📺 PANEL: The Creator Economy | Jesse Walden, Li Jin, Cooper Turley

hey bankless nation we are back it is panel time panel time david are you excited about panel time dude our last panel went absolutely fantastically was a current state of defy and everyone really liked it people liked the energy people like the speed and people like having three different takes all at once and so we are doing the same thing with a subject matter that i really want to learn a lot about which is the creator economy and so we are bringing on the three biggest experts in my opinion uh as to what the career economy is and what it's going to do for creators like

us ryan and also create creative consumers like the bankless listeners it's cool because because this is so early david i feel like these experts are probably the like biggest experts in the world on this subject like as of now but like everything in crypto i mean this is also we're all still learning so again it's another case of three-year-olds teaching two-year-olds uh this subject um but what would you how would you define the creator economy i know that's gonna be subject number one that we ask our panelists but what's kind of your

working definition of it david yeah so the creator economy i think uh to some degree uh it starts really with the creation of uh maybe the internet itself and web two platforms like where a lot of content came alive youtube is a content platform spotify is a content platform uh twitch is a content platform there's all these creators that are creating value and they're on these platforms um yet the web 2 world has its flaws that we know about and so there is a growing demand for more creative

outlets more equitable platforms perhaps that really enable perhaps not just the top one percent of creators to really maximize revenue but really the long tail of creators that these web 2 platforms have really left on the sidelines i think that's i think that's the the gist of the creator economy but i really want to get to uh these panelists because i think they have a much more complex and nuanced uh ideas about what the creator economy really is yeah we are going to find out exactly what it is and i think jesse walden has

called this the ownership economy before and i'm curious to hear his take on the distinction but it feels like nfts are part of this movement dao's are part of this movement defy is certainly part of this movement the reason we're talking about it guys is because economy is the key word here and with economies there are new economic opportunities for you a crypto native to get involved whether you're a creator an entrepreneur an investor or just a fan uh there are tons of new ways to get involved so you can tune in on uh

youtube if you're doing that now we'll also publish this on the podcast make sure you like and subscribe you can also throw in some comments in the chat box we may get to them if we have time but with that we are going to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible and then get right into the panel balancer is defy's most powerful automated market maker typical amms just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in devi with balancer you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one

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friends with benefits he's part of that doubt and pleaser doubt as well he's an operator investor man i feel like there's nothing that cooper is not involved in in crypto and d5 see his name everywhere token launches as well governance through fire eyes dao cooper it's great to have you man how are you doing doing wonderful been a big fan of the podcast for a long time so it's a blessing to be here well we've been a big fan of you too we also have jesse walden who is a bagless podcast alumni jesse is the founder of variant um his first check venture firm

investing in the ownership economy that is his focus he was previously at a16z and oh my god those guys just raised another massive round i think they're pretty excited about blockchain 2. he led blockchain r d there at spotify 2 he co-founded media chain has a ton of experience i consider him the go-to expert on topics like the ownership economy and the creator economy jesse it's great to have you how are you doing great good to be back and we also have lee jin it's her first

time on the bankless podcast super excited about lee she works at a venture fund that's focused on the passion economy and the future of work she's an expert on this space she was previously consumer partner andreessen horowitz as well where she was a board advisor for companies like sub stack imager and more and she also hosts a podcast called means of creation which i'm absolutely going to check out it's all about the creator economy as well and lee won't you pronounce the name of your your venture company for us too because i

don't want to butcher that yes i'm the founder of a vc firm called atelier ventures atelier ventures on the passion economy awesome panelists it is fantastic to have you are you ready to dive into the creator economy it's porn ready baby let's get it all right you guys were born ready so let's start with some definitions because uh it's always good to start with definitions why don't we start with you cooper creator economy those two words together what does that mean yeah i mean i think david killed in the intro for a long time we've seen creators creating a ton of value for

their communities and ecosystem as a whole there's never really been a way to share that directly with their fans and community members so community the creator economy to me is basically a relationship between creators and community to share value with one another jesse what would you add to that i just add that um like we're all creators on the internet everyone is um you know creating some some kind of value whether images like there's billions of images that get shared on social media every day um you know there's there's different degrees of creativity online um but we're all

making stuff and sharing stuff that is the nature of the medium and to you know points raised by both david and cooper the you know to date there hasn't been um sort of a ton of reciprocation for that value that's that's created by each of us as individuals um and i think crypto's gonna change that in a meaningful way so we build onto this too and i'm kind of curious after what cooper and jesse and david all said about this this definition um seemed like jesse is in introducing uh crypto into the mix here so is the creator economy is it bigger

than crypto is it broader than crypto jesse said we're all creators on the internet uh what's the relationship between the creator economy and this new crypto web 3 thing that has come about more recently yeah i think um the creator economy has existed ever since the internet existed basically um any whenever interactive content and user generated content was introduced to the internet i i consider that to be the start of the

creator economy because that was the moment when people began actually creating content and creating value and accruing a reputation and influence online and the creator economy is the process and system by which like those people are able to actually be able to monetize and accrue value financially for the content that they're producing online um and i think recently what i have seen as the shift one of the major shifts in the greater economy is that these

creators are being recognized for the value that they're contributing to all of the platforms that they're actively using um there's a new range of different monetization mechanisms that they're exploring it used to be really about ads ad revenue share branded content and sponsored content recently we've seen a lot more exploration around subscriptions direct user payments tipping patronage um and now i think what crypto introduces

is um like one is like ownership like it introduces the concept of digital scarcity and the ability to actually own digital media on the internet which i think hadn't really existed before different platforms were trying to get to that element of digital scarcity but they existed only within walled garden ecosystems and that unlocks a lot of potential for monetization and then b i think um the other intersection point i really see is around economic coordination and how to

reward contributors and align economic incentives beyond just having fans be altruistically engaged with the creator so is this kind of like a an act two would you say lee of um the creator economy that kind of crypto brings so when we talk about the internet we really think of the internet as sort of a you know communication protocol sort of an act one but its business model the business model the internet is really heavily advertising based does this

add another business model for creators which is like things like we can sell our assets we can organize capital in new ways what is crypto exactly adding and is this a whole new chapter for the creator economy do you think i think we're actually entering chapter four not chapter two so i've i think there's a few chapters in the history of the creator economy over the last decade um i would say creator economy the first era was just the rise of social networking and

ugc platforms and when those first began um creators didn't really exist everyone was a creator everyone was a user they they use these platforms just to communicate with each other and in this 1.0 era of the creator economy we saw the rise of more influential users who other people started gravitating to who they didn't know from the irl world so you had the rise of this creator class on the internet i think creative economy 2.0 era was the

era in which these people who started to amass influence and fame online started to monetize that primarily through advertising and then so basically these creators became influential but they were always the conduit for some other business to achieve its goals so brands would use them as a channel for advertising and then i think creator economy 3.0 era was creators realizing actually i can become the business i don't have to just shell someone else's product and become the face of some

other brand i can be the brand i can be the product and i can be a business in and of myself and then i think now we're entering creator economy 4.0 era which is that the creators aren't just trying to um create a business in and of themselves and like sell a product and like have this transactional relationship with their audience i think they're actually blending the line between the audience and the creator and they're creating micro economies and

richer ecosystems beyond just a one-dimensional monetization model so lee do you have examples in all four of those acts so when you were talking about those my mind was calling to examples i'm not sure these are accurate but like act one felt sort of myspace ish and the act ii is maybe more social media instagram and then act three is maybe something a bit more like a sub stack platform and then act four is now where we are with with crypto are those good examples or what would you say yeah i i think that was really apt like

act one is like the rise of ugc platforms like myspace live journal xanga facebook in its early days act two was instagram youtube like all of the platforms on which people are following in like a one directional manner it's not bi-directional follows and mutual friendships it's i want to follow someone they might not know that i exist um third era is like all of the current creator monetization products that exist in web 2 patreon sub stack etc and then four is all of the crypto

creator platforms that are arising so i would imagine all of these uh different phases of the creator economy and technology at large goes to these adoption cycles right like it's adopted it's great and then it hits maturity and then we start to see some problems right so with our the the phase of the creator economy that we are in theory leaving behind what are the problems that it's presenting creators and their fans that we are trying to solve in uh what lee is calling the the 4.0 version of the creator economy what

what does these crypto platforms web 3 platforms uh solve for the uh problems that have been plaguing the current creators of the world and jesse i'll turn that one to you sure yeah so so i'm going to riff off lee here so earlier we talked about the ownership economy we did a whole podcast on it um in short that's the lens through which i view what's what's happening in crypto and dovetails with my definition of the creator economy in the sense that you know my definition is we're all creators right and the ownership economy is about

giving everyone ownership over the value that they create that's something that didn't happen in web 2 because you know many of the platforms while they gave creators new tools um they also extracted value at the platform level um value that was built on the back of the creators who who drove the value of those platforms right so in web 3 the opportunity is to build platforms build networks that are built operated and actually owned by their users um and

you know i would defer people to the ownership economy podcast for like a much fuller exploration of that um but that's the specific problem that crypto solves and it does so uniquely because it's now possible to move the value of ownership or move that economic value at this you know the same scale and the same speed that we move information and you know we know from silicon valley's history that ownership is this really powerful incentive to get talented people to come and like contribute to your thing that's

how you get the best like engineers to come work at your startup um but it's not been possible to like you know distribute that to everyone in the world um anyone with an internet connection who is a creator crypto enables exactly that because you can literally send value tokens are like packets for value to anyone within with an internet connection regardless of where they are so that that's the big new opportunity that crypto adds to the creator economy and if you read my initial post on on the ownership economy outlaying this thesis i actually referenced lee's posts

on the passion economy and of course we overlapped in andreessen so we were talking about this back then but i see that the sort of ownership economy and which i would you know sort of say it is synonymous with um the creator economy and web three um as a the next logical step or or sort of like you know 4.0 as lee puts it cooper you have an interesting place in this world because you are i and from from my perspective both somebody who plays attention to the investment side of of this uh industry but also uh you

participate in it as a creator uh and so maybe maybe you could help illuminate us as to what what is the re what's the reasoning for the the migration right like we what are the real incentives that this new ownership economy is really pulling people away uh from phase 3.0 like like uh like lee said into phase 4.0 well as a as a user and a creator what's in it for you and as a content consumer what's in it for you yeah i think it's shared upside in

relationships you know as someone who interacts a lot of creators right now it's very difficult to build a strong relationship with them what the creator economy enables is a way to show your fandom in a much deeper level you know either financially by buying a stake in that project or socially by working for it in a very deep level and so for me as an active contributor to many d5 projects you know this notion that there's no line between team and community the notion that everything's shared with the community those are things that we take for granted and crypto but for many creators you know they don't really engage with their fans on a deep level and so what i really like about this

movement is you're really challenging creators to go deeper with the audience that they're building and give them shared stake in their projects and i think once we see that happen on a meaningful level we're going to start to see all these creator brands be 100x more valuable than they are today and the biggest benefit there is that the fans are going to capture that upside along them instead of just the creator themselves as uh the content of that cooper it seems to be the case and this really hit me when uh dave and i had our conversation with justin blau um who's an artist a creator uh in the in the music arena and he really said

like he doesn't so much of what an artist does at least a music artist and i think many artists and creators feel the same is through centralized intermediaries these like massive aggregators of information that control them so like his example is kind of like spotify and record labels and some of these are web 2 companies but some of these are kind of legacy analog companies and what he really liked about crypto and nft is he could go directly to fans is that sort of what we've seen

with the internet up to this point in kind of you know lee's acts one through three what we've gotten is a lot of centralization a lot of aggregation does this movement the creator economy kind of disaggregate and remove these large aggregators um disempower them and give power back to the creators yeah i think that um as lee highlighted as the creator you recognize you hold the keys and the power here so you can go from platform to platform and bring your audience with you you know in web 2 i think that there's a lot of notion

that you're following existed on that platform if you were to leave instagram let's say you would leave all those followers behind you but with something like discord and these new creator economies you're mobilizing across all these different platforms so tick tock discord twitch patreon only fans whatever you want to call it people are following you around the internet and i think when you recognize that you are your own digital nation state you start to see the value being created there would be a lot more powerful people go to bat for you a lot more it's not about where you're releasing content they're going to support you anywhere and you can now become a weapon across any new

platform you come into because you have this large force behind you that all of these brands and companies want to empower and partner with you because you have such a more loyal audience behind you that's going to use your product and help bring value to the systems that you're using yourself so you can port your community in reputation in ways you couldn't previously that's exactly right yeah just just to like tack onto that technically like web3 enables this in a unique way which is that you all your identity your your data and the way you monetize or is tied

to one id so rather than having like 10 different ideas across 10 different platforms like instagram ryan you have one address on chain where all the stuff that you do as a creator can be aggregated and critically it's not the platform that's aggregating it's you as an individual cooper you said the individual operating as their own nation state and that just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up we have a section in this agenda to talk about how it changes the personality and psychology of a person but we're not there yet first i want to

bring up a tweet that uh that uh uh lee said uh that um you recently tweeted out if you are a creator first company your cap table should reflect that what does that mean um lee what what did you mean by that can you just elaborate on that tweet for us sure um i think that creator empowerment exists on a spectrum and right now the notion of empowering creators and the language of creator empowerment is very popular and

ubiquitous and i think it's being co-opted by a lot of platforms that are arguably not that creator friendly and so if we look at you know creator empowerment on a spectrum from like helping them to build an audience to like sharing advertising revenue with them to allowing them to build subscription revenue to allowing them to like create their own product offering to like actually having them be part owners in the platform themselves like i

think the ownership element is like the furthest you can go and be becoming a creator friendly platform and actually empowering creators because that means that they're not subject to like you know their interests are fundamentally aligned with that of the platforms whereas in all of the other centralized web 2 models there's still this inherent tension of the platform needing to extract some value that the creator is contributing in order to be valuable as a company and so this tweet

if your creator first company your cap table should reflect that that was getting to like how do we make creators owners of the platforms themselves how do we have them not just build their own revenue streams and businesses on these platforms but how can they actually benefit from the work that they're contributing to make that platform successful um and help them get upside from that equity value appreciation and i followed this up with a larger tweet storm about creator ownership of platforms and how

creators need to go from just workers to worker owners um which is really related to this point but i i think that is like the north star for me in terms of what i see coming next for the creator economy this is so interesting that you talk about um centralized platforms kind of co-opting the self-sovereign movement of the creator economy because like a lens that dave and i often see through is is um we have like a lot of fake defy out there right and so like the bankless movement is all about hey you

have freedom you have self-sovereignty over your your private keys you can move your crypto assets wherever you want you're not trusting a third-party custodian and we want to maximize that even while knowing it's a spectrum but like i'm curious what this actually looks like for a creator like what would be an example of a a platform that completely locks you in like almost like in our world like a bank right versus that's pretending to be d5 versus a platform that is completely empowering

the individual creator do you have any examples of that where like that uh falls somewhere along that spectrum i mean i think the examples are all around us they're the apps that we use every day on our phones um any sort of centralized social networking platform i think falls within that camp and it's complicated because i think in one sense they are enabling these creators to build a following and reach audiences and

they're enabling them to create content that would otherwise be really hard to create but in another sense like they are locking them in if if you're banned from twitter if you're banned from tick tock like you don't have access to reach your followers anymore um and like if the platforms want to they can monetize your content and not share or share an arbitrary amount with you like that decision is made by the platform unilaterally um and so i think yeah all of the current

centralized creator platforms have this tension of both empowering as well as disenfranchising the creator um i recently said i think a lot of these creator funds that the social media companies are coming out with to pay creators are are bred in circuses meaning they're kind of like a distraction to make them make the creators feel happy and appeased and feel like they're being enfranchised and heard and valued but at the end of the day like they're building their creators are building their businesses

on rented land when they're building on these web to do platforms how can you how can you even tell like how can you tell that you're not building it on rented land so i think your tweet is super instructive it's basically like um a creator first company will give tokens equity ownership to its community right so maybe that's a signal um but are there any other signals like in a creator first uh platform should i have the ability to just like port my entire profile everything i create and

like own it should i have the ability to realize upside on everything that i create are there some fundamentals that you would say lee that that exists in creator first platforms because i think sometimes creators don't even know where they are like because of the marketing and um i guess the you know almost like the psyops around uh some of these these platforms that purport to be creator friendly yeah i think that economic ownership is a huge element and i think on top of

that i think transparency around decision making is another one like how our decisions made how our policy is created i think twitter is kind of an example of like what transparency starts to look like because they recently revamped their blue check mark program and as part of that revamping they solicited um a lot of ideas and proposals from the community as to what the verification program should actually be like and what the process

should be like i think like today creators think of them themselves as passive recipients of platform decisions like you know the youtube adsense split rate is 45 55 and that's just what it is and they're the passive recipient of that decision i think going forward i think people are going to start thinking of it as not just the platform made this decision and i have to accept it but like actually how do i how do i change it how do i affect change in this system

how was this decision arrived at and could i be included as part of that process i want to turn the conversation to uh a little bit more about the economics behind the creator economy and the uh the mental model of the american dream comes to mind but if you talk to the average zoomer or millennial about the american dream you get rolled eyes like no one really takes that seriously anymore and i think part of the creator economy is trying to reinvigorate

something like that back into the minds of people everywhere and so uh cooper as somebody who is a participant again on both sides of the creator economy as a consumer and a contributor tell us how you think that the creator economy might be able to reinvigorate just the average person to help kind of establish a name for themselves or some revenue for themselves and how is it different than than you know the the classic american dream meme that we know from the 50s and 60s yeah i think the most obvious answer is

buying tokens you know you've seen very clearly over the past six months that millennials in particular love buying meme tokens dogecoin being an obvious example of this it's my belief that the creator economy is an advanced version of meme investing where you're buying based on the back of a community rather than on the back of a financial statement you know i think that's a far ways away from becoming mainstream but when that happens you're going to see opportunities to earn financial capital and the brands that you support the most and i think the biggest change here is that it's no longer about where you work being your paychecks that you can take that and go hang out with your friends on the weekend it's a merge between the

two with what you're working on on a day-to-day basis is where you want to be spending your time and there's now financial opportunities you don't have to sacrifice your time for money anymore the two things can be intertwined to build community and kind of better empower the things that you know and love and so making it like quote unquote making it seems to be largely like out of reach for the average the average person these days there's just generally a pessimism in the air when it comes to just establishing a long-term career a lot of people just kind of feel confined to like a nine to five and renting an apartment for the rest of their lives is

this something that the creator economy can fix definitely think so i mean you talk to people outside of their jobs and they're really excited about things like sports betting and about like you know what's happening on tick tock and staying up with like the logan paul floyd mayweather fight you know all these events have financial markets around them but i think the ways in which you participate in them has been very degenerate and speculative in nature and what i hope to see is a more advanced evolution of that movement where if you have value to contribute to that conversation you can bring it to a discord a governance forum you can make a proposal to a community and get paid