Hello everyone, this is Sudep from Coin Gabber reporting live from Token 2049. We are joined by a big man from Southeast Asia. Yat Siu has got a history of, I mean, I cannot call him the chairperson of Animoca Brands if I don't mention his serial, he's a serial entrepreneur with a lot of ventures behind him. I mean, a free email venture and then a strong advocate of the Web3 ecosystem. So, how's been the journey from like Atari to Animoca?
Wow. Thank you so much for the kind introduction. You know, it started really in the 80s. I was born in the 70s, obviously. Yes. Okay. Great. Exactly. That's wonderful. And so, you know, we've shared some similar stories where the whole world wasn't digital at all and today it's completely digital. It's nothing but digital, you could almost argue. And you know, I don't want to sort of go too long into it because I know we don't have that much time, but my first job was with Atari in the 80s. I grew up in Europe. And I basically got connected to, I think the most relevant part is I got connected to an online service that was pre-internet called CompuServe. And through that experience, I ended up learning about what it was like to have online communities. And again, there was no TCP/IP, none of that kind of stuff. It was really a bulletin board system. We dialed in with a modem. It was asynchronous because we used to pay per minute phone charges. Yeah. So, it was super expensive. And we used to batch upload emails and I ended up making connections with people in America and in Asia and all over the world that I wouldn't normally have been able to make. And it allowed me to sort of get a perspective of the world that I didn't see before. I basically fell in love with it and I basically was in the online business ever since. Of course, that then sort of developed into, you know, basically the internet. You know, we had sort of, you know, started one of the first ISPs, internet service providers, in Hong Kong, then a cloud computing platform with Outblaze, which back then was called ASP, that was eventually acquired by IBM to compare Lotus Notes. And then started the gaming business because I was doing Atari in a way, and you know, because we couldn't do anything enterprise because of the non-compete, and that was the beginning of Animoca and Animoca Brands, which then really ventured into the Web3 crypto space in 2017 starting with CryptoKitties.
So how has been the journey in Web3? I mean, Animoca Brands, because you are a gamer, a techie since the beginning and you have seen all the stages of the genesis, I won't say the genesis of Bitcoin, not most of us were interested in Bitcoin in 2008.
No, no. I think, you know, when you think about Bitcoin, the genesis of Bitcoin was really about sort of creating the first kind of true digital property, right? Sort of a store of value and eventually maybe a currency, although I wouldn't call it a currency. It's more like gold, right? In contrast to, you know, what we saw in the early days of the internet as being decentralized as an ecosystem and it was really about the distribution and democratization of information. And now we're getting distribution and democratization of value and Bitcoin sort of led the way and now basically the entire crypto space expanded on it. But the way that I sort of think about this is with the benefit of hindsight, right? Like if I could travel back in time, how would I have done stuff, you know, when the internet was growing? And that's how I think about Web3, right, and the whole crypto space. It's a little bit like the early days of the internet. And many of the similar pathways are the same because at the end of the day, you know, even though the technology is slightly different and the structures are slightly different, it's still ultimately about human behavior. It's still about what we want as people. It's still about these very sort of, you know, core principles. And so that hasn't changed. So then what would our strategy be knowing where we think this industry is going to go because it mimics so many elements of why people went to the internet? And that's basically how Animoca Brands was born and that's what we have today, over 628 portfolio companies, because I actually think that if we had a fund, not a fund out of a balance sheet, but if we had money back then, we would have invested in all these companies that would eventually become, you know, the Alibabas and Tencent and all these companies, but with one key difference. Could we help shape it too rather than just be an investor? Could we actually guide them in the direction to make the ecosystem more open, more transparent, more fair? And that's actually part of the reason why Animoca Brands has this mission because we also reinvest back into the ecosystem. We make, and this is where we're unique, and you know, we were developers of the App Store and we felt that we're very extractive. You pay 30%. And they don't put any of that money back into the ecosystem. But you know, Apple, if they took just 1% of their revenue and made a fund out of it to invest in people making apps on the App Store, the Apple ecosystem would be so much bigger, so much more vibrant, and people would love Apple more and people would be okay to pay 30% because it will have a community, not just a fan following.
Correct. They would have a true community that has ownership that actually is much more than that. And I think Apple, you know, made a big mistake treating basically their money as an asset that wasn't part of growing the community, but rather thinking about it more that's marketing. It's not the same, right? I'm thinking about it much more in sort of your classic, I guess, zero sum thinking, right? And I think, you know, I also think because of crypto, traditional VC investing is going away because everyone is an investor.
VCs, exactly. That it's all going away. So that means who are the ones who actually should be investing? Yeah. Individuals can, but actually companies should, right? Because we know what it's like to build a company. So we can perhaps better evaluate in some cases what company to invest in, right? I mean, if a Microsoft or Google had a true startup investing structure, which they don't, right? Then aren't there so many people inside Microsoft or Google or Apple that would actually be able to evaluate the potential of a business? Much more so, right? So I don't think it's anymore a you're an investor and you're a builder or you're an entrepreneur. I think it's all mixed together and I think crypto has shown the way for that.
Right. So if I am correct in saying this, stating this on the live platform, that you're more walking the 3M path where they are compelled to make an innovation where they celebrate innovations from within the ecosystem from the employees itself. I mean we all know how 3M innovates, that is how they have so many patents under their belt. Yes. Rather than being an Apple or Microsoft, right? And the very essence is like that only.
I mean, I guess so. The only thing is that we build open source as well, which means that it's not about patents we own, it's about essentially giving access to that network to others so they can build on top. And why it works is because we are owners of the networks, who are part owners of the networks that they're building on top, so it benefits us that they have as much information and much knowledge that they have so they can build better products on top of what we've basically established or owners in that helps grow the ecosystem. Right. So I think that framing is, you know, very much like open source. Yeah. Right. If you were closed source you couldn't have this innovation in open source. And so crypto is essentially the open sourcing of value and value creation across these kind of networks and out. So I feel like, you know, if you understand that then you're also much more freer to make investments because you know that when I make these investments at the end of the day there is a dividend that is either direct or indirect that comes to you that's not possible in the traditional sense, right? So for instance, let's say, you know, you hold Solana and you invest in 10 memecoins. I don't endorse investing in memecoins, but if you want to have some fun you can maybe invest in memecoins. Let's say the memecoins don't work, but they did further the Solana ecosystem. Yes. Right. The fact that you have Solana and had some fun with memecoins meant you actually are sort of participating both ways. And that's basically sort of how we think about this. It's not like, you know, and again, you know, memecoins aren't actually necessarily tactical. So, I wouldn't recommend that, but it's just to illustrate that even something as silly as a memecoin actually helps the ecosystem as long as you're invested. People might system. Yes. Exactly. But you know, by you losing money on a memecoin you actually making Solana gain. Well, how do you play it? Own some Solana while you're playing memecoins. It's kind of one way to think about it. It's kind of an ecosystem, right? And in the real world, we do it in different ways. Let's say, you know, you're bullish on the Indian economy. Well, you would probably own some real estate in India. And then you can also invest in startups that support it. And even if the startups don't work, right, they create jobs, they create economies, they build something up, the value of the real estate will probably increase over time because there's more opportunities. Of course, that makes an assumption that we think the industry is going to grow, right? And that's the macro assumption that we absolutely make and I think everyone else would genuinely agree with that. We think there's going to be billions of people in crypto, which today, you know, we're not even close to.
