TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to TIP.

Trey Lockerbie (0:03)

Metaverse, Web3, unbundling Reddit? If any of these phrases are foreign to you, as they were for me, you are really going to enjoy today's episode where I sit down with Greg Isenberg. Greg has had an impressive career in building and selling startups such as Wall Street Survivor, 5by, and Islands, the last of which was acquired by WeWork. Greg is also a growth advisor to TikTok, as well as a venture partner at Indicator Ventures.

On today's episode, we discussed tools for building financial literacy, how you can use community platforms like Reddit to create products and build businesses, what on earth is happening with Web 1, Web 2, and now Web 3, what exactly is the metaverse, and how commerce might look in the future. This new era of community-based economics is growing at a rapid pace, and I think it's important as investors to take note and watch closely. So without further ado, please enjoy this fascinating discussion with Greg Isenberg.

SPEAKER_1 (0:59)

You are listening to The Investor's Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.

We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Unexpected.

Trey Lockerbie (1:20)

Welcome to the Investor's Podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today I'm speaking with Greg Isenberg. Greg, welcome to the show. Thank you, Trey. Great to be here.

You have had quite an interesting career, and it has primarily revolved around building community social consumer platforms. I'm not sure if I'm getting the vernacular correct, but you certainly have an expertise in building communities and businesses on top of them. But I wanted to kick off the conversation with some of your earlier work, should we say, a company called Wall Street Survivor, because I think our audience would really benefit from maybe learning more about this tool that you helped build and then ultimately sell. So why don't you talk to us about your experience with Wall Street Survivor?

Absolutely. First of all, Trey, no one asked me that. So I'm happy that you did.

Picture this, it's 2008, economy is crashing, half of your net worth disappears, and you don't know why. Because people, a lot of people didn't understand what was happening. They hear, what do you mean? The stock market is supposed to go up 7% every week. And then when they get their Charles Schwab or Vanguard statements, whatever, and they see their net worth going down by 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% overnight, that's when they went to Google and were like, what do I do? So I met a guy who had recently just bought a stock market simulator. And we talked about how can we use this real-time simulator and create almost like a game around learning about the stock market. So what we did is we gave people $100,000 of virtual cash, they're able to trade options, buy stocks.

And as they're buying, we're giving them tips. And we really did make it feel like a game. So Wall Street Survivor was that. It was a community centered around demystifying investing.

And I remember when we started building it, people told us like, people don't care about education, it's not sticky, they need things like Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Turns out actually people do care. I mean, why do you listen to this podcast? You listen to this podcast, you're trying to be better. So that was Wall Street Survivor. And it became the number one stock market game on the internet, basically overnight. Millions of students used it as a part of their finance curriculum to learn about investing. 85% of the top US business schools used it as a part of a finance curriculum. And yeah, it was in my early 20s. This is in, or even earlier, at 2021, 22

And that's the story of Wall Street Survivor, which we ended up selling.

Amazing. So you can't actually invest real money. It's simply just a tool for learning how to trade or invest using paper money. Exactly. And I think the business model, we built it really just out of the need, to be honest. And then we're like, oh my god, we have a million people using this or whatever. How do we generate money? And the first thing we started doing is putting on ads. That's what everyone used to do at the time. And then we're like, you know what? Why are we selling ads to TD Ameritrade? When we realized that these people would spend 3, 4, 5, 6, $700 for an acquired customer. So then when we started basically doing deals with some of these bigger fun, bigger advertisers.

And the lesson there was, pay attention to who's advertising on your website and try to like strike out sort of direct deals. But yeah, the business model was very strong around, we were basically top of the funnel for a lot of these financial firms.