Creators, Communities, and Crypto

**Fred Ehrsam** (0:01)
All right, creators, communities, and crypto. Three areas that we're all deeply passionate about. Three areas that have seen explosive growth over the last couple of years. And I think we all have an intuition that crypto could dramatically change the landscape for both creators and online communities going forward.
Jesse and Blake, you guys are two of my favorite people to talk about these subjects with. I think you both have really interesting backgrounds that uniquely enable you to see where the future of the space is going. Since you guys are meeting for the first time, I think it'd be good for each of you to introduce yourself quickly.
Jesse, why don't you kick us off and then Blake can follow.

**Jesse Walden** (0:42)
Well, yeah, so I'll lead off. So I guess I have a pretty non-traditional background from BC. I guess the story starts in the early 2000s when I was very involved with piracy. You know, much more than most teenagers were in the early 2000s. Everyone was downloading, but I was uploading and I was part of this group that had a guy on the manufacturing line in China that would overnight a DVD and we would pop it into our water-cooled tower and encode it and upload it to these FTP top sites to get credits. And so that's where the files were originating that everyone was downloading over the tour.
And I guess that was a formative experience in how media propagates on the internet. And it started from these FTP servers to BitTorrent, and then ultimately there were file lockers and everything moved to the browser. And through all that, I just became a huge music junkie, essentially. And so I found myself then in university throwing parties, then concerts, and ultimately getting into artist management. And so I started this artist management company that had the goal of helping artists go independent and reach their fans directly using new tech platforms to distribute their work to their fans. So I did that. I worked with Solange Knowles and Blood Orange and Magical Cloud, so big pitchfork artists.
And then learned about Bitcoin. And to me, the thing that stood out was here's a peer to peer protocol is kind of like in the same lineage of these protocols I was intimate with through piracy. But it has this thing that all those protocols lacked, which has an identity mechanism baked into the system. And that's what allows you to attribute a Bitcoin to its rightful owner. And so my immediate thought was, wow, what if you took the system like Bitcoin and applied it to a different type of digital asset instead of a financial asset? How about a media asset? And that was the spark for the startup that I co-founded called MediaChain. And that was in 2014
Too early, we were acquired by Spotify. They were sort of interested in the enterprise blockchain use case of what we were building, though our intent was to really build a developer platform.
And so I spent a year at Spotify leading blockchain R&D, only to find out that that wasn't really a big priority for them. And so I left and joined Andres and Horowitz in 2018, and was on the crypto team there for the last two and a half years.

**Fred Ehrsam** (3:37)
You made it through the crypto trough of 2015?

**Jesse Walden** (3:40)
Yeah, yeah, I made it through two troughs thus far. I think that's one less than you, Fred, probably.
And anyway, so yeah, was that Andres? And just recently left and spun out my own very small independent fund and planning to continue to invest in crypto and sort of like adjacent areas.

**Fred Ehrsam** (4:01)
That's awesome.
Well, I mean, your background is far more impressive than mine. But I was born and raised in suburbs of Detroit and always thought I'd end up in like automotive and manufacturing because that's basically all I knew.
I went to college and basically like realized, oh my gosh, I can't end up at like one of these fortune 500 companies. It seems miserable. And so I was like, there has to be an alternative. And all I knew was like business. And so I just started reaching out to like random startups and things like that. I ended up like interning with a startup called Zarly, which was like a reverse Craigslist or reverse eBay at the time. It just raised a bunch of money from Kleiner. And I was like, oh, this will be like the dream. I'll like join this company and I'll take off to the moon. And then like it basically just fell flat on its face for it after I joined them as an intern. And then used like still studied like supply chain and manufacturing, because that's basically all you can study at Michigan State.