Web3 w/ Me

TJ Laessig is the co-founder and CEO of Own the Moment. OTM is a leading Web3 sports community with a focus on education via content & analytics and gamification via NFT fantasy sports. Prior to OTM, TJ worked 10 years in a variety of corporate digital marketing & tech roles, coached college hockey for 6 years, and was a semi-professional daily fantasy sports player. TJ and OTM are on a mission to bring Web3 to the masses, with sports serving as the gateway.

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Marcia Caporn, Chief Revenue Officer of Credenza3, a Web3 company that facilitates "direct to fan" relationships while creating new revenue opportunities in the areas of advertising/sponsorship, content, ticketing, merchandise and game day executions. Marcia is laser focused on the importance of fan engagement and optimizing your professional athlete window. As a former professional golfer and soccer player, she knows the importance of maintaining a strong relationship with your fans. She is a former business and employment law litigator turned sports executive which helped her specialize in strategy and development in emerging revenue sectors for sports partners in both Australia and the US. As CRO of Credenza, she is working to revolutionize how fans interact with their favorite athletes and teams. 

Show Notes & Topics Covered:

• Being a pre-title IX women athlete who went pro
• Theresia Gouw, Founder of Acrew Capital, pointing Marcia to the Web3 rabbit hole
• First iteration of the relationship between pro sports and Web3 
• Finding a founder who had experience building and exiting a blockchain ticketing application by acquisition to Ticketmaster
• Coping with insecurity as a female athlete
• Rabbit hole research strategy
• Ticketing, merchandise, content, concessions and sponsorship as fiefdoms in the sports world
• Shortening the feedback loop with digital wallets
• Credenza as a solution for fans, teams, leagues and stadiums
• Importance of frictionless onboarding without a self-custody wallet and fiat
• Does sports want a frontend or backend solution?
• Floating digital wallets
• Understanding fans from their interests outside sports
• Dynamic collaborations voted on by fans
• What owning the fan experience means for an athlete beyond their playing years

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Shahar Abrams (https://twitter.com/ShaharAbrams). Shahar was one of the earliest Web3 educators in the Atlanta area, which is how we had the pleasure of meeting. A couple years into his consulting career with IBM, he read a book that would send him deep down the Web3 rabbit hole. He worked his way over to the enterprise blockchain team there and became a very active investor in BTC. Ultimately liquidating all of his funds from his first 5 years of working to put it in BTC. He is one of my first guests with extensive DeFi experience, and provides an amazing framework to think about it. Currently he is Head of Product for Rodo, a company putting car titles on the blockchain, he is still conducting research to start a DeFi fund and producing a Web3 film. His consistent, yet critical conviction in this space is fascinating. 

Show Notes & Topics:

• Shahar’s career journey from actor to consultant before finding a home in Web3
• The Business Blockchain as the book that sent Shahar down the rabbit hole 
• Shahar’s first bear market in 2017/18
• Shahar’s article in The Defiant, Buying Real World Assets By Leveraging Crypto 
• The importance of psychology in investing, and when conviction overtakes conventional wisdom
• The role of attending conferences in building Shahar’s conviction
• Shahar’s Web3 Use Case Matrix
• Web3 as the internet of value
• What is DeFi? It starts with understanding Finance from first principles, then making them more accessible and more permissionless. Democratizing market making. How competitiveness drives down fees. 
• Web3 ATL coming up in November 2023
• Shahar’s Head of Product Role at Rodo helping put car titles on the blockchain
• Future goals with a DeFi Fund
• Coming full circle with a Web3 film

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Jeremiah Long. He is a builder in Web3, and NFT Archaeologist, He organized one of Atlanta’s first Web3 conferences, NFT ATL. He is executive direct of Wedge, a nonprofit Web3 education organization with a focus on diversity, inclusion, and representation in the tech space. Jeremiah has worked in Product Management, Television, Marketing, Production, and Branding for over 20 years. 

We discuss:

Starting from section 8 housing and a single mother, Jeremiah created opportunities by leveraging the information made available by the internet and now Web3.

Jeremiah’s tireless curiosity across multiple disciplines coming together in Web3

Surprising number of people who created on FLOW, but ease-of-use on ETH ultimately won out

Jeremiah’s emphasis on narrative as an NFT creator

Gary Vee’s How to Make 100 Pieces of Content per Day

Start as an NFT Architect with a piece of late night discord alpha to becoming obsessed with historical NFTs

Bitcoin NFTs

Chronicles of a Degen

NFT ATL Conference

Wedge, Jeremiah’s Nonprofit

Jeremiah’s Flow-based NFT archives

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Daniel Koeth or DK. DK was one of the first photographers to the We Accept Ash movement, one that is very personal to me as ASH is the cryptocurrency of destruction created by our favorite artist, Pak. That bond along with the fact that I totally connect with his work, has turned into one of the most energizing relationships in recent memory. 

We start the conversation off in an untraditional way, exploring anonymity and pseudonymity. Starting with how I recently changed my Twitter to Zach French and no longer OffEdge, which prompted a deeper discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of being pseudonymous/anonymous in Web3.  

Show Notes:

Siblings “why you should buy one cube” lead DK down the Pak rabbit hole

DK’s career start getting dominated by LA film world to opening a successful small business studio for photography, video, and digital design

You can feel DK’s strong desire to unleash his creative genius on the world and become a full-time artist

Starting off as an investor in NFTs and not thinking they were for photography and how his mindset changed after Del’s first ASH only drop

What it felt like to impulsively list a few photos on opensea and waking up to a sold out collection

How #WeAcceptAsh was his community before DK created anything but also lead demand for his work

Being a part of a community vs. building a community as a creator

Community engagement beyond building a Discord

Friends make the best communities

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Brian Zwerner (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-zwerner/). He is an investor and advisor in sports, media, web3, and fitness. He is a founder at Beyond The Game Network, a venture group of athletes and business execs in Atlanta. Zwerner also leads the Crypto Executive Guide, an advisory business in the web3 sector and the publisher of a market leading newsletter.

Zwerner was previously the founder of Sportal, a startup in the sports industry. He managed the growth of Aquina Health through a Series A capital raise. He has invested in or held senior roles with several companies and funds. Previously Zwerner spent 20 years in investment banking roles in the US and overseas.

Show Notes & Topics Discussed:

First guest with a TRILLION dollars in trading experience

From Intrapreneur to entrepreneur 

The early fintech landscape in Atlanta

The shift from B2B to B2C 

VC investing with professional athletes in esports, gaming, and entertainment

Missing out on an early round with Dapper Labs, pre-Top Shots

Gronk and Maholmes drops helped bring Brian into Web3

Being patient and finding consistent revenue generating business in Web3

NFT Fantasy Gaming

The similarity in problems facing Web3 to those faced in Web2 and Web1 and beyond

Will the Big 4 consulting firms hop into Web3?

Wallet Wars - Visa and Mastercard vs Apple and Google

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Robbie Heeger the president and CEO of Endaoment.org, the first on-chain 501(c)(3) public charity, established with the mission of managing and encouraging the charitable contributions of digital assets. Endaoment is built to facilitate tax-deductible donations of more than 1,000 cryptocurrencies to any nonprofit in the United States, providing philanthropic financial services to the blockchain community and introducing nonprofit organizations to the benefits of blockchain technology. Donors can give through Endaoment using its Donor-Advised Funds, Community Funds, and Direct Donations, all of which charge industry-low fees to maximize throughput to recipient organizations. For more information on how to give and receive donations via Endaoment, as well as details on its ongoing efforts to become a DAO, visit https://endaoment.org/.

Show Notes:

How EnDAOment is built to last

EnDAOment’s crucial role in Constitution DAO

$275k in 2020 to $28 million is 2021

Carrying the Flag for Giving in Crypto

Ben Thompson (https://twitter.com/benthompson) and Stratechery’s (https://stratechery.com/)  influence on Robbie and the entire tech space - embracing the New Epoch

Building a company for 50+ years of success

Why EnDAOment (and other protocols) is built as two entities 

Jesse Walden’s (https://twitter.com/jessewldn)  impact on Web3 values, especially Progressive Decentralization https://a16z.com/2020/01/09/progressive-decentralization-crypto-product-management/ 

Nature of the Firm - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x 

DAO Entity Architecture 

• from Paradigm - https://daos.paradigm.xyz/ 
• From a16z - https://a16z.com/2022/05/23/dao-legal-frameworks-entity-features-selection/ 

Putting the donor’s needs first as a multivariable equation 

The future of EnDAOment, its stakeholders/supply chain and the broader tax-advantaged financial primitives

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Chris Harper (https://twitter.com/harper__chris). We met purely by happenstance at NFT NYC, but immediately hit it off and after this show you’ll understand why. Chris is a general contractor by day, to fund his passion for NFTs. He has an amazing show called the Ledge, where he interviews NFT artists James Lipton style. He has big ambitions to create a wikipedia/database of profiles on NFT artists. 

This one was one of the most true episodes to my slogan, we vibed hard in the verse about our eerily similar personalties and journey in NFTs. 

Show Notes:

Chris’ beginnings as a BTC maxi, going to see Max Keiser (https://twitter.com/maxkeiser) and Stacy Herbert (https://twitter.com/stacyherbert) rally

Chris’ bear market strategy - Pak, Xcopy, Ness Graphics, and Mycurio cards

The parallels between our journeys, starting with only NiftyGateway and no Opensea or Metamask, how much we spent on our collecting, from writer to podcaster

The vision to create a wikipedia for NFT artists to his new Web3 podcast, The Ledge - exploring deep, personal conversations with artists like James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio. 

His first guest is Gavin Meeler (https://twitter.com/Gavinmeeler), an Atlantan who was working at Pizza Hut and is now a big time NFT artist

Pak

Revisiting my previous guest, Ryland Aldrich’s three part venn diagram for NFT collecting - Trader, Investor, Collector - Chris considers the piece of art as part of which he considers himself

When will we see quality IRL displays for NFTs?

Personal Connection, pairing IRL and NFTs with Snuffy, one of the top tattoo artists in the US and creator on NiftyGateway - https://www.niftygateway.com/@snuffy/collections and https://snuffy.nyc/about

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Clive Henry, Director of Strategic Partnerships for all things Web3 at Adobe

Clive made a career helping fortune 500 companies adopt new innovation. From streaming video to Web3, he’s worked with some of the largest media companies and brands in the world consulting on direct to consumer digital products. 

Clive is also an active member of Krause House DAO, a DAO whose goal it is to buy an NBA team. Clive’s experience leads to a great discussion about what it will take for enterprise creators to adopt Web3, with a focus on retailers. 

We Discuss:

Clive’s report on Opensea while at Harvard’s Extension School on Fintech

All of the firsts for Bored Ape Yacht Club that helped set them apart

Zach’s journey into Deadfellaz (https://twitter.com/Deadfellaz), and shilling Clive about joining his first PFP community

• https://deadfellaz.medium.com/the-last-roadmap-a12a9386454 

Clive’s energy and what PFP should he pick?

#WAGBAT (https://twitter.com/KrauseHouseDAO) 

Alternatives to Discord 

Communication must improve to onboard more enterprise participants to Web3

Role of Web3 in Retail - https://nft.tiffany.com/ and 

Enterprise is in an Innovator’s Dilemma around Web3 (https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244) 

Token-gated commerce (https://open.spotify.com/episode/498S1ce1KG2Qp4H9MgYyCb?si=ASZyzP6xTzWM8CXQYz8BTw) 

Nike power moves with RTFKT (https://twitter.com/RTFKT) and building a metaverse

Clive and Zach Experience coming to Spatial (https://twitter.com/spatialxr) Soon and Ready Player Me characters (https://twitter.com/readyplayerme)

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Web3 w/ Me - YouTube

My guest today is Alexander Zwerner (https://twitter.com/Hey_Zwerner), founder of Kickback (https://twitter.com/viaKickback) a web3-native podcast monetization application. His passion for Web3 and podcasting are only matched by his drive and determination throughout his life. He started his first company in middle school, authored a book by his sophomore year of high school, and self-taught engineer. Now he has his sights set on the podcasting world and monetizing it to deliver more value back to podcasters. 

• Co-producing podcasts for metacartel (https://twitter.com/VENTURE_DAO) and Orange DAO
• Leading monetization for the Bankless DAO (https://twitter.com/banklessDAO) Podcast Hatchery and how that lead to a pivot to what is now kickback
• His process writing his book, The History of Hip-Hop. 
• How does the music industry have the same amount of listeners and so much more revenue?
• Distributing ad revenue and ads amongst the whole community for the benefit of all communities
• What does a creator grant program for podcasts look like?
• Gamification of listenership
• Why is there so much emphasis put towards discoverability and machine learning for new and smaller musicians but not for podcasts?
• How Web3 will change the technology landscape

Thanks for listening! Did you know you can also watch the show on YouTube? Just hit the link below and don't forget to subscribe!

Web3 w/ Me - YouTube