Name: "There Will be Billion-Dollar Communities on the Internet:” Jess Sloss
Uploaded: 2021-06-26T12:30:14+00:00
Duration: 52 min 41 s
Description: In this week’s episode we speak with Jess Sloss, the instigator of Seed Club, a DAO that builds and invests in community tokens. We talk about the emergence of the social token economy, and how that’s

4 years ago

In this week’s episode we speak with Jess Sloss, the instigator of Seed Club, a DAO that builds and invests in community tokens. We talk about the emergence of the social token economy, and how that’s different from the creator economy or the gig economy; the difference is that social tokens and DAOs allow individuals to create wealth rather than create revenue. They’re tools for creators, and importantly, also for creator’ fans, to build something that’s similar to equity in a company, instead of having a salary. Another concept that describes this, Jess says, is the ownership economy. This is the idea that creators and fans can have actual ownership of their communities and platforms. Jess says we’re about to see billion-dollar communities on the internet.

We talk about the difference between personal, creator, brand, and community tokens, and how value accrues to these instruments. Still, we are in the very early days of this new economy, and there aren’t any tried and true recipes; everyone is still figuring it out together.

More broadly though, DAOs and tokens enable the ability to direct resources, Jess says. They allow people all over the world to come together, pool their resources, and leverage those resources in pursuit of something greater than they could achieve separately. Those communities become valuable in their own right and tokens unlock the potential for every member to benefit from that value. The exact, best way to unlock this value, is still an open question, and the opportunity to discover that, is what’s so exciting to Jess and a growing number of creators.

00:00 Intro
01:12 Background and how Jess got into the crypto space
02:33 Initial idea behind Seed Club and what its goal was
04:10 The first batch of projects in the Seed Club accelerator
05:55 How Seed Clubs model compares to TradFi accelerators?
08:20 How social tokens and the creator economy work plus how the social token economy compares to existing similar economies? (and whether its better)
13:10 How important is platform ownership to these traditional Web 2.0 communities/companies?
17:10 How do creators and fans benefit from social tokens?
21:38 Description of personal tokens
22:40 Description of a brand token vs community token
24:05 Description of a creator token
26:09 Description of a community token
28:28 Does this tokenization process combine with DAOs to replace businesses or does it stay niche?
29:59 The unforeseen consequences of this trend
32:31 How are Web 3.0 social tokens different from Web 2.0 social tokens?
35:47 Things that social token issuers should keep in mind when creating them?
40:38 Could regular revenue for a social token come from increasing demand for those tokens in their treasury?
43:04 How do NFTs interact with the concept of social tokens?
48:00 Discussion of the creator token economy
49:28 Thoughts on some of the billion dollar networks that are already here
52:31 Outro