Primer: Jᵾlien Genestoux's dream is to change the incentives around content creation and to ensure that creators are rewarded based on the value they create for their members. Learn how he is going to achieve this with Unlock Protocol in this episode of the Zima Red Podcast.
Background
Software engineer, entrepreneur, and founder
Started to learn how to code at 13 when his father brought an old Mac from the office
In his first year of university, he created an online job board for students because he was bored. After 3-5 months, McDonald's started to put job offers on his website. It grew to a couple of 100,000 students on his website
"This internet thing is magic. It allows anyone to, you know, make a little business, create a thing that's useful for everybody else." - Jᵾlien Genestoux
When Google AdSense launched, he integrated it. In the first month, he earned $8,000 in ads. His father was shocked and created a company for him
His Path After College
Wanted to move to the US. Only way to do that is to work for a French bank in the US
Worked as a banker for BNP Paribas in San Francisco for 2 years doing leveraged buyouts
Was still running his student job board business remotely
Was using RSS feed readers a lot during the early days of blogging. Left the bank to create a company called Superfeedr, a RSS Feed API that allows anyone to publish and consume RSS feeds
When you publish a post on your site, Superfeedr will identify it and push that content out to subscribers so that apps would consume that content in real-time
Had to raise money for Superfeedr at the start. One of their investors was Mark Cuban
Superfeedr became a profitable business very quickly
Subsequently, Medium, the publishing platform, acquired Superfeedr. Joined Medium and worked there for about 2.5 years
His Experience At Medium
Was his first tech job
Learned a lot of things, such as working with a team of people. Before that, he was kind of a solo entrepreneur
Had a very good internal culture
Medium had some issues with monetization. Eventually ended up with a membership model where medium users pay to unlock features, content, or status on the platform:
Text-to-speech medium stories
Original content that was only available for members
Medium members getting a green halo around their avatar
Was surprised that thousands of people were paying for the halo status. People are actually fine with paying for things online
"If you actually make it easy for people to pay, if you make it kind of obvious why they pay and what they pay for. If you ask for a few dollars, a lot of them will actually do it because they care about supporting the mission, the vision." - Jᵾlien Genestoux
Thoughts On The Current Structure Of The Internet
Andrew: Current business model of the internet is ad prevalent and encourages outrage as that drives the most engagement. What are his thoughts on this?
Thinks that it is unhealthy and is worried for the web as he sees the web as kind of our collective brain
If we incentivize for content that triggers, we not only end up with fake news, but information overload
"And [Internet] it's kind of a collective brain that has a weird incentive structure where basically the people that are getting paid the most are the ones that are able to steal or trigger us the most. And to trigger people, unfortunately, you have to show ugly things or you have to make them upset, you have to make them angry. I mean making people happy doesn't pay well. It's sad, but I think it's how we work collectively." - Jᵾlien Genestoux
When BuzzFeed launched, people were celebrating that they are able to publish hundreds of stories each day, much more than what traditional media could do. He thinks this is dangerous as it's mainly information overload with clickbait
"I mean, if you read hundreds of crappy stories, is it better than five good stories? I don't think so. But clearly, from a financial perspective, it's better to write hundreds of crappy stories than five great ones. That whole business model around attention, I think is, again, dangerous." - Jᵾlien Genestoux
Initial Attraction To Crypto
First time he heard about crypto was in 2011/2012. One of his contractors on Superfeedr wanted to be paid in Bitcoin
Bought some Bitcoin on Mt. Gox and stayed on the sidelines
His friend introduced him to Ethereum very early on. Downloaded the Mist Browser and found it too complicated and did not get involved any further
While at Medium, he started discovering that they had a lot of crypto content on their platform. He was researching on a way for Medium to pay writers from anywhere in the world and stumbled on cryptocurrencies again. This is when he started to dive into crypto
Thoughts On DAOs
Thinks that DAOs will eventually replace a lot of institutions
Thinks that the first DAO is Bitcoin. People were willing to invest in a miner and get paid by the system for mining blocks
Before that, there was Wikipedia, where people show up in a permissionless, decentralized manner to write/edit articles without being explicitly told to do so by someone else
Will DAOs Replace Traditional Companies?
Thinks that B Corp will become some kind of a DAO, where people work in an adhoc way for a smart contract
Will see the emergence of new kinds of structures
Will have a new class of worker (i.e. the DAO worker)
Governance Of Public Goods By A DAO
Doesn't have to be everyone voting on everything. Could be a delegation of votes towards people who are good maintainers/stewards
People could collectively co-own the infrastructure/public good that they use
How Did He First Learn About NFTs?
Left Medium to look at ways to represent memberships
In the physical world, people use badges or member cards to represent membership
Realized CryptoKitties are unique. This feature is similar to memberships
The ERC-721 standard could be used for unique collectibles
Unlock Protocol
Introduction
An extension of what they have discussed earlier — people should be able to easily create a membership and sell them to their fanbase
Goal of Unlock Protocol is to change incentives around content creation and to ensure that creators are rewarded based on the value they create for their members. They do not need to resort to stealing their fans' attention
Creators are able to deploy a membership contract, which is called a Lock
A Lock sells access membership in the form of NFTs. Whenever someone purchases a membership, they get a NFT that represents that membership
They have worked with Github to allow people to purchase a NFT to support their favourite open source developers
Why Is It Important That Memberships Be In The Form Of NFTs?
Need something to indicate membership
Payment/credit card statements/receipts are not enough. They do not make for a good experience
Can Memberships Be Transferred?
Has a partial transfer feature
For example, if a NFT grants you a 1-month membership to a blog, you could transfer 1 day of that 1-month membership to a friend. You will then be left with 29 days' worth of membership
Monetization Method
Make money using their credit card gateway — allowing people who don't have a crypto wallet to easily purchase memberships
When purchases are made using a credit card, they take a small fee to cover the credit card costs
Their Non-Custodial Wallet
It's like a Web2 account with an email login and a password
The password is neither stored on a database nor on its form. It's just used to encrypt the private key
When users create an account, they create a private key randomly from the user's machine and encrypt it with the user's password. After this is done, they forget the private key
User Acquisition
Working with different companies and projects and integrating Unlock Protocol at the core of their applications
Examples of integrations:
A video platform where the creator can create a video room that is only accessible by members
Unlocking access to specific venues in Decentraland
Integration with WordPress for blog creators to deploy a membership system
Creating bots for Discord and Telegram
Evolution Of Unlock
Integration with more products and services
Wants Unlock Protocol to belong to everyone. Launched Unlock DAO a few weeks ago for users to vote on the upgrades of the protocol
A Marketplace For Memberships?
Expecting a marketplace for memberships to emerge, where people can buy and sell memberships from one another
Thinks that companies like Netflix would support such a marketplace. If users do not use the product and get charged for it, when they unsubscribe, it would be very difficult for the company to get them back as subscribers. If their membership could be passed around, it would make for a more loyal subscriber base
Best And Hardest Things About Being A Founder
Best Things
Seeing your vision being executed is very exciting
Hardest Things
The feeling of loneliness that people can't see his vision of the world
Unlock Protocol In 10 Years
Unlock is used for Netflix and Amazon
Creators on Netflix opening up their content to their members who are not on Netflix
Have an Amazon Prime NFT in his wallet
Get discounts on audio swag because he is a Zima Red subscriber
Single Favourite NFT
A few weeks ago, he was very lucky to buy a Blitmap
The image is generated by the smart contract itself
Most Controversial Thought On NFTs
NFTs are way more than just art
If You Could Improve One Thing In The Space
Onboarding users who do not have wallets
World Of NFTs In 3 Years
NFTs being used everywhere
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