Episode 3: June 2, 2021

Show Notes

Deep Dive
A conversation with Niel Robertson on Influence.co and Creator Rising where we look at creators, influencers, and everyone in between!

Hosts

• Gregarious Narain (@gregarious)
• Ken Yeung (@thekenyeung)

News Topics

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/26/patreon-ceo-says-creators-have-leverage-they-havent-had-in-years.html

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Transcript

Gregarious Narain  0:23
Welcome back to the creative economies, our weekly news show on everything happening the creative economy, we take a deep dive into everything right like founders, creators, investors, everyone in the ecosystem. Welcome back. I am Greg Narain, one of your co hosts going today of course, as usual, my friend, Ken young.

Gregarious Narain  0:45
So just for everyone to understand and know what's going on, we are broadcasting right now on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and clubhouse. So if you I see some hands up, but feel free to raise your hands. There's lots of opportunities to engage in the conversation later. Sorry about that. But yes, throughout the show, and of course, throughout our coverage here, we bring a round up of the latest news, commentary, interviews, and deep dives on key topics in the creative economy. We go live on Wednesdays at 3pm, Mountain Time, 2pm Pacific. And you can find out more at each VPS colon slash slash created dot show that is the official Show page where you can find out about future episodes, future guests, etc. We also of course, have a long form content site over at creative economy calm with where we hear some of our articles and longer forum posts. So head over there. And of course, we do have a Flipboard as well. We're all the links that we consider and think about throughout the course of the week as we prep for the show live. So Ken, you want to say hi, before we dive right into it.

Ken Yeung  1:49
Hello, hello. It's week three. I mean, we're now in the trilogy of the creative economy. So and I can't believe like this is we've gotten this far with such amazing guests and topics to talk about, Greg, I mean, I think this is going to be one of our one of our best shows, and I can't wait, it's gonna definitely be the best we've ever had.

Gregarious Narain  2:13
Every week is always an improvement.

Gregarious Narain  2:17
And not just because we have Neil Robertson for joining us later, but also because we keep improving our preparation. So let's hope we don't screw it up. All I did hit the record button This time, so we're already in good shape.

Gregarious Narain  2:31
Alright, so progress. Let's dive right into it. Just in case you don't know the format, we do about 10 minutes of covering the news, some of our favorite articles and interesting things from the last week or so. Then we'll have 10 minutes for interactions, q&a voiceovers. If you have a comment, we'll probably bring Neil in to give us some some of his thoughts as well. So be ready there with your hands on the hand raise button so you can come up. If you have a comment. Of course, if you're watching it the video right now you can leave a comment in the comment box below you. And we will get those comments and try to answer them as well. And then we have a deep dive with Neil. And then of course we have created after dark, or is that what we called it? created after dark? Yeah. Which is like our our after show. But we allow anyone in the audience to come on stage and join with us and talk to everybody and anybody that's on stage with us because we believe that interactive shows are way more fun than those boring podcasts that you probably listen to. So let's get into it right now. Welcome back. This is Episode Three, as we mentioned.

Gregarious Narain  3:28
And we are now in oh my gosh, I'm having so much trouble controlling. today. We are in week episode number three is Ken mentioned. And let's dive into the news, Ken. So what's up first?

Ken Yeung  3:40
Oh, my goodness. So I think our first one, got it. And I'll get that slide to the next one. But the first first article that we that we came across is this is Patreon CEO jack Conte who's who comes out with this interview, he basically says that creators have like this incredible leverage, you know, in terms that they've they've never had in many years. And it's not necessarily anything like breaking news or shocking to a lot of people within the creative economy space, I don't think but I think for observers, you know, it's it just shows that there's this natural progression in terms of this notion of creators and influencers in terms of people that want to that are making their living off of producing content, articles, videos, stories, whatever it is, using these, these tools and platforms that are available to them. And with the fun. An interesting point that jack made in his article is that these platforms are not seeing our need to recognize that these creators are no longer just like, Hey, we're just giving them money that they have to view these craters as businesses and they have to build up those relationships. Very similar to how Facebook or Google or YouTube or Amazon or those guys, those people

Ken Yeung  5:00
Those companies are doing it for traditional small businesses, right? They have to treat them with the same amount of, of respect. And creators themselves have an immense amount of power with them, you know, so so you know, we have all this conversation with, about social tipping and influencers and investment and everything like that we're starting to see this, this new age. And that really is New Age does this resurgence, if you will, in terms of of, you know, the creators now getting their fair do it? And I would like Greg, were like, do you have any thoughts on that? And I know, I'd love to hear Neil's thoughts later on in the show,

Gregarious Narain  5:43
I think. I mean, I think that nexus of this genesis of this show is ultimately I think that this area is proving true. It's interesting, I think most people don't realize how old Patreon is, I think they started in 2013, or something. So they're fairly well along in their journey. And so you know, I think it's really interesting to see just what, how long they've been focusing on this sort of problem. So well, we'll definitely cover that when we get to Neil, though, but we do have lots of news to get through, oh, I added this one. So let me put this one in. Yeah.

Gregarious Narain  6:14
So this was some breaking news that we came across yesterday, just in case you are interested or thought about sort of the decentralized publishing space, you know, mirror dot XYZ, which is like a crypto back sort of publishing platform allows for crowdfunding or pre raising money, basically, for the creations that you may make that you may create. Union Square ventures, early investor in Coinbase, also has now made a sizable investment at $100 million valuation into mirror, which I think, you know, is really interesting, because one of the broader sort of frames on sort of the creative economy as a whole is I think, ultimately about on this idea, generally, that sort of web 3.0 represents sort of a decentralized web and a lot of folks believe and see sort of the opportunity for the creator space very much. So marrying up in lining up with the evolution in the decentralization of sort of networks and power, ultimately. So I think it'll be interesting to see how these trends play out over time. And how true or untrue sort of some of those beliefs are. But I think it was interesting just to see that, again, this is another way for creators to get paid ultimately, and generate new kinds of revenue. In this case, I would call it like the pre funding, as opposed to say, the post funding, which we're usually used to today

Ken Yeung  7:35
How soon do you think that will we actually start to see a creator economy company, become a unicorn, besides, you know, the Patreon and everything like that we're like this new age of, of creator, Creator Academy startups.

Gregarious Narain  7:52
So I guess it depends on what kind of company we're talking about, there's probably probably a number of them, I think, um, if we look historically, and I saw I remember, I think, Molly from index ventures, I saw her speaking yesterday and event, Jackie pointed out that, you know, the tooling side, for example, has already netted us many billion dollar unicorns. So you think a company like I think like Canva, right, for example, figma, some of these other tools that actually are, enable and empower sort of creators to deliver their craft. Obviously, most of the platforms are unicorn companies already. So it is very easy to imagine that there will be other billion dollar unicorn style businesses that exist above and on top of it. And I think we've actually seen that already, like a cameo, I think, is already a billion dollar company. There's a number of them for sure. So I will continue to watch this space, because I do think we will see a great deal more evolution in this arena.

Gregarious Narain  8:42
So jumping into some youtube news. I think I had also sort of found this article interesting, largely, because, again, speaking to your point, Ken, where is some of this opportunity going right? When you see a company like linktree, raising, like $45 billion, that's not just to keep making homepages guys, right, like, and I believe, you know, if we look to Asia as great inspiration of sort of, like, what is happening, what works and what can, what can drive and change the way we behave? Live shopping is a very normalized behavior, interactive shopping, where's our QVC? Right, like, we don't have that analog yet. And we are seeing more and more that there are new startups creator tech being created to sort of power or enable some of this tooling. This is not new stuff, by the way, right? It's been there forever, right? Like, we've had, I remember at shoot, we had shoppable, Instagram, like ages ago, like probably like nine years ago, where you could like we integrate your product catalog so you could tie it into products. Other things like Instagram shopping already enables you to do some of these things. But I think there are now special purpose tools being created around this that provide a horizontal approach to this. So I think live shopping has a lot of opportunities as well. And there's gonna be a lot of growth in this area as we continue to move forward.

Ken Yeung  9:53
So this one it kind of keep it along the lines of with live shopping. I mean, Google's been really good.  Testing the boundaries in terms of what they can do for YouTube. And this this came out from the protocol a last week where the their r&d arm area at 120 has been testing this this concept of art, can they produce some sort of a digital merchandise platform for for creators, right, I think this potentially could create a could be an opportunity for creators to, to sell their own merchandise and have it being fulfilled through through the Google YouTube arm. Now, who knows whether or not that's actually going to come into existence? Clearly right now, this is just a trial. This is an experiment that YouTube is that Google's r&d arm is doing. There's no estimated timeframe on whether this will actually be available to to, you know, the creators of whatever caliber whether you have like a bajillion followers or 400 followers, whatever. But I think when you look at everybody else's, every other platform, kind of doing this arms race for creators, it's only a matter of time before this comes to fruition. Although doing Merchandising, and e commerce is going to be very tricky. It there's a lot of complexities involved into it. I'd imagine. So this is great. I think Google will is right to be taking it step by step to and toying around and seeing what could they do to make it easier for creators without going full out beyond their wheelhouse?

Gregarious Narain  11:22
Yeah, and we certainly know the power of YouTube to drive sales and conversion. So I think it's an interesting opportunity, for sure. Now, let's get into a little bit of news from the Instagram universe. So Ken go ahead.

Ken Yeung  11:34
Oh, man. So last week, there was some news from from Instagram, where they're saying like, oh, we're just going to where we will hide the the likes, right? They'll give give creative give account holders the option to hide likes, and it's more for mental health. And we had talked about last week, one of the articles you talked about last week was influencers burning out right in, and you look at that like button that like the number of likes you get and you can kind of get overwhelmed, it's almost like you're being gaslighted to assume like, hey, why do my art? Why do my photos get like only to two likes? or Why does my content? My my real likes? Wow. I know, I mean, I'm pretty good. Like, everyone should follow me on Instagram. I mean, clearly, because my photos are my contents amazing. But But, like, imagine, but that's just for me, right? And, and I posted a photo, over the weekend, I was at the mall. And I'm like, Oh, I didn't see the number of likes rolling in. And I'm not expecting like, you know, 1000s it's like, oh, just, you know, dozen or whatever. It's all good. You know, just to see just that acknowledgement didn't happen. But it's like you felt this this. I don't know this, this anchor in a manner of speaking. So it's a matter of so hiding, it is one way to psychologically get it out of your mind. But reality according to this article from the information. That's actually the number, the lake metric isn't actually what creators might care about the most. In reality, it's about the share, right? It's our people sharing your content. And in doing so, it extends your reach, extend your contents reach, so that more people are exposed to who you are and the type of work that you do. So I think as we look at, you know, the the, how we vet influencers, how we vet creators, how we vet like the performance of something, maybe instead of just like, Oh, it's garnered, you know, I can produce content that Garner's like, 10,000 likes, it's like, how many times has it been shared? Right, and, and

Gregarious Narain  13:33
a lot to say about this exactly,

Ken Yeung  13:36
I think, which is I hope Neil's just taking notes, because I think we just got a lot of stuff going, we're just gonna throw back. It's like, Hey, what do you think?

Gregarious Narain  13:44
All right, well, let's get to some Twitter news here real quick. Oh, yeah. So here's a here's a slew of threads or tweets that I found, or I think I mostly found interesting. I did have last week a, you know, a bit of a reaction to something that our friend Hugo had sort of mentioned about sort of investing in creators, which got me to sort of thinking about and scratching the itch about, well, what does it really mean to invest in creators. And so you'll see, I have a tweet right over if you follow me over at Gregarious, by the way if you are not watching the live stream, or one of the things to note is Ken has been sharing out links to all the articles that we've been discussing. We probably need to figure out how to get those out to our Twitter account as well.

Gregarious Narain  14:25
Oh, they're going on Twitter right now.

Ken Yeung  14:26
They are alright. Yeah.

Gregarious Narain  14:29
So But yeah, I did put together a small graphic just to sort of categorize and summarize sort of the opportunities for investment. And really, I think the most important part is really comparing what the traditional sources are versus say like the creator oriented versions of them as we continue to move and react to this ecosystem.

Gregarious Narain  14:47
Next up, we had Twitter spaces in case you didn't know is available on a desktop. So you can now listen to spaces I believe you cannot start them from the from the desktop, but you can listen to them from Twitter.  Um, I haven't actually seen this personally on my own yet. So we'll see how that works out. But I think it's coming at some point soon. So that'll be great to see more desktop integration. And this is really an opportunity for them to beat out I think clubhouse because clubhouse is definitely not moving as fast and sort of diversifying the consumption endpoints.

Gregarious Narain  15:22
Last one, there was an interesting YouTube video that Colin and Samir, who are apparently like the two most famous influencers now, as of late, but they are a great interesting chat with someone, they have an influencer on our queue to talk about sort of the evolution of creator DTC, as they call it, with 1.0 being merged 2.0 being digital products and courses, 3.0 being standalone brands, and then they were asking the question of what does 4.0 look like, and I'd love we're gonna try to talk to Neil about this as well, as we get to that. So with that, let's move into just a real quick note, actually, I guess.

Gregarious Narain  15:59
If you want to find any of these links, by the way, head over to created economy or created economy.com, we have a link to our Flipboard. All the links that we consider for the week are actually flipped into there. So you can you can definitely see all the stuff we're thinking about talking about. And then also can create a what's it called a magazine, I guess. All right.

Ken Yeung  16:15
Well, we have magazines we have storyboards on on Flipboard is readily available to find all your information that we cover. And plus we have a magazine dedicated just to about all the news relating to the creative, creative, the creative economy, outside of what we talk about in this show. So where you can stay up to date on everything that's happening.

Gregarious Narain  16:34
Awesome. Awesome. So before we get to the interview, though, we like to build in a little time. So Neil, I'm gonna bring you up now hope you're ready. But this is an opportunity for everyone to if you're out there listening on Twitter, I started a Twitter space, but my phone may explode because I'm reading Twitter spaces and clubhouse at the same time. So if you're out there listening, and you want to raise your hand, by all means, raise your hand when we were happy to have you up here. And, Neil, any reaction just to the news part before we jump into, you know, sort of asking you some hard questions.

Niel Robertson  17:05
Well, I did take a lot of notes on almost every single story. So I can give you lots of reactions, I think at a macro level. My reactions like Another week, another, like incredible addition of momentum and inertia as to the creator economy, right? You know that I've been doing this for a while. And if we were sitting here five years ago, we wouldn't have had this much to talk about.

Niel Robertson  17:30
Maybe been like, impressed that like, you know, some more big creators on Patreon that was kind of the news of the week. But now you've got you know, tier one VCs like USV, putting money in, you got FinTech getting funded through mirror, you've got, you know, big platforms building this, like, canon of crater monetization tools. It's sort of emerging. Like everybody has to have tipping and subscriptions, and merch and commerce and affiliate, it's like there's five or six things everybody has to have.

Niel Robertson  18:02
Its you know, it's incredible. But well, you know, one of the things I will say, in terms of like what Jack's sort of like continued, very positive drumbeat about the spinning flywheel of the industry, is, I think a lot about like, sort of, like, expansion, revenue, and sort of, you know, like, moving from one bucket to another when it comes to the crater economy. Because I don't necessarily think that what we're witnessing in the crater economy is like this net new behavior of people taking their wallet out and spending money on something I had never spent money on before. I think that a lot of the current flywheel of greater economy is coming from other places.

Niel Robertson  18:45
So for example, myself, like 10 years ago, a lot of people spent billions of dollars a year on ringtones. Right? I mean, there are companies that made 234 billion dollars on people, like, you know, doing ringtones or like ring backs, like remember all that stuff. So in that sense, it was it was repeated, right? So you'd get your at&t bill and it had for $3. And, you know, Ariana Grande, a, you know,

Gregarious Narain  19:13
ringtone actually did, I didn't ever get either.

Niel Robertson  19:17
I didn't the thought of behavior that I understood, but it was a very young person's behavior, right? So then something that we're probably more familiar with, we went into like the 99 impulse app economy. And, you know, a lot of the money moved from buying digital media sound to digital media to apps. And I really fundamentally believe that what we're seeing in the crater economy really like the first penguins off the kind of revenue boat is a shift in again, from $99, you know, app purchases into $9 subscription purchases, because you're really buying kind of like crater access in some shape or form. I think that the, the scale of those things is like expanded, maybe like 10x and every single one of those junctures, but um, you know, I think a lot of people are like, somewhat scattered. To go like, Is there a subscription fatigue? that's gonna happen, all this kind of stuff? And it's like, no, this is like what I just a change in digital media consumption. And so, you know, I couldn't couldn't argue, you know, or, you know, more vehemently in Jack's, you know, lane that, you know, it's time this is not right. And we're just in the very, very early innings of what we're seeing the decentralization decentralization conversation is massively interesting as well, and what to thoughts on that, but I'll pause for a second and see if that that rings true. And no pun intended.

Gregarious Narain  20:32
What and by the way, Neil, I would argue, you know, we've we've always paid for creators, it's just that they tended to be in this heralded sort of, like, very guarded place, surrounded by a mode of sort of, like very large, big money institutions, right. Like, but you know, like you bought, how many people bought cable just to buy HBO just to buy one show? Right? Like, like, how many people became customers of HBO for Game of Thrones, and nothing else? Right. Yeah. So they're, the behaviors actually been there as well. Right. And I think that's what, like, even the cable complex has been scared of like unbundling, in a large degree, because of, you know, sort of like that, that breakdown, right? And so like, you see, like Netflix, and other people playing around with these models, like, we're like, well, we're not going to release all the shows at one to one shot anymore. Because guess what happens? I sign them for a month, and then I just watch all that shown and I leave, right. And so you know, I saw it, I agree with you that this behavior is actually been there. Though, the hard thing I have a hard time with, I guess, as we look and think about the future, is, what is the replacement income greater or equal to? Or less than? What we used to spend? Right? So right, so I give you an example. One of the common like, when I when I attack our own space, right, I don't when I'm like being pessimistic, right. But you know, what I basically say, as I was like, great, people were complaining about paying $250 a month for cable, are they gonna really have more than a $250? month creator bill every month? Right? And that's the that's the question to me, ultimately, right is like, what is the individual sort of spend level look like? And I don't know the answer, right? Like, my guess is, you know, you might spend less on more people. So like, again, it becomes kind of a race to the bottom, where creators May my bundle themselves, as you seen some of right, like, where you're buying, what's the thing that LEED grants are great every right, where you're buying access to a bundle of people, and it's sort of like a mini medium style thing, or something where the distribution is more set? I don't know, you know, like, but what are your thoughts, I guess, in that in that universe, right. And, and sort of, like, you know, obviously, more people are participating. So that's sort of the

Niel Robertson  22:47
counter. So I mean, I think what happens in the crater bucket, kind of a macro, is, I think, you're kind of your example of cable is correct, right. But cable is sort of one thing, it's entertainment. So let's just assume that, like, you know, in the US people, you know, 200 million people are paying $100 a month for the equivalent of cable, right? So what's that $20 billion. And so you could say, well, the crater economy is basically $20 billion. Like, that's what people pay for an entertainment form, you know, subscription form center form, but I think that's unrealistic because crater economies also education. Right. And so, you know, I might have bought a book from Amazon. That's how I learned something, I might have gone to a conference, right. It could be like experiential, they're like, I don't know, the math on that. I'm sure it's another $20 billion, probably more that people spend on education, right. You know, and so you kind of get out of purely entertainment. And then you get into education abroad that very, like, very quickly after that, there's probably a whole bunch of other categories, that kind of scale, where you add another 20 billion, add another 10 million, right, you add other whatever. And you find, you know, very quickly that you're talking about $100 billion $250 billion. Just like such an insane scale that like no one is really like worrying. This is gonna be big. I like every time like a glimmer of like, how big, this get kind of like washes over me. I just, like literally, like, brush some stuff in the back of the napkin. I'm like, we're good. No, no one's running out of money here. Right. Right. But I think you're right, though, that like, one of the challenges is it's tricky when you look at your credit card statement, and you see, like 40 or 50 things, right? I mean, cable is the bundle. Right? And so that is one of the challenges. And I think this is we could talk forever about the FinTech side of things. You know, I think one of the one of the big plays going on, I just had to write this piece called the crater scape that my substack creator escaped. That sounds like the calm. And one of the things that I wrote last week is like this. I really think the big platform players are really moving to become payments companies at the end of the day, a lot of people think of them going heavily into commerce, like through social shopping, web, shopping, that kind of stuff. But I really think that payments is kind of the secret thing that's happening here. Because if you think about what's what's really going on is that Apple has a massive payments business, Facebook has a small payments business in comparison, the crater economy has provided this incredible Canvas for them to go in and offer an embedded payment system. And you know, when you're, when you're staring down 100,000,000,200 $50 billion worth of money that's really, really big. And so part of why that's valuable, too, is, if you think of what's really critical, and it's in like a subscription economy, like the billing aggregator matters a lot. So that billing aggregator could be in the old days, it could be your cable company for a while, it was not fixed. But now I paid for, like, you know, six different Netflix equivalents. And I'm not going to go and probably pay for 30 different creators subscriptions only because like, mentally, when you're looking at your credit card, you're like, that's just a lot of lines on a credit card bill. So I think that what we're gonna see emerge is someone like Patreon as really a payments provider, as I've started to really think of one of their paths, as are they like, PayPal for credit economy, or Facebook or Apple? Right, which is their big argument and that kind of epic case going on as as a payments aggregator, because if you think about my analogy, the phone, like literally like the phone company, the telco was the payments aggregator for ringtones. They delivered the bill to you. And then in the second phase was the Apple App Store. Apple was the payments provider, right? It all came through iTunes. And I think there's always been a payments aggregator and a new form of payment, and we haven't seen it yet. So the question is, like, do we get 30 lines on our credit card statement before there's a clear winner. And when Twitter announced that you could pay another tipping or membership subscriptions using Patreon? I was like, Okay, there we go. Like this is the beginning of the payments battle.

Ken Yeung  26:43
So this Patreon, so two questions there is this Patreon, wind up being the at&t of the Creator economy? And then secondly, can you to kind of put us on this equal footing? I mean, we talk a lot about creators on the show. But there's also like pre, I guess, pre pandemic, there's a years ago, we were talking about influencers. Right? And, and, you know, those were the it's like, oh, I have like 15,000 followers, or I have 17,000 followers on Twitter, therefore, I'm an influencer, you know, is is there a difference? How do you define between the two can can a creator be an influencer? And can influencer be your Creator?

Niel Robertson  27:27
Sure. Let's leave that firebrand of a topic for the lot for the latter one, because I'll take the easy one first. So it's fun to play, armchair startup CEO, quarterback, especially with Patreon, I believe that Patreon has three fundamental ways that they can succeed, or what is ways that they can go forward and like build an even bigger, bigger value. One is becoming payments infrastructure for the greater economy, I think there's a lot of indication that says it's not going to be a significant part of their business. The second is, and this is part of their and not the last thing I was doing before, is where they really go heavy into becoming a discovery engine. And this ties back to something you're talking about verse about centralization versus decentralization, like around the mirror announcement, I think discovery is like this very hidden but extremely topic. Extremely important topic, because it really differentiates kind of like two types of companies, the Udemy discovery type of company where the teachable type of company, the Facebook, we're centralized, we're giving you discovery, or the decentralized version of that, but the cloud version of that or where the case may be. So that's the second thing. And then I think the the third thing is that, I believe that Patreon has enough revenue, that they could figure out how to become a next generation platform, which I'm calling like, subscription subsidized platform where they could be the next social platform where a lot of content is where there really is no ads, because they make enough money to fund all the things that a big company needs to do trust and safety and all that kind of crazy stuff that you've got 30,000 people you know, in a building dealing with. But the only challenge for Patreon, as I think the there's a kind of a complicated collection of type of formats, some is podcasting, some is videos, some is whatever. And platforms tend to need one format that they can excel at right short form video or something like that. So I probably stack rank the inevitable outcome of Patreon in the order that I listed them, right, where I think that like payments is probably the most likely thing that they just turn into a 10 or $20 billion business. They probably use discovery as a mechanism to just increase that business. And if there's any kind of like a content play there. It's it's probably relatively relatively light. But you know, jacket all very smart.

Gregarious Narain  29:52
Yeah, I I think you're right. By the way, I i've i've been pondering this idea, I guess just is, you know, I was running this by Ken the other day, but, you know, sort of are we in a post? Post is a strong word, let's say But are we like in a post ad? Like audience world? Right? So I think like, you know, I think like when I think about the the early generation, the current generation, maybe even right, like the creator economy, it's still largely driven by like, sort of advertising, basically, audience reach personas, right? Like, like targeting people, right? Like, that's why brand deals are so prevalent. So drives a lot of the revenue, right? It seems like what our aspiration is, is to move past that, right like to something that's community based, that's relationship driven, that is value driven, right, where small audiences can can, small sets of people can be very or as fruitful, if not more fruitful, and certainly meaningful enough to a creator, right for us to create, like many more entrepreneurs in this domain. And I don't think we're ever going to be in a world that's like post advertising. That's like nonsense, right? But it seems like the energy right to create tech, sort of techno like all the starts coming up, we're not really trying to invent more ways to do ads, we're trying to invent more ways to like, say, how do we make the community more valuable? How do we bring the value forward? So that you can focus on monetizing that part, which is why I think discovery comes in? Because the underlying trends here, of course, right is like sort of this platform independence, right? It's sort of like the solo businesses now as like to Ken's earlier, our article, right? It? Is that part of what like to your thought about Patreon? Like, do you think they would they would not be out there? They won't have advertising? Because they're not even thinking about it, right? Or is it? Like, because they imagine his new world, right? Or is it just like, they won't need it?

Niel Robertson  31:42
Well, I think there's probably a lot of data out there that would indicate that the consumer was interested in an advertising free content consumption platform. And so I just think it's like an opportunity where there's like a marriage of their content creators, their ethos, the time where they end the scale that they've achieved, where they might be able to find that, like, if you three of us said, Let's go build an ad free platform, be like, great, we need to have a few 100 million dollars because like, once, once the crazies show up, and you start having to have a 25,000% trust and safety team, like you get very expensive very fast. Right. But But I think like so, you know, um, can I didn't want to like skip over your question about influencer versus creator. Right. So Oh, he did? He did he did?

Ken Yeung  32:34
Well, we can get back to it, because I think that sets it up for because I don't think people know what Neil's doing. So that'd be great to know as well. But continue. Sorry.

Niel Robertson  32:42
It does. This is actually one of my favorite topics, because name is well, let me give you a little bit of context about who I am and what I do. And then I can answer the question that

Gregarious Narain  32:51
we always wanted that, you know, we just jump right into. Hey, do you want to introduce yourself for the audience? Yeah, yeah. It's like those movies where you'd have like, 20 minutes of movie and it's like, okay. So.

Niel Robertson  33:09
So, I am Neil Robertson, I'm the CEO and co founder of a company called influence.co. One of the things that my co founding partners and I saw happening is that people were going from being hobbyists in the influencer, crater world into thinking of it as a profession. And we also witnessed that, you know, along that professional journey, really, none of that was happening on top of it on top of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional network designed for previous generations way of doing work, how they meet, how their resumes, look, how they connect with people, how they find potential opportunities. And it became obvious to us that if you've got 50 million influencers and craters now, and that's when that was from 10, five years ago, and probably heading to a quarter of a billion another five years, they would all need all the same thing that people get on LinkedIn, but design for present for themselves. So influencer.co is the modern professional network for the creator economy. And really, we believe that the creator economy becomes just the economy at some point in time. And so we think we're building a modern professional network for

Niel Robertson  34:10
really hundreds of millions, or maybe a billion people. And people essentially do three things but form they learn from each other, because there's so much to know all the time. They meet people, because creator journey is a solo journey. And so you need to is person at work, and they do have, can make money in a few different ways. Some of that is through branded content. And we're also launching some direct monetization tools to our q&a product. That was a very long kind of setup to say that I've been living in a world where I've been working a lot with influencers directly. And also in a world where I've been working with craters. The difference. I think some of it is semantics. I generally think of influencers as those who think of their audiences the primary asset in a way that they can introduce them to products, introduce them to experience introduce them to things where there is an obvious brand partner. I don't think that influencers view that as a necessary evil. I think the influencers do that as part of the content, I think advertorial is embraced by the influencer and used very intelligently to build audience engagement and affinity. I think there is the flipside is a crater who probably comes at something from a deep interest in passion in a specific area of expertise. And they sort of like desperately want to be able to spend all their time and energy on that. And so they look for ways to package their knowledge, and directly monetize, hopefully increasing audience to essentially support their habit. If you tick the Venn diagram, and you overlap those two things, there be a lot of overlap there. You know, one of things that's fascinating, you sort of touched on this is like, brand dollars are the engine of the creative economy. Everybody loves to talk about crater economy companies and patreon doing this 100 billion dollars paid out whatever, it's tiny, compared to brand dollars. I mean, YouTube paid out what $32 billion, wherever they said in three years, that wasn't, that was an advertising dollars, that was revenue share. But even just straight brand deals, that's like 16 $20 billion a year. So I get a little bit. I think it's a little bit funny when people kind of like, sort of like turn their nose up at the term influencer, because that's where like, the real engine of the influencer economy is going and also when people are thinking about taking this journey into the following their passion. Most people don't have a large audience that they can monetize. And so they start with, kind of reach out to people that'll sort of sponsor them branded content deals. And so we're a huge fan of the continuum of influencer to creator, I think, if it really is an influencer view, creator to entrepreneur, right, like, and the difference really is that an entrepreneur has realized that they need other people to help them on their journey. Right? Like, you know, you don't like no one builds a successful business gets up on stage at the end of it and says it was his or her employees, I did it all myself, right. Like, that's just not the way that works. But there's many craters that have built incredible business that they pretty much did all themselves. We're seeing the development of teams in the middle. So hopefully, I'm kind of attacking that, like head on, you know, Ken, but I think the

Niel Robertson  37:20
I also think that like, creator businesses, constant businesses are like small and medium sized businesses. There's a lot of different forms of growth that you can go after you can do paid through AdWords, you can do SEO, you can do content, you can do all these different things. And they just don't work for all companies, they don't help all companies grow, there is a constant experimentation. And what I see happening is that the platform companies are saying, Okay, great. Like, there's probably five or six real ways that people make money, right revenue, affiliate direct monetization, tipping merge, let's make sure that we have every one of those things in our buffet. So as a crater comes along, hopefully, they can like take as much of that off our buffet and think it's really good. So they don't go get it somewhere else. But like, that's the like, standard stack of monetization. And you're seeing this come from companies like almost like, like makes that statement like teach people like that's what it is. And in that mix, is either rev share through crater funds, or read through traditional advertising or affiliate or brand sponsor deals. That's still the lion's share of stuff. tipping, like very few people are making an insane amount of money at the tipping most people are making off of subscriptions or digital goods sales like courses. Some people like Logan Paul make a tough merge.

Ken Yeung  38:40
So we had he was last week we had that conversate we the information had this chart that we Greg and I went over and it showed this like this Hi. is like the amount of brand deals who were creators make their money is like heavily that like people that was heavily skewed in favor of as opposed to where else would they get their income from? And it was like social tipping was like very, very, very, very small amount like but it's still traditional brand deals and those type of things are the way to go. Great. Do you want to start taking Do we have any questions from our audience before we continue on with with Neil

Gregarious Narain  39:20
I don't see any hands up I did shut down the Twitter space because it was annoying me. But be at this was this just if anyone's curious. This was the chart that Ken was mentioning. They can zoom in on it but yeah, it brand deals 77.3% and and and new I know I come in are in a slack that we're in together. There was a you know, some people were pushing back I push back on it right like, you know, I think like that we're talking largely to sort of Instagram folks in here, but I don't disagree. Like I absolutely think um, I had a long thread. I shared it out in the links if everyone's read it, but I agree like it's um, it's A set of activities not not a mindset, per se, right, like and so like, there are activities when you're being an influencer. And there it is when you're being a creator, right. And they have that shared common trait of you're both an entrepreneur like you leveraging sort of an audience or community that you developed or a set of skills that you've developed. Right. And yeah, you know, I think, I hate that the word is so maligned. Right, like, like, we've gotten to that point. Now. The reason though, right, and maybe you could speak to this a little bit, and maybe some best practices you could share from folks, where I think that a lot of this, um, the negativity came from, was the bad actors in the influencer side, right? So much like, you know, the reason a lot of creators, I think, prefer that term. And why these new this new toolkit seems valuable, is because it lets them to have the freedom of not having to say what someone else wants them to see. Right. And, you know, is whatever disclosures you give, etc, like, Oh, you know, people are, you know, skeptical or cynical, people will always be like, Oh, really, right, like, but if you say something bad, are they gonna send you anything good anymore, right, like, and I think that would that separation. And so we've seen too many people like faking things, etc. So have you seen or encountered or any advice for creators maybe? Just like, what are some of the things they shouldn't be doing to? their audiences want to hear about products they like, right, yeah, as a creator, too, right? So So how do you, you know, sway some of that.

Niel Robertson  41:28
So, um, there's, whenever there's a new channel of marketing, and digital marketing has been a fun industry to be in, because there's been so many new forms of digital marketing, whether it's like, banner ads on websites, or MySpace ads where the case may be, there's always like, three phases. The first phase is where like, teeth whitening, and like, you know, car insurance, and like all that stuff that super CPA driven, they'll take the bottom of the barrel like, remnant inventory, and they'll just make money out of it that comes in. And it's like very, I call it like, the Southern California versus Northern California entrepreneurial spirit. NorCal is like venture backed and southcoast. Historically, being like affiliate don't get too crazy. Is that like, are you sure you want to pick fights between So Cal in North Cal IV, I live in Southern California, I live in LA, and many of my friends are insanely good at this.

Niel Robertson  42:23
I work in workout. Grew up. I grew up near Carmel. So I am a normal kid. But, um,

Niel Robertson  42:30
so I'm a hybrid. But, um, but so then you get to that first phase. All right, then you kind of like, come out of that. And people start to get, like, nervous about it. And so you go, Oh, well, how many of these, you know, cpms on these ads are below the fold. Right. There's all this like scuttlebutt about, you know, if remember, Google's quality score came in and like, you know, there's all this fraud that could mean, display had like, so many fraud conversations, so many brands have conversations for years, and years and years, it's massively bigger than what's your stuff. And then like, the industry sort of, like figures itself out the business. Speaking of good actors, the publishers, which are creators in the space become good actors as a bunch of tools that kind of, like, become embedded in the infrastructure. And like, it just sort of goes away. And so having like, been around the block, I just doesn't sort of like bother me, like I just, you know, kind of sort itself out. It's very much like we've seen this movie already, like a multiple times. I've already actually seen that. I think that influencer kind of went through a little bit of a bad patch in the last two, three years, you know, and Scott does a cut and paste the instructions from the people and put them right into his caption, like what time he should pose like stupid stuff like that. And I actually think that influencers a little bit coming back around again, I'm seeing a lot of people that were a little bit negative in the word influencer, working it into their vernacular, the big platform companies, as much as they name things like Instagram, it's a crater account, when they talk, they say influencer and creator very consistently. So I think you're finding that there is this conclusion that the answer is no one can really define what both of them but there are two of them. Because I haven't seen any company, like say, we don't talk about influencers. That's bad stuff. So I think we're gonna come back to a little bit of parody because the flip side is, you know, I think creators a heavily overused word, right? developers are an English school teacher, which my sister is is a creator, right? It's like anybody that like literally writes everything down for a living as a crater. I'm like, I don't I don't think the crater. And I think the counterbalance of that is I think that influencer has come back a little bit, um, and it'll just sort of sort itself out over time.

Gregarious Narain  44:46
Yeah, no, no, I like that. Because I feel like it's kind of like when we were cloud. And yo Jason falls has his book influence right? And so he really makes a distinction between influence and influencer, right? And so you know, and I forgot I'm still early in the book. But you know, his idea is I called the influencers like the channel, but influences is the thing. Right? And and both of them can have that. Right. But you know, I think it's kind of like the car salesman thing. I think the that that sort of idea that you're always just talking something is maybe what people are trying to shy away from. But I think, to your point responsibly getting to a better place Now, before we close up, sort of before we go to after dark, we have to ask you about this. Oh, where is creator rising? Because I don't know, my whole Twitter has blown up about this. Yeah,

Ken Yeung  45:35
that was announced. This is just a few hours ago. So that's a nice little breaking news that we can cover here. Off Twitter presses.

Niel Robertson  45:44
I will say I will say one thing before I talk about that. There's a reason why we named the company influence.co. And because we fundamentally think that jet like I grew up, and what I was trying to do was like build character. But when I was working, I was making money for someone else. Now, I think this generation, when they like think of their first job, they look they're thinking of jobs where they can build influence, because that makes money for them. That's the really like reverse in sort of, like flow of the value system that's happening. And I think if you listen to any podcast word of the world, the word influence is consistent to the conversation. And we think it's a great name for a professional platform. But that's just me.

Gregarious Narain  46:24
I agree. Yeah, good call early on in that

Niel Robertson  46:27
yeah. So okay, crater rising, um, ironically, created rising, not equal to rising, but that's fine. Um, so I have had the pleasure of working with tons of people in the in the creditor economy and speaking to people like yourselves through great slack groups and discord groups, you know, etc. And one of the things that is part of my history is I, I come from a place where I spend a lot of time in community building, I lived in Boulder for 1998, until two years ago, kind of went through the renaissance of Boulder was very early on there had one of the sort of big tech successes that help it boulder on the map, when Brad Feld had moved there, and was building foundry group, Scott movies at the time, I also have done that in Melbourne, I've done that in Puerto Rico, I've done that in a lot of places around the world, and very passionate about seeing startup communities grow. And the crater economy started to feel a lot like a startup community. To me, it sort of needed all the same things that need to go to organization of the investor investors, the angel money need a good organization, the service providers, there is sort of like layers of kind of like mentorship from everything, like how you start a company to how you sell a company, it just seemed like good organization, and the pockets of that had been organized really, really well. There's great, you know, like we met through, you know, please, you know, side group, which has a ton of startup company entrepreneurs in it. And that's been a really great resource for me. But what I think a few of us that have been looking to create our economy realizes that there's sort of like parts of it, that are not that well organized yet, because the crater economy has these funny dynamics. If I'm building a b2b marketing company, like next generation CRM, it's me and my ideal customer profile like those the two dynamics, and then whatever the big competitors, but in this in the greater economy, it's not just me and the person trying to sell to you, it's me, and the big platform companies who are announcing competitor products, arguably, every single minute, it's me, and the craters, which is all different types of craters. It's me and the talent managers, it's me and a subset of the venture capital community that sort of understands the crater economy. And we just thought, there's a lot of ability to like organize that better, so that someone starting a company in the greater economy would be able to much more quickly figure out their orientation and make progress. In parallel with that, it's always great and encouraging and valuable to give people money. So three of us myself, Adam leray, has it next 10 ventures who's going to be one of the most important people in the crater economy from investing perspective or the next 10 years, and Christian gamble, who is involved in sort of next 10 and influence as well, we basically pulled together what we call the stimulus program, where we are giving people it's an application based program, and we're giving people $25,000 of pre seed money, it's bring your own terms. So if you just closed around, and you want to jump into that, great, if you don't have around yet, we'll give you an uncapped, safe note. Our mission here is to connect operators, money, and people that are in control of money, which is still one of the hardest things. And on top of that one of the things that challenging for craters is like it's pretty hard to find the first 100 craters to work with like, even if you're like hunting on Instagram or YouTube all day long, like it's a pretty hard thing to do. And we realize that influence co has, you know, we have almost 300,000 members now. So CO is a sponsor of it as well, where we give people access to our product to find creators that match their, their software products and then a community product to sort of Do build a customer community. So it's just kind of a collection of money, thought leaders and sort of like software that we hope takes six months of time and turns it into.

Ken Yeung  50:14
So So Neil, in terms of the so having covered a lot like venture capital out of investments in the past, like we treat it, like on a traditional business side of things, right, it's like, oh, influence your ratings. And lynda.com, your company is raising is looking for funding and you you announce, hey, we raised like, x million dollars from these these VCs. Okay, I'll write that up. How is that? Is there any difference? Say from Greg? Who has his who's a creator around the fitness space? Right? gaining money from this? Is there any similar as or are there any differences in terms of fundraising from that approach? Because I think people that might be watching this, like, if they're like, Hey, I'm my own person, I'm not part of this giant business. I need I need some sort of money. I you know, I don't I can't do there's no grants from like YouTube, or, or Snapchat or Facebook that I can join? Is there any similarities between how a traditional business raises money from a VC versus how, like, I would go to approach you guys approach your organization say, Hey, your, your, your collective? Can you help me out?

Niel Robertson  51:28
Yeah, so I mean, fundraising, for crater economy, companies and startups that are doing like AI or b2b marketing is basically the same. That said, there are some very subtle and important signaling dynamics that happened in the greater economy. So people talk about product market fit, and general businesses, and the crater economy, you need like crater product fit, which means that you really need to get in front of a bunch of different craters. And it's not that easy to get in front of big craters, right, they're very busy, they might have talent managers in front of them. So we break down some of those walls for people, because we have a bunch of craters that are involved in the collective, we're increasing the number of people. And then also, I think, it's tricky to go and figure out who is really got their antenna up about the crater economy, I think like, what we've seen is this evolution from, it's very similar to like many other evolutions of sectors where like, the early days, a lot of the brand name investors we're not putting money in. So you see a lot of family offices that were putting money in that was kind of like a lot of influencer marketing companies got funded that way, we're now in the phase that like, more and more traditional, like kind of name brand institutional investors are putting in, but like, we hear about a lot of stuff, but if you look at it as Andreessen ambassador, and you know, insight and index, right, like, at the end of the day, it's still a relatively small like group of people that are doing it, and you see a bunch of other funds. So there's some other great funds, like signal fire, companies like that, that are like starting to, like really look at it not as like, we'd love to have a crater economy investment, like one in our portfolio, but like, we want to make a series of investments in the sector. And it's like, it's very hard. As a start, you know, early stage startup founder to kind of know all that. Myself and the two other partners, Adam and Christian, we're very connected to like traditional venture capital. So we just kind of know that information, because we're talking to these people. And we can just say people a heck of a lot of time and energy, and like the asset that you have the least of his time. So while it's $25,000 from us, we really think that the value is like massively more than that. Because if we can just point you to one or two or three investors that are the right ones to hear your story, or we can get you connected to someone who is at Tick Tock running to tick tock crater marketplace, and you can get some insight into how they think about their business. And it helps you frame your story or frames how you can connect with creators. that's invaluable. That's what's your other alternative, like go on LinkedIn and send a whole bunch of like cold LinkedIn mails and get no response like, this is all community building. And that's really what we're trying to do.

Ken Yeung  54:02
Is there a difference? And I know when you're when amongst founders, right, and Greg has a often does a get unstuck room on clubhouse, you know, helping founders and entrepreneurs really figure out what's the next thing? There's that collaboration? Is that is there that same camaraderie within the creator space? The reason why I ask is I was on LinkedIn, this this weekend, and I saw a post from Daniel Roth LinkedIn executive, he's, he runs LinkedIn news over there. And he had this and he's all he's fixated on Well, not really fixated. He's, he's covering the the crater economy with his creator weekly newsletter. The point and so he his recent poll was about like, you know, is should there do creators collaborate, should they be collaborating? And it seems like if you're, you know, you and I are The same, you know, type of creative type of Avenue or space. Is that that is that something that often occurs in the creator space?

Niel Robertson  55:09
So, this is such a fun topic. So, I would say like 567 years ago by and large the answer was no. I think that many like youtubers were that kind of a big predominance ours were very cagey about what was working for them Same thing with like a lot of the bloggers and a little bit because that sort of came out of the sort of like Southern California like mentality and it's so competitive to find like you mine one good Vanna gold for some like source that you can then turn into affiliate that you just are very player cards very close to the chest. I've seen this sea change in the last five years in the crater economy we're craters now are almost desperate to collaborate. And I'll give influencers credit because influencers paved the way here influencers were really early on about like, let me shout you out, right. There's like shout out marketplaces you can go to, you know, people like look at like pair pop now on tik tok, and like, Wow, what a novel idea. I'm like, it's not that the novel idea, right, they just rebuilt it on Tick tock, which is much more oriented it like kind of like shout out collaboration, but it's been going on podcasts, how podcasts industry grew. And going on an Instagram, Instagram Live influencers really forced away for kind of a collaborative environment. And now what we see in influences, people that are aspiring creators, they're like, desperate to connect with other people that are going through the same journey for mental health reasons for tips and tricks for like, come like, come in, we'll walk around Central Park, and we'll shoot content together, I need you to hold my camera, right. I mean, Papa Razzi cannot be done without someone else there. So you can imagine like whole paparazi groups, which is like, please come take pics with me. But I think it's a really, I'm so glad you're brought up because I think it's a very subtle transition that has happened slowly and then fast. In the crater industry that changes a lot. company like companies like pear pop wouldn't exist at the mentality was like, why would I share my cloud with you? But like Now, that's a very standardized mechanism for growing your audience.

Gregarious Narain  57:14
can let me ask a follow up question, actually. Related clarification. Were you thinking about the creator side or at the creator tech side?

Ken Yeung  57:22
You're asking me or asking me

Gregarious Narain  57:24
I get I'm just curious. If not, I'm going to ask Neil about the other side? Well, no, I

Ken Yeung  57:30
think I think in general, it's I think it's all universe, I think it's a universal question. It's the creators of themselves. Are they prone to? Are they Is there a territorial issue at play within the creators themselves? now talking about from the creator tech, I think there's a lot more territorial issues at play, because they it's like they want a it's like a land grab, right? You know, we're putting out you know, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, they're throwing out a million, they're throwing up millions of dollars at creating funds to creating these new products and features and tools to entice people. And they're going to hold on for dear life. And this raises an interesting question, Neil, from your conversation at VidCon. Yesterday, even mentioned something about this, you're saying you it's almost like you're skeptical in a way and that's my word, skeptical about these platforms that are launching these tools to appeal to creators, but it's more basically about shoring up their defenses against competitors. It I hope, like I'm I'm quoting you, paraphrasing, you could you elaborate on that.

Niel Robertson  58:43
So, um, so if you've got a bunch of different platforms, there's like, let's say that that your Facebook, you've got Facebook video and your YouTube and your tik tok, and let you know, out in the world somewhere, there is some brilliant 16 year old that is making video content. And right now she's got 5000 followers, but that woman is going to be you know, a mega star, right? Like, you are desperate to make sure that they start building on your tool stack before they build on top of the other tool stack. They start contouring their content for your format, short form content on you know Tick Tock versus longer form content etc. And they're getting really like wed to your products and I've had conversations with the major platform companies where they have described it exactly as this they are. They are waging battles by buying like contracts like you know, Ninja goes to mixer or Will Smith did the thing where he went to Facebook and not to talk to him or was right. That's kind of like a tried and true sort of like talent battles like old school like movies, and I'm like, I'm like Hollywood Studios like buying top of each other. But really where the battle is being waged is in the person with 25,000 followers that might be 25 million in a month and a half of things go well. And so I do think there's like a hyper competitive thing going on here between the platforms. It's almost like someone like a scout looking in the foreign leagues, right and trying very desperately to find that like, amazing, like pitcher that no one's heard of before. That said, I think that the platforms are also pretty aware that like, very rarely does someone build only on one platform. And so another thing that I think is happening is that people are looking at essentially their funnel from like, just audience acquisition to like, where they can get like affiliate conversion to where they get membership communities, right, really, there's like a correlation between steps with the funnel and like monetization sections, and then figuring out what platform those work best on. And it's a lot of that is because of like feature complexity, right? So, you know, in Instagram, you can only have a swipe up when you have 10,000 followers, and you can't put live links, right, which is why people roll off the link tree. But like in other places, like on YouTube, we have a bunch of live links in your descriptions. And there's a whole bunch of like, stuff that goes into figuring out like, what platform is the best place for different parts of your funnel and how to cross promote. And so I think they know that they live in this world where like, it's not, there's it's not a winner take all world. But they played parts of the game as if it was at the heart of the game as if it was this very, like a gala. terian Let's all just like rise the Korean economy together by giving them tools, so they want the best of both worlds. They do and I think the long play is let's just increase the amount of what's going on in the crater economy. This goes all the way back to the top of the conversation to jack Conte is flywheel video, right. I think he's summarized what's going on in the crater economy so well. And you've got the platform companies almost backed into a corner, where just the like the game theory, math says they should play because they had basically had game theory math says we're not going to play for the last five years. I mean, when we looked at Instagrams API keys, I don't know, X number of years ago, literally in their API Terms of Service, they says may not be used by an influencer network. They didn't want people to use their API for influencer stuff. They were very against it, right? Snapchat was like, we don't like craters. craters are like businesses, we're gonna put them in the media side of our company. Now Snapchat is like bear hugging every creator they can find on the street and ask them to make spotlight content. I do not think the platform companies were like, being like we should we see where we're going to be in five years, let's navigate there, they have been backed pretty heavily into a corner, right. And they're sort of like putting on the happy face and being like, we're here. It's Christmas crater monetization tools. But I think it's more of a survival mechanism, frankly, than it is like that it is yet because things change, a deep seated ethos about what drives their business. At some point in time, I would say they probably had the same antithesis with mobile. Mobile was like an annoying thing where the experience was slow, and they hated delivering it. And then they woke up one day, like something didn't fit, everything's mobile. And all of a sudden, they become a mobile first company.

Gregarious Narain  1:03:06
By the way. Now, Neil, now you understand why I asked that question, actually, about the brand advertising side versus the sir. Because it really what it the real question there is ultimately, how is it impacting the platform's themselves? Right? Because like it to your point, that behavior is certainly happening, right? Like, now, you know, I've said this the past few episodes, I think it's all a shell game, all these creator funds is just like, you know, these these are building moats around themselves to say like, No, no, you don't need to go, right. Like you could stay here, right, like, and the terms will, will not be great. But friction is worse, right? So. So you know, sure, you could go try to hike it out on your own without YouTube, but then you don't have access to those ad dollars, right, or, you know, whatever it may be,

Niel Robertson  1:03:52
I would, I would love at some point in time to see a study where people tried to really calculate the friction of platform lock in for creators. And to get a really deep sense of that, right. And, you know, I'm sure this happens in like, lots of other industries, where there's just like, intense lock in I mean, I mean, Apple versus Android, right, Microsoft versus everything else. But I don't, I don't think we have a really like good like mathematical sense of it. Like the average trader, if they move from short form video on one platform to another, we'll lose 76% of their audience. I mean, I don't know what the number is, right. I made that. But like, there's some number there. And I bet you it's Stark.

Gregarious Narain  1:04:30
I'll give you a good analog. I was had a chat yesterday with some young guys building a tipping platform. And we were talking about the decentralized use case, and they were like, oh, but there's no fees. And I'm like, my ass, there's no fees, you know, what gas costs to take to actually take your money out of those platforms? Right? That's like 40% you know, I'll gladly pay for 4% just right, compared to 40%. Right after you take out all the hurdles, right. You know, like, I had this existential chat with my co founder. I'm like, so what do you think Twitter I mean, Twitch, it's ridiculous. It's 50%, obviously, right? So there's obviously room in there. But realistically speaking, right? those users aren't free either, right? Like they're subsidizing them. They're hosting them. They're scaling them out, right? Like they're recruiting them constantly. Now, I'm not justifying the 50% rate. But I guess what I'm, what I'm saying is, most people don't do the math on what they're actually what the costs are actually to hold that customer where they are either, right?

Niel Robertson  1:05:27
Like I, we didn't talk about the decentralization thing. But I think that there's obviously this huge, sort of like crypto driven, kind of like mirror XYZ driven discussion about moving to decentralized social platforms. But I have always said one thing, people exchange utility for privacy, and people will exchange utility for distribution. And I think that people vastly underestimate the power the platform's have, over people, when they can get them into the algorithm, get them out of the for you page, whatever. And like, you're readily pay that 50% to twitch because you can go on Twitch and become a star, like, I can't go on bit cloud and become a star like not yet, right? I mean, I can't do it, like, you know, go on mirror and have 10s of millions of people look at my stuff, because the algorithms in front of them. It's why Coinbase is the most valuable, valuable company

Gregarious Narain  1:06:27
on an ad though, so they're not aware of like what an ongoing marketing cause actually looks like, and what it would eat into and how it would perform. And all the work required to keep generating new and interesting advertising that would actually keep drawing new customers in. But we've got some folks in the audience, I just wanted to create an opportunity for us to you know, of course, you know, go after dark now. This is what this What does this mean, by the way, all right, we're doing we have a little part of our show, it's the last half hour or so, it's called creative after dark. And the goal really is ultimately to bring the audience into the show. So if you're out there, I see some of you in clubhouse, I see some of you watching on the live streams. We don't just want comments, we want to hear your voice, we want to give you a chance to ask and talk to ask questions and talk to Neil directly. You know, we don't think we have the best questions, we know you likely have way better one. So feel free to raise your hand, we'll bring you up, you can ask a question. If you're shy. Feel free to take your time and think about it even though you've heard us chatting for a while. But yeah, you know, so I do think that this is some of the challenges I do have in the rush to decentralization is because I feel like, you know, like, there's so many parts that you have to be very careful with, you know, in that transition, and and if we thought like, even like going from free to like barely charging. Imagine the friction we're introducing when we're like, oh, no, don't just charge, like you have to go get a wallet, you have to like do KYC right? Oh, and then you can never get your money out. Right? Like those. Those are really, really high bars, like lay on your on your customer.

Niel Robertson  1:07:57
Yeah. And like, you know, if you go, I mean, side note, I'm a co founder of a blockchain company. So

Gregarious Narain  1:08:02
I'm not anti blockchain. Oh, just, you know,

Niel Robertson  1:08:05
I'm not either, right. I'm hugely long on it. But the state of the world is now right. Like, if you want to send someone $1 you know, USD in Ethereum, it's gonna cost you $7, to move that. Right. So it's just not practical, right? There's other there's other like, you know, technologies coming along to try to like reduce that. But there's a huge amount of like, for like, like, whatever rent seeking cost accidentally, if you will, right. And in blockchain right now. So I think people there's actually a really the decoder podcast actually had an interview with the head of chief legal counsel for Spotify the other day talking about like Apple's 30%, and all the different like, dimensions of it. It was a really, really fascinating, like, and like, like, honest dive into like a lot of these complex issues around like, trust and safety, and what are the real alternatives? And like, you know, what value does Apple really provide? Like, but

Ken Yeung  1:09:01
realistically, Spotify and Apple, they're not exactly on the best terms period?

Gregarious Narain  1:09:07
No, no, no, like he wrote their his his op ed or whatever. One of the problems with letting people up on stage. Sorry. But yeah, I think there's a hit. There's some hidden costs here that that I think, like, if we're going to have a true comparison that we should talk about, right. Like, I don't think I think it's inevitable that we end up where we've been talking about the timeline, however, is not tomorrow, right? Like, yes, it's yours. Right? Most likely, and the big, big folks, they can drive people to action, you know, in different ways than that then the emergent economy, I think, right?

Niel Robertson  1:09:49
Well, and so I talked about this concept very briefly, when I called the subscriber subsidize platform. And loosely it's imagine you have a platform where like some of the creators have have relationships with their audience on Patreon. And core companies making money from that the core content, any company can take that to essentially provide the rest of the infrastructure for creators that are not making money from their audience. And then you have kind of this hybrid of a paid service and a free service. Like Think of it like purely in the video context, I think it takes gonna take something like that to emerge and evolve and have enough money moving behind it, that they can sort of like change the core ethos of the company to having something that's not engagement oriented. And then we get into like a whole different discussion about decentralization and algorithms and things like that. But it's gonna take a long time, because you need someone to come from scratch and get to a certain amount of revenue, where they could think about that kind of approach for sure. So tea shop,

Gregarious Narain  1:10:47
I see Satish up on stage. Did you have a question for Neil or for us about anything we talked about

Satish Ganesh  1:10:53
today? Yes, yes. So it's a very interesting topics, what you guys are discussing, and Yak can really a big fan of Flipboard have been, I think, using it ever since it was launched. I think the team at Flipboard is doing a great job. That one question about Flipboard. Specifically, do you manually curate the topics that comes up? Or do you use some sort of machine learning algorithm to pick trends to show relevant topics? So how is how do you separate? A noise and fact checking content into your platform?

Ken Yeung  1:11:35
That's a great question and a question I get, we get asked a lot. So we are we use, we have a recommendation engine, we use an algorithm that large and for most people that this is what they get, you know, when this is your feed, this is when you join when you onboard onto Flipboard, you choose whatever you're passionate about. And it could be you know, as granular as the creator content, as as a topic or something as broad as virtual reality or technology, science, whatever, right. And those the content that you will that you'll largely that largely surfaces in your feed in your main feed is algorithmically recommended, right? And then you can control we have control, so you can fine tune it. So it's like, oh, I don't want to see from this particular source, or I don't want to see this from, you know, this particular article anymore. You can also, you know, you also pull what other people pull articles that may be relevant to you based off of the people that you follow on Flipboard. My role, specifically as the technology editor is that is on the edge, editorial side. So we we we blend both we have editorial and we have human side. And so it's kind of like it gives you that balance, right? Because we we all know that AI can't necessarily give you the best news that's relevant to you. And humans also can't do it as well. So we offer that blend. And, you know, I think, you know, it was a Neil, you had mentioned a way back in a day, way back earlier in this conversation where like, it just doesn't scale where you have, like, you know, 1000s of people to to moderate something or to do to do content, right. And that's kind of what we have at Flipboard there's no way that we can have editors for the 1000s of topics that we may have on Flipboard. So my we pick the we have editors that are around specific areas such as lifestyle, entertainment, culture, General news and politics. I'm with technology and in science, but also branched off into covering other ish other major issues such as the coronavirus pandemic. So that so it's it's a it's a blend of both of which is of capabilities that that Flipboard has.

Satish Ganesh  1:13:57
So do you in some way, compensate the publishers? Or is there a model where, let's say there is New York Times or there is an independent publication, which is a city? I think

Gregarious Narain  1:14:11
I'm going to try to keep this focused on the creator space. But feel free to connect with Canada, I think if you want to chat about Flipboard, specifically.

Satish Ganesh  1:14:21
Okay. So even with the Korea created economy, I had another question. Sure. So in terms of the entire defy platform, so I've been I've, I've been personally involved in the crypto space for almost a decade now. I mean, every eight years, we've been accepting crypto as payments in our graph. So I personally run a b2b SaaS company, we 10 year old. And so in one of our product, we've been processing it for almost eight years. So we've been having some exposure on that vertical. So you mentioned about the gas phase that's close to 40 to 50% days, right? So do you see this free Going down, because I personally think for any sort of decentralization to be applied at a consumer level, it should work seamlessly, like how you are using PayPal. So for example, I should be able to deposit withdraw all of that happens seamlessly with and pre determined or at least realistic piece. So So how do you see that happening?

Gregarious Narain  1:15:33
Yeah, no. So it's interesting I am, by the way, I do agree with you, I think the overall general user experience sort of, of defy, like, broadly needs to improve. My guess, honestly, is that side chains will be one part of the solution, we see. And I'd be curious to hear some of Neil's thoughts on the, in this social tokens and sort of creator coins sort of arena as well. But I think like some of these other currencies, so it's interesting, for example, like with social coins, or social tokens, I accrue example, I have the AMA coin on rally. And in a lot of ways, we're designing or advocating the use of these coins, as a way to hold your or hold is an expression of value in the community itself, as opposed to be using fundamentally as currency, right? So. So for example, I prefer to think about like social tokens as gate as a as a tool for gaining more so than as an actual currency that you exchange, right. And so a lot of one of the advisors said, that we often hear here is don't use it in place of currency. Right? Like, like, don't use, um, you know, eath, when you want dollars, right, because of like any of these other factors, especially that with social tokens. So we say, for example, that however, you know, much like Twitch, say, you have to have certain number of channel points to be able to, like, unlock a certain behavior that feels like another good use case of sort of, have some of this, these tokens in the universe right now, I think On the flip side, right? If we don't improve it, so you know, I think you're gonna end up with micro currencies or side currencies, I changed, right, like, as probably the only way to sort of get to normalizing some of this behavior, right, and then building some more predictability into it. Because I think like, for example, if you want to pay your rent, you can't pay your rent today, right with eath. Right? Like you can't, you know, it cetera. And so like, I think, like, there's still a lot of these fundamental challenges, maybe because the currency isn't widely spent, right, that these fees, you know, are there. But also, I think, as we change the models, like proof of stake, and some of these other things that are evolving, right to make it easier to some of these things will have some impact. But Neil, I'd love to hear what you think are just in terms of like, is the broader UX and sort of like leverage here.

Niel Robertson  1:17:47
One of the things that I really like about crater coins is they do provide a cross platform mechanism to in the same way that like link tree provides a cross platform recommends that there's high utility, it's gonna take some while for people to kind of like develop, like, Don't make them portable. But you know, I would love for example, if, inside of an influence that co community, like we have a product, it's sort of like slack or discord, if I could actually tip, a crater that was in the community, using one of their coins, could then go over to their site, which might be their own website built on Squarespace. And I could actually buy a piece of merch using a coin, or I could go and I could grab some, grab some coins, if I was a long term believer in their kind of growth in the greater economy. I think like that, that sort of over the over the top ness of it is really, really interesting. The challenge there is of course, finding this hybridized view of a crater coin as investment in the long term potential on a bet on someone versus in terms of like, General utility of currency. I mean, this is the sort of like natural problem of crypto right now. But I think that like perhaps, many craters can skew more of it to kind of it's almost like airline points or Amex points, right? Like I mean, I earn Amex points and I basically don't buy off anything on Amazon Amazon that I can't buy an Amex points I paid for Ubers and then I Amex points for a long time like there was a huge amount of like over the top efficiency that Amex crazy and crazy incredible lock into me so I might create locking to me with a crater if all of a sudden I've got a lot of utility and other places because I'm sure part of that craters ecosystem as you will that's what's most fascinating to me about it less so I'm going on big clouds and I'm buying $50 a view that might be $500 in 10 years right like Yeah,

Ken Yeung  1:19:41
do you see Do you see on on your platform my influence influence Ico? Like as we're talking about the creator coins Do you see a lot of your your members your users do like not only do they have their own creator coins, is that a comment? discussion, you know, like, how prominent is it on on influence CO in general?

Niel Robertson  1:20:08
So I would say that like caveat that influences probably focused on kind of like torso, mid torso, craters, right 25,000 to 200,000, sort of we have both above or below that. So it's less of a relevant conversation there. I mean, I think craters in that world are, I think you need to be on either end of it, right? You either have nothing and so you're trying to figure out like, Is this my way to create something massive? Or you have a lot? You know, you're a big YouTuber, and you're trying to figure out, like, what is how do I implement crypto, NF, T's, whatever, into my kind of overall audience, you know, monetization or engagement strategy. So I think it kind of like just sails right over the head of that group of people. But you know, I mean, my sense of it is that it's that both NF T's and also like creator coins is a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the market. Not that it won't get bigger, but that like, just like Coinbase provided essentially, like, kind of a utility layer that extracted all the complexity, you know, if I could drop it in bed, and you know, on my blog, or in influences, you know, crater community, or my link tree, and all of a sudden, now I've got, I can accept payments, and it's just like a form of payment provider, I can do it on my Shopify, like maybe that layer of like, kind of, like composable utility for I think, if we get broad appeal, and then the problem with that is, you then kind of reduced it to like a payment system. And then the options like, well, do I do that or PayPal? Right. And so like, that's, it's, it's a tricky, it's a tricky landscape. For for that, I think, to have like very large breakout success right now.

Gregarious Narain  1:21:50
Short term. Great. Do we have any other questions from the audience? No, that's it for now. And you know, we're getting close to time as well. Thank you. So Tisha, we appreciate your question. It was good to meet you. Thank you, guys. Thanks for being with us. And, Neil, any any last things you wanted to sort of chat about before we, you know, pre wrap up for the day? last things to chat about. I know you had a new body of work out on creator funds recently.

Niel Robertson  1:22:23
Yeah, I mean, we continue to produce Oh, well, let me tell you about something coming out. I think it'll be Tuesday of next week. So a year ago, we created something called the creator escape, we actually worked with the guy, the manager cafe who built the first one in 2019, we updated it for 2020. There's like 270 companies on it, it's just basically a market map. Other people have put up market maps only recently, just private gray market map, use some of our data, and zone two, we're gonna put out the 2021 version of the crater scape, and it has something like 483 companies on it. So it's almost doubled from last year. And we publish the whole data set along with that. So hopefully, people will find that a high utility piece, we've had to create a,

Gregarious Narain  1:23:08
b, by the way, for folks,

Niel Robertson  1:23:11
we'll put it out on my Twitter, which is Neil arwen. also put out on influenced CO, hopefully, it will be so widely distributed, you won't have a hard time finding it, you will

Gregarious Narain  1:23:21
hear it as well. So make sure you find

Niel Robertson  1:23:24
that that's gonna be a big, big body of work, we're putting a lot of effort into it. And it's just, it's amazing that the number of companies has doubled in the last 12 months, I am scared already of the 2022 version, because I'm going to need a much bigger piece of paper to put on the wall.

Gregarious Narain  1:23:41
Now, let me ask you a question. You know, in the doubling there, we were talking about previously sort of like, how creators being sort of applied sort of broadly to like, every end user, are you seeing like the misappropriation I guess, like, at the at the tool level, right. And so I guess more like how, like, you know, like, my guess is there are probably 1000 people who would say that they're creative tech, right?

Niel Robertson  1:24:07
Yeah, if you want to piss off a bunch of people come up with a taxonomy. And so, it's like, yeah, and so um, you know, when we put out ours, last year, there was a bunch of people that were kind of a little bit nitpicky, about where they fit. Ali. Forsyth just put out one and there was like a bit of like, kind of awesome. Bing. So I think like what I've seen is that a couple things, there's there's so many companies now that we've actually had to increase the number of categories so we added a newsletters category, we added a crypto category. I'm debating adding a courses category because like Ed, like crater edutech, is there's so much depth to it. So we've increased a kind of like the the depth of the taxonomy, the other challenges the opposite challenge, which is there's all these platforms now that have Become multi category companies. So you've got, you know, gumroad is memberships plus digital goods, you know, you've got things that are like think mighty is event plus Courses Plus community kajabi is, you know everything. And so like, where do you stick one of those companies and last year we kind of like had this little escape hatch recreated First off, we're like, well, we're gonna put you in the tech in the category that you're best known for. Right? And because she was so young, like Patreon was known for memberships and gumroad was known for digital goods, and it was a little bit defensible. It's hard now where the there's like, clearly, there's this power dynamic emerging where you've got like, Facebook at all creating crater products to create like the standard canon, then you've got like, individual companies that are focused on like one sort of like, beachhead, that they can kind of bowling pin that they can go after to try to expand, but then you have these companies have been successful, like Patreon and mighty and companies like that, that are like raising tons of money and trying to become category aggregators. And there's like, different views on what the category aggregation is, like, is it around educational courses like kajabi? Or is it around, you know, buying things from creators like memberships and tipping and whatever, which is more like gumroad. And I think like, that's where a lot of the interesting action is going to be for the rest of this year is to see like, who turns into the six or seven or eight companies that are like we're bleeding. Thank you very much. We're bleeding across the category lines and we're becoming a consolidator platform. And we're making a pitch to the crater that we're not Facebook. Right try to offer you every single crater product, but we're mighty networks or link tree or whatever. And we want to get as much of your you know, your crater monetization flowing through our platform. Yeah, so we had all these categories last time 270 companies and it was a pretty like, I didn't really miss many companies like it was actually a sort of like a deterministic problem back then I'm guaranteed that I'm going to miss a bunch of companies because by the time I go to production, and I put it on Twitter, three new companies will have been funded.

Ken Yeung  1:27:05
I think that's the same thing with like, the loom escapes, right? When you look when they cover different areas like your you will always miss

Gregarious Narain  1:27:12
some I don't think it was gonna take as much heat though. Because we live outside the space.

Ken Yeung  1:27:18
No, no, but but it's like, it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't like loom escape across, whatever, whatever they they do, right

Gregarious Narain  1:27:23
the booking like Scott Brinker thing, which, like 17,000 companies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's gonna look like my submission. I haven't I'm pretty sure azelis probably isn't even there yet. Right. dead center. Yeah, but you know, it's interesting. New, I guess the broader question, right. Like, the problem that you're trying to reconcile is a question that I hear from venture capitalists, for example, when we try to fundraise, etc, is isn't there just going to be massive consolidation? Right, like, so like, Where's your mind on that? Right, like?

Niel Robertson  1:27:56
Well, so, yeah, we're actually out raising our kind of next big round, because we're influences doing incredible right now. And one of the topics that comes up is some venture firms. And I would say, like, these are the firms that are less like, our thesis is around the crater economy becoming the economy more around like, wow, this is a category we want to play in, they want to pick the winner. And it's like, there's consolidation, but it's like, there's 27 things, and four of them at a time are getting consolidated. So I don't think that there's a winner. Like, I don't think everybody's gonna say, Well, kajabi is the crater accounting company, like, I'm a crater, I'm on kajabi, like, I just, they're gonna do really great energy tech. And I don't think mighty is going to become the reference platform for every creator in the world, or, or Pico or whatever, these are all great companies. But I don't know if it's gonna be, like 40 of them, or three of them. And it's funny, we had this great conversation on clubhouse with about Lincoln bio tools, which has like, it's like a microcosm, because it's like 70,000 Lincoln bio tools. And the question is, like, in two years, will there be 500 of them? or will there be three of them? And so like you had it's turtles all the way down? Right? Like, you gotta have this. It's just

Gregarious Narain  1:29:14
funny, you know, like, I mean, you're the accelerator program that you've been running internally, like the beta program and influence go. And I remember that day when we all met each other. It was like 10 companies, but always had a Lincoln bio, like at least a capability. If not, that was like the primary thing that we did,

Niel Robertson  1:29:30
right? Yeah. Right. And so you've got all these interesting like, sort of like stopping orthogonal questions, right. Like, do some categories get become features, right? Like does clubhouse become a feature? Does Lincoln bio become a feature right? And I think linktree would have to really, like change its game for that to be true. It's so like, the minute I think that like we're a little bit hitting like peak crater economy startup where there's just like so many companies, they're doing similar things. There's like so much fun. pollination, there's this like new wave of dynamic that emerges where like, mighty raises $50 million, and LinkedIn raises $45 million. And all of a sudden, the possibilities for what those companies could be in a year are very, very different. And we are definitely in the second inning of the game.

Gregarious Narain  1:30:19
Yeah, I find it very interesting. And you and I chat a lot about just trying to, like lay out the ecosystem. I actually I jokingly told Ken, that there's an arms race to be the first one to be the best cartographer for the space also, right? Like, we see so many competing models, we got Hugo's model, Ali's model, your model I've been, I've been working on one Luma has got like, like some parts that touch it. You know, my last take is my belief is that there will be many, and they will likely be verticalized. Right? Like, like, you'll have a leader in a domain, right? Because like your point, the hub is the creator or type of creator. And then the spoke is all these types of tools that service them. And then you even have these specializations where I only use this wedge, because like I don't do, I don't have a book in me, right? Or I don't have a course in me like, but I do consulting, and I do newsletter and I do this. And so the other parts are irrelevant. I don't want to pay for them. I don't want the complexity of them. Right, etc, etc. Right?

Niel Robertson  1:31:25
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think like, if you are like a creator, he's mostly focused on creating educational courses. That's a very specific type of creator versus I'm like a fashion and beauty influencer, who's doing a lot of product stuff, right? I mean, it's just like, those are two very, like different customers. I will say, though, that like, there are a few companies. And this is a very self serving description, there are a few companies that are horizontal, that it doesn't matter what you are, they're useful. And that's why LinkedIn bio tools are so prevalent. And professional network is also a horizontal tool, because we can create sub communities on top of our platform, just like LinkedIn does for lawyers versus digital marketers with their kind of groups products. And so you know, that's our kind of like, strategic thesis is like, just like, don't have to get sucked into that game just become a horizontal play. But you have to have a business that like naturally is horizontal. And a professional network is one of the few things I think in the industry. That is there are some others as well. Payments company would end up being naturally horizontal to hence why I think that that's a powerful move,

Gregarious Narain  1:32:30
I think. Was Ellis. shopping, live streaming like shopping CRM, I think is probably another semi horizontal one. Right. But yeah, there's certainly horizontals without a doubt, yeah. But, you know, it becomes kind of Salesforce II, right. Like, like, we're there's still a massive ecosystem, a billion dollar businesses on top of Salesforce, right, even though there's a substrate there, right. Yeah. So I do think that's the opportunity for sure, in the long term, but we want to say thank you, Neil. It's been, it's been awesome. Like, you know, we probably could use like a dozen more hours. And feel free to come by anytime we are here. We'd love to have you, you know, join us at any moment to chat on these topics. Yeah, it's always fun. And I'll see you in the slack soon. I'm sure. Thank you guys. There's a fun chat. And I love the format. Thank you. ppreciate. it. Cool. All right. Have a great one. So before we go, let's just get by in case you didn't know. We are here every Wednesday at 3pm. Mountain Time. 2pm Pacific. And coming up we've got the next few weeks scheduled out already next week. We got Matt develop from FameBit coming in there we've got Alex from get vocal Fernando from superfans, and Mike Donahue from subtext. But what we are looking for are more host more guests to join us. So if you are a founder, if you're a creator, if you're an investor out there who works in the space, we have do over a head over to our website, there's a link at the top to to be on the show. We'd love to have some of you be our guests. We are definitely trying to represent more and more of the Creator community in the ecosystem. So by all means, put your name in the in the hat and we would love to see. And with that, Ken I think that's all we got for today. Any closing thoughts?

Ken Yeung  1:34:16
Look, I think it's this is great show. I Neil just just again, blew it out of the water. I mean, I think I think it was really great to get that solid definition of an influencer versus creator. Like I think those things often get tossed around. You know, am I an influencer? Am I a creator? Am I an influencer or a creator? Like, can I be both? Am I just having just some psychological issues? Like I mean, that's that's normal. I I'm sure I do. But you know, specifically in this case, like what what am I right? So it's great that he clarified it. I'm very keen to know, to see where he takes influence to the next level, especially to help influencers and creators and builders really collaborating and come up with this new new thing, because we've been talking before like this, this Creator Academy can be this wild wild west of madness, right? It's like all these different tools like, Hey, I'm just gonna, like start just thing this another Lincoln bio thing where I'm going to do this social tipping or blah, blah blah and everything like that. But I think if the you have that collaboration, you have a better understanding of what creators really want and influence influencers really want and how they relate to brands, and hopefully that'll help to not necessarily bring order but like to kind of bring establish some clarity in this industry, so that we know, okay, who's got like, how is somebody gonna take the effort to build this Salesforce type of thing? for creators? Are they going to build something to establish something for, like, you know, this some sort of standard for social tipping or, or how to work, you know, this inter platform mechanism for for whatever features, right, it's like to really get to the root of what creators really want, as opposed to kind of really get guessing it from from an anecdotal standpoint. Right. So and, and the hit the fact that he the creator rising? I mean, could it be the could that be like the Y Combinator for for the greater economy? I mean, or more like, like an angel, hopefully,

Gregarious Narain  1:36:27
it's gonna be better?

Ken Yeung  1:36:30
No, absolutely true. I think there's a lot of potential, many people that we have a guest on this show, are on that group. So it's like, we know, this is going to be an outstanding thing. So definitely.

Gregarious Narain  1:36:44
My key takeaway, though, I think, was just that, yeah, number one, queer, queer, rising, great idea. And I do think it has an opportunity to much improve the process, right. And I think what I really appreciate is just Neil pointing out the nuance, right? Because it's very different. And sort of the means of access into the space is very difficult. And someone who's been in space for a long time, I can tell you how hard that is. But the thing, the last thing I'll take away, or just wrap to closes, the things that we knew was pointing out before. And then crater escape itself, I think is really important for as a creator, if you're paying attention, right? Because the smaller opportunities are really important if you're smart. But if you're wise, you're investing in the horizontal ones, right? Like you're building the foundation for you to have a lasting business that, that that's sustainable over time, right? You're building professional networking, influence that goes a great product, if you haven't tried it already, or not registered. So obviously go do that. But you know, you need CRM, you need all of these other things that make you a business in the long term, right creators, like the number one way that you will undo yourself is by not taking seriously the fact that you're also becoming an entrepreneur, right? Work on your craft get good at that. First, don't worry about the business stuff. First, get the other part, right. But once you do, start to think about these things, right? It's so much easier if you start with them from the beginning. And that's what I hope, ultimately, we get from building tools. And creating this ecosystem is ways that you have to think less about doing the business parts, but still be good at it. Right. So let's hope that that's what ultimately like crater rising. Like ultimately, that's out right is a way for creators to be successful, without having to sell their soul into the business world. And that's what I hope I can help with. And I hope all of us are here watching the show and participating in the process. So with that, thank you, everybody. Ken, great to see you again, my friend. Likewise, looking forward to next week and you lights on, by the way today. Ah, I know. I know. It's always one thing, right. All right. We'll see you next week everybody. Bye bye. Set