John, welcome to the Human Protocol podcast. Thank you for being here.
Thanks, Simona. It's a pleasure.
And it's great to finally see each other, albeit remotely, after a little bit of time. When were you in Portugal? When did I see you?
I think it was at least 2 years ago. It's been a while.
Maybe three or four, something like that.
Yeah. It's been a minute.
Okay, so just for context for you to know and obviously anybody tuning in for the very first time, the reason why this podcast exists is number one, so I can chat to friends and also people I care about. And then number two is to get the human story behind all of the big things that got built in this space that we tend to hear about and know about and tweet about. But I'm interested in the human arc behind it. How building and how the journey has impacted or has benefited or has made you grow as a person, you know, in all of these many years. So I want to take us back to PC. So pre-crypto, you obviously you started you studied architecture and civil engineering then did a stint in advertising and then came the crypto moment. What was that like? Can you tell me a little bit about that journey and where was that point where you thought this isn't really the path that I want to be on or continue on.
Yeah, it was I mean it was very you kind of like non-traditional or nonlinear to you know to say the least. Yeah, I was kind of always interested in math and science and you know like design. Um so that kind of led to the you know architecture and civil engineering like I really like the math portion but also kind of just the aesthetic part of architecture and stuff. So that you know seemed like a logical conclusion and then you know kind of quickly realized that that was not really you know the industry for me. There was you know lots of regulatory hoops and you kind of like it's it's a long path. Being an architect is very hard this is very there's lots of school. So I, you know, after school was kind of wondering what to do and there was, it was also kind of close. So I graduated 2010, so it's, you know, reasonably close to the crash in 2008. So there also weren't lots of like civil engineering or architecture jobs just cuz no one was building anything.
There were plenty of coding jobs and I was like, well, it can't be that hard. Like I had done some amount of like you know MATLAB and like simulation programming and stuff like that and so I moved to New York and just kind of was like well I've got a few months of cash and I'm sure I'll figure it out and you know landed a job in advertising they called it like interaction design or like creative um creative technology and that was super cool. I learned a lot but again it was still like you know I could kind of tell you early on I wasn't going to be a lifetime ad guy.
Okay. So, I was going to I mean, one of the great things about New York is uh there's tons of, you know, things going on. At the time, meetup was like it's probably like the heyday of meetups. There's just tons of meetups happening all over the city. And one of those meetups was the New York Bitcoin meetup. And I was like, "Oh, this is super fascinating." Also, having gone through the 2008 crash, like that had kind of led me down sort of like a Austrian economics bent. So I was reading a lot of those authors and that was resonating with me and so I got pretty excited about Bitcoin and so for a while was kind of trying to find you know someone to pay me to to to work on it which yeah took quite a bit of time actually in between I took a job for about a year at a eyewear startup. So I went from advertising jumped to the startup world that was also not you know didn't work out and then towards the end of that is when consensus had a hackathon and I went with uh Charles you know my brother and co-founder and so we did a project there and then I met Joe and he was like why don't you come back next week and we'll um see if we can find something for you to do and I was like oh this is great like I think there's like the right kind of crazy people there like these are like people with the crazy audacious ideas, ambitious but also, you know, cool people to hang out with. And so I was like, "Oh, this is clearly where you like the space I should be." And yeah, so you kind of never looked back.
What do you remember that feeling of finally that basically you didn't have in the other rooms that you were in? What was that feeling like? Cuz I think we I've definitely felt that feeling. What was it like for you to kind of be surrounded by these crazy people but with super interesting ideas and so on? Were you like, "Yeah, these are my people."
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's uh you know there like there are people who are like ambitious and you're kind of like questioning like the what exists today. Like I feel like that was like always very like part of what drew me to Bitcoin is like well asking the questions like well why does money work like this? And you just cuz it is how it like that's how it is today doesn't mean that's how it should be. There are plenty of things that we used to do in the past that we were like oh wait this is a horrible idea. And so I think it was just the combination of like you know very smart people who are super technical building cool things and then also asking a lot of these you know sort of open-ended questions about you know just because this is how it's done today doesn't mean that's how we should do it in the future. And like let's you know like let's poke holes in the in these ideas ask some questions and yeah I was immediately I was like these are my people this is what I should be doing.
Nice. So then you went into Bogart with Charles. You both went in and were like what was the idea that you pitched? Did you even pitch an idea at the time or were you like let's figure it out?
Yeah. So we Charles did the hackathon with me and then he I think he might have still been in school. I think he had one more year of school maybe um or or maybe he had just graduated and he had an internship but so he didn't Yeah, he didn't start working at consensus and then I quickly like I met Kieran and the block apps crew and so started working on their software stack and um was basically working with them for about 2 years.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, I had been follow obviously like you know, we we were all around for the ICO boom which was super crazy and I was really fascinated by just the you like the code for the ERC20 contract super simple you know it's like I don't know how many lines of code it is but it can't be more than like 80 or something.
Yeah. It's not many. And I was like oh this is amazing. It's like a very simple standard, but it allows, you know, like exchanges and wallets to like both interact with this distributed ledger in like a super cool way. You could think about like XMTP or like like for just like some of these open protocols and it's like, okay, this is it facilitates like a market at a scale that's like much bigger than what you like people had imagined before you had the standard even though the standard is, you know, kind of like open and simple. And so I saw some of the conversation around like the early ERC uh 721 conversation. I was like, "Oh, this is very interesting." Um yeah, I was less, you know, like my background wasn't in finance, you know, that was just like obviously, you know, I was interested intellectually by finance, but like wasn't my passion. I was like, "Oh, this could be really interesting for like kind of like the consumer web." Like I was very curious about like when is crypto going to flip and we're going to see more consumer apps built and you know kind of felt like some of those early consensus days with the year like the ERC 721 I was like this could apply to you know all of you know social content on the internet if you think about like what a Instagram post is. It's an image with like a title and some other metadata. So I was like oh this could be really interesting like what if people could trade social content? what like you know there's just like you kind of start having those like weird esoteric conversations which was very fun and so we just at first we kind of just started building simple software at the time there was no minting tools like there was obviously no marketplaces and so we were just building out kind of the base infrastructure and then we're you know I was going to meetups again just like talking to folks and you was in New York talking to some of the art folks and I was like oh this is really interesting in college I was doing some amount of like you know or I guess just after college but I was doing like um using processing for like creative coding and kind of like you know I had been doing Arduino work at of ad agency and I was like oh this is really interesting like what if this is the tool to like actually facilitate the growth of a digital art market there had been you know there's been many attempts and it never really took off and it just felt like it was like so obvious that like it was to me it was like oh my god this is so simple and so Why is no one doing this? It's either a horrible idea or it's like it's actually going to work. And um yeah, in the end it turned out to work a little bit.
So obviously Pixuro was first because remember we did what was it? We did the bounty with faces of Ethereum with Pixura at ETH Denver. We launched it. And then there's that really nice NFT of the Pixura later super rare team in Prague.
Did I send that to you or did I send that to Zach? I can't remember. But it was a really beautiful It might be in Zach's wallet. We'll have to ask him.
Yeah, ask him because that was really, really cool. And that was obviously the first kind of collaboration where we were looking at, okay, how easy is this for anybody to do when we had several submissions to that bounty of just like anybody and everybody submitting self-portraits, portraits of other people in the ecosystem and so on. So that was super cool. And then from that moment, so this is what DevCon in Prague and then ETH Denver that year. What was the path from Pixora to Super Rare?
Yeah. Well, so we were actually running both in parallel. So we kind of had like Yeah, we're running both in parallel. So we like built the base infrastructure and then we launched Super's like oh here's an example of what you could do with the technology, right? I was not like digital art is going to be huge. This is going to be the thing, right? And I was like we need to build a platform there. Like this is a new technology. We need to make it easy for everyone to use. So we were kind of running both and then you know this is pre pre AI and vibe coding so as a team of like four people like it's actually extremely hard to maintain two different products and so we kind of had to choose and then there was just like very clearly more of an like like more organic growth and like a real community building around super rare and so we made the call to like okay we're going to double down on Super Rare like you know we changed the name of the company from Pixar to Super Labs. But uh yeah, that was a it was a tough call. Yeah, I think we made a good choice.
And so then obviously Super Rare were betting on that and then it's a family business. So it's basically you, Charles, your brother, Jonathan, your cousin, right? Like what did that feel like? Was that easier to bootstrap and get going because you were already, you know, you have the family dynamics? And also, I'm interested when things get a little bit tough and we'll touch on that later. Does that affect the family dynamics or is it quite still a very kind of nice flow where the connection kind of persists and makes things easier?
Yeah. No, it's a very good question. I think I think it can either go it's like can go one of two ways. It can either be like horrible or like kind of more like a superpower. And yeah, I think it was beneficial for us, you know, with Charles, you know, like we were always close growing up. And so like, you know, we've had experience getting in fights for, you know, approximately at the time like, you know, 26 years or whatever. So, you know, we're kind of used to like, you know, volatile personalities. you can get mad at each other and then you like one's taking it too personally. So I think that was kind of like you know in in any sort of like business you it's like there's highs and lows people didn't get enough sleep whatever just not taking it personally if someone's you know you being an [ __ ] or what you're just like okay dude just go take a nap like I I don't want to deal with this right now and like if you're you know folks you're not as close with it's harder to do that like it's not necessarily an easy tell them to take a nap. Yeah. Yeah. People tend to not like that. So, I think it Yeah, it was actually pretty helpful and we had both with Jonathan and Charles like we were always kind of tinkering with things growing up.
So, we had built a number of different like Jonathan and I in college tried to build a few kind of like websites and services that had failed. um like immediately before launching Super Air, we were actually we had like a it was called blockchain jobs. So we had like a short-lived um kind of like crypto job place like advertising uh site that like again it was kind of like it was working. Some people were posting on it but I was like I don't really want to get into the recruiting business. This is not a good fit for me personally. So we had experience with like we like wound wound that down and like you know so we'd kind of like gone through the motions before.
Okay. So with cuz you mentioned kind of the the dynamics and that it really it really helped from getting that initial kind of traction on super rare. you then very I mean you've shared this before that then about 120 VCs said no.
I am curious cuz 120 is a big number. How do you take that repeated rejection? Number one, do you take it personally? Number two, how do you kind of brush it off and keep going? And number three, were there ever moments for you personally and for you as a team and as a family going, are they right? Like, are we super off the mark here?
Yeah. Yeah. It's very hard not to take it personally. So, actually, I had some sales experience. So, actually, my first job out of I guess it was more like an internship. It was kind of like it was like, if this works, you'll get hired. And it ended up not working. So I had interned at like a software, it was like a civil engineering specific company called Act.
So I was like trying to sell software again in like the downturn after 2008. So you know, no one was forking over five figures for um like no one was building anything. So like we don't need any new software licenses today. And so I had some experience there. Obviously, you know, it still sucks like you think you give a good pitch, you're like you're like my idea is great. what could what could be you should just give me the money right now. It's gonna be awesome. And yeah, there you know there was a lot of like oh my god or are we doing the right thing? And I think there are actually like a few moments. I'd say there are probably like three different moments throughout the course of like the entire time.
Where we would be like, okay, nothing is working. Like the numbers are like, you know, flat to down. Like is this really something we should do? And then there would be some sort of signal from, you know, like it was like the numbers are going up or there's like a few more big collectors and we like, okay, maybe we're not crazy. I remember the summer of 2019 like heavily debated just being like should we just scrap this and do DeFi like this seems to be like working way better than everything else and we were kind of like and then after some soularching and then like there was some more activity we were like okay now we should just keep going but uh yeah it's very I'd say you have to be very stubborn luckily I'm a fairly stubborn person so I was just like no this I think this will work Okay. And I can't wait to prove you guys wrong.
Okay. So, there's a little bit like, no, we're going to do it and then the signals, but also you all are going to see like
Yeah, there there's some Yeah, there's some person out like, you know, like if that's your type of person. I think that's pretty helpful. Like, you have to be slightly delusional, I think, to start anything cuz like statistically it's going to fail. It's like look, the numbers say you'll probably fail. So you have to be a little bit crazy like you know I'd say a lot you know a lot of the most interesting people are that's what makes them interesting.
Very true. Very true. So we're obviously very glad that you persisted and that you are also a little bit crazy. Did everybody kind of feel the same way? Were you all on the same line or was there any kind of pushing and pulling of like yeah maybe we should pivot maybe we should do this or were you all kind of aligned of like no okay this is let's just commit. were committing to this road.
Yeah. I mean, it was we would all heavily debate and so there was lots of argument. There'd be a lot of debate, but then it would be like, okay, if we're going to decide there can't be like no grumbling or like, well, I want to just like we're either going to actually all choose to do this or like we need to keep discussing it, but like it's not going to work if you're like, you know, your brain's somewhere else wishing you were doing something different. you need to you actually get on board. So I think we we were able to do that but yeah there was certainly lots of uh debate and discussion.
Okay. Do you so when obviously we get to the point where things start taking off. Tell me about that moment because you just mentioned 2019. When does the hockey stick situation start happening?
Yeah, we I remember very distinctly. So, it was October 2020.
You know, like CO's also like in full swing, so everything's pretty weird. But that was our first million dollar volume month. And I think that was the first moment of like, oh my gosh, like it might actually be working. Like this is I feel like still like you're like, I think it's going to work, but you're like also maybe it's not. And then at that moment it was like, oh wow, maybe like this is, you know, that was the first kind of like real big month where we were like, yeah, there's like the psychological psychologically like the $1 million mark is a big number.
Hell yeah. And like you say, I mean, the community was forming already. I mean, I remember you guys when was it again Prague with the iPads and you did the exhibition and the like it was forming and it was growing. But like you say, from that of people being really passionate but still kind of smallish numbers to then going to 1 million and that's in the space of what less than a year.
Yeah, I think it was just under a year. Yeah, it was about a year I think cuz I think Prague was November 2018. So then it would have been about Yeah, just under a year later. Yeah, they started to move. It was like and then from that moment on it was it was very wild to be a part like we would have all hands and I'd be like well the revenue doubled and it wasn't from anything we did differently you know like we should all expect a big pullback at some point and then it' be like the next month it' be like well it happened again and I would just like to reiterate that it's this is not you know we didn't figure out like a new ad strategy that's going great like this is just more people are showing up And so we should all be prepared for, you know, a change of weather at some point. But
do you feel that kind of keeping grounded was really important to not just go, "Oh my god, we're so successful. This is like we always knew it. Let's pop the champagne. All of the VCs were wrong. This is like going to go on forever."
I think so. And I think partially too, you know, we had spent so long doing it truly on our own. Like, you know, by the time we had raised money, the company was, I mean, we were paying ourselves basically nothing, but like the company was, you know, lightly profitable before we ever took any outside cash. And so, yeah, I mean, it was like you we still very vividly remembered just like, okay, it's another month and we got one less collector than the month before. like, hm, this is inspiring.
