Yat Siu Of Animoca On NFT Gaming, Launchpad Luna, And A Huge REVV Racing NFT Giveaway, Plus: Polygon NFT Gaming Studio, Gary Vee Leads Anheuser-Busch, And More...

The gaming space is growing prolifically and NFT gaming is a top topic to watch within blockchain tech. For today’s episode, join Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley and Josh Kriger as they chat with Yat Siu, one of the sharpest minds in NFTs and gaming. He’s Chairman of the Board at Animoca Brands, a global developer in gamification, AI, blockchain, and mobile tech, and is the company behind games such as The Sandbox and Crazy Kings, to name a few. He talks about the company’s early beginnings and how they became one of the pioneers in NFT integration into gaming. Yat also shares about new developments and projects to look forward to, as well as an exciting REVV Racing giveaway at the end of the episode. Stay tuned for the hot topics segment to see what’s cooking in the world of NFTs right now.

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Yat Siu Of Animoca On NFT Gaming, Launchpad Luna, And A Huge REVV Racing NFT Giveaway, Plus: Polygon NFT Gaming Studio, Gary Vee Leads Anheuser-Busch, And More…

This episode is a can’t miss. Find out what the Founder of Animoca Brands, Yat Siu, is going to do with the $138 million his company raised.

Discover what discarded fashion items of his mother’s that Yat tried to sell in his neighborhood when he was a lad.

Last but not least, find out how you can be one of the first to earn 1 of 1,000 exclusive Edge of NFT Genesis REVV racing cars and compete for $150,000 in prizes by reading this show and taking action. All this and more to come on this episode. Make sure to head over to EdgeOfNFT.com to sign up for our newsletter and dive even deeper.

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This episode features guest, Yat Siu, Founder and Chairman of Animoca Brands, a global leader in blockchain, gamification, entertainment and AI. It has been ranked in the 2021 Financial Times list of high-growth Asia Pacific companies. Beyond his groundbreaking work with Animoca, Yat Siu is an advocate for self-paced, self-directed education via his work with the Dalton Foundation. He also works to elevate the voice of underrepresented groups while promoting a healthier public dialogue via his work with Cortico. He has also received a number of impressive accolades such as the World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow and Young Global Leader of Tomorrow. We feel fortunate to even have him here with us. Yat, welcome to the program. We’re looking forward to talk.

NFT Gaming: The way things have been evolving with technology and the pace of change, the best people and the smartest people are not going to work for you; they’re going to work with you.

Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

It’s an honor, Yat. Congrats, by the way, on closing $138 million round of funding. My niece wants to be a unicorn and would be jealous. You’ve had such an amazing career that spanned the spectrum of tech gaming, entertainment, and blockchain. How did your experience lead to the formation of Animoca?

If you look at the history, it’s always easy to connect the dots looking backwards and saying, “This is how it all happened.” The birth of Animoca before it became Animoca Brands started after we sold our business, which was a cloud computing business being outplaced to IBM. From that, we had a three-year non-compete on anything related to the enterprise. I myself have a gaming room, having started my earliest career with Atari in the ‘80s. We had lots of exposure to the gaming side and we already had some gaming assets. IBM was like, “We don’t care about the consumer. We can’t have you do anything related to enterprise for three years.” I said, “Fine. Consumer it is.”

IBM was also interesting because from an M&A standpoint, it turns out that they don’t like to bring founders into the business. For them, it’s more like buying the structure, revenues, and organization, but not wanting the founders because they consider founders quite disruptive and perhaps even invested. As one of the managers was saying, “Founders come in and tend to want to change things. We like the way things are organized at IBM. We don’t need people going and try to tell us what to do because we know what to do here.” It was quite compatible for us because I was able to come out and branch out to do something else.

Around that time, the smartphone was coming into being. I had an iPhone already, but the App Store was just emerging. This was 2009. I was like, “What can we do? Perhaps the first thing we can do is take a look at this device that I was using.” The birth of Animoca happened because of my children. At that point, I was a young dad. I don’t know if you remember or if you have children. I was carrying around these Baby Einstein big flashcards and they were way big. You had to put them right in front of the face of your kid and say, “Car, orange, apple.” That was a big sensation back in the day. I used to carry stacks of these. I caught up with my 2 or 3 or 4-year-old. I was like, “This is terrible.” Each stack was only twenty cards and they go over twenty cards fast.

Data is the most precious thing in this world that we have right now. Click To Tweet

I was telling my team, “I had an iPhone. Why don’t we take these flashcards and put them onto the phone?” At least I could use it, but perhaps other people might like it as well. The general reaction I had from a lot of people was like, “That’s ridiculous. Why would I want to put $1,500 on a device into a toddler?” It was something expensive at the time. They got to chew it, bite it, and do something crazy to it. I said, “It’s okay. It’s my phone. Let’s just start it off.” They put it together and it was fast. In a week or two, they made the app because after all, they were images. There was no voice. It was super primitive.

That was the birth of what was known as Baby Flashcards. It was a free flashcard service on the App Store. I used it and it was great. I didn’t have to carry out my stacks of cards. Shortly after possibly a few months later, the producer of the product came over to me and he said, “Did you know what’s going on with baby flashcards?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I didn’t have access to the console. I was just using the product in the App Store. It’s new.” He says, “We had five million downloads.” I don’t remember the figure, but it was something insane. I was like, “Wait.”

Clearly, a lot of people seem to think it was a good idea, but more importantly, the potential of the scale and growth of what the App Store represented became very aware to us in 2009. We decided, “This is something we should focus on.” Hearing that, I sincerely shifted our entire operations to focus on the stuff related to apps. Originally, it was children’s apps and then I went on to launch one of our first games on the App Store, which was called Pretty Pet Salon. In January of 2011, the launch of that was also one of the first products to use in-app purchases because in-app purchases had just come about in late 2010. The product took off and we became one of the largest mobile game companies in 2011 and very prolific on the App Store. That was the beginning of Animoca itself.

There’s another backstory to this because after we grew the business and getting investment from Intel and IDG-Accel and becoming one of the biggest mobile game companies in 2011. In early 2012, the platform, Apple, removed us from the App Store and completely de-platformed us. To give you context on this, at that point, 12 of the top 20 apps were ours. If you look a little bit at the history, we had figured out that if we end up launching many apps as we did, we’re super prolific. We’re launching an app a week and do it through cross-promotion, we would ensure that we were in the top rankings of the App Store. If you recall back then, the App Store having fairly primitive algorithms of discovery, we ensured therefore that we always had some discovery and dominance.

That irked some people at the App Store or perhaps our competitors. We’ll never truly know because instead of giving us a call, having a chat with us saying, “We don’t quite like the business practice of yours,” or whatever, they removed us as a company that was based in Hong Kong. At that time, the App Store didn’t have a presence in China. They didn’t have an App Store team. We were nameless faces doing something. Someone in Cupertino didn’t like it at the time. That was not our first experience with de-platforming but it was certainly one where we go, “What just happened there?”

I remember I was at the airport in Japan going to some meetings and we had lots of conversations. People wanted to work with us and we’re gone. Just like that, we went from star to pariah, where even the partners that were working with us are like, “It seems like you’re in the bad books of Apple. We’re not sure we can talk to you anymore because it’d be risky. If Apple knows that we’re talking to you, then it’s like talking to the bad guys.” It was a hiring experience. At that point, we’re at 160 staff, but worse even, we had millions of customers using our products and all of them didn’t know what the hell was going on. The birth of Animoca was dramatic, to say the least.

Ultimately, we came back to the App Store two years later and of course, our leadership position was changed. One of the big reasons we got back into the App Store was because Apple at that point had opened up the App Store office in Hong Kong. They started reaching out to developers who had capabilities and China had become important as a market. Commercial is the reason why they started reaching out again. At that point, we’re like, “It’s nice talking to you guys again.” To be clear, we had never spoken to anyone at Apple. That’s the point. They were terms of service type of organization until they came to Hong Kong. We have a great relationship with the team in Hong Kong now. That team had no history or background as to what happened in Cupertino. We may never know. We certainly don’t know exactly what happened.

I also can’t help but wonder what IBM was thinking after letting you guys go into gaming. They’re wondering at some point along the way if they should have adjusted that non-compete and made it a little bit broader.

NFT Gaming: We are actually living in a world not governed by a form of governance. Users in the digital world currently don’t have any kind of rights.

One of the things that we were definitely eyeing at the time is the business that IBM bought was our messaging email business. At that point, we were one of the largest enterprise email providers out there and perhaps one of the last ones that were truly independent. I remember when we first started in the mid-2000s, something like 15% to 20% of global email was flowing through our spam service. Network Solutions, Juno Online, Register.com, and all of those companies that are big don’t exist anymore but back then were giants in the space using our service.

When we saw what was happening in the messaging space, the first thing we’re thinking was like, “Maybe we should be doing something in messaging,” but we couldn’t because of our non-compete. Certainly, capability-wise, we could have gone and done more messaging quickly because we had all the infrastructure to do that. That space went to the lights of WhatsApp, Messenger and so on. That’s what it was. We certainly had a good exit with IBM at the time, so we weren’t complaining necessarily.

I’m glad we got to hear that from you. I have another podcast, where the goal of the podcast is to help people think about starting businesses, which is affiliated with another podcast called the Indie Hackers Podcasts started by a Y Combinator graduate. It’s to inspire, especially programmers that are starting their business. A lot of people would be inspired by the fact, “You can get started with a flashcard app.” That was a while ago, but something as simple as that can get you started to having a big company like you have now.

The other piece of that we often encounter is not to be dependent on a platform as much as you can own the way that clients interact with you, the better. These platforms like Apple, Amazon, or whatever you’re tied to, have such control and can do things without even letting you know. It’s a great story and lessons learned. I appreciate you sharing that. I have another topic to connect us with this show. When did you first hear about and encounter NFTs? You talked about in-app purchases and things like that. When did you start integrating NFTs into what you’re doing?

The introduction to non-fungible tokens came because of our involvement with CryptoKitties. The backstory to that was at that point, as a business, we were about to acquire a company in Canada called Fuel Powered, which happened to share an office with another company called Axiom Zen. Both of them were involved to construct this little thing called CryptoKitties, almost like a science experiment. When we had acquired Fuel Powered, we didn’t do it because of CryptoKitties because, at that point, CryptoKitties wasn’t even patched.

Mik, who ultimately became a cofounder of Dapper Labs and Roham, who had also been longtime friends from before back to college days acquired them because of the gaming studio that was building network and leaderboard-based games. That was the background of that. When CryptoKitties took off, everyone was like, “Maybe you can come to join as a cofounder.” We’re like, “We had just acquired your business.” The expectation was that Mik was going to join us in a role in North America as the Head of Games. The compromise was like, “You go ahead and join the Dapper Labs.” He remained involved with our business.

As a result, we became the publishers of CryptoKitties one month afterwards in January of 2018, and ultimately, an investor in Dapper Labs because when that took off, certainly for us, it was obvious as to what the potential of that could be. It was early days but we said, “This could potentially revolutionize what we thought, at least the gaming industry needed.” If you think of our history, we tend to identify opportunities early, sometimes, too early. We then get excited about that and then we go all in. We see this on the internet and we see this on mobile. With NFTs, we said, “This is that moment.”

That was our first interaction with NFTs, and then since then, in 2018, while the crypto market was collapsing in probably all possible areas, we doubled and tripled down into the space of NFTs, which of course was challenging in another way because funding wasn’t easy to get. The narrative was also harder to explain because crypto had a negative sentiment and a negative narrative. On top of that, there’s this thing called NFTs that most people haven’t even heard of. I remember the conversations that people had back then that’s like, “The fact that you call it NFT means it’ll never be mainstream.” It’s a technical weird thing.

Blockchain is the one mechanism where we can actually own anything digital. Click To Tweet

They won’t do a skit about it on Saturday Night Live, do you mean?

That’s right. That was 2018. That’s the beginning of that. Those are the things that we enjoy because, in a way, we were almost a lone ranger. Certainly, when it comes to the funding scene, we were alone in the field and we weren’t super well-funded but because we were a public company in Australia at the time, we were listed. Our participation and involvement were very welcomed because we added incredible credibility at the time to a market desperate for credibility because of the fact that it was so destroyed by sentiment. The other one is that we had resources in terms of making games and having talent in that area, which was difficult as well.

Even in the blockchain space, introducing the idea of NFT in gaming was also weird. They were like, “Why would I want to play games?” Because they didn’t play games. The crypto community, because of the nature of the token, started with financial guys in many ways, or at least the biggest players were all finance guys. It took on the flavor of Wall Street. You could argue that crypto now is still much guided by people from Wall Street, people who are into games and culture. The NFT guys were the micro minority. In 2018, we were probably 50,000 people that had NFTs in that space. It was so small.

I was looking at the Axie Infinity coin price. While the whole market has struggled, Axie Infinity is going up. That’s a popular game.

What’s interesting is that there was a point where everything correlated to Bitcoin, even Ethereum correlated to Bitcoin. Everything was correlated to the master coin for the longest time and now it started to decouple. To your point, Ethereum is doing much better but still, it’s down from its highs. When it comes to gaming-related NFT projects, in some cases, there is recovery. In the case of Axie, it is much higher than it was. Axie is another interesting example here because we were the lead investor in 2019 and it was such a struggle to raise money for Axie. It wasn’t just a struggle because they didn’t have lots of users at the time, although great potential, but they were based out of Vietnam.

From our perspective, there are a lot of interesting innovations that happen out of Vietnam and some great founders, of course. However, for most of the world, it’s a little bit of a backwater. It’s like, “It’s Vietnam. It’s not quite China. It doesn’t have the potential. It’s far away. I don’t know anyone there.” It was treated like that on top of it and with esoteric technology as well with something like NFT and gaming. It was hard to raise money. They are also all first-time founders, relatively inexperienced and not given the time and respect at a time on what they’re building.

Because they were early users of CryptoKitties, they saw the potential earlier than most and felt that maybe they should iterate on what CryptoKitties did and make it into a game, make it better, and introduce that with elements of collection like Pokémon style as well. They built and built on that until they get to this moment. Axie Infinity took three years to gestate to where it is now. It wasn’t an overnight success just like that. There were many things that had to happen first before this moment and we’re seeing this happening. There will be more moments like this happening, particularly with gaming NFTs, especially in 2021.

It’s so interesting to reflect on how you’ve involved and supported the overall ecosystem and how all these projects have grown up to be their versions of adults and self-expressing gaming culture. If you look at how Facebook integrates companies that they require investing, it’s different than your approach. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

This is an evolution over time, but it’s somewhat generational and it’s where we are now. When you think about historically, because of the concentration of the access and the power and the fact that business models in the past were designed around creating monopolies, you rely on governments to break it up and off the cycle continues. As of 2021, the government hasn’t been so good, not just in the US but all over the world, around dealing with antitrust issues when it comes to technology because they don’t fully understand it.

China is starting to make moves to that area as well, where Tencent’s merger of two of the largest video streaming platforms has been blocked by antitrust regulators within China. That is interesting because, in the past, this type of stuff would not have been blocked. People are cottoning on and catching up to the fact that these things ought to be regulated as well, even though it’s technology as it were. In the US, there were many talks about, “There should be a set of antitrust on Microsoft or possibly Facebook.” All of these are talks, but at the end of the day, none of that is happening.

You create these centralized power structures, whose business model requires you to be monopolistic in practice because that’s how you continue to grow and benefit. This is what is changing and has to change as well for a couple of reasons. They’re thinking about building a decentralized future, then isn’t it hypocritical for us to then say, “To build a decentralized future, we need to control everything.” That doesn’t seem to make sense to us. I also think very strongly about the fact that because of startup culture and the way things have been evolving in the past with the technology and the pace of change, the best people and the smartest people are not going to work for you. They’re going to work with you.

That means that our entire working model approach, including, by the way, not even just working with people but even within your family and your children, or whatever, is to treat them more like peers and to work with them on an equal footing. It means that it doesn’t make sense for us to aim to control everything to consolidate. Rather, to take an approach where we are investing alongside together with them and making sure that the incentives they have as founders are strong enough that they will continue to do what they do as well. It’s respecting their effort, ultimately. This is the part where we are different because it’s a reason we’ve done at this point, over 75 investments in the space. We had announced our accelerator, which is much similar to that thinking in terms of how we can grow together with people rather than consolidate them. That’s the vision we have in building a decentralized future and then working with people around that.

I dabbled in screenwriting. I’m working on a treatment for the story of you and Animoca. There’s so much cool stuff built in there. True ownership plays to earn two relatively novel concepts with tremendous potential and also, blockchain and in its capability to create new economic opportunities for financial inclusion. How do you envision the future of the ownership economy within the gaming space?

If you go back and take that macro view first and to us, gaming is the one that’s driving that and the tip of the spear in digital property rights. First, we have to think about what is digital anyway? Why is it important for us? Why is ownership so critical? Because we see the parallel similar to how it was many years ago when most of the world was feudal. Breaking that up right now, we are seeing the same situation in the digital world because we are living in a world where it is not governed by a form of governance. Users or people in the digital world don’t have, at least most of us, any kind of rights.

You ask yourself this question as it is based on your own experience, what happens when you become de-platformed? What happens when you are not online anymore because Facebook, WhatsApp, Apple, or Google don’t like you? For whatever reason it is, arbitrary as it may seem, your human potential is significantly reduced. You don’t have the same ability to make friends. You don’t have the same ability to conduct business. You certainly don’t have the same economic potential. Thousands and thousands of companies and probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have their lives affected because of the terms of service decision, not one on governance.

NFT Gaming: Non-fungible token is going to deliver to digital assets what Opensource did to code.

You can’t run a country that way. That would cause a revolution. That would cause all sorts of issues. That’s why we have a judiciary. That’s why there’s a democracy to ensure that these rights are one that we have. When it comes to digital rights, we don’t have any rights. They’re not human rights at all, they’re platform rights and we live on that. We live in a digital kingdom. It’s digital feudalism. We are all digital services. For the small benefit that we get, which is I can make friends online and I can connect with people, we are surrendering 95% of our value. What is that value? It’s our data. Data is the most precious thing in this world that we have. Who harnesses the benefit of that data? It’s the platforms.

That’s something that we, however, as end-users don’t understand and don’t appreciate. If we get a single block of data, it’s not worth that much to us. We don’t know what to do with it. I have all this knowledge but I can’t do anything with it because we never had a way in which we could harvest the network effect ourselves until blockchain came about. With the network effect going to the platforms, they realized that they get the benefit and they don’t want to share that so they created these walled gardens and make sure nobody else gets access to it. That business model is that every social network is in every platform, in every marketplace, and every game.

As a result, we have all these separate little kingdoms not talking to each other with their separate little data empires trying to attract us to go in, giving us all sorts of candies so that we can go in and use it surrendering all our data rather willingly Matrix-style but not appreciating what we’re giving up. We always thought that our digital life was an add-on to physical life. As I illustrated before, if you lose your digital life in a way, in the sense that you lose your platform, your human potential is less and therefore, in many cases, may be worth more. How do we protect non-fungible tokens in blockchain?

Blockchain is the one mechanism in which we can own anything digital that is not controlled by a single party. Who controls it? The end-users, us as a community. Depending on what system we’re talking about or what consensus, that’s a different topic. No single platform can operate in all of that. We’ve seen an example where the network effect becomes powerful within a community of a service that even the largest of companies are forced to use it and that example is open source. It’s probably the one and only service of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 that emerged to demonstrate open source as a potential.

If I’m using something that is not open-source, I can avail myself to the network knowledge of the millions of coders that have contributed, which is also the reason why a five-person startup can compete with Google on product and service because now they have access to all of that. The network talent that sits inside open-source is large that Google or IBM can’t with all their resources compete with that. Everyone is now contributing to open-source and we all benefit but that’s not true for content. Non-fungible tokens are going to be an open digital asset and it’s going to deliver to digital assets with open source digital code.

You talked about, in various ways, competing with Google and Facebook. We’ve talked about it as unprincipled. We’ve talked about it as digital citizens or even non-digital citizens. Those are very interesting framing and it makes me think about all of the data surrender that has been encouraged over the past decade or two by these types of companies. I was always intrigued by the fact that the founders and the leaders of those companies weren’t throwing their data out there. Not to say that they should have to necessarily but there’s an interesting contrast between those things. One asset that you have is the funding round to compete with this type of strategy. I’d like to check in on that. How is this funding going to reshape your mission of creating sustainable player-owned economies with NFTs?

First of all, the funding will help us supercharge a lot of things in terms of building out the ecosystem. One of the things that we have done in the past, with the acquisition side, is we have brought in content, in this case, games. Games are still digital feudalism. These gaming platforms don’t provide a good service to the end-users. Ultimately, the game business model has become exploitative by necessity. To make money, I have to keep selling content. To keep selling content, I have to devalue what else is in there. Otherwise, there’s no incentive for you to buy more content. It’s a traditional loop that’s out there. The economic setup is closer to that of Venezuela or possibly even North Korea. That’s not a place that many people would like to live in.

When it comes to funding, there are two parts to this. The biggest and most important thing that we have to help develop and grow is a community. The assets that we grow contain that network effect of the community. If I’m buying an NFT, what I’m buying isn’t just a beautiful object that looks good. I’m buying access to the network effect, the network power of the whole community that owns these assets. That means that with the capital that we’re doing is we’re investing and creating these types of assets that have powerful network effects or at least designing around them. Games are one of those that have powerful, intrinsic network effects because it’s social, people play together, they use these assets and so on.

We’ve seen this happen with things like Axie Infinity, with sandboxes developing or even with F1 Delta Time. People are valuing and using these assets because of the utility but also because of the future potential or who else is using it. We see that. That’s how we’re going to be using our funding to drive that. The business was already doing quite well before and didn’t need the funding, per se. One of the reasons we also brought in the funding was to bring in the partners that we have. Bringing in money isn’t about capital to deploy. Bringing in money is bringing in new shareholders and new stakeholders who then have a vested interest in your success.

By introducing groups like Blue Pool, Goby Ventures, Samsung, or Razer, these are companies that are more than money. These are companies that have access to millions and millions of potential new users into the space. Working with a company like Razer is not a surprise because of the fact that they have access and reach to all the gamers that buy their hardware. Working with someone like Scopely is also something untechnical here because they are one of the biggest game companies in the world and they have lots of users playing games. It’s bringing that in as well.

A problem has many solutions around it. Click To Tweet

Where we want to deploy the capital is we want to build these network assets and that comes in the form of IP. It’s one of the reasons why everyone out there is trying to acquire big IP and the prices have risen ever since. We were fortunate that we had acquired a lot of IPs in 2018 and 2019 when NFT was like, “What’s that? I’m not sure what that is but it sounds cool. Take our IPs.” It was a lot more economic to acquire IP back then but now, everything is much more expensive, so we need more capital. You see that in other deals as well.

The other one is from the M&A side, where we have created a little bit of a niche for ourselves is that we’re out there bringing in-game studios into this universe of blockchain gaming. We’re reforming and reforging their economies from what was inflationary in nature to one that has a true economic infrastructure with blockchain and that is something that we know how to do well at the moment. That’s how we’re doing it as well. Continuing to invest in the space, making lots of investments and helping grow the ecosystem. We want to be helping to grow this.

We’re in a position where we can help shape the thinking around that space, which is rare. It’s not many times where you can be in a situation where you can help direct people towards how we think this new decentralized world should be. That’s also why we announced our accelerator, where we’re bringing in the youngest of founders having great ideas and building it out. We are possibly the first NFT accelerator in the world.

Since you mentioned the accelerator, tell us a little bit more about that. You’re partnering with Brinc and it’s called the Launchpad Luna.

Launchpad Luna is very much a nod to the whole crypto community in terms of the thinking around where that is in a slightly less obvious but still the obvious way.

It’s also one of my favorite projects. It’s a cool one.

The thing here is, why did we partner with Brinc? We’re already an investor in Brinc. Brinc is the Y Combinator of Asia. They have launched many successful batches originally in the hardware space but then ultimately, they moved into food tech services and all that stuff. They know how to run accelerators. They know the program inside out. They’re experts in that. They’ve raised tons of money within the companies that are out there. We don’t run accelerators. We have a vision and we know what to do there. If we suddenly have to build the capability of running an accelerator, that would be difficult. That’s why we partnered with Brinc.

The funding is us. We funded and we supported it. What’s also interesting there is the funding goes up to $500,000. For those who have come to the court, at least $250,000, which is significant. It’s not a small chunk of money for founders in that space. What’s also incredible with Launchpad Luna is the outpouring of support that we have managed to get from all of the mentors, advisors and supporters who said, “We’d love to support this. We want to help grow the ecosystem.” This includes not only companies we invested in, outside of our own Sandbox or the folks at Axie Infinity. We have people like the Metapurse, Metakovan. We’ve got Gabby from Yield Guild Games. We’ve got the team from Zed Run. We’ve got all these incredible individuals and groups that are supporting it.

We also have platforms. It’s wonderful. It’s reflective of the NFT community, which is a willingness to share because they understand the power of what that could deliver. It reminds me also back in the earliest days of the internet where we were starting that this was very much the ethos as well. People are sharing openly about how things should be and how to grow that space before it became more centralized. We want to encourage that and continue to grow that. We’re stoked to see it happen. We announced it. We’ll see what cohorts come in.

You’ve had amazing several years but the last couple in terms of partnerships has been impressive. You have the Formula E, WWE Undefeated, Dapper Labs relationship, Axie Infinity, and much more. You have this public alpha for REVV Racing, the arcade simulation car racing blockchain game with $150,000 in prizes. It’s built on Polygon. It launches on August 11th, 2021. To our readers, by the way, you have to hang around for details that we’ll cover about a killer launch contest we’re helping Animoca to run. For now, tell us more about REVV Racing. What is it all about?

REVV Racing was born out of the idea that we wanted to have more freedom in terms of what we could develop with brands in terms of the cars and the racing context out there. Our first game was F1 Delta Time. F1 Delta Time is, as far as NFT, are fairly famous because of Metakovan’s initial purchase of the 1-1-1, which in 2019 became the most expensive NFT. In 2020, the sale of a Monaco track was the most expensive NFT as well. These were modest sums in comparison to what we’ve seen in 2021. Back then, it made headlines.

I remember, Metakovan never disclosed his ownership up until now. A lot of people were like, “Nobody’s ever going to spend that money on NFT. This has to be an inside job.” What’s also interesting is that the controversy of that fueled more conversation on it. That helped usher in more discussion around NFTs. Because we work with F1, it was helping him to do brand power. Also, there were restrictions when you work with IPs. In the case of F1, they have different games that are out there. The way the game has to be played has to be distinct from another game. There are restrictions around that.

By introducing something like REVV Racing, we have the freedom to do the games we want to do, which is either front-facing, skill-based in a certain way, all these things that we couldn’t do. We have hired and brought on board people like Matt Solomon and professional Formula 3 racers and drivers to help recreate a racing experience that feels like that of a racer. That’s all part of the freedom we wanted to implement with REVV Racing and create this incredible racing experience from the top down with the funding that we have to make an awesome game. The other thing you’ll note is that we have also started partnerships with drivers themselves and working with them. This is not on an advisory on the NFT side. We’re hoping also to design specific cars that they can model as well where they can say, “This is the dream car I would have wanted to have,” and work with them.

That’s amazing. Eathan and I know a racecar driver. We’re going to have to talk to him about this.

Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee also designed race cars in college at DIGITALAX. She’s an amazing leader in the space. There’s something brewing here.

We even had a specific conversation with that racecar driver, “What can I do with NFTs?”

We have a couple of the segments we want to get to. We’re probably all fascinated with the next question I want to ask, which we tend to love to ask people. We saw how you were prescient back in 2018 with the various investments and partnerships you made. We could delve deeply into why that happened for you. You’re intelligent here, especially about the space. We like to think long-term on this podcast 3 years, 5 years, 10 years or 100 years. What do you see in the NFT space, projects, platforms, either existing or yet to be formed that are standing out to you that will be game-changers in the more distant future?

NFT Gaming: If you buy an NFT, what you’re actually buying isn’t just a beautiful object that looks good. You’re buying access into the network effect and network power of the whole community.

The way I view the space is a little bit like the internet 2000, 2001, meaning that we’re that early in the stage of our development. You have to take that into the context of numbers. How many people have a DeFi wallet? In the context of it, maybe still less than 100 million now. How many people have NFTs? It’s maybe barely over a million. We’re early in the stage. It’s difficult to pinpoint and say, “Here’s this specific winner.” That’s a little bit like saying, “Who’s going to be winning the search wars, per se?” That’s the first part.

The second part is I don’t think and I don’t want that there should be a future where there is a zero-sum approach, meaning that there is one winner, winner takes all. Because of the way the business model was designed and because of the inherent weakness of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, it necessitated a consolidation of that. We as people were unable to manage our own data, so we gave it to someone else to manage for us because they would be able to obtain the network effect from that and then give us a small part of that benefit. Not telling us, that they kept most of it for themselves.

Blockchain can change this, meaning that the network effect is one that we participate in each and every time that we have an involvement with this, whether it’s through NFTs, tokens, or whatnot. In that infrastructure, I am hoping for a birth where there will be thousands and thousands of companies out there. Axie Infinity is certainly leading the pack when it comes to blockchain gaming but it won’t be the only one that’s out there. At the same time, I also don’t think that even if Axie Infinity doesn’t end up becoming one of the biggest ones out there, they will always be there because they have a community and they have a loyal audience and they have people who love the product for what it stands for. We’ve seen examples of this, particularly from the gaming world.

The gaming world also doesn’t have a singular giant. There are hundreds of unicorn companies on public and private markets in the world of gaming. I remember this because back in 2011, when we were one of the mobile game leaders, we had to obtain funding from the likes of Intel, Excel, and IDG. We had an opportunity to invest in many of the emerging mobile game companies and mobile platforms in 2011 because we were in a leadership position and we could do so. At the time, similar to where Animoca Brands is, people were like, “We want to work with you because you seem to know what you’re doing.”

At the time, our investors were like, “No. We didn’t give you money so that you could invest in what might be competitors.” Don’t enable them, kill them. That was the mantra because it was very much zero-sum thinking. That was a mistake. Many of them ended up becoming successful for which we could have participated. More importantly, we lost intelligence. We lost the opportunity to share ideas. We lost the opportunity to connect closer with them. Also, as we have seen, it wasn’t one game company ruling the world, it was many of them and they continue to emerge in that space. The metaverse will develop in exactly the same way.

What I love about this is that it does celebrate diversity because we now have a way in which we can exist in a place that speaks more to ourselves rather than being in an environment that necessitates you to be the platform deemed you to be because there’s only 1 or 2. In a way, being on Facebook or being on Instagram is a definition of an expression that is forced upon you. You can participate in a passive way but then you don’t get the same benefit. Most of the people that are on Instagram that succeed are the ones who are, frankly, more extroverted in nature, perhaps louder or more whatever it is that they’re doing because that is how that platform is designed.

With blockchain economies, you’ll have different forms of consensus. It’s not just consensus in terms of the chain but it’s also consensus in terms of how the game is run. Maybe I like a game that’s a bit more centralized. Maybe I like a game that’s completely decentralized. Whatever that may be, you can choose to exist there on these platforms as you like. The future will be decentralized not just in terms of ownership but decentralized in the form where platforms, content, and marketplaces will be all over the place. This will be better because we now have a fair take of that network effect. With the artists, you can take 10% of all the secondary sales. That means the artist now has the freedom to do other things with that and create and innovate in different ways. There will be hundreds of niche marketplaces out there that can thrive because we’ve moved from rental economics to ownership economics. That’s another big point.

To be optimized in your performance, you have to be able to say no at times. Click To Tweet

That’s good to know because we’re young and we want to be around a long time having conversations with folks like you about this exciting place where innovation happens within days and weeks as opposed to years.

I also find it interesting the way that you’re envisioning the future of many players and it reminds me of the process of speciation within biology. Biodiversity is where learning is key to the health of the planet. I studied neuroscience and it makes me think of the different ways that the brain has been viewed over the years. It almost always coincides with the economic technology of the day. When you had the Industrial Age, the brain was a machine. When you had the Computer Age, the brain was a computer. When you have the Network Age, the brain was a network. Now, I even see the brain is probably going to be more and more viewed as an ecosystem in the next stage.

We’re talking about economic ecosystems and all the players having their important roles and respecting them. Within the brain, we’re even talking about the heart brain, the gut-brain, the head brain, and how they all need to be integrated. I love the direction that you’re going with how you’re thinking about the future. I appreciate all the answers to these questions, wonderful and thoughtful answers. We appreciate having you on the show. That’s why we have the next segment and that we want to get to know you a little bit better.

We’re excited to have you here. Edge Quick Hitters are a fun and quick way to get to know you a little better. Ten questions and we’re looking for short, single, or few-word answers but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready to dive in?

Let’s get started.

Question number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

Probably some candy as a kid. The first memory that comes to mind is my mom gave me a little bit of money. I grew up in Austria so it was some shillings. It was tiny. She said, “Go buy your own candy.” I was like, “Okay, fine.” I go ahead and I’m super excited. I go to the store and pick something from the candy bar. That was my first memory of purchasing something.

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

My mom’s shoes. It was a funny situation. This is also in Austria. My mom would throw out things like they all do in spring cleaning. There was a pair of golden shoes. My mom was an opera singer first and then became an opera director. A dramatic wear was something that was part of her nature. She had some fantastic costumes and outfits. There were these shoes that were golden, shimmering and were incredible. They may as well be flying shoes. I was like, “You can’t throw this away. This thing is valuable.” I was a kid. She’s like, “I don’t need this anymore.” I said, “I should go try and sell it.” I thought that I could make some money. I went around and took the neighborhood old school style on a bicycle and broadcasting, “Golden shoes for sale.” I was maybe 7 or 8. I don’t remember the age. It was my first big experience. Most people are thinking, “What’s this crazy Asian kid in the middle of this neighborhood doing?”

Did you sell the shoes?

Yes. At the end of the day, it was peanuts but I was glad to be able to find some crazy buyer. I don’t know what they thought. It was probably a charity buy. It was like, “This kid, shut him up. Buy the shoes so he’d shut up.”

You didn’t negotiate 10% royalties for life on future purchases?

No. I wasn’t that sophisticated yet. I just wanted to sell it. That was the first thing I remember.

You’re still hustling and identifying opportunities at an early age. Number three, what is the most recent thing you purchased?

Not to toot our own horn but because of the timing, it was Olympic NFTs. It’s our subsidiary and we had launched these NFTs and had done a sale for them. I had purchased them. We’re doing a sale for the Tokyo Olympic NFTs, which is an interesting one because the Tokyo Olympics has many stories both positive and negative attached to it. They’re the official licensors. I bought some NFTs. I haven’t bought much in the physical world, to be frank. Everything has been virtual.

Number four is, what’s the most recent thing you sold?

I can’t think of anything I’ve sold. I’m generally a holder. Even with virtual assets, I buy and then store them and keep them. I’m buying mostly virtual assets like Bored Apes. I bought a bunch and Meebits because I had some CryptoPunks and everything. I haven’t sold anything. This question is harder for me to answer because I don’t know what I sold. It doesn’t come obvious to me.

Number five, what is your most prized possession?

It’s difficult because prized possessions are one of those things that alter over time. If you had to ask me this question now, I would say it is our family home. Why is it prized? It’s because it contains my kids. We have three kids. We grew up in this house. The memories attached to everything around us are what make it prized in our view. There’s a little bit more of that as well that comes into play. I would say it is our family home for all these reasons.

All those memories and experiences are special. Number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical service and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be?

I don’t have a particular attachment to physical things in terms of needing to buy a car or something like this. As a little context, I don’t even know how to drive, so I don’t have a relationship with cars in that way. I do love the appearances and look at them, but I don’t have that, which is why I have team members that helped me on that side of things. On the digital side, if I could buy it again, the narrative is so incredible. If I could get some bigger plots of LAND on Sandbox for myself would be quite amazing because I see where that’s going. That’s what I feel passionate about. Stuff on the virtual side, come and pitch to me. I’m very likely to be a buyer at this point.

Switching gears, a little bit, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?

My optimism and positivity are something that’s helped me fuel through, frankly, some pretty dark days. This comes from maybe a background of how I grew up and also the fact that ultimately, I have a divergent approach. It wasn’t designed this way but it was a circumstance of the time. I was forced to be different and divergent in my approach, which led me ultimately to find multiple pathways when there was a problem. A problem has many solutions around it as opposed to there’s a problem and that’s a dead end. That is a trait that we don’t have enough of, because of the way that we’re educating our children and the way that we were told the way the world was working.

We talked about people who have solutions but the path of people having solutions is this being divergent in their approach but you need to be optimistic. If you’re not optimistic, it doesn’t matter how a diversion approach you are. You won’t be able to see the positive pathway and you won’t do it anyway. I’ve seen so many people paralyzed by being pessimistic. They won’t do it. They won’t even try. Even if it’s zero cost to do it or little risk doing it, they won’t do it because they see all the dangers and not the positive benefits. That would probably be one of the traits I would love to pass on.

NFT Gaming: We now have a way in which we can exist in a place that speaks more to ourselves rather than being in an environment that necessitates you to be like how the platform deemed you to be.

It’s such a key insight. Optimism leads to resilience. Question eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?

It’s a little bit related to the first one because they all come in counterbalances. As a result of being optimistic, I have a difficult time saying no because every time someone would present something to me, I see all the possibilities. I see all the ways in which it could be even if it’s not there because that’s my nature. The positive side helps develop the opportunity but maybe sometimes I infer too deeply into what could happen. Sometimes, I would say to be optimized in your performance because we have limits. We have capacity. We are scarce in our own way. We have to be able to say no at times too. I’ve gotten better over time to do that. I suppose wisdom does that a little bit but I would say that it is certainly not my superpower.

I can totally relate and oftentimes, I use Jeff as a litmus test for some of my ideas.

We’re glad you said yes to joining us. It’s been a ton of fun.

If you say yes to lots of things, I also have a golden pair of shoes to sell you. I’m pegging the starting bid at maybe $1 million. We’ll see how far that goes. Moving on, question nine. It’s a little easier. What did you do before joining us for the show?

I was sleeping. It’s 5:00 AM in Hong Kong. I got up before the show.

Question ten, what are you going to do next after the show?

Since it’s early in the morning, typically what I do is I go for a walk or run with my dog and my wife. It’s 6:00 AM so probably in about half an hour or an hour, we’re out there. I typically like to start the day with a form of exercise out in nature. Hong Kong is great that way even though the weather hasn’t been fantastic. Most people don’t realize Hong Kong is something 70% or 80% green. We live right next to mountains and great scenery. That powers the day when you start this way, at least for us. This is a daily routine.

It’s a great way to start the day.

I went from knowing Central Park in New York City to visiting Hong Kong and going through some of the mountain green hikes they have there. That’s their version of Central Park. We were surprised to see hogs and monkeys running around.

There are animals are everywhere. It’s a jungle.

It’s an amazing way to start the day and a great way to finish our Edge Quick Hitters. Thanks so much for those ten questions. I appreciate it. Do you want to hit a couple of hot topics?

Sure.

Let’s do it. Let’s talk about what’s in the news here. The first item to talk about is coming to us from the Crypto Briefing here. It says Polygon Launches NFT Gaming Studio. The studio will focus on growing the global blockchain gaming and NFT industry. This is an interesting development of Polygon. Any thoughts on this from Jeff or Josh?

I feel that Yat has the inside scoop here already. It’s a hunch.

First of all, we’re working closely with Polygon. If you go to the Polygon website, you’ll see that Animoca Brands is mentioned as a partner. We’re involved with that. We’re launching the REVV Racing game on Polygon. We have a couple of other things that are happening in that. We’ve been great supporters, and they’ve been supportive of what we’re doing as well. It’s a great solution, particularly for Ethereum based.

It’s necessary as well to bring more resources into the space, because we all believe that gaming is going to bring more people into the blockchain. Polygon recognizes that as well, and building out specific tools and to help onboard that. We ourselves are doing that as well together with Polygon. Where we are a little different is we are very much cross-chained so we work with Flow, Polygon, Binance, and everyone because we think that the future ought to be cross-chain. It’s not incompatible at all with what Polygon is doing here. After all, they are essentially a layer solution for Ethereum.

With Polygon, we get these reduced gas fees, which are so important for transaction-based economies like gaming, where you want people to play and not have buyer’s remorse about making these micro-decisions with their games because of gas fees.

It’s a whole different story when I buy something online and the tax is 5% or 10% of my purchase and a whole other game when I buy something in crypto and the tax is three times the actual purchase price of what I wanted to buy.

Ten times or one time.

That Gary Vee NFT that we bought Jeff, I still have nightmares about the gas.

The cost of gas is an interesting one because tax is a point where the transaction fee may not make sense economically but I do like the system of gas and costs because of the fact that it ensures that there is at least in our view, a way in which the network is kept healthy and maybe it’s too expensive, then it becomes maybe a little bit like Switzerland. Maybe only certain kinds of transactions make sense in that environment like big banking services or whatever that may be. The fact that there is a cost to me is good because it ensures that the network is kept healthy, paid for and people are rewarded for the activity. That is an important aspect of a blockchain feature.

The idea of taxes and fees, I can get on board with if my taxes are going to something that benefits me, my family, and my community. It’s where we get frustrated when these types of add-on fees go to a central authority and we have no idea what they’re doing with them. That’s the spirit of what’s going on with blockchain. When these things happen, it’s going to be decentralized instead of individuals that help control what’s happening next.

That’s a great segue, Eathan to the next article we found about governance in NFTs.

The world’s first NFT resort will revolutionize the timesharing market. “LABS Group, the first end-to-end crowdfunding service in the blockchain and real estate industry launched the world’s first community-powered and owned resort, Kunang Kunang Glamping Resort would solve the pain points of the traditional timeshare market and it’s interesting that it’s glamping. I feel like all of these revolutionary new things remind me a little bit of Burning Man.”

It’s an existential question for me. Are there problems in the timeshare market or is the timeshare market a problem?

One thing that blockchain is going to infiltrate much like how the internet has every part of every business so it doesn’t matter to me almost what that does is. It will be on Web 3.0 because of the fact that the nature of it will offer a distribution of its benefits in a way that is no longer centralized. It applies to everything we do but there are flavors one has to consider here. When it comes to things like timeshare, without knowing the full details, which I don’t. Is that an element that starts to draw closer into possibly a security, if it gives you ownership in that. When it’s a derivative of something, especially if it’s a fractionalized derivative, it certainly becomes a security.

NFT Gaming: There’s a counterbalance between rapid super-fast innovation that breaks all barriers and the existing rules out there designed to protect.

This is something that the industry at large because it is a little bit Wild West, as well. Everyone’s innovating and creating. That’s great on one hand. On the other hand, though, the people who are building it don’t have all of those experiences. They don’t maybe even understand that what they’re doing is something that becomes a security and therefore, gets into riskier territory because they don’t even know what that is.

There’s a counterbalance between rapid superfast innovation breaking all barriers. There are existing rules out there designed to protect, and one has to pay attention to that. This is probably the one space where we employ lots of lawyers and so on to help us think through all of the projects, we get involved in. That is something that is untypical because in the past, you innovate and do but now, you do need to have a review especially when you’re issuing a token or even with NFTs. Just because you issue an NFT, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be a security.

We all hope that it’s a fresh and new space where a lot is going on and people are experimenting. It’s great to be able to have those resources of lawyers and in the end, let’s try to support those people who are trying to do good in the space. Let them experiment and hope the regulators can help foster that as well. That can probably conclude our hot topic. You especially have had some great opinions on that stuff so we appreciate it. We should probably check in with you quickly about where people can go to find out more about what you’d like them to and we’ll have Jeff, wrap us up.

If you want to learn more about what we do, you probably go and visit projects like The Sandbox or REVVMotorSport.com. That’s basically some of the things we’re talking about. General Information on local brands, you can go to our website, you can also follow our Twitter. I’m reasonably active myself on Twitter discussing things and sharing stuff under my handle. If you search Animoca, you can find a whole bunch of stuff. We also post on Medium and have thoughts and opinions on this one. Do look us up and check us out.

There’s no better way to keep up with what you guys are doing than to be part of the action and be part of the REVV Racing landscape and get your own REVV Racing car. I’m excited to share a little bit more about that with our readers and give them a chance to participate in this Genesis Event. Animoca is going to generously give us access to some level one REVV Racing Car NFT’s, which can be used to play the new blockchain game, REVV Racing, and earn from $150,000 prize pool. Tell us a little bit more about what’s going on here with this Genesis event that we’re fortunate to be part of.

REVV Racing is basically the genesis of a new racing game that is sitting on Polygon. We wanted to bring more to the masses. One of the challenges we also had with F1 was the value of these assets because the income potential had skyrocketed, so it’s become harder for people to be onboarded as well. In order to start playing on F1 Delta Time, you need to spend thousands of dollars and that’s not the most obvious way to get on board but it generates a strong yield. There was an article on one of our players who had bought a house in Queensland, Australia for his family of three based on his winnings of racing in F1 Delta Time. That was already beginning, as it were.

With REVV Racing, we are trying to be more inclusive community-wise. We are generating these cars through these staking, earning, if you have REVV, and participation events to build out a community that can benefit from all this play to earn growth that we’re seeing. Because it’s level one cars, everyone, in this case, is skill-based. Everyone’s on a level playing field and they can compete for that early prize pool as a start. As time goes on, we have custom cars, we have more levels that you can use your existing level one cars to upgrade to level two cars.

There’s a pathway to basically start with these assets and grow that. I would encourage everyone to participate as much as they can in this because as we continue to invest and grow in the REVV ecosystem, the way to enter it is through level one assets. These level one assets are what we’re generously giving out because we want to build the community. There will be a point, of course, where that stops and the upgrade paths begin. That’s where the scarcity will ultimately come in. As we have done with previous models rewarding the early adopters is how we’re looking to grow the space.

I’m super excited about it. I’ll give a little recap for all of our readers here as well with some of those details he noted. Readers, REVV Racing and Edge of NFT is giving away 1,000 Level 1 REVV Racing Car NFTs. Enjoy the drive and the opportunity to win a total of $150,000 in prizes. Players will compete in a seven-day competitive racing event starting on August 11th, 2021. Now’s the time to get yourself a sleek racing car by going TinyURL.com/REVVcars, and follow the steps to enter. The first 1,000 participants will be part of the Edge of NFT racing family along with us. You better get there quick though, because this promotion is on a first come, first serve basis and the cars will be leaving a lot faster than you can say REVV Racing. We’ll be right there in the mix trying to win cars of our own as well, so move quickly.

We’ve reached the outer limits at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starships. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. How? Go to iTunes right now, rate us say something cool and they go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Want to help co-create Edge of NFT with us? You’ve got guests you want to see on the episode, questions for the hosts or guests and NFT you’d like for us to review, drop us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet us @EdgeOfNFT to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.

Important Links:

• Animoca Brands
• Dalton Foundation
• Cortico
• Register.com
• Indie Hackers Podcasts
• CryptoKitties
• Axiom Zen
• Dapper Labs
• Axie Infinity
• F1 Delta Time
• Brinc
• Launchpad Luna
• Metapurse
• Yield Guild Games
• Zed Run
• REVV Racing
• Bored Apes
• Meebits
• CryptoPunks
• Polygon Launches NFT Gaming Studio
• Polygon
• Flow
• Binance
• The world’s first NFT resort will revolutionize the timesharing market
• REVVMotorSport.com
• Twitter – REVV
• Twitter – Yat Siu
• Medium – Animoca Brands
• TinyURL.com/REVVcars
• iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
• Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com
• @EdgeOfNFT – Twitter

About Yat Siu

Yat Siu moved to Hong Kong in 1996, where he set up Hong Kong Cybercity, the first free web page and email provider in Asia. In 1997 Yat joined AT&T Solutions’ System Integration practice, but left in 1998 to set up Outblaze, which developed innovative web-based multilingual white label communication and collaboration services.

Yat Siu’s steady leadership and vision steered Outblaze through the Dotcom Bubble and several subsequent crises. Outblaze became a world leader in white label-hosted web services, winning numerous awards and accolades. With over 75 million end-users under management, Outblaze secured clients and partners from all over the world and business sectors, including service providers, telecommunications operators, corporations, academia, media and publishing companies.

In April 2009, Outblaze messaging assets were sold to IBM and incorporated in IBM’s LotusLive suite of services. IBM also used the Outblaze assets to open its first cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong. The transaction established beyond doubt that -like banking and finance services- Hong Kong’s local information technology can compete on a global scale.

Yat Siu was called World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow and a Young Global Leader of Tomorrow. He has also been awarded for his contributions in business and society: Standard Chartered Platinum Achievers Award, the URENCO Innovation Award, and, for the execution of his vision at Outblaze, the IT Excellence Product Award, Linux Business Adoption Award 2003 and the Asia Pacific Information & Communication Technologies Award 2003. Most recently he won the Young Entrepeneur Award from the Hong Kong Business Awards 2009.