Devin Finzer - An Everything Store for Digital Assets - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 53]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:54)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:19)
My guest today is Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, the world's largest NFT marketplace. In a journey that started like many other founders in the space, Devin went deep down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017 and became particularly fascinated with the potential behind digital assets. During our conversation, we touch on the origin story of OpenSea, how Devin differentiates between the spectrum of NFTs in the market and what he sees as the opportunity in the future for the industry.
We also talk about the various risks within a blockchain, from security dynamics to market speculation. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Devin Finzer.
So Devin, with stories like OpenSea's, which now appears like an overnight success, I always like to go back and pick apart the early days first because I know everything's not always easy. And maybe the beginning point for our conversation can just be when you first conceived of this concept of OpenSea and kind of describe what that early conception was. And then we can pick up the story there and go into all aspects of what's interesting today.

**Devin Finzer** (3:20)
Sure. Yeah. So the way that we came across the idea for OpenSea was first started with crypto. We were just, my co-founder and I were just really excited about what was going on in crypto. There was all of this philosophizing about the future of the internet, future of finance, these protocols, autonomous organizations.
And we were just really interested in that, just reading all the white papers. Kind of the classic falling down the crypto rabbit hole situation.
CryptoKitties hit while we were working on this other idea, which was around decentralized network for sharing internet bandwidth. It was very much in its infancy. But CryptoKitties, when it happened, which was the first NFT, it was this digital cat breeding game where you could buy and sell these cats and trade them on the blockchain.
It was just really interesting to see a blockchain-based application oriented towards a consumer audience. So for a lot of people, it was the first time they were ever installing MetaMask, which is a browser-based Chrome extension that allows you to have a wallet inside of your browser. And it was really the first time that people were getting their hands on what people now refer to as Web3. That was just really cool. We sort of joined the communities. And one of the exciting things about CryptoKitties was the fact that you could permissionlessly build other applications on top of CryptoKitties. So for example, someone built something called Kitty Race, which allowed you to take your CryptoKitties, which again, you kind of owned on the blockchain, and race them inside of this other application. Or like there was something called Kitty Hats where you could accessorize CryptoKitties. And actually, I was thinking about creating a CryptoKitty battling just because I thought, you know, what if you could battle? Yeah. From there, I was like, oh, well, maybe there's actually like a bigger idea here where it's not building another experience on top of CryptoKitties, but rather building another experience marketplace for CryptoKitties, but then a marketplace that could span horizontally across other NFTs that come online. This sort of idea of interoperability would apply to something that maybe was actually like a much more long-term play. That was where this idea of building a general NFT marketplace came from. The nice thing that happened after that was other NFTs came online slowly but surely. So there was Decentraland Land, which was a virtual world where you could buy land as NFTs. There were a few little like trading card games.