StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Devin Finzer

Co-founder & CEO, OpenSea · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@dfinzer ↗

Devin Finzer co-founded OpenSea in 2017 alongside Alex Atallah, growing it into one of the leading global marketplaces for non-fungible tokens. Before OpenSea, he worked as a software engineer at Pinterest and co-founded Claimdog, which was acquired by Credit Karma in 2016.

19statements → 11claims → 6claims resolved → 83%fully supported → 3.63/5average certainty → 1.74/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

5 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 9 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Devin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Devin Finzer: OpenSea volume jumped from $350M to $3.4B in one month
“There's a similar inflection point from like July to August of this year, where we went from about three hundred fifty million to 3.4 billion dollars of transaction volume.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 16:34 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
90% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

236 words/min while actually speaking · 0.8 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Devin Finzer: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 32 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,887 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Devin Finzer is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything Devin Finzer said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Devin Finzer: NFTs capture value for creators unlike rent-extracting Web2 social platforms
“I think long run, you know, this does open up the playing field for really anyone to like directly tap into a fan base or people who want to support them. So I think long-term you're talking about kind of brand new business models and the different model than …”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 25:17 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Devin Finzer: NFTs represent the first true property rights on the internet
“It's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet, right?”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 6:53 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Insight
Devin Finzer: Incumbent game developers lack economic incentives to enable NFT interoperability
“The game developers are rightly skeptical of this. I think existing games don't necessarily have a incentive to, like, open up their economies and allow this sort of interoperability, and you kind of have to think about what are the reasons that a game develop…”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 9:36 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Supported
Devin Finzer: OpenSea volume jumped from $350M to $3.4B in one month
“There's a similar inflection point from like July to August of this year, where we went from about three hundred fifty million to 3.4 billion dollars of transaction volume.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 16:34 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Devin Finzer: Experimental developers will crack the business model for open worlds
“But I think new games and new developers who are more experimental and kind of want to figure out what's the business model incentive structure that works, they will eventually crack this and eventually build Sort of these open worlds that I think could be rea…”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 9:51 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Opinion
Devin Finzer: The 2022 seed fundraising environment is far crazier than 2018
“It wasn't as crazy of a funding environment back then as it is today, where it's just like so easy to go and raise a giant seed round and an insane valuation.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 11:02 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Disclosure
Devin Finzer: OpenSea tracks transaction count over GMV to evaluate marketplace health
“We definitely, you know, don't look just at GMB, right? We look at Number of transactions, right? So number of sales as a more healthy metric, because that's an indicator of, are people able to sell the stuff that they want to sell in the marketplace? And then…”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 13:04 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Partly supported
Devin Finzer: OpenSea volume grew from $8M to $160M in three months
“So I think in January, we did about eight million dollars of transaction volume. In February, we did ninety five million in transaction volume. And then in March, it was like one hundred and sixty million.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 16:01 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Disclosure
Devin Finzer: OpenSea expected gaming and utility NFTs to lead over collectibles
“That phenomenon, I didn't think was sort of what would drive a wave of excitement around NFTs. You know, I sort of had more of a thesis around, like, games or things that are useful or like inherently useful NFTs versus these like more collectible use cases.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 19:02 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Insight
Devin Finzer: Marketplaces must master core transactions before expanding peripheral features
“Because if you don't have that foundation of being a really good marketplace, You know, it's hard to kind of have things that are more peripheral.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 21:56 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Devin Finzer: Short-term NFT profits mostly accrued to early crypto investors
“A lot of the people who have made the most money from NFTs are probably the people who are already made a lot of money from crypto, for example, right?”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 24:12 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Supported
Devin Finzer: Traditional brands are building on Bored Ape Yacht Club IP
“Now what we're seeing with Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is another NFT project that's similar to CryptoPunks, and that there's only 10,000 of these kind of rare apes, right, is that traditional brands are starting to build interesting things on top of Bored Ape…”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 27:35 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Devin Finzer: Volatility across the Web3 tech stack hinders NFT application development
“I think there's a lot of, like, volatility up and down the technical stack, right? There's, like, underlying blockchains that are shifting around. There's, like, Wallet layers. There's just so many moving pieces that I could see, you know, some of those kind o…”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 31:37 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Supported
OpenSea originally pitched Y Combinator on a decentralized Wi-Fi sharing network
“So the first idea that we had was building this decentralized marketplace for sharing internet bandwidth. And that was the idea that we got into Y Combinator with”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 4:41 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Supported
Devin Finzer: Billions spent on Fortnite virtual clothing proves gaming NFT potential
“I think gaming is this really interesting natural fit for NFTs because people have been buying digital items online For quite some time now and spent, for example, billions of dollars buying virtual clothing and some, a game like Fortnite.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 8:06 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Disclosure
Devin Finzer: OpenSea grew linearly and occasionally shrank during 2018 crypto winter
“Because on one hand, you know, we weren't really growing that fast. We were kind of, like, linearly growing. Sometimes we had, like, a negative month or whatnot, but we still did have, like, Some transaction volume on the marketplace.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 11:32 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Supported
Devin Finzer: OpenSea operated with only six to seven people during takeoff
“We had like six to seven people, right? When, even when things started taking off, we were really small.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 14:33 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Devin Finzer: Customer support and platform reliability were OpenSea's main scaling bottlenecks
“I would say the two main ones are sort of customer support and relatedly trust and safety, so ensuring that people aren't selling fraudulent items, and then core platform.”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 18:00 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Disclosure
Devin Finzer: Figma founder Dylan Field is a close mentor on OpenSea
“Founder of Figma is a really close mentor of mine. I mean, what's great about Dylan is he is able to do so many different things. He's running Figma, but he's also extremely deep in the NFT space, so he's just been, like, very helpful from, like, mentoring us …”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 30:32 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!

The other half of the tape: Devin Finzer's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2Semil Shah 1

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Br Jan 14, 2022 22m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more