Charles Du is the CEO and cofounder of Fast Break Labs. Fast Break Labs is building VBA, a Web3 game that allows basketball fans to strategize as general managers of their own virtual basketball teams. They just raised $6M with Patron and Pantera Capital leading the round.

Angel investors include Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai’s Family Office, Sacramento Kings co-owner Aneel Ranadive, and Marc Merrill the Co-Founder of Riot Games. In this episode, we discuss the inspiration of VBA Game, how the game works, and future plans and considerations.

Charles and VBA links:

• Charles’ Twitter: @gmcharmander
• VBA's Twitter: @vbagame
• VBA's Website: https://www.vbagame.com
• Explanation of game play: https://vbagame.medium.com/welcome-to-the-vba-f83b5701f7c7
• VBA's Medium: https://vbagame.medium.com/

Episode notes and links:

• Charles’ first exposure to basketball
• Charles’ playing basketball
• How Charles’ got excited about building VBA game
• Zed run: https://zed.run
• https://vbagame.medium.com
• How VBA Game’s goal is for managers to spend a lot of time talking to their friends, creating back stories, etc...
• VBA vs. Fantasy basketball’s core loops
• How VBA is “Fantasy, fantasy basketball”
• VBA game’s core loop
• The initial VBA team
• 7 initial players + potentially buying players from MagicEden
• VBA Player attributes and play styles
• How VBA simulations will run
• What’s given to GM’s at the end of games for more analysis
• Is VBA game thinking about GM’s hiring coaches or acting as coaches?
• How Charles thinks about player progression / regression work?
• NBA2k (https://nba.2k.com/) + MyGM fantasy sports
• How many players can someone hold?
• What was difficult to build?
  • How the fundamental simulator work?
  • What was on chain vs. off chain (player attributes)
• Evolving simulations + strategies
• How Charles thinks about reporters on the game
• Blaze ball
• How one Crypto Coven line, generate via GPT3, drove Charles to buy his CryptoCoven
• How did Charles refine the core loops and key problems to solve with VBA game?
• How Charles learned to code
• What unique Web3 role Charles is looking to hire for - COMMUNITY MANAGER!
• Have you met Joe Tsai?
• How Charles’ experience on the Facebook integrity team helped him think about and address potential risks to the game
• “Adversarial thinking”
  • https://www.smokescreen.io/adversarial-thinking-improving-cybersecurity-with-ants-and-barcodes/
  • 2018 NSA NCCP Workshop - Adversarial Thinking poster.pdf
• Where to mint a pack?

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