Jenny 00:02
Today, I’m absolutely thrilled to be introducing Jeff Kauffman, Jr. to the show. Jeff is the founder of Parachute, an agency that builds and invests in web3 solutions for both marketers and advertisers. He’s also created the first community of marketing and advertising professionals who are passionate about web3. So Jeff, a very warm welcome to the show.
Jeff 00:29
Oh, it’s so good to be here. I can’t wait to see where the conversation goes. So yes, let’s get things started.
Jenny 00:36
Well, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. So would you mind by starting off just telling us a bit about you Jeff, and why you started Jump, which is this community for people passionate about web3?
Jeff 00:50
Yes, absolutely. So I’m assuming this will be a video somewhere, so for those of you that aren’t listening to this on video, and you’re just listening to the audio version, behind me, there’s a photo. And that’s me skydiving. So back in the day, I used to jump out of a lot of aeroplanes over the course of my skydiving career. Simultaneously, while I was in the agency world, I made 1800 skydives. I got my start skydiving and marketing at the exact same time, which is 2005. If we all remember MySpace, do you still have your MySpace page or it that gone?
Jenny 01:36
Gone, long gone.
Jeff 01:38
Hopefully it’s all gone. So yes, the web2, 2005 mobile and social, the beginning of web2, this era, of what I feel like, sort of, we were moving into this stage where brands and their customers were just going to have this free flowing conversation, and they’re going to interact together in this like, wonderful way,we’re going to remove the intermediaries or are just going to have this beautiful relationship. And agency people are super excited about it, the marketers of the world were super excited about it and then something happened between 2005 and 2020, which is all of the middlemen that we thought were going to save us, and this intermediary, sort of this communication relationship that brands have with their customers, these middlemen in the form of Amazon, Google, Facebook, these big tech platforms basically put up these huge walls between brands and customers. And if you didn’t play by their rules, then you’re toast. And their rules really felt like handcuffs and shackles in a lot of ways. So getting my start in the world of digital strategy and social strategy and agency life in 2005 and then building agency services and working on behalf of clients, like Chick Filet, Home Depot, Dr. Pepper, Dodge Ram, just your typical big enterprise agency life, and experiencing sort of what it’s like and seeing the evolution of Facebook, and how Facebook changed a lot of rules on us over the years. Really, what happened was, as the landscape changed and sort of not owning your content, not being able to control your brand in the way that you want to control it, and just all that stuff, came across web3 and sort of these concepts of social tokens and NFT’s, early 2020, which is before anybody in the agency world was really talking about any of this stuff. But when I saw it, the light bulbs went off. And it obviously looked like something that was going to solve a lot of these problems that we’ve been presented as brand marketers, when we’re dealing with sort of these middlemen.
Jenny 04:11
Right, and that’s why you set up Jump, which was to get everyone together, who also could see that things were going to change, right?
Jeff 04:19
Yep, yep, exactly. So, like any good agency person, as I saw this new emerging space of web3, I put together a trends deck, and we’re all in lockdown because of COVID and we’re sitting at our homes doing work. I put together this trends presentation, and just started getting on the calendar of all the smart people that I knew. Principals, creatives, digital strategist, very senior people, very junior people, just basically anyone that I had some sort of respect for in terms of the quality of their work. And I just presented to them this concept of NFT’s and social tokens. This was August, September of 2020, last year. And the response that I got from every single person was the exact same thing. This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe what I’m looking at, what you’re showing me. I don’t understand any of the words that you’re saying but I have a problem. I have no idea where to start. And so I heard that over and over from close to 20 people, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to start. And so as I’m planning, how do I get involved in this space? What should I do? Hearing that from people over and over, the lightbulb went off. Obviously, the first place to start, at least for myself, and the people that I know, is we need to create a community to learn about this stuff. So in the 90s, you had the Internet Advertising Bureau, in the mid 2000s, you had the Mobile Marketing Association, or any kind of social media sort of organisation. There was nothing like that for web3. And these terms that no one has ever heard of, which is kind of amazing, considering I think, if you walk into any advertising agency right now, and you say, have you heard of an NFT? 99% of people probably say, Yes, I’ve heard it, maybe I don’t understand it, or I hate it, or I love it or whatever. But last year, the answer was dead on zero. And so yes, that just kind of seemed like the best most obvious place to start was this concept of an industry association. But how do we do it in a way that’s native to web3, right? Like, we can’t just go out and say, we’re going to do an industry association or whatever, and not use all of the tools that are native to the space. And so that’s why we introduced concepts of NFT’s in our community social tokens, we’ve minted, the Jump social token, we’re operating with the DAO tool stack. So if you haven’t heard of DAO-Decentralised Autonomous Organisation and this whole set of tools that allow communities that have never met each other that are across different time zones, organise themselves around a token, and go on this crazy adventure together and build stuff. So we’re trying to operate the community in a way that’s native with the goal of, well we’re going to learn along the way, and we’re going to figure out a lot of stuff. And then we might be able to do it for brands or other projects that we like.
Jenny 07:42
Well, I have to say, generously, you let you let me be part of this community and I have to say that I’ve never been in such a thriving environment that you just can’t keep up with all the messages. Everyone is just so engaged. So it’s a very exciting place to be right now. And Jeff, for those, as you said, you presented this concept to a lot of people, they didn’t get it, and they’ve only just realised what NFT’s are and it’s just become mainstream, but how would you define web3 for those who would benefit from having some kind of explanation?
Jeff 08:17
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot to it. One of the easiest ways, or one of the best places to start is the concept of ownership. Web3 equals ownership. And we’ve never had ownership from a digital standpoint. There’s only really one example for the everyday person, unless you’re a corporation or something like that. But for the everyday person, there’s only been one thing you’ve been able to own on the internet. And that’s domain names.
Jenny 08:50
Sure.
Jeff 08:51
That is the extent of our digital ownership, economy. And when you take a step back, and you just kind of really let it sink in, we’ve been renting and we have not been owners of this digital footprint and this digital life and this digital stuff that we contribute value to. What would Facebook be without you or me or the 2 billion people that are on it? And
what web3 does, what it unlocks is it unlocks ownership for every single person that participates. And so really what we’re talking about, what gets me so excited every single day, is that we’re at the start of the biggest economic boom we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity, because it’s all going from zero to 1000 in the digital economy. And it’s happening like right now.
Jenny 09:56
It certainly does feel like that doesn’t it because everything’s changing so quickly, it just seems like everything’s sped up. So, Jeff, ultimately, what do you think this means for how we operate currently, because obviously, the listeners are working in agencies. And because of this ownership economy that we’re going into, how do you see that brands and agencies are going to be operating? Can you paint a picture for what you see is going to change?
Jeff 10:30
Yes, exactly. I mean, there’s so many layers to sort of unpack here. But the idea of brand equity completely changes what brand assets are, it completely changes the formula to calculate brand equity, changes your relationship with your customers, changes all that stuff. A really simple way to sort of think about it, that kind of hurts my brain, but it helps sort of, I think people move in this direction, is that in the old world, you had employee or you had owner of the business, and then you had an employee, and then you had a customer. So there’s these three kind of personas floating around making a business happen. Over the last 50 years, this crazy idea that we never had before is like, what if our employees became owners and that’s where we got the idea of like, stock options? And tech, Silicon Valley, leaned into this better than any other industry or entrepreneurial segment out there. They’re just like, well let’s make our employees co owners of this thing. And we’re going to unlock a new level of participation and creation. And we saw the boom of that. Well what we’re sort of moving into now is this whole customer base over here, who’s never been owners of the thing that they consume, are now becoming owners. So the idea that owner, employee and customer are three different things, is old way of thinking about it. New way of thinking about it, is they’re all the same. And you are both an owner, and an employee, and a customer all at the same time. And if you want an example of that, we have examples. But I’ll stop there, because that still hurts my head to think about,
Jenny 12:34
Oh, Jeff, what I love about the way you describe things is you make it so simple to understand. Because I’ve been going down various rabbit holes in my research behind this and you simplify it. I mean, that’s obviously your skill, of simplifying, so I get what you’re saying. So please carry on and tell us some examples so that brings it to life.
Jeff 12:56
Yes, exactly. So we’ll kind of use an OG version example, which is Bitcoin and Ethereum. Okay, so let’s take Ethereum, for example. You’re an owner of Ethereum if you own the asset Ether. All you have to do is buy it and you’re an owner. You’re a customer of Ethereum if you’re using Ethereum to do a transaction. So if you bought an NFT, if you’ve swapped one token for another, or if you’re someone like myself, or you’re using tooling on the back end to build these tokenized communities, but just the simple fact of buying an NFT, you have to spend something called Gas which is Ether. It’s kind of like the native tax to the economy, you have to spend Gas so you’re a customer of the network. You just spent your customer. But then when you tell your friend about Ethereum and how great it is and how it’s going to change the world, you’re a salesman, and you’re an employee of Ethereum. So all in one day, I can buy Ethereum and be an owner, I can spend Ethereum and I can be a customer, and then I can talk about Ethereum right here as a salesman for Ethereum, and I’m all the same.
Jenny 14:25
Okay, love it. Obviously. I’m following you, this is what I’m loving. I’m following you. Okay, Aethrium aside, what about a normal brand? Like, what about a company that sells bottles? How does that concept translate?
Jeff 14:49
Yeah, exactly. So this is the problem for us all to solve. Right now I would encourage legacy brands to think about ownership and being a customer and being an employee, that merging of all of those three, as it relates to fandom for the brand. Just take away, if you’re a water brand, you’ve got all the off chain, you’ve got your supply chain, you’ve got your buildings, you’ve got your infrastructure, you’ve got all this stuff that’s not digital, that in terms of bringing a bottle of water to market, but in terms of your fandom, that’s around your brand, and the people that love your brand and like what that kind of community looks like, that is where you can actually see that merging of those three roles come to life. So someone can buy the water and they’re a customer of the brand. They can be a very important member of that community where there may be hosting meetups for the brand, or they’re doing other things and they work for the brand in that sense. Or if they’re just active in the community and they’re participating with other people in maybe some structured role, they’re an employee of the brand. And then as you introduce tokens, whether it’s a social token, or an NFT, and those are tradeable, and there’s a market around it, then they’re an owner of the fandom.
Jenny 16:23
Got it. Okay, brilliant. Okay, I’m following this. This is great. So, a few questions have come to mind. Do you think that it’s inevitable that all companies are going to move in this direction? And if so, how long would that take?
Jeff 16:43
I think it’s inevitable that all companies that we think of as the big brands of the world, or brands that have fandom, that have community, I do think ultimately they all move in this direction in some way. This feels a bit like… there are a few examples, right? All is a dangerous word, because it’s like, my answer would be no, not all. But 90 plus percent of companies adopted the internet, they adopted cloud based solutions. They adopted mobile into their customer journeys and their sales and how they service their customers and all that, they adopted social media. Some companies because of the segments, the industries they’re in, they adopted that stuff sooner. Maybe a B2B construction company adopted their social media strategy much later. But guess what, at some point they figured out Google reviews and Yell reviews, and all that stuff was super important to a B2B construction services company and they leaned into it. So when we’re talking about web3, categorically speaking, we’re talking about big categories of like, internet, mobile, social, in any business where if it’s worth its weight, adopted and integrated those things in a very substantial way into their business. Everything that’s happening in web3 is the same.
Jenny 18:17
So I’m just racing ahead thinking, Okay, so where does that leave agencies? Because obviously, we’re hugely valuable at the moment for brands, but are mostly, some are doing brand strategy, some doing PR, some are doing social media, how do you think that we are going to have to adapt to cater and support and help our clients navigate this new web3 world?
Jeff 18:44
Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I think is exciting is that until I went hard down into the web3 sort of rabbit hole there was a bit of this internet out there that clients are taking agency stuff in house, clients don’t want agencies, they want to build their own internal agencies. They don’t want to outsource stuff anymore, and they’re starting to kind of gobble this stuff up. The good news is that web3 is so complicated, it’s so different. It changes and moves so fast, that there’s a bit of a renaissance of the glory days, I think, of agencies being able to help clients and brands navigate this space, because it’s so new and different, and changes so fast. So I think agencies, the best agencies out there are going to focus on this stuff, and they’re going to help navigate it. But that’s looking through one lens, which is agencies helping legacy businesses and brands adopt web3. There’s a whole other agency conversation, that once you get deeper into web3 it starts to uncover itself, which is -What about all the new brands in the world that are created using web3 fundamentals? So the brands that didn’t exist one to two years ago, and these brands are going to become billion dollar brands in the next five years. We already saw it with the D2C space and how quickly direct consumer could scale very, very large companies and brands overnight, we’re going to see the same thing happen. And so
how does an agency work with a brand that has its own token and its own native economy? That’s as hard of a question is, how do I get my legacy brand, let’s call it Coca Cola to adopt web3. So agencies not only have to help clients reinvent their businesses for web3, but the best agencies will reinvent their own businesses. And if you’re doing it right, you’re actually working with native web3 projects.
Jenny 21:12
Wow. Can you give me an example of a web3 native company that possibly would need the services of an agency and how that would work?
Jeff 21:23
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s this concept of DAOs – Decentralised, Autonomous Organisations. And what’s important about DAOs is this is the first legal structure that’s native to the internet. So every other legal structure, LLCs, incorporations, all of that stuff is just like, physical, real world and we’ve just tried to make it work in this internet, global real time economy, and all of that. And so DAOs are this new thing. It’s quite possibly the most important invention since the LLC, which was an incredibly important invention. If you don’t know the history of the LLC, we wouldn’t have railroads without them. LLCs were invented for hundreds of people to come together, pull capital, build one railroad to connect it to another city, because it’s going to raise the economy of both their cities, and to do it in a limited liability way so that the hundreds of people that fund that railroad aren’t liable for what happens on that railroad. Right? That was an incredibly important invention that governments responded to with this thing called an LLC, because of the technology that was pushing it forward. DAOs take that 1,000x. And so
what DAOs are doing is they’re becoming this global network, native company for lack of a better word, community, this Internet Corporation, if you will, oftentimes, they have their own token. Really, it’s tough to be a true DAO without your own sort of native token. And so there’s this new sort of category called D2D. So we’ve had B2B forever -business to business. And now we have the emergence of D2D. And I do think back to the original question of where this all started, before the history lesson and exploration is, I do think there will be B2D, and D2B, and D2D. I think we get it all, I think we do. I think it all kind of happens. But D2D is going to be an absolutely massive category.
So what’s an example of this?
Jenny 24:03
It was funny that you asked because actually, I wanted to ask you because you I know you’re involved in a DAO – Seed Club is a DAO – so you’ve obviously got experience, so please carry on.
Jeff 24:13
Yes. Okay. So here would be one example. So Coinbase – are you familiar with Coinbase?
Jenny 24:22
I use it, yes.
Jeff 24:24
That’s something most people are familiar with. It’s probably the most well known way to buy bitcoin and Ethereum or something like that. So Coinbase is a centralised service providing a web3 sort of service. And so they’re kind of like web 2.5. They’re not really a DAO. They’re traded on the US stock exchange, and they do web3 services. Uniswap – have you heard of Uniswap?
Jenny 24:52
I haven’t.
Jeff 24:53
Okay, so Uniswap is the decentralised version of Coinbase. So Uniswap is an exchange where you can swap any token that you want, anything you want to trade. Whereas Coinbase is like, Oh, we’ve got these 30 tokens, this is all you can buy. And we create this really safe place for people that don’t understand web3 and you’re not going to get scammed on Coinbase. If you go into the Uniswap world that’s just free flowing, you need to know what you’re doing because it’s completely decentralised and it’s completely autonomous and anyone can use the tools. And that’s got a lot of pros. But it’s got some cons in terms of if you don’t kind of understand what you’re doing. So like maybe a city analogy is Coinbase is a tour guide that holds your hand and walks you to all the safe places within the big city. And then Uniswap is, here’s your bicycle, go wherever you want, you might find some cool stuff but you also might scare yourself a little bit. So when you’re working with a company like Uniswap, Uniswap is way bigger than Coinbase. And that’s what people don’t understand.
Jenny 26:11
Wow.
Jeff 26:11
We celebrate Coinbase as being $100 billion company that went public. Uniswap is way bigger than that. And it’s going to be way bigger than it long term. How do you provide services though to Uniswap as this decentralised autonomous organisation, there’s only 20 full time employees. Coinbase has 1000s.
Jenny 26:32
Wow.
Jeff 26:33
Right. And so if you want to do something, if you want to work for, if you want to provide some sort of service to Uniswap, you’ve got to write a proposal. Okay, well, now you have to have a certain number of Uni tokens to even be able to submit a proposal to the committee for everybody that holds the Uni token to vote on. And so let’s say you want to do a sports sponsorship, make it just super practical. You think, I’m a big holder of the Uni token, I want to see this organisation, this business grow, which I’m a stakeholder in, and I own a piece of it. And I think if we just had a Superbowl commercial, everything is solved with a Superbowl commercial, I think if we had a Superbowl commercial, we would create a bunch of awareness and that would help more people understand Uniswap and get the word out. So I’m going to draft a proposal, and I’m going to submit it to the DAO in the community of Uni token holders. And it’s going to say, this is how we’re going to do it, this is our budget, this is who we’re thinking about partnering with, this is the reasons that we’re going to do it. And then everybody in the community votes on that proposal. And if you get the green light, then boom, you’re off to the races, and you’re creating a Super Bowl spot for for a decentralised autonomous organisation.
Jenny 28:01
So the possibilities for this, and like you said it’s the community ownership, isn’t it? I suppose at the moment, we’re so used to companies that work in a kind of waterfall way, they’ve got the C suite at the top and then it’s layered down so that the authorities of the top. What you’re saying is it’s a very flat kind of structure and everyone gets to vote. And whatever role they are.
Jeff 28:30
It’s an extremely flat structure, it’s transparency that would scare most people in a way that you could not believe. Which is one of the reasons why Jump exists is to experiment with all of this stuff in a way that’s completely native to web3, so that you can just kind of see what’s going on and you can get a real feel for it. But transparency and bottoms up. Community is a word that’s been thrown around a lot for the past 15 years, that’s kind of overused in a way that makes most people go, Okay, not another discussion about community. But when you look at web3, it’s community and the hard example for why it’s community is this. The code for something like Uniswap, which we just described, Aetherium would fall into this bucket, Bitcoin would fall into this bucket as well. The decode and the tech, the underlying infrastructure of it is all open source, meaning anybody can take that thing, Aetherium or Uniswap. And they can do this thing called fork it, which is copy it. They can copy it and make a replica of it. And they can say, so all this brilliant work that the founders of Aetherium and Uniswap did, just brilliant creative work, put this thing out into the world. And it’s open source, and then anybody can just copy it and take it. It’d be like putting your patents in your blueprints and your supply chains, all your contacts and how you do everything as a business and just open sourcing it, giving it away, nothing sort of proprietary in this space. Why does Uniswap continue to exist, or Aetherium continue to exist? it’s because of the community. The community bands together, and they say, this version is the thing. It’s the thing that matters, it’s the official thing that matters. And if it weren’t for the community and all the people that surround it, ‘the thing’ wouldn’t exist as an idea in our head, or as a brand in our head. And so web3 lives and dies with the community, because if you launch a token, let’s say a social token for your community, anybody can just launch a new token and use the same name and tell all the people in your community that hey, this is a new token. And you know, it’s called Jump. And we do the exact same thing as Jump, we have a podcast and we have a newsletter, and we have events, and we do research and we do all this stuff. And the only thing that keeps Jump kind of going is the community that surround that token and around Jump says no, this is the official version. And this is what we like and we’re gonna stick here and stay here. Wow. Okay. So tell me about Seed Club, because that is a DAO and you’re part of it. Could you talk to me about what that is and how it operates? Yeah, absolutely. Are you familiar with Y Combinator? No, no, it’s okay. It’s a startup community. But you probably are familiar with some of the brands that come out of Y Combinator. So Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, whole host of other startups kind of came from Y Combinator. So think of it as this legacy incubator, startup machine. Seed Club, is the incubator and accelerator and startup machine for social token communities. So Seed Club wants to be the Y Combinator of web3 for tokenized startups and tokenized communities. And what’s an important distinction is that Seed Club is operating in a way that’s completely native, kind of what we talked about earlier, is sort of Jump strategy, which is to run your organisation and your mission in a way that’s native to web3. And so last year, I got in contact with the Seed Club crew through Twitter, just being present on Twitter, interacting with people on Twitter, trying to be helpful and sort of nice within the Twitter sphere. And then over time, built a relationship with a few of the individuals within that community- just last being the founder, calls himself the instigator of Seed Club. And earlier this year, in February 2021, they were taking applications for their second cohort. So a very new incubator. And I submitted the idea for Jump, the DAO itself, the members of Seed Club reviewed all of the sort of applicants and fortunately, Jump was accepted into that second cohort. So Jump comes from a DAO, Jump was born out of a native web3 community. And what’s cool about sort of this linkage between Jump and Seed Club is that cohort members like Jump, once you graduate, and you just get a brain dump of it’s sort of like a boot camp of how to build a tokenized community and meet with all these experts and ask questions and work on frameworks and get feedback from a peer group and people who have done amazing things in the space. Once you graduate, you then vote you become a DAO member of Seed Club and you then vote on the next cohort. So previous cohorts select the next cohort. So in a way this sort of machine, ideally, and it’s already happening because we sort of we just finished our third cohort. And so members like myself of the second cohort, voted on applicants for the third. And some of us even helped with the third cohort as well. Myself, I helped run a few learning sessions and learning huddles, and brainstorm and help answer questions and kind of let this cohort lean on some of the experiences that I had. And yes, and so now, cohort three has graduated. We’re all alumni, now we have this peer group of people who are creating and launching and running tokenized web3 communities. And I believe, December or January we’ll start to take applications for our fourth cohort. And we will vote in our next group of 10 to 15 projects, which will essentially be our next group of peers.
Jenny 35:52
When you explain it like this, it kind of makes total sense. But it also makes me think about how people must have to behave in a certain way. Because you’ve got to be accountable, you have to show up, you have to contribute, and you kind of have to, you’re creating your own culture as well, aren’t you? Because there’s transparency in how you’re operating. So I presume that if there’s one rotten apple that’s not following what it was set up to do, or being a bit against everyone else, I suppose the power of the community, the power of the crowd, would make sure that that didn’t continue. So it seems quite an honest way of actually operating.
Jeff 36:37
It is a very honest way of operating. And one of the ways that helps that is it’s all transparent, because it’s all on chain, meaning all the compensation is on chain. So if you’re the, for lack of a better term, CEO or lead kind of person of a community, how much you get paid is there for everybody to see.
Jenny 37:05
Because the transactions are all there for the public to see, because it’s all on blockchain.
Jeff 37:10
It all happens on blockchain. And while that feels scary, because we haven’t operated in a world like that and we all know how bill rates are not transparent and in so many ways, for better or for worse. What transparency does is it gives us a layer of trust that we couldn’t have otherwise. And one of the things that is near and dear to my heart is doing things that are very adventurous, such as jumping out of planes. And one of the things that is important when you’re doing things that have high stakes that are adventurous, that are unknown, that are a little scary, is that if you have two bits of culture, within a group of people, whether it’s 10,000 people or just 3 people or 2 people, if you have generosity and you have transparency, those are the foundations for doing high risk, dangerous things. That seems scary. Right? Because if you have generosity, and you have transparency, you get trust. And when you’re doing risky, dangerous things where the outcomes are unknown, and we don’t have all the answers, you got to have trust.
Jenny 38:39
I love that. Because actually, what you’re describing is this kind of evolution. And it’s a moving feast, like you said before, it’s changing. And change is scary, isn’t it? Sometimes we like to kind of hold on to what we know, what we’re familiar with. And I’m sure it’s actually people are listening to you thinking, Oh, my gosh, it’s like another language, I’m going to have to really gem up on this, I’m going to have to get involved in some way. So we’re going to talk about Jump a minute and how people can get involved. But before I do, we’ve mentioned tokens quite a lot. And I know according to what you read, it feels like tokens and NFT’s are going to be the future, the way we do business. So can you talk to me about what you’ve learned about NFT’s and how you see them helping us in the future?
Jeff 39:29
Yes, absolutely. So one of the hardest things about new technology is it’s so new, doesn’t look like anything that we’ve seen in the past. And we try to make these comparisons and we kind of talk about all this stuff. But until you actually experience a new technological breakthrough that says, big is web3 in tokens. it’s hard to put yourself in that situation where you’re like, I don’t have the words to explain the new thing, right? Like, over the course of Humanity, a lot of the reasons why we invent new words is because we invent new things. And we come across new concepts that the old language couldn’t describe. And right now we’re in this awkward phase, where we don’t have the language quite yet to describe the new thing that we’ve created and that we’ve invented, but to kind of give some analogies -what is a website and what can a website do? Well, in the very early days, we would just put a PDF on a website, and we’re like, that’s a website, that’s a.com, you just take the PDF, and you just put it on the thing. And then over time, as apps kind of evolved, and these different tools and API’s got invented, where data could just kind of flow everywhere, what a website could do would be like, Well, what do you want it to do? It can do anything. And a word that helps us understand, it gets used a lot in web3 and it’s called primitive, meaning it’s a new foundational element that you can just kind of invit on top of. And so when we think of NFT’s and we think of social tokens, these are two different types of tokens, NFT’s and social tokens, fungible and non fungible tokens, we kind of think back to well, could you even imagine all the ways that a website could be used? No. Apps? Absolutely not. So I think that NFT’s and social tokens will be a part of everybody’s digital experience, so much so that we won’t even know we’re interacting with an NFT or social token that will be the point at which, we’re just doing digital things, we’re interacting with our friends and our family, we’re conducting commerce, and the things that we’re pushing buttons and moving around and touching and feeling across our sort of digital footprint, they will be fungible and non fungible tokens, social tokens and NFT’s. It will literally be everything.
Jenny 42:29
Do you think that because some people have been mocking NFT’s because the first use cases have been with sales of digital art for example, that’s the first thing that became really famous and someone sold a piece of art for millions. And it was like what, you’re not actually going to feel it. It’s just going to be copy this JPEG and I can see it too and so there was a little bit of that wasn’t there? But then you see that brands like Coke have actually dipped their toe in the water with NFT’s and had that online auction and they used Decentraland. And they auctioned off these Coke branded memorabilia. So it’s something that we can’t ignore but we’re seeing the early use cases. But as you say, the future is going to be extending to all sorts of transactions that we have online. Do you agree?
Jeff 43:25
Absolutely. A good sort of way to think about new technology like this is the most innovative stuff looks like a toy at first. The first personal computers, IBM ignored them, didn’t think it was a market, didn’t want to get into the game. But Apple and Microsoft, obviously we know the story. They look like toys, like Steve Jobs and Apple sold a hobbyist kit that was super expensive, that only the biggest computer sort of geeks in the world wanted to have this like super expensive thing. That’s one of the cues, is this incredibly innovative. Does this check the box of some of those big moments in history? Does it look and feel like a toy at first? Can I just write it off as as looking and feeling like a toy? And if that answer is yes, it actually might be something worth paying attention to.
Jenny 44:31
I mean, it looks like creators, musicians, artists are the ones winning in this space so far really.
Jeff 44:38
Yes.
Jenny 44:39
For a long time they’ve been, all of a sudden, they were selling their music and then it was downloaded for free and they had to go and find other ways to make money. Artists have never really, it’s always the poor artist isn’t it, but suddenly things have changed and it feels like quite a momentous moment for the people with the real creative talent, which feels quite good, actually.
Jeff 45:04
Yes and that’s what gets me excited for the marketing and the brand side of thing. And so when we look at, as you just described, the artists, the musicians, the creatives of the world, are the ones sort of unlocking this moment for for us and, and sort of NFT’s and digital art and all this. Brands are enterprise versions of creators. In agencies or enterprise versions of artists and for a long time, because of intermediaries like NBC and ABC and Fox for 20/30 years, and then more recently Google and Facebook and Amazon, these intermediaries extract value from individual creators as well as the enterprise creators. And then they forced them to play by certain rules that aren’t as good for the creators themselves. And so hopefully, where we’re headed, is this ability for brands and individual artists and creators, everybody from the solo sort of person to the big, multi billion dollar brand entity, gets to create freely, own that creation, sell it directly to the person that appreciates it most without having to deal with the intermediaries that we’ve had previously.
Jenny 46:44
That seems a lot fairer. And how long do you think that’s going to take to happen? So for example, take an example of a small ecommerce business that relies on Google advertising, that relies on their SEO being optimised so that they rise to the top in search, etc. And their whole business model depends on Google, depends on this organisation. How quickly do you think that things could change? Where, for example, like you said, I’m going to build my community, my fan base, and then I’m going to cut out the middleman and I’m going to have my direct customers, and we’re going to be able to do business without them taking a huge chunk of change.
Jeff 47:25
So how quickly does it happen at scale? Or how soon do we have an example? Because it’s already happening.
Jenny 47:33
Okay.
Jeff 47:34
The difference though, is that it’s happening with projects and new brands. The brands that are created this year and last year and the brands that will be created next year. It’s the startups that are using the web3 fundamentals to actually create their brand. So Bored Ape Yacht Club, have you come across them?
Jenny 47:57
I haven’t got one, unfortunately. Have you got one?
Jeff 48:01
No, I have a Bored Ape mutant, which is…
Jenny 48:06
Is that a spin off?
Jeff 48:08
It’s from the original group that created Bored Apes but they actually rewarded all Bored Ape holders with a mutant version of their Bored Ape right? Some of those Bored Ape holders decided to keep their mutant version and be like, Oh, I’ve got a collection, I’ve got my original Bored Ape and now I’ve got the mutant version. Other individuals decided to sell off their mutant and so I was able to buy one from someone but then I sold that off. But this is an example of a community of a brand. Some people say it’s like, they’re kind of competing with Supreme. So one of the biggest drop culture brands out there. I had a buddy the other day, he’s hopping on an aeroplane, he’s wearing his Bored Ape sweatshirt, he’s walking down the aeroplane aisle, he sees someone else wearing a Board Ape sweatshirt, and they’re immediately like, Oh, hey, what’s up? We’ve never met but like…
Jenny 49:12
You’re part of the club.
Jeff 49:14
You’re a club. And so these are physical products, that you have to hold the Bored Ape NFT in order to buy the merch, right? And then some of that merch is being sold aftermarket on eBay for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Right. And so now we already see it. There’s no venture capital within Bored Ape, their treasury is hundreds of millions of dollars. They launched in May or June. So you have this startup brand that exists that came out of nowhere. that has this thriving community that owns these digital assets that represent that community. And so now the founders of this community and these 10,000 Bored Apes, now their goal and their strategy is to actually provide value to the people that hold those Apes. And if you provide value to people that hold those NFT’s, those NFT’s become more valuable. So if you have exclusive rights to content created by the community, if you have exclusive access to merch drops, you can envision a world where you could be a reseller of Bored Ape, the next Bored Ape fall collection of hats and jackets and shirts and sort of all this stuff, both physically and from a metaverse perspective for all of the avatars. Right, better out there.
Jenny 50:56
If you generate any income from that, does that automatically go back to the community? Because I read, I don’t know whether I got this right, but they’ve created a band, a musical band based on four of the Bored Apes. So that music is going to play somewhere, people are going to possibly pay via NFT’s to attend the event? And how does that work financially?
Jeff 51:22
So there’s two models here, this is business being created by the community itself and then there’s business or rent, let’s say revenue streams, there’s revenue streams created by the business themselves. And then there’s revenue streams created by sort of the core founding team organisation that is stewarding this brand. They don’t control it, because this group of Bored Apes over here decided to create a musical group and they’re going to start writing songs and performing events and selling tickets to their events, right? The core team that founded this whole community had no say over that, they just went and did it. But here’s what happens. Let’s say they’re successful at what they do this group over here and this new musical act that they’ve created, they’re going to create, if they’re the next big thing, and they have a hit song, they just created value for everybody else that holds a Bored Ape. They created value for the core, sort of founding sort of stewards of this community. And so everybody’s actually incentivized to celebrate, this is where you get positive feedback and positive loops, versus the web2 world that we live in now, which is if it bleeds, it leads, it’s negative, there’s basically negative viral feedback loops in web2 at large. What we’re describing here is positive viral feedback loops. So someone within the community rises up, does something amazing that the rest of the community loves, guess what, this little sort of improv group over here with their new song has 10,000 allies to help spread the word who are economically incentivized to spread the word because it will increase the value of the asset that they hold. So they don’t necessarily generate income off of it, but their asset itself increases in value. There are other ways to think about income elements, which we don’t have to dive into, but that there’s a lot of positive economic feedback loops in community collaboration and creation in this model.
Jenny 53:51
And it does feel very positive, doesn’t it? And like you said at the beginning Jeff, this concept of owning brand equity and the brand can’t change, or brand guidelines. I mean, how many agencies have produced brand guidelines documents? I mean, is that going to be a relic, isn’t it? I mean, if we move in this direction, I mean, what?
Jeff 54:12
Yes so the brand guideline documents, they basically go on chain. So when you create the NFT, and the art itself and all the components of what makes up the brand, you’re basically putting your brand guidelines that used to live in a PowerPoint or document or a notebook if we’re talking about 40 years ago, right? Those brain guidelines go from digital copies, file copies to on chain assets that people can own or do stuff with. And so you can actually create some really good foundational brand guidelines by putting all this creative and artwork and whatever. You can put voice on chain. So you could create the brand voice that exists and have kind of derivatives of that from a true audio standpoint. And so the future of brand guidelines is to actually put it on chain, and then let the community create freely around that. And that’s scary at first, but it’s inevitable and the biggest brands are going to lean into that.
Jenny 55:32
I think from everything you’ve said so far, thank you, first of all for explaining it so well, and for really kind of explaining it in such a clear way that it’s easy to understand. Like you said, it’s a completely new language, it’s words that we haven’t, we don’t use day to day. So I’m respectful of your time, I could go on all day. But I just want to be respectful of your time Jeff. So I mean, if there’s an agency owner listening to this and thinking, right, how do I keep up to date, because clearly, things are moving fast, I want to be able to be in a position where I’m keeping up to date with what’s changing, what would you advise them to do?
Jeff 56:17
The best way to learn in this space is to get hands on. So you’ve just you got to find a way to get hands on in some of these communities. My analogy there is, if we’re in the 90s and we’re having the same conversation about the internet, the advice would be you’ve got to go create a web page, you’ve got to have a newsletter, you got to do a blog, you got to play around with social, you just have to do it. You’re not going to learn about the internet by watching CNBC on your TV screen. So you have to get hands on. And so the best way to get hands on is to get hands on in safe places, meaning you don’t have to go out and start pitching your clients on all this stuff, there’s going to be plenty of opportunity for that. You’re not going to miss the boat, you just need to get good at this stuff and you need to do it in a hands on sort of way. So two ways to go about it. One, identify any kind of passion that you have, whether it’s film, or gaming, or sports, there’s a DAO, a tokenized community, it’s called Krause house, their goal is to buy an NBA team. So if you’re a fan of sports, or you’re more in particular, an NBA fan, and you want to learn about web3, you go join Krause House and be as active as you can possibly be. And you’ll learn about web3. So just pick a passion and go down that path. Obviously, the agency people of the world and brand marketers of the world, Jump was created as a space to come in, learn, be a part of a community and by being a part of a community, you start to learn sort of this new way. So that’s the second way.
Jenny 58:13
Amazing. And is it open to anyone working in an agency? Because all of my clients work in an agency, either in an account management capacity or the owner of the business, or can anyone join from any area of the business? They don’t necessarily have to be someone who’s got technical knowledge?
Jeff 58:32
Yes, exactly. Right now Jump is open to anybody in the agency and marketing world that wants to learn. Down the line, as the community becomes an on chain community, and the community holds Jump tokens, the community will ultimately decide the future of Jump. And this is where it’s bottoms up, community driven. And so could there be an application process for Jump one day? If the community creates a proposal and votes Yes, that could happen. But at its current state really, anybody who wants to join the community with the advertising and agency background is more than welcome to join. Right now, we have about 500 members that span just about every single continent. Except for maybe, dark Dix if you will in the south, and whatnot. I don’t think we’ve covered those continents yet.
Jenny 59:35
It won’t be long, I’m sure. Obviously, I’ll include the link to join the community. Are you happy for me to put the link to join?
Jeff 59:46
Yeah, absolutely.
Jenny 59:47
Is there a special place that you would like people to go to?
Jeff 59:50
Right now it’s joinjump.community. And at that URL there, there’s a very easy signup form. We send out invites very manually, this is not automated, you don’t get a bot response, you actually get an email from me. And about twice a week, I’ll send out a welcome email. Usually that welcome email goes out to about 25 to 50 people. And then you’re invited into the Jump discord, which is just a crazy set of channels of people interacting and talking about all things web3, and trying to build a community driven organisation like what we’ve talked about today.
Jenny 1:00:30
It really is fantastic, Jeff, and I want to say a huge thank you to you, first of all for making it really clear to understand, and I think you are best placed to be that person to drive this community because you just make everyone so welcome. Thank you for making me welcome. And I’m sure anyone that joins, I’m singing from the rooftops about joining the community so hopefully, we’ll bump those numbers up to even more past 500 soon. So Jeff, thank you so so much for joining me. And if anyone is interested in kind of working with you maybe or you’ve got your agency parachute, and you’re very at the forefront of what’s changing perhaps there’s a marketing director listening to this, is there a way that they can contact you to have a discussion about how you can help them?
Jeff 1:01:16
Yeah, absolutely. Whenever members join the community and we send out that welcome email and then within our discord channel, I actually provide a link to my calendar. So you’re free to book some time and we can have a conversation and jam on whatever ideas you have. You know, I will say at this point, Parachute exists. But Parachute has one job right now which is to help a lot of people become Jumpers and Jump into the world of web3. So there’s one project that Parachute works on it and that is Jump for the time being.
Jenny 1:01:51
Perfect. Okay, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much again Jeff. I really really appreciate it. This has been fantastic.
Jeff 1:01:58
Absolutely it was a pleasure being here. What a vibrant conversation.
Jenny 1:02:04
All right. Lovely. Thank you so much.
Jeff 1:02:06
Alright, take care.Have a good one.
