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Jesse Tevelow Of Praise On Gamifying Digital Currency
NFTs have been sweeping the internet scene these days, turning almost every piece of digital content into a potential art collectible. But instead of simply making these transactions purely capitalistic, why not turn them into an opportunity to spread tokens of appreciation? Wanting to make the (online) world a better place, Jesse Tevelow started Praise, a gamified digital currency that makes NFT trading more human and enjoyable. He joins Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley, and Josh Kriger to share his work in making currency valuable to everyone again by giving more attention to its conscience side. Jesse also talks about how cryptocurrency gives birth to collaborative work, the financial transparency when doing business with NFTs, and the advantages of launching crowdfunding projects.
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Jesse Tevelow Of Praise On Gamifying Digital Currency
This episode features Jesse Tevelow, Founder of Praise, a gamified digital currency platform that makes money feel more fun and more human. They partner with celebrities, thought leaders and top brands to mint limited edition collectible NFTs which are then tradable on the platform. Jesse is an investor, international speaker, a three-time number one bestselling author and the founder of two international marketing agencies. He also founded LaunchTeam, a distributed network of go-to-market experts who help remarkable people launch remarkable things. Beyond the Praise product itself, Jesse’s passion lies in developing an organization that fosters curiosity, growth and happiness in everyday life. Jesse, welcome.
Thank you. What an incredible introduction. I appreciate it. I’m happy to be here.
Jesse, it’s great to see you again. It’s great to run into you at that fun NFT party that turned out a little wilder than we all thought it would.
It was good. For people reading who don’t know, Josh and I have known each other and been running around in the blockchain space all over the globe for a long time. It was great to see you back in LA at the party. I didn’t know exactly what you were working on. When I heard about this, I was like, “We got to get together.” I’m excited.
This is a special sponsored episode of a project that we find interesting but this is not financial advice. Certainly consult your local lawyer, jurisdiction and tax accountants, all those good, important people before making any decision with your money. This is something we thought was cool and we wanted everyone to know about it so here we are.
I’d also like to say for my purposes that anything I say is also not financial advice.
It’s great to have you, Jesse. I’m privileged to have also met you in person at that event in Hollywood. That was great. You’ve been around in the crypto and blockchain world for several years now, both individually and collaborating and running around with folks like Josh and Jeff. I want to know how you first come across NFTs. Were you all in immediately? Was this something gradual that you had to get used to?
I’m going to go back in time on a lot of these questions because I’m an old man when it comes to this stuff. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token for people who don’t know. That’s what it means. Essentially what that means is it’s a token. You probably know Bitcoin if you’re following this show. It’s a token or coin but the difference is if I have a Bitcoin and Josh has a Bitcoin, I give him a Bitcoin and he gives me a Bitcoin, nothing happened because it’s the same amount of value there. With an NFT, it’s different because it’s unique. That’s the non-fungible part of the title. Non-fungible means that it’s essentially unique or not exchangeable. It’s got its own value. It’s a 1 of 1.
Even when you hear these NFT collections where there are 100, each 1 of those 100 is still unique. That’s the value. That’s why you hear collectibles a lot with NFTs. That’s why art is so popular in the NFT space. If you think about it, what is art at the core? It’s a unique piece of content that we call art. That’s why if you print a million Mona Lisas and nobody knows who the original is then that wouldn’t be as exciting to people. We’re able to do that with technology with NFTs. That’s the quick context and background.
I had a game company. That was my first company when I was 23 years old and that company did well. We were making millions of dollars in digital currency with games. We were launching games on the Facebook platform and then on mobile. We had a virtual world game called MiniPlanet and it did millions of dollars. It’s like a lot of these games like Second Life or if you saw Ready Player One. Virtual world people come in and have an avatar. Ours was real cartoony. We had people spending thousands of dollars on all kinds of digital pieces of art, a couch, a trophy or something to put into your virtual home. It’s been happening for decades.
Anyone from the gaming industry will tell you it’s billions and billions of dollars. That’s why you see companies like WAX or other gaming veterans that jumped on this early because they understand what it is fundamentally. There’s been an economy there. We have a new technology called blockchain and a new concept called NFTs to make it better. That was my first time getting into NFTs. It just wasn’t called NFTs.
I’ve been in blockchain before blockchain. I’ve been into Bitcoin before Bitcoin. I’ve been into NFTs before NFTs because it’s just new names for the same stuff with a new technology layered into it. That’s what gets me excited about NFTs. When did I get into the next phase of it? Right at the beginning. We were already running around. Josh and I were doing stuff. We had companies that were coming to us talking about NFTs back in 2016 or 2017. It’s been here. We’re talking to the founder of VeVe a few years ago. It was called ECOMI back then.
Tokens Of Appreciation: Art is so popular right now in the NFT space because at its core, it is a unique piece of content anyone would love to own.
It’s rare that we get to speak to somebody that’s been thinking about it for so long. I’ve been fascinated with digital assets and ultimately what was the name for NFTs back in 2003 when Second Life first came out, the Linden Dollar and all that stuff. Everything happened in that virtual world back then.
Think about the Linden Dollar. They had a cryptocurrency. It just wasn’t cryptocurrency because you couldn’t take it outside of the platform. Those were NFTs. They were non-fungible inside the platform.
That was the foundation. Let’s fast forward then though. Let’s get to what you’re working on Praise. What is Praise? How does it relate to NFTs and the world that’s exploded?
Praise is the culmination of my entire career. It starts back then with the game company, which was digital currency. That was over fifteen years ago. What happened since then is I exited out of that company. That company is still flying high. I got some cash and became an author. I wrote three books and learned how to market those books and then we started marketing everything. It’s like the Amazon model. You start with books and then you got everything.
Now we launch all kinds of things with my agency called LaunchTeam. That company has helped over 50 companies go to market. We understand digital currency, gamification, going to market and marketing. Something that’s important in a space that’s emerging, that has not yet reached mainstream adoption. You need marketers to come in. I’m also a product and design guy. I design games so I understand the front end.
What’s the final piece? Understanding blockchain, the technology that can power this and why are that important in this equation. As you guys know, it’s core to changing and having a paradigm shift in the total financial strategy of the world. We have all the pieces. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for over a decade now and it’s finally the right time to do it. We had a term sheet a few years ago for Praise but I didn’t take it. The market was doing lots of crazy things back then and NFTs hadn’t reached the mainstream. It didn’t feel consumer-ready. In 2021, it does. We’ve had a political shift and economic shift. There’s all this stuff. The consumers are ready for it.
We’re targeting Millennials first. There are 75 million Millennials out there estimated, more coming in. This is in the US because immigrants are coming in but they think it’s going to max out around 75 million within 2022 or 2023. I don’t know if they’ve already hit this but they are projected to have the highest most spending power of any generation in history. This is the generation and also those coming that it will define our future. They will have the deepest wallets to do that. We already see Millennials coming into the fray.
There’s a bunch of stats out there. There are Millennials that are coming in but they’re still like, “I don’t know.” Our mission is to bring this thing to the mainstream to allow consumers to understand how this thing works and to make it fun. Praise is a gamified digital currency and it is meant to be the token of appreciation. I always say everybody deserves praise. We all deserve praise. For being alive, being here and trying to get through life. I feel that the energy I get from the world is that we don’t feel like that. People are fighting to stay alive instead of feeling like they’re being praised for being alive. There isn’t this happy tone. There’s this negative, risky, scary tone and I want to end that.
Praise is a brand. I’m going to talk about the team and staff behind it. If you imagine an app, this is taking it down to brass tacks, what Praise will be is an app that allows you to use our currency called Praise. It’s going to have all kinds of cool features and gamified features that make it more fun than regular money. If you think of the US dollar, do you think fun? No. You just think it’s a transaction. I use it to buy stuff. With Praise, you feel good about it. You’re going to be giving Praise to people and you’re going to be getting Praise from people. There are some mechanisms in there for rewards that are important to us.
The most exciting thing is the NFTs. Let’s go back to NFTs. We’re going to partner with top brands, celebrities, people with large platforms, large audiences and people who believe in this technology. We already have a bunch of partners lined up for this who are super excited and they are going to be the frontend. What’s fun? This is fun. We’re going to create collectible limited edition NFTs or coins that will be visual. We’re going to design these with the partners and they will be rare. There will be certain quantities of these. People can get them and decide what they want to get whether it’s Beyoncé’s coin or whoever or a company’s coin. Maybe it’s Taco Bell’s coin because you love Taco Bell.
These coins are going to not only look cool. We’re planning to have hard copies of these too. We’re going online to offline so you can carry these coins in your pocket and be like, “I got the Beyoncé coin.” They will also give you access to things. They’re functional. This is the innovation that Gary Vee’s talking about. A lot of these people who have been in a little longer understand it a bit more and also the business-minded folks understand the second wave of NFTs is functionality, functional NFTs. It’s starting to come out but a lot of it’s focused on content, an art piece, a piece of digital content and that’ll be there. That’s the baseball cards, the Mona Lisa or whatever.
Our collectible coins will be that but our coins also do things. They have functionality that we work out with every single partner. Maybe it’s a backstage pass to Beyoncé’s concert. Maybe it’s free tacos for life. It’s whatever they want. All of a sudden in the app, now you have a currency that’s fun and you also have special coins, which make it even more fun and allow you to do things. You can also trade those coins later and make money off of them. I’m super excited.
Let’s talk a little bit more about that passion that you’re bringing to this conversation, your motivation and your vision here. You mentioned appreciation as being central to the platform. What does currency with a conscience mean to you?
This is core to my entire being. My first book is called The Connection Algorithm. It’s about how to make meaningful relationships and why that is arguably a more valuable currency than fiat or crypto. That’s where I’m coming from. If you look at the brand, it’s called Praise. James Sommerville, the former Global VP of Design for Coca-Cola who’s one of our core advisors, was instrumental in helping us design the Praise brand.
We designed the Praise brand specifically to outlive us so that when my daughter who’s a year old is on her deathbed, Praise is still a brand that people know and is still thriving. That’s the goal in centuries, not in decades or years or months or weeks. That’s the reason for this. Currency with a conscience is specifically looking at the next hundreds of years. Where are we going? We’re not going in the right direction. Praise is meant to be like, “Let’s make currency truly valuable to the people again, not for capitalistic reasons or whatever else.”
I’m not entirely familiar with the landscape of projects like this but I’m sure folks that are readers that have been around the space have heard of some projects that are similar. I remember Good Money was trying to do this. I don’t know where they’re at with their business model these days but this isn’t the only time people have wanted to use cryptocurrency and NFTs to enlighten consciousness. How do you see Praise’s similarity or difference with Good Money and some other projects that are out there that seem like they’re inspired by the same goals as you are?
First of all, I love the Good Money guys. I actually was early with Good Money and love them. Everybody should check out their project. I’m collaborative and that’s the beauty of crypto. It’s such a collaborative network if you find the right people who are the lifers in this industry. That’s part of the beauty of it. Everybody’s working toward, hopefully, this concept of Praise, decentralization, more independence for humanity and a more relationship-based world versus a transactional world. Good Money’s right in there.
How are we different? Everybody asked this question. I love and hate this question because as an entrepreneur for many years, any founder out there is going to nod their head when I say this, you know you’re different. What’s different is the founder and then what comes from that is either a good difference or a bad difference in the market that either works or doesn’t work. There are no new ideas, there are only new executions.
You look at first principles, you try to tear things down and build them back up. That’s that. We’re different in that we’re going to focus on UI/UX and gamification like nobody else because I come from a game background. People ask me, “Where does this fit?” We have a cool little graphic of where the competitors are and where we sit is right in the middle of business and pleasure that I don’t think anyone’s gotten yet. “Is it a game? Is it like Venmo?” It’s somewhere in the middle there and that’s the beauty of it. It’s never been done before. You either have games or you have money and money is serious and games are fun. It’s like, “What if we can combine those? What if we can put those together and all of a sudden, everybody can have fun, make money, transact, share and grow all at the same time?” The goal is to sit right in the middle there.
There’s another difference that you told me about which was the tokenomics of your token and how you benefit. That’s important because people want to know where the money is going. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. People can always learn more about it by going to StartEngine and all that good stuff.
I love this question because this gives me a chance to answer this big problem that we have in the market which is pumping dumps and volatility. In my opinion, that’s what’s stopping consumers from coming in. The institutions, the banks, all the big players, they’re in. They know they have to be in. They know if they ignore this, it’s going to be at their peril. That’s already there, the next step is consumers and mainstream adoption.
We need some more technology to do that but we also need just better infrastructure and systems coming out from dApps like ours that are built on these protocols. How does it work? We have some innovative things that are happening. First of all, this is the first time I’m announcing this publicly in a forum like this, it came out from our other partner but we have partnered with Wise token. Wise token is an incredibly successful project that launched and essentially what they did is they invited people to invest in Wise through a liquidity pool that they created on Uniswap.
They said, “If you like our projects there’s this liquidity pool. Go ahead and put ETH in here and then you’ll get your Wise token.” Wise is backed by Ethereum. They literally put it on Ethereum, wrapped it and then they’re building new features on top of that. They’ve got staking and bond-like instruments. Ethereum’s not doing that so Wise is doing it and they burned the keys to that liquidity pool. They have over $300 million in that liquidity pool. That’s just on Uniswap. They’re going to be going on Binance, they’re coming on all of these different chains building these liquidity pools.
What does this mean? It means the investors who put the money in can get their money back out. They have immediate instantaneous liquidity. To break that down into layman’s terms, there’s a bunch of people who said, “I believe in this. Here’s a bunch of money,” and nobody is touching that money. Anybody who put that money in could take it right back out whenever they want but they’re not because they’re getting value out of it. Because Wise is building value and they’re getting those features. They’re getting returns there.
Tokens Of Appreciation: Building currency with a conscience can make any form of transaction enjoyable and fulfilling instead of simply for capitalistic reasons.
If they leave their money in Wise, they get those. If they take it back on to ETH, they don’t. We have partnered with Wise to do the exact same thing. We will be doing building our own liquidity pool or wrapped in Wise. All those features get to come over to Praise. We will have bond-like instruments, we will have high-yield returns, we will have a price floor that starts at the base of Ethereum backed by Wise and then it will grow from there.
If Praise gets too volatile, they’ll be able to move it out into a stable coin. If you don’t like crypto at all, we have Praise credits. We’re giving out Praise credits first and anybody can get those. They cannot be refunded or taken out of the game. They’re just like the old world of gaming but you don’t have to go through all the crypto stuff. If you’re reading and you’re like, “I’m kind of into NFTs and crypto.” You can go into Praise, get your credits and four months later when you have 10,000 credits built up and you’re like, “I’m ready.” You can go do the riffraff. Whatever the world’s doing, the governments have decided, the tech guys have figured out to go make sure you can get this crypto and all that, we’ve got that option too.
All those things are there for people. That’s how our token works. Let me now talk about the tokenomics and the minting mechanisms which are interesting. Essentially, what we’re doing is once this thing goes out, we’ll have our auction and we’re going to issue out one billion tokens that will be removed from our treasury. There are 21 billion overall so there’ll be 20 billion left and that’s built directly out of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was 21 million, we went with 21 billion because we want to give out smaller micro rewards so we wanted to have more tokens but there’s a fixed supply. There will be scarcity and that’s important.
What about specific to Praise in five years?
I went to Michigan so I’m on the Brady wagon.
Some crypto in between there.
Number four, what’s the latest thing you sold?
My heart.
There’s no limit to how much I can spend?
That’s right.
I’d be into that.
It would be empathy.
Impatience.
Important Links:
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
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@EdgeofNFT – Twitter
About Jesse Tevelow
Jesse is the founder of LaunchTeam, a distributed network of go-to-market experts who help remarkable people launch remarkable things.
The firm’s 50+ clients have raised over $500 million in VC funding. Clients include an Olympic Gold Medalist, the Managing Director of a multibillion-dollar VC fund, and founders of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses.
As a three-time #1 bestselling author, product designer, and the founder of two international marketing agencies, Jesse is able to craft compelling stories, develop winning products, and crystalize brands.
At age 23, he co-founded a game company that has leveraged digital currencies to generate $100M+, so he has a deep understanding of gamification principles. The company was born out of Techstars, where he incubated the idea and became an alumnus of the inaugural class. He now serves as a mentor for the Techstars accelerator.
Jesse was also an early employee at Seamless, which was acquired by Aramark and then merged with GrubHub Inc.
Specialties include product launches, DLT, blockchain, emerging tech advisory/investing, startups, marketing, writing, copywriting, product design, and UI/UX.
Jesse has spoken on stages around the world, including Tokyo, Seattle, Los Angeles, and India. If you would like to book him for a speaking engagement, please get in touch through his website.
For more information, visit www.jtev.me