Devin Finzer
Co-founder & CEO, OpenSea. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
2appearances
30statements
8resolved
7supported
0contradicted
88%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Devin Finzer said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
Finzer: OpenSea trades new NFT projects without custom integrations
“Oftentimes projects will kind of come out of thin air and start trading on OpenSea without us ever having to go and do special integrations with them because it's all kind of built into the blockchain.”
Finzer: NFTs give creators an open, free market from day one
“That's sort of one of the magical things about it is you get an open free market from day one the moment you launch your NFT.”
Finzer: Digital art was not a real market three years ago
“Digital art just really wasn't a market three years ago.”
Finzer: Tokenization gives assets instant liquidity and DeFi compatibility
“With an NFT, the exciting thing about it is the moment you turn something in an NFT, it sort of plugs into all of the existing like crypto infrastructure. So when you make an NFT, what do you kind of get out of the box? One is you get a marketplace, right? You…”
Finzer: Vaulted physical items can trade as NFTs before physical redemption
“One of the interesting things is, and we're starting to see experiments with this is people are holding in, in their own custody physical items, but issuing NFTs for them so that they can be traded around many times before they're actually redeemed for the phy…”
Finzer: CryptoPunks is the first candidate for a true digital antique
“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.”
Devin Finzer: Virtual land will face physical-world zoning and regulatory issues
“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.”
Finzer: Instagram and ad platforms capture most value from creators
“So if you think about Instagram today, you're creating all of this interesting content, but much, most of the value is being captured by the platform itself, kind of due to how the business models work, right? Advertising based business models don't typically …”
Finzer: High transaction costs make trading NFTs on Ethereum tricky
“Tricky it is at the moment to buy and sell NFTs on something like Ethereum due to the high transaction costs.”
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: 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.”
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 across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2Semil Shah 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 3
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
- 20VC: The Anduril Memo: Founders Fund's Brian Singerman on What Makes Palmer Luckey One of the Greatest Innovators in History, Why It Is BS The DOD Do Not Want To Work With Silicon Valley & Why in Venture You Have To Play A Different Game to the Hedge Fun
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Devin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, OpenSea | 1 | 19 | 83% 5/6 | full record on 20VC → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, OpenSea | 1 | 11 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |