Praise but I didn’t take it. The market was doing lots of crazy things back then and NFTs hadn’t reached the mainstream. It didn’t feel consumer-ready. In 2021, it does. We’ve had a political shift and economic shift. There’s all this stuff. The consumers are ready for it.

We’re targeting Millennials first. There are 75 million Millennials out there estimated, more coming in. This is in the US because immigrants are coming in but they think it’s going to max out around 75 million within 2022 or 2023. I don’t know if they’ve already hit this but they are projected to have the highest most spending power of any generation in history. This is the generation and also those coming that it will define our future. They will have the deepest wallets to do that. We already see Millennials coming into the fray.

There’s a bunch of stats out there. There are Millennials that are coming in but they’re still like, “I don’t know.” Our mission is to bring this thing to the mainstream to allow consumers to understand how this thing works and to make it fun. Praise is a gamified digital currency and it is meant to be the token of appreciation. I always say everybody deserves praise. We all deserve praise. For being alive, being here and trying to get through life. I feel that the energy I get from the world is that we don’t feel like that. People are fighting to stay alive instead of feeling like they’re being praised for being alive. There isn’t this happy tone. There’s this negative, risky, scary tone and I want to end that.

Praise is a brand. I’m going to talk about the team and staff behind it. If you imagine an app, this is taking it down to brass tacks, what Praise will be is an app that allows you to use our currency called Praise. It’s going to have all kinds of cool features and gamified features that make it more fun than regular money. If you think of the US dollar, do you think fun? No. You just think it’s a transaction. I use it to buy stuff. With Praise, you feel good about it. You’re going to be giving Praise to people and you’re going to be getting Praise from people. There are some mechanisms in there for rewards that are important to us.

The most exciting thing is the NFTs. Let’s go back to NFTs. We’re going to partner with top brands, celebrities, people with large platforms, large audiences and people who believe in this technology. We already have a bunch of partners lined up for this who are super excited and they are going to be the frontend. What’s fun? This is fun. We’re going to create collectible limited edition NFTs or coins that will be visual. We’re going to design these with the partners and they will be rare. There will be certain quantities of these. People can get them and decide what they want to get whether it’s Beyoncé’s coin or whoever or a company’s coin. Maybe it’s Taco Bell’s coin because you love Taco Bell.

These coins are going to not only look cool. We’re planning to have hard copies of these too. We’re going online to offline so you can carry these coins in your pocket and be like, “I got the Beyoncé coin.” They will also give you access to things. They’re functional. This is the innovation that Gary Vee’s talking about. A lot of these people who have been in a little longer understand it a bit more and also the business-minded folks understand the second wave of NFTs is functionality, functional NFTs. It’s starting to come out but a lot of it’s focused on content, an art piece, a piece of digital content and that’ll be there. That’s the baseball cards, the Mona Lisa or whatever.

Our collectible coins will be that but our coins also do things. They have functionality that we work out with every single partner. Maybe it’s a backstage pass to Beyoncé’s concert. Maybe it’s free tacos for life. It’s whatever they want. All of a sudden in the app, now you have a currency that’s fun and you also have special coins, which make it even more fun and allow you to do things. You can also trade those coins later and make money off of them. I’m super excited.

The beauty of cryptocurrency is in collaboration. It can lead to a more relationship-based world versus a transactional one. Click To Tweet

Let’s talk a little bit more about that passion that you’re bringing to this conversation, your motivation and your vision here. You mentioned appreciation as being central to the platform. What does currency with a conscience mean to you?

This is core to my entire being. My first book is called The Connection Algorithm. It’s about how to make meaningful relationships and why that is arguably a more valuable currency than fiat or crypto. That’s where I’m coming from. If you look at the brand, it’s called Praise. James Sommerville, the former Global VP of Design for Coca-Cola who’s one of our core advisors, was instrumental in helping us design the Praise brand.

We designed the Praise brand specifically to outlive us so that when my daughter who’s a year old is on her deathbed, Praise is still a brand that people know and is still thriving. That’s the goal in centuries, not in decades or years or months or weeks. That’s the reason for this. Currency with a conscience is specifically looking at the next hundreds of years. Where are we going? We’re not going in the right direction. Praise is meant to be like, “Let’s make currency truly valuable to the people again, not for capitalistic reasons or whatever else.”

I’m not entirely familiar with the landscape of projects like this but I’m sure folks that are readers that have been around the space have heard of some projects that are similar. I remember Good Money was trying to do this. I don’t know where they’re at with their business model these days but this isn’t the only time people have wanted to use cryptocurrency and NFTs to enlighten consciousness. How do you see Praise’s similarity or difference with Good Money and some other projects that are out there that seem like they’re inspired by the same goals as you are?

First of all, I love the Good Money guys. I actually was early with Good Money and love them. Everybody should check out their project. I’m collaborative and that’s the beauty of crypto. It’s such a collaborative network if you find the right people who are the lifers in this industry. That’s part of the beauty of it. Everybody’s working toward, hopefully, this concept of Praise, decentralization, more independence for humanity and a more relationship-based world versus a transactional world. Good Money’s right in there.

How are we different? Everybody asked this question. I love and hate this question because as an entrepreneur for many years, any founder out there is going to nod their head when I say this, you know you’re different. What’s different is the founder and then what comes from that is either a good difference or a bad difference in the market that either works or doesn’t work. There are no new ideas, there are only new executions.

You look at first principles, you try to tear things down and build them back up. That’s that. We’re different in that we’re going to focus on UI/UX and gamification like nobody else because I come from a game background. People ask me, “Where does this fit?” We have a cool little graphic of where the competitors are and where we sit is right in the middle of business and pleasure that I don’t think anyone’s gotten yet. “Is it a game? Is it like Venmo?” It’s somewhere in the middle there and that’s the beauty of it. It’s never been done before. You either have games or you have money and money is serious and games are fun. It’s like, “What if we can combine those? What if we can put those together and all of a sudden, everybody can have fun, make money, transact, share and grow all at the same time?” The goal is to sit right in the middle there.

There’s another difference that you told me about which was the tokenomics of your token and how you benefit. That’s important because people want to know where the money is going. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. People can always learn more about it by going to StartEngine and all that good stuff.

I love this question because this gives me a chance to answer this big problem that we have in the market which is pumping dumps and volatility. In my opinion, that’s what’s stopping consumers from coming in. The institutions, the banks, all the big players, they’re in. They know they have to be in. They know if they ignore this, it’s going to be at their peril. That’s already there, the next step is consumers and mainstream adoption.

We need some more technology to do that but we also need just better infrastructure and systems coming out from dApps like ours that are built on these protocols. How does it work? We have some innovative things that are happening. First of all, this is the first time I’m announcing this publicly in a forum like this, it came out from our other partner but we have partnered with Wise token. Wise token is an incredibly successful project that launched and essentially what they did is they invited people to invest in Wise through a liquidity pool that they created on Uniswap.

They said, “If you like our projects there’s this liquidity pool. Go ahead and put ETH in here and then you’ll get your Wise token.” Wise is backed by Ethereum. They literally put it on Ethereum, wrapped it and then they’re building new features on top of that. They’ve got staking and bond-like instruments. Ethereum’s not doing that so Wise is doing it and they burned the keys to that liquidity pool. They have over $300 million in that liquidity pool. That’s just on Uniswap. They’re going to be going on Binance, they’re coming on all of these different chains building these liquidity pools.

What does this mean? It means the investors who put the money in can get their money back out. They have immediate instantaneous liquidity. To break that down into layman’s terms, there’s a bunch of people who said, “I believe in this. Here’s a bunch of money,” and nobody is touching that money. Anybody who put that money in could take it right back out whenever they want but they’re not because they’re getting value out of it. Because Wise is building value and they’re getting those features. They’re getting returns there.

NFT 35 | Tokens Of Appreciation

Tokens Of Appreciation: Building currency with a conscience can make any form of transaction enjoyable and fulfilling instead of simply for capitalistic reasons.

 

If they leave their money in Wise, they get those. If they take it back on to ETH, they don’t. We have partnered with Wise to do the exact same thing. We will be doing building our own liquidity pool or wrapped in Wise. All those features get to come over to Praise. We will have bond-like instruments, we will have high-yield returns, we will have a price floor that starts at the base of Ethereum backed by Wise and then it will grow from there.

If Praise gets too volatile, they’ll be able to move it out into a stable coin. If you don’t like crypto at all, we have Praise credits. We’re giving out Praise credits first and anybody can get those. They cannot be refunded or taken out of the game. They’re just like the old world of gaming but you don’t have to go through all the crypto stuff. If you’re reading and you’re like, “I’m kind of into NFTs and crypto.” You can go into Praise, get your credits and four months later when you have 10,000 credits built up and you’re like, “I’m ready.” You can go do the riffraff. Whatever the world’s doing, the governments have decided, the tech guys have figured out to go make sure you can get this crypto and all that, we’ve got that option too.

All those things are there for people. That’s how our token works. Let me now talk about the tokenomics and the minting mechanisms which are interesting. Essentially, what we’re doing is once this thing goes out, we’ll have our auction and we’re going to issue out one billion tokens that will be removed from our treasury. There are 21 billion overall so there’ll be 20 billion left and that’s built directly out of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was 21 million, we went with 21 billion because we want to give out smaller micro rewards so we wanted to have more tokens but there’s a fixed supply. There will be scarcity and that’s important.

How do people get these twenty billion other tokens? They get them through a rewards system that we have that essentially just doles out more Praise to everybody who has Praise for various reasons. That is our secret sauce, the algorithm of how that works, where those rewards go and it will change. The reason we have to do that is because I can’t foresee 200 years out. Anybody who tells me, “Now you’re controlling the rewards.” We can’t tell what’s going to happen.

We’re going to have a reward system that it’s says, “You get a reward for inviting someone. You get a reward for sending Praise.” People who are active in the system will be the ones standing to get the most rewards. Those rewards are released at regular intervals. As the market grows, the idea is that the market’s bigger, the same amount of coins are going out. It creates an automatic market.

Thank you for so much of the detail on that and you clearly put a lot of thought into it. It makes me think about a sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who explored this idea of capital in all its forms. Social capital, cultural capital, physical capital, political capital and all these things. The concept has been out there for a while and you made reference to the fact that people sometimes burn their relationship capital in the name of earning currency or something like that.

I understand the idea of having that flexibility because we’re all creating something new. We’re trying to make up for things that hadn’t been accounted for a while in the past. Having a mechanism where we can adapt and change and hopefully, make up for some of the lost value that people have gotten when they’ve earned something like cultural capital by being an artist but they have been rewarded financially. Moving on to another topic that I’m curious about, what’s on the immediate horizon for Praise? We’re hearing about a crowdfunding campaign forthcoming with StartEngine. What’s that going to look like?

This is super exciting. StartEngine is live. If you want to check it out, if you like this, if you think Praise sounds cool, you can go to PraiseToken.io and you’ll see that we are raising money with not an institution, not a fund, not a bank, not any of those guys. We’re raising with you, the audience. You have to be in the United States but if you are reading and you’re in the United States, you can go and you can own a piece of Praise. That’s not crypto or anything like that. It’s shares, equity. Actual shares in the company like owning shares of Facebook or Google when they first got started. That’s regular, that’s been around for many years.

Equity is an instrument that everybody understands for the most part. Years ago, most retail investors could not get into these deals. It was only the funds that had access to this. Now, another advancement, this isn’t in crypto, just more stuff happening in the world, crowdfunding is now a thing where you can get investment from regular people. If you’re reading this, you don’t have to be an official investor, accredited investor, you don’t have to be any of that. $100 I believe is going to be the minimum for people to put in.

Remember, I’m not giving you financial advice here. I’m not a financial analyst or anything like that but the cool thing is $100 isn’t that much to some people. If $100 is a lot of money to you and you need that $100. I’m just telling you, as a friend, as a person I wouldn’t put that in but you could put it if you have $100 and this sounds interesting to you and you don’t mind where that money goes then do it.

The potential here is exciting because, with something like a StartEngine, they’re one of the fastest-growing companies in the US. They’re named top 100. This is exploding. I think it was $66 million or something that they did that they announced. Their average project is doing $1 million. Go check out the StartEngine. Get in early on this thing. There’re bonuses for people who come in early.

I don’t know exactly when this is going to drop but if it’s within the first two weeks which we’re going to hit, you should be able to jump on the page and see bonuses. If you put in some money in the first 24 hours, you get bonus shares. You get more on top of it. If you come in in the first two weeks, you still get more bonus shares. There’s the gamification right there just starting off. It’s like, “How can we make it fun for people and give people perks?” That’s the StartEngine and we’re super excited. Go check out the page.

There are no entirely new ideas in the market, only new executions. It all boils down to which ones work for you or not. Click To Tweet

Amazing stuff you’re putting together there. We talked about what’s happening right around the corner. We talked about not being able to predict what’s going to happen many years from now. Hopefully, you’ll still be around making waves. What’s on the roadmap? What should we expect to see here in the next few years?

We’ll continue to see a proliferation of blockchain generally. Hopefully, the governments, including the US government are starting to realize that it is something that is mainstream and will be mainstream and that they need to adapt to it. We’ll be much closer five years from now to that because I believe that the consumers will be much more into it. Once that happens, usually, the governments realize that they have to just play ball. The cool thing about blockchain is that nobody can stop it because it’s literally coded that’s replicated across thousands of computers.

What about specific to Praise in five years?

The NFT market is going to explode so the idea is that we’re going to have a thriving marketplace of NFTs and that the Praise brand will have extended out past just NFTs into more typical financial functionalities. We have a lot of concepts on the roadmap, for example, integrating Praise with businesses. Let’s say, my agency launch team prepays $500,000 worth of Praise and then we issue that Praise out to our employees as a perk program. There’re all these different ways to use the currency to go with the brand of Praise, the token of appreciation. “How do you use this currency to create loyalty? To create trust?” We want to blanket the internet with pay with Praise buttons, raise with Praise buttons for fundraising campaigns with social good attached to them.

We also want to do AR and VR. Imagine you’re in the stadium for the Super Bowl, you got your phone and there’re Praise coins all over the stadium in AR. You got to take your phone or the special glasses that we’ve created and you can see our coins. There are ones up in the sky above you, one’s down on the field. One is attached to a guy’s jersey and you got to grab it. If you grab those special coins, you get to go and talk to the players in the locker room after the game. That stuff where you’ve got campaigns that are real, relationship-driven, customized, consumer-focused, fun and they have a real value attached to them. If I’m in the stadium and I grab Tom Brady’s token and I get it? That’s a miracle moment in my life.

This is a miracle moment, Jesse, because you mentioned Tom Brady before Josh on this show.

I went to Michigan so I’m on the Brady wagon.

I’m down with that. The key thing for me in this conversation to close it out is there are going to be hundreds of NFT platforms over the next five years. The amount of new cryptocurrency tokens that have been created this 2021 has been exponential. What I’m hearing from Jesse is it’s all about the brand, the DNA of that brand and the brands that differentiate themselves are going to stand the test of time and endure. That’s why you’re doing it clearly. That’s why you see what you’re doing is so different from what everyone else is doing. When you look into other burgeoning industries, even the CBD industry, it’s the companies that have the solid brands that have made a real go at this versus someone who just says, “I want to create another CBD company.” Those haven’t done well. That was my takeaway from this conversation personally and I wanted to share.

Also, the underlying DNA of the company, the core values that are the foundation, carrying that forward and how important that is. I appreciate you sharing that with us. If you’re not pumped about Praise by now, I don’t know where you’ve been. This is amazing. I can’t wait to see this thing come to life. In the meantime, we’d love to get to know you a little bit better personally and some of your stories and whatnot and do a little bit of Edge Quick Hitters. They’re pretty much a fun way to get to know you a little better. Ten questions and we’re looking for a short single word or a few words response but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

It was magnetic bars and balls that you could put together to build stuff and I was probably 6 or 7 years old and I had earned money as a kid through allowances and stuff and I saved. It was $40 and I bought it and I had buyer’s remorse immediately after I bought it. That was the first thing I bought.

I had buyer’s remorse with one of my first purchases too but it’s a very STEM-focused purchase for a young person.

I wanted to build. I was an engineering mind a little bit then it went into my closet and I never touched it.

Question number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

NFT 35 | Tokens Of Appreciation

The Connection Algorithm: Take Risks, Defy the Status Quo, and Live Your Passions

It would have been in my car. That’s another thing that I bought with my own money. I have $5,000 that I saved up from working at a plant nursery, at the cashier, hauling mulch around and bagging groceries. I got this car for $5,000 and sold it years later for barely anything.

Number three, what’s the latest thing you purchased?

A new car seat for my baby girl. She’s fifteen months.

Perfect. Those cushy ones with the head cushions and everything.

Some crypto in between there.

Number four, what’s the latest thing you sold?

I probably sold copies of my books without knowing it. Ask Amazon, they can tell you.

Always be selling. Number five, what is your most prized possession?

My heart.

Number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that is currently for sale, what would that be?

There’s no limit to how much I can spend?

That’s right.

There’s got to be an island out there. I’m an ambivert. I like to be social with the right crowd but I also can get drained by too many people. If I could buy an island like Richard Branson, I might do that.

Millennials will define the future of NFT as they have the deepest wallets to do that. Click To Tweet

I met someone that is doing an island off of Miami, about 7 or 8 miles, that’s like a crypto/green tech island.

I’d be into that.

He’s building it up. Get your own area of the island so that you can be around people when you want to.

This exists in our day and age. You can go to PrivateIslandsOnline.com and you can search for your private island. There are lots of options.

I’m not there yet. I don’t think I have enough to buy my own island yet.

It’s one of Eathan’s side hustles, trading islands. “I got an island for you. Don’t worry about it.”

To bring this back to interesting blockchain, crypto talk, that’s going to be a lot easier, getting properties, not islands but fragmenting out lifestyles for people. That’s where my mind is going with an island. It doesn’t have to be an island.

Number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?

It would be empathy.

Number eight, if you can eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?

Impatience.

Number nine, what did you do just before joining us on the show?

I tried to get myself ready to go. I was showering, frantically brushing my hair in case there was video and trying to get up by 8:00 AM because I have a fifteen-month-old baby. That’s the truth. Real answers.

NFT 35 | Tokens Of Appreciation

Tokens Of Appreciation: Crowdfunding is now a thing where you can actually get investment from regular people. They don’t have to be an official or accredited investor to contribute to your project.

 

That’s what we like. Last one, question ten. What are you going to do next after the show is done?

I am going to kiss my wife and my baby because I get to work right next to them which is a blessing and a curse and then I’m going to get back to work and be heads down. It’s a crazy time for us. It’s an exciting time. I’m in that zone where I’ve got 100 things to do and I can only get to 5 of them. I have to choose which 5 I’m going to do and then there’s another 100 that crop up during that time period. It’s about keeping two feet on the ground. I’m going to go back to work. It’s early. You got me at 8:00 AM so I got the rest of the day in front of me.

With those kids, you got to take advantage of the earlier years. Less mobility the younger they are. The older they are, the more trouble it’s going to be.

I’ve got nephews and nieces and my mom is telling me, too. She’s like, “You better enjoy it.”

Thanks for playing Edge Quick Hitters with us. it’s great to learn a little bit more about you and your experiences. Let people know where they can go to learn more about you, the projects you’re working on, Praise, any place that can get information about what we talked about.

Let’s keep it pretty simple. Google Jesse Tevelow and you’ll find all kinds of stuff. With Praise, it’s PraiseToken.io and you’ll learn everything about praise. You’ll also see the StartEngine there.

I heard we got a giveaway that we’re cooking up over here in the background for our readers. Maybe, Jesse, you could give a little insight as to what we got in the works?

We talked about this and we definitely want to do something special for the audience. We were brainstorming a bit and what we came up with is I’m absolutely willing to do a laser session, at least an hour, with someone reading this as a reward. The guys are going to set up some raffle or giveaway for that. If you have a project, I’ve been in the space for a long time, we’d love to consult with you for free on that as we would do with our agency, LaunchTeam.

I can dig as deep as you want. You can ask me what you want. I’ll attack the places that you want me to attack and hopefully, I can provide value there. Also, we’re looking at some other rewards. We have a concept called Praise credits and we may be able to provide some of those. I got to check back with my team on that but that’s something that could be in the works. Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with some other cool stuff.

Remember, I’m a gaming guy. I might have to go back and we’d put our heads together and then come up with something else. I love giving things away to audiences like this that are clearly interested in the space. I always think, “Why not? The more value the better.” I hope some people take advantage of that. At least get a chance to consult with me and then if we can come up with some other stuff, I’ll let you know.

Thank you. People are going to be pumped about that. Keep an eye on our socials and you get all the details. We’ve reached the outer limit of the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better out. How? Go to iTunes, rate us and say something cool then go to EdgeofNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Do you want to help co-create Edge of NFT with us? You got guests you want to see on the episode questions for hosts or guests? An NFT you’d like us to review? Drop us a line at Contact@EdgeofNFT.com or tweet us at @EdgeofNFT to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in for more great NFT content. Thanks for sharing this time with us.

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About Jesse Tevelow

NFT 35 | Tokens Of Appreciation

Jesse is the founder of LaunchTeam, a distributed network of go-to-market experts who help remarkable people launch remarkable things.

The firm’s 50+ clients have raised over $500 million in VC funding. Clients include an Olympic Gold Medalist, the Managing Director of a multibillion-dollar VC fund, and founders of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses.

As a three-time #1 bestselling author, product designer, and the founder of two international marketing agencies, Jesse is able to craft compelling stories, develop winning products, and crystalize brands.

At age 23, he co-founded a game company that has leveraged digital currencies to generate $100M+, so he has a deep understanding of gamification principles. The company was born out of Techstars, where he incubated the idea and became an alumnus of the inaugural class. He now serves as a mentor for the Techstars accelerator.

Jesse was also an early employee at Seamless, which was acquired by Aramark and then merged with GrubHub Inc.

Specialties include product launches, DLT, blockchain, emerging tech advisory/investing, startups, marketing, writing, copywriting, product design, and UI/UX.

Jesse has spoken on stages around the world, including Tokyo, Seattle, Los Angeles, and India. If you would like to book him for a speaking engagement, please get in touch through his website.

For more information, visit www.jtev.me

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