Sam Englebardt and Richard Kim - Investing in Immersive Worlds

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
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** (2:14)
Today, my guests are Sam Englebardt and Richard Kim, general partners at venture fund Galaxy Interactive. Having come from the media and finance sectors respectively, Sam and Richard joined forces in 2018 to invest in their shared thesis that immersive digital experiences would become the dominant way people engage with each other in the future.
Our conversations centers around the evolution of art, finance and gaming as they proliferate in Web3. Please enjoy my conversation with Sam and Richard.
So Richard and Sam, we're gonna talk a lot about different potential areas of impact for Web3, from gaming to art to the financialization of everything in our conversation today, and probably even touch on topics like mental health, which will be really interesting. I wanna start though with art and maybe actually in the traditional art world. I know you both had a conversation with a person that runs the Whitney, very classic art institution. I'd love to hear about that conversation. What was the purpose of it? What did you take from it? Maybe touch on this idea of, that you learned about art versus market. I'm really intrigued by this concept and think it's a great place to start.

**Richard Kim** (3:17)
Absolutely. So I got into a rabbit hole in the first quarter of last year in a platform called Artblocks. As I was looking into the NFT space and asking myself the question, okay, which of these digital art platforms are actually gonna do something interesting in the long run? And the reason this platform, Artblocks, stood out to me was because they specialized in what was called on-chain generative art.
And the idea here was that a lot of NFTs are essentially links to metadata stored on some centralized server. And so there's this critique of NFTs of, hey, despite all of the promise of decentralization, these things ultimately roll up to centralized servers. And so it's fundamentally not that interesting. What makes Artblocks interesting is, aside from the dependence on a couple of libraries, like p5.js, all of the code needed to recreate your NFT lives on chain. And I thought that was a really interesting starting point to delve into what I would later discover is generative art. It's probably worth defining what is generative art for a second.
I think the most commonly used definition is from this professor, Philip Gallanter, and he said generative art is any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, computer program, a machine, or any other procedural invention that's set into motion with some degree of autonomy that results in a completed work of art. Now, you'll notice that that definition is not algorithmic art, which is what generative art is often associated with. And the reason it's not limited to algorithmic art is because generative art actually has a decades-long history, going back to the 50s and 60s and a lot of the conceptual works of art from Sol LeWitt and others. And so I found this intersection of something that has as long a story to history as generative art with this new technology that, in the context of natively digital productions, could bring global scarcity and global status. So fascinating. Going back to your original question, one of the things that made Artblocks as a platform so explosive is it wasn't just an art platform. Prior to collecting on Artblocks, I would have never considered myself a big art collector.