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VC Yohei Nakajima Discusses PixelBeasts, His 24x24 Pixel Exploration Into NFT Art, Plus: A Bonus Conversation With Creatify CEO, Michael Krilivsky, And More...
Who says the journey into the world of NFT is lonely? With a great, creative community to explore it with, you won’t have to worry about being alone. Yohei Nakajima took that up a notch and developed a generative NFT collection full of curious creatures exploring the metaverse looking for friends to play with: PixelBeasts. He joins today’s episodes to take us deep into his 10K project, sharing how he started in the world of NFT while continuing his career as an early-stage venture capitalist. Yohei also talks about the visible and invisible attributes that are driving rarities, the community of tech investors and NFT enthusiasts and his philosophy of choosing not to have a roadmap for PixelBeasts. There are so many more nuggets in this conversation, so don’t miss out and get to know Yohei and PixelBeasts.
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VC Yohei Nakajima Discusses PixelBeasts, His 24×24 Pixel Exploration Into NFT Art, Plus: A Bonus Conversation With Creatify CEO, Michael Krilivsky, And More…
This sponsored spotlight episode features Yohei Nakajima, the artist and developer behind PixelBeasts, the generative NFT collection with curious creatures exploring the Metaverse looking for friends to play with. They like to build, share, and collaborate on cross NFT utility tools. Yohei is an early-stage venture capitalist who is known for hacking together prototypes of various tools and sharing the process. He literally wrote the code for the open-source Tango NFT project. With PixelBeasts, he is bringing together a community of VCs, founders and collectors’ interests in learning about the Web3 ecosystem alongside him. Yohei, welcome to Edge of NFT.
Thanks for having me.
It’s awesome to have you here. I have the privilege often to have a little chat with some of our guests before they come on the show. I got a sneak preview of your background and what you’re up to. I’m personally excited. When a lot of people think about venture capitalists, they don’t think of hackers that are going in there and creating code and tools for developers and all sorts of cool stuff. You’re definitely cut from some different cloth, which is what we like to see in the NFT world. Let’s start from the beginning. How did you hear about NFTs and how did you get involved in all this fun stuff?
Being a VC, I’ve been tracking crypto, DeFi and Bitcoin for a while. I was aware of CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks pack. I started paying attention when there was that initial bump around February. I even went through the process of going through minting. I looked up Mintable, Rarible, Cargo and OpenSea. I went through the process of going through minting a test NFT.
We’ve all been through the same journey. It’s like everybody got set on a foot race at the same place. Some people sifted through the information more quickly and got their bearings quickly. Some people had a little bit of a head start because of their background. It’s been an interesting journey for everybody. It’s searching for information, making connections with people that might be useful, and also getting your hands dirty. Where did the idea for PixelBeasts come from? Is that something that’s been in your head for a while or it just popped in there one day in the shower?
No. I made the first drawing before the concept existed. I have always been a doodler. If you look at my notes from class, it has little animals on the side. I don’t have the attention span to draw a huge piece of art. Lots of respect for true artists who do. I’ve been doodling my whole life and I’ve done a lot of pixel art too. When I was looking at CryptoPunk site, I got fascinated by this idea of a 24×24 canvas and how little you can do in it. I thought, “That sounds fun. It sounds like something I could do before I go to bed.” I sat down and opened up Photoshop. I draw for fifteen minutes. That turned into a four-hour session where I ended up drawing 200 layers. The next night, I was like, “I have enough layers. I might as well see if I can write some generative code.” The next thing I knew, I had all the work in pieces for a 10K project.
Where do you write the generative code? Does it happen in a JavaScript application or something like that?
For PixelBeasts, I wrote it in Python. There are some cool projects that are taking the actual transaction address and generating art base on that. It’s cool but I’m not doing that. I’m generating all 10,000 ahead of time, and then you’re picking one randomly when you mint, which is also true for other projects.
You mentioned the 10K project. This is some lexicon that’s becoming more common now. All these projects are doing that. Is that how many unique NFTs you’ll be generating from the project?
Yeah, I’ll be doing 10K. A lot of it was inspired by CryptoPunks. The backgrounds are not an attribute. It’s 24×24 pixels each. It’s hard, block, bold lines.
There are some big inspirations there. What are some of those fun attributes? One of the things that people are becoming more aware of is the visible attributes and the invisible attributes, the things behind the scenes that are driving rarities and whatnot. What can you share about the attributes?
Having all this space, there’s been so many exciting ideas. Loot was a big one that we all saw and that was an inspiration for adding a lot of what I call invisible attributes on the PixelBeasts. In addition to the visible attributes, which are 41 base beasts and visible attributes like hats and shirts, I have six invisible attribute types. I call them invisible attributes because you can’t see them in the image, but you can call them with an API and get the data.
My favorite by far is that each PixelBeast has a best friend and a nemesis. That’s 5,000 pairs of best friends and 5,000 pairs of nemesis. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it, but there are a lot of fun things you can do. We’ve talked about doing an airdrop of 5,000 pieces, but you have to get there before your nemesis, or doing some reward if you collaborate with your best friend. It forces you to go find strangers across the internet to win stuff.
It drives the community element of it. It’s undefined. Who knows? You can do all kinds of fun things.
We have the six basic Dungeons and Dragons stats like strength, speed and whatnot, which all 360 dice rolls. They have a class such as a mage, thief and warrior. They have an element such as fire, water, air and earth. A habitat, which is based on Magic: The Gathering cards such as island, plain, mountain, forest and swamp. They have one dice roll each of a D4, D6, D10, D12, and D20. I put these in without knowing what I was going to do with them. Part of it was I wanted to pack it with attributes so that we could build cross NFT utility later. If somebody is building a game where all you need is 1 of 4 elements, in theory, they could swap out the address and let PixelBeasts play that game as well.
It reminds me of character development in screenwriting, where you develop an entire backstory to this character and you only see this character in front of you. You’re doing the things within that half hour or an hour that you’re seeing them on a show for a couple of hours in a movie. There’s an entire history usually written about them and it fills them with reality. This reminds me of that. You’re talking about the hidden attributes and how deep you could go with that if you wanted to. You could look at core values. I know a lot of Gary Vee’s NFTs are rooted in these individual values. What about the entire set of core values that drive a particular character? Is it empathy?
The unexpected is the most exciting. Click To Tweet
It’s funny you brought that up because I did find a huge list of personality traits for non-playable characters. I did consider putting in personalities into the PixelBeasts, but upon thinking through the process of purchasing one and I wanted people to feel ownership of it, I felt like I wanted people to add their own personalities to it so I decided against the personality traits as an attribute.
Let’s go into the roadmap a little bit. Give us a sneak peek at some of the benefits and utility that you’re conjuring up for owning one of these PixelBeasts. Maybe not owning one but twenty.
I’ll start by saying let’s not call it a roadmap because I’ve been clear I don’t want to come up with a roadmap. I would rather underpromise and overdeliver. My communication says there’s no roadmap. It’s just me. It’s not a team. That’s why I built all the utility myself. I’m running a fund. This is my side project and how I learn. I’m bringing people alongside me.
That being said, we will have a couple of utility pieces on day one. I know the Tango project was mentioned in the intro. These are just hacky prototypes. For people who don’t know, Tango NFT is a private chat room for every NFT collection that requires no setup by the collection owner. If you log in with MetaMask, whatever NFTs you own, the collections those are in are the rooms you have access to.
If I have a more Loot NFT, the moment I go in and sees that I have that, it gives me access to more Looters. If I go and type a chat-only, people with more Loot can see it and so on with the Robotos, CryptoPunks, or whatever you want to call it. That was a quick hack that probably took me two nights to do. I pushed it out and open-sourced it, then we got a lot of people coming to me saying, “I want to help build this. I’m building a different version of this.”
Going back to utilities, one of the big utilities for PixelBeasts is going to be experimenting with various token-gated tools. This is a way for me as a VC to learn about these tools and experiments. Essentially, everybody who has a PixelBeasts along the ride with me. We have a couple of startups we’re talking to that I’m excited to announce on the token-gated tools about being the first to test them out. We have our own token-gated tool called Beastopia. This is different from Tango and this is just for PixelBeasts owners.
I built Tango into Beastopia. I know this gets confusing, but what that means is within Beastopia, each collection has its own room. If you find the CryptoPunks room within Beastopia, you have to have a PixelBeasts and the CryptoPunks to go in. The whole idea came up because somebody in the PixelBeasts Discord was wondering who else in the group had friends with benefits. This started the whole conversation, “Wouldn’t it be nice to find other holders of the NFT collections you’re in when you’re in a certain community?” The Tango within Beastopia is a feature to help people find other community members that you’re in the community with alongside others.
Which other NFTs do you own that would get you into various communities? Any examples?
I have a Robotos and Koala Intelligence Agency. I have not minted my Woodies Mint Pass and I got a couple of others like a Farmers Market and a Kokeshi and more Loots.
I love those Kokeshis. I don’t know what happened with that project. I don’t think people have realized how cool it is.
We have a handful of those.
It didn’t blow up but I like them. I have two little half-Japanese girls. Worst case scenario, it’s a perfect gift for them.
They’re super cool.
Is there some way for you to get access to those private chat groups that you don’t hold the NFTs? Are you excluded as well?
Yes, I am.
It’s decentralized in terms of code.
PixelBeasts: A good classical music player has sheet music in front of them and plays it perfectly. The nuance is where their skills are. On the other hand, if you set a jazz player on a stage and somebody else jumps on stage, they jam with whatever sound is happening around them.
Being in control of the code, I could give myself access to all the rooms. If it’s this specific wallet, I’d show them all the rooms. I am excluded from those rooms.
It’s a super cool feature that you came up with. I’m sure there are all sorts of other fun stuff that will be part of the PixelBeasts ecosystem over time.
It’s definitely not part of the roadmap because I haven’t even figured out how I’m going to make it happen, but I did design this massive multiplayer fantasy board game that I want to make happen. We’ll go into that when I get a little more detail.
It’s PixelBeasts/Yohei’s hacker journey. I love it. We’ll have Michael, the founder of Creatify on the show. Why did you end up choosing that platform? It’s an interesting backstory.
I had mentioned back in February 2021, I went through the collection of minting. It was a silly concept called the Numbers Collection and it was 1 through 10. There was only one 1, two 2s, three 3s. I went through that whole process but when I did it, I made a significant minting error. I minted my collection twice, which means I paid an extra $350. This was my first foray into it and it was such a bad experience. To have made a mistake that cost me money and thinking through other people getting into the space, I realized, “This is broken.”
I connected with Michael who was passionate about solving that specific problem and the UI and making this NFT space more welcoming to other people. He’s done that before in other industries, helping people take their art and sell physical products from it. Given his background and his passion for this specific problem that I had experienced, combined with how excited I was for the NFT space. I was excited to work with Creatify as an investor, and then the PixelBeasts project was in parallel. I drew those completely separate from Creatify. When I realized I had Michael and these guys like Brett by my side, I went to them first and said, “I got some art. Should we do it together?”
We’ll get a little bit deeper into that connection story when we bring Michael on and how you guys met or something. I’m curious how you’re collaborating with early-stage startups and expanding your community.
With the Tango project, it attracted a lot of developers. What’s interesting is I’m not a great coder by any means. I’m good at packing prototypes together. Tango is built in crappy code. I used PHP because I’m faster at writing it. What happened was a lot of devs reached out to me saying, “I didn’t realize I could build for Web3,” because I don’t use any Web3 code. I use JavaScript, MetaMask and OpenSea.
I have a couple of developers interested in building for Web3 and for every startup, that’s a value-add. Anytime a startup comes to me or I come across them, I reach out, jump on a call, and post about their startup to our PixelBeasts community in our Discord and say, “If you’re looking for startups to work with, here’s some fun ones I’ve come across.” That’s when we try to help the startups that are already building in this space.
On the investor side as well, my background, I’ve worked with Disney on the Disney Accelerator. I’ve worked with Nintendo for a couple of years. I have a deep entertainment media VC network, half of which haven’t touched Web3, but they’re all interested, especially with NFTs so I’ve pulled them all into. I’m trying to use this as a way to get crypto-curious folks sucked into the ecosystem. Once I add value to the startup then they’re like, “Thanks for helping promote us.” I go back and say, “When you’re ready to launch your product, let PixelBeasts be one of the first to test out this token game experience you’re building.”
It seems like the future is wide open for this project but at the same time, aside from a lot of the other projects we see, there does seem to be developing a theme around entrepreneurship and tech investment, even though it’s potentially a character-based role-playing game at some point. There’s also this piece of bringing the community together around tech investors and people interested in NFTs from that aspect of things. I’m excited about that piece of it. That’s interesting.
To summarize, it is like the startup ecosystem VCs and founders plus the no-code ecosystem because I’m a big no-coder. There are no-code tools that are building MetaMask login functionality. Those people I’m connecting with quickly. It’s startup ecosystem meets the no-code ecosystem. We’re learning about the Web3 community combined. It’s what PixelBeasts has turned into.
Have you ever checked out the Indie Hackers Podcasts? Are you familiar with that podcast?
Yeah.
I was trying to imagine if you’d be a good guest. They’re anti-VC over there but they’re also pro no-code. It’s an interesting mix of interests. For anybody who’s not familiar, definitely go check out the Indie Hackers Podcast. It’s founded by a guy who went through a Y Combinator and decided, “I don’t know if I need a VC startup type of project. I could just start a business that funds my lifestyle and support a community like that.” Long story short, he ended up being acquired by Stripe, which is back to the original idea.
I’d love to back up and talk a little bit more about the larger philosophy of not having a roadmap and what that means now and in the future for PixelBeasts.
I’ve always used this analogy for as long as I can. Some people who know me well probably hate it, but I use this analogy of being a classical music player versus a jazz music player. A good classical music player has sheet music in front of them and they play it perfectly. The nuance is where their skills are versus a jazz player. If you set them on a stage and somebody else jumps on stage, a good jazz player jams with whatever sound is happening around them.
I always took the philosophy of wanting to be more like a jazz player. There are great classical music players and my brother is one. He had a ten-year roadmap to becoming a celebrity chef and he became one, so that’s great. If I can guess today where I’m in five years, I failed. I’m bringing that whole philosophy into PixelBeasts with me. If I can tell you what PixelBeasts is going to be in five years, I failed because, to me, the unexpected is the most exciting.
One of us is a jazz piano player, so you’re talking to the right crowd.
It’ll be fun. I don’t know where it’s going to go but I’m having a ton of fun with it. The people who’ve jumped on board are having fun with me. Web3 is going to be in a lot of places so we’ll figure it out as we go. There’s so much information. Having people to learn alongside has been nice.
That’s a great way to think about it.
The other aspect I appreciated about what you’re talking about is that you are an investor and there are these certain negative stories or tropes about the VC world of folks that want to give you money and then own you or something like that. They don’t necessarily know how to do anything that you’re doing. It can be oppressive. It’s fun to see that you’re getting your hands dirty just like anybody else would who’s starting a business, and you’re interested in the tech and how it works. Yes, you might not be a pro at all the details but you’re leading by example by creating in front of everyone. I definitely appreciate that aspect of all this.
My goal is to share as much as possible. All the code I write will be open source. All the templates I use for design will be open source. Hopefully, it’ll help some other people who run projects and find inspiration to help theirs. Mike is always like, “Yohei, you need to put all the utilities in one place.” I’m like, “I can’t because they come up with new ones every day.” We also decided to do a weekly Beastopia. It’ll be a weekly event in a virtual setting that you can walk around with and meet people. We found a couple of platforms around that. That’s another utility we’ll be doing. I’ll probably do some office hours. I’ll find some VCs and friends to do private talks.
That’s a good first purchase.
Onward and upward.
I automatically paid my gas bill.
We both have those couple of crazy purchases.
Was it Tesla?
No, it was not. It’s Prius, actually.
Some big piece of land in nature.
I totally know those guys.
Maybe in the near future.
Being happy all the time.
What kind of dancing?
We got a special guest here coming in.
I will share some.
That’s a little early for that.
Thank you for saying that.
That’s my thing.
There you go. That’s a wrap.
Important Links:
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PixelBeasts – Discord
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TikTok launches first creator-led NFT collection – article by TikTok
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YouTube – Creatify
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Palm Studio – past episode
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@YoheiNakajima – Twitter
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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@EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
About Yohei Nakajima
We recently announced Untapped Capital, a new VC firm I started w/ my true friend and role model Jessica Jackley.
We’re a pre-seed/seed fund investing in unexpected founders, found off the beaten path, not well connected to VCs. We’re talking young, underrepresented, small town, immigrant, and so on. These founders aren’t in our network (almost by definition), so we primarily source through outbound, meaning we reach out to founders.
We look at tens of thousands, track and tag thousands, and reach out to the startups that stand out to us. We like to do other things in unexpected ways too. We’re fully remote, impact minded, and run our firm off of a custom no code CRM. We’re lean, experimental, and collaborative.
More than anything, we’re all about our founders. Very humbled to be working with incredible companies such as MilkRun (ag/food), Level (fintech/marketplaces), Obviously AI (No Code/ML), Endpoint Logistics (proptech/logistics), Tennibot (sports/robotics), and Windmill (home/climate).