#196 with Dan Held - Who Really Created Bitcoin & Other Crypto Startup Ideas

If you told me that it makes him personally $30 million spread evenly over the next 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

All right, what up? Sean here. We got Sam, and then we got special guest Dan Held, the Dan Held from the Bitcoin space. And on Twitter, you've probably seen him around. I told my brother-in-law that you were on the pod today. He was very excited. I've told him about every guest so far and you got one of the biggest reactions. He was a, I think he's a paid subscriber to your newsletter or something like that. So he's very into you. And on the other hand, I think Sam has no fucking clue who you are. So I think it's a perfect mix. I know some stuff about you, Sam knows nothing about you, and I think it'll be fun for that reason.

I only know that Sean says that you're cool. And you're in Bitcoin. I know nothing about you.

Um, we got an hour to figure it out.

Whenever one of us proposes a guest, it's like you put that guest— it's like you have to go take the stand and have an oath that this person is going to be good, and then you better be able to lawyer up and defend why this person's a guest. And so he'll— every time, anytime he mentions a name to me, I'm like, why the fuck are we having that person on? And then he'll like defend it. And then same here, I was like, no, no, this is gonna be gonna be interesting because couple, I think a couple reasons. We should talk about crypto and then we should talk about, I think, like kind of like building your personal brand because you've done a really good job of that. And so we'll do both of those during this, during this convo. But I want to start with like, give people the, like, what's the 1-minute story of who the heck you are? And yeah, I don't know, like give us the 1-minute story of Dan Held.

Yeah, the elevator pitch. Yeah. So I'm from Texas originally. I grew up in Dallas, 25 years in Dallas. I studied finance in undergrad, stumbled and bumbled my way into tech. I didn't know what I was doing when I first built my, my first software product in the space. It was successful. From there, learned how to formalize some of my skills around product management and marketing. Worked at a couple of different early-stage crypto companies. So I was at some of the first crypto companies I worked at, like Blockchain.com. I've had two exits in the crypto space, so I've sold two of my products. And then I've also worked at Uber where I was on rider growth led by Andrew Chen. So I was one of his directs. And the growth marketing team. So I've had big company, classic tech experience, but also a lot of kind of that startup hustle in early-stage crypto, which early-stage crypto is kind of Wild West. Yeah. Which I guess fits my Texas attitude.

So, and so tell people the story. So you got into crypto, Bitcoin, Bitcoin specifically. You're a Bitcoin guy. I shouldn't, I shouldn't keep saying crypto too much. Bitcoin back in, I think, 2012 or so. Bitcoin was maybe $10 back then. Um, what, you know, what caught your interest? How did you hear about it? What's the origin story for you?

Yeah, so I got back in 2012. Uh, my buddy paid me back for a beer with something called a Cassius coin. A Cassius coin are those gold coins that you see in all those news articles where they talk about Bitcoin. They were physical Bitcoins essentially. And that was a good time. And in that 2012 era, Bitcoin is so new and weird and different that that was like a good bridge from the physical fiat paper money world to the digital Bitcoin world. From there, my background is in finance. I really dug the 21 million hard cap as a solution to bad central banking policies. I mean, I was in undergrad during the 2008 financial crisis studying finance, and I'm like, my professors don't know shit, right? Neither do the people on TV, and neither do these books that I'm reading. And that's what kind of shook my foundational trust and belief in the existing financial system.. And that's when Bitcoin came around. When I saw that, I was like, this is a good new way to rebuild the financial system without having to trust these institutions.

And Sam, I don't know if you know this, Sam, do you know when Satoshi signed the first block, he put a message in there. Do you know, do you, have you ever heard what this is?

No, but I love that guy's stories. I mean, the, the myth, or if it's real, I don't know what the truth is, but I love the story behind it.

And then I don't know if you know it off the top of your head, but do you, do you know what it is?

Right. And so the mission was sort of cleverly baked in, which I just love. I'm like you, Sam, where I'm like, the more I learn about the origins, the more this shit seems like it's out of a movie. Uh, it doesn't seem like real life. It's like, oh, this anonymous creator. It's like, how's anything anonymous nowadays, right? Like, there's, there's like way, you know, like the, the way they caught the Silk Road guy was like his, the way he was typing or whatever matched some review he left on a movie message board or so, you know, there's always something like that. There's always a breadcrumb trail.

There's actually, is it still anonymous? Uh, I mean, obviously no one's come out. Could it have been the, the, the guy who had ALS and died? I mean, what, what's, what do you, what do smart people who know what What's Dan's, what's Dan's theory?

Uh, the, uh, everyone's got their own favorite Satoshi tale. I'll give you two. So one is Hal Finney, the one that you just described. He had ALS and died, I think in 2012 or 2013. Uh, Hal Finney's a classic favorite because he ghostwrote PGP encryption and Bitcoin's proof of work system is based on his early reusable proof of work system that he created earlier. Bitcoin wasn't a new innovation. It just kind of Frankensteined all these other innovations together. And that's how Satoshi built Bitcoin. Hal Finney has the demeanor of Bitcoin. He was also the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction, or he was sending it to himself.

Right, which is what, by the way, if you ever work with developers, that's what they do when they're testing shit out. The first thing they do is they send it to my account, A to my account. Sean sends a Sean test.

Wow.

So he understood what it meant to take on a government at this scale. And when I say ghostwrote, he ghostwrote it because his name isn't officially on it. So same with Bitcoin. He was one of the few people that would've built Bitcoin in that fashion, hiding behind a pseudonym of Satoshi and using that because that was critical that the project had no face to it, had no central weak point. Because if you could find Satoshi and he's sort of a weak point, in the governance structure and in the ownership structure, that could undermine the long-term success of the protocol. So yeah, Hal's a classic favorite.

Also, he died around the same time that Satoshi stopped doing anything. We haven't seen a flare from Satoshi since, right?

That's right. Satoshi hasn't signed a message with his private key, which would concretely determine that that is Satoshi, or give us a strong determination that that is Satoshi.

So that timeline makes sense. That's theory one. What's theory two?

Theory 2 is the NSA. So Theory 2 is that it's the NSA because the NSA builds weapons, and Bitcoin is a financial weapon. It could destabilize countries and destabilize their currencies. And so this is just a more fun— I mean, totally off the wall sort of thinking, but so let's say a group of cryptographers, which some of the best in the world work at the NSA, come up with Bitcoin because they're tasked with building a weapon. And after they build it, they go, wait a second, Maybe we should just release this into the wild because we do believe that this is good for humankind, right? And they release it as kind of like it's like a Frankenstein experiment let out of the lab. So I think that one's kind of fun. I mean, there's no facts behind that at all.

Where would you bet your lab leak hypothesis for the pandemic? Basically, that's what you're saying.

I think one's more realistic than the other. Maybe. What would you bet your money on? One of those, Dan?

Probably more the health. Anyone? I feel that it's an individual. So that's always the question too. Is it an individual or a group of people? I skew more individual. Design by committee is really hard to do with something as niche and like incredible, like an incredible breakthrough like Bitcoin. Right. So I think that one person just had that genius to, to take all these elements and put them together to create Bitcoin versus a group of developers trying to figure out how to build this thing.

And, and, uh, what— there's also the other thing, which is like, it's just somebody else. So if you were going to apply your percentages, what percent is Hal Finney, NSA, or other?

Wow.

All right. I like that. Um, okay. So you discover Bitcoin because some guy gives you a coin, uh, and you don't— you're not just like, dude, what is this? Like, can I have my $10 please? And, and so you go, you read about it. Uh, what happens that night? So you go and you, you, what, you read the white paper, you join the forums, you just start reading about it online. And then like, I guess, like, take us through the thought process of you going from where you were then to like where you are now, where Bitcoin is like, you know, a pretty major part of your life.

Yeah. And I can kind of weave in my early entrepreneurship, like in tech part of that too, because it's all kind of intertwined together. So I start to read about it, the 21 million hard cap, the monetary policy. I see this as a huge breakthrough because if you remove the subjectivity of choosing what an appropriate rate of inflation is, you've solved the problem of monetary theory. So like, Satoshi solved the problem of like going, hey, we shouldn't constantly figure out what the rate of inflation should be. We should fix it and the economy can reorient around that. Genius breakthrough. So that got me really hooked. Um, I worked at a small investment firm in Dallas, nothing anyone would know. It's a really tiny one, wasn't prestigious or anything like that. They relocated me to San Francisco to open up their West Coast portfolio. Out in San Francisco, I, during the, uh, it was the April Bitcoin run-up from $10 to $260, back down to $100. I was going to the Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco. This is where like Brian and Fred from Coinbase were hanging out. And same with Jared Kenna from Tradehill and Jesse Powell from Kraken, the company I work at now. I mean, there's only like—

And what were those like? Because we were just in Miami when the Bitcoin conference was happening and it was kind of like a bunch of fools acting the fool. I thought I didn't attend, but just through what you, what was coming out on social media, I guess. And everything, every community changes from like when it's the outsiders and, you know, just the true believers to like, you know, 10 years later, 11 years later, what it looks like is very, very different. Every community changes.

All of my friends, my roommate was buying, I was mining in '11 and '12 and they were just hardcore devs and nerds.

So what were those meetups like?

And, how'd you do that?

But, you can just fill in a shit ton of words in the core title. Old-school keyword stuffing. Yeah.

Old-school growth hacking technique of just keyword stuffing, but it worked. Now, it was sort of a crapshoot to see if the App Store reviewers would approve it, but 1 out of 5 would, and if you did, you could clinch that spot, right? So that kind of started my fascination with both products and with growth marketing, kind of on the more hacky side of things. And yeah, that was my, that was my initial foray into tech. And then we sold ZeroBlock at the end of the year to Blockchain.com. Blockchain.com is still around today. It's a really popular wallet. I was the first product manager there. And so kind of that's what I mean by stumbled and bumbled my way into tech is I don't have any formal— yeah, I didn't have any formal background. I just kind of was really empathetic with solving a problem for my customer, wanted to propagate the message of my products, and that's how I learned those two skills.

All right, let's talk about some ideas, Sean, shall we?

Yeah.

So, Dan, I don't know if you know, but this is the Ideas Podcast where we basically say, okay, that like I'm interested in the past, but to the extent that I learned cool things and then I'm like, all right, let's get to the future. What's the future look like? So, so ideas. So I think there's really like I guess like, let's start in the Bitcoin crypto space. What problems do you see today that you think somebody needs to solve? Like back then there was no real-time price data. That was a problem that needed solving. Sure. What are you seeing today as a problem that needs solving?

I mean, you can't even— you can't— I told my guy at the bank today, let's buy some Ethereum, and they were like, oh, we can't.

It's ridiculous. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. It's so antiquated. They just don't talk, don't even talk the same language as all these crypto folks, right? Like, I'm a more Bitcoin guy, but if you go down like the Ethereum rabbit hole, there's a whole— I mean, there's so much complexity in how those DeFi and smart contracts work. To where you need like a full tax team to solve that problem too. But these, I mean, I've been in this space for almost 9 years. I know more billionaires on this planet than probably anyone else because of crypto, because crypto has created so many, not institutions, but individuals who have billions to where you need to be a due diligence.

Bitcoin is probably, Bitcoin plus Ethereum has probably created more individual billionaires than any other project.

Right.

Exactly. I think that's gotta be true, which is kind of insane. Like more than Microsoft, more than Amazon, more than any of those projects.

How many crypto billionaires do you know? How many billionaires do you know?

I would say off the top of my head, at least, at least 10.

10. How many, how about $100 million on up?

Oh man. I mean, I would assume I at least know 100 or so folks that probably have that much now. Look, Bitcoin people don't tell you how much they have, but you can kind of assume based on how long they've been in this space and what companies they worked at and how much their net worth was back then. And probabilistically, yeah.

I mean, it's a general assumption, but how much of your personal money were you putting into this before your Bitcoin started like making sense? Like, were you putting like $100 grand into this in 2012 when it was like, who the fuck knows if this is going to work? Because $100 grand to you at your—

I wish.

Well, you could do it. I wish you were really young.

That would have been a lot of money.

Yeah, I didn't have that much money, man. I mean, look, I was like 25, 26, just out of college, and I was in— I, you know, my first job was in Dallas. I was making $45K a year. It wasn't like a ton of money. Yeah. And then I got into tech eventually, and of course that went up quite a bit. But that was in 2013, 2014. Now my average cost basis was $10 to $100, but there's a bunch of coins I got from in the hundreds to thousands, right? Yeah. So I think a lot of people look at like crypto OGs like myself and they assume we had like a million dollars sitting around that we all dumped in at $5 a Bitcoin. And also, I wasn't a perfect hodler. I day traded, I traded Litecoin, I traded a bunch of other stuff just for fun. I even mined Primecoin. So I'm not, you know, on my Bitcoin journey, I've touched a bunch of other coins as well. Um, so no one's a perfect hodler.

Psychologically, are you able to buy the dip when the dip is like $30,000 and it's like, well, my cost basis is $192,000? And, uh, you know, or like, whatever, it's $5,000, even, even if it's $3,000, even my cost basis is $3,000, buying at $30,000, it's like buy the dip. Great. So are you able to psychologically do that or are you just like, hey, my position is set. I hope the rest of you suckers buy the dip so that, uh, you know, we keep this upward momentum.

Yeah. So technically I'm over 100% of my net worth in Bitcoin because I took a small levered position back when Bitcoin was $7,000 at the bottom of the cycle. Uh, because I believed that Bitcoin, you know, in a bull run obviously appreciates. So I, uh, technically over 100% of my net worth is in Bitcoin, uh, also. I do something where I lend out my Bitcoin to earn a yield. That yield is like kind of a day-to-day stacking mechanism to add more sats, to add more Bitcoin.

And you're using what, like, uh, Kraken, BlockFi? Who, who, what are you using? So Kraken doesn't have— you, you're at Kraken now, so I, I put them first, but I don't think they offer this as a service.

I appreciate the shout out, but no, we don't offer that yet. Yeah, so we've got like BlockFi, Ledn, and, uh, Genesis Trading. Genesis Trading, you have to have like a minimum of 20 Bitcoin to be a customer.

So, by the way, I bought some secondary in Kraken, so I'm, I'm with you on, on the Kraken train.

Let's, we'll go, we'll go all the way to the top, dude.

How the hell, when you So Kraken, how many people at Kraken do you think have more than $15 million?

How do you employ people when they're all fucking rich?

That's what I want to know. Like, how often do they tell you, like, you know what, Dad, go fuck yourself, I'm out. And then like next week it's like, Dad, I'm bored, got a spot for me.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's a particular challenge for crypto. I mean, crypto, it's the hardest industry to build a business in. Think about it this way too, like you've got monsoon season, the bull run, and you want to capture all of that revenue potential. But if you start to spend and deploy capital through hiring and building offices and whatnot, by the time that the bull run's over, like, when do you turn off the spigot? Like, when you turn off all that cash flow going out and then how much do you cut back? And I think that's really, really tricky. Like, how do you predict these cycles? No one knows. If we did, we'd all be trillionaires. And so I think like that's the most difficult part of this is like, how do you build a business with those fluctuations in demand And how do you match expenses to meet that? But yeah, I mean, you know, in terms of, in terms of employee churn, it's super tricky. I actually put in my job descriptions for my growth marketing team, no crypto experience required. I first find it really refreshing when folks come in and challenge language that we use in our ads, homepage, app store page, et cetera, on how we describe crypto, because I'm, I've been in too long. It's hard for me to zoom all the way out and see what it looks like from a newbie. Right. And so one, I like that perspective. And two, to the motivational issue, I think, um, you know, folks who are new to crypto are much hungrier, uh, than ones who haven't been there.

Um, okay, so let's do this private wealth manager. So what would you actually build here? Would it be a services company? Would it be a software company? What would be the— how would you attack this problem?

Yeah, it's a services company, and you can't take BIPS on AUM. That's like an old way to do it. You'd have to figure out some sort of new model that's maybe more subscription or something like that. The first and foremost problems you're tackling Taxes. Taxes are incredibly complicated for crypto trades, especially if you're going to do DeFi things. Yeah. One would be taxes. Two, uh, so taxes not only cover trades but also covers future tax minimization strategies. For example, there's a trust called a GRAT. A GRAT is a great way to pass on your crypto to your son, daughter, etc., a partner, without any taxable event occurring. So there's all sorts of very advanced structures that exist for very wealthy folks that most crypto people have no idea This wasn't institutional wealth. They didn't work at Goldman. They were in their basement mining Bitcoin or mining Ethereum. It's a whole different world, right?

Right. And that's where we're going to trust different things. In fact, I think what you did where you built your brand and you're like, oh, I built a big audience. I think you have a few hundred thousand followers on Twitter for Bitcoin. I think that's what you would do if you come out and you're like, hey, I'm the Bitcoin tax guy and I'm going to talk every day about how to deal with the tax problem of Bitcoin and wealth management for wealthy Bitcoiners. And my sales is all going to happen through content, and then whoever— and then you'll probably get billionaires coming inbound saying, hey, will you manage my stuff? Um, that's how you would do this.

So Sam, do you know about the, like, the Tether, uh, question mark? Have you heard this, Sam?

No.

Okay, so, uh, I'll ask Dan to kind of explain it. So Dan, I'm going to ask you to do two things. One is explain what are— what some people are afraid of with Tether and, uh, why that might be like, you know, people call it, oh, is this the black swan that's going to crash all of crypto, etc., etc. And then how you sleep at night being 100% of your net worth in Bitcoin knowing that this potential question mark exists with Tether. So, so explain the, the potential problem and then how you think about it.

Sure. So Tether is called a stablecoin. A stablecoin is a representation of a fiat currency. So Tether represents US dollars, and it's called USDT. So USDT is created by companies wiring money in to a Cayman Island entity, and they wire it in there, and then tethers are minted and created, and those are put on blockchains. Tether has existed on the Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum blockchain, and Tron blockchain, amongst others, I think, as well. So what Tether represents is a 1-to-1 backing of a dollar. Now, the company that issues these, which is like Tether United— like Tether Limited plus Bitfinex, which is an exchange, there were concerns over if they were truly backed 1-to-1, and there were moments when it wasn't. But they've recently reached a settlement with, I believe, the New York District Attorney, I think is who they— I forget exactly who they settled with. Attorney General.

New York Attorney General.

I think there's so many regulators, I forget who settled with who. But yeah, they essentially settled and agreed to do auditing, to perform audits and come out with exactly how much they had in reserve. So the controversy and the worry is that Tethers are— so there's a couple of worries. One is that tethers, you know, first and foremost, aren't backed. And that could lead to a kind of like a classic run on the bank situation where more people try to redeem tethers and there's not enough— there's not enough dollars in the bank to be able to redeem, to be able to be redeemed. And that would cause structural problems in the crypto ecosystem. Number two, I think, is like the idea that USDT is being used in smart contracts and DeFi, and it's completely centralized because USDT like USDC, these stablecoins that are centrally issued by companies like Tether and Circle, they can be reversed or frozen or paused. They're not truly decentralized. In a lot of the DeFi space, I think a lot of the contracts, for example, like MakerDAO— So MakerDAO is like an algorithmic stablecoin. Well, almost 50% of its collateral is centralized stablecoins. So it represents a systemic risk to DeFi and centralized finance, aka the exchange base.

So the fear is basically if the Tether people are not being on the up and up. So you have to trust people, which is like kind of the anti-crypto way. Um, if they're just— they could just be printing Tethers, um, or be holding not 1-to-1 dollar assets. So they could be like a bank fractionally reserving, saying, oh, for every dollar we have, we have 5 Tethers, um, and basically using that to buy. And then that's being used to buy Bitcoin. So it's like artificially— it's not that Bitcoin has any issue with it, but But that's what's driving up run-ups in price is there's a huge amount of Bitcoin that's bought with Tether.

That's the question. That's the concern. Now, how legitimate is the concern? If we dig into it, and I wrote about this in The Held Report, my newsletter, if you dig into this, it isn't as bad as people say. There's all sorts of moments when Tether wasn't fully collateralized, as in there wasn't enough Tether to be redeemed to dollars, and the industry was fine. Also, we're talking about exchanges don't hold Tethers, the users hold Tethers. So Tether is just like any other crypto asset. So there's been tons of times when multi-billion dollar crypto assets have gone to zero and the structural problems in the space have been okay. We've also suffered much more egregious moments in the crypto space like Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox represented 90% of trading volume. This would be like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken all going down at the same time. You know, these are hugely stressful moments for the, um, for the marketplace. And so Bitcoin has been through a lot worse. Bitcoin inherently doesn't need Tether. Tether is being used to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But for example, like, um, different other government fiat currencies are used to buy Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean that Bitcoin is dependent on the dollar. It's not dependent on USDT. And then I think, you know, another concern that I forgot to bring up earlier, people hypothesize like Tether is being used to pump Bitcoin. I think that's completely unfounded. It was based on a University of Texas research report, which I don't even know if you could call it fucking research, but it was like a research report where they basically said that correlation is causation, right? Which is absurd. It's like saying that, like, you know, umbrellas cause rain, right? Because they're correlated. So it's really ridiculous. That's where the core root of some of the concerns that like, oh, Tether is being used to pump Bitcoin come from. Completely unfounded. There's no data that supports that. And also there's moments when tethers are printed when Bitcoin goes down. But of course the people who buy into this whole theory ignore those moments.

Right. And, uh, okay, so, so that's a great answer. So you, um, I want to switch to basically talking about, uh, other Bitcoin or other, other, let's say, crypto ideas that you see that, uh, the average person is either not knowing about, you know, it's an interesting idea that you're not that's not as well known yet, or you see the opportunity for somebody to go build? Do you see any other opportunities besides the private wealth management space?

The private wealth management one for me is one that's just really sticky. That one's like super interesting. Other ones that would be good as well. I just think simplicity is the ultimate way to go build product. It means that folks find value in your product much more quickly. You can convey the value prop, people discover the value prop, they get activated at a higher rate. So I think like simplest, a very, very simple very, very simple mobile experience for wallets, I think is still very underappreciated. I think the wallet space still has horrid user experience. For example, let's say when you send a Bitcoin transaction, Bitcoin transactions have two states, unconfirmed and confirmed. And to a layperson, what does that even mean? And all wallets default to this language. And I would disagree that they should even default to that language. I mean, you should add a layer in the layer above that in the GUI of something much more understandable. Wallets are kind of fundamental to the core ethos of the system, and there's a lot of things you can do now where you layer in trading capabilities built in there, etc. So I think the space still doesn't have great, great-to-use wallets. I think like Exodus Wallet is really good, but other than them, I haven't seen like an experience around the core experience of holding your crypto that was just mind-blowingly amazing.

Do you have a security team? Like a physical security team?

Do we like bodyguards and shit?

No, you. Well, I'm in Texas, so obviously I own a few guns, so it's a come and take it sort of attitude. At conferences, I do have security.

Who do you hire?

It's, it's, you know, provided to me by— through the company.

How much do they spend each year on, on these security guards?

You know, I'm not sure, but But Kraken is constantly focused about security. They're kind of nuts when it comes to security at Kraken. It's, uh, in terms of like how you control like where your laptop is and everything else. They're an exchange, right? Kraken's been around for 10 years and has never been hacked. So for us, like, they're constantly paranoid about that. And the human attack vector is the weak points in any tech system. So they're very conscious about like different executives and high-profile individuals, like where they are, um, you know, if they're events with a lot of people, they got to think about physical security. So it's something that they think about all the time. I have no idea how much that costs though.

I would be curious to hear about that because whenever I see, I mean, I don't have, I'm in a different friend group as you. Maybe I've got a few friends that have tens of millions of Bitcoin, but, um, I am always curious as to how like the, the actual security, because I would think that when it comes to hacking, I would think it would be just like stealing, like kidnapping someone, stealing, stealing the person as opposed to trying to like break into the thing.

Totally.

And that's actually classically called the wrench attack in the Bitcoin world is that someone could come to you and just whack you over the head with a wrench right now. At the same time, you know, Sam, you've done very well and say, Michonne, like you guys have both done very well. And we see you guys know billionaires that walk around the streets of San Francisco and they're not getting mugged and kidnapped for ransom. So in, in with Bitcoin, yeah, Bitcoin is easily transferable, but let's say that, let's say this person is not into Bitcoin at all. They can easily take their liquid assets, buy Bitcoin, and then transfer it to the kidnapper. So whether or not you hold Bitcoin, if that makes you more or less susceptible to getting attacked, I don't think it does.

Well, that doesn't necessarily seem fair. Like, but that said, I'm not, uh, I'm not entirely educated on it, so I'm not sticking by this quite hardly. I'm not sticking to this entirely, but like when I, when I have money in a variety of different places, there's a pretty large amount of checks and balances that go into transferring it. So I just tried to transfer money to another bank today and there was like a hard cutoff. Whereas with a lot of crypto stuff, you can literally have it in a, uh, in like a store, like some type of store, like physical.

I could fat finger the number I'm putting in and I could transfer, you know, instead of 5, I could transfer 5. $100,000, you know, and there's no getting it back.

And like credit cards do a pretty good job of doing fraud protection. Um, um, usually is it— what's it called? What's the, the $250,000 of checking accounts are, uh, are insured?

Yeah, it's also a big problem of like death, right? So, uh, so I think there's a startup opportunity here too, which is what happens to your Bitcoin when you die? And, um, and, and, and how do you, how do you manage that? So on one hand you can leave instructions to your spouse or whatever, which is like, hey, to get all— to get access to all of our private keys, here's what you do. But now you have instructions to get all your private keys that's, you know, somewhere. Uh, so you have to protect that. And so you have to have multiple layers.

You're starting to go down the rabbit hole. You're starting to— yeah, exactly. You kind of get in the circular logic loop of like, well, I can't trust anyone else with my money, so I need to manage my private key. And then it's like, well, if I want to pass it on, I have to trust with them.

Yeah.

And then you give the other 2 to whomever else, or you keep 3 on your own. So there's a lot of elegant ways to do that. Multisig, I think, is the only way that's like— but the thing is now you have to educate your— there's no CPA in the world that knows private key management well, right? That's where this entity would, for example, be one of the key holders. They would know very good private key management practices and only sign as for under certain conditions, which would also help against the kidnapping vector, and where they would have like a velocity limit.

You've DM'd me before about stuff that's in the creator kind of like audience space. Um, I don't know where you want to go with that. I'll kind of leave it open, but, uh, You seem to have a theory or a framework of where the puck is going when it comes to this creator thing, or, I don't know, you've successfully built your personal brand. And I don't know how many years ago nobody knew who the fuck Dan Held is, and today you're known by a bunch of crypto nerds. So what is the— give me your thought process around either one of those two, generally where it's going, or for you specifically, how you think about it.

Yeah, so I'm a growth product, growth marketing guy. So when I find a vein of gold where I find engagement or I find user acquisition, it just fascinates me, right? So The creator economy is about— or most folks on the show, I'd say, up to speed with creator economy stuff. Okay, cool. I built an audience in the crypto space, in the Bitcoin space. My main message is just Bitcoin though. I'm straight to the Bitcoin ethos. I've been in a long time, and my last name is a pun on the favorite meme, HODL. My last name actually is real though. My last name truly is Hell. It's actually a German last name. And so with that, I decided to lean into that and I just started to write. I wrote long-form articles, I started to tweet, and those got traction. And I found over time that there's a certain way that these gain traction. It's not by random circumstance. There are ways to understand the engagement algorithm and use that to propagate your message. For me, I really love Bitcoin.

What's an example of something you saw that was working?

So let's fast forward 3 years from now. Audience keeps growing and the monetization things get more baked out for you. How much do you think an individual creator in your niche, like how much do you think you can make 3 years from now just on the personal brand side of things? Forget the job and investing and other stuff.

Have you guys talked to Pomp yet?

Yeah, a couple times.

Yeah. And we both know him well.

I don't, we, I mean, I didn't ask him that, but that question.

Yeah.

But if I, if I had, we, I can, but we can guess.

I would guess before. Okay. How about we all guess?

Okay.

So I'll not, let's not include investment revenue, which I think investment revenue in the next, uh, we're talking about like paid newsletter sponsorships, recurring revenue, I think we should throw in there. Cause that's kind of like part of the personal brand stuff.

Courses now, courses.

But let me just say though, his, his investment revenue, if you told me that it makes him personally $30 million spread evenly over the next 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised. Is that crazy, Sean?

Per year? Or you talking about 30 total?

Sorry, 30 total spread out evenly over 10 years.

Yeah. I don't know how big his fund is, so I'm just gonna take that out for a second. I think just the personal brand side, which is 2.5, I would say 3.5. What would you have guessed, Dan?

$2 to $4 million is my best guess as of how much revenue he's making. And that's based on like my best knowledge, right?

Maybe 5 people on staff. So maybe half a million in costs.

Yeah, very, very little overhead. So very high margins, right? Um, these are all value accretive too. Like if someone gets, gets a job through Pomp, they might be really inclined to sign up to his newsletter, right? These aren't like mutually exclusive sales. Right. Um, but by far, I think like, so he's got the— so Pomp is the biggest. Pomp is— so this is our upper bound limit. And that's why I chose Pomp, right?

Is the biggest—

what about, uh, in the Bitcoin, in the crypto space you're talking about?

What about, uh, my guy, uh, Raoul Pal? Or is that his name?

Raoul Pal? Yeah, Raoul Pal. He's more of like a macro— I mean, I guess we could call him crypto now because he's—

like, there are these— even though, like, let's say like a guy who's kind of a troll, even though I love him, like a James Altucher, I bet you makes $30 million a year in crypto newsletters.

Dude, I don't, I don't think— James Altucher, that guy's from like 2017 era.

Wow.

Wow.

Yes. Holy shit. I didn't even know that.

Do you know Motley Fool? Yeah. Motley Fool does close to $100 million a month in revenue. Wow. So I think that Pomp is the popular poppy one, but I think they're— I bet you, I guarantee you there's guys who have newsletters that they charge $20,000 a year.

Well, you guys have— you guys did the breakdown of Agora, right? That like crazy newsletter thing they bought. James. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, I got the— I got the, you know, after you guys did the breakdown of it, I actually talked to someone who worked there.

Yeah.

And got the breakdown. So like that backend newsletter, the one that's a really high markup, like $1,000 a month, that's where they make all the money.

Yeah.

Were we wrong, by the way? Were we wrong on our guesses for Agora?

In terms of like, uh, the revenue, I didn't do any revenue back of the envelope revenue stuff. I just want to know tactically, like, how do they think about it?

I'm with you, Dan. There is something to that, like, oh, this like weird slippery slope where you end up with these, like, you know, this small 1% of these like whales who you've just milked their whole life savings because they think they're getting this thing. No, no thanks.

I'd rather build longer-term value to like deliver something I think is truly worth that amount of money. That's where I've experimented with courses. So I've got my newsletter, I've got my newsletter, I've got ads. Which one is the best?

The best combination of like effort, fun, and money? Like if you combine those, right, you want a low effort, high fun, high money. Like what is the best one so far you've experimented as a creator of these tools in your tool belt?

Probably YouTube, because it's kind of fun shilling a product that you really— so I only represent products that I personally use, right? It's an ethical standard that I have for myself. So, which means that I have eliminated a lot of the potential advertisers that would pay me a lot more, right? For me, it's the only way that I feel like it'd be appropriate for me to, you know, represent this product. Um, then the YouTube is fun because I get to like have like a little skit with it where I like, I bring it up, I talk about it, I represent it. The newsletter, it's a lot of work. Um, that, I mean, writing an article a week doesn't sound like a lot. Yeah, it's a lot.

Fuck yeah, it's a lot.

It's a ton of work and you take pride in it, especially when it's paid.

There's a bar of these people paid for this information, so the information better be different and unique and awesome every week.

Totally. And now, I'm a classic growth guy, so I have a survey at the end of each one to get like a raw NPS score. I get feedback on what the next article they want written. That way, I write the best, most relevant content, which means that they're satisfied. But it's tough. It's really hard to where— I don't know how Pom does it daily.

I think he's got a guy. I would bet that he's got about 2 young guys.

He says he doesn't. He says he sits down, he writes it in one take.

Um, well, I, I went out to— me and my wife and him and his wife all went out to lunch one day and just hung out. And, uh, Paulina, his wife, was teasing him. Like, like, she was like, it takes me forever to write my weekly thing. He just sits down and he does it in 15 minutes and he's done.

I mean, I've, I've had some that have like cruised through like a straight like stream of consciousness, but it's tough. Some of them I do a lot of research for. Like, I wrote one on Bitcoin DeFi, and that was a ton of like— actually, I tried to try out a couple different apps It was a lot of work. So fun and ROI would be YouTube channel where like I do these pre-roll, mid-roll ads. They're kind of fun to do. I can visually show off the product in a more fun, compelling way, like the products I'm representing versus like the newsletter, which I have to sit down, really think through hard. And it's something that, you know, I want to make sure I represent really, really well.

By the way, you're a growth guy. I've said that this Bitcoin laser eyes thing is one of the most genius, kind of like decentralized marketing tactics I've ever seen. Um, I, I, what is the origin story?

Is there an origin story? Were you and people behind it?

No, no, no. I don't know if he invented it. I'm saying, do you know? He knows more people than I do. Where did this come from and who are the geniuses that came up with this?

Yeah. So I wrote about Bitcoin's decentralized marketing team before where like Bitcoin has no central marketing org. There's no propaganda arm of Bitcoin. It's like me and Pomp and everyone else who talks about Bitcoin. I don't know who originated it. It's like the origin of memes. I mean, sometimes you can find where a meme came from, but sometimes it just kind of like it came from nowhere. I'm not sure who the first person was, and no one I know has claimed it.

Yeah, the space is— I mean, memes are such an incredible part of how stuff is communicated nowadays, right? Like, I mean, we saw like elections, people can be elected based on memes. Like, memes aren't just these funny things on like 4chan or Reddit anymore. Like, memes are Memes are like the main trend. Like, my mom uses memes now. She does it on like Facebook, but you know, it's, it's crazy. Like, it's narrative compression at its finest. It's taking a whole narrative and compressing it into one image, and I think that's why it's so powerful as a transmission.

Yes, it's the most shareable viral thing you can do, right, on the internet. And so it's like, what, you know, memes are the packaging for ideas. If you want to most efficiently package an idea, a meme is the best way. So I've joked about, uh, we saw this thing called I think it was called like Meme University or LOL University or something like that. And basically they took the website of Lambda School and they just remade it for a school that would teach you how to do memes.

That's class.

It was a joke website. There's not like a real course behind it. But I was like, you know, if there really should be a course that somebody should take, this is it. People, if you could learn this, it's learning, you know, the native tongue of the internet. And, you know, it's pretty important to be fluent in internet nowadays. And so I think that's one where I'm like, like somebody really should create this. I have this Slack channel that me and Ben do where we basically put out a challenge where we said every day for 50 days we're going to make a new meme because it's easy to spread these, but the act of actually making one is hard. It's telling a story, telling a joke in the most efficient form. And it's been so challenging to just do this every day for 50 days.

Yeah, that's smart.

I like that. All right.

We're about at the top of the hour. Do we want to go over one more idea or what, Sean?

I don't know if you have— if you have one that's burning, you could do it. Otherwise, I think we should wrap it up.

Cool. Well, Yeah, I mean, just my— I think like closing thought on like the creator economy stuff. Um, I've been in Bitcoin for 9 years and that has been a huge fascination for me. I would say the creator economy is not an equal fascination, but quickly becoming something very interesting. Um, I think about it as like the monetization of all human information, right? Like creators are just taking whatever knowledge they have locally, putting that on the internet, distributing it, and then monetizing that. And what is the value of all of that combined? I mean, it's tens of trillions, $100 trillion. I don't know what it's worth, but like, for me, I just kind of see this huge— I mean, there's so many niche things that someone could write about. Like, there's a million things, and it's very low, very low effort to find your MVP versus before you had to go buy a warehouse and start producing things. You just produce content. And if that content resonates and people click and want to figure out what products you'd recommend for them,, then you can go build your own products. So I see kind of like a whole economy kind of reorienting around content marketing and that being the top of funnel and like idea generation for all future products.

Great. Well, what do you think, Sean?

Yeah, yeah. Let's wrap it up. I like that one.

That's—

I like the way you explain that because I think it aligns with something I believe, which is when, when there's never been more information, it's all about who actually has attention. And the person who's going to have attention is whoever is putting out great content consistently. So great content once will get your attention once, and then great content consistently will build trust, which just says, look, it's too noisy. I'm just going to go to my sources I like. And, um, and then those people then hold the keys. And, you know, up till now that's been captured by the platform. So that's been true, but YouTube still captured way more value and Twitch captured way more value and Twitter captured way more value than the people on it. And that seems to be flipping, uh, where, where either new platforms are going to come out where the creators own it, or the, the value is going to accrue off platform in a bigger way than it did originally when it was like— I think the value accrued like 99-1, um, 99% to the platform, 1% to the creators. And I think that's, that's going to flip, uh, closer to 50-50 over time.

I think Twitter has recognized this, right, with the Super Follows, where you can have like subscription followers where people subscribe to like a premium set of tweets you have. I mean, Twitter I think sees this coming. They see the exodus of folks building an audience on Twitter and then the exodus of all that monetization going to Substack. They're trying to bring that back in.

Yeah, I think that's sort of just trading one master for another though, in a way where it's like, as long as Twitter will put super follows there and then they'll take the cut they want, and then as long as they're, they're the button to pay for stuff, they get— they'll just inch that cut from 10% to 15% to 20% to 50% over time. And, um, And so I think, you know, the real answer here is, is how do you build this independently? And I think basically that, that's the part of crypto I'm most excited about, is people who are building, uh, you know, a social network that is open source, um, that if it can get adoption— and this is why I was interested in Bitcloud— is if it can get adoption, then, uh, that ratio will flip. The, the, all the value will accrue to the creators and not to the core platform or protocol underneath. So, so that's what I'm excited about is like, that's the real disruption there.

Well, we appreciate you coming on, Dan. It's— I've been following you on Twitter now for a couple of weeks since Sean's been talking about you and he's been saying that you were the guy to speak to and we appreciate it.

Yeah. So go, go give him a follow. He's @danheld on Twitter and yeah.

All right.

We'll see you. We'll see you later.

Yeah, I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.