Who Really Created Bitcoin & Other Crypto Startup Ideas | My First Million #196
Bitcoin, Tether, Satoshi, and the Creator Economy - July 2, 2021 (almost 4 years ago) • 53:06
Transcript:
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Sam Parr | If you told me that it makes him personally $30,000,000 spread evenly over the next 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, what’s up? Sean here. We’ve got Sam, and then we have a special guest, Dan Held. The Dan Held from the Bitcoin space. You’ve probably seen him around on Twitter.
I told my brother-in-law that you were on the pod today, and he was very excited. I’ve told him about every guest so far, and you got one of the biggest reactions. I think he’s a paid subscriber to your newsletter or something like that, so he’s very into you.
On the other hand, I think Sam has no clue who you are, so I think it’s the perfect mix. I know some stuff about you, Sam knows nothing about you, and I think it’ll be fun.
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Sam Parr | For that reason, I only know that Sean says that you're cool and you're into Bitcoin. I know nothing about you. Well, we...
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Dan Held | got an hour to figure it out we got an hour to talk about it | |
Shaan Puri | Whenever one of us proposes a guest, it's like you put that guest on trial. You have to take the stand and swear an oath that this person's going to be good. Then, you better be able to lawyer up and defend why this person is a guest.
So, every time he mentions a name to me, I'm like, "Why the heck are we having that person on?" Then he'll defend it.
In this case, I was like, "No, no, no, this is going to be interesting." There are a couple of reasons we should talk about crypto, and we should also discuss building your personal brand because you've done a really good job of that.
So, we'll cover both of those topics during this conversation. But I want to start with this: give people the one-minute story of who the heck you are. Yeah, you know, just give us the one-minute story of Dan Held.
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Dan Held | Yeah, the elevator pitch. So, I’m originally from Texas. I grew up in Dallas and spent 25 years there. I studied finance in undergrad and stumbled my way into tech. I didn't know what I was doing when I first built my first software product in the space, but it was successful.
From there, I learned how to formalize some of my skills around product management and marketing. I worked at a couple of different early-stage crypto companies. Some of the first crypto companies I worked at include blockchain.com. I've had two exits in the crypto space, meaning I've sold two of my products.
I also worked at Uber, where I was on rider growth, led by Andrew Chen. I was one of his directs on the growth marketing team. So, I've had big company classic tech experience, but also a lot of that startup puzzle in early-stage crypto, which is kind of the wild west. I guess that fits my Texas attitude. So, tell...
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Shaan Puri |
Tell people the story of how you got into crypto... Bitcoin specifically. You're a Bitcoin guy, I shouldn't keep saying crypto too much. Bitcoin, back in I think 2012 or so, was maybe $10. What caught your interest? How did you hear about it? What's the origin story for you?
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Dan Held | Yeah, so I got back in 2012. My buddy paid me back for a beer with something called a **cashacious coin**. A cashacious coin is one of those gold coins that you see in all those news articles where they talk about Bitcoin. They were essentially physical Bitcoins.
That was a good time. In that 2012 era, Bitcoin was so new, weird, and different that it served as a good bridge from the physical fiat, like paper money, world to the digital Bitcoin world.
From there, my background is in finance. I really dug the **21,000,000 hard cap** as a solution to bad central banking policies. I mean, I was in undergrad during the 2008 financial crisis studying finance, and I thought, "My professors don't know shit." Neither do the people on TV, and neither do these books that I'm reading.
That experience kind of shook my foundational trust and belief in the existing financial system. When Bitcoin came around, I saw it as a good new way to rebuild the financial system without having to trust these institutions. | |
Shaan Puri | And Sam, I don't know if you know this. Do you know when Satoshi signed the first block? He put a message in there. Do you have you ever heard what this is?
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Sam Parr | No, but I love that guy's stories. I mean, I don't know if the myth is real or what the truth is, but I love the story behind it.
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Shaan Puri | and ben I don't know if you know it off the top of your head but but do do you know what it is | |
Dan Held | Yeah, so Satoshi was a really crazy character in terms of his expertise. I mean, he understood human games, game theory, encryption, and all sorts of different topics. He wove this all together to build Bitcoin.
Bitcoin isn't just software; it wraps itself around understanding human levers to press, like greed. As the price cycles and goes up, people become more aware of it and buy in expectation of the price going higher.
So, Satoshi really understood humans intimately. Part of this understanding that he wove into the first block was the genesis block message, which said, "UK Chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks."
That was the only message that Satoshi ever put into the Bitcoin blockchain. It's a very clear signal that Bitcoin wasn't here to disrupt Visa or PayPal; Bitcoin is here to disrupt the existing financial system and central banking.
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Shaan Puri | Right, and so there's like the mission. The mission was sort of cleverly baked in, which I just love. I'm like you, Sam, where the more I learn about the origins, the more this stuff seems like it's out of a movie. It doesn't seem like real life. It's like, "Oh, this anonymous creator." It's like, how is anything anonymous nowadays?
There's the way they caught the Silk Road guy; his typing style matched some review he left on a movie message board. You know, there's always something like that. There's always...
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Sam Parr |
A breadcrumb trail... There's always... Actually, is it still anonymous? I mean, obviously no one's... Could it have been the guy who had ALS and died? I mean, what do smart people who would know about this think?
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Shaan Puri | what's dan's theory | |
Dan Held | Everyone's got their own favorite Satoshi tale. I'll give you two.
One is Hal Finney, the one that you just described. He had ALS and died, I think, in 2012 or 2013. Hal Finney is a classic favorite because he ghostwrote PGP encryption, and Bitcoin's proof of work system is based on his early reusable proof of work system that he created earlier.
Bitcoin wasn't a new innovation; it just kind of "Frankensteined" all these other innovations together, and that's how Satoshi built Bitcoin. Hal Finney has the demeanor of Bitcoin. He was also the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction, or he was sending it to himself, right?
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Shaan Puri | Which is what? And by the way, if you ever work with developers, that's what they do. When they're testing things out, the first thing they do is send it to my account, to my account, to Sean. Sean sends it to Sean Test.
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Dan Held | But the ghostwriting of PGP encryption back in that era, with Phil Zimmerman, was considered a weapon by the Department of Defense. So when he ghostwrote PGP, he knew that he was essentially going to be convicted for illegal arms trafficking. Wow! He understood what it meant to take on a government at this scale.
When I say he ghostwrote it, I mean his name isn't officially on it. The same goes for Bitcoin; he was one of the few people who would have built Bitcoin in that fashion, you know, hiding behind the pseudonym of Satoshi. This was critical because the project had no face to it and no central weakness. If you could find Satoshi and he was sort of a weakness in the governance structure and in the ownership structure, that could undermine the long-term success of the protocol.
So yeah, Hal's a classic favorite. Hal's...
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Shaan Puri | My other died around the same time that Satoshi stopped doing anything. We haven't seen a message or flare from Satoshi since, right?
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Dan Held | That's right. Satoshi hasn't signed a message with his private key, which would concretely determine that it is Satoshi or give us a strong indication that it is Satoshi, right?
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Shaan Puri | so so that timeline makes sense that's theory 1 what's theory 2 | |
Dan Held | Theory 2 is that it's the NSA. The NSA builds weapons, and Bitcoin is a financial weapon. It could destabilize countries and destabilize their currencies.
This is just a more fun, I mean totally off-the-wall sort of thinking. So, let's say a group of cryptographers, which some of the best in the world work at the NSA, come up with Bitcoin because they're tasked with building a weapon. After they build it, they go, "Wait a second, maybe we should just release this into the wild because we do believe that this is good for humankind."
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held | And they release it as kind of like it's a Frankenstein experiment let out of the lab. So I think that one's kind of fun. I mean, there's no facts behind that at all.
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Sam Parr | where where would | |
Shaan Puri | you put your lab leak hypothesis for for the pandemic basically that's that's what you're saying | |
Sam Parr | I think one’s more realistic than the other. Maybe, what would you bet your money on, one of those, Dan?
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Dan Held | Probably more than health. I feel that it's an individual. So, that's always a question too: is it an individual or a group of people? I ask you, is it more individual?
Design by committee is really hard to do with something as niche and incredible as a breakthrough like Bitcoin, right?
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Sam Parr | so I | |
Dan Held | I think that one person just had that genius to take all these elements and put them together to create Bitcoin, versus a group of developers trying to figure out how to build this thing. | |
Shaan Puri | And there's also the other thing, which is like, it's just somebody else. So if you were going to apply your percentages, what percentage is health, any NSA, or other?
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Dan Held | This is super tough, but maybe like **50%** health, **30%** Nick Szabo, and **20%** NSA.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, I like that. So, you discover Bitcoin because some guy gives you a coin. You're not just like, "Dude, what is this? Can I have my $10 please?"
So, you go and you read about it. What happens that night? You read the white paper, you join the forums, and you start reading about it online.
Then, I guess, take us through the thought process of you going from where you were then to where you are now, where Bitcoin is a pretty major part of your life.
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Dan Held | Yeah, and I can kind of weave in my early entrepreneurship in tech as part of that too because it's all intertwined together.
So, I started to read about the 21 million hard cap and the monetary policy. I see this as a huge breakthrough because if you remove the subjectivity of choosing what an appropriate rate of inflation is, you've solved the problem of monetary theory.
Satoshi solved the problem by saying, "Hey, we shouldn't constantly figure out what the rate of inflation should be; we should fix it," and the economy can reorient around that genius breakthrough.
So, that got me really hooked. I worked at a small investment firm in Dallas—nothing anyone would know; it was a really tiny one. It wasn't prestigious or anything like that. They relocated me to San Francisco to open up their West Coast portfolio.
During the April Bitcoin run-up from $10 to $260 and back down to $100, I was going to the Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco. This is where Brian and Fred from Coinbase were hanging out, along with Jared Kenna from TradeHill and Jesse Powell from Kraken. My company... we're at now, I mean, there's only like...
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Shaan Puri | A couple of things... We were just in Miami when the Bitcoin conference was happening. It was kind of like a bunch of fools acting the fool. I thought I didn't attend, but just through what was coming out on social media, I guess, every community changes.
From when it's the outsiders and the true believers to, you know, 10 years later, 11 years later, what it looks like is very, very different. Every community changes.
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Sam Parr | My friend, my roommate, was buying. I was mining in '11 and '12, and they were just hardcore developers and nerds.
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Shaan Puri | so what were what were those meetups like | |
Dan Held | So, I remember I was still working at a small investment firm. I'm rolling up in business casual to a developer.
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Shaan Puri | to a bitcoin meetup yeah | |
Sam Parr | and they're | |
Dan Held | Like, what the hell are you doing here? There's only a dozen of us. I mean, it was tiny.
Actually, I put pictures on Twitter where you can see pictures from the old meetup. I mean, it's just a cooler of PBRs and a bunch of people kind of geeking out on this thing called Bitcoin.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held | March, April 2013, the hit price goes to $2.60. Boom! You've got like VCs slinging out business cards. Everyone's excited. There are 150 people that come to the meetup. You know, there's this energy, this palpable energy.
Then the May 2013 conference happens. The Winklevoss twins announced they've bought Bitcoin; they're involved. The conference had a few hundred people, which was kind of wild. If you see Coinbase's booth from videos back then, they printed out like an 8.5 by 11 sheet that just had "Coinbase" on it. They just printed it off their computer or their printer in the office and taped it on their booth. Brian and Fred were the guys manning the booth, so like that's how early it was—super, super early in the space.
During that moment, that's when I found a problem—a problem that needed to be solved, which was finding the real-time price of Bitcoin on your mobile device. At that time, there was no app in the App Store that gave you real-time market data, which is crazy because Bitcoin fluctuates a lot, right? People were constantly opening up their phones to check the price of Bitcoin. All the other developers before then just refreshed the price every 15 minutes or so.
So, me and a buddy put it together. Now, I didn't know what I was doing. I was a finance guy trying to figure out how to make a product. I just became really obsessed with solving this problem. I knew enough in Photoshop to design the app, so I looked at apps that I liked and took elements from those to design 0 Block, which was this product. We designed it really, really simply because I couldn't design anything more complex. Back in that day, skeuomorphism was the popular design aesthetic, and we did flat UI because I couldn't design bevels and stuff.
I just became obsessed with solving this problem for myself. It turns out a lot of other people had that problem too. That's where I kind of stumbled my way into some product fundamentals: it's all about solving a problem for your customer. Then I got into a tinge of growth marketing, where I found how to hack my way to the number 2 spot for the word "Bitcoin" in the App Store. So, we got most of our installs, you know, all the way to the app.
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Shaan Puri | what what was the hack | |
Dan Held | Yeah, so Apple, at the time when they originally built the App Store, they forked it from iTunes. There’s an old character limit that they had for titles of songs, which is 255 characters. But they also allowed that character limit for app titles. It was truncated after 60 words, basically, you can't fill it.
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Shaan Puri | shit ton of shit ton of words in the in the core title | |
Dan Held | Old school keyword stuffing... Yeah, I learned old school growth that could technically just be keyword stuffing, but it worked. Now, it was sort of a crapshoot to see if the app store reviewers would approve it, but 1 out of 5 would. If you did, you could clinch that spot.
So, that kind of started my fascination with both products and with growth marketing, kind of on a more hacky side of things. And yeah, that was my initial foray into tech. Then we sold Serial Block at the end of the year to Blockchain.com. Blockchain.com is still around today; it's a really popular wallet. I was the first product manager there.
So, that's what I mean by "stumbled and bumbled" my way into tech.
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Sam Parr | so and I | |
Dan Held | didn't have any formal | |
Sam Parr | yeah I | |
Dan Held | I don't have any formal background. I just kind of was really empathetic with solving a problem for my customer. I wanted to propagate the message of my products, and that's how I learned those two skills. Alright. | |
Sam Parr | let's talk about some ideas sean shall we | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so Dan, I don't know if you know, but this is the Ideas Podcast. Here, we basically say, "Okay, I'm interested in the past," but only to the extent that I learn cool things. Then I'm like, "Alright."
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Sam Parr | let's | |
Shaan Puri | Get to the future. What does the future look like?
So, ideas... I think there's really, like, let's start in the Bitcoin and crypto space. What problems do you see today that you think somebody needs to solve?
Like back then, there was no real-time price data. That was a problem that needed solving.
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Dan Held | sure | |
Shaan Puri | what are you seeing today as a problem that needs solving | |
Dan Held | Yeah, there's one idea that's particularly fascinating, but it's not very sexy.
Now, there are a lot of really good intersections where you find value in this new idea because not a lot of people are looking at it. It's around **private wealth management for crypto holders**.
Imagine a current crypto billionaire walks into a family office or multifamily office and they're like, "Hey, I'd like you to help manage my portfolio." They sit down, five suits in front of this guy with a hoodie, and they say, "Hey, well first of all, we'd like to take a 2% management fee of all your holdings."
And they're like, "Well, I self-custody my coin." Right? And they'd be like, "I don't even know what that means."
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held | You know, and then they would go, "Well, how much of your net worth is in crypto?" And they would say, "90%." Then the first thing they would say is, "Diversify."
Right? The existing private wealth managers and multifamily offices have no idea how to service crypto-wealthy folks.
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Sam Parr | I mean, you can't even... I told my guy at the bank today, "Let's buy some Ethereum," and they were like, "Oh, we can't."
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Dan Held | It's ridiculous. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. It's so antiquated. They just don't talk... they don't even talk the same language as all these crypto folks.
Right? Like, I'm more of a Bitcoin guy, but if you go down the Ethereum rabbit hole, there's a whole... I mean, there's so much complexity in how those DeFi and smart contracts work. You need like a full tax team to solve that problem too.
But these... I mean, I've been in this space for almost 9 years. I know more billionaires on this planet than probably anyone else because of crypto. Crypto has created so many individuals who have $1,000,000,000, not institutions.
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Shaan Puri | There used to be a belief that Bitcoin, along with Ethereum, has probably created more individual billionaires than any other project.
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Dan Held | exactly I | |
Shaan Puri | I think that's gotta be true, which is kind of insane. More than Microsoft, more than Amazon, more than any of those projects. | |
Sam Parr | how many crypto billionaires do you know how many billionaires do you know | |
Dan Held | I would say off the top of my head at least 10... How many in crypto?
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Sam Parr | how about a 100,000,000 on up | |
Dan Held | Oh man, I mean, I would assume I at least know a hundred or so folks that probably have that launched out. Bitcoin people don't tell you how much they have, right? But you can kind of assume based on how long they've been in this space, what companies they worked at, and how much they're now worth compared to back then. It's probably really... yeah, I mean, it's a general assumption, but...
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Sam Parr | How much of your personal money were you putting into this before your Bitcoin started making sense? Were you putting like $100 into this in 2012 when it was like, "Who the heck knows if this is gonna work?" Because $100... you at your... he's.
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Shaan Puri | like I wish | |
Dan Held | well it could be yeah I wish yeah | |
Sam Parr | you were really young that that would have been a lot of money | |
Dan Held | Yeah, I didn't have that much money, man. I mean, look, I was like 25 or 26, just out of [college]. My first job was in Dallas, and I was making $45,000 a year. It wasn't like a ton of money.
Then I got into tech eventually, and of course, that went up quite a bit. That was in 2013-2014. Now, my average cost basis was $10 to $100, but there are a bunch of coins I got from $100 to $1,000.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held | Yeah, so I think a lot of people look at crypto OGs like myself and they assume we had like a million dollars sitting around that we all dumped in at $5 a Bitcoin.
Also, I wasn't a perfect toddler. I traded Litecoin, I traded a bunch of other stuff just for fun. I even mined Primecoin. So I'm not, you know, on my Bitcoin journey, I've touched a bunch of other coins as well.
So no one's a perfect hodler, exactly. | |
Shaan Puri | Are you able to buy the dip when the dip is like $30,000? It's like, well, my cost basis is $192, or whatever. Even if it's $3,000, my cost basis is $3,000. Buying at $30,000... it's like, "Buy the dip!" Great!
So, are you able to psychologically do that, or are you just like, "Hey, my position is set. I hope the rest of you suckers buy the dip so that we keep this upward momentum?"
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Dan Held | Yeah, so technically I'm over 100% of my net worth in Bitcoin because I took a small leveraged position back when Bitcoin was $7,000 at the bottom of the cycle. I believe that Bitcoin, you know, in a bull run obviously appreciates.
So, right, technically over 100% of my net worth is in Bitcoin. Also, I do something where I lend out my Bitcoin to earn a yield. That yield is like a day-to-day stacking mechanism to add more stats, to add more Bitcoin. | |
Shaan Puri | And you're using what? Like Kraken, BlockFi? Who would you use?
So, Kraken doesn't... you're at Kraken now. I put them first, but I don't think they offer this as a service.
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Dan Held | I appreciate the shout-out, but no, we don't offer that yet.
Yeah, so we've got BlockFi, Ledin, and Genesis Trading. At Genesis Trading, you have to have a minimum of 20 Bitcoin to be a customer.
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Shaan Puri | By the way, I bought some secondary on Kraken. So, I'm with you on the Kraken train. Let's go all the way to...
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Sam Parr | The top... how the hell? When you say Kraken, how many people at Kraken do you think have more than $15,000,000?
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Shaan Puri | how do you employ people when they're all fucking rich | |
Sam Parr | That's what I want to know. How often do they tell you, "Hey, you know what, Dan? Go fuck yourself. I'm out." And then, like, next week it's, "Dan, I'm bored. You got a spot for me?" Yeah, it's... you know.
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Dan Held | It's a particular challenge for crypto. I mean, crypto is the hardest industry to build a business in. Think about it this way: you've got monsoon season, the bull run, and you want to capture all of that revenue potential.
But if you start to spend and deploy capital through hiring and building offices and whatnot, by the time the bull run is over, when do you turn off the spigot? When do you stop all that cash flow going out? And how much do you cut back? I think that's really, really tricky. How do you predict these cycles? No one knows. If we did, we'd all be trillionaires.
So I think the most difficult part of this is figuring out how to build a business with those fluctuations in demand and how to match expenses to meet that.
In terms of employee churn, it's super tricky. I actually put in my job descriptions for my growth marketing team: "No crypto experience required." I find it really refreshing when folks come in and challenge the language we use in our ads, homepage, app store page, etc., on how we describe crypto.
I've been in too long; it's hard for me to zoom all the way out and see what it looks like from a newbie's perspective. So, I like that perspective.
To address the motivational issue, I think folks who are new to crypto are much hungrier than those who haven't been there.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, so let's do this. Private wealth manager.
So, what would you actually build here? Would it be a services company? Would it be a software company? What would be the... how would you attack this problem?
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Dan Held | Yeah, it's a services company, and you can't take basis points (bps) on assets under management (AUM). That's like an old way to do it. You have to figure out some sort of new model that's maybe more subscription-based or something like that.
The first and foremost problem you're tackling is taxes. Taxes are incredibly complicated for crypto trades, especially if you're going to do DeFi things.
So, one would be taxes. Taxes not only cover trades but also cover future tax minimization strategies. For example, there's a trust called a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT). A GRAT is a great way to pass on your crypto to your son, daughter, etc., or a partner without any taxable events occurring.
So, there are all sorts of very advanced structures that exist for very wealthy folks that most crypto people have no idea about. They weren't institutional wealth; they didn't work at Goldman Sachs. They were in their basement mining Bitcoin or mining Ethereum. You know, it's a whole different world, right? | |
Shaan Puri | Right, and that's where we're going to trust different things. In fact, I think, yeah, what you did where you built your brand and you built a big audience. I think you have a few hundred thousand followers on Twitter for Bitcoin.
I think that's what you would do if you came out and said, "Hey, I'm the Bitcoin tax guy, and I'm going to talk every day about how to deal with the tax problem of Bitcoin and wealth management for wealthy Bitcoiners."
My sales are all going to happen through content, and then you'll probably get billionaires coming inbound saying, "Hey, will you manage my stuff?" That's how you would do this.
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Dan Held | I've known these billionaires personally for **eight** years. So, I actually DM'd a bunch of them and asked if they used multifamily offices, and none did.
Right? So, I already know that it's a problem that they're not currently solving. They went to some traditional financial folks and talked to me about their experiences. I was like, "Wow, that sounds terrible."
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Sam Parr | right | |
Dan Held |
So for me, I'm very happy at Kraken. I love the team I'm working with, and I love the team I've built. Also, they acquired my company, so I'm very incentivized to stick around. I couldn't be more excited in terms of a rocket ship in this space - Kraken's a great spot to be at.
I'm a growth guy, so it's all about that hypergrowth, and Kraken's like a perfect spot. But this [project] is more for fun on the side. We're all tinkerers; we like to tinker with stuff and think through things. This is kind of my recent fascination.
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Shaan Puri | So, Sam, do you know about the tether? Have you heard this, Sam?
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Sam Parr | no okay | |
Shaan Puri | So, I'll ask Dan to kind of explain this.
Dan, I'm going to ask you to do two things.
1. Explain what some people are afraid of with Tether and why that might be, you know, people call it, "Oh, is this the black swan that's going to crash all of crypto?" etcetera, etcetera.
2. Then, how do you sleep at night being 100% of your net worth in Bitcoin, knowing that this potential exists with Tether?
So, explain the potential problem and then how you think about it.
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Dan Held | Sure, so Tether is called a **stablecoin**. A stablecoin is a representation of a fiat currency. So, Tether represents U.S. dollars and it's called **USDT**.
USDT is created by companies wiring money into a Cayman Islands entity. They wire it in there, and then Tethers are minted and created. Those are put on blockchains. Tether has existed on the Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum blockchain, and Tron blockchain, amongst others, I think as well.
What Tether represents is a **one-to-one backing** of a dollar. Now, the company that issues these, which is like Tether Limited and Bitfinex (which is an exchange), there were concerns over if they were truly backed one-to-one. There were moments when it wasn't, but they've recently reached a settlement with, I believe, the New York District Attorney. I think that's who they settled with... this Attorney General.
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Shaan Puri | new york attorney general I think | |
Dan Held | There are so many regulators; I forget who settled with whom. But yeah, they essentially settled and agreed to perform audits to determine exactly how much they had in reserve.
The controversy and the worry is that Tether's reserves... So, there are a couple of worries.
First and foremost, Tether's reserves aren't backed, and that could lead to a classic "run on the bank" situation. More people might try to redeem Tethers, and there may not be enough dollars in the bank to fulfill those redemptions. This would cause structural problems in the crypto ecosystem.
Number two is the idea that USDT is being used in smart contracts and DeFi, but it's completely centralized. USDT, like USDC, are stablecoins that are centrally issued by companies like Tether and Circle. They can be reversed, frozen, or paused, which is not truly decentralized.
A lot of the DeFi space, for example, MakerDAO, is affected by this. MakerDAO is an algorithmic stablecoin, and almost 50% of its collateral consists of centralized stablecoins. This represents a systemic risk to both DeFi and centralized finance, also known as exchange-based finance.
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Shaan Puri | So, the fear is basically if the Tether people are not being on the up and up. You have to trust people, which is kind of the anti-crypto way. They could just be printing Tethers or holding not 1-to-1 dollar assets.
They could be like a bank, fractionally reserving, saying, "Oh, for every dollar we have, we have 5 Tethers," and basically using that to buy Bitcoin.
So, it's like artificially inflating the price. It's not that Bitcoin has any issue with it, but that's what's driving up run-ups in price. There is a huge amount of Bitcoin that's bought with Tether, and so that's the question.
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Dan Held | **Concern**: Now, how legitimate is the concern?
If we dig into it—and I wrote about this in the *Held Report*, my newsletter—if you dig into this, it isn't as bad as people say. There are all sorts of moments when Tether wasn't fully collateralized, as in there wasn't enough Tether to be redeemed for dollars, and the industry was fine.
Also, we're talking about exchanges that don't hold Tether; the users hold Tether. So, Tether is just like any other crypto asset. There have been tons of times when multi-billion dollar crypto assets have gone to zero, and the structural problems in the space have been okay.
We've also suffered much more egregious moments in the crypto space, like Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox represented 90% of trading volume. This would be like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken all going down at the same time. You know, these are hugely stressful moments for the marketplace.
Bitcoin has been through a lot worse. Bitcoin inherently doesn't need Tether. Tether is being used to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but for example, different government fiat currencies are used to buy Bitcoin. That doesn't mean that Bitcoin is dependent on the dollar. It's not dependent on USDT.
Then I think, you know, another concern that I forgot to bring up earlier is that people hypothesize Tether is being used to pump Bitcoin. I think that's completely unfounded. It was based on a University of Texas research report, which I don't even know if you could call it research. It was like a research report where they basically said that correlation is causation, which is absurd.
It's like saying that, you know, umbrellas cause rain because they're correlated. So, it was really ridiculous. That's where the core root of some of the concerns that Tether is being used to pump Bitcoin comes from—completely unfounded. There's no data that supports that.
Also, there are moments when Tether is printed and Bitcoin goes down, but of course, the people who buy into this theory ignore those moments.
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Shaan Puri | Right, and okay, so that's a great answer. I want to switch to basically talking about other Bitcoin or other, let's say, crypto ideas that you see.
Are there any interesting ideas that the average person is either not aware of or that are not as well known yet? Do you see any opportunities for someone to go build?
Do you see any other opportunities besides the private wealth management space? | |
Dan Held | The private wealth management one, for me, is just really sticky. That one's super interesting.
Other ones that would be good as well, I just think simplicity is the ultimate way to go. Building a product means that folks find value in your product much more quickly. You can convey the value proposition, and people discover the value proposition; they could activate it at a higher rate.
So I think the simplest, a very, very simple mobile experience for wallets is still very underappreciated. I think the wallet space still has horrid user experience.
For example, when you send a Bitcoin transaction, Bitcoin transactions have two states: unconfirmed and confirmed. To a layperson, like, what does that even mean? You know, all wallets default to this language, and I would disagree that they should even default to that language. I mean, you should add a layer above that in the GUI or something much more understandable.
Wallets are kind of fundamental to the core ethos of the system, and there are a lot of things you can do now where you layer in trading capabilities built in there, etc. So I think the space still doesn't have great, great-to-use wallets. I think Exodus wallet is really good, but other than them, I haven't seen an experience around the core experience of holding your crypto that was just mind-blowingly amazing. Do you?
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Sam Parr | have a security team like a physical security team | |
Shaan Puri | do we like pocket cards and shit no you | |
Dan Held | Well, I'm in Texas, so obviously I own a few guns. It's a "come and take it" sort of attitude. At conferences, I do have security. Who do you hire? It's provided to me through the company.
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Sam Parr | how much do they spend each year on on these on security guards | |
Dan Held | Do you know? I'm not sure, but Kraken is constantly focused on security. They're kind of nuts when it comes to security at Kraken.
In terms of how you control where your laptop is and everything else, they're an exchange. Kraken has been around for 10 years and has never been hacked. So for us, they're constantly paranoid about that.
The human attack vector is the weak point in any tech system, so they're very conscious about different executives and high-profile individuals—like where they are. You know, if they're at events with a lot of people, they have to think about physical security.
It's something that they think about all the time. I have no idea how much that costs, though.
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Sam Parr | I would be curious to hear about that because whenever I see... I mean, I don't have... I'm in a different friend group than you. Maybe I've got a few friends that have tens of millions of Bitcoin, but I am always curious as to how the actual security works.
I would think that when it comes to hacking, it would be just like stealing... like kidnapping someone, stealing the person, as opposed to trying to break into the system.
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Dan Held | Totally, yeah. And that's actually classically called the "wrench attack" in the Bitcoin world. It's that someone could come to you and just slap you over the head with a wrench.
Right now, at the same time, Sam, you've done very well. And, Michonne, like you guys have both done very well. We see you guys know billionaires that walk around the streets of San Francisco.
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Shaan Puri | mhmm and | |
Dan Held |
They're not getting mugged and kidnapped for ransom. So, with Bitcoin... Yeah, Bitcoin is easily transferrable, but let's say that this person is not into Bitcoin at all. They can easily take their liquid assets, buy Bitcoin, and then transfer it to the kidnapper. Whether or not you hold Bitcoin, if that makes you more or less likely to be attacked, I don't think it does. Well, that...
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Sam Parr | Doesn't necessarily seem fair. But that said, I'm not entirely educated on this, so I'm not sticking by this quite hardly or entirely.
When I have money in a variety of different places, there are a pretty large amount of checks and balances that go into transferring it. I just tried to transfer money to another bank today, and there was a hard cutoff. Whereas with a lot of crypto stuff, you can literally have it in a stored, like some type of store, like physical.
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Shaan Puri | I could... I could fat-finger the number I'm putting in, and I could transfer, you know, instead of $5, I could transfer $5,000. You know? Yeah.
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Sam Parr | and I don't get | |
Shaan Puri | and there's no getting it back | |
Sam Parr | Credit cards do a pretty good job of providing fraud protection. Usually, it's called... what's it called? The $250,000 of checking accounts are insured.
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Dan Held | f d a I yeah yeah | |
Shaan Puri |
FDA. I [think there's a] big problem of like death, right? So I think there's a startup opportunity here too, which is: What happens to your Bitcoin when you die? And how do you manage that?
On one hand, you can leave instructions to your spouse or whatever, which is like, "Hey, to get access to all of our private keys, here's what you do." But now you have instructions to get all your private keys that's... you know, somewhere. So you have to protect that. So you have to have like multiple layers.
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Dan Held | You're starting to go down the rabbit hole. You're starting to... exactly. It gets you kind of in the circular logic loop of like, "Well, I can't trust anyone else with my money, so I need to manage my private key." And then it's like, "Well, if I want to pass it on, I have to trust them."
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. And then you also have the problem of property transfer when you die. It goes through either probate or you have a will. I just think that there's probably a lot there.
If you look at this group of crypto wealthy individuals as just a new customer that exists, it's important to consider. I have this framework, this 2 by 2, which is like: Is it an old problem or a new problem? And then, is there an old solution or a new solution?
In this case, it's a bunch of old problems, but we need a new solution because it's a new type of customer. | |
Dan Held | Goes back to the private wealth management idea.
There's actually a way to solve this too. It's called **multisignature**, which means that your Bitcoin isn't controlled by one key that opens up the vault. There are 3 keys, and you need 2 out of 3 keys to open the vault.
There are also 3 out of 5 key structures, so those would be how you do this over time. You could give your CPA 1 key, your wife or husband 1 key, and keep 1 key for yourself. You could also give the other 2 keys to whomever else or keep all 3 on your own.
There are a lot of elegant ways to do that. I think **multisig** is the only way that's viable. But the thing is, now you have to educate your CPA. There’s no CPA in the world that knows private key management well, right?
That's where this entity would, for example, be one of the key holders. They would know very good private key management practices and only sign under certain conditions, which would also help against the kidnapping vector.
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Shaan Puri | and where | |
Dan Held | they would have like a velocity limit | |
Shaan Puri | You've DM'd me before about stuff that's in the creator, kind of like audience space. I don't know where you want to go with that, so I'll kind of leave it open.
But you seem to have a theory or a framework of where the puck is going when it comes to this creator thing. I don't know, you've successfully built your personal brand.
You know, like, I don't know how many years ago nobody knew who the heck Dan Held is, and today you're known by a bunch of, you know, crypto nerds.
So, what is it? Give me your thought process around either one of those two: generally where it's going, or for you specifically, how you think about it.
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Dan Held | Yeah, so I'm a growth product marketing guy. When I find a vein of gold, like engagement or user acquisition, it just fascinates me, right?
The creator economy is about... you know, for most folks on the show, I'd say they're up to speed with creator economy stuff. Okay, cool.
So, I built an audience in the crypto space, specifically in the Bitcoin space. My main message is just Bitcoin, though. I'm straight to the Bitcoin ethos and I've been in it for a long time. My last name is a pun on the favorite meme "HODL." My last name actually is real, though; it truly is Hell. It's actually a German last name.
With that, I just decided to lean into it. I started to write long-form articles and tweet, and those got traction. Over time, I found that there's a certain way these gain traction. It's not by random circumstance; there are ways to understand the engagement algorithm and use that to propagate your message. For me, I really love the nature of Bitcoin in that regard.
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Shaan Puri | what's an example of a of something you saw that that was working | |
Dan Held | Sure! You can use Twitter's advanced search to find the most popular tweets from any account. Filter those by popularity, and then take note of the format of what they've tweeted. You can create an iteration of that.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held | you already know it's probably gonna work and you just take a small tweak and that's that almost always works yep you could also do a quote tweet where like let's say let's say like a naval tweet you can just copy paste naval's quote with quotes and tag naval and you'll get almost as much engagement as naval does yeah but even if you're a really tiny account so little little things like that there's a whole bunch of those that I discovered because yeah again I'm a growth marketing guy so I'm digging in and I'm like oh man this this engagement tactic really worked I've done some things like if you see auto playing videos you can build those in the media center in twitter which you have to have an ads account to do those but they're not an ad it's organic so little little tips and tricks like that consistency I think is the number one thing that people forget I have not missed tweeting a day in 3 years if you do you lose your spot in the relevancy engine with twitter so twitter every day there's there's like 90% of consumers and 10% of us creators well the creators create content for the board consumers the consumer session and the product and twitter needs to figure out how to hook them immediately and so twitter goes to all their previous engaged content and they go well who do they engage with every day and if they've built up an habit of engaging with myself then they're like well let's give them a damn hell tweet but if I don't tweet that day then they're maybe like oh let's give them a chris tweet or someone else's tweet because they need to go hook them immediately and then if that engagement loop gets built with them over time then I'll slowly start to lose relevancy with them so con consistency is absolutely the most important thing on twitter and most of these channels I think that was like the really big breakthroughs for me it's it's not quality it's quantity it's about always having content there for them to consume and building that habit and then you over time you focus on quality where I think I've gotten a little bit more high quality over time especially like I've stood up a youtube channel I've got 25,000 subs in in 6 months and I just shoot one continuous shot I don't I don't even edit it I just do one continuous shot even if I like sneeze or something I just kinda like keep going because I don't have enough time to spend in post production and doing cuts you guys have great video content I just don't have time to go do that | |
Sam Parr | had to do it but it's | |
Dan Held | All about like, does my audience... does my audience like, will they engage with the content? Well, it's an MVP, right? It's an MVP. If people like it, then you go spend time, you pay for an editor or something to help out.
Yeah, it's been an incredible journey going down this rabbit hole. And then, you know, monetization-wise too, just seeing all the different ways that folks... you know, tipping on Twitch, you've got like tipping on Twitter now, you've got subscription products, you've got swag. So let's go for it.
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Shaan Puri |
Three years from now, assuming the audience keeps growing and the monetization strategies get a bit more fleshed out for you, how much do you think an individual creator in your niche can make? How much do you think you can make just on the personal brand side of things? Let's forget about the job, investing, and other stuff.
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Dan Held | have you guys talked to pump yet yeah we've been a | |
Shaan Puri | couple times yeah | |
Sam Parr | and we both know him well I don't we I mean I | |
Shaan Puri | didn't ask him that but that question | |
Sam Parr | but if I if I we I can but we can guess I would guess | |
Dan Held | before k how about we all guess | |
Sam Parr | Okay, so let's not include investment revenue, which I think will be in the next...
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Shaan Puri | are we talking about like paid newsletter sponsorships yeah recurring revenue | |
Dan Held | job board | |
Shaan Puri | I think we should throw in there because that's kind | |
Dan Held | of like | |
Shaan Puri | part of the personal brand stuff | |
Dan Held | courses now courses | |
Sam Parr | but but | |
Shaan Puri | I'd like | |
Sam Parr | To say though, his investment revenue... if you told me that it makes him personally $30,000,000 spread evenly over the next 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised. Is that crazy, Sean? Is he...? | |
Shaan Puri | per year | |
Sam Parr | or are | |
Shaan Puri | you talking about 30 total | |
Sam Parr | sorry 30 total spread out evenly over 10 years | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I don't know how big his fund is so I'm just gonna take that out for a second I think | |
Sam Parr | I'm yeah | |
Shaan Puri | just a personal branch which is a little | |
Dan Held | bit 2 | |
Sam Parr | and a half 2 and a half | |
Shaan Puri | I would say 3 and a half what would you have guessed dan | |
Dan Held | 2 to 4 million is my best guess as to how much revenue he's making. That's based on my best knowledge.
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Sam Parr | right but maybe 5 people on staff so maybe half a1000000 in costs | |
Dan Held | yeah very very little overhead so very high margins | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held | These are all value accretive too. If someone gets a job through Pomp, they might be really inclined to sign up for his newsletter.
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Sam Parr | right | |
Dan Held | These aren't mutually exclusive sales, right? But by far, I think like... so he's got "Pomp." The biggest "Pomp" is... so this is our upper bound limit, and that's why I chose "Pomp," right?
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Sam Parr | is pomp the biggest what about | |
Shaan Puri | in in the bitcoin in the crypto space you're talking | |
Sam Parr | crypto space about my guy raoul pal or is that his name raoul pal | |
Dan Held | Yeah, Raoul Pal, he's more of a macro fighter. I mean, I guess we could call him crypto now because he's well...
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Sam Parr | Like, there are these... even though, let's say, a guy who's kind of a troll, even though I love him, like a James Altucher. I bet you he makes $30,000,000 a year in crypto newsletters.
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Dan Held | dude I don't I don't think james altucher the guy's from like 2017 era he's he's old | |
Sam Parr | he's a friend of mine dude he sold his new new his crypto newsletter for $60,000,000 | |
Dan Held | wow wow yes holy shit I didn't even know that | |
Sam Parr | Do you know Motley Fool? Yeah, Motley Fool does close to $100 million a month in revenue. Wow!
So, I think that Pomp is the popular one, but I bet you, I guarantee you, there are guys who have newsletters that they charge $20,000 a year for.
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Dan Held | but you guys have you guys did the breakdown of agora right that like crazy newsletter thing | |
Sam Parr | they bought james | |
Dan Held | Yeah, oh, okay. I mean, I got the... you know, after you guys did the breakdown of it, I actually talked to someone who worked there.
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Sam Parr | yeah | |
Dan Held | And got the breakdown. So, like that back-end newsletter, the one that's a really high markup, like the $1,000 a month, that's where they make all the money.
Yeah, it's like you got your $20 to $30 a month upfront one, and you get the $1,000 back-end one. I couldn't personally do it; I just feel kind of weird doing it personally.
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Sam Parr | were we wrong by the way were we wrong on our guesses for agora | |
Dan Held | In terms of the revenue, I didn't do any back-of-the-envelope revenue calculations. I just want to know, tactically, how do they think about it?
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Shaan Puri | I'm with you, Dan. There is something to that, like, this weird slippery slope where you end up with this small 1% of these whales who you've just milked their whole life savings because they think they're getting this thing. No, no thanks.
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Dan Held | I'm not interested in short-term gains. I'd rather build longer-term value to deliver something that I think is truly worth that amount of money.
Uh-huh. That's where I've experimented with courses. So, I've got my newsletter, I've got my newsletter, and I've got ads. Which world is the best?
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Shaan Puri |
The best combination of effort, fun, and money... If you combine those, right? You want a low effort, high fun, high money. What is the best one so far you've experimented with as a creator of these tools in your tool belt?
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Dan Held | Probably YouTube because it's kind of fun showing a product that you really love. I only represent products that I personally use, and that's an ethical standard I have for myself. This means that I have eliminated a lot of the potential advertisers that would pay me a lot more. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Dan Held |
For me, it's the only way that I feel like it'd be appropriate for me to represent this product. Then the YouTube is fun because I get to have like a little skit with it where I bring it up, I talk about it, I represent it.
The newsletter... it's a lot of work. I mean, writing an article a week doesn't sound like a lot, but yeah, it's a lot.
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Sam Parr | oh yeah it's a lot | |
Dan Held | it's it's a ton of work and you take pride in it | |
Shaan Puri | You want it to be paid. There's a bar of these people who paid for this information, so the information had better be different, unique, and awesome every week. Totally.
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Dan Held |
I know I'm a... you know, classic growth guy. So I have a survey at the end of each one to get like a raw NPS score. I get feedback on what the next article they want written. That way I write the best, most relevant content, which means that they're satisfied.
But it's tough, you know? It's really hard to... I don't know how Pump does it daily. I... he...
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Shaan Puri | must have | |
Sam Parr | said I think he's got a guy I I would bet that he's got about 2 young guys who do | |
Shaan Puri | he says he does it he says he sits down he writes it in one take | |
Sam Parr |
Well, I went out... Me and my wife and him and his wife all went out to lunch one day and just hung out. Paulina, his wife, was teasing him. She was like, "It takes me forever to write my weekly thing. He just sits down and he does it in 15 minutes and he's done."
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Dan Held | I mean I've I've had some that have like cruised through like a straight like stream of consciousness but it's tough | |
Shaan Puri | some of | |
Dan Held | I do a lot of research for projects. For example, I wrote one on Bitcoin and DeFi, and that was a ton of work. I actually tried a couple of different apps.
There's a lot of work involved, but it's fun.
The ROI would be a YouTube channel where I do these pre-roll and mid-roll ads. They're kind of fun to do because I can visually show off the product in a more compelling way.
This is different from the newsletter, which I have to sit down and really think through hard. I want to make sure I represent it really, really well. | |
Shaan Puri |
By the way, you're a growth guy. I've said that this Bitcoin laser eyes thing is one of the most genius, kind of like decentralized marketing tactics I've ever seen. I... what is the origin story? Is there an origin story?
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Dan Held | where you | |
Sam Parr | and that's find it | |
Shaan Puri | No, no, no. I don't know if he invented it. I'm saying, do you know? He knows more people than I do. Where did this come from, and who are the geniuses that came up with this?
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Dan Held | Yeah, so I wrote about Bitcoin's decentralized marketing team before. Bitcoin has no central marketing organization; there's no propaganda arm of Bitcoin. It's like me, Pomp, and everyone else who talks about Bitcoin.
I don't know who originated it. It's like the origin of memes. Sometimes you can find where a meme came from, but sometimes it just kind of came from nowhere. I'm not sure who the first person was, and the one I know has claimed it.
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Shaan Puri | Which is insane because somebody should... and you could be the first person who did this, right? That's not like a wild thing, but it's genius.
It is like Bitcoin in so many ways; it is a religion. This is just yet another, like, you know, religious mark basically. You know, this is the yarmulke. This is the thing you wear that says, "Hey, I'm a part of this religion."
Putting it in the profile picture, having it be slightly mysterious so people don't know what it's for, and then they ask... and then making it memeable where we can all do it, I think is just brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
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Dan Held | Yeah, the space is... I mean, memes are such an incredible part of how stuff is communicated nowadays, right? Like, I mean, we saw that elections can... people can be elected based on memes. Memes aren't just these funny things on 4chan or Reddit anymore. Memes are like the main trend. My mom uses memes now; she does it on Facebook.
But, you know, it's crazy. It's narrative compression at its finest. It's taking a whole narrative and compressing it into one image. I think that's why it's so powerful as a transmission method.
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Shaan Puri | It's the most shareable, viral thing you can do right on the internet. Memes are the packaging for ideas. If you want to most efficiently package an idea, a meme is the best way.
I've joked about this thing called "Meme University" or "LOL University" or something like that. They basically took the website of Lambda School and remade it for a school that would teach you how to do memes. That's nuts! It was a joke website; it's not like there's a real course behind it. But I was like, you know, if there really should be a course that somebody should take, this is it.
If you could learn this, it's like learning the native tongue of the internet. It's pretty important to be fluent in the internet nowadays.
I think that's one area where I'm like, someone really should create this. I have this Slack channel that Ben and I use, where we basically put out a challenge. We said, "Every day for 50 days, we're going to make a new meme."
You know, it's easy to spread these, but the act of actually making one is hard. It's about telling a story or telling a joke in the most efficient form. It's been so challenging to just do this every day for 50 days.
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Dan Held |
Oh, what's kind of fun is my buddies over at eToro... Brad Mitchelson, really, really smart marketing guy. Him and I are buddies, and what they did is they started to create GIFs on Giphy. And Giphy, like that, that gets pulled into Facebook Messenger.
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Shaan Puri | yeah search engine | |
Dan Held | Twitter GIFs. So, I started to make... I saw their strategy for eToro and I made that for myself. I took the most popular Bitcoin memes and then wrapped them in my own black and white design.
This way, you could search for "Dan Held" and you'd see a bunch of black and white GIFs with my logo watermarked on them.
So, you can kind of create "meme factories," which is what I learned from that. You can create a meme factory to use that to propagate content. Giphy was a really great way of doing it because it's plugged into so many different platforms.
Versus, if you were to create each one individually, like trying to create an emoji for each social platform, that would be tough. But Giphy gets pulled into all of them. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah that's smart I like that | |
Sam Parr | alright we're about at the top of the hour do we wanna go over one more idea or what sean | |
Shaan Puri | I don't know if you have if you have one that's burning you could do it otherwise I think we should wrap it up | |
Dan Held | Cool, well, yeah. I mean, just my closing thought on the creator economy stuff: I've been in Bitcoin for 9 years, and that has been a huge fascination for me. I would say the creator economy is not an equal fascination, but it is quickly becoming something very interesting.
I think about it as the monetization of all human information. Creators are just taking whatever knowledge they have locally, putting that on the internet, distributing it, and then monetizing that. What is the value of all of that combined? I mean, it's tens of trillions—$100,000,000,000,000. I don't know what it's worth, but for me, I just kind of see this huge potential.
There are so many niche things that someone could write about—there are a million things! It's very low effort to find your MVP. Before, you had to go buy a warehouse and start producing things. Now, you just produce content. If that content resonates and people click and want to figure out what products you'd recommend for them, then you can go build your own products.
So, I see the economy kind of reorienting around content marketing, and that being the top of the funnel in idea generation for all future products. | |
Sam Parr | great well what do you think sean what are we doing | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, let's wrap it up. I like that one. I like the way you explained that because I think it aligns with something I believe, which is that when there's never been more information, it's all about who actually has attention.
The person who's going to have attention is whoever is putting out great content consistently. Great content once will get your attention, and then great content consistently will build trust. This just says, "Look, it's too noisy. I'm just going to go to my sources I like."
Then those people hold the keys. Up until now, that's been captured by the platforms. That's been true, but YouTube has still captured way more value, and Twitch captured way more value, and Twitter captured way more value than the people on it.
That seems to be flipping, where either new platforms are going to come out where the creators own it, or the value is going to accrue off-platform in a bigger way than it did originally. I think the value accrued like 99.1% to the platform and 1% to the creators. I think that's going to flip closer to 50/50 over time. | |
Sam Parr | and I | |
Dan Held | Think Twitter has recognized this, right? With the super follows, where you can have subscription followers, people subscribe to a premium set of tweets you have. I mean, Twitter sees this coming. They see the exodus of folks building an audience on Twitter and then the exodus of all that monetization going to Substack. They're trying to bring that back in. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I think that's sort of just trading one master for another, though. In a way, it's like as long as Twitter will put Super Follows there and then they'll take the cut they want. As long as they're the button to pay for stuff, they'll just inch that cut from 10% to 15% to 20% to 50% over time.
So, I think the real answer here is: how do you build this independently? I think basically that's the part of crypto I'm most excited about. It's people who are building a social network that is open source. If it can get adoption—and this is why I was interested in Bitcloud—then that ratio will flip. All the value will accrue to the creators and not to the core platform or protocol underneath.
So, that's what I'm excited about. That's the real disruption there.
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Sam Parr |
Well, we appreciate you coming on, Dan. I've been following you on Twitter now for a couple weeks since Sean's been talking about you. He's been saying that you were the guy to speak to, and we appreciate it.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, so go give him a follow. He's at @DanHeld on Twitter.
Alright, we'll see you later.
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