A 20-year-old founder on building and selling Agora Labs

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities I'm Jaybird and this is the doer Spotlight where every week we break down the leaders of top projects in web 3. today's Spotlight is with Matt Espinoza we dive into so many exciting things first off how at 20 years old Matt built and sold his web3 startup for six figures within one year we talk about how Matt launched his own

currency mat token and raised twenty thousand dollars from friends and family and now Matt token is a verifiable token on the blockchain you can trade it you can buy it we'll talk about that and why he launched that we'll talk about building Agora Labs into a leading platform for the Creator economy which led Matt to drop out of school and attend Z fellows accelerator program and then the key steps that Matt took in order to get acquired for a six figure payout and then we're also going to talk about Matt's predictions for the future of social tokens where does he see it years from now

this is a banger folks you're really going to enjoy it so excited but before we jump into the show let's hear a word from our sponsor the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content or their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from

Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graph and followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-saverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web3 Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today Matt welcome to the show great to have you today thank you so much for having me really excited to dive into I mean gosh

so much that you've done in such a short period of time I can't believe that you're only 20 years old you make me feel like I've done nothing with my life so thanks for inspiring me I'm so excited to kind of Deep dive over this last year like it's been it's enough you can write a movie out of it like it's it's crazy I mean maybe maybe we should nft drop an nft make it write a script together you know we'll get a whole community and we'll do it that way or maybe we'll do it with your with your token with that token okay wait before we die we jump into all these things uh let's start at the beginning so how did you first sort of fall down the rabbit hole what caught your

interest uh about web3 yeah so I first started kind of diving into the world of crypto almost a year and a half ago uh when all my friends started talking to me about this new platform called Big clouds uh and essentially it was a social token platform like kind of similar to a decentralized Twitter where each user has their own token uh and they can post uh they can share what they're up to um and then that I did is super interesting to me like having a social token you could definitely dive into what a token really is but essentially it's it's a kind of way to communicate with your fans more directly uh have people fund your life have some governance and where you're going to be in life and then easily tell your early

supporters from day one okay so so you learn about bitcloud so let's just take where are you at this point are you in school are you in high school are you in University that's cool uh so this would be first year just finishing first year of University okay so you're finishing first year you're you're at York University in Toronto correct okay and what are you what are you studying at computer science computer science okay and and and you notice a bunch of friends and people are on bitclub yeah that's right um again and mostly everyone's talking about it they're either posting on their stories uh and most of my friends were Tech friends like anyone else outside

the tech football didn't know about it we might have a clue um but the people that were up to date knew it was happening and something was happening okay okay and and so explain to us a little bit what you mentioned Bitcoin is a decentralized Twitter so yeah so so I I create a profile on bitcloud and as part of creating my profile I now have a social token yeah that's right so that was actually part of the process and so one of their I think initial bets was that uh instead of having tokens for anyone I mean specifically for celebrities or uh top individuals why not have every user be a token uh and at that point that creates some interesting Serendipity

moments within the platform interesting Okay so I do want to dive a bit more into why somebody a person other than a celebrity would have a social token but but first let's just let's keep going along the story so then as part of this you launched matte token yeah so I did some research obviously before I launched my own token but uh from there I was pretty committed it made a lot of sense uh and that was my first like real step into web3 actually launching my own personal token which is still available it's called mat token uh and at the time I raised around 20K from some family and friends um and it kind of had to explain the

concept of you know you're kind of investing into who I'm going to become in the future you have some say in where I'm going to go in life um and from there kind of builds out a now I actually update all my investors token holders whatever you want to call them every month and a half or so about what I'm up to okay so I I need to hear this this pitch so yeah you're going to uh your your mom your your brother I don't know like some family friends you raise 20K amazing that's yeah that's incredible that's that's that's no small feat uh and you did that sorry so what what are they investing in what are they what are they getting in by owning that token yeah so um I think the biggest thing was that I

had a lot of family friends especially High School people so in high school I was like top of the class and everything um and people knew that at least I I just based off how much they invested they seem to understand that I was going to do something that other people in my age wouldn't be able to do um and so they thought you know what even invest a quick 500 bucks into this token is not too big uh of a deal and I get to be able to see someone progress uh and in the same way that they kind of felt I think their position is more like I want to be an angel investor to critically into a company and this company's gonna be met and so when I started viewing it that way I feel that at that point I started like really

shifting my mind of like I'm a company I'm a startup I need to grow as quickly as possible I need to you know exponentially increase my Revenue sources and so once I started having that entire shift just from launching a token um I thought I had I had investors I had I had um you know people I need to update to I need to show that I'm making progress in life um so that was a complete mind shift I would say from launching my first token and of that 20K is that mostly 500 Investments like is that is that a bunch of one dollar Investments like what's the breakdown of your investors or token holders yeah I would say it was like um I think closer family friends um who had been more I guess like money

to spend off for the initial get-go was a couple thousand and then more high school friends who were still you know working um like a minimum job um more of a closer to 500. okay okay and and so you're getting out of this out of this and this is just a unbelievable concept is this idea of creating a token of yourself yeah so you're getting out of this accountability right right that's that's what you get out of this it forces you as you said you give a update to all your token holders every six weeks uh you feel yeah definitely you feel accountable there's a real sense of wow these people have believed in me and

they invest in me so I need to deliver for sure it brings yeah it brings some pressure definitely which can be can be a good thing but what do what do they get and what's their involvement are they voting on things are they getting some sort of utility out of this yeah um so there's another way I set it up actually was that initially on diesel there was no evident way to be able to see what the perks and the um like the actual incentive would be for buying a token in the beginning of a lot of speculation you would buy someone's token kind of hope it would increase in value then sell if you wanted to and so that actually you know what you're literally saying right now

is actually the idea of Agora Labs uh that was the initial problem that no one was solving adding products utility uh and reason Beyond to a token Beyond speculation uh so we we built an initial demo of the app um nothing too fancy just to kind of get user validation landing page very basic basic products um we launched that out in like six days we just hacked it together um and then we had a landing page but we didn't show we didn't actually have access to the product no one had access to their products you had to pretty much go to the landing page and sign up and we wanted to see you know is there any user validation before we make this super fleshed out um and within the span of 72 hours we got a little over a thousand email

signups and this is like a niche super Niche blockchain uh diesel protocol was known by very few people and so a thousand was like probably like 10 15 of the entire um entire protocol pretty pretty good validation which is a pretty good validation yeah and so from there we launched our own um token which at the time was called bit perks which is later rebranded to Agora Labs um so we launched the initial bid Pricks token which is still also active uh on the on the protocol uh and that was kind of the Kickstart and that kind of kick-started some some monetary value for actually building the company hiring the first engineers and kind of scaling it from there okay okay so you

you brought up Agora Labs which is your startup that you created and I want to get into that I just want to talk a little bit more about mad token first uh so because the one thing I I'm trying to wrap my head around is with social tokens and I think we can put mad token into that category of social tokens uh where what I don't understand is where is the line between uh investment and an aim to to to make money from this and profit versus the I'm doing this because I support this thing or this person and this is

actually not about the money for me yeah I just want you know it's like how do you because to me social tokens sort of fall more into that like almost support category it feels a little it's not a charity right I wouldn't go that far but whereas like a fungible what I would you know more like I think about a more traditional fungible token like that is pure investment right like I am investing in that because I believe that it's going to go up about did you make that distinction how do you think about that yeah to be honest I don't think there's a fair line I think um so for example patreon uh there's like some give get a value so I think the best way to think about it is like you have the initial here's if you

invest my token maybe you have like a one-on-one monthly call for me for example that is a typical thing you can add that to a token but then what's also interesting about a token is that imagine now you have patreon you're investing uh maybe 20 a month into just random Creator and maybe two months later this guy just completely blows up he's like millions of followers you don't get anything from that you didn't get any Boost from that but if you were to add a token to that exact same scenario you would have potentially definitely have been able to monetarily increase assuming the token of that individual also increased more or less alongside the followers he gave right right and and just for our listeners so patreon is a web 2 platform that

essentially allows creators to monetize their followers by charging uh a fee for Access right uh like you said you're exactly a 20 subscription fee paid 20 a month and you get access to my writing to my videos to me personally like it's there's a whole variety of things that you could give access to through patreon okay so so the real the real difference here is what a social token allows is in web 2 if you're a Creator you are you're giving you're selling a monthly membership in order for somebody to get access to your stuff and it ends there there's no value going back to the to the the person who's supporting you

right exactly there's like a one-on-one exchange like 20 monthly call like that's that's it but with a token you have that extra layer which is the potential for exponential curve uh of a token very interesting very interesting okay so so you launch map token and okay so take us continue telling us the journey so uh launch mat token found the same problem you did um like a lot earlier than that everyone else uh seemed to figure that out um and then build bid predicts which solved the problem of uh individuals it took us a bunch of speculations you need to have some reason for actually buying the token uh so build that out uh shipped it out and then in January I

started taking my startup game a little bit more serious uh and joined a couple of accelerator programs uh which really kind of scaled my ideas of just like knowing how to build a product to know how to build a company um and from there that kind of just from there it was able to increase the users understand the feedback um and then eventually you know eventually sell the platform right right okay so very exciting uh ending to this story is that you have sold this platform and so we'll we'll get to we'll get to that talk to talk to me first about the early startup days was it just you when did you bring on Founders yeah how did you find Founders what was what was that process like yeah that's a good

question so initially it started out with me my best friend from high school uh and then one person I met like twice online uh but I knew he was like uh I I it took like almost it's funny it took almost like seven months for like the entire co-founding team to all me in person um and we were just like building on the sidelines just through like Discord Community calls um and and eventually we met up uh actually funny enough a couple months ago but initially it was just like us a finite company um having the same idea of the problem and then having unique ideas for Solutions and just kind of building failing experimenting understanding our families and experiments and then reiterating

um and we all did that like everyone was in school at the time um during the September to December grind and so we're doing school and then right after startups call all is a Discord daily standups um and so that was like it wasn't complete complete hassle there uh but that was that was super fun it's like kind of doing it with friends and no higher expectations at the time we didn't raise any money uh during that time period Beyond just the initial token launch uh it was just just a lot of fun it was just a lot of fun and when I look back at those like a couple months it was just like doing school and then doing a startup which was like kind of crazy it's totally wild you're uh you're you're a unique individual to leave school and not go drink beers or go

party with your friends yeah you're going home to Discord to build and create a web 3 tech product it's amazing with like one thing one person I've met in real life and one person I've never met yeah exactly which is just the amazing part of building online now yeah and I don't know if it's like covid that really allowed us this I think that's a big part is you know Luke pushed us all online everything online yeah forced us to be more trusting online because you just knew you weren't going to meet people in person but yeah it's also it is so cool that the relationships that you can develop with a total is a total stranger online that you could build a company and then so let me just asked

this question did you meet in person before you sold yes we did yeah we did okay I thought you were gonna say you met in personality sold no we definitely didn't mean to prisoner [Music] that's great yeah I mean we talk all the time we're starting uh we started a dow went through Academy Dow about two or three months ago and our our tagline for it is building a building a company with internet strangers yeah that's that's exactly what happened um yeah it's it's hilarious okay so let's let's just talk a little bit more about I want to I want to talk about two things one I want to talk about Agora labs and what that what that product was and what you were doing I know you

mentioned briefly the problem you're solving but let's just dive into that a little bit more uh and then I want to talk about your journey of building a little bit more in the I know you mentioned you had some sort of inflection points of acceleration that and I want to talk about what those inflection points were I know you joined some accelerators and so I want to chat about those but first let's just break down Agora Labs a bit further what was it called in the beginning sorry it was called mid Pricks bit perks first what let's ask why did you yeah why did you move from bit perks Google or Labs I think there's two reasons the first part is that a bit perks just sounded a little bit scammy uh if I were to say hey I have a company um it's called bid perks like we have

rewards on top of tokens this doesn't sound like it doesn't sound like a billion dollar company uh Agora Labs was like adjacent enough that we weren't tied to the idea of perks if you wanted to ship a different product it didn't have to be reward based um and so with Agoura Labs the gore actually means community in Greek um and so that was the initial idea and then you only see all these companies that have Labs at the end like Utopia labs and like I I find him a couple others as well and so all these world three companies have Labs at the end so we're like you know what we're gonna have laughs at the end of this as well so yeah adjust Labs dust Labs the Gods uh founding team they yeah their their name is yeah dust Labs what is another they're so it feels like so is that is

that branding 101 right they're just obvious for web free products yeah just add lives at the end yeah take find a find a find a Greek or a an old time word use that meaning and find a Greek god use the meaning and put Labs on that and there you go okay so and and what were you what were you doing what was the dive a little bit I know you explained it briefly yeah dive a little bit more into it uh so essentially um with the girl platform you're able to connect your token that was built on the diesel protocol um easily connected the same way you would log in using Google right login using Google login using diesel um so that same type of web3 uh integration uh

so you log in using your DSO platform um I mean just to cut you up I just want to quickly we didn't really explain D so is the same as bitcloud so we were talking at the beginning about bitcloud can you just make that connection yeah sure so uh big cloud I think it was September October it was rebranded to diesel protocol um mostly because I'm I mean the community mostly believed it was mostly because of controversy around the cloud but regardless it got rebranded uh and so when I say big cloud diesel they're the same blockchain platform um just the way it is connected there um so yeah so you log in using the diesel protocol

um and so you have your token you connect it and from there you're pretty much able to choose your rewards your tokenated access um pretty much entire layer that you weren't able to access just regularly creating your token so diesel is good at making tokens scaling tokens and building tokens what we were good at was actually taking that initial token and then adding a new layer that no one else is building on top of which was the rewards the perks why hold it and it kind of creates similar to what nfts are doing now with I give you an nft you have token gated access to I guess nft gated access to a product product or service okay and can you give us a maybe use met token as an example or another token can you can you give us an example what what

are the actual use cases yeah so I think one I'm trying to think some interesting use cases one user on our platform for example um he had like some governance based off of how many tokens you owned and so depending on how many tokens you own you're able to eat like he tattooed uh certain parts of his body you get to choose what the tattoo was um yeah so it's kind of crazy okay that's kind of cool um okay so using the tokens to vote on tattoos on this guy's body and is this person a large influencer are they just regular Regular Guy um who made a decent amount of money from making his token um because he was a unique stance another one was kind of cool was someone

was live streaming their their life uh for I think like three four days and so then the people who are watching the live stream could then just decide what activities he's going to do when he's going to eat so that was a pretty fun one as well um for mine personally I often just do investor updates um and then uh something of I've also seen some tokens as well which is kind of cool I don't know if I would do this um but something I've seen is not they have like income share agreement uh based off the token and so depending on how much uh of the token you own I say I make a 100K and 20 of what I make it's going to go directly to the Token um and contributed to all the

shareholders or token holders I was gonna I was gonna ask that because you you mentioned when you first said why people invested in that token yeah was because you were seen as this like future Mark Zuckerberg everyone was like this that's so smart I just I wanna but but you're not doing that to be clear yeah yeah I'm not doing the income share agreement right yeah yeah because that's a that's a big commitment to do that because if you were to commit to that I'm guessing that would be you would write that in in a smart contract like would that yeah would you be able to change that later or would you be committed to that forever I mean yeah that's the thing right so

um like I I know at least one person I think he's doing like 10 or like seven percent of his entire income and so I think one of the biggest problems at least for me anyways that you have to publicly show how much you're making every year right um so yeah that's you can get away with like any any tax fraud or anything like that you have to literally show how much you made on how much you're gonna give back um so I think he's actually doing it after taxes as well so he shows like the after tax amounts and how much he makes and it should be said right right um but yeah so mostly mostly then um I think that's a fascinating model we'll see if people take that model uh it's a I would want to see others do it first and watch the issues and then and

then and then try to do it yourself but so mostly the reason that people are buying these social tokens is the same as the reason somebody would support somebody patreon it's it's access right it's right that's the main that's the main so for okay so then for you you guys are now at the point where how big did did Agora did it grow quickly what was the the trajectory for Gordon um it started growing it was like pretty passive obviously when we're doing school from September for December uh and then in January we got um I started I never knew about the idea of

accelerator programs I was not confused between the idea of like what's an incubator you know what's an accelerator like I said I was like Bare Bones better than anyone on web3 barely knew anyone in Tech um and so then I got introduced accelerator programs and so incubators and accelerators just so people know the difference is it incubators it's like pre-idea and so they kind of test you on ideas like here's a good idea can you build a ship it um and it maybe it's gonna work accelerators are you have an idea already and you wanted to celebrate the process of your initial idea so we went through um three accelerator programs we went through Z fellows where they typically give you 10K check and a billion dollar valuation but the best part about seed fellows which was actually one my

favorite accelerator programs I went through was because it connected you with like insane like absolutely insane people like a typical week for example would be uh Tuesday Zoom session with founder of Netflix a Thursday Zoom session with founder of Tinder um and then maybe Friday session of like uh I feel fellow um and like you get to have and because the guy who does admissions does like insane access to a lot of the people in the Silicon Valley world so that was a lot of fun and then at night you would do like a build sesh um and then get feedback and so for example uh there's 10 people that are selected every every month every two months or so for the critical hurt and that was actually the only person uh who

is actually in the Toronto area and actually only the second and two people got accepted from Canada like everyone else is like Harvard MIT um like all those kind of people um and then for me it was just like not a super prestigious school um also considering to drop out so maybe like no school at all um and then um very few people in Canada I barely anyone from Canada never forgets it uh so that was like super fun as well um but yeah it was insane I got to meet eight other nine other incredible people uh and then every month like they do a new one so like right the the bar to get in is super high and so anyone who comes in is like incredible already uh and because you're part of the same program you're you're pretty much automatically friends

um no matter what uh so it's it's pretty cool and so okay so you join these accelerators are you still in school at this point yeah so right now I'm actually taking a semester off uh working at Talent protocol okay okay no no but that's now that's today but like at this point in your build I remember seeing a tweet that you put out that said you were you were dropping out of school last January but yeah joke of it because you only dropped out for a week did you drop out of school at that point yeah so I I found it was kind of funny so at that point it was like a one week Dropout it was back in February um I did end up going back just finished the semester's new exam but then it started to like this new semester was

coming I think it was just September I'm not in school okay okay yeah okay so so you're building you do all these accelerator programs you get great access to so many Founders they teach you so much uh and take us to I'm not sure when it would have been last spring or at what point did you decide was it you guys that decided you should try to sell this where you know how did that process come about yeah that's a good question so at that point um I was pretty confident we could raise and so we ended up getting term sheets um I'm not gonna name the the company but some of the some that are in pretty insane PCS I'll look in the back as uh and we're easily we're gonna close

around for 350k uh back in April pre-seed round okay new preced round if you do appreciate around all the funders are going to drop out um like we're not going back it is a real Capital we're going to be VC back so this is no joke um and so at that point we have 350k ready uh at our disposal um and around that time April was the crypto crash and so we decided you know what either we could take 350k continue building and scaling the company or we can go for maybe a possibly bigger exit um but more importantly have the exit underneath our belts um which is like I think was it I think we're probably one of the biggest reasons there I talked to one of my mentors from Z fellows uh and we kind of went back and forth on it but I think

the biggest reason for selling was if for example if it is 350k precede scale the company and it wasn't being able to be feasible grow fast enough to be able to raise another round it would be difficult to sell there and now we have VCS and so the money would actually make from selling would be a lot decreased um and we're also in a market in crypto which is not the greatest to be building um so this is also difficult on that end on the opposite side of things uh if you were to sell um the story would be really great of a 20 year old selling a company uh for a good amount of money for an exit and then joining the company that actually bought us out which is the story that you're looking at right now and so it kind of made more sense there

and if I ever wanted to build another company again I could easily raise money because at this point I'm an exited founder um and you know I did what I had to do over the year uh so it just made more sense like from a long-term standpoint uh to be able to sell okay okay and so then take us through how how did the selling process go did you yeah did you guys do all that yourself did you bring in somebody to help you how how is that essentially it's actually interesting because I actually didn't know what's interesting about Acquisitions is that there's very little information online about that you can find a ton of information about raising money I got a boatload of information recently um it's very limited on the one of uh

people that have actually shared how to actually get a company acquired um and so I had to LinkedIn a couple people that I knew a couple connections and so I had to kind of go through them and kind of say what did you mess up on what did you do right how would you do it again uh get a whole bunch of insight had like a huge notion page about all these insights that people gave me um and on top of that um probably one of the best ways to learn now would be through a platform called micro acquire which they also do Acquisitions essentially they're like an acquisition marketplace where you have a company and you have a buyer and they kind of connect you guys to possibly sell we didn't end up going through that process because uh the crypto option was very limited

um it was more for like web 2 startups who have like made an insane amount of ARR but because we we're only here for a year we only Built it the company for the last year we didn't have super insane data on what we're looking at we're still too early um so we had to go a different route but what's great about their platform is that because they kind of facilitate Acquisitions on The Daily um they have incredible resources blogs um you know panthens PDFs on how to do it so that was also an incredible resource on top of what I understood from the people that I was chatting with anyways um so from there learn as much as I could did like a four week Sprint of like understanding everything I could about doing an acquisition without actually doing the acquisition

um and then another four weeks of actually doing the acquisition so messaging uh potential um companies companies and we've worked with in the past who we think could be great either adjacent or were direct competitors to what we're building um and then eventually uh within three four weeks getting offers from like multi-million dollar companies um and also a lot of stuff companies that were built by incredible Founders um and so from these four offers then at this point we had to decide and choose okay which company is the best one to kind of go with um and from day one literally it was it's funny I imagine this to everyone a town protocol was like number one on our list like we have a list of all the potential ones we were going to reach out to and we also ranked them from like

one to like I we reached out to maybe like 15 companies so one to Fifteen and we listed out like if we got offered by this one we'd take it over this one and on top of the list there's always time I was just like I have a screenshot to have like messages about it I can show anyone but on the topic it was always talent for the call and like I remember sending the initial message saying like hey we actually sent them and when they sent them the message we actually had offers from other companies because I didn't want they were like so I bought for me that I wanted to make sure I had other offers that can say hey we have other offers uh you guys aren't the first people are approaching uh so at the time I made a few other offers and

so we're like hey we have to do other offers on the table um you know let's chat not to be able to kind of figure something out so how to call the CEO I was close friends with CMO at the time because you did a Twitter space together back in February so I did have some connection there I had to call the CEO it went incredible The Vibes were like insane um and he we went through the entire process from the legal uh to the pr to um to now making it fully public um very very quickly uh the process was was very fast I think it was like six six seven weeks um wow like the initial call to like legal closing uh figuring out everything there and then the only thing that took a little bit longer than expected was PR um but that was just somebody just PR

you can't really talk too many people maybe you have to do exclusive with one person so PR is always a little bit difficult uh but we closed before the end of summer which is my goal cell company um like the beginning of Summer April okay I want to sell the company by the end of summer I want to sell it and so by the end of summer we sold it to an incredible 50 million dollar plus company um and then now working at the company that bought us up wow just incredible is uh it's it's amazing I I see why you say you could make the movie out of this because yeah it's like it's it's like you manifested this everything just happened exactly as you wanted as if you had Talent protocol number one on your list like it's like that it doesn't want

doesn't happen that way like that's just not the way your life Works no no it's crazy like and the thing that was like this whole thing was like a year and a couple months like it was like a year and two months um so it's it's been kind of crazy um like I I honestly like looking back a year like I could never tell myself this like my younger version would never believe me um it kind of oh like you you sold a startup that's the start I've been working on right now um it's been all the struggles you might be having right now or despite the insane successes nothing's going to be able to match the feeling you get when you saw your first company hmm cool well I just since you you bring up your younger version uh I've got to ask what

if you were to give any advice to your yourself at the start of this journey uh and to anybody listening to this who's at the start of their startup Journey or earlier in their career what would you say I think the biggest thing I'd probably tell myself uh would probably be like really like sink in the moments of like small wins I think I was at a point where I just continued building and continued iterating but then everybody appreciated the small wins I had from like getting into Z fellows and being one of two Canadians that got in during the 10 cohort um or like getting offered from from VCS it's like there's a lot of moments where I kind of glossed over them didn't

really celebrate them and as I and this is like all the founders as well were like this we're just like insane work mode uh and we didn't any small win we had okay cool what's the next thing um but I think for me looking back I I made a huge celebration of the acquisition because I'm like I need to really celebrate my wins I think it's probably the biggest win I've had um at least right now in my life uh and so I need to be able to really cherish this moment uh because it's not gonna be every day I'm gonna be able to sell a company uh so I think I think really kind of focusing on the small smaller wins I had when when I was just getting started I think I would have been able to really focus on like the bigger

picture and I noticed now you mentioned that on your your personal website yeah and we'll put a link to it in the in the show notes for everybody listening uh you have a achievements page and you have a failures page tell us a little bit about that it's very interesting yeah as you took that inspiration from one of my friends who also has a personal website and so I publicly show all my failures online because I think when you look at someone who's gone over the same journey I went through in the last year you think oh he has his entire life super easy uh like he was super lucky you know the first one he had on his list obviously was the one he sold to I could never do

something like that but then when you go on the website you can see I got I got reject it from a huge a huge amount of accelerator programs um you know there was some VCS I wanted to to get on the cap table wasn't able to close and so a lot of the the things publicly that I failed in uh I wanted the other everyone else to know that you know I didn't make it in a lot of things and the things that I did do well in super grateful in but um at this point there's a lot of things that I I learned from and so I want to make it public to show other people that it was not an easy Journey um and it was definitely a lot of struggle uh but you know the the success um they're bigger than the failures that

they had so it makes it yeah that's that's awesome I love that it's so there's there's a lot of power in taking the time to write down your achievements and celebrate those but also to acknowledge your failures and to be aware of those because they're a reminder of this the the grind and the hard work yeah uh so yeah thanks that's really cool thanks for sharing that okay let's I want to talk about Talent protocol now so yeah you you got acquired by telling protocol for six figures can you tell us the price or is that uh yeah it's um publicly it's undisclosed but it was in the 60 Direction okay number of course

uh and so so you got acquired by them yeah and and now what so or actually I shouldn't before I say now what um why why why were they so high on your list what was it about the protocol that got you so excited I think that one of the biggest things was the there's a couple things um the first one was like the name recognition and so what town protocol has which is super cool so they fund people to go to different conferences at crypto conferences around the world so they're funding people to go to uh Bogota I think it is right now and then they found people to go to um eighth Lisbon a couple weeks ago so they find a lot of people um to kind of go to cool different

crypto places uh and so a lot of my friends who were also around my age like 22 I'm I'm 20 but you know a little bit older than me probably um have gone through the talent House program where they have been able to get fully funded to go to a conference uh and you know first introduction to crypto is huge and so being able to fly out for free live in a cool place of a lot of cool taunted Builders and just build cool stuff um it's just insane insane idea and they're they're funneling that Talent as well um so that's like one reason a lot of my friends knew the company so when I said you know I saw talk to town protocol my friends would know okay like he sold to a very legit company then it's not my program that I went through as well

um and then the second reason was that um they were doing a very similar model around social tokens and so they're also building their own token model and I remember going and being on board to their platform and it was just it was like insane like my mind was opening like they had some ideas that I never thought about um or especially around like perks and tokens and I had more of like a career path where like you had you each uh individual uh would have like where they've been but also where they want to go and so what's cool about that is that the initial investor supporters could then easily see and kind of come in like I need someone who uh is connected to a PR Agency for example okay then uh publicly uh announce the acquisition and

so then these uh initial token holders would try to find someone to be able to kind of fill in that spot so it's cool stuff like that where I was like while they're doing social tokens in a way that I've never seen before uh and if since then it kind of expanded Beyond tokens as well um but it was like such an interesting idea for me uh and the team was um I think it's around 15-ish people uh and everyone's insanely talented um like really like really world class about what they're doing um and when I had the initial call with the CEO and you know you have beautiful companies on the outside but then they're broken on the inside out with the culture and the people and the CEO which is maybe not being that great uh and so when I first did the onboarding

call and met the CEO he was incredible like it was it was like I was talking to like a future version of myself and I don't get that feeling a lot where I'm looking and talking to someone I can I can feel that we're in the same place or like we're mentally in the same did I mention of where you want to be in life and I I think he went the same way as well and so when did the first onboarding call and everything was super fast like he would say like okay we'll get a response to you by Thursday I need to talk to the team Thursday a response there's a lot of other companies that offered where they're like oh we'll get back to you and they never get back to us and it takes like me a week we have no idea uh and we have to move this

process quickly it's not like a slow process we're gonna take a long time on um and so he was super transparent in everything he said he was able to do um and so that was that was incredible and then we got on the a couple really cool um places once we did the acquisition like Yahoo and Bloomberg um bitcoin.com and so we got them insane places and my name's everywhere now which is pretty funny um but I I I I I think part of it was like taking a huge belief in the founder of the company as well cool that's awesome I love that story I I just gotta ask so one thing that we are seeing that you're talking about here which quit quite honestly we have not talked a lot on our show about social tokens we've

been more focused on on how to use nfts to build businesses and and Dows and really using doubts and I know that there's a big crossover between thousand social tokens but I I think that you're in a different generation than I am I'm in my mid-30s right and so you know not to make a big separation between us but but I'm what I'm curious is I'm wondering if you're seeing a trend that I'm just not seeing do you do are a lot of your friends launching social tokens do you see this like where do you put put social tokens out a few years from now where do you see this going

yeah so I think so I'll give you the ideal timeline and I'll give you like the realistic timeline um so my ideal timeline would be that this is the matte timeline which is the I do everything before I'm 20 timeline versus the everybody else moves that are more normal that's right so my ideal timeline is that um I can see that when I'm like 25 30 so 5 10 years from now um people who are like um you know the typical snapchatters instagramers of you know high school elementary school they all have some sort of digital identity in the Webster World um and I think that one of the best ways to show that is through a token a

non-nft the reason you don't have a representation of you as an nfts because um you know they can't not super scalable um with number one they're not super easily traded um number two but I think number three is that like um nfts I think for me it represent like a one-to-one transaction like nft is a token gated access and if he for a monthly call but nft is not like everything all all together you don't have it and again I want to add something else like it's it's just not that type of uh utility versus a token um and I think in the long term I'd like to see longer people have more tokens not I think right now they're often reserved for celebrities I think Talent protocol is making a huge

um State a step in that because a lot of individuals who you normally see on LinkedIn who have their career who have some sort of professional outset who are maybe college students to try to find a job in the web 3 Market you need to have a web free resume a web free presence online the best way to do that right now is is through the town protocol because they have the initial token you make from the uh from creating your profile you're going to show your entire resume everything you've did uh now they're also implementing verification on the blockchain so for example let's say you worked at a web3 company that's what you worked out like Utopia Labs or like layer three or like coinbase at that point coinbase can verify whether you work there or not uh maybe issue an nft if you want and everything there is like

publicly you can easily see your entire timeline uh but what's cool is you could have token holders and so now they're pretty much creating a web through Linkedin where each individual has their own token and each individual can easily see where you want to go in life and add value to where you're going hmm it's so powerful it's I mean it's it's Community which what we talked about so much in web 3 but it's building your community around you and your vision and your goals in life which is really I mean when you when you cut to it like could there be anything better for Humanity other than this like opportunity to build your own fan Squad that are going to support you and have your back and

hold you accountable like it sounds I mean maybe I'm maybe I've got Rose Colored Glasses on but it sounds like a huge a huge potential for pushing Humanity forward and making people versions of themselves I know exactly like I said in the in the beginning of this podcast like when I started thinking of myself as a company and having token holders as investors like that that was like the Pinnacle moment I would say that like everything else that I did was like focus on that same idea that same mindset um and I know a lot of other people like that where they launched their token and like oh wow I'm actually accountable like I actually have to maybe update a little bit of my token holders maybe have to like really set up a timeline for myself and so having investors and a

lot of companies can preach for this as well when you have investors you start really thinking differently uh you know if you have a startup company it's like you have investors you're like we have to scale we have to uh really you know make this a big thing because now we have other people the science ourselves that are really putting money um into this project but then when you put that same idea into an individual you become like an insane Limitless uh state where like it's just incredible it's just like you become like Bradley Cooper and yeah exactly um it's fully Limitless um whatever could one of our listeners put Matt's face on Bradley Cooper in Limitless and meme that please [Laughter] that would be great oh that's awesome

that's I mean it's it's super exciting do you have any idea what are what are the numbers on Talent protocol how many or decent protocol how many people have their own token I know foreign stats you can give us for Town protocol their stats are pretty public I think right now they're 150 plus 150k um users um all of which um should have at least either which means we've either invested into tokens um or I think a subset of them are also token created interesting interesting any idea the average like craze I guess or conversion

like somebody who launches a token would would guess yeah typically I see like a thousand is the typical number of of uh when you launch a token like how much you're often getting uh from that a thousand a thousand dollars a thousand yeah yeah I'm interested and then most of the time interestingly it's like people you don't know uh who maybe just find you through the platform yeah most of my inventions to people I've never met um slash um like for example when I launched my company token my personal token went up went through the roof because the company was doing well and the initial consensus is that the company token is doing well the people who built the token who have their own tokens as well they're probably going to do well as

well uh so like the second my company token started pumping then the my personal training started pumping as well but you're always going to get like token holders that are just in there for the money uh but you're also going to get token holders that are more of a long-term um I want to actually support you for a long time do you invest in any social tokens yeah actually uh I invest in a couple of the Town protocol Founders um I used to invest in a couple like a couple celebrity ones as well I used to be like a Logan Logan Paul had his token as well I'll not do so so I used to hold it at one point um but yeah yeah also my my mother co-founder stuff tokens I I invested a little bit cool

cool uh okay I want to jump to a speed round but before we do I want to give you a chance I know you I want to give you a chance to talk about what you're focused on now and where people can find you and where they can follow you how they can invest in that token uh you've got such a great story and I know people are going to want to find you online so uh yeah go ahead and give give your shell for the folks listening yeah sure definitely um so right now I'm really trying to focus I think my main domain is in web three so uh so if I build a newsletter some of them are my token holders some of them are people who are potential token holders and some of them are just people who want to know where I'm up to and

what I'm doing every month or so so if you go to web3 club.vip completely free newsletter uh mostly update people of what I'm up to new projects I'm working on maybe new companies uh that I'm going to be building uh and right now I'm working on Talent protocol and I'm starting to become a little bit more active on Twitter uh after the acquisition announcement now is a good time to finally kind of show myself out in the world and so you can find me on Twitter by just typing Matt esp-oz um Matt espos is like a short form of my last name uh so you type that in you can find me on there as well awesome we'll include the those links both those links in the show notes as well uh okay let's do a quick speed round before we wrap

here so first question what's an nft you'll never sell they actually recently airdropped me close uh just recording so I'm getting I do like one out of like 800 in the world uh that are actually um those like type of Italian clothes so definitely worth it okay so when you say the airdrop you close did they airdrop you like virtual virtual item and then you had to burn it to get the physical or how did that work um Yes actually so virtual and then burn it to get the physical so now I burned it and then it got the physical um I'm getting it in a couple weeks which is really cool digital is such a I mean it's the worst word this physical

digital word digital I think is how you say it so they need to Rebrand that word but that is that is a huge unlock for the fashion industry yeah I think we've seen I mean we keep seeing it Nike's done it Athena style Cabana has done it I think Gucci's doing it I think it's uh yeah it'll be really exciting what's really interesting to me is the people that will not burn and instead will keep the the the uh the digital version yeah because of the collector aspect of it right that it becomes more valuable over time um I like the physical stuff so I'd probably burn but cool

favorite person to follow on Twitter uh Andrew gazdak is the CEO of micro acquire um so he was a huge Hub obviously in the acquisition um awesome awesome okay we'll put his Link in the show notes as well something you've purchased recently for under 100 that brings you Joy does not have to be a digital good yeah I recently bought uh my first Funko Pop you know this little um and they're like little characters I think I have no idea what that is one of these little things I bought one uh for I think it was like I think it was a Captain America one

um and it's just like just a cool little Funko Pop and then since they're called um and so I have I I bought my first one and I interested about Luke um like they're like 12 13 bucks I just have them on my desk and they're like super cool so um that's awesome that's awesome yeah I wonder I wonder if Uncle puff will drop an nft soon yeah maybe okay if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it um I would say humble Builder on the trajectory to impact more lives humble Builder on the trajectory to impact more lives

yeah I love that I love that from humble beginnings in Toronto Canada all the way to the top way to go Matt so happy for you so great to have you on the show thanks for joining us it's been uh yeah it's been really cool to hear your story I'm really really impressed yeah thank you so much I appreciate it thanks everyone listening have yourself a great week we'll see you next time thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we

say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one