YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Rezvani

lines on the record: 79
first: 2023-02-01
most recent: 2023-02-01
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

“Interoperable key pair of a decentralized identifier that the Web3 consortium, the W3C has decided this is a new identity. Maybe that's a way you should identify a user or a creator. The next thing said, okay, well, what if you want to store data and how data is distributed? That's where we evolved and said, you know what? Maybe this decentralized web node spec that block is working on. Maybe that's a cool way to store data for a community. If you're a creator and want to develop this community, maybe this is a cool way to do it. And the final piece is, oh, how do you monetize this entire vehicle? Well, if you can figure out that each user has a wallet and happens to be a lighting wallet, and every time an object is posted inside that network, you can send SADS from any wallet to that object that then the creator gets paid. Maybe you have an idea of a new type of creator network. Maybe this is a new way to think about how a creator can monetize. And those are the primitives that I've spent a lot of time thinking.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With an open architecture. So when I talk about, let's say identity, for example, most people's digital identity is owned by Google. 1.5 billion digital accounts. Of your Gmail that you use to log in downstream to almost everything else is owned by Google. So just like if you put out a scenario through Gmail account gets turned off, you can't log into your bank and the 5,000 other websites that you've used because your base layer identity is owned by alphabet. So let's think about, okay, well, how do we break through an identity that's interoperable? Maybe an idea is this DID concept. That's kind of where we started and thought about Zion V2 is like maybe we should use this.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second thing that's broken is the way that messages are distributed and stored. That's the other thing that I believe is broken because these large platforms own all of that. And then thirdly, the monetization mechanisms of how these systems work, which is fundamentally a third party by advertising. So when I think about these problems, I don't think about it in the narrow scope of just like messaging distribution. I look at these three specific things. And what I am sending all my life force energy on is how do I solve for each of those individual layers?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they are, but I think we have to take a step back and see what are the things that are broken in these systems that need to evolve and need to expand. And I think there's three main things that are kind of broken in these systems. Number one is The identity layer of who you happen to be within these open architecture systems. That's the first thing that's broken.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can people like sense for individual messages or when they watch a video? Why can't they stream sats for watching a video? I think we have this completely new unlock that's available, particularly because of the Lightning Network.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that we're a ways away from the incumbents going away. I think we're three, five, maybe even 10 years away because they have such deep-rooted network effects. But the point is, are we starting to build systems that allow for peer-to-peer money transfer to work within the content networks? Because right now, I think a lot of these systems we realize is like they're discovering content networks, but they're highly centralized. So what if there's a way where the distribution and the monetary aspect of that distribution can come together, right? Like where you can actually make money for posting things on the internet and directly be paid by your fans by not a middleman. I think we're entering that new era and we've seen a little bit of a proxy of this is like OnlyFans, right? OnlyFans makes more revenue. And how they do it is through peer-to-peer monetary transfer. Yes, it's adult content, but why does it have to be adult content?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we're entering an age where I think protocols and systems that allow a relationship between two individuals to be more, I guess, peer-to-peer is emerging. I think that we're seeing that a little bit with what you're seeing like the last couple weeks with Nooster and the idea of that and like how exciting that might be for a decentralized messaging service.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now the question is what is the natural next evolution of the crater economy if we know that platforms are now people, the tools that are built to support the previous platform? So it was natural for me to say like the crater economy is basically the system of following another individual and being able to monitor and express the following of this individual and the sharing of content across this individual. Because now people like yourself, you are a cornerstone of the crater economy when it comes to talking about investments and Bitcoin and those things. You are a creator in that sense. And that's kind of my thinking and definition of the creator economy.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the way to think about it is the emergence of the creator economy comes from platform theory. And platform theory to me is that how have platforms evolved over the past 20 years? And this was like something that I wrote in like 2014 when I first started it. My first company was that the first series of platforms were Google and Apple. And those were in like the early 2000s. And what they did is they enabled the next series of platforms, which are the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the Twitters of the world. Those are now the key plots. Now, those key platforms enabled the next series of platforms, which are creators. And that was the enabler of the creator economy. Platform like YouTube gets created and it develops Mr. Beast”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the simple elegance of what I wanted because I knew that the centralized advertising models of these platforms was eventually going to go away. But I also knew that you had to figure out how to make a monetizable business. The reason that these companies use advertising is because it's the only way they figure out how to monetize because there was no peer-to-peer money at the time of Facebook was created There's no peer-to-peer money at the time. Twitter was created. And now you have an opportunity that a peer-to-peer money system is there. That's the way that you can monetize and bootstrap these networks in a more effective way.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to me, it made the most sense that if you're a fan and you want to transfer value to a person like a crater that you look up to, why not use the hardest digital money ever created, which is Bitcoin? Why invent my own currency? Why invent my own tokens when I can do it with the hardest money ever created at scale and the brilliance of Bitcoin is just use this asset that is there. And that was my, Frankly, I just was never, I don't think I was even smart enough to figure anything else out. I just made so much sense. It was intuition was so elegant and perfect. It was intuitive and it was elegant and it was perfect. It was because my mission, my simple mission was can a fan pay a creator without anyone in the middle?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think because I appreciated the elegance and the simplicity, but to be quite frank, when I started this thing, many people were like, do a token and I'll make you $100 million. And I knew I could have done it. Like there was the amount of relationships I had with creators and venture capital and all those things. I could have done one of these coins. I could have made a ton of money, dumped it on retail, flown into them. But it just like, it didn't feel right to me. And I wanted to build something that had true longevity. I also didn't want to be in the token business. I wanted to be in the processing business, the somewhat the payment processing business. For the creator economy, that's what I wanted to study.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That point, I was trying to invest in a company that was doing it, but I didn't find one. Like I had, like, my family office had a charge, like, hey, let's go find a lightning startup to invest in that does this, that's building a social product with lightning payments and Bitcoin involved. And everyone was doing it with tokens or some other thing. No one was doing it at the time with Lightning. And I basically went to myself and I said, Justin, like you're semi-retired. Like, you got to go do this. Like, you got to go build another business. So 2020 started what is now Zion. And we're almost a little bit over two years into the journey.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was the lightning white paper. And I read it and I read it six or seven times on this flight, 10 hour flight to Istanbul. And I'm like, this was the technology that I needed basically four or six years ago to build the Amplify. But now I can do it now. And the idea was that could you send money between two individuals without anyone in the middle through a protocol? And lightning was it. And that was the light bulb moment to me. And I said, is there a creator network that pairs a fan to a creator that's doing something through the lightning network at scale? And at scale in like a consumer product way.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, you know what? I want to lose weight. I decided to be trained as a professional athlete, and I was doing Iron Man full time for two years. And then I go through this really traumatic brain injury at the end of 2019. I've talked about it on Peter's podcast and McCormick's podcast, but basically. I had a stroke at the 28th end of 2019. They found a tumor in my right temporal lobe early 2020. I had brain surgery remove that. So I have a titanium plate holding the side of my skull together. I'm feeling great. Survive that, and I'm on a flight. This is late 2020, October 2020, and I'm on a flight to Istanbul, an advisor of mine.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I stay on the board till 2018 and then I leave. I sell it. I'm no longer on the board. I'm no longer CEO. And I take about two years off, and that was really around getting my health together. I weighed 240 pounds when I was running my company. So it was quite a big boy.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now it's like generational wealth has been created in one generation. And for my dad, it's a big deal. My dad's for me wrong When he came here, when he was 18 with literally nothing. And for him, within one generation of his son to be able to, like, I give a lot of credit to my parents. They've been so, so kind. And growing me as an entrepreneur. But for them, it's just like, it feels so good to get to that place at such a young age. And now here we are.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not like that was crazy to them because it was just like pay off the house, buy my brother a house, buy another place. We did all this stuff. And it was a moment that really changed my family. You know, those things like that one person in your family to change the whole trajectory.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's just amazing. I sold the company. I sold the company at 27. I owned 100% of it. I bootstrapped it. No investors, no outside capital. What did dad get?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Influencers were the only way to do it, and we were doing this at scale. So we would have 20, 30 influencers posting all on your behalf in one hour. So we created these like thunderstrike campaigns where it was just like all these people would just post at the same time. Everyone would see it on Instagram. They're like, oh my God, I got to go see this movie or I got to go buy this product. It was a really, really exciting time.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were the only way to do it up until the middle of the summer of 2015 because Instagram had no ads. So imagine you're a brand. You're like, hey, I need to have a presence on Instagram. How do I drive followers to my page?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I sold the company after the fourth year in 2016. So we ended up being one of, we were actually like if you were running ads on Instagram and needed to grow an Instagram following.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sitting there, and the amplifier is running. I'm like, this is like more money that I've made my entire life six weeks. Like, this is the thing. And we proceeded to do $1.5 million in revenue the first year I took home one, the second year I took two and a half million home, the third year I took three and a half million dollars home.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then 2,500 to kind of do the back end stuff. And we got it done in two months. And I went out to the market. And within the first six weeks, I called two people that I knew that was from the previous ad world. The first person was the head of digital at Fox, and the other one's the head of digital at Lionsgate. They each gave me, one gave me $60,000. The other one gave me $50,000. In six weeks, we did 110,000 in top line revenue, and I took home almost $75,000 because my cost of goods sold for that campaign was like, I don't know, 40 grand or something like that.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no, no, not at all. So basically, living in an apartment in Culver City, two grand a month in rent. And my dad loaned me $8,000. And he said, look, I'll give you three months. You got to figure this out in three months. And at that time, I found this developer in India that I was paying two grand to basically do the app.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From a person posting on social media. So I start coding an application. This is really my first instinct in kind of building a product and said, okay, there will be an app, it's a two-sided marketplace where an influencer could log in. They would get campaigns. They would get questions from a brand and say, hey, you want to work on this movie campaign. They would create the content on their phone, submit it to the brand. The brand gets a dashboard. The brand says, yes, they post on Instagram. They're paid instantly through PayPal. And that's that was it. That was the idea. So can we build something like that? And it was the first and it just really just took off. Did you almost?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the time, there wasn't. And also, Instagram still had this open graph API, which allowed you to gather all this data.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I understood what a CPM and a cost per engagement was. And man, like these followers are impressions. Like, what if you posted and then we use those impressions as like a CPM model to do an ad campaign? And he said, is there an app on the app store that connects an influencer to a brand?”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, so let's go circa 2012. Instagram gets bought by Facebook for a billion dollars. I grew up in Los Angeles, so some of my friends that I went to high school with happened to be actors and actresses and some new show. And I talk about this in my book. And there's an actor named Keegan Allen, who's a good friend of mine. And he had about like 50,000 followers on this thing called Instagram. And they got bought. I was like, hey, are you doing ads? Like, have you like, have you done advertising with brands before? And, but he's like, not really. It's like, it's really cumbersome process. My agent has to get involved and then a manager and then there's contracts. And the brand always has feedback. And it's just a really complicated process. But I would like to do it if there was an easy way to do that. So I was 24. I said, you know what? I'm like, I've been working at this ad agency that I was really unhappy with. I was selling little banner ads. And so I was in the ad business.”
2023-02-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC115: Bitcoin and The Creator Economy w/ Justin Rezvani (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT