YouSaid · the spoken record

Hunter Walk

lines on the record: 84
first: 2018-11-27
most recent: 2018-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Out, they were right. They now have over 160,000 businesses on the platform, over $100 billion of new projects going through it each month. They have a freemium product. So you start using it and then they upsell you the advanced features. Revenue will grow more than 3x this year. If I had just sort of gone through all the venture tropes, oh, you need a warm intro or I don't want to read your email. I never would have opened their email. Oh, what's the TAM? If the TAM's not billions of dollars, and of course these guys could have shown me a slide that says construction is a $7 trillion industry. If we capture just 1% of that, but like, that's bullshit. Like, that doesn't tell you anything. That doesn't tell you anything about the problem. We care about problem size more than market size. So if a problem is large, if a problem is urgent and a problem is valuable, that's sort of like an enterprise notion more than a, you know, sort of like consumer social, but if it's large, urgent, and valuable, you can usually figure out a way to make money. And then in this case, the founder market fit was off the chart. We didn't think that there were going to be a whole lot of other entrepreneurs.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looked at the quote unquote TAM, the total addressable market for what they were trying to solve. You would have looked at it and you would have said $100 million, which is not venture scale. Why was it $100 million? Well, because that's all that the industry was spending on software to solve that problem. Why? Because the only software available was terrible software sold at a $20,000 per seat license, which meant you only bought it for one person in your firm. So that $100 million represented 100% of spend, but 1% of the problem value. They knew this because the CEO had worked at one of the construction companies, had been in the seat that was doing the bid management, and said, this is horrible, grabbed a technical co-founder who he had gone to school with, so good relationship, but who had not worked in construction, convinced him that this was an idea, and then sent me an email cold. So over the course of a month or two, got to know this team, invested in them.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in a lot of cases, you could almost feel the contempt for the customer like dripping off of the keyboard. And I think ultimately a lot of those businesses failed because people don't want to spend time with their customers. They thought that they could solve it from afar. And it doesn't mean that if you're working in these industries, it doesn't mean everyone's going to be happy with you. You're often cutting out a middleman or changing the way work has been done, giving people a better alternative. But you're doing it out of respect for the customer and respect for the industry. And so, for example, there's a company in our first fund called Building Connected in the Construction Space. They build a freemium SaaS product, a market network that allows commercial GCs who are doing these tens of million, hundreds, million dollar projects to manage the subcontractor bidding and qualification. It's a part of the process that is fundamental to every piece of construction. But when we invested in this company beginning of 2014, if you had”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're probably not a good fit for. The ones that have a problem that they think will take 10 years to solve have a thoughtful way of what each phase they need to do to get there while still beginning sort of a bringing a beginner's mind or learning mind to that fit very well with us. They usually have some empathy for the problem they're solving, either because it's an industry they worked in, it's a family business”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are generalists. There are areas that we are evergreen in, financial services, fintech, SaaS, marketplaces, commerce, healthcare. Then there's a bunch of places we get pulled into the future by founders, areas that we didn't have experience in before, but end up building out competencies in agriculture, autonomy robotics, things like that. One of the things that we probably overendex on compared to our peers, I'd call it sort of founder market fit. We care a lot about how do you describe the problem you're solving and why do you want to spend 10 years of your life solving it? The 10 years of your life question is very interesting because a lot of founders sort of recoil at that question 12 to 18 months of capital, raising two years of capital. What do you mean 10 years? It's like, no, but you're doing that because you're hoping to have the first phase of a business that's going to take 10 to 12 years to actually build. The ones that sort of recoil too much of that question.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was 80 20 until you paid back your advanced type of stuff. And so we took something that had traditionally, you know, the record industry had done whatever, whatever, whatever. And we just did it at a data-driven global scale in a way that allowed this huge creator class to start to see that you could go from this being a side hustle to a full-time job, a full-time job to a mini media company, a media, you know, then once you had that core video, that a million people would watch, you could start shouting out your friends and directing traffic to your other videos or doing, if you were doing something on fashion, well, maybe you should be creating this brand under which you can also do some stuff on travel and lifestyle. And we start to see these mini media companies spring out of what was at the time, like 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds who just started out uploading a video a week.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why aren't they? And so you go and you talk to some of these creators and they say, Well, I'm working at Starbucks to pay my rent. The YouTube money is great and it's been increasing, but like I need this other job. Or I don't, you know, it's a lot of work. If I could get another hundred dollars, $200 a week, I'd hire an editor. And then I'd totally make two videos because the time it takes me to make one and edit it, I can make two and somebody else can do the editing. All these sort of little barriers, which basically just came down to, I don't have a thousand dollars free available to forward invest in my business, essentially. So we started doing this thing called founder grants, excuse me, creator grants, which essentially cash advanced them at the time, I think they were sort of $2,500, $5,000, or $10,000 to put into their video creation strategy. And then we just kind of garnish that off of the Rev share as they upload new videos. We wouldn't take it all because they still need the cash flow, but maybe instead of whatever it was, you know, 70, 30 split.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We saw a bunch of creators who would upload one video a week. That video would fairly, you know, maybe it's them talking in their basement to their followers. Maybe it's a character they've created. Maybe it's makeup tips. It's something the production budget is low, but the fandom is high. And we could see fairly reliably when they released it, it would get 50,000 views the first day, 25,000. You could start to see these tales and maybe if somebody was doing a good job and promoting it or you'd start to see the first day would be 60,000 or 70,000. You could see their fandom growing. And we also knew that when we, because of the nature of the content, let's say makeup tips, when we put fashion, beauty, ads against that, they'd probably be getting a $5 CPM or something. So for every thousand playbacks, we'd get $5 from an advertiser and give them the majority of that, take a little bit for ourselves. And so you really start to see almost a predictable revenue curve coming off of any piece of content they uploaded. So we sort of asked ourselves, well, what would happen if they uploaded a second video a week?”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it made perfect sense to me that the YouTube native stars, the people who were creating content on YouTube that you never heard of but building their following there, would be, if not the tip of the spear, one of the most important cohorts we had. And so we were able to grow a multi-billion dollar ad revenue business, not just by negotiating with the media companies, sports leagues, and record labels to bring their content online, but by creating a system by which what we call torso and long tail as opposed to head of the tail content can make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars a year by working to create original programming for YouTube, often with no money up front. So we weren't, you know, it only became later that we understood how to license that stuff or even how we tried this thing called partner grants. It was very interesting. So I think one of the themes that we were talking about earlier is sort of like measurability and what you do with that data. So let me give you an example of how that was important at YouTube.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might get taken down, but in this, any other hosting service, it probably would get taken down. But on YouTube, it essentially may be the worst thing that would happen would be at the end of your wedding video, an ad would pop up that Bono would get his tenths of a cent on and we'd get our tenths of a cent on and you'd get your video with the YouTube backing soundtrack. So it's one of the, I think the most incredible business innovations sort of of the digital age and sort of proud to be part of the team to help build it. And then the third was, can we make money in general, right? Which was from my AdSense experience, I knew that it wasn't just going to be about monetizing the licensed content, the music videos, the stuff that the CBSs of the world were putting on the site. I had seen how quickly and durably a new class of websites, these community sites, these social networks, places where people gathered where new voices were heard were underserved audiences were gathered, how durable those communities were, and how much money we were making off of them at AdSense.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monetization and video infrastructure as part of the AdSense team. And it was clear the gravitational pull of all this stuff was moving over YouTube. After three years, Google had grown a lot. I was thinking about maybe doing something else. And I tried to transfer my products over to YouTube and I ended up transferring myself. Chad and Steve, the founders, asked me to come over. It was just 65 people at the point of acquisition. And they had a lot of work to do. Phase two, the phase that I was there for, I sort of say that I had three, I was charged with three responsibilities. The first was the durability of the consumer product. This thing was phosphorus. It was burning hot. But could we turn it into a furnace? Could it burn reliably? The second was the copyright issue. We believed we were in the legal right with DMCA and Safe Harbor and what we were doing.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a fantastic opportunity. I feel so fortunate that the founders invited me over from Google to join them after the acquisition. So YouTube had this amazing phase one. Phase one was their first 18 months of existence. They went from obviously an unknown site to 100 million playbacks a day, which at the time was huge. And about 18 months in, Google bought them for whatever it was. It's one and a half billion dollars, something like that. I remember Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at the time, was doing these town halls within Google to help answer questions because it was a sizable acquisition at the time and YouTube had some controversy around it because of the question of copyright. And somebody got up and said, Eric, one and a half billion dollars is a lot of money. How do you know it was the right amount? And Eric, who was great, pause for a second and said, it absolutely wasn't the right amount. It was either way too high or way too low, and I'll tell you in 10 years. So the answer, of course, was way too low. So I was working on some video stuff.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excel led, and then Google Ventures led the round after that. And so, yeah, I get really excited when I see somebody who is taking a type of media or a format that previously was expensive, was thought to be difficult to use or could only be put in the hands of the true creatives, you know, that special 1%, you know, with somehow the other 99%, the unwashed masses shouldn't be allowed to do it, where distribution was previously expensive or constrained by shelf space, and where founders have the desire to create not just a creative model, but an economic platform to support their creatives. I will back up the truck and write a check to that.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a lot of torso and long tail. And what they're starting to see, of course, you build these platforms. And what you're starting to see is at the beginning, it's a bunch of people just experimenting. You know, it's not quote unquote high quality content, so on and so forth. But then you build the better tools. And what happens is the people who are just experimenting, some of them start to rise up. And folks who just want to get involved but don't want to go buy all the gear, don't want to go find a production studio start doing it. So they've had people who've just started using the platform, no money being paid for Anchor. It's a free platform. I think Ashley Graham, the plus size model that's friend of the Kardashians, Cameron Klaske, who was one of the Parkland students, co-founder of the March for Our Lives, is starting a pot. I mean, so they just sort of start noticing all these people who actually have followings now using the platform. What comes next? Obviously helping these folks monetize too if they desire, right? So that's what completes the circle. So we participated in their seed round that.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I invest in it. Your eyes perk up. But I'm not necessarily dependent upon it. So, for example, in our second fund, we were fortunate enough to invest in a company called Anchor based out of here in New York. Anchor is a podcasting platform that makes it very easy using your phone and your iPad to create audio content. Now, traditional podcasts, you can make law inform programming, but you can also make five, 10, 15 minute. It does things like if I wanted to, you know, we have to be sitting next to each other, but let's say I wanted to do a 15-minute interview program, I could use the anchor app to call you and just record it through the app. Then I could do editing, I could do transitions, all this type of stuff. Fast forward, Anchor now powers one in three podcasts on the iTunes store.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they eventually will. So I did Second Life, so all three of that virtuous cycle within a virtual world. Then I went and worked on the first three years of AdSense at Google. So the web and web publishing were the first two parts of that, but the medium and long tail of web publishers, again, this was sort of 2003, 4005. So we're talking bloggers, people building the first community sites, had no way of making money that wasn't pop-ups, pop-unders, flashing banner ads, punch the monkey. And we gave them a contextual advertising unit that they could just put on their page and make money by creating content. And then for me, the perfect job was running product at YouTube, which again was sort of all three of those things. Making video without having to go to a Hollywood studio, distributing that video to a worldwide audience without first having to sell your soul to somebody in a suit, and then being able to make TV dollars if you had TV-sized audience. Sure.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the creator, the company, when it's also the way the company can make its money, then your incentives are aligned. But I just believe so, and it can't be a world just about making money, right? So it's not like YouTube, you have to monetize your video. But I think you end up with this native creative prosumer class that if you're not helping them make money, if you're not helping them pay their rent and quit their Starbucks job in order to spend time in your system, you are A, doing them a disservice and B, your leaving a competitive flank open for you, right? So it's very interesting to see that like Snapchat, for example, was very resistant to paying its creators or creating an economy. Now they're moving that way. Instagram has also been hesitant there. Popular Instagramers can make a lot of money, but Instagram is not involved in that. It's not the platform.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hugely durable lane. And when I realized that I was maybe part of my father and part of my mother, so I had left brain and right brain, the three products I worked on before starting homebrew the venture fund were all within a virtuous cycle of technology is a bar that pushes down the barriers to creation. So it allows more people to be creative. It allows it to be done within communities for both audience and collaboration. And then I believe the strongest platforms also have monetization native to it. So native to it in the sense of YouTube if you were a creator, we would help you monetize your content and take a personal monetization.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? It's like because you're building a spiritual home, you're conditioning. Like, I need a toilet. Like, your avatar doesn't need to do that. I mean, unless in the Sims and your program to, that's a predefined need. But like in a world like Second Life, your avatar never needs to relieve itself, but the majority of virtual worlds have toilets.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same distance that people do. So they don't get too close because that would be weird, and they don't stand too far away because you wouldn't be able to hear each other. Now, both of those things make no sense in a virtual world. We are typing so long as you're within some range of text, like you're going to see what I'm saying. And avatars don't have bad breath. So the fact that I'm smashing my face against yours should have no impact. But because there's people behind these keyboards, it makes them very uncomfortable to violate the norms that we're used to in our person-to-person interaction. It's sort of, I guess it's the quintessential answer to when people build virtual homes, why do”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I sort of sometimes joke with Philip, the founder that he was a computer science nerd. So like, hey, this is like high school, except the nerds are the most popular kids because they're the ones that drive the economy. They're the ones that can code the really cool objects. By the way, the real world's going this way. The drama kid is the one that, because they made the cool outfit and the cool set design, that's the thing that has value. So we thought about it as, of course, there's going to, the world is going to take on its sort of own complexion, own biases. But how can we make sure that you can be successful in second life without being quote unquote successful in real life? The other thing, and there's this guy at the time, he was at Stanford, Nikki Yee, I think was his name. And he did a lot of research in these online worlds about what behaviors do people just sort of naturally take into these spaces. And so, for example, avatars in virtual worlds tend to stand in proximity to one another to talk.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we tried, we had this principle. We wanted to make sure that the size of your wallet in the real world wouldn't necessarily impact the size of your wallet in Second Life. At the time, a lot of the early, what they called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, some more pigs, Ultima EverQuest, and so forth, went so far as to initially kind of ban the sale of gold or goods or stuff because they didn't want people. Yeah, for real currency. A, because I think they were trying to figure out, hey, some of this value should fall into our pockets. But B, also, it was like hacking the game. It was like somebody who could come in and that didn't seem fun to the players. Of course, to think about that now, given the way that these games, you know, make their money is crazy. But back then, it was sort of, if you came from the gaming world, it was a very bad thing. We didn't want to go that far because we actually wanted people in the world to build things that had real value and transact them.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's no, no, no, what? No, no. This was the whole theme of Westworld, right? We are scanning people's brains because here in this world they act according to like they're id or whatever, right? Their baser instincts and now we're using this for marketing. Second life could have been Westworld. So yeah, so it was definitely interesting. The second part was about the contained environment.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And millions of users, the data that these types of things throw off is incredible. I forget which movie it was, but there was one that was just recently. Ready player one.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going on, just give us a chance to comment. You don't have to not write about it, but give us a chance to input into it. But this world is even with a few hundred people, it's already too big for us to understand everything going on. So we need a journalist, we need an ethnographist to go figure it out. But on the other side, some things were incredibly measurable. So your avatar, the avatar you design, your face, so on so forth, if you think about it, it's really just a bunch of slider bars with points between zero and a hundred. So I have larger than average ears in real life. If I was on a zero to 100 ear slider bar, my ears might be 72, your ears might be 51. So we could actually look and see, well, what is the average person look like? Or do the early adopters make themselves look different than the people coming in now? Do people who claim to be women, what positions do they use? Do men playing women use actually different positions on this type of stuff? So if you could imagine if this had become something at the millions and millions.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. So let me answer that in two parts. First, the measurability of it. So it was a little bit different than a game in the sense of if in a game, the designers of the game create, you know, can create an object called a chair. And then you can put that chair into the world and see how people use the chair. Things that people built had, since it was user created, had no real representation. You can sort of think of it as if they named it chair, we would know it was a chair. But if they just took a bunch of primitive solid geometry and built, the system doesn't know what it is. It just knows that it's an object that has mass and so on and so forth. So you had to be, it was really interesting to sort of figure out, well, how do we know what people are doing? And how do we understand what's going on around us? It ended up being a lot of art and a lot of science. The art part was we literally hired a blogger, a game blogger, to be our in-world journalist. We said, you can write, we will pay you to hang out in the world and find interesting stuff going on and write public stories about it. It's called New World Notes. It later became a book. We ask one thing, if there's anything that's really bad.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, it was a subscription service. You could play for free, but you wouldn't get any currency. So most people subscribed. By subscribing, you'd sort of get a stipend, I guess, a version of the safety net. Citizenship gives you some Lyndon dollars. And then really the way that those would transfer within the world would be people would build goods and services. So if you made a”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cryptocurrency system works. So basically, you know, it's going to be fun when one of your advisors is a real estate economist from Berkeley. So we basically didn't want to sell the virtual currency. So we wanted to make sure that as best we could, although there was going to be an economy and the economy was really to manage resources. Each server we ran could simulate 16 acres of virtual land and could have up to 5,000 objects on it at once. And we had a real physics system. So you can think about if somebody builds a giant tower, a Jenga tower and pushes it over and those all fall down and bounce like you'd expect them to bounce, that's taking up a high percentage of the computing power at any given time. So how do you manage that? How do you make sure that you don't have 100 people building 100 towers trying to push them over all at once? Well, the way that we chose to do that was essentially with an economy. You have to buy land and it costs money to maintain your land and it's only on your land you can do things like that.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start to see some of our earliest users online for 12, 18 hours a day, wondering if that was a sign of success or something we should be worried about. I was essentially the non-engineer, non-designer. So I worked on the product the whole time and then I solved whatever the highest nail issue was. Oh, we've got to figure out distribution strategy, go talk to NVIDIA, Intel, so-and-so forth. Oh, we need community terms of service. This is a fully open world. Should you be able to do anything? How do we enforce community standards? How do we police it? All this type of stuff. There we actually pioneered a lot of very interesting design choices that people later copied to greater degrees of success. Mark Pincus at Zynga talks a lot about how our virtual currency system was an inspiration for the virtual currency that it had.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case of good timing right after I left was sort of when it took off. So it became this hype thing of the 3D internet is everybody going to live their lives in second life. You had really bad implementations of corporations trying to, Mike Dell made a virtual replica of Michael Dell's college room you could walk through, you know, insurance agencies were trying to open in Second Life. Benchmark, the amazing venture fund funded it. And Bill Gurley sat on the board for a while. The sort of cut to the chase thing is online communities like this are very hard to create, but also very hard to kill. So now Second Life, the company Lyndon Lab, is in its 18th year. It's profitable based in San Francisco. It's kind of always hovering around 500,000 paying members who some of them from the earliest days literally are living their lives virtually. They spend more time in the world than out of it. Now it's interesting as people sort of debate the role of social media and it's healthy or not. I mean, we had some of these questions very earlier on.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was bought by real networks and became CTO of Real. And so he felt like now was finally the time to build this. And I came on and it was my first job out of grad school where I sort of came to a conclusion about how I was going to make professional decisions before I was sort of throttling between this in my left brain or right brain. And then I finally realized maybe I'm a little bit of both. So I said I only want to work on projects that I put on my tombstone. So they represent me. They're not just a job. I only want to work on projects where I think I can have a unique impact. Doesn't mean that I'm the best person for it. Other people might be able to succeed in the role as well, but I'm going to bring a point of view or an experience set that might be unique. And I don't want to compromise on the quality of people I work with. And so that was kind of our merry band of an early team that built this product that then I was there for three years. Very interestingly after it was sort of bootstrapped, angel funded, I left after it commercially launched for reasons we can get into. And in another class.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design it in Photoshop, upload it, and apply it to yourself. So it was highly creative, highly malleable. We had a virtual currency that predated Bitcoin and at various times was a floating point currency. So I think it was, it traded more favorable to the US dollar than like the Thai bot at times and stuff. And it was Burning Man in some ways. Like when you think of a virtual world, I think you can kind of think it too extremes. You can either think of Disney World, someplace that people have created for you to walk through, or you can think of Burning Man. being dropped in a desert, scorching heat, no supplies, and having to figure out how to survive using the people around you and your skills. For better or worse, we chose Burning Vad. And that probably actually turned into sort of a ceiling on the number of people who wanted to survive in the desert. But I was the sort of first non-engineer on the team, the founder, this guy Philip Rosedale, who's actually now building another version of this in VR, had been thinking about this for a really long time, built one of the first high quality video streaming products.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second Life is a virtual world where you're sort of represented by an avatar, a 3D creation of yourself that you can customize to look like you or not look like you. In fact, it was very interesting to see people would, there were very predictable paths of when men or women would sign up for the service to either make themselves photorealistic. They'd want to look like their digital selves would want to look like their real selves, or they'd want to look idealized, muscles and abs. If you were a dude, long hair, boobs, if you're a woman, whatever type stuff, or extreme. Just move the slider bars and let me see how crazy I can go. And the idea was that we were trying to build sort of a fully virtual but also constructable world where the inhabitants could shape it. So if you could sort of think about what maybe kids use Minecraft, where the idea you have a bunch of little parts and kind of Lego virtual Lego, but we also had a coding language where you could actually program these things to do things. Or if you were going to want to make a dress for your avatar, sure, you could go buy that from somebody else in the world, but you could also just”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source