YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Rosedale

lines on the record: 59
first: 2021-12-07
most recent: 2021-12-07
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

“Over the bodies and get to a new idea. I don't know. It does feel a little bit like a time to re examine that. Why more of my kindness experiences?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the easy answer, and then there's the harder answer you like Bill. The easy answer for me would be specifically in the case of Second Life too, Mitch Kapoor, who was the first investor in Second Life. And the story people often don't hear. And I mean, Bill knows as well from us, is second life was a pretty odd idea. It may not seem like it now, especially with all this metaverse stuff, but it was really pretty difficult to get people's heads around the idea. And so I think there were a lot of moments where we wouldn't have made what we were able to make there if I wouldn't have had people saying, keep going, keep going. Don't worry. Your investors don't understand, but you got to just keep going, keep going, keep going. I really appreciate Mitch for that. But I guess I would say the elephant in the room, too, is I can't come up with those stories very easily. And maybe that tells us something about tech and what we all are doing and what we need to think about. I don't know if there's enough kindness out there in that space, right? I mean, the tech, I guess, is supposed to be this bastion of unfettered capitalism where we're all just trying to climb.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concepts that have everyone worked up into an excited tizzy and how the future might look. Philip, I ask everyone new to the show the same closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, if you use something like Clubhouse today, like we were talking about, and I agree with Bill, I think Twitter spaces is also really important to look at right now and see what happens there. If you use Clubhouse, you get this experience of hearing people all around you, which is really, really cool. I mean, it's a different experience. Yeah, you can do that with a wall. The only little technical geeky point I would make is because you and I and Bill are all three of us are using pretty nice microphones is that being able to walk around the room while you talk to people through the wall. No, we're not there yet because the problem is we've got to keep your mouth close to a microphone. And so there's a physics problem with that. But I think that one's solvable. Microphones are getting better and better, but it's still a problem. Your AirPods, which we're not using on this call for that specific reason, just don't reconstruct the sound of your voice well enough to do a good job with 3D audio. Bill and Philip, this has been awesome. I mean, what an interesting exploration into some real world experience that you've had with a lot of these.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A technical question with the latency as the root of the answer. Is it conceivable that we could just have a whole wall that's a screen that could be made to look like I'm looking into another room? And then it sounds like someone's talking at me. That's something that seems like you can mix technology to make it feel physically like I'm in a space with somebody else. Like, is that a conceivable version of this in the future that reduces the friction of connection across space and time?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversation If it's above two tenths of a second, we have that painful waiting to talk, stepping on each other, cell phone experience. That's an example of where good technology work can bring us from disliking people we meet online to liking people we meet online. And then the other one is just how do I give you a room of thousand people? And then that goes back to what Bill was saying about Discord. How do I come up with the simplest experience that, for example, gives me a lot of scale? Because that's something that we haven't had on the internet. We haven't had on any of the video games that are out there yet. Bill, I'll make up a closing question for you. What are you watching most closely as it pertains to the metaverse? What signs or companies or people are you just tracking?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time, you can't understand them unless their voices come from two different points in space. That's the simplest way to explain it. That cocktail party feeling of like being in a conversation and a party at a conference or something, that's all driven by this magic of the audio being three-dimensional where it seems to be coming from where it's coming from. That's what enables you to feel, to be part of two conversations at once, for example, which is very common thing in the real world, but very uncommon online. There's a magic trick associated with advancing 3D audio. It's what we've been working on at High Fidelity, and we've got customers at Clubhouse that are using it to do that so that multiple people can talk at once and it feels great. There's so many learnings like time delay. One of the things I'm obsessed with, I'm a latency freak with this stuff. The time it takes from my sound to get to your ears, if it's below two-tenths of a second, we get along with each other and we have fun and we interrupt and have a lively.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Audio is such an interesting talk about Twitter spaces kind of taking off Clubhouse. Who knows where that's going, but audio as a specific standalone medium seems incredibly compelling. What have you learned building in this space in the last couple of years? What would be the most surprising findings or potential for new technology when we think just about audio as a medium of communication and exchange? If you want to get to something amazing, you want to get to something that everybody perceives as having immediate basic utility and audio is certainly that. I mean, in the age of COVID, for a lot of people that say know each other well, a lot of businesses transition from that video on all the time to experimenting with rooms like Bill was mentioning with Blue Jeans and experimenting with audio only, you know, where you can just kind of pop in and talk to people, especially for people you know, audio, if it's done right, convey a lot. The big magic trick with audio, which is what we've worked on at High Fidelity, is that if two people talk”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much like crypto kitties. I mean, it was interesting. As Bill said, we had these pets that people would breed and they would grow. And it actually that continues to be one of the big markets in Second Life.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interaction, which we talk a lot about, is a key driver of the metaverse, the Discord concept, and ownership. Like these are huge concepts that we're kind of recreating digitally with powerful effect. Bill, you've studied bubbles and value creation and value capture for a very long time. As you look at something like the emergent NFT economy and some of the speculative returns that Santa Magic Wand would not cost $50, it'd probably be $50 million in today's context. offer your reaction to kind of what you're seeing today where is it just seem insane where does it seem like there's lots of promise hidden in the rough”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that you can sell or give to somebody else without anybody else being in the middle of the transaction. Your clothes on your body, the things on your desk, the paintings on your wall are alienable. Your car, your iTunes, your house, more complicated. Other people have to be involved. So that idea was fundamental and it came out of this meeting in 2004. And we went to a law conference in New York and made the pronouncement that we intended to build a world where we made no claim on the intellectual property that people created and that to the greatest extent possible and someday in a decentralized fashion, no one would be able to stop somebody from selling something to somebody else. And so that was very, very much what NFTs, for example, are enabling today. And I think it is very important. People want the freedom to control trade person to person.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes them real. What will make things that people make in a virtual world real outside of those things being the result of their creative efforts, which was kind of fundamental to our strategy? We were talking about exactly the issues that we're seeing today with NFTs. And one of the people in the room in this meeting that we had invited was Lawrence Lessig. And I remember this moment where we were talking about what is the value of digital things? What makes them real? And he said, I'll tell you exactly what makes them real. He said, what will make digital goods real is if they are alienable? And he said this word alienable. And it was so funny because I had one of these moments where we didn't yet have iPhones. This is 2004. And I thought to myself, well, shoot, I don't know what that word means on this table of really smart people, and I don't know what alienable means. But in short, what alienable means is that like a hat, like you're wearing, alienable means.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exchange of value digital asset ownership in a trustless way should lead as a simple building block back to that concept, all this other crazy stuff. And we're kind of seeing that. The market value of, let's say, NFTs or something bubble or not is a large number compared to like the market value of all in-game items or something from pre-NFTs. How do you guys think about that as an exciting component of the metaverse of all these concepts, this idea of persistent, provable, trustless digital ownership? I want to tell you a story from Second Life about that because I think you get a kick out of it. And Bill had just joined the team at this time, but we had a meeting about the end of 2004 where we brought a bunch of people who didn't have a background in necessarily in computer games, but they were just big thinkers about this together in a room and had a meeting about this stuff. And we were talking about digital assets and their intrinsic value and like what made”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember Bill that being a point that, yeah, you made to great effect, it was very helpful with Second Life was anything that can be arbitraged will be instantly. And now that was something I took to. There's a far other side version of that where you have a scarce set of fixed assets in a virtual world and you basically allow people to compete to farm those assets by essentially how much time will they devote to get those assets distributed. I think that's an extraordinary, like Bill said. It's very nuanced. That's an extremely different thing than something like Second Life, this pay-for-performance type thing. I guess I would say that it's also something that we must outside of the capitalist model be thoughtful about. That may be something which does real harm to people. I think as entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to be thoughtful about that. We talked already about taking the Ferrari from Grand Theft Auto to Among Us, but I remember originally when I started exploring crypto in 2016-2017, one of the core ideas that really called my attention was the internet was about the permissionless open exchange of information. And this is about the same openless permissionless.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And divisive when people talk about it is that there's not just a basic, like everybody's got to get crypto because now all chewing gum and hats worldwide bought and sold using crypto. We're just not there yet.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the on ramp to the thing could be a lot easier, and that would get us to a larger market than we have today. But as we touched on earlier, it doesn't just mean that you get to get 4 billion people using the thing. I've always said about crypto versus the internet. I was there, as Bill was. I was there in 1994 when we started the internet, so to speak. And the thing that was really different in comparing, say, crypto and the internet was we actually all knew what the internet was for. There was a strong sense of urgency. We had to have email addresses because get calls from people. Are you getting emails from people? And we had to put up websites about what our companies did. There was a very real like, let's get this party started sort of a thing because there was a utility function that was obvious around broadcasting information. And crypto doesn't yet. It's anchored to a couple of big ideas, some of the same ones that were in Second Life, but those ideas as yet have no immediate utility. I think that's part of what makes it so polarized.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your partner, Mitch Lasky, taught me kind of everything about the evolution of the models in gaming from $60 for a game to free-to-play with whale dependent spending to play to earn. What do you both make of the business model behind some of this stuff? As you think about Second Life, if you were to try it again today from scratch, like how would you think about business model? How do you think about concepts like play to earn? Like, is that fundamentally just a race to the bottom? How should we think about the evolution of games and these places and how people earn or spend money? That's a big couple of questions. I mean, one thing I'd say, echoing something Bill said, if you told me to build Second Life all over again right now, I'd focus on, first of all, knowing as we discussed before that without magic changes that haven't happened yet, we're going to have a smaller audience. So I want to be saying at the get-go, this is going to not be the new internet, but it's going to be something amazing. Then what I would do is focus on simpler building blocks that were still adequate for people to be expressive.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light on the horizon. It brings to mind one of the most interesting little factoids I've discovered in the crypto gaming space was for Axie Infinity. And I want to ask about Play to Earn here in a minute and earning money via online participation. But they didn't explode until they created this Ronin sidechain that didn't have the frictions of Ethereum itself. When they were trying to have their economy beyond Ethereum, it just couldn't possibly work. It wasn't scalable enough. When they made Ronan, which is fundamentally not decentralized, it's like controlled by the company. It has all the problems. It probably looked a lot like the Second Life economy currency control system worked. The thing exploded in activity. And I think it's a great actual real recent point of kids being magic. Like it has to be low friction and has to, you have to manage it in order for there to be commerce on top of the platform. It seems like kind of the same thing.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say from just going back to Second Life, I agree. I think crypto has got two big things embedded in it. One of them is working pretty well today, like it or not, so to speak. And the other one hasn't really been worked on. And that is frictionless capitalism is like what crypto is doing. And that's part of what's interesting about it right now. But the other part of crypto, like Bill said, that's embedded is governance and in particular democratic governance. And I think that we are a couple of clever innovations. And I'd like to work on them away from seeing something where, for example, you can vote one vote per person in a meaningful, easy, quick way on something as a group using crypto. We are not yet there, but there's a bunch of people working on that. And I think that once we see the impact that crypto could have on simple, scalable forms of governance, particularly democratic governance, that's going to be really, really cool. And we're not there yet, but there's good.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a couple of examples of what Bill is saying. There are several decentralized versions in a sense of Second Life that are out there today that you can go walk into right now. And Just Bill said, what you'll see is that they're much earlier in their capabilities because it's much more difficult and expensive to do things in a fully decentralized fashion. I always talked about crypto in some measure as being the price of distrust. If you want to build a distributed system in which no one trusts anyone, you will realize that there is a fundamental basic cost to that. And that cost is nowhere near zero. And it's nowhere near low enough to create a virtual world yet.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have it. There's lots of work underway, and that works interesting. Of course, if we had crypto people on here, they'd yell and scream about all this stuff, lightning networks and things that are happening. But the fact is, there's not an easy way for me to pay you for something in crypto. And Second Life was dependent for its success on there being an easy way for me to say to Bill, hey, can I buy that really cool hat that you're wearing right now? And we're just not there yet.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, we could go on for days and days about that. But I think as it relates to virtual worlds specifically, if you look at Second Life, we had to build a digital currency that spanned multiple geographies because if you walked up to somebody, I would always say, you know, if you just walked up to somebody in Second Life, right? There was a 60% or more chance if you're in the US, a 60% chance that they were not in your country. And so if you wanted to buy something from them, you know, say Venmo had existed then, right? You can't just bust out Venmo and pay them offline. So we had to build basically a currency and we had to make it easy to use and very, very low or zero in the case of Second Life for most things fees to make a transaction. And I would just note that despite the excitement that we have about crypto and the legitimate excitement around maybe it's moving power control from one place to another, we don't yet have a stable currency with low fees. We do not yet.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love to explore this intersection of decentralized technology, crypto, Web3, whatever you want to call it, with the idea of the metaverse collective behavior together online. Because it seems like the promise of some of the decentralized permissionless technologies is that they can help us create better, more scalable versions of these things. Yet today, or 10 years into the crypto story, all of the places that we're talking about, Discord, Twitter, Roblox, all these places, Fortnite where the Travis Scott concert happened, they're still centralized. companies that are running and responsible for and curating these experiences. Why do you think that is? Why haven't we seen an example that's more crypto native, something protocol enabled that's as interesting as the Travis Scott concert or the congregation of all these people of humanity together? Like, what am I missing about why crypto hasn't produced more of these stories? It's the biggest conversation in the world.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dig big difference exactly artistic. There's just this huge difference between the play experience of consumption and then the together experience and the purposeful experience of making things. And I would just argue that the low level components and the platform components are at least somewhat different between those two. And going back to the Unity comment earlier, they're just very different beasts. And so I don't think we can expect to see them spring from new architecture equally.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's well put. I mean, I think that games are, Bill mentioned escapism earlier, and you can actually look at it through the lens of, you can kind of look at it, I guess, sort of at a huge meta lens of escaping from Earth to somewhere else. But in the game experience, you can also look at it as just, you know, escaping from your day-to-day life for a short period of time. But you can do that in a purely consumptive way where you are just on a ride and you go on the ride for an hour and then you come back to the real world and you just didn't add anything there. You just consumed an experience in the same way you'd consume a TV show. I think that's still the mainstay of what we do with gaming. But like Bill said, the purpose part inevitably has to be combined with some ability for you to do something, perhaps with others, that is constructive. I mean, it might be meta constructive, you know, it might be investment or it might be ideation or it might be whatever. But there's a really”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, Facebook has that network graph. In some ways, they have that interesting distribution advantage. And it raises the question for me of product versus platform place versus game, what the difference is between those two things. Like you go into a game, there's a predefined objective versus in Second Life, it's just a place. The users do whatever you want. What lessons have you both learned about that contrast between maybe a platform on the one hand versus like a specific tailored product or game on the other hand? And which is more exciting in the future? Like if you're looking to invest today, how do you think about that distinction between investing in a great metaverse game or some sort of platform?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny because for me the desire to kind of rebuild the laws of physics is better met my mindcraft in some ways than what we've yet been able to do with Second Life. So I agree with Bill on that. And I also think, by the way, that the idea of the world being alive and malleable and subject to understandable laws is itself a cul-de-sac to talk about separately from communication and expression. I think there's an opportunity to build things beyond Minecraft that are simply compelling because they are moldable and simple and the outcomes spectacularly unknowable like Bill said about people building things like computers that work.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Haven't yet crossed it. It's kind of this uncanny valley problem. What Bill would want to adequately be able to walk into a board meeting and fully participate in it, we do not yet have. What we need to be able to play a game that lasts for 10 minutes with people we went to high school with. Yeah, sure, we have all that technology.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're driving your startup motorcycle off the left hand side there, know that you have to actually get over both of those things. And what I mean by that is if you are representing yourself as a player in a gamer as a Minecraft character, you don't care much about what nuance you're presenting as a person to the other person. You're using the avatar as a prop in a fun way. maybe an escapist way like you're basically playing a character for a short period of time in a game and even if your character's got expensive sunglasses that were an nft you bought or whatever that's all fine but that's not at all the same thing as coming into a conference or a classroom or a bar and presenting yourself with the intention of establishing you know a new relationship with the people that are in there right the rule for the latter is much more demanding and indeed i would say technically we”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more basic. I'll answer hopefully in a funny way, hopefully not too cryptic a way, which is to say that the challenge of the metaverse is that you have both chasm to cross and the uncanny valley, if you will.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before we go, I want to spend like a chunk of time on some of these crypto things that are so exciting because they're so poppy in terms of the numbers being eye popping and just like the excitement around them. I'd love to hear both your impressions of them. But I don't want to leave this chance to talk a bit more about the 3D avatar technology, graphics part of the world. Because it seems like if you take Minecraft, I think everyone's probably seen Minecraft. It couldn't be simpler looking graphics. It's like these big pixel blocks. It's not visually appealing, but it's just incredibly malleable. It seems like almost graphics don't really matter. It seems like some of the limiting factors that could be talked to experts on the metaverse, they'll say to achieve everyone in high fidelity on one screen at one time, we need more bandwidth. We need cloud resources that evolve. We need Unreal Engine 7 or whatever it is. Just say a little bit about whether or not that is real. Are we really just waiting for technology to unlock more? Or is that really just like nice to have on top of something?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's so well put, Bill. I mean, this idea that you loiter together as, say, kids or young adults in a place and then you decide what you're going to go do, I'd add the additional point here. That place is typically a public place, which is interesting. It's often a place that's broadly accessible. It's safe. It's a kind of a safe ground where you start. We don't have that yet. And one of the opportunities then, I think Discord is the closest thing to it, but you can still look at that a bit more and think about what needs to happen next. What is the simplest ground meeting place that is kind of a public commons that we can go to maybe as adults as well and as young adults where we go off from there together? And what are the rules of engagement and to what degree, for example, do we need decentralization or whatever to make that workable?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is kind of embedded in everything. That second one to me seems very separable. You don't need to do 2D or 3D to do that. In fact, Bill and I were talking about this earlier. Look at Discord as an example of a communicative metaverse, definitely larger by the numbers in terms of people than anything that's yet been fielded. And I think that's a very interesting way of looking at it. So there's two ideas. 2D to 3D is separable from people being there all the time.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My piece to add to this is I think when you look at what's happening now, people are mixing together two pretty different ideas and they're interesting to consider in isolation. One of them is the trend to go from 2D to 3D, right? People have talked for years about how certain types of information is better presented in 3D. the famous memory palace that we used to talk a lot about in Second Life where if you see things on a wall in a virtual museum you remember them better and you actually remember even conversations that went on and stuff like that. So the transition from 2D to 3D, which is made vaguely possible by increases in computing power, is like one thing. And Bill, you've talked about this with me. On the other side of that, there's just the idea of moving the internet from being a largely lonely single player sort of experience to one where there are other people there all the time, where there's communication.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it reminds me of a funny comment my friend Gabe Laden made to me who ran machine zone, who I think is like a realistic, interesting person when it comes, especially to gaming, but also to the metaverse. And he said, look, all the guys are building like the general purpose AIs when they have conversations with me. We need you. We're going to need you to distract the masses, like when the AI takes over. And it is a very dystopian wally like feeling future. It begs the question, like, what the metaverse concept means to both of you today. Of To which everyone is projecting.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person to make this statement You have a dystopia, there would obviously be a much larger percentage of the world that would get value out of role-playing in a virtual. And if we don't have a perspective dystopia that really matches up to science fiction levels of quality right now, I don't know what else is COVID, right? We're looking down the barrel of possibility where we all have to shift more of our social life online, even if we don't like that prospect, it could be thrust upon us. And that's a real world scenario that looks like these science fiction stories. I read something funny to say what Bill said. I don't remember who said it, so I can't credit them, but I read a great quote the other day where they said something like, for God's sakes people, the metaverse was a warning, not an instruction manual.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, give up your body and take on a new body in a virtual world are very different and they're certainly not common. By the way, they're wide-ranging to expand on what Bill said. You could live in an authoritarian regime in which you were largely restricted in your ability to do whatever feels like a good life to you. You might be disabled in one way or another. You might be in a rural locale as a creative artist or something where you just don't have anywhere to do your thing and have people respond to it. But as Bill said, those things I just listed do not apply to all of us. If you're trying to build something top down, like Facebook is saying it wants to do that applies to all of us, there's a tremendous disconnect between what has worked so far as demonstrated by Second Life and other systems and what we would all fantasize would be a really big opportunity.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'd play that back and say it's that for adults, what we learned to the negative in Second Life, although, I mean, again, overall, there's kind of wanting to, like Bill said, you look at it with a smile and then with, I guess, some regrets. But there's wanting to have made something that worked for four billion people, which is certainly what I said at the time. And I felt we could do. And then there's the reality of it, working incredibly well and in a very hopeful, interesting way in terms of looking at behavior and relationships and stuff, but for a much smaller group of people. Like Bill said, he said it perfectly. Kids want to play with their identity, for example. They want to grow up, try what it's like to be 20 when they're 12, you know, and that drives the appeal of a lot of experiences for kids. And we have to be careful, obviously, as they make those experiences good ones. But that desire is there from every kid. When you're a grown-up, reasons why you would”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so if we're saying that, you should listen to us. I mean, we did find the user stories in Second Life where people do want that. And of course, there are tons of them. There's almost a billion dollars a year of those stories. But the simple idea of a world of worlds or of a metaverse of games, I just don't think there's a there, there. I don't think any of us want to do that.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I could answer that in part. First, the obvious thing which you said is unity is a software development kit, not a product. And you could want it to be a product. As yet, it is not. So it's a development kit. But I think the other interesting thing to say is, do we get to a metaverse by 10,000 different people using Unity building some kind of a single experience and then connecting those experiences together? I deeply think that's one of the things we need to carefully consider. In short, I think the answer is no. We don't. I don't think if you were playing a game of Grand Theft Auto and you could drive your car from Grand Theft Auto into Among Us, I don't think that game designers want that. I don't think the guy wants that. Nobody wants that.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building stuff together, you don't need as much graphical quality. So there are these really interesting differences in these systems. But I think calling out Roblox and Minecraft, as Bill did, as the two, I think, most important data points and projects to look at after Second Life is exactly right.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that distinction you just made about calling out Roblox and Minecraft is really useful and important to look at. I agree with you. Minecraft in particular used simpler primitives so everybody could build. I've watched my kids when they were 10 and 12 using Minecraft and building the most incredible things reminded me of some of the amazing spaces that people built in Second Life looking over my kid's shoulders watching them do this. My daughter and my son building different things, building together. But they were able to take advantage of these simpler primitives. But as Bill said, what's interesting about that and an interesting challenge is that the simpler the primitives are, the more appealing they are to kids and not grown ups. You've got this interesting trade-off, graphical quality is the same thing. If you want to have, for example, work or dating or going to shows or things like that, you probably need a lot of graphical quality if you want to have 10-year-olds.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landed at all in that area. I want to come back to a lot of these lessons, the things that specifically worked and didn't work and whether or not those things are going to be different in the future. But Bill, I'm curious when you first approach this concept and this idea with Philip, what was it that was most exciting to you? What was the promise of it that got you so personally invested in asking all these same questions that were now asking again 15 years later? What part of reality didn't line up with the excited potential that you saw at the beginning? In talking about this in retrospect, I worry.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you really did want to build something like what people are saying with the word metaverse, that is a genuinely open construction that is the scale of the internet, you would have to be putting online hundreds of thousands of new servers or something like that every day at some point. And so you need to build an architecture that would enable that many people to work in parallel to deploy that. The idea that it's going to be something that is both simultaneously can handle and is interesting to billions of people is built by one company that's peddling the wheels on its bicycle as fast as it can while it puts machines online. I don't think that's a very likely outcome. I think it's much more likely that we have to use some kind of decentralized technology. Now, having said that, I think, as we all know, the different pros and cons of where we are in crypto and to what extent that decentralization exists is we're right in the middle of it right now. And clearly everything is not.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology problem that was the rate limiter to success as you saw it back then that maybe some of these new technologies would address in a new metaverse I mean there's a couple of things stuck together in there first I mean at a very high level as a two-letter answer I think there are basic technology problems that keep all of us from wanting to go into what we're imagining or talking about here as a metaverse there are technology challenges that are just as challenging today as they were then that are going to block that or going to make it challenging However, I think some of the ideas that everybody is putting out there today like decentralization are very powerful ideas as it relates to how you would build such a thing. One of the points I used to make about this is the internet itself websites themselves I think reach their peak rate of growth in about 2012. And at that point the number of new websites that were deployed per day was something like 300,000 a day.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This guy's magic wand. And it's sold for, I think, and I'm laughing saying this given where we are today with crypto, it sold for like $50 or something. But of course many, many thousands of copies of it sold. And we were all like the idea that somebody would pay $50 for a thing made in a virtual world is so incredibly exciting and wonderful. And it was evidence of this guy's capability as one entrepreneur. I'm going to try to constantly like come with the argument of what I think the biggest metaverse crypto Web3 maximalist would say in response to some of this. Well, this time it's different because of X. Have you responded? Because I do think some things are different. Open public ledger blockchains seem like a really interesting general purpose technology in search of use cases for end users. What is the most different that you look at and think, geez, I wish we had that during Second Life? Another way of asking this is, was it?”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was a favorite example of entrepreneurship within the game? Give us an episode or an artist or a builder, someone that was doing something that used this raw physics engine in this world to build something online that kind of feels like entrepreneurship digitally. There was a guy named Starax was his name. I remember the guy's name. And he used our scripting language. Again, this would be like Shades of Ethereum virtual machine or Solidity today. He used our scripting language to build this thing called Starax's Wand. And if your avatar was holding this wand in its hand, you said something or somebody else said something, the wand would magically create these ridiculous funny props that would go along with what you said. So if you said Santa Claus, I remember Santa Claus and the reindeer would appear 20 feet away from both of you and then fall to the ground and like shatter into pieces and this kind of horrific mess. So it was a very artistic process.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that it remains steady. In addition to that, the value of things in the world was entirely or almost entirely in every case driven by their real utility. So if you bought a baseball cap to wear around on your avatar in Second Life, you probably paid $2, or if it was a designer, one, you might have paid $20 or $100, but you didn't pay $2.4 million for your profile picture, which is clearly a different phenomenon, right? So it's fascinating that Second Life, the value of the things in there was more real world tethered, yeah. Yeah, it's tied to their real utility, which is really interesting. And it's almost like Second Life separates the speculation from the utility in a way that lets you study things.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another point there, as Bill says, is that what makes Second Life fascinating to look at as a study of what may happen, or I suppose what a lot of people hope will happen next in this space, is that the value of those things people were making and selling to each other in Second Life and in fact, indeed, the very value of the currency, as Bill said, were basically small and stable. So it was very different than the tulip bulb situation or the speculative investment situation that we have today with crypto. In second life, as Bill said, we actually increased the money supply as people came into the world to keep that honest. We basically were openly traded against the dollar and the euro at prices that we couldn't control. We essentially made an early version of an exchange as we have today with so many crypto sites. We had that exchange. And so the Linden Dollar traded freely against the dollar. But as Bill said, we increased the money supply by selling new currency into the market.”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eight on to now. One of the big obsessive points that everyone has honed in on today is the ability to on and off-ramp into other currencies within the virtual world. This is where crypto and Web3 become very popular topics. How did that work in Second Life or how does it work? There's Linden Dollars, which I think is the name of the currency on the grid or in the game. And then there's US dollars. Like what is the interface between those two things? Is there a consistent exchange rate designing an economy is hard? How does all that work? I'm thinking of Bill at this moment. When Bill and I met, he had just, among other things, had deeply What was that story”
2021-12-07 · Invest Like the Best · Bill Gurley and Philip Rosedale - Back to the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 254] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source