YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg Solano

lines on the record: 46
first: 2022-09-01
most recent: 2022-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's a lot of people building in this space. And if you become an authentic part of it, you get involved in Discords. You have to use it as the secret. And then you'll find plenty of itches that you can join into Scratch.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say it's actually a richer opportunity to build a lot of the tools that communities need and want when we threw an event or Ape Fest event. It's not actually the smoothest process at this moment token gate an in-person event in a safe and secure way to someone with an NFT. And so an enterprising startup that had been working on a, actually it was a COVID vaccine app for verifying that you had your vaccine card pivoted to being an NFT authenticator for an event like this. It's brilliant. Loved it. They're called token proof. It was a great success.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say that there is the aspect of consumer goods associated with BOIC that's like a strong vertical. But really, I think the vertical that we're most bullish in and that we think is most ripe for disruption is in the games industry like we're talking about, where there's already single companies that are doing billions in digital assets that are essentially renting these things to the end user rather than having them own them. And so it's actually much more ripe for disruption with actually thinner margins than what's happening in the space already.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already lived the experience of having incredibly rich digital lives translate into our real ones. And I think setting up the standards for things to be kind of more egalitarian, more fair, more transparent, allowing users more sovereignty over their assets. This stuff is just inherently better than doing it on a database somewhere else.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's another framing here as well, which is the simple fact that we already spend a huge amount of our lives digitally and then actually finding kind of richer ways to interact with each other for the times that we are spending digitally is incredibly powerful. When I grew up playing EverQuest, me and my best friend from elementary school were playing this online game. And we met some people, you know, characters. To us on the screen, they look like a dwarf and a half elf and an ogre. And we got to chatting with them. It turned out they were around our age. They had our same humor. My mom at the time was like, how do you know that's not a 40-year-old guy in the basement somewhere who's like trying to find something out about you or whatever? And I was like, I don't think that's the case, really. You know, I don't think they would have the same sense of humor. And lo and behold, you know, they lived in Virginia, met them in person. And so we.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't need to wear goggles. You can be on your phone. You can be on your computer. I think the important parts for us are The interaction, it's not a metaverse if you're playing Skyrim by yourself, you're playing Super Mario by yourself. What makes it the metaverse is you're in a virtual world that the community that people are helping kind of co-create, that it's maybe more akin to Minecraft or Roblox than some of these other virtual worlds. And actually owning your digital assets is a super important part of this whole experience for us as kids who grew up obsessed with MMRPGs we really valued the idea of, hey, we can make a gamified, interoperable fun metaverse of our dreams, this virtual.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, our vision of what the metaverse is at the base level, you think about a virtual world, a world where you have a character and you're jumping into a space.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, he's like incredibly energetic and likes to text in all caps and all that. And so he just was like, hey, what's your phone number? What's your name? At this point, you know, it was just like an anonymous board API club Twitter that he was even DMing and I was like, okay, I guess I'll tell him like, here's my number. And then he connected us over text with a guy named Gaiosiri, who he introduces as in all caps Israel's sexiest man alive and the manager to Red Hot Chili Peppers and YouTube and Madonna.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've spent four, six hours on the phone together almost every day since this whole thing started rarely in the same place.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think hidden in your question is, I think the answer, which is just the community in itself, like that's what propels it forward. And that's what the power and the network effects and the belovedness of the brand comes from. It's like that it was in actuality a grassroots thing that sprung up magically on one day in May of last year and has kept building on that. And so somebody trying to mimic that, copy it or whatever it is will never have kind of that immaculate conception of that moment”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like if we are focused on just what we have been, which is taking this thing that lives on the blockchain and making it more accessible and more fun translating into real world experiences, real world consumer goods that you can touch, there's a lot of opportunity in the world for people to actually own their digital assets and be able to use them. Like our whole philosophy here is that there's a ton of digital assets in the world in Web2 that we're kind of just renting. And so as long as the value proposition of truly owning your assets is already there and if we support that and innovate across that, everything else is going to figure itself out.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, all we can do is try and create as loving, welcoming, fun, strange, cool of a community as we can and kind of keep our heads down to do that.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say I think number one, that's part of the inspiration, let's say behind the Mutin Ape Yacht Club, which was essentially, this is like a lower tier membership for the club. No one would ever confuse an MAYC for a BAYC that's like a wild collection. And it's interesting. I mean, like you said, Board Apes were sold for $220. And frankly, we are not in control whatsoever of the price of these things. The reality is a lot of what's happened here, you know, we can't really take credit for what we can kind of take credit for is that we set the circumstances in the right way. We thought hard on how to make things more egalitarian, how to empower creators and that kind of stuff. But it's really the kind of growth that's being fueled by the community and what they're creating and what they're doing that's created this incredibly powerful feedback loop.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that was basically the idea here where if we're embracing the technology, if we're properly embracing the medium that we're distributing this stuff on, then that means that we're bracing the fact that anyone can prove that they own this on the smart contract. And so how can we attach certain privileges or rights to that permissionlessly? They don't need to come to us with a separate agreement to prove that the smart contract can be the thing in itself. And I think what we found is that when you do that, you're really empowering creators and the hive mind and the network effects and all of the benefits that you get from that are so much more powerful. You get to Disney levels of empathy and belovedness for a brand much sooner when somebody can own a little piece of Mickey Mouse.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, on kind of the eBay of NFTs, say like, Selling it to someone else and then Sudley's or Christie's picks it up and it sells for 100x that and the original artist maybe doesn't get a piece of that. So we do actually collect a 2.5% royalty on the BOIC collection on OpenSea.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, that wasn't our model. We actually decided to go opposite that. Matt and John, the creators of Cryptopunks, their monetization strategy, if they even thought that far, was around, hey, let's hold a bunch of punks ourselves. And if these are worth money later, we'll sell them. Our ethos was how do we make a club that's egalitarian where you just want one membership, one membership is equal to any other membership? And so to be faithful to the spirit of the club, you know, Wiley and I were like, no, we've only ever owned One Ape. We didn't even choose our apes. You know, and frankly, obviously, we're never going to sell them. So it was really about actually building the club, treating this like a startup. And if we could make money off the secondary tradings because other people are, you know, making money selling their apes. Cool. Then we take a small piece of that and can keep.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So to frame it even more, that week I was kind of despondent almost. I was sure that it didn't work because when project succeeded, they succeeded almost immediately. And if they didn't, that was it. And Wiley was pure fire at wanting to push through and brought me along and we hustled. But I will say I think maybe the part that you're missing there is A lot of the people who minted these were crypto native to some extent or another. And were excited about something that maybe felt like it was pushing the space forward, that was doing things right, that was offering like an interesting take on this thing that they'd seen before. If you work hard to try and build things for the crypto ecosystem, then I think it's a rewarding feedback loop if you're opening up the space of possibility.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was actually that number one, it was cheaper than almost everything out there. Number two, it was a flat price, so it wasn't getting more expensive, which is what was happening to a lot of these collections where like, cool, the first round of NFTs, say 500 or 2,000 or one price, but now the next batch is more expensive and nobody wants to pay that. And the other thing was that, you know, there was something that you could do with this. There was an idea that this was kind of a mysterious club and that you could get access to this like bathroom wall like there was a direct utility around the token that I think kind of was exciting. And I think some of what we were trying to do from a storytelling perspective and just frankly the sheer effort of the website kind of shined through to people that once we got eyeballs on it and all on the treasure hunt, what we're, you know, the IP rights and everything else that we could do, it just felt like, hey, maybe these guys are doing it right. Let's take a chance on that.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we were just on Twitter following, tagging anyone we could to get attention. And then what we also did is we thought, you know, wouldn't it be funny to make kind of honorary board apes? So like, you know, one's in the likeness of certain influencers or something like that, you know, like Kobe on crypto Twitter, whereas his like Bitcoin glasses, what if we put those on a board ape and tweeted it at him and tried to get him to laugh at how ridiculous this was. And so we did a lot of that. We've, you know, for a week there, we were trying to, you know, guerrilla market this thing in any way we could.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the uphill battle, and typically a collection in those days would either immediately catch fire, it seemed like, and sell out immediately, or would kind of never happen to them. And so we tried to be very clever about ways of drumming up interest. We had a treasure hunt on our website saying, hey, Had fallen out, and if you solve these puzzles, you can win this $2,000 basically.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Full license to the commercial rights to use that because that made a lot of sense to us because it was like this could be your identity on the internet. You could use it as your Twitter profile pick. You could do whatever you want. And if it's going to be your avatar and quote unquote the metaverse here, then you should be able to use it how you wish.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we tried to lay the groundwork a little bit firmer than that in the sense was unlike a lot of other NFT collections where it felt like the project, say, selling out or minting out was kind of the thing in itself. And then now this was fully in the hands of the community. And we'll see what happens or it's just a collectible. We started to think about like, hey, this is the board ape club. There's these 10,000 apes, but there's also this like kind of hinting towards this lifestyle brand maybe like, you know, it has this weird logo. It has this like brand identity that we wanted to empower. And so, and the other aspect that we baked in here was the idea that if you owned a board ape and could prove that on the smart contract level, you had it in your Ethereum wallet, then you also had, by virtue of the terms, a”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we all had day jobs except for Wiley. So we were just nights and weekends putting things together. There were certainly parts of it that we needed to hire out for even just like neither of them were much good at websites, for example. They were more like back end stuff for a lot of what they were doing. And so I think at the end of the day, it was somewhere around like $30,000 is what we ended up spending to do this.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so creme was not crypto native. I think he probably bought crypto a little bit in the past, but certainly not really paid attention to the space in the same way that Wiley and I had. But we were basically like, come on, come be part of the team. And he was like, okay, like, sure. I'd also called our friend Zishan, who's a, you know, actually studied computer science with Karem. He was a little timid about jumping into, but I think the idea that they would both have each other on their side of things to kind of lean on and get the technical part of the project done. They were like, okay, if we're all in it together, we're in. And so, you know, we added them to the LLC and we were off to the races.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so after filing the first LLC paperwork, I essentially got on the phone and called everybody I'd ever known that studied computer science. It wasn't very much more artful than that. I called Karem and was like, hey, do you know any JavaScript? And he was like, yeah, that's like a huge part of my job. And I was like, great, let's make an NFT like here. Look at what these things are. And like an hour later, he's like, this has nothing to do with JavaScript. Like, where did you even hear that?”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So the first thing we did after I texted Wiley, let's make an NFT. He was all in immediately. And to kind of ensure that this new COVID side project wouldn't just flounder as a side project. The next day I filed a legal zoom LLC. That was my way of kind of burning the ships. It's like, really, you're going to form an LLC and then give up on this. Like, no.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So our first idea there was, hey, maybe it's a, what's behind this wall, basically, this door that you can only get in with the NFT? Perhaps it's like an artboard where every 15 minutes, you can put a pixel down on this kind of board, this screen, with the idea being that you essentially have this collaborative art piece that's being created pixel by pixel by 10,000 people in this weird little club on the internet.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spent a long time batting around different ideas and frankly some of the times thinking more along the lines of what do we think people would like rather than what do we think is cool and what do we think would be fun and strange i think the first thing that unlocked for us was the idea of hey this nft this nonfungible token that lives on a blockchain and anyone in the world can basically audit who owns this token like how do we create a piece of our a piece of storytelling essentially that embraces that aspect of the medium and to us that was well if if i can say that this token one of 10 000 can never be confused with any other then we can have like a part of our website that's gated only to people in this community this can be kind of a strange little exclusive club there can be utility associated with this token um and so”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think our relationship came out of being obsessed with MMORPGs where, frankly, the pursuit of digital assets is everything. And out of the fascination with cryptocurrency and with the culture that we saw on crypto Twitter and the idea of wanting to make something, but kind of always falling out like, you know, we'd work on a literary magazine together. But, you know, well, is this actually going to be that big? Is this going to be that special? There's already McSweeney's in Paris Review and these other things. Whereas it felt like this unique moment where we actually know more deeply perhaps the crypto space than a lot of people with our storytelling backgrounds and it felt like maybe this is our moment to make something together that's special and really just contribute finally to this space in a way other than as spectators frankly”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was this project where each one is kind of this painting and each of these characters is wearing a mask. And there was a lot of kind of intrigue to the project, ideas about how you, you know, if you looked at the collection as a whole, kind of mapping up, you know, putting certain masks side by side that the backgrounds would connect and maybe tell you something. It felt kind of cryptic and fascinating. And more than anything, We're buying them, talking about them, excited about what this was.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't even buy Crypto Kitty. I found out about Crypto Punks a little later when I had kind of stepped away from crypto and foolishly didn't pick one up back then. So like Wiley said, it was really in 2021, in late January, early February, where there was this inflection point where there's these projects being released, or at least one in particular called HashMasks that felt like this isn't really a technical project. This doesn't feel like a creative technologist in a lab like put this together in the way that kind of crypto kitties or crypto punks felt back then. This was just an art project that was using blockchain as a medium and like any medium could open up the space of possibility. So that's when we got all of a sudden way more interested because of our backgrounds as storytellers.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a bit different in our opinion. Number one, the on-ramp to buying a crypto kitty, understanding what one was and how to use it was frankly much more difficult than it is today, I think. And the real precursor to what we've done and that we've built on was a project called Cryptopunks that came out a bit later that was a collection of 10,000 pixelated punks. It's like a profile picture. Some have 3D glasses. Some are like smoking cigarettes or other things. It just felt like this really strange, cool project. And there was only 10,000 of them. You weren't going to breed them and make more. It's just you could have one of the 10,000 or not.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was interesting to me in that, like, you could actually do something. Like here was a token, something that's living on the blockchain that's not just like a quote-unquote store of value. This isn't meant to transact with. This isn't money. It's a digital cat. But what was strange at that time was I couldn't understand the end goal there. Like you could just keep breeding them and breeding them. There's no scarcity. It was difficult to understand like what cat could you really want. It felt like a game where the stakes weren't clear.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in 2017, you kind of couldn't have been involved in crypto without hearing about a project called Crypto Kitties. It felt like it was clogging up the Ethereum network at one point with how many people were out there collecting these digital cats and breeding them and playing with them.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A poet, and I'm always about simplifying things down to their core and what's the most viable minimal thing that then other people can take and run with. And I think the process of working together has been really fruitful and meeting somewhere in the middle. And I rein him back and he pushes me into the pool.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we have a very strong kind of yin and yang relationship is how we like to talk about it. There's a boldness to Wiley that's incredibly powerful in how he like approaches things and a willingness to keep focused on an idea for a long period of time. I liken it to if you want to get really fit and you got to find the right gym buddy who's going to push you and go as hard as you and not call in sick and be like, no, I can't go today or whatever it is or make other plans. And when I had an idea it was extremely passionate about, you know, he was down to work through that idea. And I think vice versa. And where he is kind of a maximalist and wants to pile on more complexity and ambition and just more to a project. He's a maximalist. And that way, you know, I was literally an editor.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we would have ideas for projects that we dream about launching together, start writing something or a literary magazine that we were developing, kind of these like felt like hobbies that never quite got off the ground. And in 2017, we got into crypto together, but we weren't building in this space. And by the time the bottom fell out of the crypto market and say March of 2018, it just felt like a lot of people left the space. There weren't interesting projects being launched. It felt like everything went quiet. You know, it's not even just cryptocurrencies itself, but ways of using crypto and adoption and just people even theorizing and talking about these things. Frankly, even just people on the internet, you know, on crypto Twitter making memes, you know, everybody just kind of left the building. It felt like for a bit there.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was like a thousand dollars was, I think, what I put into the markets in 2017, which was like, you know, half my paycheck. So it was a pretty big deal.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which was kind of what we would do. In the wider group, everyone just kind of joke around and post memes. But Wiley and I developed this relationship of kind of like a Was almost like a little bit of a writer's room for us. You know, I'd call him, or he'd call me with an idea for a short story or a potential novel or anything. And then we just had this kind of relationship where we could bat around an idea for hours and pick it apart and find good nuggets and what the other person was saying. And I think that's really core to our DNA as friends and how we've been successful as founders as well.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than actual utility. But in any case, it felt like this thing that would just really capture your attention and you could just dive into crypto Twitter, spend all day, every day reading about it and feel like you're only scratching the surface. And it was really exciting. So that's kind of what unlocked it for me, I think.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I first heard about Bitcoin in like 2009 or something like that from somebody who was mining it off of a laptop. And I just thought, this is kind of crazy. I don't get it not interested, basically. And it wasn't until 2017 where I think it was kind of a bull run back then. Bitcoin had doubled or tripled in value over a period of time. So all of a sudden it was in the news and people were talking about it, thinking about it. You know, I bought a little bit of Bitcoin. I bought a little bit of Ethereum. I bought a little bit of Ripple. And what really struck me, though, was Ethereum. It was this, you know, you could kind of read everything you could care to know it felt like about Bitcoin on a couple pieces of paper. But Ethereum felt like this really rich ecosystem, incredibly rich with possibility. At the time, I think much more just possibility.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Like almost not at all, like four or five times, I almost want to say, I don't think it would be an exaggeration over like 10 years.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had a kind of a group chat with some other friends from Miami and people would just kind of be posting memes throughout the day. And occasionally Wynne and I would play like World of Warcraft for stints at a time. And actually it was in 2017 that I texted him like, hey, I just, you know, I bought a little bit of this thing called Ethereum Ether. You should do this with me. And so it was really around playing games kind of beating up literary ideas and talking about books and eventually getting into crypto that our friendship was formed around. Yeah.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found out about this crazy world where you could get an MFA in writing and basically get paid a stipend to sit around all day and read books and try your hand at writing and go to workshops and that kind of stuff. And that sounded like the dream thing to do for a couple years there. But I didn't really, you know, there's not a whole lot of money in poetry as like I got a job out in California at a small publishing house, and I worked for years as an editorial assistant all the way up to a senior editor. And so I was working on licensed books. So basically anything with certain video game studios or movie studios, other people kind of telling the stories behind.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2011, yeah, I graduated from NYU in 2011 and then I immediately jumped over to a master's in fine arts and creative writing at the University of Virginia.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. I was studying comparative literature. I was doing a minor in creative writing. We both had designs of being writers and spent all of our weekends and free time writing short stories and poems and stuff. So we gravitated fighting about immediately talking about books. And I was, if you're in creative writing classes in the 2008, 2009, everybody's talking about David Foster Wallace and I took that as like an impetus to run in the opposite direction away from kind of what felt like the flavor of the moment. And Wiley took that as a personal attack.”
2022-09-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Bored Ape Yacht Club: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT