Guest Jason Choi
Host Frank Chaparro
Metaverse is a virtual world – games, ecomm, new experiences – use the term broadly, “ online gaming + social experiences defined by digital ownership”
FC: Crypto twitter can be considered a metaverse pre cursor
Will take 5-10 years before truly immersive VR metaverse
Current metaverse are bare bones eg Sandbox
Lack of economic activity inside metaverse – rails / tech missing to buy and trade things besides simple tokens
Cold start problem – easy to create the worlds, how do you get 1M users to come in and consistently hang out
First build good games and experiences – like Fortnite, then extend to things like concerts (Travis Scott), ecomm
VR Chat on Quest – lots of content is user generated, but developers aren’t properly compensated
Metaverse analogy is to layer 1s – a platform for other developers and for users
Maybe a less extreme power law – fat tail of metaverses that cover niches, specific games
Jason grew up in HK, started a small venture fund, doing crypto podcast
Spartan was started by former Goldman partner, Jason joined
Initially focused on Defi
Advisor to Dapper Labs / CryptoKitties
After they found Axie Infinity, thought growth + revenues was really interesting, made big bet that became lucrative
Dove much deeper into gaming + NFTs
Decided to setup fund to invest properly
Have $110M Defi fund too
Metaverse fund will be larger check sizes
3 investment areas
1. Infrastructure layer – immutable, flow, game engines, hardware
2. Experiences (games), social apps, metaverse storefronts
3. Value add layer – guilds, studios, discovery + aggregation
NFT Worlds project
Tied their NFT lands to servers on Minecraft – tapping into its massive userbase
Assets are still on Ethereum
Guilds
2 types of guilds
1) Macro – large balance sheets (YGG, Avocado)
2) Micro – long-tail, 20K of them, a few people, very reliant on scholars
But all guilds are still very reliant on Axie and Axie-type games
Guilds are marketing channels for games
Guilds could become studios, create experiences
Barrier to entry is low, differentiation is team (do they have prior gaming industry experience?)
Defi
Prices don’t reflect the innovation and usage
Defi rails for NFTs will be interesting
NFT areas of innovation
1. Fractionalizing NFTs
2. Collateralizing NFTs and taking loans – how do you determine price and rate
3. Lending NFTs
“Still in ICO days”
Jason’s podcast Blockcrunch
180 episodes since 2018
Passion project
Ran out of crypto blogs to read
Reason to reach out to influencers / experts
Doing a new Shark Tank series, have pre-launch founders come pitch
Active on Twitter too
Heavy metal fan
His favorite band Synyster Gates dropping NFTs directly to fans, don’t have to pay middleman like Facebook
All risk assets gone bonkers the past 2 years
Massive growth in fund sizes – Bain Cap $560M new fund, lots of sideline capital
But prices have slightly cooled recently
Funds will need to be either thesis specific, or go super early stage, or get super big