during the web camp twenty twenty six. After years of being in the startup world, flash forward a little bit more, I realized that, like, oh, no. It's broken too. It's broken in different ways, but ways that rhyme. If you actually want to invest in a startup, you have to be an accredited investor, which which means that only rich folks can, like, put money into startups. That's pretty fucked up. I think of running my company as my work of art now. Like, I think of myself not as a CEO, but as an artist, and it is like a durational performance art. Sure. I'm coming down from the mountain top. I'm Moses. I have the tablets. I'm, you know, I'm the auteur. I'm the visionary. I know what this product needs to be. We just have to build it. And that's totally the wrong way to build something. Like, why are we spending only 6% of global GDP on the engine of prosperity? Like, all wealth, all the good shit we care about comes from art, science, and technology. We are dramatically underallocating.

this idea of how to reinvent funding for art, science, technology for a really long time. And, it came from my personal intimate relationship with the struggles of being a creative human. My mom is a jazz singer. My dad, plays classical tar and is a is a novelist. And, my grandfather was a violinist. My grandmother was, in the movies. My great grandfather was a vaudevillian acrobat. My uncle was a amazing filmmaker in the seventies. He made two great movies, that inspired Robert Redford to start Sundance. And, so I I grew up surrounded by people who had, these wild ideas in their head and would struggle, these herculean efforts to, to get these ideas out of their head and into the world and made. And it it would always take money. It was so difficult to fund the work. And, it wasn't just my family too. It was, like, everybody in our community who are also creative people. They just struggled with money. And you either would have to go, you know, work a straight job or you'd have to teach guitar lessons or, you know, maybe you could get, like, a university gig, but you're always doing something else to get the money to go do the thing that you really loved. And I just accepted that as the state of the world. I then got hooked by, the filmmaking bug. I was eight and, became obsessed with, animation. And I would stay in my bedroom until late at night, making, you know, claymation animations with a stop motion, like, Super eight camera. And, that... Painstaking process. Painstaking is super, super tedious, but I love the whole thing. And I loved, I loved that if I put, you know, gobs of effort into it, that you get something magical on the other end. And, and it really is this addictive dopamine rush of creating something. You, you know, you you toil over it and then you put it out in the world. And when I was eight, it was my parents or my grandparents that would see it and you get this reaction. And, and so I I, you know, I went to school for film, when I graduated, college. My first sort of professional thing was, a couple of my friends were in a sketch comedy troupe, and I said, we need to produce a TV pilot. I financed it on a credit card for $10,000. Some other friends and I managed to sell it to MTV, and, they paid us to, basically remake the pilot. They didn't pick it up for a season, but, it was sort of the the first taste of, okay, I'm out of college. It's no longer about just the craft. It's now about the business. I have to figure out how am I going to raise money. And film, like a lot of other creative disciplines, is really expensive. Right? And, even if you're not in a creatively expensive discipline, like if you're a writer, it doesn't cost much to write a book, costs time, but, it does cost a lot of money to get it out and to be seen. Right? So whatever your medium is, you are faced with the the reality that you're going to have to deal with money at some point if you're going to make the thing. And then once the thing is finished, have the thing have a life out in the world and be seen and experienced by people. And so, so so that began this, this brutal, like, training of, of figuring out how does the film industry work? How do you pitch to studios? How do you get a a streaming service to pick up your show? How do you, convince an investor to put money into your thing? And none of my friends had the stomach for it. And for whatever reason, I did. I I was able to pick projects, either my own or my friends, that I had a fire in my belly that was so intense that I would suffer through the pain of going through the... This fundraising process. And, again, I sort of just accepted that as, okay. I guess this is just how the game is played. This is just what you have to do. Related to the story about me doing the MTV pilot, they didn't pick it up, but an Internet startup did pick it up. This was 2007, 2006 when YouTube was sort of a thing. There's an Internet... I mean, it was just becoming a thing. It's obviously a big thing now, but it wasn't the thing it is now. And there was a number of other startups that were well capitalized that were trying to do video online. And one of them was called On Networks, and their bet was we're gonna give micro budgets to people, to make things that look like they could be on TV, but they'll cost like a fraction, because digital cameras and equipment are making it much cheaper. You know, ultimately, it was the wrong bet. Like, user generated content was the right bet. Mhmm. But that allowed me to continue making the sketch comedy show for a couple years. But really what it did is it introduced me to startups. And I realized that, oh my god, there's this whole other universe of funding. And the creative process felt very similar to me. It's like you, you have a crazy idea just like you do with a film. You, you then have to assemble a team of talented people to make it with you. But unlike the film industry, which felt like an industry in decline, it felt like an industry that you, that all the money connections and all the, all the, the process of raising capital was really, really hidden. Like, they they didn't want to make it legible because, there's just such a supply demand imbalance there where there's so many people that wanna go make movies. They almost purposely make it, like, illegible. So only the people that have, like, sort of gotten in and have the right connections, can actually raise capital. Very different from the startup world in in some ways, at least on the surface. There's all these resources where investors seem to want to take pitches from you. You know, you could understand who the venture capitalists were. And, there's all this literature and things like accelerators that you could go through that would sort of prime you. Very, very different from, from the world of, of, you know, sort of film and art and entertainment. And, and so that's first actually started to get my brain working like, oh, there's other ways to raise money. It's not... Doesn't have to necessarily be this way. Look, these these startup people, they're raising money in a way that feels much more logical, much more, fair, much more, open. Of course, after years of being in the startup world, flash forward a little bit more, I realized that, like, oh, no. It's broken too. It's broken in different ways, but ways that rhyme. And we, you know, we could talk about some of those, but, things like it's, you know, it's highly exclusionary. Like, if you actually want to invest in a startup, you have to be an accredited investor, which which means that only rich folks can, like, put money into startups. That's pretty fucked up. You know, a lot of the the openness that I thought was there isn't really there. You really have to have a warm introduction from the right people. You have to mix in the right social circles. It's, you know, it's closed and gate kept in, in a way that's actually pretty similar to the to the entertainment industry. But it did get my mind thinking. Like, just realizing there was other models to do it with, made me think, like, well, if there's other models, you could make new models. Like, this is the thing that you can do. And, ever since that little bit got flipped in my brain, that was the thing I couldn't really stop thinking about. And so when I went into startups, you know, I did some startups that, you know, were sort of what you expect. They were like, you know, this is 2012 when I did my first one and and sold it to a company, and it was in the social networking mobile based, like, you know, like check-in, Foursquare, that that thing. And it was... So it was part of that thing. And it wasn't the thing I really cared about. It was sort of me doing pattern matching and being like, I think, you know, I think this is the idea that could be cool in this moment. It's not really what I wanna do, but, you know, I I like... I wanna learn how to do startups. I'm just gonna do it. It wasn't my passion thing. But after that, when I did my next startup, it was like, that's the idea I wanna go back to. I wanna go back to figuring out how do I fund how do I fund creativity in a different way. And this was, this was 2000 or twenty twenty fourteen. And this is this is right when, virtual reality was coming out, so maybe even 2013. And, and I was so excited by it because it was this new medium. And, you know, and my my heart was still very much in, like, you know, art and storytelling. And, and so I had a new thesis. I said, well, if I wanna reinvent how the world funds, you know, creativity, maybe maybe maybe maybe a good laboratory would be a brand new medium like virtual reality. It's an... It's a new industry that's just, you know, being born right now. I bet it would be more receptive to me experimenting, with different models for raising capital for for projects.

I think of running my company as my work of art now. Like, I I I think of myself not as a CEO, but as an artist. And my... And it is like a durational performance art Sure. Creating, building, making this thing. And I try to run Artisan, with the same compass that I would have when I was making, like, a film, which is very, very intuition based. In, like, startup land, it's so metric based. It's so, like, best practices based. It's so, things that feel very cold. And, and for me, I found... I don't... You know, we'll see if it's, like, Bruce to be smart. But for me, the... Part of how I've been able to continue working on Artisan day in and day out, grinding away and grinding away, is I try to make everything creative. I try to I try to take the same the same process that I would have for doing, a work of art and apply that to running a business. And, if nothing else, it makes it tolerable for me. So when I wake up in the morning, it's like, oh, I get to be creative. And how can I make this, like, investor outreach email that I'm writing something that's fun and a little weird and a little off kilter? How can I, like, rethink how we do marketing? Or, you know, it's like everything I try to approach through the lens of, like, this is a creative artistic expression.

the... Funding funding is always trend trend based. It doesn't matter if you're doing start up funding or if you're doing, you know, research grants, or or if you're in the entertainment industry or the art world. There's always these trends. And the funding sources, you know, tie into these trends. And there's a lot of logic and reason for why that happens. And so, to bring it back to my epic narrative, in 2013, 2014, there was a... You know, one of the big trends was virtual reality. Right? Yep. And so, and so this is a good thing for if, you know, anyone who's watching this, if you're raising money for a crazy idea, one of the things, that you do need to be cognizant of is what are the trends because there's going to be pools of capital that you can go tackle, if you can, ride one of those waves. And so, so virtual reality was a wave, and there was a lot of money sloshing around, which was also why I was like, okay. This is a moment where where we can experiment with different ways to fund things because there's so much money sloshing around. And that's totally the wrong way to build something, almost always. I mean, every now and then, maybe that's the right way, but, generally, that's a terrible way to do it. And so this this this time around, I wanna do the polar opposite, and I said, I don't know the solution to this problem. I know the problem that I wanna solve is funding weird, crazy ideas. I don't know how to solve it. So why don't I just start by starting? Why don't I just start by funding projects however I can? And why don't, in that process, why don't I just keep a very open mind and just iterate and iterate and iterate on, how can we fund more? How can we fund bigger projects? How can we fund smaller projects at a higher level, like, more more quantity wise? And and somewhere in there, there's gonna be some idea that stumbles out eventually that feels like the one that can scale and really be transformative. And so we we started very basic, identify the talent. Who are people doing interesting things in this new medium? And we started, in San Francisco at Mozilla headquarters doing these, VR cinema meetups. So it was like, who... Is anybody in the world doing things that are looking at virtual reality, through a storytelling lens? And so the very first thing we did was, like, let's do a traveling VR film festival. Let's find the best projects, and let's just fucking put them in a U Haul and and drive around North America and Canada and, and do these pop ups. And and we did that, and it was, like, by hook or crook. We, you know, got Samsung gear to, to to to lend us all their their headsets. They never got them back. You know, we we we almost got arrested going in and out of Canada because you have to have, like, something called a carne when you're doing, like, a large number of, like, things that could be expensive. You have to have documentation, that says what it's for. And if you don't have it, they'll, like, confiscate it all. It was a total shit show. Very, very punk rock. But it started to prove that there was an audience for this stuff and that people were showing up to these events with curiosity. And other creators were like, I haven't thought about doing this, but now I'm thinking about doing it. And it felt like there was this moment, where there was energy there. And we capitalized that energy and we said, oh, okay. Well, who's gonna fund your next project? Let me help you fund your next project. And so we'd start to go to whoever... Like a truffle pig looking for money. We'd sniff out where was the... Where are the pockets of money. And we'd go to, like, all the brands that were, wanting to be hip and sort of on the... Showing they were, like, forward facing, future forward, tech forward companies. And we'd we'd pitch them on, like, hey. You should sponsor this crazy art project, and we're gonna go do, like, a festival circuit at Sundance or at Tribeca because they were starting to make room for these types of projects. So that was, like, one funding source. Okay. Brands are willing to pay money to put money into things. Another one was, like, tech companies. Meta, wasn't called Meta then. Called Facebook. You have this new VR headset. You need amazing content. Like, you should, like, put money into these projects. And by the way, we're talking to HTC too. Like, you know, do you wanna be the exclusive one? So then you realize, okay, tech companies, they can they can put money in. And then you go to investors, and you start to make the case like, okay, investors, like, you should put money into this project because we're gonna get well known talent attached, and we're, you know, we're gonna set up an LBE experience. We're gonna charge tickets for it. We think we can bring money in. So you start pitching investors. And you do all that stuff, and you start to realize patterns, and you start to realize how do you need to package this stuff, and you start to realize where the the limits are, where the ceilings are. And and we hit a ceiling, which is that when you go through these traditional funding paths, which ended up starting to look more and more like sort of the same funding path that you'd have in the traditional entertainment industry. It started to feel like, oh, this is, this is starting to, calcify and, become rigid in the way that, like, you know, more traditional, you know, industries get after a while. And we realized that, like, we couldn't get to anything that was scalable. None of that felt like this is gonna change the world. It felt like we were turning into a studio. It felt like we're getting really good at packaging projects, selling them to, like, people that would make sense to sell them to. But you could only do, like, 10, maybe 20 of those projects a year. Like, it wasn't enough. It was never going to change anything doing that. You'd make some great work maybe, if you're lucky, but it it wasn't changing the game. And so we we started to think how... What's a different game that we could play? And and that was when we first got the idea for community funded grants. So we, we had all these these these these creators that were sort of in our roster, and we were always looking for new talent. And we were like, how do we get new talent on board at scale? How do we give them, like, $5,000 to go prove that they can go do something before we, you know, get a a budget together to, you know, raise a couple million to do a big thing with them? And, so we started a grant program. We realized that, like, grants are incredibly hard to manage. Like, we we... You know, we were thinking, like, grants would be an easy way to find new talent. No. No. You get, like, hundreds of applications. You've gotta look through all those applications. You've gotta make, you know, hopefully, good judgments. And so we said, okay. Interesting. People are are very motivated for relatively small dollar grants. That was like a little bit of, like, we got a little... I'm always looking for heat. When I'm building a product, I'm always looking where's the heat, follow the heat, find the heat, you know, fan that little flame into something bigger. And so we're like, okay. Small dollar grants. I wouldn't have expected that we'd have so much interest in small dollar grants. The second thing was like, okay. Curation. Really, really hard to do. Party time. Party time. The the the the the next thing that we tried was like, okay. If we don't have the time to do it, how do we get this community of creators that are sort of all around the company to do the curation for us? How do we how do we, hack together something in, like, a weekend that would allow them to, you know, start to review these and and, you know, vote them up? And, that was like a year of sort of like nights and weekends just experimenting on the side, not really thinking this was the thing yet. But it was an interesting problem. And, we ran a million different experiments and most of them were, like, failures where the creators would get pissed. The, you know, a project that they collectively thought was not a good one would win. It was just, like, clunky, you know, confusing. But little by little you start to realize how do you do community curation. And the next thing we realized was that, like, if we're going to scale this grant program up, we can't cover the costs entirely ourselves. Like, we can do a couple of these every month, but we can't do 10 every month. We can't do a 100 every month. So that was when we got the idea of, like, well, what if people could contribute to these grants? What if it wasn't us just putting the money in? What if it was anybody can contribute to these grants? And, and then those two ideas together were when I finally stepped back and was like, oh, fuck. Fuck. And this is the idea. This is the thing we've been waiting for. This is the idea that could maybe scale. And, and so we we we spun down the studio. We stopped doing these events that were sort of like paying all our bills, and we went all in on this idea of community funded, community curated grants. And we launched a product. It was still under the old name of this company, Kaleidoscope, that I was, you know, been running for years. And, and we had a killer first month. Like, we... Like, it worked great the first cycle, like, like, positive vibes. We'd gotten to, like, $20,000 in recurring donations to these, these these grants in a month. That felt like really significant. It's like, oh, we... That's amazing. We can grow this. Like, every month, $20,000 of, like, subscribers to these grants is coming in. We can build on this.

interested in funding that, like, this... It was just small dollar contributions to people that gave a shit about the topic of the grant. So, like, when you're part of a subculture, you know, people love it so much. And and VR at the time, still is, probably even more so now, was like a deep subculture. And so when we were doing these grants on, like, weird immersive art stuff, people were excited about it. And they're like, yeah. I'll put in a $100. After we closed our first round, I was walking to the grocery store and I I was texting, a buddy of mine and and I was like, we made it, dude. This this is working. And literally, the next thing I get is a ding from Stripe, and they fucking canceled us. Stripe is our payment processor. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, and great payment processor. But, I later learned, crowdfunding is a high risk category, in in terms of payment processing. And why is it a high risk category? You have, higher rates of chargebacks than, than like a a general merchant. Like, if you're running a, like, a, you know, mom and pop gift shop or something, like, chargebacks are relatively low. And as a payment processor, chargebacks are like poison to you. And we had... It wasn't even a human in the loop. We had triggered some, like, small spike in chargebacks over the course of, like, three days. And it was just high enough, to, like, trigger them, having an automated, like, we're killing your account.

like a... Part of it was our fault too. Yeah. And so, so again, like we've, you know, we've experimented with so many things. And and the way that I experiment is by... I I only learn through, like, painful, like, real world failure. And, and so whenever we do these things, we're always experimenting on things. And, like, if we're lucky, like, you know, some of the ideas will work and land and you'll you'll you'll, you know, get enough positive momentum that it doesn't, like, blow the whole thing up. But almost always, some things go sideways. And one of the things that we, had as a failure mode was, it was winner take all grants. And so, the projects that didn't end up winning the grant, felt, like burned a bit. And so their creator or their fans who had put money into their project to try to help them win the grant, called up their credit card and was like, yo, I didn't make this charge. I don't wanna do this. So it was like a it was a game mechanic error on our end. Yeah. And it was like Stripe just being like, you know, like, we were so small. And we... Yeah. Again, there was there wasn't even like a judgment call. It was just like you had, like, you know, it was like 3% chargebacks in a twenty four hour period. You're done. And, and that was when two things happened. One, that was when I finally was like, okay. I'm going all in on crypto. And two is when I realized that this was the thing that I wanted to dedicate myself to. And so we spun down that company, and we said let's do this for real. Let's not have this duct tape experiment. Let's let's build it for real. Let's go raise some real money, and let's build it... Try to build it the right way. And that's that was 2000, yeah, that was '20... That was 2020 when Stripe canceled us. And then we had, like, you know, six months of sort of getting our shit together. And then we raised, you know, a small round to get going and started Artisan in twenty twenty one February. And that that was sort of the genesis of Artisan. And, I can talk a lot about what we have done since then. Yeah. But it's really the same thing. Like, we... Like, since 2021, we've done, we did about a year of just experiments. We didn't really call them seasons. It was just, like, experimenting with more funding mechanisms, and we awarded, about $800,000 in those experiments. And then and then we moved over to the season idea where we fund projects on a seasonal cadence. And each season is basically an opportunity to rebuild the whole product and try a bunch of new ideas. And in season one, creators raised about $50,000. In season two, it was about 150,000. In season three, it was close to 500,000. In season four, it was about 800,000. In season five, it was, 1,200,000. And in season six, which we just closed here at DWeb, it was, it was, almost $7,000,000. It was just under $7,000,000 raised. So, like, we're still fucking up. We're still running into brick walls. But the, the key is that, like, you, you have to run those experiments. And and little by little, you start to realize where solid ground is and what what... Which which foot you can pivot out with. You know? Where where do you have to anchor a foot, and where can you where can you pivot your other foot to try to find the next step to take?

different campaigns, or was it also investors putting in some money who just wanted to see... So basically the name of the game that we've had since the beginning is, is raise capital from investors and, you know, I'm I'm... Happened... Yeah. I'm lucky that I have friends that that that, you know, believe in me and put money in. I'm lucky that I've, you know, gone through accelerators like Techstars that were super helpful. And so little by little, you build up a network, and build up trust over many decades. Yeah. Yeah. And when you do a crazy idea, people are willing to throw some money in. So, you know, we raised... You know, basically, I've been fundraising constantly my whole life. But for Artisan, it's like, you know, it's it's basically I'm always raising money for it. And we take the money that we raise from investors, and we use that to run these experiments. And all of our experiments have been some variant on match funding. That... That's the key idea. And even when we were doing grants before, it was it was really match funding grants. It's like us putting... Well, it's not entirely true. In the beginning, it was just grants. But then when we got into this idea of community funded grants, it was really turning into match funding. This was when, you know, Vitalik and Glenn Weil and Kevin Awakie, who's one of our investors, were publishing all their work on quadratic funding. And, you know, there's... It was sort of in the atmosphere, and, and I was super inspired by it. So all these experiments were on the the topic of of match funding. And and and the key there is, like, we take the investor money as a carrot, as an incentive, as a as a sort of the the the the start of the fire. Right. And, and then and then you play different games where creators have to then go raise money from their own supporters to get access to that capital. So that that Right. Those fundraising numbers are always a blend between investor dollars that we've raised, and now sponsor dollars too. So we we have an... There's three categories of money that's, like, investors put money into artisan, sponsors put money into community funds, and then fans put money into creator projects. Mhmm. And all three of those, those flows of capital, you know, end up in the creator's pocket at the end of the day. Interesting.

It's totally exhausting. Yeah. And it and it also,

trends are real, and, it's good to be aware of them. But, but as as a creative person, it, it is exhausting to... I think the best projects and the ones that I'm most interested in and I think the world needs the most, are the ones that, that are the projects that keep you up at night, that that you that you just can't stop thinking about. And it's and and it's generally, it's something that's very specific to who you are and your history, and your interests. But it's it's it's the thing that, if you had a magic wand that, like, you would go spend all of your time on. Like, that's the thing that every creative human, whether they're in art or science or technology, that's the thing that they should be they should be making. And the problem with having, so much of the funding landscape be, based on, you know, investors chasing trends, grant agencies having these, you know, requests for proposals on these topics, that may or may not have anything to do with what you actually care about, is that you end up, trying to, conform to these shapes that don't really have anything to do with you or anything to do with your project. And you get often... Like, either you're doing this, like, weird, fan dance to try to, like, convince somebody that your thing is really this other thing that it's not, and that's a huge amount of wasted energy. And maybe you can do it well enough to, like, capitalize on it. But it's... But it... Ultimately, it's wasted energy. Right? Like, and and that that that that's my critique of all the existing funding infrastructure, whether you're talking about scientific research grants, you know, it's small, deliberative, you know, bodies of, like, three to five people, highly risk averse.

All the established industries, you know, whenever you're dealing with a lot of capital, you get into risk management. Right? And so when you're in the entertainment industry, you know, risk management is the lens that you're looking at that through. Right? Like, we are gonna drop a couple $100,000,000 on this film. How do we how do we manage our risk? Well, we've got a pattern match. We've got a... You know, we know that this star can bring in this amount of money in his last three films and, you know, they they have all these ways of trying to minimize risk. But what you're not, you know, what you're not doing is, is you're taking big swings at crazy ideas. Now venture capital has the, I think it's the best out of all the funding mechanism at taking big swings at crazy ideas. At least a lot of them talk the game, you know, say that that's the goal. In reality Right. I think, you know, the best ones do. The best ones do take, big swings, at, at crazy ideas that seem like bad ideas but actually turn out to be good ideas. Like, that's how you get big outside returns. But the reality is that most investors aren't great investors, and most investors will just be fast followers, tune into trends, and, and aren't really taking ideas seriously that are illegible. And the most interesting ideas, the ones that are on the frontier, are illegible. They are almost impossible to understand. The ideas that I get most excited about are the radical ideas that are between, you know, two or three known nodes, but are in new territory that nobody really understands. When somebody pitches me a project, and I don't get it, like, that's a good sign. Like, I lean in. I get curious. Like, I don't know what the fuck that is, but but I haven't heard anything like that before. Most of the ideas will end up being bad ideas. It's a it's a high mortality rate. But the only way to get to true transformative ideas is to fund a lot a lot of ideas that that that look like crazy ideas. And a, you know, a few of them will will turn out to be crazy and and and good,

Yes. To receive funding? Like, what does that mean? No. I don't think it does. I I think it does in one sense. And first of all, I wanna clarify that Artisan, one of our big big, founding principles is, it's not just for art. It's for art, science, technology, human creativity in the broadest sense. I think there's so much value that, can be unlocked when you have a dancer next to a neuroscientist, next to, someone doing immersive art, next to a journalist, next to, you know, a technologist. Like, these silos that we get, forced into, are unproductive, because the best ideas, again, are, in new territory. They're on the frontier. And to get to the frontier, you have to, go to spaces between known disciplines. And, the traditional funding landscape forces you into these silos because raising money in the fine art world is totally different than raising money for a television series, which is totally different than raising money for a video game, which is totally different than raising money for a startup, which is totally different than raising money for basic scientific research. So you you you get forced into these silos because you have to become an expert in one category of of funding. And so for Artisan, it's super important that we're building one game mechanic that works just as well if you're doing a weird art project or if you're doing something that looks like a start up. And this does get back to your question about does it have to be investable. And so, in startups, you have something that is investable. Right? Like, you have a structure. You, you know, you buy shares in a company. If that company goes and makes a bunch of money or gets acquired or makes an IPO, you know, you can see a return on investment. The one consistent thing though is that what projects will we be talking about in 10 from now? How about a hundred years from now? Right? The ones that make a lot of money, sometimes we'll be talking about those in ten years or a hundred years. But the consistent things are the ones that change the world are the ones that we'll be talking about. Right? Like, if a project, whether it makes money or not, changes the world, those are the ones that we'll remember. And if you have a big historical impact like that, if you change the way that people think about art, the way that we understand the universe through science, the way that we live our lives through technology, even if it's open source technology that makes no money, you've made a measurable impact. There's value created. Right? And that tells me that you can always invest in something if there is real world impact. And so one of the things that, I've had a couple of, like, light bulb moments in my life, and one of the big ones was, being so frustrated with how, how how a lot of things didn't look investable. Right? There was, like, just no way to get get your money back. That's one idea. That was very frustrating. Like, why the fuck can't we put money into a weird avant garde art thing? If people love it, like, how do we how do we not see a return on investment? Or, like, basic scientific research that, you know, is uncovering knowledge but may have no commercial application ever or maybe not for fifty years, how do you see a return on that? Very frustrating. The other thing that was very frustrating is how exclusionary traditional investment landscape is, both from the perspective of, someone who wants to invest in something. Like, you can't unless you make $250,000 a year or have over a million dollars in liquid assets. It's like the only way you can do it as an American. Might be different here in Germany. I don't know. Probably not. That's very frustrating. Feels very unfair. One market in the world has some properties that solve both those problems. Art. Art is the last unregulated great market. Anybody can buy art. There's very, very few rules for who is allowed to buy a work of art. That solves one one problem. The other thing that it solves is that art has a magical property. Art is a way of putting a dollar value on impact. A work of art that changes how we think about the world, that has a group of people that deeply love it, that has stood the test of time, appreciates in value. It appreciates in value in proportion to the cultural impact that that work of art had. Those two things together had a giant light bulb go over my head. What if we made works of art the investable asset in any kind of project? And that's what we do on Artisan. So when you back a project on Artisan, every single project, whether it is a work of art, like, whether it's somebody that's, you know, raising money to go make a music album, or if it's somebody who's raising money to go do basic scientific research, or it's somebody who's, raising money to go do something like a startup. They always have to have an artifact. And all an artifact is is that under the hood, it's an open edition NFT. But we have guidelines. It has to be square. It can't have text or graphic overlays on it. It has to be an image, a GIF, or a short movie that captures the spirit of your project. It has to document, where that project is in its life cycle right now. It has to capture the aesthetic, the vibe. It has to be something that the people that give a shit about you and your project would resonate with. And when people put money into a project on Artisan, what they're actually doing is they're collecting these unique works of art. And the bet will see. This is sort of what I'm working on now, but it's been, you know, the vision for, you know, almost eight years now, is that the projects that we end up funding, most of them will not change the world. If we're lucky, I think the top 5% maybe will, maybe just the top 1%. But those projects that do change the world, these artifacts will appreciate in value in proportion to that impact. And that gives people skin in the game. It gives them some mechanism that I can go back a project that that makes no money, but maybe it solves, you know, peace in The Middle East. Maybe it, you know, maybe it, maybe it changes, how we think about, you know, spirituality in some significant way. Maybe it changes, how we, generate electricity, you know, in some significant way, and thus changes our whole lives. Those projects, that artifact, I would expect to be more valuable in the future. And if you back a project that, happens to be one of those, it gives you some non zero chance of seeing upside. And we wanna build a lot of, product around these artifacts to give them inherent utility, to give them reasons that you'd wanna own them even if they don't appreciate. But at the end of the day, if we do our job right, if we pick great projects, and if, those projects are capitalized enough to go complete their work and to go start having impact in the world, I think over some time horizon, we'll see these artifacts become valuable. And whenever that happens, I think a bit will get flipped in people's brains. And right now, people are backing projects because they love the creator and they know that if they give money to a creator on Artisan, it's gonna amplify their impact because they unlock match funding from these community funds and from the Artisan Endowment. So they're primarily doing it today because they love the work and they wanna see their dollars have a maximal amount of impact. But I think as soon as we have at least one project that hits it big and we see an artifact that increases in value the same way we saw in the NFT mania, we have one example of that. I think people will start to think about how they're giving differently. I think they'll start to think about it less as a donation and more as an investment. An investment in the world that we wanna, you know, build together. The investment in the the creators that we think are going to solve all the problems, that that we face. And and when that that flips, when that bit flips, I think the amount of money people are willing to give will be considerably more. If you if you stop looking at this as I'm giving money away, and more look at it as I'm planting seeds. And some of these seeds won't come up, but some of them will. And I can I can potentially make more money investing in crazy weird ideas at the frontier than I could anywhere else? Like, if we can if we can make that narrative a reality, then I think we start to shift, how capital flows to all forms of human creativity. And that... That's the vision. Every every year we spend about $7,000,000,000,000 on human creativity. That's venture capital, that's, philanthropy dollars, that's government, and corporate r and d, that's crowdfunding, that's, you know, corporate sponsorship. Like, if you look at all the flows of capital that are going into art, science, and technology, it's about 7,000,000,000,000. Sounds like a lot of money. But when you look at global GDP, which is about a 110,000,000,000,000, you know, it's less than 6%. Right? Like, why are we spending only 6%, of global GDP on the engine of prosperity? Like, all wealth, all the good shit we care about comes from art, science, and technology. We are dramatically underallocating. But if we can give capital, both people that are just normal folks as well as big pools of capital, a reason to flow to the best projects in a way that's efficient, effective, fair, and you can see a return on that investment for the ideas that actually change the world, then I think we can not only allocate that 7,000,000,000,000 in a better way, but I think we can actually increase that, slice of the pie. I don't know what that slice should be, but it should be bigger than 7,000,000,000,000.

Yeah. I mean, I think people are motivated by many different factors. So first of all, I wanna say, when whenever whenever I meet anybody that's in sort of the... Either, you know, on the funder side and public funding or on the side of creators that are chasing that public funding, I say, god bless you. We need we need more we need more money going to art, science, technology. So however you can get the money, go get the money. Totally. And if you're in that industry, working in the government, allocating that money, god bless you. Like, do the best job you can. Thank you. I also think it's highly inefficient and incredibly wasteful. I think, I think the projects that get... And I... Because I've because I've been in it, and I've seen how the decisions are made. They're made, and it's... And and there's a logic to it. Like, all the public funding that we got was because you had become friends with the small group of people that were making these decisions. Yeah. You go to the festivals, you hang out with them, you get drunk with them, you get high with them, you become friends. And then, and then you build trust. And then they, you know, then when they see your application, they're gonna, you know, weight it more highly. That's fine. It does work. But it also is not the most efficient way to get the best projects funded. It it becomes a club. And so I like that money is going to those projects. I think the projects they do fund are great, but it also it also very much ages out. Like, the people that are making these funding decisions, they get their little cohort of friends and trusted colleagues and people that they love, and then they retire at some point and there's a new wave. But in that interim, it can be very nonresponsive to new movements. So huge huge amounts of critique to it. Totally. Totally. It depends on what type of capital you are. Right? If you are a brand and you're wanting to put money into one of our community funds, you're doing that not... You don't get anything back Right. Money wise. What you're doing it for is, ex... You know, brand exposure and association with artists, scientists, technologists at the cutting edge. And hopefully, you're selling something that those creators or their fans would want. Right? Like, that's why you'd sponsor one of these funds. If you are in... Putting money into the endowment or investing in artisan, you're gonna want a return. You're gonna want some some chance of getting your money back. If you are backing a creator as an individual, that's a whole spectrum. Right? Like, I, Sure. There's some people that will back a project, most people right now. I mean, that's, like, all the all the backing that's happening right now on Artisan. Nobody thinks of Artisan and thinks of investment right now. I mean, my subscribers, they invest in me. Yes. They're not getting... Yeah. They invest in you because they... But, but you're doing it because you you love the thing and you wanna see the thing made. Sure.

You're leaving a lot of capital on the table. There's a lot of money out there, oceans of money. The world is, you know, drowning in money. There's so much money out there. You need to give it a reason to flow to the most important things. Right? And you need to just remove emotion from it. And if you're saying the goal is right now we are not allocating enough capital to human creativity. If the thesis is Yeah. I agree with that. The source of wealth is creativity, and all the problems that we face, whatever existential thing you're worried about, like, I believe every single problem is solvable if we apply enough human creativity at that problem. Right? And so, if you if you say, okay. The question then is how do we how do we come... How do we how do we hoover up as much money in the world as possible and then blast it out at at these creators and do it in a way that, you know, hopefully the most talented creators, the most worthy projects are getting that that capital. You have to start to speak to all the capital that exists out there. Right? And at the end of the day, you have to compete on what's going to get a a bit... A better, bigger return. And, the only way, to do that is to have some plausible plausible path, some path, for people putting money into a project and seeing a return on on that investment. Yeah. And I don't know if... I'm sure we don't have have the solution figured out, but I think the I think the the proper solution is one that allows anyone to put money into a project. It has to be something that's open. It has to be something that you don't have a bunch of bullshit regulations keeping people out of allocating capital to things that are worthy in the world, that they love, that they care about. So it has to be open. The other thing is that it has to work, it has to work for projects that don't make money. Right? It has to be some mechanism. Again, I think we all can agree, at least here, and maybe the people watching, would all agree that, that artists, scientists, technologists, open source developers, create a tremendous amount of value for the world that they don't capture, that no one captures. It's being given away for free. And so what we need... You know, so the solution, you know, again, I'm sure we don't have the solution, but the solution will look like this. It's open, it gives you some path to return on investment, and it captures the value created by things that don't make money. Right? Right. And that's... Those are the three things that we're trying to solve, on this level of the product. Yeah. And and again, to be clear, like, we have not, like, we've not really turned this side of the product on. This is the things I'm focusing on now. Like, most of the product is about match funding and cash prizes and turning that into a game that's fun for people and, sort of like, it gives people an effective way of, pulling in money from their their backers and all that jazz. I think, I don't think that's really the big idea. I think that's that's a good mechanism, and I think there's always ways that you can improve on on these ideas of, of how do you get different players to play a game that, incentivizes as much money as possible to flow to these projects. That's a fun game. But, but I think at the end of the day, you have to, you really have to you have to find some mechanism that captures that real world value that projects create and have it flow back to the creators themselves,

to... Like, we can't we can't apply... No. You need a pluralistic you need a pluralistic approach. Yeah. Yeah. So Kevin Awakie, founder of Gitcoin, love him. He, I was worried that he would think of us as a competitor. Very, very much inspired by Gitcoin. And, and and and we knew each other, like, when we're both sort of starting. Gitcoin did amazing, still is doing amazing things. Kevin's still pushing the project forward and doing super innovative things. And the whole time, I was like, oh, fuck. Like, I don't wanna feel like this competitive energy with him because I love what he's doing, and I hope I hope he loves what I was doing too. But I wasn't sure for a while, and then we became friends over a while, you know, over many years of bumming up at each other at conferences. And, the more I got to know Kevin, the more I realized his philosophy of pluralism, and it really changed how I think of everything, really. Like, I think whenever there's a problem, you want as many people tackling that problem as possible. And you know that a lot of those solutions aren't going to work. You know that some will, but not one will. Right? Like, there's never gonna be one solution. You're gonna want many, many solutions, and they'll address different flavors of that problem. And and only with this pluralistic approach will you find the things that have the maximum amount of impact. That being said, I think whenever you're trying to solve a problem, a, you need to pick the right problem. You need to pick a problem that really, really, really matters. And you need to think of what's the most extreme example in case of that problem. And then that changes that changes your thinking about the solution. Right? Like set... Like like, I used to not know what money was. Coming from a family of artists, like, we don't like to talk about money. Money is kind of a gross topic. It's kind of taboo. And I couldn't even comprehend a million dollars. Like, how the fuck... Like, you know, I had no way of knowing what a million dollars was. And then you start to do work in the world and, you know you know, for me, it was like maybe the MTV pilot where I was like, oh, woah. They just gave us a $250,000. And I could sort of start to mentally do some gymnastics of like, well, it's, you know, it's four of my little TV pilots is a million bucks. Now I know what a million bucks is. I have some, some comparable that can give me some sense of scale. And and the more I dealt dealt with money and got to know money better and worked on bigger projects, you can start to wrap your head around, how much a dollar is, you know. And so you can start to see, like, oh, okay. I've I've had friends now that have raised, like, you know, $30.40, $50,000,000 for stuff, and I can sort of see what they did with it. I can sort of size that up. And I've had friends that have done things that are in, like, you know, that are in the hundreds of millions. And then, you know, I know some people that have done some things that are sort of in the billions, and you can kind of start to see the size and scale of money and what can be done with the money and how much, you know, effort goes into raising a certain size of money. When you get to trillions, it's like, it's so hard to see how big a trillion dollars is. It's so fucking much money. Right?

yeah. Another another podcast. But, I think I think I think when... Like, whether it's me working on Artisan or you working on your thing, you need to go to the nth degree. Go to the final state. And for me, it was really sizing up how much money is being spent today. Clearly, it's not enough. And then going, oh, shit. Okay. So if I'm gonna even move the needle at all, this thing that I'm building has to be insanely big. Like, we... You know, the goal needs to be for us to be, you know, awarding trillions of dollars. And that that that changes your approach. It changes the energy you bring to it. It changes the kind of solutions that you're looking for. Yeah. And I encourage everyone to do that. Like, I think that's the that's the right lens to look at the work you do is to is that you need to have some path, some path to solve the true root cause. You probably won't get there. Like, I probably won't get there. But unless you're, like, aiming for the thing, you'll never get there. So you gotta be... You gotta gotta really reach out to the most ambitious version of it, and then and then have some step back over like, oh, okay. How do I... Like, you know, we have, awarded $6,800,000 in this season. What do we have to do in this next season to get to that number, that big vision number? It's gotta be a lot. It has to keep growing really fast or else I'll, you know, die well before we'll ever get to a scale that matters. It, it just... Yeah. It changes it changes your perspective, and I think it's something that a lot of people would value... Would find value from from going through that exercise and realizing, like, oh, shit. Like, this... I need to rethink this. I need to think I need to think bigger and more ambitious if I'm actually going to solve the problem.

You can go to artisan.fund. That's spelled a r t I z e n. It's like artisan, someone who works with their hands and is a craftsperson mixed with citizen, artisan,.fund, f u n d. And we look for projects that, no one else will fund. We have found a lot of success in, in backing work that is illegible and impossible to understand by traditional funding mechanisms and traditional funding apparatus and institutions. If you've got a a project that looks like something that a traditional funder would fund it, like, go go fund it that that way. If you've got a project that, like, you love and you've got a fire in your belly and and you've been telling people about forever and you've never been able to raise capital for, but it's a thing that you love, like, that's the thing that we wanna help you fund.