After 20 weeks of Social Confoes, it is time to reflect on the past 5 months and make plans for the future. In this episode, Diego and Jean-luc are having a #SocialConfoes Tea Time. In other words we answered any audience question that came in. Of course, we will also talked about why we have invested in different NFTs, such as VeeFriends and NBA Topshot, and what we plan to do with those investments.

Episode Overview

• 0:00 – Intro and state of the pandemic
• 4:47 – Financial Independence
• 15:23 – Starting a business with family or friends
• 26:43 – Having a personal assistant
• 32:28 – Office Politics
• 35:05 – NBA Topshot
• 42:00 – VeeFriends
• 51:18 – Ethereum and transaction fees
• 1:00:04 – What would happen to VeeFriends if the creator were to pass away
• 1:03:03 – The value of community
• 1:12:31 – Crypto and video games
• 1:20:52 – Closing off

Video Version of the Episode

The Hosts

• Diego Ameerali
• Jean-Luc van Charante

Feel free to join our Discord Server.

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Full Transcript

And good evening. Good night. Good morning from wherever you are. Diego, just put all the Social Confoes, but just to show you guys where it originates from, Hey, does the tempo of the intro change. When we move in or all it is, is the, the tempo the same, or does the tempo of the audio change during the intro? I’ve really starting to wonder about that.

Diego: [00:01:42] That’s a very peculiar observation. I’m not sure. I’ve just noticed it one way maybe because I’ve been sitting and editing it from the beginning. I really barely notice it anymore.

Jean-luc: [00:01:52] So for those of you are watching, thank you for joining in. It’s going to be a little bit of a fun episode. It’s actually, gonna be a real Social Confoes. And for today we’re allowing a lot of comments. So if you’re watching a field, you want to ask a question, just drop it in the comments because we will probably discuss it. We’re also going to talk a little bit about the lockdown.

I want to talk a little bit about things that we have been doing. I’ve been trying out and experimenting with this year. I think that’s quite interesting as well for people not just for the people that are watching live, but people want to join in and all of the, the recording or watch it on YouTube. I think it’s interesting to talk a little bit about the dynamics and the shifting dynamics currently in the, in the internet space to say it that way. So for you, what, what has been like First of all we’re in our full log down. So that’s, I think the first thing that we have to talk about thanks, Greg, for finding all of that. The audio and video is doing great. Thank you for joining and again,

Diego: [00:02:54] in here soon, Greg, so

Jean-luc: [00:02:56] keep an eye out. Yeah, we should get rich. We should do a Social Confoes with the host of the other Confoes shows as well. I think that’s a great idea. We should probably do that next week. What do you think?

Diego: [00:03:09] Good work, good work. Let’s just double check our schedule cause we’ve been double booked a lot lately, but we’ve kind of solved that now. So that shouldn’t be a problem, but yeah. Full lockdown for me. It’s kind of, in my personal opinion, I’ve been barely noticing it. I kind of live more online than offline nowadays, basically since I got back, I can count the times I’ve been out there.

I’ve been out just, you know, for a few social engagements and then just a work project. But most of the time it’s been in the home office doing stuff online, doing conferences, online, doing lots of things online.

Jean-luc: [00:03:52] How do you do groceries? How do you do your groceries? How do you get bread? That’s that’s the main question. And though, how do you get your bread.

Diego: [00:04:01] Luckily, I have a an awesome brother who drives out a lot. Well, and, you know, whenever he goes out to do his work projects, there’s always time to get something to eat. So that’s how that happened. So I personally don’t feel that as much, so that’s a convenience for me.

Jean-luc: [00:04:20] Yeah. I’m lucky. I’m lucky as well. I have a wife who is an essential worker, at least according to the rules of the government. So that’s interesting. But, but a on the others joining in, thank you for joining, fawaka Anil.. Actually have an interesting story for Anil later of the show.

Diego: [00:04:38] Yeah, I could had a call with Anil just this, this afternoon. So I’ve told them to tune in cause he was asking some questions and he’ll probably throw them at us as we go.

Jean-luc: [00:04:47] Awesome. We also have Rachim and for those who are not familiar with Rahim, you should definitely check out his page. And he provided us with some good tips to actually give to people in Suriname to, to earn a little on the side, because during this locked down, what, what we noticed is like a lot of companies are struggling. There is a promise of economic support system from the government, but at the end of the day we should really check opportunities to. To create a source of income outside of sure enough, especially using digital platforms and the internet. So I think Rachim give us, gave us a real look into what the possibilities are and actually something that I want to share with you guys is and, and girls watching is we spoke a lot about Upwork, but here’s the interesting thing that I found out last weekend.

I did our, this past weekend. I was presenting at the RYLA at the rotary youth leadership arts, and we talked a little bit about financial independence, especially starting from a young age. I don’t know. What, what was the age that you started focusing on financial independence?

Diego: [00:05:55] Well, what’s your take on financial independence?

What’s the definition you got and I’ll base on that.

Jean-luc: [00:06:02] Okay. So for me, financial independence means that you don’t, you aren’t independent on others, like mainly your parents to provide for yourself and be able to to pay your own stuff and whether or not that’s paying rent to somewhere to live or you groceries are your daily payments or your monthly payments, as soon as you’re able to be financially independent from, from your parents or from somebody else. That’s when I consider it it’s financial independence, but I’m not saying when you were financial independent, but when you, you started.

Diego: [00:06:33] thinking about, I’d have to say the moment I started doing something for myself but still, you know, 2013, when I graduated from the university Adek here in 2014 but we already started around 2012, 2013 with some friends, strengths and project trying some different for quote on quote entrepreneurial stuff, you know, feeling and trying to get something for yourself and income.

So I guess that’s where it started that train of thought. But when I actually brought structure in it, where I actually, you know, went deep, did a deep dive, I’d say was 2016 ish. Yeah. I’d say 2016.

Jean-luc: [00:07:14] How old were you at a time?

Diego: [00:07:15] All right. So if I had to calculate back 2016 would be 25. Yeah. 25. Yeah. Yeah.

Jean-luc: [00:07:26] I would say so here’s the thing that I think and ensuring that we get like very late in our, the development we get financially independent. It’s not something that we consider as, as teenagers. And of course, like in the rest of the world, like there are countries that are a little behind in countries that start a little earlier.

But I think like countries where you go out to study, where when you start studying at the age of 18, you go out and you have to pay your own way. Of course, the Netherlands has like the support system, but when you start having have to make one yourself to be able to go somewhere, become a little bit more independent. I think that that’s something we don’t do as much. And a reason I got through this is because we were speaking about the presentation and I was sticking off Upwork for teenagers between 14 and 18. And then I found out that Upwork is for 18 plus, and I then found out that Patreon and Fiverr are actually starting from 13 and up.

So if you’re a teenager, you can actually, yeah, you actually, you can actually go on Patreon and you can actually go on Fiverr and start selling off stuff. And as the interesting thing, I think Fiverr has a lot of leverage now where like at the beginning, when people were on five where you could get stuff for $5, I mean, I got my logo, I think for five or $10. Whereas if you go now on Fiverr, it’s like, if you want to professional stuff, it’s like $2500 no longer, just the five. I mean, they already have to leverage. So that’s quite interesting, I think. And yeah, I do feel we should look at opportunities to, to earn something in us dollars or in a foreign currency, or even at crypto for that matter. So feel the pain a little less. Yeah.

Diego: [00:09:16] Greg brings up a good point there. If you can live with your parents until you’re 30, there’s no incentive to be independent, I’d say yes and no.

Jean-luc: [00:09:26] I don’t agree, but you go first.

Diego: [00:09:28] Yeah. So it depends on how you look at it. Also depends on your personal upbringing, you know, personal circumstances for me, I’ve been in that position. You know, to, I’ve had a, let’s say not sheltered upbringing, but the nearest. We, I didn’t really have

Jean-luc: [00:09:48] to say shelter because in shelter.

Diego: [00:09:51] Yeah. But I also had the Liberty to do what I wanted. And in that free time, you know, I explored many different things. Actually it, my student days, leveraged my position as a student to get access to things for free to, you know, attend conferences, attend the trainings.

So that’s kind of where it started. And that’s kind of, you know, you’re, you’re bartering your position for an experience. And as time went on, when you start doing something with yourself, you. Look at the actual income, do you know buy stuff buy your computer equipment. And fortunately for me, then again, my brother stopped working at his normal job and he’s decided to start a company and, you know, just join him.

Cause I I’m, I had some technical insight, you know, computer, but pretty good with computers. So and 2013 we started our company like a print and media business. And that’s when you start thinking more on the, you know, financial structure, how are you going to run? Day-to-day so that’s baseline level and why?

I mentioned 2016 earlier. That’s when I started another company with friends and that where I was more independent because it was me making decisions by myself. And that’s where you really learn to, you know, negotiate things, things can go wrong. And I actually had mapped out worst case scenarios.

And fortunately for me, I did that. So I kind of was able to get that out of situation financially as a, at a breakeven point. So I didn’t really suffer a loss. and that’s the, about the time I, you know, got interested by other friends. So I also did things with, on, you know, crypto and that, and that was the trigger to go deep. That actually wants the trigger to go real deep.

Jean-luc: [00:11:47] Okay. People want to join in on, on the NFT part. So a shout out from Ruiz and also from Marvin Tevin joins and he wants to go straight to VeeFriends. We’ll go into that in a second. Leroy jumps in as well and says, Hey, we’re going to talk about NFTs.

We’re gonna talk about, and if these, I just quickly want to jump into something you just mentioned, because I think we’re on the age of 25. That’s when I started my first business as well. I actually had to start ups at the age of 25. When I came back from studying abroad and. Let’s talk a little bit about the startup culture here because Neil kind of woke us up a little bit on how the infrastructure is in, in Silicon Valley where it’s like, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

And that one just hits and boom, you, you skyrocket the way. for me, I think my first business we got to the point after a year, we got to the point that we were at breakeven and kind of similar to you. I didn’t lose any money. But there was money lost. We had a structure where one person came in with the strategy.

One person came in with the money. One person came in with, with the operations and we kind of went our separate ways after a year. The business kind of went off the person who was in the operations continued in that line of business. He actually still works. He has his own company and that business still, I just completely left out because I decided to start working, full-time for a boss again, which kind of is like a weird move at the age of 25.

But my reasoning behind it was that I wanted to learn what it was like work and like a small, medium enterprise before really starting my own business. Because I think there were skills that I had to learn about scaling a business that if I haven’t had that experience, like I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing now.

So that’s also a thing that I think is not to be underestimated. I think it’s a I wouldn’t say it’s a negative thing that we insert M become. Aware of, of financial independence at a late age, but yeah, I’m not sure if, if, do you feel like you were left out, do you feel like you wasted a couple of years in your twenties, but knowing the importance of financial independence and how easy it is to make moves if you have that leverage?

Diego: [00:14:13] I don’t think it’s too late. I think it’s, it was timing and the conditions of, you know, the environment you’re in. So yes, maybe if you look at it from a pure age perspective, now we know people who are much younger than us who are already doing what we’re doing now, but at a much younger age and you take us back then, what were we doing at 20?

But I don’t feel left out because the conditions and accessibility, it wasn’t as wide even though it’s not as widely the accessible yet. In my opinion, back then there were any barriers to, you know, get to, for example, the stock market, get to what, what even is the stock market.

Get the knowledge on that, but also the access. And I think the access sport played a very important role. It wasn’t until I got my own credit card, that actually a lot, a lot of potential. And I see started to see a lot of possibilities in my head immediately. Open up and that’s where it started that, you know, you realize this.

Jean-luc: [00:15:23] for me, my first credit card kind of scared the hell out of me because I was like, oh no, I’m liable for this. I don’t want to be liable, but I guess for you, it’s the other way around the question that Tevin has for you is, is it a good idea to start a business with a sibling or family? Would you recommend it or not?

Diego: [00:15:42] it it’s personal circumstance. You got to decide that for yourself. I have a pretty, I’d say chill mutual understanding of my brother. Of course there are some downtimes and yeah, he. He is the one who is more in the field and stuff. So we know who’s good at what, and we finally have a non-verbal way of communicating that. So it kind of works out for us. So it’s kind of like where we’re still working independently, but together, if that makes sense.

Okay. So you got to say that for yourself, but for, for me it kind of worked out at it. It’s even the same thing with friends. Well, people you consider friends. So then that’s very good you know, thread carefully on if things go wrong. How, how do you depart? I I’ve had project startup ideas with friends who I still have a pretty good relationship with and others who just disappeared off the face of the earth. You don’t know where they are or something. So it’s, it’s, it’s about that communication and, you know how you ended and how. know, go up out the situation,

Jean-luc: [00:16:48] Yeah, I would say though, I would say I wouldn’t recommend starting a business with friends. I wouldn’t recommend it. We, we we’d done it. We actually, I experimented with all different kinds of businesses. We actually have a business that has, I think. Like 20 to 40 shareholders, it’s like a complete mess and it’s kind of died down silently. We’re considering whether or not we should sell the brand because the brand does have value.

So we’re considering still selling it off. But yeah. And w if you sell up the brands, you get all the brand benefits and all the social media channels connected to that brand, which do have some value. But again, yeah. If, if you sell of the company, most likely you have to pay all the assets to all the loans that accompanies still has the outstanding payments that accompany still has, and this like nothing left after the sale and after everything.

Diego: [00:17:45] you brought that up. So my might be one, you know, lone sticking on depth. Yes, we did dig on a bank loan for our first company. I’d say. There’s a certain level of relief once it’s paid off but even then when I, when we were in that position and I started doing other stuff with other people as well, my point of view was I don’t want it to be in that position of owing something like a, so I’ll take the bootstrapping approach, you know, using your own savings, using your own resources, what you have at hand and build from that.

And there’s, there’s a, you know, there’s a point of view for scaling, but then you got to decide for yourself, what’s your goal? Do you want to go big, like a hundred employees, one 50 employees or the, you undergo small and flexible? So I chose for the latter and okay.

Jean-luc: [00:18:43] Let’s be honest, like, like from a realistic perspective, because I know there’s some people watching, you’re thinking like, okay, I want to have 200 employees. I want to grow this big business. Like in a time span of one generation. I mean, it’s gotten easier to go from zero or one employee to 200, but realistically, like how much knowledge, how much resources would you need to have to do that in a time span of 10 years?

And then also. What do we have to sacrifice? I feel you, because there’s a question from Gregory. Do I regret being an entrepreneur so quickly let’s pull that up. I’m going into Chinese art or don’t worry. I’m on port Chinese. So do you regret being an entrepreneur? You could have stayed at a company or gone to a larger company?

Actually, the funny thing is I couldn’t have stayed at a company. There was like a a crossing, a crossing of paths. And at that point there was kind of decided for me, I w S kind of agreeing with the decision, but on the other hand, I wasn’t ready for it. And there were crossroads and I had to go my, my, my own pet.

And so stay at a company wasn’t, wasn’t an option going to a larger company. I don’t like office politics. I really don’t love office politics. I can deal with people not being honest, completely honest with me. Just, just tell me straight to my face. I don’t like this about you. I can work with this.

And then you have to be fair as well. Like also being open-minded to my feedback and if you’re not open-minded to my feedback, but also you’re not being completely transparent with me and, and keeping stuff behind my back and telling stuff to others behind my back. I can deal with that. I’m not that kind of person.

So for me to run my own business, that was kind of the only way to go in yet. So looking back, was it worth working for a boss and would you have learned those skills better or faster if you stayed an entrepreneur? So does the funny story? I was 25. I own two businesses. The third one came two years later and I decided to shift from being an entrepreneur to go work.

Full-time I did that for at least five years, I think, five years in total. And what I’ve done it again? A hundred percent. Yes. There’s so many skills that I learned during those five years. Dealing with different levels, bid any organization, how to deal with management, how to deal with starting at the starting blues, how to deal with people chroming from the outside, giving advice to the company.

These are skills that if I would’ve stayed an entrepreneur, it really would have been different. And I did become more grounded also because I was very open to learning. So for me, it was five years of a learning experience because I, everything that I experienced during those five years, as negative as you could put it, or as positive, it was all a learning experience.

So from everything that happened, I can recall basically all those moments during those five years, what happened with me and I couldn’t always recall how I got into the situation, but I could always recall what I’ve learned from that situation. And that’s when, when we started with ineffable. The thing that I really did was everything I didn’t like about office politics, everything I did at like about companies really left it out completely.

And I was like, if it’s important, we’ll have to implement it. I kid you not 80%, 80% of the things that were considered import important previously, I realized were not important. Like starting on starting the starting the morning. Exactly. At eight o’clock and at everybody has to be present at work at eight o’clock.

This really doesn’t make any sense because some people want to go to work at seven. Some people want to go to work at night. Some people want to start at 11. The people starting at 11 have to realize that if you start at 11 o’clock pluck and you go away back to home. No, at four, you’re not going to reach her old targets.

That just the darkness of the company, your own goals in life. If you are not very efficient, you’re just not going to reach them. So it’s, it’s fun that you want to decide for that person to start at eight. But if that person wants to start at 11 and work from 11 to actually nine at night and a person does like kids or a wife or a husband.

Why not, I mean, but then you have to have your own responsibility and that’s where I think most people are like, yeah. But in certain we’re not used to having that kind of independence, but also the situation isn’t catered towards that. Like if everybody in the organization is working from, from seven to three or from eight to four, or from nine to five, of course is going to backfire.

If somebody starts working at 11 o’clock, but if your organization is fully geared, the worst, everyone having that freedom. And the only, the only rule that we have at our company is if you have a meeting with a client or you have a meeting with a colleague in a morning, you have to be there. You can see like, okay, I’m starting at 11, but you have a meeting at nine with a client.

You have that responsibility. So those kinds of small things, I think if I wouldn’t have had the experience working for a boss, I wouldn’t be able to let go as well. That experience, because I think the first one and a half years, two years of ineffable, I was pretty much still like the CEO that I would say, but you have to be at the office.

You have to be an and somewhere in a third year or second year, it kind of, I let go of it. And then I realized that some people didn’t have, weren’t used to having that freedom and it went completely wrong and others embraced it until we came to the point that everybody embraced it. Yeah.

Diego: [00:24:31] Some people just require some structure or guidance.

But that’s people independent. I think it’s also the culture that you’ve called the faded from the start. Yeah. I observed the company as an outsider. So I can’t really see what’s going on inside, but to me it pretty much seems pretty, you know, flexible mobile. I see people sitting in a second floor at some just in the office.

So it’s it gives a really, you know modern our feel to it than what I observed in traditional. I’ve never had that experience. So I can’t really say, but I asked, you said you deliberately chose to do those five years? I deliberately decided not to go at all. In my view, it’s, you know, I’m, I’m going to try and benefit for, from not knowing and finding out.

Yeah. So yeah,

Jean-luc: [00:25:23] I lost some of the creative, I have to be honest, there was a time, I think for a year, like for a year I completely lost myself. I became so KPI driven. I had a zero inbox. I was literally fighting to get to zero inbox. It was like once and once a fighting to get through a zero in books, it was, it was fully Val because you completely lose track of what’s important and what’s not important because you’re so fixated on getting to that zero inbox.

And if you would go to my inbox right now, I think there are on 30 mails at the moment. So, which is free, decent, but I have been with all the personal assistant for, I think now two months because we move kind of, as soon as we need one of them, as soon as I have a personal assistant within a first couple of months, that person already transitions to project manager because there are enough projects open for new project management positions.

And I think the benefit of starting off as a PA. Is that you kind of get through the process of the whole company quicker. So you kind of know what’s important, which clients are important. So it’s shifting to a project management is a lot easier, but now actually this week, we’re, we’re going to put out a call for a, for a new

Diego: [00:26:43] so quick question before we pivot to the NFT side, since everybody’s egging for that, a quick question on the personal assistant, but so for you as CEO, as an individual, how much impact has having a personal assistant have for you personally?

Jean-luc: [00:27:02] Oh, a lot. So, so I think people don’t understand like why that would be important for, for somebody like me. But if I don’t have a personal assistant, I spent a boat four to eight hours a week on structuring my week.

I spent about four to eight hours a week, responding to emails and WhatsApp that don’t lead anywhere. And then I spend another four to eight hours a week on communications and things that could be done by somebody else.

Yeah. So between 12. So between 12 and 24 hours a week, I win by having a personal assistant that fully understand how my schedule works.

When to plan something into my calendar, when to leave something out, when to check back with me, like, is this something valuable or can somebody else do it reg? And these are simple things like things like creating assume meeting for somebody else. So we bought Zoom pro package really early during COVID because I realized, okay, we’re gonna need it, we just bought a pro version.

And kind of like every organization I’m involved through, it kind of used that Zoom package at some, some way, or that are in a past year. So if somebody would constantly ask some of them do it on a weekly basis. So we have like four organizations, different organizations currently using our Zoom so, and if I would, for all those people, if they would send me apps, who’d you make assume link be present when this meeting starts handover to hosting those kinds of small things.

They really start adding up. And then I forget like, like three weeks ago, I just forgot that there was a meeting because I’m at home with my kids and a meeting starts at eight o’clock and I’m busy putting them to bed. And then after eight o’clock, when I put the kids to bed, I have like five missed calls and I realized like, I completely forgot about it.

So I think that’s one of the things for a PA the second thing for a PA, what, every time I have had a PA during the past five years, our company has made like a fundamental leap because all of a sudden, under like 10 to 20 hours, I have a week more that I don’t have to spend processing these small desks that I got to put into, like, okay, I really got to do this.

I really want to do it is. So I think at a certain point, but I think what people should not underestimate is don’t get it too early. Because I all, I wanted the PA at an earlier point, but you first have to structure yourself and provide that structure to the PA, because if you’re not providing the structure beforehand, the P has got a golf.

He or she has got to try something and you’re just going to throw it all away and you’re going to throw it out of the window. Yeah, it is. Doesn’t work. This doesn’t work, this doesn’t work. And I spent like five cycles of structures finding out like, what is the way we used almost every project management tool there is.

And we ended up with Google spreadsheets and Google calendar, like Google spreadsheets and Google calendar, or just gold for me and WhatsApp. Which is not allowed anymore. We officially use slack now, but if you want to do something quickly, it’s just WhatsApp. So Hans would be a good PA Gregory.

I think the best PA’s are people that are really structured and they can make snapshot decisions, whether something has value or it doesn’t have value, it could go wrong. Like I had experienced that somebody was like you should fire it as PA because I don’t like this person. So that, that also happened.

All my bee farmer peers are going to be like, are they talking about me? But don’t worry. But what that was like, like we had a case that somebody was like, yeah, this person isn’t fit for this position. But there was also somebody who was very strict, like very structured. And you do have to have a little bit of leeway.

You can’t be like, okay, so I’m not available for the rest of June. I’m not available. So go into my calendar. Yeah. If you go into my calendar for this week, practically, if it would be fully filled in, which is not at the moment, but if I would fill in, I do have a task list. I think I have a task list of 50 tasks for this week.

And if I would schedule all those 50 tasks into my calendar, everything would be at next week. Let’s do it next week. Let’s do it next week.

Diego: [00:31:43] So provide, I gather from what you’re saying, sum it up is basically don’t get it too early. Structure. Your.

Jean-luc: [00:31:50] Self yourself first,

Diego: [00:31:53] you know, and I guess it’s signaling point would be the moment you start stacking things up or just keep pushing it. And yeah, not procrastinate by postponing things and the stack is getting bigger and that’s when you should start considering, okay. It’s time to get a PA, but go through the process or processor shelf first. That’s what I’m getting from you. Yeah.

Jean-luc: [00:32:14] Got it. So I want to go into more questions. Do you want to jump to NFTs?

What, what what’s the next step for us today. So quick shout out to Rajiv bootstrap. His life definitely bootstrap is definitely alive also at home.

Diego: [00:32:27] Yeah. Yeah. I guess that let’s take one more question and then we’ll, we’ll pivot to the NFTs cause we’re halfway through the show now and let’s see, is

Jean-luc: [00:32:38] Yeah. So he mentioned office politics was the worst. And then Gregory asked like how to prevent office politics, taking a hold in a company. So basically if you’re like an employee. You don’t have full control over that? Unfortunately, well, the office politics being pre-funded starts on the edit top of the company.

So actually it’s funny. I was on LinkedIn today. I don’t go there often enough, but Derek Curry, who many know in pseudonym, he posted a quote today on LinkedIn saying like, don’t forget that the bottlenecks are always at the top of the bottle. Like it’s, it’s, it’s a funny analogy, but it kind of makes sense.

So if you have like a top down structure within a company and from the top, it’s not being, there’s no transparency. There’s things hold back. It’s kind of a carrots and sticks situation where you kind of get hit. Like you get blamed. If something goes wrong. I really think I’ve been in, in like personal development meetings with team members of mine and they were sitting there and just waiting to be punished.

And I would be like, So, how is it going? And then for them it was kind of confusing because they were so used in, in certain homies, culture were used to being punished if we did something wrong. So then getting the question like, but are you sure? And it doesn’t the work. It doesn’t always work. We have situations in our company that, that the, the gap between what we wanted to achieve for the person and where the person was at that moment was too big.

And then you also have to make decisions like, okay, we can try it next year, or maybe the year after our comeback, when you’re ready for this. And that’s really hard to accept, but the other side, we also had situations where I was like, yeah, but there’s something wrong. What’s going on? Can we help? Can we help in a certain way?

And then the person kind of confesses assess, like this is the really the issue and, and the best way to prevent office politics is in weekly meetings. As soon as we feel like somebody feels offended personally, kind of deescalate it saying like, Hey, let’s, let’s focus on the issue. Don’t focus on the person.

Don’t focus on what went wrong, focus on the issue, what went wrong? Why did it go wrong? And not who made a goat? Who, who was responsible for the fact that it went wrong, but what was the actual situation?

Diego: [00:35:05] Apparently people are already digging this, but yeah, I think this is a good place to be, but let’s go back to, we started this talk actually on, you know, financial independence then starting your own company, and then the experience within that. But let’s zoom back to the, you know, financial independence and how that, that actually brought us to, you know our interests, personal interests in, you know, the blockchain cryptocurrency space and what has now, and, you know, developed kind of gone mainstream the NFT space.

So two, two interesting projects that have been kind of taking off in the last few months is one, the one you’re so interested in. Cause you’re, you’re aware that this NBA top shot a pop it in here for a second. This room. Yeah. So we got M NBA top shot is basically digital collectable, NBA moments like videos from back in the day from players like LeBron James.

Jean-luc: [00:36:08] Well, they started, they started with this year, last year and this year. So these are like all new kind of moments. And I think the best part about this is that it’s own, but it’s not, it’s owned by Dapper Labs who has a crypto background, which is good, but also it’s together with the NBA and the national players association.

So they’re pushing like NBA players to promote this as well, which makes it kind of, you know, for a fact like you own this NBA moment, like if you have one of those moments, I don’t think people really realize what, what the potential of this is because

Diego: [00:36:44] in the end it’s kind of, yeah. What does it mean to own a moment? What can I do with that? And how, how would you explain that owning a NBA moment? Well, why did you, even aside from you being a huge sport lover and NBA lover, what does owning an NBA moment mean for you?

Jean-luc: [00:37:03] Okay, so let’s, let’s, let’s just bring it back first to collectibles. I’ve been collecting like my whole life and I’ve NBA collectibles, like trading cards. I have flippers and, and big I used to collect soccer stickers as well. And I I’m actually upset because I think my, my best, my 10 best collectibles, like basketball cards from Michael Jordan to Charles Barkley, like the high quality ones I actually used. I actually. Put them on like my wall as a, as a kid, when I was younger, I actually put a glue on them and I grew up to my wall.

And so they don’t have any value like my 10 best collectibles actually from my youth, which I’m pretty sure are like at work between $20 and a couple of hundred dollars, I can sell them off anymore because they don’t have any value. So I think that’s the biggest mistake that I made. And then but I still have a very big collection.

I think I have over 300 basketball trading carts of which probably 200, 250 are just. Useless like our players that I don’t even know where they are, but there’s a small collection that is actually worth something. And if I would trade it off, I would pay for the, the ones that I do have. I think there would be like a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of trading cards there.

So whereas this upper deck, because most of them are upper deck cards from the nineties. So where’s that little different from these MBA top shots. It’s because these are like real, you have these it’s similar in one side, but are there other side, you can watch it on YouTube. If, if the highlight is available on YouTube, you can watch it on YouTube, but then it’s owned by YouTube or it’s owned by the NBA or the broadcasting station at broadcasted it.

But these moments are actually owned by you. And then the question comes, but how valuable are these moments? Like if I have a LeBron James. Mormon and 40,000 other people have it. How valuable is that actually, and that’s kind of where we’re still in a beta phase because this is year one. And I think people don’t realize it.

I can actually buy I’ve bought in the past month. I’ve bought a couple of moments for $1 of which I’m pretty sure that there’ll be $10 somewhere along the next 10 years.

Diego: [00:39:24] Okay. Just for reference from the moments that are out now, what’s the most expensive moment. Just, just to paint in picture at, at what stages now.

Jean-luc: [00:39:34] So there is like a LeBron James moment of which there are like 49 available in the world. And I think also the skill people don’t understand the skill. And we’re going to talk about, about VeeFriends as well. I don’t think people understand the scale because when we think from scarcity, from a Surinamese perspective, we talk about scarcity and 600.000 people are able to chime in.

But when we talk about scarcity, when we consider the whole world, then all of a sudden you realize, wait a minute, somethings are really scars because some of those moments are expandable. Like they keep being produced and mended, but most of these moments, they have a limit. They have a finite amount of, of replica that are being made.

It’s like a shoe basically. Like if you were a shoe collector and the shoes with the, with the lease replica us with, with the set amount, which are the least, and people don’t forget, people lose their shoes, people lose their password. So in 20 years time, if there are 49 LeBron James moments and like 40 of those people don’t have access anymore through their collection.

They’re only nine people who actually have it. And nine people and there are already over 300.000 top shot collectors. So that’s also kind of like a confrontation, like wait they’re 300000 people trying to get this, these 10.000 packs that are available so we’re thinking 10.000 packs that’s a lot.

And then you realize like the chances of getting one is like, it’s, it’s like 2% or something. And the LeBron James, I think the most expensive moment that has been sold on NBA top shot went for $250,000.

Diego: [00:41:23] Wow. That is a quite a lot. And yeah, that’s one in how many copies. So don’t expect to go into it and make $250,000.

If you’re listening to this, just to make that clear.

Jean-luc: [00:41:39] There’s a guy who invested $17,000 into this. And he’s like valued at over million, which is cool. I would in, I’ve put in $350 into this. And my expected ROI at the moment is 15%.

Diego: [00:42:00] Okay. That’s still I had to make that joke. But yeah, to, to compare it with scale reason, I asked that how many and how valued. So you and I both know we follow Gary Vee talked about collecting shoes. You’ve got one of Gary Vee’s shoes. It’s one of those things you collected back in the early days. And he came with his own IP, his own project called VeeFriends. Let me pop that up in a second.

Jean-luc: [00:42:27] Okay. Quickly say, can I quickly, so I feel, and for everybody that’s watching right now, I feel Diego undersold this episode, because before we actually go into VeeFriends, Diego, I think people don’t understand that you have invested over a thousand dollars into an NFT.

Are actually thousands of dollars into NFTs. And I think for people that’s, so for, for people that are watching, they’re like, guys, wait a minute, where’s this going? Why are you so putting so much money into, and also where’s the money coming from? I think that’s something people want to know as well. So I don’t know how much you can disclose about that, but I mean, to be honest, my Topshots, all, all my top shots do to give an intro to you, to your, their segment.

All the top shows that I bought the whole $350 that I invested are actually crypto gains are gains from cryptocurrencies that I bought in 2018 that rose in value. And I decided to invest it in something else.

Diego: [00:43:31] Yeah. So to answer that, that first part or the second part on where does the money come from and did this comes from the, you know, financial independence perspective.

As we talked about earlier. So 2016, you know, started a deep dive and 2016 starting 2017 into crypto. And you got to keep in mind. These are the decisions what’s paying off now are based on decisions I made in 2017. So it’s like four years later and I got into crypto space back then, you know, I built miners, people who know me know that experimented with it.

You know if you all, always, if you look in retrospect, you could be way more if you make those decisions, but you don’t know that.

Yeah. That’s why try it and experiment with it. And this is, I guess the next bet I’m making and, you know, experimenting in this space, seeing how things work and why I decided to go with VeeFriends in the first place one I think the space matured enough and NFTs aren’t a 2021 thing it’s been there since the backend of the 2018 even.

But it’s only now that they’re getting mainstream attention. And if someone like, you know, Gary Vee who’s also been in the crypto space since 2014, 2015, got into Ethereum 2017 as well. Looks at this. And if you know anything about Gary from what I’ve seen online at this, you know, he is all about owning his own IP.

He wants to buy the jets all about, you know, creating something for himself. And this was his approach, at least from what I’m getting to get his own kind of Disney type characters to make that into a social thing that people all over the world can see and associate to. So he combined like animals. He loved with personality traits like patient panda shrewd shark into these characters. I think it’s over 300 characters, something like that. Yeah. And it created different NFTs on it. And I think 10,000, 255 in total. So to bring this into scale perspective to the NBA to p shot. So this initial token, there’s like 10255.

Gary V has millions of followers. If you check all the socials millions, they started the discord channel server for this project in particular,

Jean-luc: [00:46:02] how many people are on the discourse channel?

Diego: [00:46:05] If I remember correctly three weeks ago, four weeks ago, when I first went into it, It was over a hundred thousand already. So I expect maybe around 200, a few hundred thousand people in that.

Jean-luc: [00:46:17] So this is crazy. So to put this in perspective there, how many, 10,000, the NFTs,

Diego: [00:46:24] Yeah. 10,000 tokens of available which he left gap. A few of them for himself, the goose, the Gary originally owned. These are for his giveaways.

So subtract this 1,240 that’s for him to give away to someone. So available would be a 10,000 minus that there are 9,000 something in a discord server with hundreds of thousands of people.

Jean-luc: [00:46:48] And so you’re in the lucky 10%,

Diego: [00:46:50] it goes even deeper. So I didn’t even know what a Dutch Auction was. Until they started a sale also. For those of you who don’t know, the Dutch auction is kind of like the traditional auction, you bid something, someone else gets higher and goes to the highest bidder at the end of the auction time.

Or if no one else gets higher. So the Dutch auction is kind of reverse that it starts at the highest price. And then over time it goes down if nobody buys it. yeah, it was kind of crazy the first day when, when they launched the head postpone, if it’ll be, cause you know, the technical stuff. So they released out of those 10,000, I think it was the first batch was around 4,000 first around 50% of the ones available.

and the cheapest ones, the course they started at 2.5 Ethereum and the bottom price was 0.5 Ethereum so of course the, the characters that were popular, that he was pushing to, it still shows like a Panda and a cat there was, got swept up at 2.5 feet, but no one knew what was going to happen the first day.

So you have some people swooping in call this, the whales and other are cautious trying to accumulate this Ethereum to get there. And this was at a point that Ethereum was at its all-time high around $4,000 per Eth.

Jean-luc: [00:48:08] yeah, so people pay 10 K some people pay 10 K

that’s $200,000 Surinamese dollars for people who are listening in $200,000 for an NFT. Just, just put it in this perspective. Yeah, go ahead.

Diego: [00:48:24] Okay. Before I move on, what these NFTs also do this 10,255. Grants you access to the conference. He’ll hold the next three years to 2022, 2023 and 2024.

And only people with a NFT get access to it. So at max, theoretically, there can only be 10255 attendees.   coming back to the cores and the first sale, why I decided to go for it? Cause I was, I told you this, I was going to just observe.

What’s going to happen. So I been in the discord server for the first week. It got postponed. I’ve been following conversations, how people were interacting, how people were planning, and this is where you can see how the community, how our following truly is. And if it’s worth your time and investment or not.

So people are already planning out if a VeeCon is going to be here, I’m already thinking out how, you know, you’re going there, but also educating each other on the crypto space. Because a lot of people, a lot of his followers, or even knew they didn’t know nothing on crypto. So they made the tutorials and you know how to make a, a mask.

So they educated compared to other platforms, the whole process. And then this was in a discord only. So he didn’t publish it quite, on the socials. So do I support this statement group who really invested, and then you have this moderator who kind of the guy now, you know, a kind of a guiding role in that.

So you, you see this happening in the dispatcher and then, hi, this is getting interesting. And then the firstly sale happens and you know, obviously the cores the cheaper ones that that’s the most affordable one for most people. So of course a few people scooped them up, but as the price got lower, you know, one Eth 0.9 it’s 0.8.

It, you see a velocity and purchases, people are starting to buy more. And actually the cores from day one got sold out the next day before the opening of the next day. Ooh. I was chatting with you as like, I think I need to pull this trigger now I was chatting with you and, and I was looking at it as like, the numbers are going, you know, there are I think 200 or 300 left of that.

And I’m like, I gotta do it now. And I, in my mind, you think when the price hits the floor, everyone wants to buy it at floor level and that’s going to increase the network. Traffic and prices were high. And if, if somebody is a bit faster or their transaction gets approved before yours, you miss that out and you have to pay gas as well. And you lose on that. Yeah. You don’t get the gas back.

Jean-luc: [00:51:18] I actually, you have to, you have to explain. No, no, you have to explain the gas to people are watching that are not familiar with Ethereum because you keep saying it, but for the people that know that don’t know that’s Ethereum that’s the second largest cryptocurrency in the world at the moment market gap wise. So, but, but explain a little about the gas and then explain your strategy as well. Yeah.

Diego: [00:51:42] So quickly on that. So if I’m not mistaken and be top adoption at this, I know neither I think it’s called flow, so

Jean-luc: [00:51:48] that’s fine, but they did something from smart and I really appreciate them for that they use Dapper credits so you actually purchased that per credit, which you can purchase with any, any. Crypto on Coinbase, not ripple because ripple is being there’s a lawsuit against a ripple. So basically you have Bitcoin and so on, but then you buy credit and

Diego: [00:52:12] you gotta fix like a fixed, fixed,

Jean-luc: [00:52:16] fixed value. And yeah, your money gets deposit back when you miss a sale, which is good because our internet connection in Suriname is really slow. So I miss out on a lot. Of $1 and $2 moments because somebody outside a Suriname has a quicker internet connection and they get to pull off because it’s click, click, click, click, click, click, click into Dapper and then kind of, okay.

Diego: [00:52:40] So back to  Ethereum. So VeeFriends has actually on the Ethereum network and Jean-luc already mentioned second biggest network, but at this point, Ethereum is working on scaling solutions and to process more transactions, that’s just kind of one of the bottlenecks with the platform, with the ecosystem right now.

And the way transactions work is you gotta be kind of like a, they call it gas, but a certain amount of Ethereum as an incentive to the miners, the, the machines that keep the network intact that verify the transactions as an incentive you, you beat that to verify your transaction on the blockchain.

So when traffic is high gas prices increase because it’s kind of like a competition to, you know who’s transactions get approved. and it was an all-time high. So one transaction around that time, kind of like if I just put it with maybe $30, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 30, $30, but this is a contract.

If you’re buying an NFT it’s a contract and contracts have separate fees. So at some point there’s a few hundred dollars at the highest point that you have to be as transaction fees to get aside from the actual cost of the NFT for a chance to get verified. So if you don’t get it, there’s also

Jean-luc: [00:54:01] another thing.

There’s also another thing. The higher, the gas fee you pick. To pay the faster the transaction goes, right. Want to pay more? Okay. Okay. Go ahead. Just

Diego: [00:54:16] to share that officialized her here, that kind of, you know, the per fan of south park where you see these are the transactions, this is the waiting line, kind of, of all the transaction waiting to get improved.

So the people pay higher gas get on the train, basically get on the network. And this is where we can see like the, the fees. Now, now it’s at an all-time low. So this $1 50 was around 40 $50 at its peak.

Jean-luc: [00:54:42] So, okay. But what’s, so at the end, you, you managed to get a VeeFriend

Diego: [00:54:47] land, the risk being a bit higher for a high, awkward, a higher guarantee to get it with a lower gas price because lessons action at that point, that was the buying strategy.

So, yeah, I got a VeeFriend that way, and then you just, you know, follow the community along and how things go. And the next day, basically consequently, each day, the cores sold out that same day or before the next auction started. So the core four also outfit in those five days and that left, you know prices for the more expensive fund kind of more rarity.

And aside from those they’re special tokens, like gift goats, that kind of aside from the access to the conference, they are going to cater an experience through it that they mail you gifts. And those went for like, I think a five Ethereum at the cheapest.

Jean-luc: [00:55:41] So this just to give you a brilliance on Gary Vee found the ultimate leverage. Like this is like the altar. He basically

Diego: [00:55:53] one more thing. Just, I’m not a type of tokens for the access to conspire. You get either breakfast with him, like mentorship by him for a few hours or, you know, one time a year. So then there’s different modules and those go for like 10 Eth or something like that.

Jean-luc: [00:56:11] So here’s the funny thing though. He all, he, he was already doing that. So basically he just gamified his own system. He already had all these things in place. He already knew exactly what value he wanted to provide to people. And he just exchanged the value that he was already giving to his community into NFTs, which is.

The way it should be done. And this is why people are suspicious and don’t trust NFT projects because a lot of NFT projects and probably there’s already a video clip of Gary V explaining this what I’m about to say, but in the NFT market into F and F the spear, there’s this. Idea that you could just create NFTs and you can just go to paint and kind of make something and paint and put it on the blockchain and it will sell for hundreds and thousands of dollars, which is not how it works.

I mean, there’s real value in it’s like the successful NFT projects have real value in them. And I think people still underestimate that because it’s like, yeah. And we can make it. And if they do this and do that

Diego: [00:57:19] well, it’s, it’s all about, so that added value that’s been added just to just the open kind of sold me on it as well. Like it’s not a loss, even if it goes to south when, if everything crashes, which probably it’s

Jean-luc: [00:57:34] going to happen between now and

Diego: [00:57:38] 2025. Okay, well, you will survive the good projects. And this is one that I identified like, really? This is, there is a substance in this. So that’s why I decided to pull the trigger and to give context again, like 10,255 tokens.

And if you go back and check the stats, there are only there they’re sold out, but there are only 4,500 token holders.

Jean-luc: [00:58:02] on the market. Oh, okay. How many are on the market of those standards and how many are currently being sold?

Diego: [00:58:08] I’d have to check open, see, not that many because a lot of people are still holding I could probably check that real quick.

Jean-luc: [00:58:14] Now, so what I’ve experienced with NBA top shot,

Diego: [00:58:17] your honor, that 50 are being sold out of those 10,350 on the secondary market, 350. So that’s where you see scarcity. So if you look at a cores the bottom price was 0.5. Ethereum, the cheapest one from what’s being sought now it’s 2.5. It’s five X already.

Jean-luc: [00:58:38] Okay. But realistically we are both not in it. We both looked at the project and we’re like, this is something that I want to invest in. This is something that’s fun. This is something I find value in. It’s not something we did for the money. I’m going to get good XM. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Diego: [00:58:55] We is also a thing that there were actually people flipping there have been actually people who bought cores at 0.5, flipped it on the secondary market.

Phew, phew. Eat because you know, Gary calls out, oh, this is an underrated character. They put it on the market and then someone else scoops it up. So some people went from a core to a gift goat So they upgraded their token just by reselling and buying another one. So that’s also a way to grow it, and that was part of his strategy to give people access.

And that’s why he did it Dutch auction. So, you know, rails are kind of this incentivize and other people get a chance to flip and gain some financial view with it, aside from just the token for those who can,

Jean-luc: [00:59:38] well, the, the real that it’s patient, the will, that is patient also got as well. But was there a limit to the amount of VeeFriends you can have for one account?

Or how did they,

Diego: [00:59:49] I don’t think there was, I’m not sure if that was intentional or maybe something, a limitation in the, you know the deck, but even then there’s ways around it. You can need multiple accounts and purchase multiples.

Jean-luc: [01:00:04] Yeah. So I think that’s before we go to Anil’s question, it was a really interesting one.

I think NBA top shot did a couple of things. Right. And they did a couple of things wrong. One of the things that he did wrong was the challenges and a day overestimated. I think the market kind of crashed reasonably, and that’s why I’m actually pulling people into it now because when the market crashes that’s, when you want to put people in you, you don’t want to get people in when it’s at all time high.

I want to get people in Minnesota at an all time low, because then, you know, they’re gonna get value from it. So I think what was the thing that they didn’t do right for NBA top shot is they kind of the, the rewards for certain challenges, Jade, they just weren’t valuable enough. And that kind of backfired and certain facts also backfired, but in all the experiences it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s so well thought out the way they release right now.

They’re just releasing facts only for people that don’t have a back yet, like to make sure that everybody has equal opportunity. And also Dave, they made Alabama eligibility. And did you go to the rules that you cannot purchase more than one pack per person. And they go through all those different calls to make sure that nobody has to duplicate account.

And mark Cuban actually made a mistake of saying that he had to have costs. So that kind of the community was like, wait a minute. That’s not allowed, but owners are in it as well. Players are in it as well. So let’s quickly going to go to the question of annual, so, okay. Interesting. What happens if Gary fee dies?

Diego: [01:01:41] I cannot predict what’s going to happen, but you know, you go into this assuming that that’s not going to happen, but where to happen, that the keys of course are in his, you know at least the ones he owns, he has it. And I dunno how it works in the back end. There’s probably contracts, and conditions being met in the backend team.

I say, if he were to die the access token kinda you know, you should get, you can’t really get that service or, oh,

Jean-luc: [01:02:10] you can. Oh, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait. I do think you can. I mean,

Diego: [01:02:14] yeah. To have something alternative, but you know that that’s worked out in, in the project itself, you kind of, kind of look at it as just any other type of reward based conference.

If you scheduled a meeting with a coach or something, if it, if the coach dies or, or a trainer I assume they would have mechanics around that for something.

Jean-luc: [01:02:38] That’s interesting. I wonder if he addressed that already on one of his channels, it would be interesting because I do feel Gary would be somebody who already put something in place or has ideas on, I can

Diego: [01:02:50] probably throw it in the Discord later.

What if,

Jean-luc: [01:02:52] Yeah, and I think there, and we have to understand it’s a community over a hundreds of thousand of people who would, I mean, they would pay to go to his funeral. So, you know, there, there’s so many things that

Diego: [01:03:03] to talk about community and material. I’m going to maybe take a side track here on, you know the gaming world, for example I’m also an avid gamer for the people who know me.

I played online MMOs and you know, you have a strong community and this is just a gaming world. There was actually a popular manga artist who recently passed away a popular show in Japan, for sure. And when, when the news hit the internet, there are a lot of fans of him in the game I’m playing, and they actually had the kind of a funeral or tribute of respect.

Yeah. Kind of everybody line up with their shorts in the ground with the fire, just to show respect in one of those cities. And it didn’t go, just goes around. And that’s thousands of a few thousands of players just for a few days straight. So you can see the power of community there. And if you translate this to a real world example of, you know, someone who has been impacting people’s lives through his socials a lot yeah, you, you can expect something like that from the community side.

Jean-luc: [01:04:09] So if you talk about community, we do have to quickly talk about Doge as well.  I think, yeah, I think it’s interesting though. It’s just a very interesting at a very pro career place. I, I, I don’t have a good idea how many people in the doge community are there because they’re just thinking more and more and more, and how much of the community is still like the community who has been there.

Diego: [01:04:31] or development community.

Yeah. Is that what you mean?

Jean-luc: [01:04:35] Yeah, because I know there’s, there’s part of the community. That’s saying like, we’re not going, we don’t sell below 5 cents. We’re not ever going to go below 5 cents again. So I think that’s a really interesting dynamic because there’s a lot of speculation, whether or not we’re still in a, in a in a bull run.

Are we already moving towards the bear market? There’s a lot of speculation about that. But also. These, these cryptocurrencies are going to drop. Eventually they’re going to drop. We don’t know when they’re going to drop. They might go up a little and then have a drop, or they could be stagnant now and drop off later this year or next year.

But it will be interesting to see, like what’s the bottom Doge has going to go back to

Diego: [01:05:20] Yeah.

Jean-luc: [01:05:21] So a lot of people are saying like 5 cents. There are people who are like, yeah, but I’m not buying those for more than 1 cent. There are people who are like, yeah, it’s going to go back to a fifth of a set of a fifth of a cent.

So there’s kind of, but the community is what makes it special. And that’s why kind of Elon is, is putting so much effort into tweeting about the community. Because from a community perspective, they’re really, really strive here.

Diego: [01:05:51] Yeah, I really can’t say much on Doge, because even though I’ve been looking at it from a sideline and the price spiking up, I personally haven’t dived into it.

Kind of missed it. If you don’t pay no mind, just focus on other projects like the NFTs so he, he, here’s what I want to say about that.

2017, took the deep dive? You know, we talked about financial independence and to understand something really, you gotta live it. You gotta engage with it.

It’s not something you just see. Oh, and you hop on the train and then go with it. Cause that’s not where you’re going to see the value it’s the moment you start engaging, actually engaging with it with the people busy in that space and try to do a transaction. This was actually my first NFT transaction. I had a few of these, but like purchase for a piece of art on

Jean-luc: [01:06:50] the, on the theorem, on the term blockchain.

Diego: [01:06:53] Yeah. Yeah. Off of this type of token. I got my ENS domain before that a few months ago as well, but then there’s also a findable on OpenSea, but yeah, so this is kind of moment. I don’t say start with VeeFriends, but if you’re really interested in the space and see what the potential is, just check out other projects there, the cyberpunk cyberpunks projects with I consider different types of projects, but get your hands dirty.

Just try it. Doesn’t have to be Ethereum can be any other place, but just actually try it, spend a little amount of money just to get an experience and then decide later, okay, this has value or not. And then base your investment. If you want to call it that on that and not just go under those strain or it’s going up and need to buy Doge

Jean-luc: [01:07:47] yeah. But that’s, that’s how most people start, you know, because those she’s relatively cheap, but 40 cents, 70 cents, even 10 cents is not cheap. So definitely wants to know where you can mind nowadays. Can you still mind, so how, how do you feel, how do you feel about faucets mining and also what’s the last one?

Tear airdrop. How do you feel about it? Of how you feel about faucets airdrops and mining.

Diego: [01:08:16] Okay. The startup faucets. I I’ve never done. And to do explain not positive, it’s just basically you have this website and you do a few actions and you get rewarded for it. I think you did it awhile, but I never even bought it.

Jean-luc: [01:08:29] I actually, I think my faucets in the beginning, when I started doing it in 2018, I was at a certain point. I was like, okay, I’ve been doing this for months. And I got like $5, but in the end, like when the prices spike, I got a least a hundred dollars out of just clicking, literally just clicking upsides.

There’s still a couple of faucets up, but now yeah. Now you don’t get it.

Diego: [01:08:54] Yeah. So for, at that scale, I didn’t really bother with it as too meticulous for me. Mining, I mentioned before I tried it again, it was getting your hands dirty and experimenting with it, with the tech and what’s possible. That’s where you don’t appreciate what’s going to happen.

So I did that. The reason why I stopped is, you know, you take a big picture perspective. I was running Nvidia card, so graphics cards and, you know, graphic cards are expensive. And if you look at a tech cycle, there’s, you know, newer cards every few years. And at that time I was looking at the release cycle of Nvidia.

So the next year they are going to come with a new card, like the 2080 something. So new cards, new chips needs better processing for it’s going to outperform your card. So I got out sold my card before that happened or around the release time. That was just a tactical decision on that board, big picture.

And I didn’t go back into it cause you know, I done my time. I got the experience. Okay. This is how it works. And I was in.

Jean-luc: [01:10:00] Be honest, you, you, you, and you ended up with quite some Ethereum.

Diego: [01:10:06] yeah. It’s kind of a paid for one of my trips to Europe, to the conference, to a conference physically. So that, that, that’s kind of the mindset there on mining. I’d say yes, you can still mine. And here’s another mind shift change you have, you mentioned, you know Doge people not going to buy under 5 cents or less selling, selling, not selling or selling or buying. Yeah. But that’s still thinking in us dollar terms, I early on stopped thinking in us dollar terms, I look at my portfolio in either Ethereum or Bitcoin terms I establish if I’ve grown, if that.

Coin amount has grown, not the U S dollar amount. That’s one of the fundamental differences in the way I look at it compared to most people. I think

Jean-luc: [01:11:04] I have lost. If I look at that I’ve really lost because I did, I did.

Diego: [01:11:10] I probably lost

Jean-luc: [01:11:11] more. I did own more than one Ethereum once.

Diego: [01:11:15] Yeah. So I, I probably lost two over the year, but that’s, you know, you, you experiment, there was a phase where I experimented with trading and that’s how you get that experience as well.

And you start understanding market psychology. You start understanding again, communities, why people buy, why not? And that’s how you look at that. And Arabs, I, I miss the Arabs good old ICO days. I got a few airdrops not a lot, but in 2020, there’s a huge one. Because that’s when I was in New Zealand, and I wasn’t really focusing on the market.

I saw the news come through with, you know, Uniswap on G exchanges. Yeah. And I slept on that. But, and then a lot of other platforms try to copy that effect to a certain degree, but I think it kind of died down now. So it’s just kind of an incentive now to get people onto newer projects and I don’t really pay the newer projects so much mind yet.

I focus on what I’ve experienced in 2017 that kinda laid a track record of, you know, this is, has an established community. It has a established set of developers who are really working on the product itself.

Jean-luc: [01:12:31] Yeah. So I think that’s, that’s you made a good comment there now. It’s, it’s very painful to, to, to think of it like that.

Diego: [01:12:40] I, I see a question here, if you’re talking about gaming and have you checked in the games running on earning the crypto? So this is really interesting for me. I am very much bullish on that. I am waiting for the moment when triple a games, online games start implementing these kind of things. And that’s why I’m really not investment advice, but I’m really bullish on Enjin.

Enjin is it also runs on the Ethereum network, but with a different protocol combining the fungibility of normal tokens that you can exchange Bitcoin with NFTs, with non-fungible tokens. So if you translate this in game language, You have this currency in the game and you can buy this piece of armor.

Jean-luc: [01:13:27] I’m fairly unfairly, this is my mandatory, here’s where my mandatory high stock comes in. I think we have one more screenshot off of hive. I mean, And the city right now, people are really upset. Like this area is a really good game. If you’re into SIM city, it’s really worth checking out these idiots DCAD diet.io, and that’s on the, on the right.

So on the left, you have my top shot collection or at least a couple of cool cats and some fantasy stuff. This was a slide in one of my presentations as well. Recently. What underwrite you see the city? And I think what’s, what’s really interesting about the city is basically it’s SIM city a little bit more, two dimensional SIM city, really see what the city looks like, but as you can see, the city is quite bad.

I think my city right now on D-city has over 7,000, a population of 7,000. My peak Fell you at the moment. If, if I would get all my revenue from my city, I would make about $2 a day. But currently, and this is why the city is a lot like, regular life is because at the moment for the city, we pay a hundred percent taxes.

So the complete revenue that I would earn as a city goes directly to the government, the, to the game, it gets burned. And this is to actually, it’s a tactic that our current precedent is doing to get the price of the president, the price of the game. You had the president of the game every, every two weeks we fought for a new precedent.

So all 2000 players that are playing, we get the vote for a president. And then there’s also something like holding rewards, which is The Molotov SIEM, SIM powered is so same as the simulation token for, for the city and the Mart of SIM that you have stock that decides how much forwarding power you actually have.

But this game, especially with the third edition that rolled out it’s next level, it goes into politics. You really have to focus on learning how politics works, but it also has the dimension of the pandemics fires riots. You also have cards that are focused mainly on education. You have cars that are focused mainly on creativity.

You have courts that are focused on, on crime. So there are so many dimensions students game. And the question is, have you checked out Green’s running on crypto. This is a management game. On crypto, it runs on a crypto ecosystem. So that makes it really, really cool because there are also some side tokens that I earned from playing this game, like beer and, and wheat token.

I actually earn from it as well, but why I want to talk about, well, I want to talk about hive is DCAD isn’t even the biggest game when I’ve these 80 has around 2000 players at the moment, but I think a splinter lands, splinter lands has over 10,000 players and a splinter. Lance. You also have crypto grammas Mar master splinter.

Lance is like a monster gaming trading card. It’s like, you can compare it to How it was called a pick or choose part of what game.

Diego: [01:16:32] Pokemon

Jean-luc: [01:16:33] So you have kind of like splinter Lance, like NFT, Pokemon NFTs. Like once her game, you can treat and fight against each other. And then you have crypto brewmaster, crypto brewmaster is kind of like this blue brewing game.

And then you also have for our  and I was like, which is really weird. I should be playing on a board. I don’t know why I don’t play it, but it’s a, it is a football game. A soccer game on the blockchain. So there’s are so many levels too, and these are all different than if these, so when you’re seeing, like, this was the first NFT that I bought, like, I’m like, yeah, I have over a dozen NFTs, but they’re like small carts.

The most expensive NFT that I sold was kind of an automation that you could get on this area. And I sold it for like 30 bucks at a time and I actually sold it twice and I reinvested it all in a game.

Diego: [01:17:22] When did I do want to mention or add to that list is if you’re into virtual world stuff, check out Decentraland yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of like a, if you’re into Minecraft, like open box and box building stuff, there’s people building cities, literally Lance. Plots of land are being sold like in same city. And these are being treated on OpenSea open sea as a platform where people on the secondary market exchange things a few of them go for a lot.

So if you’re into that virtual space, just try and give this a shot and see how that works.

Jean-luc: [01:18:00] Yeah. So it’s different kinds of games. Of course, certain games, just this don’t work yet. I think with brief, like people are getting more aware of Brave as well. So it brief, you’re already having the browser kind of revelation that people are like, wait a minute.

Instead of Google making money off of us, we can actually make money while browsing. So that’s already like a very interesting kind of new age incentive, but for like actual, real first shooter gaming, I think that’s, that’s a little bit,

Diego: [01:18:30] no, actually development on RPG style. Dungeon games. Yeah. With the NFTs, I saw some demos on a few YouTube videos that they’re actually in development already. People experimenting with it. So with, you know, fancy graphics, high end stuff 3d models and everything.

Jean-luc: [01:18:48] That would be cool. If you could play like Bioshock and get like you earn like crypto from playing Bioshock or something like that.

Diego: [01:18:56] Yeah. And to translate that into games, to bring it back to a bigger perspective, look at how e-sports has grown.

Let’s look at the scale of e-sports now. translate that to e-sports and e-sports rivals like traditional sports. Like, I don’t think FIFA yet, but you know, international sports, there are competitions on, you know Hey.

Jean-luc: [01:19:20] We said, we spoke with Renzo last week and like, there are e-sports people that earn water and money then Olympic swimmers. I mean, that’s, that’s kind of ridiculous, you know, so it’s, it’s like, we’re getting into this. I mentioned there’s like, actually a question that we asked Rishi was like one of the pros playing from Suriname, FIFA, rose playing from Suriname like to like, to what extent is it like fair that you kind of, you earn a living from like playing FIFA, like on a console.

And there are people like playing semi-professional soccer, who are like, they’re not earning anything. It’s just weird where it’s second layer dimension that we’re not. And then, and then it gets to the point actually of how much time and how much resources and how much killed we can invest into something. Because I think that’s, we should put a disclaimer to this, like the amount of hours that you’ve put in to that Gary Vee discord server. It’s it’s you invested in that as well.

Diego: [01:20:24] Bring that into perspective that the project was supposed to launch May 5th. So at the beginning of may, I joined the Discord Server and I’ve meant checking the server at least a few times a day, following what’s going on and how things go. So it’s the research that you’re doing and trying to understand. So that, that all goes into that all went into me, making the decision that they like. I think this is a good move to make for me.

Jean-luc: [01:20:52] I think that’s a good disclaimer to close it off it, like all these things that we’re talking about, the amount of hours that we spent and yeah, I can see, I don’t have time, but the amount of hours I spend into NBA top shot, like understanding what’s going on, learning, making mistakes. I mean, I made a lot of mistakes that I could have avoided them, but they’re also.

You also get rewarded, like, and that’s the funny thing about it. Like when you invest a lot of time into something, eventually get lucky at some point and realize the luck because of the hours you’ve spent into it that you wouldn’t realize. If you just spend a couple of hours just quickly researching it, you, you just don’t get those opportunities when you just are like, yeah, I’m gonna put myself into make account and then you’re done with it, the actual result.

And then we’ve gone full circle because I ended up in social media by accident. I studied leisure studies. I studied sports and tourism. I mastered in urban development and planning. of course. I mean, my, my, my Social, my social science background of course helps a lot. So.

Hey. Yeah. So I nearly was onto something. When you have, for PA you can spend time for, for, in becoming financial independence. That’s true. That’s definitely true. I, I wouldn’t, I don’t hold any against the thing against it, but for me personally, don’t want of time. I’ve put in to certain topics to, to learn certain things and to put it full circle.

When I first got into social media, I’ve my first one of my first projects for social media was figuring out whether or not. Tourism companies should invest in social media. We’re talking here 2009, 2010, I think 2000, the end of 2010. And we were, I did a research on figuring out whether or not making a social media and like a Facebook at the time.

It was still flicker. I think we did the flicker account for photos, a YouTube account and a Facebook account. And what we wanted to do is like figure out whether or not actually having a Facebook account with help generate traffic or sales for this tourism, for these tourism companies. And, and of course, what you end up finding out is if you have like a page and you don’t do anything on it.

So like any, nothing we said here is financial advice. Unless you’ve put in the work, the hours and the time to figure out and research for yourself, what works for you and what you believe in, I mean, Diego infested in fi France, because he believed in the ecosystem. I invested in city and MBA adoption, because these are actually fun things to do.

Diego: [01:23:52] Yeah. I actually know nothing about NBA dot shot from that perspective and yeah, I’m not that interested in sports, so I didn’t even bother with it.

Jean-luc: [01:24:01] Yeah. So it’s not like, yeah, you should invest in this because it’s going to be no it’s because you love. I mean, like I, for instance, we just put all the screens, NBA top shot gave me a Stephan Curry, like a SA a seventh grade, top shot for a milestone.

He achieved, he broke the record for most points out for his franchise. And that’s that franchise moment that up where he broke the record for most points in the warriors franchise, I own one of the 17,000 limited additions of that one. And of course I don’t own the number one, which is the most valuable.

But in the end, when they’re like 50,000 people want in on that moment and I’m one of the 17000 and that owns it, I want to keep it. I actually don’t want to sell it. So that’s also something that you’re getting confronted with. Like a lot of times. Yeah. Like you made this investment at a certain point, you’re going to have to sell some of these things off because otherwise you’ll.

Be like it’s a consumer investment and that’s, that’s my takeaway as well. Like the city, I consider it as the following when I was, I don’t know, a teenager and I wanted to buy a SIM city. My dad would have to pay the, the store for me to get that game. And I would be playing that game. And I was wasting my time playing that game that I purchased.

And now we’re crypto gaming is heading that you don’t purchase the game you purchase in in game purchases. And actually, you’re getting paid back a certain amount from those in-game game purchases. So if you’re lucky, best case scenario is that you actually earn more from the game, then you’ve invested in it.

And your worst-case scenario. Is that you bought a game and you play the game. So it’s kind of, for me, it’s like, it’s a, win-win

Diego: [01:26:02] awesome. I think that’s a good place to leave it up. Or my camera died for some reason. So with that being said, this has been, got, this has gone longer than we expected, intended.

We intended, we kind of expected this to happen for some reason. Then it’s just the two of us. We go way over inside because there’s no, you know limiting factor for us to keep it someone else’s time that we have to take into consideration. But I think there’s just a pretty fun time. And thanks everyone for tuning in.

Jean-luc: [01:26:35] S y’all know, we will be posting the full episode on the website this weekend, or Diego will be posting full episode this weekend. You will also be able to listen to a few of these back on different streaming platforms, your favorite streaming platforms.

And I guess we can say, see you guys next week with a host of the other Confoes series, Tevin and Gregory it’s official. Now they can’t back down anymore. So see you guys next week, Tuesday at nine. O’clock have a great time. Bye-bye