Gabby Dizon - Mapping the Metaverse Economy - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 49]

**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** (1:47)
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** (2:10)
My guest today is Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games or YGG. In 2020, Gabby and his co-founders built YGG around the growing play-to-earn economy within blockchain-based games. Based in the Philippines, YGG effectively backs players who might not otherwise be able to afford to play in exchange for a share of their profits. Today, YGG is paying out over a million US dollars a week to players within its community, largely concentrated in their home country of the Philippines.
The play-to-earn model has seen its most rapid growth in the popular NFT-based game Axie Infinity. Players earn tokens within the game which can be exchanged into local currencies or be used to purchase more digital assets. For a sense of how this market has expanded, Axie Infinity has already reported over $1.5 billion in sales over its history and nearly $900 million over the last 30 days.
The speed at which these games and ecosystems around them are growing is remarkable. In our conversation, Gabby explains YGG's decentralized structure, the unit economics of their business model, and how he deals with the volatility of crypto assets when trying to build a durable long-term business. We also discussed the broader metaverse landscape, how it might evolve, what might derail it, and the technicalities of building a token-based as opposed to equity-based business. I hope you enjoy this wild conversation with Gabby Dizon.
We just met a few days ago, but I've been so damn excited for this conversation because I think you're building one of the more interesting and different businesses in the world right now. You're in Manila, I'm in New York. That's the nature of things these days. I absolutely love it. Maybe just since a lot of people won't be familiar with Yield Guild Games, you could just give an overview of what the company does today before we retrace your steps and the company steps back in time. I think that's a good place to begin.

**Gabby Dizon** (4:00)
Yield Guild Games is what we call a play-to-earn gaming guild. In a way, I call it similar to a World of Warcraft guild with a balance sheet. So we're a group of gamers who are set up as a DAO or decentralized autonomous organization and we invest in assets in different blockchain games. So Axie Infinity is the main one that we are playing in. We buy these axes. These NFTs are used inside the games to earn some form of yield. So in this case, it's SLP tokens.
These are used by players to earn an income.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:31)
I think we need to talk about play-to-earn in some detail upfront because without that foundation, it's going to be hard for people to follow what the hell an SLP is and why anyone cares.