The Exchanges

Q for 50 years, but they're so big and the founders are dead. And so I like, I'll go and like read the biographies, but I'm like, I don't know even know how you started this damn thing because like it's been lost in 50 years of history. How is, how does your, what's your research business providing the user and how, how do you operate it? How does it work?

A Basically in crypto there are these things called protocols like Uniswap and Aave and Compound and then there's like these layer ones like Ethereum you've probably heard of, Solana, all these other things. The industry's moving from treating these protocols like they're these like weird esoteric things To treating them what, like what they are, which is just businesses. So MakerDAO, for example. They'll do a hundred million of revenue this year. That is a business. They have like people they pay, like employees and contractors, profits, costs. That is, nobody talks about them like that. So what Blockworks Research does is it's a platform for investors who allocate to crypto assets to basically look at, uh, these crypto protocols and look at their user metrics, financials, get research on them. We're very early to trends. With what's happening with the protocols, you can look at the governance. So like, if you want to look at, uh, who's voting on different proposals, if you want to look at like how people are, how people like, who are the big stakeholders inside the protocol, you can look at all of that inside the platform. So it's probably not useful to you. It's incredibly useful if you're a crypto fund who alloc, who has like two percent of their portfolio in, in crypto. So.

AI assessment note: “what Blockworks Research does is it's a platform for investors who allocate to crypto assets”

Q No. Is it, wait, is he a, does he, does he spell his name funny? Does it actually start with a T?

A It does. It does. So, all right. So Peter Turchin is this historian and mathematician. He developed this field called, uh, Clio dynamics, and he kind of studies the, you would like him. He's a history guy studies, like the cycles of cooperation and conflict amongst elites and societies throughout history. And his argument is that. Periods of internal peace and cooperation are disrupted when the population of elites grows too large, and then competition emerges among them for what is actually these limited elite positions, which then, because there's too many elites and too little positions, that leads to infighting in the elites as they try to maintain their wealth and status, and it causes social instability and a breakdown in cooperation, and it doesn't, historically, that Breakdown, cooperation, social instability does not stop until there's a crisis like something big, right? State collapse, revolution, whatever it may be. And then a new, new cycle of cooperation resumes. So I don't know if you tend, like, if you look at history, you can cut, you can see history through the lens of whatever lens you want to see it. There's like the The fourth turning, which is like these four big periods, and you can explain it like that. There's like this Peter Turchin, Clio Dynamics view, but one thing I believe is like, crypto is a better way out of this whole system.

AI assessment note: “It does. It does. So, all right. So Peter Turchin is this historian”

Q your story earlier. You're like, I thought this, I thought crypto was going to be a big thing, but no one was covering it. But in reality, it was like, Ethereum sounds sick. Um, I, I, I need a job. Um, I'm just going to host this event and see what happens. Like, you know what I mean? You just kind of like do shit and it works out sometimes.

A There's always basically a, so like that is true. What I said about like, we had this vision that crypto would be this institutional asset class. Cause once we said, Hey, how do you host an event? What, what, what should we talk about? I think our first talk, like one of our first events was like crypto and the institutional age of blockchain or something like we had that vision. Right. But yeah, I think you are dead. Right. And I think that is a, almost a problem that gets pushed is that everybody thinks that founders had this vision from day one. But if you talk to founders who have built big companies, 99% of them do not. They do, they never did at the beginning. Second-time founders actually do, I've noticed. Like, second-time founders will, but honestly, like, a hundred percent of first-time founders, there's no grand vision. It's this kind of, it's this, like, how did Blockworks get built? I don't know. We took one foot in front of the other day after day and, like, slogged it out, and that's how you build your first company. Second company, I think, is different. Second company can be, like, Um, you know, robotics and like all this other shit, but that's, you can have a grand vision, but not the first company.

AI assessment note: “I think you are dead. Right. And I think that is a, almost a problem”

Q He said in 2023, you're going to do twenty five million in revenue with eight million in EBITDA. He says, 2022, you did 25 and seven million in EBITDA. Is that right?

A I'm not going to say specific numbers, but what I will say is, yeah, last year we had a goal of Uh, twenty million in revenue, and we pretty decently exceeded that. Um, and we've been profitable since day one. So, yeah, we, we bootstrapped the business for the first five and a half years, and then back in April or May, we took, uh, we raised our first outside round of capital from, from Tentee and Framework and, and, uh, this Angel Santiago. So we raised twelve million bucks at a one-thirty-five valuation. Um, and yeah, we've been profitable since then. I mean, kind of since we started, we did a decent bit of EBITDA last year. This year, Uh, those numbers are wrong because this year, just to kind of share a little bit of insights into like the crypto market, I don't know how, I think you follow pretty closely, Sam, the market's just gotten crushed, right? So what's actually done really well for us this year is our subscription revenue on the research platform, but the ad market across the board, both in crypto and digital media, if you probably talked to the morning brew guys, or you probably saw the Buzzfeed numbers because they're public, like it's gotten, it's, it's, uh, it's been a tougher year than last year on the ad market.

AI assessment note: “I'm not going to say specific numbers, but what I will say is”