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Mickey Maher of Dapper Labs - CryptoKitties to NBA Top Shot & Beyond, Plus: Snoop Dogg is @CozmoMedici, Snoop's NFT Party Pass, OpenSea NFT App, And More...
The NFT space is evolving at a rapid pace, and Dapper Labs wants to be at the forefront of these changes. With projects such as NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties under their belt, what’s next for this company? We get the answer to that question in this episode as Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger discuss the future of NFTs and blockchain with the SVP of partnerships at Dapper Labs, Mickey Maher. Mickey talks about how he got introduced to the NFT space and clues us in on what’s to come. Tune in for a great look at the NFT space from someone intimately associated with the top NFT projects of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
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Mickey Maher of Dapper Labs – CryptoKitties to NBA Top Shot & Beyond, Plus: Snoop Dogg is @CozmoMedici, Snoop’s NFT Party Pass, OpenSea NFT App, And More…
This is the show that brings you the top 1% of NFTs and what will stand the test of time. We explore the nuts and bolts and the business side and also the human element of how NFTs are changing the way we interact with the things we love. This show is for the dreamers, disruptors and doers who are pumped about this ecosystem and driving where it goes next.
Dapper Labs: We have a long way to go before VR becomes mainstream.
This episode features Mickey Maher, SVP of Platform and Blockchain Partnerships at Dapper Labs, the groundbreaking company behind NBA Top Shot that uses the power of play to deliver blockchain-based experiences and digital collectibles that are made for you and ready for the real world. Mickey is responsible for all partnerships involving the Flow blockchain or Dapper Wallet. It’s aiming to expand the company’s open ecosystem partnerships in content, entertainment, gaming, music, fashion, talent, influencer, payments and more. Mickey has a BSEE, Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Southern California. I’m excited to have you, Mickey.
I’m excited to be here for sure.
It doesn’t look like you got the party hat that we sent you in the mail but this is a big occasion for us. This is our 50th episode. Randomly, I couldn’t ask for a better guest than you in representing Dapper Labs. It’s been busy for us. We’re up to episode 50.
Congratulations, you could have definitely pushed me off if you wanted to have more notable guests but I’m happy to be your 50th guest.
Even if you got the hat, we wouldn’t want to cover that hairdo. That’s tight.
Thank you.
You’ve worked in virtual currencies and gaming for more than a decade. Were you super early on Bitcoin and crypto in general?
I was but I didn’t put enough money where my mouth was. I was into Bitcoin talking about it often and actively as early as 2012. I wish the amount of time I spent talking about it, I spent that amount of money buying it. Unfortunately, I did not. I bought a little bit but then I also sold a little bit. I have more now but I don’t have Bitcoin or crypto at the 2012 prices. I have it at more recent prices, which is unfortunate. I was pretty confident and I should have been more confident that the stake was coming.
How about NFTs, did your tune change there? What was the moment that you realized that NFTs can be what they’ve become?
What have they become is an interesting question. The reason I’m at this company is that I was messing around with CryptoKitties. I was interested and curious about it. I understood NFTs. I don’t even know why they were called NFTs. I knew they were CryptoKitties on the Ethereum blockchain during the ICO boom of ‘17 and ’18. It piqued my curiosity and here I am.
I can remember meeting with one of the founders of CryptoKitties in a bar in Venice. It was the Whaler back in the day and him talking about how the network blew up and what they’re trying to do to scale. It was the early days of nine people hanging out and having drinks. Times have changed.
A big part of that conversation too was, “This is a great fit for sports, collectibles and cards.” Josh and I, this was the obvious use case being baseball card collectors from our history and whatnot. When we started to hear about the evolution of Top Shot and everything, we’re like, “This is the use case.” I don’t think we could have ever guessed that it would take off the way that it did when it did but it’s something else.
You’re into CryptoKitties. You’re getting into it and understanding what’s happening here. You’re realizing some of the capabilities there. How did you make the connection though with the Dapper Labs team and the guys behind it? How did that relationship form and then ultimately become a working relationship?
One of the ways I operate in my life and in business is I try to be helpful and as helpful as I can. It comes naturally to me, to be honest with you. I’ve spent a lot of time on emerging platforms in gaming and consumer applications. I have a lot of connections and built a lot of contacts. I’m always trying to be helpful with people networking, people who are getting into the space, giving advice, putting them in touch with the right people, etc. It’s what I do.
Interestingly enough, I learned about CryptoKitties on Twitter. I started to engage with CryptoKitties. I was early on the Facebook platform, 2007 and 2008, in a startup right when they opened up to apps and games. This is pre-Zynga and pre-everything. I was right at the forefront of that and that was successful. I moved quickly on from that after my company was acquired by American Express into mobile. I was on mobile in 2011 or 2012. I was early on mobile and I rode that tidal wave all the way up until 2018 with quite a bit of success in that space.
I had seen it happen a couple of times. Given my experience in the space, I knew that all of these consumer applications and game developers were going to flood to the next platform. I didn’t know what it was going to be at the time. There was a lot of conversation around it being VR/AR, etc. I didn’t believe in the VR space as much then. We still have a long way to go before VR becomes mainstream. One of my thoughts prior to discovering CryptoKitties was I didn’t need to work in crypto. If I wanted to make money in crypto, I could invest in crypto and trade crypto. It didn’t need to be a job.
Dapper Labs: The winners in the mobile ecosystem we’re all simple five to 10 person startups that came inbuilt natively and creatively for that specific platform. These grew to become billion or multi-billion-dollar businesses.
CryptoKitties was the thing that changed my mind because I saw very clearly how this could be the next platform or growth opportunity for all these Web 2.0 applications and game developers that may have sputtered or plateaued on mobile and were in search of that growth stage on another platform. When I saw CryptoKitties, I was like, “I can work in this space.”
To wrap this all up, once I learned about CryptoKitties, I decided to research the company. Frankly, two of the individuals that were founders of CryptoKitties are people that I had helped with their companies or in the mobile or Facebook space in the past. It was an easy and seamless conversation to say, “This is what I want to do next. Do you have a role for me?” The rest is history and that was a few years ago.
You mentioned earlier being helpful. I know a lot of our readers want to co-create the space. We’re all about co-creation on the show and we have quite a few readers who are as well. Before I ask my next question, I want to ask you for any advice about how to be helpful. First of all, if you do know something to bring to the space, it sounds like you’ve been in situations where maybe you didn’t know as much. You found a way to be helpful, gain knowledge, be productive and be an integral part of things growing. Anything to say about that?
When I was embedded in the mobile space, I knew as much and I was as well networked as anyone. I had a lot to offer. Some people would disagree with his advice but I was helpful to people that I liked and I thought had the right intention in mind and had something to offer to the space. A lot of people ask first and ask for something, “Can I have a piece of your company?” “Can I have a piece of equity?” “Can you pay me?” “Can you do this?” I gave up some short-term revenue or opportunities at that point just to be helpful but being helpful led me to a much greater set of opportunities down the line including Dapper Labs. It’s not for everyone but my advice would be to be helpful to people that you think can offer something to space and the universe will come around and reward you probably eventually.
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That leads to the next thing I want to ask about. You did find that things were coming back around for you and you were being behind the scenes during the ideation and development stages of a project like Top Shot. Did anyone foresee how in-demand, in some cases, valuable these moments would be?
We did and we didn’t. We believed in what we were doing. Our CTO wrote the ERC-721 standard on Ethereum and we invented NFTs as they’re known now on Ethereum. We were all in on NFTs and the future of NFTs. We’re more into the power of smart contracts, composability and blockchain beyond the collectibles. We knew something was there. That’s the reason we engaged a world-class partner like the NBA with 1.5 billion global fans. It’s because we knew that type of brand in the space certainly had tremendous potential.
The other thing is we didn’t expect it to take off this quickly because there is so much left to do from a product standpoint. We’ve experimented with great utility in Top Shot but we haven’t completely unlocked all of our ideas around utility, composability and the openness of a project like that and what that potential could be. The fact that the collectible and the beautiful UI/UX and design of the product has driven so much notoriety and activity is a very good sign. We’re still at the starting line here of what we think is possible, not only with Top Shot but with NFT and smart contract-based projects.
I heard the word composability at a conference. Can you tell our readers what that means to you?
It’s what you would think of when you think of the metaverse. It is smart contracts functioning as Lego blocks that are built on top of each other or around each other. If you have a smart contract, that can be a leverage point or a building block to build other experiences or other smart contracts on top of. Any smart contract or any project leveraging smart contracts that get built in the space becomes a stepping stone or an accelerant to other projects. Internally, we’ve used the terminology that blockchain and smart contracts can accelerate software development and that’s exactly what composability is.
Lego blocks have high composability and dirt doesn’t.
It’s a great segue. Everyone knows CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shots but I’m sure our readers are curious about what’s next. What are you guys going to crush next? Where are you going? Tell us a little bit about your roadmap and how you intend to continue to build out the ecosystem.
Sports are obvious. We have a UFC license. We’ve had that for a while. We announced LaLiga, the Spanish football league as a partner in the Dapper Labs studio. What’s important to note is Dapper Labs is a studio building into our layer one flow blockchain ecosystem. What’s next for us is the 3,000-plus developers that are building into our open ecosystem.
Because of the success of Top Shot, there tends to be a focus on what Dapper Labs and the Dapper Studios are doing. Dapper Studios is a customer of blockchain. We’re going to build projects. We’re going to build projects around sports and other IPs. We have a lot of other ideas that could be great fits for other large IPs and we’ll continue to release those into the Flow ecosystem.
The power of the community, albeit entrepreneurs, Web 3.0, Web 2.0, everyone that’s now coming into this space and building and those 3,000 or so developers that are building into the Flow ecosystem, that’s going to unlock so much potential and so many interesting ideas. Dapper itself can never capture all the ideas that are coming out of those 3,000-plus developers.
There are so many different possibilities that require a lot of bandwidth and focus. There are so many amazing people coming into this space with ideas. How do you amplify the ecosystem beyond the constraints of your own team?
The two platforms that I’ve been successful in are Facebook and mobile. Those platforms were built by the long tail, the indie developers and the entrepreneurs. The winners on the Facebook platform, iPhone or in the mobile ecosystem, we’re all simple 5 to 10 person startups that came in and built natively and creatively for that specific platform. Those things grew to be billion or multibillion-dollar businesses that are there now.
It’s like the origin story of CryptoKitties reimagined over and over again.
The more shots on goal you have, the more developers that are building the space, the more interesting projects like Axie Infinity, CryptoKitties or an NBA Top Shot will emerge.
Let’s talk about some of those projects. What projects come to mind that is operating within the ecosystem? We heard about Momento, for example. Can you tell us about that project or maybe some others that come to mind?
I don’t want to say too much about Momento specifically but there is a project that Momento is building in the space. I am always hesitant to share too much about projects that aren’t live because the entrepreneurs are sometimes sensitive. Momento is building into the Flow ecosystem. I always hate to do this too because there are so many projects being built in the Flow ecosystem that if I name a few, someone’s going to get mad at me but I’m going to give it a shot.
There’s a company called Mint. Mint built a project for an art gallery, which sold over $1 million worth of art. They built a Chicago Bulls NFT project and it’s all built on Shopify. You can think of Mint as an agency and Mint builds out Shopify stores in partnership with Shopify in the Flow ecosystem. There’s a company called GigLabs. They’re built into the CNN website, Vault.CNN.com. They built the Miami Hurricanes college football team ring project and they’re similar approach to Mint and they will also be leveraging Shopify moving forward. There’s a company called Eternal. Eternal has a record of secondary market transactions outside of Top Shot in the entire Flow ecosystem that is a platform for Twitch streamers to sell NFTs.
There’s another one called the RCRDSHP. RCRDSHP is built by a technologist and EDM artist, Obie. They are doing a series of NFTs whether they’re video, collectibles, etc. around emerging EDM artists. Obie is an EDM artist himself and a coder. That’s doing well. We have a Steam game called Chainmonsters. Their Genesis NFT sale sold $1 million worth of NFTs in under ten minutes or something like that. All those NFTs are launched, built and designed to have utilities in the actual game. Things like Chainmonsters is what is moving the space forward. Aside from art and high-end art, that’s fine to remain as collectibles. NFTs need to have utility and need to have a use case. You are in a digital environment. The power of digital is to allow these assets to do something and be distributed. Projects that are building with utility in mind are going to be successful projects.
Dapper Labs: It’s more important to this upcoming era, what people’s digital social capital is than what their physical social capital is.
How do you work with these folks and mentor them and support the ecosystem? What have you found works best and how much of it has taken off the training wheels?
The company knowledge that we have at Dapper is much greater than any knowledge center on earth around NFTs, NFT design, what works, what doesn’t and what the future looks like in terms of NFTs. We try to take as much of that knowledge and pour it into our Flow ecosystem because we want those entrepreneurs to be successful. We want them to build projects as great as Top Shot or as successful as Top Shot in the ecosystem. We take all of that knowledge and all of that learning and we try to help these entrepreneurs as much as possible.
I’m on this show so I have a fear of misquoting the actual number but it’s something like this. The NBA Top Shot itself has more users than the top 40 or 50 Ethereum projects combined. We have a lot of users in our ecosystem. We want to help all of these third-party projects in our ecosystem get discovered by those users. When we talk about network effects, we might not have the network effects that Ethereum has in terms of high-end pieces yet but we certainly have a tremendous head start on a lot of chains in terms of the number of users in the ecosystem that we can build network effects around. We like when those users discover third-party projects outside of Dapper projects.
It’s pretty special what you guys have built there in the time period and also what it’s grown into over a similar time period. I do want to know one thing. I asked about Momento and it stood out to us because we did see a press release about it. I want to call it out because there’s something interesting there. Our understanding is it’s a direct-to-fan NFT social network that allows for the fans and collectors of particular content creators to own the best moments of that content creator’s content, which is pretty special. Especially for us and folks in a similar boat to us, there are all these special moments, these mic drop moments from our episodes that we love to capture in a different way to share with our fans. It sounds like that’s the path these guys are taking. I wanted to elevate that because it’s something that popped up. We think that’s special.
The power of digital is to allow NFTs to actually do something and be distributed. Click To Tweet
A great thing about the space is connecting creators more directly with the fans. What 3LAU is doing with his Royal project is exactly what this space is and is exactly what the space needs to evolve to. I’m sure you’re familiar with that project and your audience is likely familiar with that project. 3LAU is selling his music as a set of NFTs and he wants to enable other artists to do that.
My understanding of the project is that users combine these NFTs and by owning those NFTs, you get rights to that music or that album. You can earn cashflows. That asset would appreciate as the album does well and that asset also gets you special access to 3LAU whatever that is that he defines whether it’s backstage access, part of the exclusive clubs so you can capture social capital.
Those types of things are what moves the space forward. That’s utility. That’s beyond the collectible and that’s what makes the space interesting. You mentioned Momento. It’s the same type of thing. It’s connecting a creator. No one likes the word influencer anymore, except for me but an influencer more directly with someone that is their fan or they might resonate with.
I want to know a little bit more about the evolution of Flow and what you guys are projecting or planning. What are the plans for interoperability are you planning for the Flow platform?
The Flow foundation and Dapper Labs, all of us are big and true believers in the open ecosystem. Everything should be as open as possible and that interoperability is as open as it can get. I believe that the interoperability is based on community demand and it’s more of a community initiative to bridge over to the other projects that they want to bridge over to. If the right team or teams came to us and said, “We want to build a decentralized bridge over to Ethereum.”
Let’s hear about that.
I am. It was prior to their blockchain use case.
It’s coming.
It’s dangerous stuff.
There you go. You make it easy.
The Genie, the avatar, is buying for you.
It’s The Matrix.
What part of Chicago did you grow up in?
I grew up on the Southside.
Beverly or something?
It’s exciting times to be in the space for sure.
That’s not boring at all. That’s interesting.
It was a good ten-minute ordeal.
Be careful out there.
Some of that grit.
It’s a trap.
I bet that developer is excited.
That’s question ten. Let’s do it.
That’s why he has to leave.
Why would he claim it though?
I’ll be paying close attention.
You’re ready for Ready Player One already.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Important Links:
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Twitter – @MickeyMaher23
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@CozmoMedici – Twitter
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Decrypt – Snoop Dogg Reveals Himself as Ethereum NFT Whale With $17M Collection
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Frogland – past episode
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Flow – Twitter
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Dapper Labs – Twitter
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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@EdgeOfNFT – Twitter