Devin Finzer

“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”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“Digital art just really wasn't a market three years ago.”

“OpenSea as a company, we were looking to set up a headquarters in one of these virtual worlds. And I actually went to sort of the equivalent of a virtual real estate agent to figure out how, you know, how do I get a good deal?”

“CryptoPunks, for those of you who aren't familiar, is kind of one of those most famous early NFT projects. I like to call it kind of the first candidate for a true digital antique.”

“But I think to answer your question, a lot of the same problems that we have in the physical world will start to emerge as well.”