NFT Hype And The Rise of Digital Collectibles
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Even Rikin Mantri, whose company launched an NFT exchange on Friday, admits the eye-popping sums being paid for digital artwork, NBA highlights and even Tweets are being fueled by hype.
Mantri, co-founder of Curio, which launched last month, expanded his platform to let fans trade their digital collectibles directly. It will be competing with a bevy of blockchain-backed collectible exchanges including Rarible and OpenSea, which just raised $23 million.
But Curio plans to appeal to the average consumer by targeting dedicated fan bases and partnering with well known entertainment brands. Already, it's struck a deal with Fremantle, which owns the television drama "American Gods" franchise, based on the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman.
"We're definitely seeing a hype cycle," Mantri said. "If you see who's placing the bids, it's based on crypto enthusiasts who've made a lot of money investing early on."
But he still sees a big business in targeting dedicated fans. "We think about (NFTs) as a passport to prove your fandom and also unlock VIP experiences."
So-called "smart contract" technology that underpins NFTs can give the owners of these tokens special access to experiences, like celebrity meet-and-greets.
Mantri thinks most people won't care about the underlying technology of NFTs in the same way they care little about how credit cards work. To appeal to a non-cryptophile audience, Curio accepts payments in normal currency – in contrast to many NFT platforms that require crypto – and also offers a "gallery" feature and enables sharing on social media to allow collectors to "flex" their items.
"Collection is a human condition," Mantri said, noting his old pet rock, trading card and watch collections that have been gathering dust.
Mantri and co-founder Juan Hernandez met in the computer science program at Northwestern University. Hernandez went on to build a blockchain-based financial exchange as founder of OpenFinance Network. Mantri entered the world of entertainment, first at William Morris and later at ABC. Along with Ben Arnon — an early employee at tech startup Wildfire that was later acquired by Google — the two began the company last year to capitalize on their experience across crypto and entertainment. They wanted to ride the tailwind created by NBA TopShot, which first launched in July 2019.
Curio has so far sold 2,350 NFTs connected to seven different American Gods characters. The tokens have been priced between $50 and $100, depending on their rarity, and have in total yielded $130,000 since sales began in late February. Collectors who purchase all seven types unlock one of two bonus items.
Mantri said every NFT "drop" has been sold out within two hours, and some in as little as 90 seconds.
One NFT that was sold originally for $100 later traded for $1,800. Numerous others have traded for six- or seven-times their sales price, Mantri said.
Curio makes its money by taking a percentage from the primary purchase and from any secondary-market trades – which it now enables on its own platform. The intellectual property rights holders receive the remainder.
With Fremantle, Curio is working with its merchandising division, which manages the distribution of earnings to the proper rights holders.
"It's all boats rise; a completely new incremental revenue stream," said Mantri.
The company also plans to offer a service that allows IP owners to create their own NFT platforms.
Earlier this month, Curio announced a $1.2 million raise that it closed in late 2020. It is currently pursuing another round.
Since Hernandez built Curio's platform eight months ago, the company has grown to 12 employees, and plans to expand to 20 next month.
The timing of Curio's future NFT "drops" will largely be determined by its partners' overall marketing strategies – for example, in between show seasons, or to boost one-off content releases.
"It's about fitting into the space in between a fan's experiences," Mantri said.
He thinks these partnerships and a selective strategy of what to offer will help Curio stand out.
"Open Sea and Rarible are more like YouTube and user-generated content; we're more of a Netflix model," Mantri said.
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Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
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Activision Blizzard Employees Set to Walkout on Wednesday
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Workers from Activision Blizzard are planning a walkout at Blizzard's Irvine campus Wednesday morning, according to documents reviewed by dot.LA and confirmed by multiple company employees.
A group of several hundred employees crafted the messaging and coordinated the release of the documents with journalists, according to Valentine Powell, one of the organizers.
"We will not stop demanding the systemic changes needed to protect women and marginalized genders in our work spaces," tweeted Powell, who is a Blizzard software engineer.
The walkout announcement follows Monday's publication of an open letter signed by over 2,000 Activision Blizzard employees criticizing the company's response to the lawsuit brought to it by the state of California. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the company last week after a two-year investigation found male workers and bosses tormented women and executives didn't deal seriously with the complaints.
In the written statement circulated to numerous publications, the walkout organizers issued four demands to executive leadership: ending mandatory arbitration clauses, which they say "protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution"; improving representation via new recruiting, interviewing, hiring and promotion practices; publishing compensation data and empowering a task force to audit the company's diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The statement also called on social media supporters to show solidarity with the #ActiBlizzWalkout hashtag. Some Twitter users began calling for gamers to abstain from using the company's products, which include popular series Call of Duty, Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
Read the full letter below:
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Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Projections on Cars? Adway Gets Funding to Pioneer an Unusual Advertising Method
Culver City-based Adway is offering Uber and Lyft drivers hundreds of dollars every month to project ads on the sides of their cars.
So far, the company has signed up about two dozen drivers in Los Angeles, where competitor Firefly faced fierce pushback a few years ago from city officials who sought to ban digital ads on moving vehicles.
Adway promises drivers $50-$350 a month in what they call "passive" income. All the drivers have to do is install a small device that sits just underneath their vehicle's side view mirrors.
CEO and co-founder Sasha Krylov said his wife deserves much of the credit for the idea. A feature on a car she saw called a "puddle light," which projects a logo or image on the ground when one of the doors is opened, caught her attention. She felt the image was trying to communicate something.
"I told her it was just a gimmicky logo," Krylov said. "But I thought to myself, 'what if she was right?'"
It was this epiphany that eventually led Krylov to this moment. Last week, the nearly three-year-old company clinched a $6 million seed round led by Upfront Ventures.
Among its advertisers are Webex by Cisco and poke restaurant Sweetfin. Adway gives these companies an estimate of how many impressions their ads made by determining how many Bluetooth devices came within a certain radius of the vehicle. Krylov said this one-way communication system does not collect personal data from the devices.
Krylov decided to project on the side of the car because, according to him, it was his only option. In his research, he learned that it was illegal in California to project an image on the ground, as the puddle lights do, when the vehicle is moving. The same went for the front and the back of the automobile.
"The only thing that was left, really, was the side of the car," said Krylov. "Coincidentally enough, the side of the car presents the largest possible real estate on the body of the car, which any advertiser would want to capitalize on."
Another early concern was the mere fact that projections do not show up well in daylight, meaning that Adway drivers can only make impressions on customers between dusk and dawn. At first, Krylov worried that this could be a limitation for the company, but he has seen only promising results.
"To our surprise, [it] actually makes a lot of sense if you think about this," Krylov explained. "A lot of traffic is actually concentrated in the evening, between 4 and 7pm, and if we're not talking about summertime, it goes dark around 4, 4:30. And people are more prone to making purchasing decisions after work hours rather than before."
Despite this, looking into hardware options in the future that can allow these projections to be seen during the day is also on the docket for Adway.
"This is what we're building this technology towards," said Krylov. "We just need to start somewhere, and somewhere is now, because there's still a tremendous amount of the market to be seized, and there's an opportunity for us to build a community of intellectual property around this today."
Adway's method of advertising has the potential to stir up controversy. A couple of years ago, L.A. city councilman Bob Blumenfield wrote an op-ed for the "Los Angeles Daily News" condemning San Francisco-based Firefly for their similar advertising method of digital billboards on the roofs of rideshare vehicles.
Behind Her Empire: LOLA Co-Founder Alex Friedman on Building a Better Tampon
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
On this week's episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, meet Alex Friedman, the co-founder of feminine care brand LOLA.
LOLA was created to address the need for more transparency in women's health. It was begun as a passion product to understand whether women would be interested in a tampon product made from healthier ingredients. Wince then, it has grown to create its own feminine care items free from harmful chemicals.
As Friedman and her partner began building LOLA, they realized that what was lacking was a comprehensive understanding of women's health.
"Nobody had any idea what we were talking about," Friedman says. "Ninety-five percent of the people we were meeting with were men. And they didn't have any personal understanding of or empathy for a woman's reproductive experience and had never seen or touched a tampon."
Friedman and her partner were able to "lean into" the knowledge gap, something she says created "warm friendships and relationships" and was "fun and productive."
Friedman started her career at a private equity consulting firm after graduating from Dartmouth. She later attended the Wharton School of Business, and went on to work as an investment consultant and analyst.
She shares how she was able to overcome her fears to take the leap into entrepreneurship — and what other entrepreneurs should keep in mind.
"It's important for founders to be thinking about the problem that they're trying to solve — rather than the company that they want to form — and focus on solving that problem," Friedman says.."Because if it's a real problem, and you solve it correctly, you will have success."
Friedman discusses how motherhood has made her a better communicator, the high value she places on mentorship, her tips for fundraising and how to overcome doubts around business ideas.
Alex Friedman is the co-founder of LOLA.
"I have very little kids, and so I have to communicate very clearly and simply all the time. And I think that actually is a positive for a business leader. Right, as I have just be able to very clearly and quickly articulate expectations. And I have found that that's a positive for me, too."
Want to hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast? Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Engagement Intern Colleen Tufts contributed to this post.
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.