The NFX podcast is about seeing what others do not. And getting at the true mechanisms behind people and companies that endure change in the world. Today, James Currier is run by Lee Jin, former partner at a 16z, and now founder and managing partner at Atelier, who focuses on investing in the passion economy, which makes it easier for people to monetize their individuality through unique, creative work.
They discuss how NFTs are changing the economics of the creator economy, what happens when everyone has to be a marketer, and how they look for ways to make platform participants into platform owners. If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a rating and review and by sharing with friends you think should listen. You can also discover more content, like other episodes, transcript, essays and videos by following us on Twitter at nfxandvisitingneffects.com. And now on to the show.
So, let's get going here. You, my friend, have been talking about fashion economy since around 2019. And just to make sure that everybody understands where that came from, can you just go quickly through what you mean by that? Yeah. When I talk about the passion economy with my investor hat on, I'm referring to technology platforms that make it easier for people to monetize individuality and to earn income through work that feels more fulfilling and meaningful and creative.
And where that came from that I would say I've been a very creative person for my whole life. I studied art very intensively as a child. I was, like, very online during my childhood doing a lot of the things that are now James, but before we're not considered to be good uses of time, like I was building websites, spending writing fan fiction, participating in online communities, all of these things are things that people can do and earn money from now, but that wasn't the case before.
Same with my passion for art and painting. And so it's always been this really lifelong desire to find a way to unite those passions and hobbies that I had with a way to monetize. Like, there always seem to be this binary choice between, like, you pursue your passions, or do you, like, opt for a logistical career and decide to major in something that's actually useful. Right. Follow your art and your heart, or go get a cube job at an insurance company. Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. It seems like such a stark decision, and it felt like with the Internet touching everything and multiplying everything, it should be possible to solve that problem. Absolutely. Yes. I think the internet uniquely unlocks this opportunity for the next generation and also Flint generations of people versus what had been available to us before in a very local IRL based world. Got it. And what's the difference between the gig economy and the passion economy?
Yeah. So I have a really cool chart that I included in my original blog post about the passion economy over at the a 16z website, but there's a few James of differenti 1 is that the type of work is different. So in the gig economy, you're doing really wrote, commoditized, kind of, repetitive work the platform is telling you exactly what to do in the passion economy workers are deciding for themselves the types of services and products they wanna offer.
The way that you scale your earnings is also different. In the gig economy, you just have to do more gigs, do more work, put in more hours, take on an additional task, versus in the passion economy, it's much more about either growing your audience or intensifying the relationship that you have with your audience and your customers. Like, that depth of fandom.
So an example would be a Patreon where you put up one video, but, you know, 4 months ago, you had five people subscribing or being a patron to your stuff, but now a thousand people. And so you've scaled it up, but you still only had to make one video to earn more. So it's a sort of scaling factor.
Exactly. And I think of, like, there's these new types of products that creators can offer that allow you to scale yourself in completely new ways and allow you to price discriminate among your audience as well so that you don't need to just, like, scale your reach and reach more people. You can monetize your superfans to higher degree such that you don't need to become mega famous. Like, what would be an example? An example is NFTs.
And have they enable creators to price discovery in a really powerful way. For instance, earlier last month, I sold my first ever and on a website called Foundation. It's an NFT marketplace. I didn't really know how much it would sell where I set the reserve price for 1.5 Pete, which at the time was about, I think, maybe, like, $3000 or something. I I thought the reserve price was quite high. I was afraid that it wouldn't Beller.
And it ended up selling for 13.37 which was about $25,000 at the time now about $50,000. But, like, that was just insane to me that there was someone out there who cared enough about me supporting me. I'm supporting my work that they were willing to pay so much for this NFT.
So I think I've jokingly called that the one true fan model versus the Kevin Beller, a 1000 true fans or this post study about a 100 true fans, but I think NFTs allow you to identify that one true super fan who is willing to pay, like, a really high amount and allow a creator to earn a lot off of, you know, not that many followers. Right. And so not only can you identify them, but really you're allowing them to by themselves. Yes. Exactly.
And in this case where this person paid this, they were not paying that amount of money because they thought the artwork was going to give them some utility. They didn't anticipate they would sell it for more. They were doing it because they were interested in supporting the person who was selling it. And the work that they were doing, maybe this work, this animated gift was part of it, but there's also a lot of other work that you do in publishing that he might have been wanted to support.
Is that right? Yeah. I actually had a conversation with him afterwards where I just wanted to understand what was going on in his mind when he was participating in this bidding war, there was a bidding war between 2 Beller. And, ultimately, his name is James And so I was asking James, like, why did you pay so much for this? What is your goal? What do you hope to do with this?
And he told me something really interesting, which was that he said, that for him, yeah, buying it was a form of activism. It was a form of sending a message to the public as well as to me that crypto can help be a solution to the creator middle class problem. That crypto should be and can be used as a way to build up the creator middle class, which I have talked about as being kind of nonexistent today.
And so for him, it was really important for him to own this NFT because he wanted to communicate through his active ownership. And so right now, we're actually in the process of talking about, like, how to leverage this NFT to fund more artists. So it's been an ongoing conversation. And did he then pitch you a startup idea? I mean, was that part of why he wanted to get to you? It wasn't a startup idea.
His idea was that we start a decentralized grant giving organization to fund emerging artists Mhmm. Mhmm. Got it. Got it. And so early on in this NFT boom, which, you know, has been in the works now for 3 years, but really just took off in the last 5 months.
You know, these sorts of acts can have a little more impact than they will, you know, in a few years when this is more commonplace, but it's interesting that transactions in this fashion economy are perceived as sorts of activism or social statements. Yeah. I think it super fascinating. I think zooming out from just this one example. I think broadly speaking, I think the coverage of NFTs as just purchasing art and investing in art. I think that kind of misses the mark.
It's definitely true of some of it, but I think it's really just scratching the surface of what people are trying to accomplish when they purchase. I think there's NFT sales that function as relationship building. Mhmm. In this case, like, I formed a relationship with this buyer. We're still talking about how to fund emerging creators. We're thinking about setting up this, like, decentralized organization to do So there's that element.
I think it's a way to capture the attention of a creator in a world in which the creator Pete constantly being bombarded by tons of messages constantly, like, this is a way to dial up the volume of your message in a way. My friend, Patrick Rivera, he had this amazing tweet recently where he said that Currently, on the internet, all likes are fungible. Everyone's like counts as the same like, but I think NFTs are a form of a non fungible like. Right.
And is this some sort of an indication that perhaps we have a very immature attention economy? Where this person was willing to spend $25,000 to get your attention Yeah. And that we are undervaluing attention dramatically and that over the next few years, maybe that is going to get priced in and fixed. Yeah. I think this is such an interesting topic of discussion, and I still need to really clarify my own thoughts around it.
But I think when people typically talk about the attention economy, they're referring to creators amassing the attention of an audience. And then after they have the attention, they're able to monetize that attention in all sorts of different ways. I think what's really interesting about NFTs and some of the new creator economy products that are coming into existence is that they're reversing that relationship.
And they're flipping the economic transaction between attention, the direction that the attention is flowing, and the way that the money is flowing. And what I mean by that is The audience member is purchasing attention from someone that they admire in the case of an NFT James, in the case of, like, a cameo a sale, a cameo purchase. I think of the fan of that celebrity is purchasing their attention for a brief moment in time as well.
James with, like, the tipping behavior that you see on only fans, which drives a ton of their GMV. Like, people are sending large tips to creators as a way to get their attention. And so, yeah, I think of it as not just monetizing the attention that you have, but potentially, like, paying for the attention of someone that you wanna establish a relationship with. Right. And in the sense of Cameo, I might buy that shout out for my son or for my wife because I'm trying to get her attention.
I'm essentially buying her attention by getting that person to give her That's it. Yeah. Just all this attention going around, and it's gonna get increasingly monetized because we can measure it in the digital realm. Right. And attention has become such a scarce thing. To capture that people are willing to pay for it. Does that mean everyone has to become a marketer? I mean, because we have a person who was really good at getting attention through Twitter, and he ended up being president.
To be president if you're really good at this. Is that the future world that the marketers are the winners? I think for better or worse, yes. And I think this relates to, an amazing post that Paki McCormick just put out the other day called The Great Online James, where he describes how we are all participants in this huge Massive multiplayer online game, but not in the traditional sense of an online James. Rather, like, this game spans the entire web. It spans the entire world.
It bridges to the offline world, like our performance in this online game of Twitter and social media and blogging, etcetera, It bleeds into the opportunities that we have for making income and for progressing in our careers and for networking and connecting with people. And I think we're now in a world where you do have to play this game. You don't have an option anymore.
Like, I think the notion that you could have one job forever, and it could be pretty secure as long as you just did a good job in that position. I feel like those days are over. In America. Mhmm. So you do have to play the game. I and part of the game is being a good marketer. And isn't that gonna be exhausting for certain personality types?
Yes. Yeah. I mean, certain personality types are gonna be very disadvantaged in this new world because they might not like tweeting or they might not like getting that type of attention. Yeah. I'd completely agree. Yeah. I don't think it's gonna be this phenomenon and it's not gonna be welcomed with open arms by everyone, but I think it's happening regardless of whether or not we like Yeah.
There's, blog post I wrote, I think, in 2007 or 8 called the economics of creativity, and it details has different technologies sweep through different ages different people's talents are rewarded more with money, like incredible amounts of money, like my aunt who recorded music in the fifties and distributed it on vinyl records you know, she made 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars doing that.
Whereas my grandfather who was a great cellist and his parents had made money, he didn't make any money the thirties because radio made it so that live music just was much less compensated. Yeah. And then you get, you know, a person like Michael Birch who designed Bebo and sold it for $850,000,000. He was really good at interface design. A creative act he would have done for free.
But in that moment, you know, he made 100 of 1,000,000 at that time because that was the skill and the talent that was being rewarded by the technology of that time. And what I think we're saying here is that perhaps writing or marketing or figuring out how to get more attention is the talent for the current age and going forward. And I think being good at memes is part of that. Being able to generate memes and memeify things and get them to take off.
Like, I think that is a really prized skill set in today's day and age. Who's the best you know at doing that? I feel like this is a skill that is really native to Gen Z and all of the creators that I see on TikTok. It's all very, like, second nature to them to remix others work and do at them and collaborate on videos together and Like, that entire platform is, like, a huge generator on a daily basis of so many memes. They're constantly trying to make their videos viral and take off.
So I feel like that generation in its entirety is very good at it. You didn't say yourself part of that generation? No. You're what now? Yeah. I'm a card carrying millennial. This is no for founders out there. I get contacted by founders who are looking for Gen Z Investors and I have to break it to folks that I'm not a Gen Z investor. Got it. You're a millennial. I'm a millennial. Well done. And, you know, since 2019, certainly, I mean, how do you think about it? Cause you're a creator.
Like, you've got it raised. What how big is the fund? 13,000,000. 13,000,000. You've raised 13,000,000 from a lot of great LPs. You've made how many so far. Oh my gosh. A lot. Like, almost 30. 30 investments. And out of this $30,000,000 fund, how many more will you make? I will probably make about 15 to 20 more. Great. And you're investing anywhere from a 100 to 400 k?
Mhmm. Yeah. Okay. And at the same time, you are at the same time you were involved in, you know, getting articles, New York James, New Yorker, and other things. How do you think about your creative act as an investor? I think it's a really important part of my work, and I think it's a really important part of all investors work now. It's just given the world that we live in and everything that we've described just now.
I think it's a huge part of being able to be a good investor and to see the right deals. Today is that creative activity. But more than that, I think I do it more than just, you know, to drive deal flow and stuff. Like, I genuinely love it. Like, this is what I grew up doing. And It's clear. Yeah. So it feels like second nature. And so even if it didn't really have as much use professionally, I think I would still do it. Right. Well, that's what's interesting about it.
I mean, it resonates with me that this is the passion economy. And if you have a passion for startups, you have a passion for investing. You have a passion for the future of work and all the things that talk about, then you're gonna be natural at it. Think people will be drawn to listen to folks who are really wearing their heart on their sleep. Yeah. I agree.
I think I feel you doing that, but also adding in, you know, the intelligence to mummify it or to put it in a way that people can understand the core message. Oh, thank you. Yeah. It's very cool. Yeah. It's very cool. I think also I think everyone's a creator. I think everyone has a creative streak. Like, when we're in kindergarten, everyone thinks of themselves as an artist.
And we kind of lose that over time, and people stop thinking of themselves that way, and people start saying, like, I can't draw. Like, no one said that when they were 5. Everyone thought they draw. I think everyone has a creator inside of them. To your point that, like, having to be a good marketer is not Pete don't all want that. I think there is a type of creativity that everyone enjoys. They just need to find it. Right. And some of it's gonna get more attention. Some of it won't.
Yeah. Yeah. But the form that gets attention is gonna be more monetizable in the world we live in going forward. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. So it's interesting. You made a comment that some people call you looking for Gen Z Investors. Why? Why do you think they're looking for Gen Z Investors? I thought you were gonna ask, why do they think I'm Gen Z Which is probably because I behave in a really young way. But to your actual question, why do you I think they're looking for Gen Z Investors?
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure, and I would love to learn more about their rationale because I think it's a bad move to select your investors based on their age and to artificially constrain yourself in that way because it's I don't know what the boundary is between gen z and millennial. Like, maybe 25 or something. It's not like something magically happens overnight where if you're if you're born after a certain day, you're just, like, not qualifying to invest or add value to this company.
So I think it's, like, too rough of a constraint to impose on the way that people look for Investors. I think what they're trying to use age as a proxy for is being plugged in to youth, trends, and youth culture. Which, I guess it correlates with your age, but it doesn't necessarily mean that someone who's gen z is necessarily an Pete, or if someone's not a gen zed they're necessarily clueless.
So I would encourage founders to be more open minded about the age of their investors because I remember the days when all of this, like, online culture stuff and, like, blogging and YouTubers and all that. It used to be so hyper associated with millennials. And somehow, like, Millennials are now over the hill, and the torch has been passed on to Gen Z and only Gen Z get to be online people. Only they get it. Yeah. I don't know how this happened, but I don't think it's actually accurate.
Like, millennials also grew up very online. A lot of my friends are growing up for people that I'd never met in person. They were blowing that on online forums and aim. So, yeah, I don't think one's age necessarily dictates how savvy they are. It does sound like maybe what they were saying was I want someone who gets it.
Yeah. You know, if you're out there pitching these investors and they just don't get it, if you're pitching a biotech company, you want biotech investors who understand biotech because otherwise they're just not gonna Flint. I can relate to the feeling that you're just looking for someone who's gonna get And that can take many forms.
Maybe it's age or maybe it's that they're really into social media or that they like biotech or whatever, but we Beller that tool, you know, of signal.nfx.com to let people find, like, who's gonna get this idea? That's why I get that. I get that. But I think it's also the case that, you know, when you get a lot of attention, people are gonna call you up just because your name is well known too. They're hoping to find something that resonates with you. You're listening to the NFX podcast.
If you're enjoying this episode, feel free to rate and review our channel and share this conversation with someone you think would benefit from these insights. Follow us on social at nfx and visit nfx.com for more content. And now, back to the show. So what are some of the passion economy companies that you think are most emblematic of what's happening with this ability for the internet to let us make scalable revenue generation from things we really care deeply about.
Then after that, I wanted to just ask you, what do you think are the keys to getting these types of businesses going. And I say that because I have a suspicion that it's something about attention. It's something about network effects. It's something about viral effect that is gonna be the key to differentiating one because, look, we probably see, I don't know, 4 companies a week that are figuring out some new form of you know, passionate economy platform. We're gonna get people paid.
We're gonna get people notice. We're gonna and it's very hard to distinguish between them because so many people have a passion about being passionate. And so it's like maybe 10 years ago when people were making these loyalty programs for restaurants and bars. Right? Like, everybody in New York had one of these startups because they thought, would this be a great life if I could, you know, build a platform or marketplace for restaurants and bars?
And then right now, we're seeing the same thing with the passion economy. That some of these platforms are coming in. So I'm trying to dig in for our listeners for the startup founders. What are those key things that make for great companies in this area? Yeah. Great question. So I'll start with the examples of companies that I think are really emblematic of this shift towards the fashion economy. I'll name 2 companies. This is just like, you know, tiny small sample size.
There's many others doing very cool stuff, but one of them is mirrormirror.xyz. They're a blogging platform that's Beller on crypto that enables writers to monetize in all sorts of new interesting crypto based ways. So one of those is potentially minting your essay as an NFT and selling that through an auction. Another thing that's happening on the platform is that writers are crowdfunding Morgan piece that they're working on in advance of when it actually gets published.
So this crowdfunding mechanism, it's been used to fund novels. It's been used to fund, like, really ambitious, essays that require a bunch of time and research because I think zooming out a little bit from mirror, there's a ton of people who love to write. There's a ton of people who have interesting pockets of knowledge and expertise that can be shared with the world.
And to Pete, on the internet, the way to monetize if you are great writer is either through putting ads on your blog or I think Substack did a lot to pioneer the subscription model of newsletters. But I think those 2 models leave a lot of writers still without a great business model. And those writers that are left without a great business model are perhaps publishing a lower frequency, a lower cadence, they might publish, like, an amazing in-depth piece, like, once a year or twice a year.
They might be investing a ton of time into an investigative piece that requires months of research or relationship building, potentially that never even ends up turning into a finished piece. Substack is really subject to the same power law challenges at a place like YouTube and Twitter, or just a few make a ton, and almost everybody else makes nothing. Yes. That's right.
And I think that's a symptom of how discovery works on the internet, which is that it's driven by these algorithmic discovery platforms, the social platforms, and those discovery platforms kind of determine what readers are able to find in terms of writers. So I I don't think that's necessarily a challenge with the business model itself, but really with how attention is directed and allocated.
But I think mirror is really interesting because it's opening up Flint new type of business model and creating business model innovation around writing online. The second company I was gonna mention is called Maven. They're a platform to create cohort based courses online.
So if you're an expert in a certain topic before you could monetize that through maybe consulting or Getting a job in that industry or writing a book, but it was really hard for you to teach a course to many people, especially if that expertise area is kind of esoteric or niche. And so Maven is giving these experts all of the tools and support to package that into an online cohort based Morgan the idea is that a cohort based course can be monetized at a higher price point.
It can be much more engaging for the end students as well. They would have a much better experience going through a cohorted experience than just consuming, like, a recorded video. So it's a better experience all around, and I offered a course on that platform Currier this year, teaching about the creator economy too had a great time.
And I think the commonality of these two companies as well as getting to your second question of for founders like What are kind of the commonalities of companies that find success in the passion economy? What I'm really interested in is the companies that are inviting, like, new participants into types of creative work that had been previously inaccessible to people.
So they're enfranchising like a new segment of the population to do some type of work that hadn't really been easy or available to them before. In the mirror case, that was, like, writers who aren't publishing frequently, in the Maven case, that's experts who didn't really have a way to share that expertise and monetize it with the world.
But, like, for these companies and for many others, they're creating the entire toolbox that a person would need to convert, like, their skills or their interests or their passions into a product or a service that can be easily offered and create a great consumer experience the end of the day. So you're taking people from 0 to 1 from I'm not making any money to I'm making some money.
Yes. And it's interesting because, you know, a lot of people make businesses to compete with tools that where people are already making money. I know in marketplaces, we often see people design marketplaces to try to intermediate or digitize transactions that are already happening.
Mhmm. And the big mental breakthrough is to say, can we create something that creates transactions that aren't happening at all because now you have incredibly loyal people to your platform because you've taken them from nothing to something. Exactly. And I think this is what Clay Christensen would call new market disruption. Like, you're taking people who previously had not been productive in this way Morgan. And enabling them to participate in this new type of work that hadn't been available.
So it's creating a new market where previously the market had been much smaller didn't used to exist. And for me, personally, I think that's just a lot more exciting as an investor and as a person in this world. Than just, like, intermediating a relationship that Han already existed. And I think it's also emblematic of the huge shift that's happening in work. In this country.
Like, I think we're moving from this world in which, like, people just had a job at a company forever to a world in which more people are self employed and suing work with greater degrees of autonomy and self direction. And if that's the case, then what you really want to do is enable these new participants to be able to work in new ways, not just intermediating an existing transaction.
Yeah. And I think we started to see that you know, sort of in the 2000s with World of Warcraft where people were getting paid to kill pig and mine gold and then sell it to people. There's a new job that they'd never been in for. And then we got to see it more as I'm thinking about it with Uber And Airbnb where you have these assets that you own.
Yes. And you've basically digitized them by turning them into your profile on Uber or the profile of your home on airbnb.com, you digitized them, and now people can pay you for them in ways they couldn't do before because they can, 1, discover you and to pay you and compare them and all that. And now we've moved on to where we're creating new digital things, like you know, these NFTs where there's actually new assets.
Mhmm. These these new digital assets that can then be monetized that you can then create or something that you write infrequently, but wonderfully. And now you can monetize that. It's interesting to see that evolution. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that way. And so what else should these passion economy type products businesses be doing? Yeah. I would say another key element that I really look for is founder Morgan Flint.
And I know you have this amazing blog post on that topic, which I refer to Morgan, but I think in the passion economy, the end users, the the creators or solopreneurs or whatever you wanna call it, the users of these platforms, they're sitting somewhere between, like, a consumer and an enterprise. They're like a micro SMB.
And I think in the early days, the way that you acquire them is, like, hand holding them, identifying them, talking to the one on 1, cultivating their trust, getting them to try this completely new platform. And so it's really important for the founder to have great founder market fit to have, like, really deep customer empathy to be, like, basically one of them such that they're able to earn the trust of those initial users and to get things going and to get traction on the form.
I get nervous when, you know, someone is building for a new type of work, but just, like, does not have relationships with the types of people who would be using the platform or connectivity to those communities because I think those initial users, whether they're writers or experts or teachers or whatever, like, they're making their decision to use this platform as a huge expression of trust in the founder. Yeah. It's interesting.
Who it's coming from does matter a lot now that that's become more transparent because of the Internet. Right? Yes. Exactly. I think people actually care a lot about this. They don't just think of, you know, the platform as, like, a company that is Flint the distance Does it have the functionality I need? Is it fast enough? That's not it. That's part of it. Yeah. They care about who they're supporting by using the platform. Like, who the founders are. Who am I associating my own brand with?
Yes. Exactly. Who am I building wealth for? Yeah. That's a little tough, though, because if you're a founder and you're not of the right age or the right gender the right, you know, group, you might not be suited to win the hearts of the people you hope to win the hearts That would be a hard thing to swallow. Yeah. I and that's right. But I think that's no different than, you know, like, there's many other sectors where it's also hard for the wrong a founder to start a business in that sector.
Like, it's hard to do enterprise sales if you don't have those relationships, etcetera. Yeah. That's interesting. So finding that really strong product founder fit and getting that right from the beginning. We hear that story about Patreon with Jack, right, where he was the independent musician, and he was one of the first to do one of these creator, passion economy type platforms. Would you call Patreon one of the earlier ones? Yeah. I would. I think they really paved the way.
For the passion economy. And I think they've had huge cultural influence in a way that, like most people don't even think of or don't remember, which is that I think they gave permission to the entire world to ask for money directly and broke through the sense that everything should be free and should just be monetized through ads. Yeah. And, boy, I mean, since the nineties, we had had so many attempts at micro payments. Mhmm. And those had never worked before.
And this work because it didn't say pay me for this content or pay me for this thing, it said, pay this human being. Yes. Support me if you care about my work. Yeah. And that made it so personal. That's such a positive direct for the Internet to let us move. Isn't it? Yeah. It really is. And I think it's amazing to Pete. There's Patreon pages out there that list various donation levels or patronage Levy-Weiss, and some of them are, like, 100 of dollars per month or 1000 of dollars a month.
And I think they're only possible when you move away from, you know, pay me for this piece of content to pay me as a person, like support me as a human being. I agree. So most people would think that the real definition of happiness would be to do something you love and the money will follow. Right. This is an old phrase from, I don't know where. Mhmm. And some people say, do that. And most other people say, that's crap. That never happens.
But we're starting to see that be potentially possible because, like, I gotta say, in the last 3 years, 2 years, the proliferation of ways to make money has never been greater. Right. But there was really no new ways of making money until, you know, the late 2000s and now just got the spike in these NFTs and fungible tokens, the unfundable token. Color tokens are so many layers of new money emerging and new forms of payment and whatnot.
And so now it's gonna start to be potentially possible to do what you love and the money will follow. Do you think that could be a new social contract that our society can have with its Pete? I hope that that's the case. Although I acknowledge that perhaps it's a little too overly optimistic. Mhmm. So, yeah, I think it's not as simple as that as everyone can just be happy all the time and make money. I think you have to have true Passion. And do you have to have talent?
Yeah. You have to have talent. You have to offer something different to the end consumer. Like, I think in the passion economy, every individual creator is trying to offer a product and trying to find product market fit for it where the market is their target customer base and they themselves are the product just like in the start of world. I don't think every company. I don't think every creator gets there.
There's gonna be folks that try to do this, but aren't able to make ends meet and aren't going to be able Or find their niche. They won't be able to find their niche or they won't have the charisma. And some people are born with it, and some people have less that they're born with and can only go so far in their development. Yeah. There's gonna be some heartbreak around this because if I put out a piece of work and you don't like the work, that's fine.
But if I put myself out there and you don't like me, that feels different. Yes. Exactly. It's like when you're a founder and you get rejected for fundraising, and it feels really personal because that company is an extension of yourself. I think creators go through that on a daily basis too. Yeah. Because it's about their individuality. It's about the unique thing that's going on with them. They're putting themselves into their content, their course, their newsletter, whatever it might be.
Yeah. And this thing gets back to this bugaboo that the internet gives us, which of these power laws Yeah. Which is that some people are very charismatic and other people just aren't some people are really fast and smart and interesting to listen to, and some people aren't. The systems we've had today has not allowed for their their class, really.
Mhmm. You did this great article for the Pete listing 10 ways we might think about, you know, designing systems so that you can have a thicker middle of the power law. Right. Where there is some middle class, it might be, you know, percentile 90 to 98 because the top 2% will do Flint, but whether it could be the top 30% making an okay living. It's not clear, but I thought you did a great job of thinking through what could we do from a design perspective to help make that happen.
But the power law is so pernicious, right? And the internet just makes it more pernicious. The example I keep using is, you know, 30 years ago, you would wanna sell your home and your town, and there were 30 agents And you really had no information. So you just went to the one that was at the PTA that you were at last week. And that person would get their fair share of listings and make their fair share of money, and they would Pete food on the table. Now you can go online.
And of the 30 agents in your town, you can easily see who the best agent is. And don't you wanna use the best agent? Right. And so the power law gets steeper in this case because of the transparency that the internet gives us. Yeah. And that is affecting people everywhere as they struggle to realize where they are in the power law of life. It feels to me. I agree. That there's frustration. There's anger. There's upset.
I mean, might be a lot of what we're seeing politically in the United States is just people realizing where they really are and not having the illusion anymore that they're doing better than they really are. I agree. And it's painful. Yeah. And it relates to that piece about the great online game because we are now all having to compete with each other in this online arena, and it's no longer the case that you just have to be the local best at something or, like, even locally just decent.
In order to make a living. You now have to be, like, one of the best people in the world at a certain niche in order to be successful because to your point, like, Now as consumers, we can go online and choose the best and do our research and, like, find the best possible provider for anything. And That means everyone who's not the best ends up losing out.
And, yeah, that piece that I wrote for HBR had a bunch of different proposals for how we could help to mitigate this, but, yeah, I'm not entirely sure if it's, like, fully, like, think the cat's out of the bag now and we just aren't going to go back to this world in which, you know, we had local monopolies on different types of services and everyone can make like a decent mental class income just by being okay. Not something.
Like, I think that era is over for better or worse, and there's gonna be beneficiaries of it, and there's gonna Pete who lose out because of this. And I'm not sure what that means for society and what we should do collectively as a society. Like, I think there's been a lot of discussion in which, like, we should continue to have about universal basic income and, like, how we can support the folks that maybe just don't have the skill set to be able to succeed. Or too depressed.
Yeah. Or too anxious. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Or the skills that they once had that were well, just are no longer the case anymore. I think we should consider those kinds of society wide policies. Yeah. And it's interesting.
I think we also need to differentiate between doing well and feeling like you're doing well because people might be earning enough to have an okay standard of living But if they're constantly bombarded with this feeling of inadequacy that the overall internet throws at them Right. Then despite doing okay or doing better than they were than their parents did, they won't feel that way. And that will cause social unrest, and that will cause misery. Why do we want people to have money?
Because it helps them be happy if they're just not gonna be happy Pete matter what, that itself, I think, is a challenge. And sort of designing systems to help people feel smart, to feel successful, to feel connected feel loved or appreciated or to get some attention. I feel like they have somebody listening to them. I remember this old story of, daily strength. There's a website for Beller care years ago, raised about 4,000,000 bucks and then died.
And it died because it was like a Craigslist for people to talk about their different health concerns and the depression and anxiety groups came onto the platform, and they weren't getting enough attention from each other. So they spread out into all the other groups, and then everybody else fled the web site. They were desperate for attention as that's what they wanted, and I get it. I totally get it. Yeah. I remember when I used to speak to some of the company CEOs and founders pre COVID.
I remember the sentiment in Silicon Valley, which you probably remember too, was that, like, You know, even for, like, a really mediocre engineer, you had to pay so much just to be able to recruit talent because Pete were local, and you only had this, like, small pool of talent. And now with remote work, those are the people who Pete, if you're a mediocre engineer, like, there's nothing to stop this founder from hiring someone across the world who's a much better engineer. He was like, okay.
Well, maybe they should just get better. Maybe they can take a course, but offer by an expert and just, like, be better. I don't think that's necessarily, like, realistic to expect that of everyone. Yeah. So I'm not sure I'm not sure what the solution is. Yep. Me neither. So, I got 3 more quick questions for you. I'll change this up to you a little bit. Okay. Let's talk about the media for a second. Going back to the attention a bit. So, you know, you've got a sub stack.
You've got this means of creation on your YouTube channel. What's going on behind the scenes there? How are you thinking about building your own personal brand? And then how would you advise other founders and other creators to think about their personal brands? Yeah. So I have a podcast called Means of Creation. We also export it as a YouTube. I have a newsletter that I write myself Lee's newsletter is what it's called very original.
And then I also work with the guys Beller, which is a media company, a media bundle of different writers to also publish another weekly newsletter called means of creation. I think that's pretty much it. I'm obviously on Twitter, but in terms of, like, the strategy and my advice to folks when it comes to brand building. I think it's really important to find creator creator content fit or creator format fit. Which is kind of the creator version of product market fit.
It's like, what feels natural to you? What feels the most authentic? And, like, James the easiest? To you. And I think it's really important to find that because otherwise, you're not going to enjoy creating that thing and brand building in that way. For me, writing comes really naturally I love writing. It feels as natural to me as breathing. And And probably even it helps you think. Yeah. And it helps me think. It helps me, like, clarify my own thinking, and I just really enjoy doing it.
And so for me, it's just very natural to create a sub stack and to publish that way. But if you had to ask me to brand build on TikTok, I would absolutely suck at that and not be able to get anywhere and to not be able to build a brand at all. Whereas that comes very naturally for people. So I think just identifying what you enjoy creating is the first important thing.
And then if you enjoy creating in that format or that type of content, like, you're naturally going to want to do it and do it as a hobby, and then you're going to excel at it. That's great. And web 3.0. Are we there? And then how would you define it if we are? Yeah. I think we're getting there. I'm really excited about like, web 3 and what comes after all of our current centralized platforms and companies. Yeah. So I'm doing a lot of investing in this space.
I'm exploring kind of the intersection of web 2 and web 3 companies that are trying to build bridges between the two and Are we there yet? I think perhaps, like, the state of the world that we get to is never gonna be, like, fully one or the other, but there's going to be probably a mix of, services that make sense as web 2 companies and then other companies that make more sense, like, as completely decentralized services.
And that's really the definition that we're using to apply to web 3.0 here is is this decentralization. Yes. Exactly. Decentralized applications and services that run on the blockchain. And what do you think people are not seeing clearly about that? I mean, you know, everyone is using words like crypto and blockchain and decentralized and whatnot. You know, are people seeing it clearly or not yet?
I would say, like, I I Pete mean different things to different Pete, and people emphasize, like, different elements of web 3. I think there's a little bit probably, like, too much emphasis on the trustless nature and also being, like, unsensurable. I think most people are actually very trusting and don't mind trusting a third party. And I think also most people probably aren't saying things that would need to be censored or removed from these centralized services.
Like, obviously, there's notable exceptions to that, but for the most part, people aren't worried that Twitter is gonna deplatform them or, like, you know, suspend their account and not allow them to use the platform at all. I think what's more interesting about web 3 and the angle that I would love to explore more is Insofar as it serves as a vector for allowing platform participants to become the owners of the platforms themselves.
So as a way of distributing ownership to the broader ecosystem rather than just a small group of investors and employees of the company. Mhmm. Yeah. The ownership economy sort of thing. We're gonna have many more ways for people to participate in owning of the real estate or the companies or the platforms or the art that they're involved with. Yeah. Exactly. I think that it just makes logical sense. It's kind of the next natural evolution.
And I think as we move away from traditional employment and to this world in which people are utilizing a variety of different tools and services to create their own businesses, those individuals who are utilizing those platforms and services, they're just as meaningful to making that platform valuable as the employees who are, like, you know, doing the engineering full time at that company.
Like, I think of, you know, Pete equally being built by all of the creators who decided to use Patreon, especially in the early days, as it was the work of one single company and employees that worked there. So I'm really interested how we can involve all of the platform participants as co owners and stakeholders in these platforms. Really interesting.
And we're gonna end up seeing the development of some standards and benchmarks around that too because it's unclear where the lines should be drawn. Right? I mean, iOS trying to take 30 percent of all the revenue on their platform, is that the right number? Should it be 10? Should it be 20? Should it be variable? And, we still haven't come to the conclusion of that, but that's been pretty stable for about a decade.
And it'll be interesting to see what percentage of these entities get shared with the contributors or if it's gonna be super variable along with the power law. Yeah. Totally. Well, Legion, this is so fun talking with you, pal, and, thank you for spending an hour with us. We're, so pleased to have you Congratulations on Beller and all you've done so far, and I can't wait to see what's next. Thanks so much. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.
At NFX, we believe creating something of true significance starts with seeing what others do not. Send this so to any friends that may need these insights and frameworks, and feel free to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to the NFX podcast.