And our job is to make it so easy, like coinbase made it easy for people to buy bitcoin without ever worrying about the complexity. I want to do the same thing for nfts. You want coinbase to make it so easy for people to participate in the nfd economy that they forget about the how and they only enjoy the what i love that, what a beautiful line, the garyvee audio experience, vayner nation. I am extremely excited to have uh sachin sexianna on uh on the podcast.

He has been at the forefront of technology on consumer apps that i have spent my career navigating and trying to use the best of my ability. I want to get more tech talk into the podcast this year, especially as web 3 continues to evolve and people need more tech, information and education, and i thought we could nerd it up for 20 or 30 minutes here and deliver a great podcast for everybody. So uh sachin, how are you my friend, i'm doing great, thank you for having me greg. Why don't? Why don't you before we get into that? Let's just get to know sachin a little bit like where were you born? What kind of kid were you, let's play that game zero to 14 years old? Give us a little narrative, yeah, that's a great question, so i was actually born in a very small town called saharanpur in india.

It had about 80 000 people when i was growing up and there was no technology. There was no internet, there was no computers at that time, so it was a fun upbringing and fun fact. I did not know how to speak in english until the age of 14. So then i have to learn what english looks like what that language is.

So it's been a great journey of learning and exposing myself to different things, and during this time i was born and raised in a family of doctors. My dad was a heart surgeon and he grew up in a family with academics and solving tough problems was the norm. So i grew up in that culture where take on big, bold, ambitious problems to solve, and then just just just put your head down, keep solving them. So that's the mindset, that's the world that i came from.

I love that one. What were you into as a kid like, like soccer, highlight you know a cricket, uh books like games like food, like what were you, what were your biggest interests? Would you say in your youth before you started learning english and then let's talk about how you got into tech yeah, my biggest interest were cricket and soccer like i was a big sports nerd. You know i love watching every game until dave. Ronaldo is my favorite soccer player, you know and i i will follow wherever he goes and i played a lot of uh sports as well.

But, more importantly, i was just deep into nerding out on books. I've read pretty much any book you can imagine about people fun fact gary. I never read in my life any book about fiction, or you know, love stories or novels any of those things. I actually read about people.

I read about people like bill gates. I read about people who have been successful: different walks of life, there's music uh, whether it's arts, whether it's engineering, whether it's business and my goal, all along, was to figure out what they learned in their journey that i can pick up on that. I can learn from and probably at some point in time, incorporate in my life as well, so i've always been this guy who wants to know people's story, why they did what they did the? Why matters more to me than the what and those books help me learn a lot about those people fascinating. Take me through a transition.

What um? What happens in your high school years university years yeah? I was actually fascinated by aerospace, so my undergrad degree is in aerospace engineering. I wanted to be this guy who went to space. You know did some crazy stuff back in the day there was no elan. Must there was no spacex, you know.

So the only thing i could do is go to nasa and i'm not that kind of guy who likes doing a phd. You know five years and figuring those things out. I have an adhd. You know i just like to go.

Do things so my undergrad and high school was more around learning. I stumbled upon this book called brief history of time by stephen hawking and that fundamentally changed my view of all the things i could learn about space and all the things i could learn about how humans can survive in space and what gravity is et cetera so That was my starting position and then, when i went on to to do an undergrad in aerospace, engineering, my dream and my vision was: go to space figure out how to build society and civilization server, then how to solve those tough technical problems. But then, in my third year of engineering i stumbled upon computer science. You know what computers can do as well, so i transitioned over to the tech industry and that transition was stumbling upon transition.

I actually left college for about a year or so to start a company. My goal was to figure out how i can build the first multilingual email for india and that's what i tried to do. I raised some money with friends and family start to hire some people builders, so that was my what year, what year was that this was 2000 and 2001., so the the peak and and that and the drought of uh dot com? You know, if you remember 2001, everything was doing you know so from 2001 to 2003. It was very hard to raise money.

I remember going from if you add.com to your name, your valuation, five access to. If you have a dot com to your name, your valuation tax in 2001 to 2003., it was very hard to raise money, etc. So, anyhow, just like a good kid, i am. I went back to school finished.

My engineering got a job at microsoft and my mom was very happy about that. I love that. So when did you really get serious like? When do you feel like you kind of really clicked in in your career yeah? I would say when i, when i landed in silicon valley, i mean honestly i was i have this desire to be a wanderer, but i look for different information. Seek information, try to understand? What's going on, i'm, unlike you know some of the other players or some of the other people who were born and raised, and they knew exactly what they wanted to do.

I actually did not know what i want to do. I had to stumble upon. Learn stumble upon, learn and see what really gets my energy going. So i would say when i landed in silicon valley back in 2007 2008.

That is when i think i found my jam. I was like building products, solving tough problems and doing that at break neck. Speed is where i thrive it. You know people solve problems, many tough problems and they might have a different time horizon to them, etc.

But the thing that really excites me is when i get to take on a big challenge, solve it with the power of technology and do so in a compressed time frame. So you can actually have impact on society impact on your customers very very quickly. So i got here and it's been a roller coaster - ride i've been very blessed to have worked at facebook, instagram airbnb. Where did you start? I started back in uh at microsoft, so my first job i know i mean and then and then and then facebook, sorry and then facebook, let's start there.

What did you come in at at facebook? I was an individual contributor, uh working on uh driving facebook growth and what year was that that was the early years like 2012 or so, something like that and instagram was just bought over uh. At that time it was like 20 30 people, i believe yeah. I was like eight when it was gone well or something, and what did you feel at the time that that this was the biggest company in this emerging space of social? Is that kind of what it felt like it felt like very different things. To be honest, it felt like we were tackling some major.

We had stumbled upon some major uh product market fit where customers were loving us, but, more importantly, what it felt like was. There was some mission to build. You know some mission to solve to help community connect with each other in a very democratic way. If you imagine back in the day, if you wanted to have a voice with your audience, gary you needed to have to go to media.

You know now you have your own voice. You know you can connect with anybody you wanted directly and that was the power of facebook or social or instagram. Maybe you know that allowed people to have that platform and connect. So i felt like i was on a rocket ship.

We knew nothing to be honest, we were like building stuff learning, building, stuff learning and as the as the craziness continued, we continue to stumble upon great product market fit and continue to deliver products for our customers. What was the biggest aha, you had in 2012 to 14 or 15 that window about consumers. You know you're you're, now really working you're getting deeper to your point. The kind of world is evolving.

What was an observation that you can share with everyone? That was a big aha because i think that might attach to the nft thing. Yeah, absolutely the biggest aha moment for me was when i joined instagram. It was tiny company. You know we had less than i think 30 40 employees and we had this.

We stumbled upon this idea of what you call today influencers gary like back in the day. You know only a few people like you believe that a platform like instagram can actually give you a voice to that extent. But there weren't like an influencer tag, name if you may, and what i saw the power of creators, which is which i will connect back to nfts in the future. But what i saw was, i was at the front row seat, building tools for creators to actually amplify their presence, their message directly to their community and the rate at which the community adopted that wasn't was amazing.

People wanted to know what kim kardashian is going to say what gary's going to say. Ronaldo is going to say on that platform and they wanted to have a dialogue with them. That thing was missing before instagram got to where, where it was because you had to do that asynchronously and maybe many times you didn't even have the opportunity to do that. So to me the rise of the creators and the rise of the creator economy.

I luckily had a front row seat back then, and at that time as well, one of the other things we stumbled upon was visual uh commerce. So let me share this anecdote back in the day. Uh instagram shopping is what i bootstrap at the at the company. Back in the day, and the idea and thesis was very simple: creators are building a community, and now they all of a sudden have a chance to actually communicate but also drive commerce over there and visual commerce.

Was that that uh aha moment very like okay? I can actually put a camera in front and actually put on the lipstick put on that dress and actually communicate to that audience what it is, as opposed to a search box where i need to precisely know what i want. I always joke about this, but you can't find inspiration in a search box. You just can't you know, there's so ins. You already need to know what you want and you go to the search box.

Yeah, google google's an intent machine exactly right. Social was a discovery. Machine exactly right and that serendipitous discovery was really really powerful. You know i remember there was a merchant in thailand, you know who actually tiny merchant in thailand, they were selling flip-flops and people would visit thailand and then follow them on instagram, and you know how they would sell on instagram they'll put a photo up there on Instagram saying if you want to buy this dmv, you can't remember remember right yemen comments exactly that's how all social commerce started, and then we got together to productize that version.

Let's talk about the transition, so you read, you were at facebook, then you went to the instagram side. Is that what happened? That's right. I was there facebook for a very short duration. I was there for instagram for three and a half years and then what and then i went to another uh company by the name of airbnb.

You know early days very different domain. You know i was just enamored by brian chesky, who was building a great company with a great mission, so i went over there to build airbnb plus, which is a high end of accommodations, that airbnb wanted to build before somebody else disrupts them, and you probably already Know when you stay in an airbnb, the hitter or miss you know, sometimes you get a good house. Sometimes you don't get a good house and brian chesky wanted to build a company where you can also have a consistent experience of a high-end home, but you can actually have a peace of mind. So that's what i built about gm over.

There ran product engineering, design and operations to build that business unit from ground up and then something crazy happened gary. This is something i'll, never forget in my life, corona wires happen and if you're, a travel company and three billion people are locked up inside the house, there ain't no travel nobody's traveling, you know - and i i remember all of a sudden. We were talking about going. Ipo successful company, and now we are trying to figure out how do we survive? You know our revenue dropped like was there real, was the real fear of that real real fear.

I remember brian chesky on a company all hand, saying don't worry about it. We built this company to last. We have two billion dollars that we raised that we never spent in our bank account and four weeks later, he was in the same all hands saying okay. This is, this is once in a hundred year kind of an event, and we need to figure out what to do.

If i remember correctly, our revenue dropped like seven or ten percent of last year's revenue. You know, let me tell you this no head of product. No cfo, no founder evidence business plan on what to do that happens when you lose 90 percent of your business, that's exactly that's impossibly challenging, so brian went into a very different mode. We raised two billion dollars that he will have to lay off 1900 employees.

You know about 200 of those, just in my organization it was a painful painful time and what i joke about, but it's real is that you know i could not have gone to hba stanford business school to learn about what crisis leadership is. I was right in the front seat - that's right, you know trying to survive but also trying to grow, because all of us believed that when this is all said and done, gary people will want to travel. Travel is in the blood of every individual. You know there was a survey we did a long time ago, which is: if money wasn't a consideration.

If you could retire, what would you do? What do people say i'll travel the world? Why does it say that? Because that is how they build memories and experiences, and it's an extension of who they are so we had hope, but during those uh year year and a half it was a crazy time. Luckily, everything worked out. Just fine you know, airbnb went ipo became a hundred plus billion dollar company. People are traveling uh, but it was a fun fun experience being in the front row, seat learning and when did you leave airbnb uh late 20? What is it 2019, 2020.

2020. Yeah. Sorry yeah late 2020. and then uh.

Then i took a six months break. I was kind of you know to be honest like when you do facebook, instagram airbnb kind of it's a lot company or not yeah. Exactly you burn out. You know so fun like not a fun fact, but the honest answer is i burnt out.

You know i felt like i was not able to keep up with the craziness of that. So i took six months off and what did you do? I just stayed at home because it was going to my screen. Go out. Oh right, right right.

I just stayed at home connected with my my family. By the way i lost 20 pounds, i gained 20 pounds 20 pounds good for you yeah. I lost 20 pounds like man, i got ta, take care of myself, invest in my relationship with my wife and kids. That's what i did and during that times, when i got into got back into the rabbit hole of crypto and web 3..

You know that's when i was like man if this is all happening right in my backyard and and i started investing in crypto back in 2013, 2014 fun fact: there's a tweet from me from 2014. I believe, when i said bitcoin is the future blah blah blah. I got zero likes at that time. You know but like i started investing there, but i never felt like this was the right time for me to jump in and be a builder, but as i spent six months at home learning and reading, i realized man.

This is where i can take my consumer x. Product experience, married with something that is fundamentally revolutionary, comes once in a hundred years kind of an opportunity and build something really cool as a builder, not a trader, not a buyer and a seller. But as a builder deep inside the crypto industry, what was the aha when you got back into web three, so you're when you the way you deliver that sentence, i assume it was something you were flirting with and looking at right. But now you have time.

That's right, and so with that time, that's the big lesson for a lot of people listening. Sometimes you really really actually have to take yourself out of your day-to-day. I mean absolutely, i i don't think i would have been as deep nft if it wasn't for corona and the fact that i built up my management team during it, which gave me a few minutes during the holidays. To look, and in that few minutes it was enough, and then i went uh in q1 2021 right for you um when you, when you stumbled back in you started, you know whether it was check reddit channels or comp or twitter or discords or google searching yeah.

What was the first thing you found when you started doing your digging again? What had changed? What had stayed the same yeah? I think i think a couple of things happened. One i i like you, said all the places twitter discord, conferences, chatted with brian shared with a bunch of other people as well, just to understand what is going on um. I think there were two or three different aha moments, one. I learned that you know in the 1990s uh gary information started to travel at the speed of light.

You could be in india, you can open up new york times. Dot, com and information will travel to you at the speed of light. Right previously, when i was growing up, information took four days for new york times to be delivered a physical copy to india. You know, but what i noticed was for the first time, value and money can travel at the speed of light.

Today, the joke in crypto is what is the fastest way to send money to someone from san francisco to london. It is to buy a plane ticket sit on the plane, deliver it yourself, it's gon na. Take you nine and a half hours, a bank will take you five five days. So what started becoming was like.

I started to feel like value and money can, for the first time talk about the speed of light. You can press a button. Usdc could show up from one place to the other in about three to four minutes. It's a fascinating world.

Bitcoin can travel around the world in a very different way. That was the first ah moment. The second aha moment was that money, or rather your wallet, could also become programmable. If you think about your bank account just sitting over there, it's dumb money sitting over there, you need humans to actually program it, meaning earn yield on it, trade, it etc, etc.

But you can imagine now your wallet can be programmable. You have smart contracts, you have other things that can actually interact with your wallet and can actually do amazing things that required human intervention before and again i'll come from a world of technology. So all of these technological innovations make a lot of exciting sense to me, because then i can think of what real world problem to solve with this innovation that are happening around us. So that was the second aha moment that i can program and say i want to earn yield in d5, or i want to actually receive tokens back in case of an nft.

If i, if i own an nft, i can actually have airdrops. All of that can be programmed at a massive scale without requiring human intervention, and then the last piece was i was just witnessing early days about nfts and how creator dynamics are changing. If you, i had a front proceed at how creator economy grew at instagram, i can tell you it was very unfavorable for the for the creator in many many regards. While the platforms did a phenomenal job, no taking away from youtube instagram facebook, they did a phenomenal job of giving these creators distribution.

That in the process of doing that, the creator lost control. And if you think about nfts, the creator has a lot of control and the platforms for the first time have to morph to the creator designs. You know it's. A fundamental mindset shift.

So as a geek technology myself, i was like man. These are fundamental shifts that i believe happened once in a decade once in a century kind of fundamental shifts, and you can actually build incredible products to actually see these things come to life for the masses. What did you not see that is now clear to you about nfts 14 months ago right before this all got crazy yeah? I think i think a lot of things. So.

First of all, i did not see that nfts in as much as i believe that there are more use cases than pfps. You know it was always a question. You know: how far can you push this? You know how far like yeah there will be in real life events that can be tied. You know there was a concept yeah exactly you're doing that very well.

You know, but now that i'm sitting over here, it's like, i can literally see anything that has ownership. Anything that has then attached benefits by you of having ownership right and anything that requires you to prove over time that you, you have that ownership is all disruptible by this new technology using the word disruptable like they can be disrupted by this new technology. So that was an aha moment for me, which i did not catch up early on. You know thinking that yeah there's a future, but like did you, you know knowing that you go geek life and i go consumer psychology life.

Did you understand how much it would act like the fashion industry, where the ownership of the nfts was a way to communicate really no different than a picture going viral on social yeah? I mean that's a great point, so i i wouldn't give myself enough credit to say i could connect the dots in the beginning, but over time it started becoming very, very clear that these things could actually be connected. Just the way you described. Something can go viral on social, you can take the similar analogy from fashion and actually think about how that can go viral as well, and the other thing i would say is: i always believed in this gary that community matters a lot right for a creator right, But the power of community is insanely more pronounced in the web 3 world than it was yes right, the fickleness of a community in the world of web 2, where you can go from one to the other very easily, because you don't have skin in the game. You know you haven't invested seven million dollars to buy that at right.

Yes, it was a lot of fickle community right, but now i see the the concern i have is that it's over correcting in the short term of this gold rush, where people are only part of it because of the financial interest, and i think, we'll find our Middle soon, we'll we'll find a little. I think i i while it is true what you're describing is is definitely a problem. I do view that in the cambrian explosion of ideas that every industry goes through these kinds of rights, that's right that always that always happens. We just have never seen so many people deploy so much capital in the short term.

This is day trading internet stocks in 98 at a scale that is profound. It's profound. It's really really profound, while still a very small community, i mean even my podcast. That's listening right now, a lot of them do not own an nft, which i think is a nice segue, because i think what you're up to in your day, job is going to lead to a lot more people owning an nft.

That's our hope. Let's talk about that, give me a little 4-1-1 on what you're up to. Why? Don't you tell everybody in the audience if they're unaware of what's going on on that front, yeah happy dude, so i think uh. Let's, let's start first with the with people who are creators and then we'll come back to people who want to support those creators.

I think the fundamental underlying revolution isn't that you can have a pfv, isn't that you can have a profile photo. The fundamental revolution is that, as a creator, you have a lot more control than you ever had, and i want to give two examples to people in the previous world. You create content on youtube or whatever that is, it is becomes their property right at the end of the day, you're using their platform, it is part of their ecosystem. It's not your content per se anymore, as per the terms of service right, but in this world your smart contract that powers, the nft, is yours.

If you can get a smart contract of your own, you can dictate the terms that places like openc, coinbase nft will have to follow to be able to do that. The second piece that is very exciting is that, as a creator, you can actually dictate and benefit from the for, like the long-term sales of your uh of your art as well, and that's super powerful. That mechanism did not exist easily in the previous world, but through the power of on-chain royalties. You can actually be assured that, as long as the art that you've created sells for 100 years you're going to benefit from it, you know as a creator as well for the collector's side.

I think there's lots of challenges today. To be honest, you know what we're telling collectors is, what we probably told internet users in the early 1990s. You know you got to have a command line prompt. You got ta type in the ip address to get to a website, and then you can actually use that website.

Remember. 1990S early 1990s. This is how people access internet, i think we're putting that technology in front of the collectors which is not good. We got to solve the technology for the collector, so it's easy for them.

What are the solves over there number one. I think we've got to onboard the masses, which means technology has to be abstracted in the background. The best technology to me is magical. You never know what it is.

You just get to do what you want to do and that technology doesn't exist in web 3. Today we are building it as builders. We are building it, but we are in an early early stage. The second piece that creators uh collectors also are are telling us is that they want to actually be able to not just buy that nft, but also be part of the community around that nft.

You know a typical, create collector, buys one nft a month at best. Gary and but what do they do on a daily basis, they're connecting with gary they're connecting with the creator they're in their discord, they're chatting with them they're trying to understand who other fellow collectors are and why they matter as well, and i think solving that problem Will be really important because today, these things are happening in a very disparate way. Some are happening on twitter, some on discord, some somewhere else, and if a platform can combine all of these things for the user, that could be incredibly powerful for those users to to access. So my message to everybody is we're at the early stages.

A lot of technology needs to be built, but there there's a lot put this in the context for everybody winelibrary.com website in 1996. The shopping cart was down 25 percent of the year. There you go, i mean it was just you know, yeah early days, you know how to take discovery, the credit card it was declining. We didn't anticipate that uh.

You want to hear a great one. My friend, the serper, that held up the website was in the closet of our store. There was no, there was. There was no amazon services right, there was no shopify, there was no.

There was no wordpress, there was no crm, there was no shopping. Cart. Optimization there's like we built everything from scratch. Absolutely and people don't remember that anymore.

Absolutely i mean you want a good one. Yeah we're recording this, just as it looks like elon's buying twitter. You you remember this twitter in 2006, seven and into early 08 was down all the time twitter in 2000. I don't know if you remember this, because i see you looking in the sky thinking, if you remember in 07, i was there early early.

You were early yeah, it was down every day wow as a matter of fact, blaine cook, the original cto, who was awesome, kind of, took the bullet and like resigned because i mean it would be down for hours almost every day. That's crazy, curious to think about those days and - and you look what happened last week like aquitars, is a great community they're building great stuff, but they ended up in a very serious situation. I always remind people, we are teaching creators technology when, actually, what should we? We should be giving them are tools that that empower them to just focus on their creativity. Imagine a world where adobe photoshop didn't exist gary and as an artist as an illustrator.

You have to not only draw the illustration, but then also have to worry about how that pixel is stored on the hard disk. You know, and if you mess up one time and there was a corrupt segment on the hard disk, you lost that part of the photo that is crazy to think about that world. But that's the world that we're living in. We don't have an adobe photoshop of nfts today, i'm using that as an analogy.

But like you get the idea, we don't have the tools where the creators just focus on creativity, while the technology is not what they worry about, and i think we are about to usher this era in this year. In my opinion, i love it final thoughts before we get out of here anything that we haven't covered that you would like to touch on. I would say we are super early folks. You know if you missed out on board 8 yard club or something else don't worry, there's the next one coming there's a lot of exciting things happening um and please come in here for the for for the long term.

You know we're gon na see a lot of ups and downs, we're gon na see a lot of things coming up, disappearing, etc, but at least i am in this for the long haul coinbase is in the is in this for the long haul. I know gary you are in this for the long haul. You know we want to welcome everybody for the right reasons and continue to innovate as builders and creators to take this amazing community of nfd artists and collectors, even bigger, just final thoughts, the anxiety of launching so big, like the nft platform, a lot for you. A little like how does like, if you at the scale, you're playing at with something that's so complex right now, it's so early.

Was it anxious for you. It was definitely a lot of um. What i should say is excitable energy. You know, i would say it was a lot of excitement.

You know it was a lot of energy and sometimes you can confuse excitable energy too, into nervousness or anxiousness right to me. It's the excitable energy. We are at the beginning where we could actually do something that the community has always hoped for, but never had and that's what we were excited about. So the team worked 24 7 for the last six months, or so you know kudos to the team for shipping.

This out, i'm just excited that the first version is out. Now we can rapidly ship on top of it. You know it's always hard to get the first brick down the first wall created you know and then, after that you can ship really really fast. So i'm really excited for people who have tried coinbase nft.

My promise to all of you is we're going to be shipping every week every day, keep checking it out, we're going to have more and more features for you and our job is to make it so easy. Like coinbase made it easy for people to buy bitcoin without ever worrying about the complexity, i want to do the same thing for nfts. We want coinbase to make it so easy for people to participate in the nfd economy that they forget about the how and they only enjoy the what i love that, what a beautiful line sachin! Thank you so much for being one of the pioneers of this future world. Thank you gary for having me.

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