On this week’s episode I chat with Sterling Campbell, CEO of Minotaur. Minotaur is a web3 platform that helps people and brands launch NFT projects. There are a lot of steps - including a fair bit of technology - required to take an NFT launch from concept to launch. Minotaur’s tech-enabled service does all of this. As they put it, they “bring together artists, blockchain engineers and community managers to build successful NFT projects that can scale.”

Sterling has been in NFTs since 2017, which for this space is a long time, so he’s been around the block a few times and learned a bunch of stuff.

If you are still scratching your head when you hear about NFT, well he breaks it down pretty well in this conversation.

He also dives into what’s wrong with the industry right now and how he is hoping for a transition to what he calls NFTs 2.0, where NFTs flip from their focus on providing membership access to being technically more integrated as a method for adding value to communities. 

Sterling is the right guy for this space - he has lived at the nexus of media, entertainment and business. And as far as being in a risky space - that’s not really an issue. He tells us about the time his parachute didn’t open while sky diving. 

Oh yeah…and if that wasn’t enough…he’s a DJ that toured with the likes of Lil John and T-Pain. Enjoy the conversation.

**Note** I’m an investor in the company.

Show Links:

• Follow us on Twitter: @djsterlingc, @mpd
• Guest Links: Minotaur
• Guest Articles: NFTs: What You’re Missing And Where They’re Going Podcast Links: Website, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

‍Transcript (this is an automated transcript):

MPD: Awesome. So let's start. Do you mind giving us an overview of what your company - Minotaur - does?

Sterling Campbell: does? Yeah, totally. So Minotaur is a full service end to end solution for an creation for brands and creators. So it's a, on one hand, it's a white glove agency for top tier creators and brands. On the other hand, it's a self-serve platform that enables long-tail creators to build their own NFT projects.

The whole reason for creating the company is the fact that interacting with a blockchain is extremely important for long-tail creators to own their audiences and to own their own monetization. But at the end of the day, it's really hard. Cause you have to find a, a solidity dev, you have to understand the crypto space, you have to understand their crypto communities.

And we really just wanted to make that easier for long-tail creators, but also enable all of our idols to jump in and make their own projects as well who need a more white glove treatment. So it's a nice little hybrid there. 

MPD: And so folks doing. They were finding their own teams of people who were kind of experts in the space and putting it all together.

And now you guys show up in your one-stop shop. Is that the right 

Sterling Campbell: way to think about it? Yeah. There's a couple of things that we always make. The joke that like half the celebrities that we talked to, or half the creators we talked to it's a bunch of kids in hoodies that come in and they're like, let us do your NMT project.

You'll make millions of dollars. And they have no idea what they're doing. They have no idea what they're agreeing to. And for us, it's like we come from a place of trust. A lot of the people at the company worked in entertainment before. So we know we have strong trust in the ecosystem, but at the same time, it's also abstracting a lot of the complexity out.

So you're not overwhelming them with, like now you've got to, you have to talk in this discord and you have to go on this Twitter spaces and all this stuff that, again, like they don't really want to do, but at the end of the day, that they have to do in order to convert into this opportunity.

So for us, it's yeah, one stop shop, but also we're there for the strategy was there for everything else. Because we think it's important. These are in these early days for projects to have as much in them as possible. And we really want to stand above in terms of. 

MPD: You think of us, some examples of folks you've worked with, who's used you guys to do their NFT drop.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. So we built the tech for creature world I'm with Danny Cole. Danny was a, an artist in New York. He did 150 million in secondary revenue on his project. He's currently building out the second phase of it. Really strong artists with a really cool anyone that hears Danny talk it's so electric that you people have to buy, which is the main driver of the secondary, but also so much really cool tech went into building that project.

There was a game before you meant it. There was a way to change metadata of the actual entity you have. There's a lot of like really cool things that happen there. Another project is castle kid with Collin Tilley CA call until he is a Grammy award winning director, Amazon, a bunch of music videos for Justin Bieber and a bunch of other.

That one has been really ambitious in terms of our rollout. We were the fastest project to ever the most traits ever in a project, which ended up being a little bit more of a problem than it was a success. We also did the fastest time to merge in terms of token gated access to things. He is doing a masterclass on producing and directing.

And then the longer-term plan here is to do a, the first feature film based on an empty cells. So allowing the community as a Dow to decide the future of the film, to contribute to its creation, as well as its actual recording and like the post editing process and all of those other areas.

And then being able to be that first film created out of a doubt, which we're really excited about. Those are just a couple, we also, I've done a bunch of advisory work for a bunch of different projects, some of which is public and some of which isn't, but I've been around the space since 2017.

So I've definitely had my fair share of interactions on the 

MPD: blockchain, which is a long tenure. 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, I think it's one of the longest, everyone's always like I was in cryptos it's whatever. And no one can say like NMT is since that long, other than a very select view, which I think is I've always clung to a bit, 

MPD: what is the service I've been Atari do and not to like, where do you guys 

Sterling Campbell: start and stop?

So we were there from day one, if we can be for Kalika, for example the actual, like creation of the IP happened on the, on one of the first calls. So we sit from strategy all the way to, to follow through one thing that we're really starting to work on now. And one of our early learnings was that the follow-through is fairly important.

So like creating the proper incentives. Attach us to things without hurting. Our scalability is really important, but there's so many like hacks that we have for scalability and so many different ways that we can dog food, our own products that now everyone on our product, everyone on our team come the end of this month, we'll be able to launch their own project.

So essentially it can run the process from start to finish and we don't necessarily need this, this team hopping from project to project like we previously did. But to be honest, like we continue to support. Now. I, it's been about three months since we met to castle kid and we're just hammering each of the roadmap items.

The other part about that is that's really nice is that every time we do something it's tech that could be, can service the rest of the projects that we do. So as soon as we built like a dowel workflow, one click down. Now we can add that to any project. So any projects that we do now, and this has been what we've been working on over the past couple of months, any projects that we do now can come ready to rock so you can keep that momentum.

Yeah. We're launching a project and then saying, all right, now we're going to go build all the stuff that we said we were going to now. It's here's what we're promising. And we can deliver, 75% of this on day one, and then you get the journey of the rest. So you get to have that cool experience alongside the media.

MPD: Okay. So let's say someone listening to this decides, all right, I want to do one of these, how much time and planning do they need? What's, how long does it take from the time they drop you guys an email to the time something's happening? Yeah, 

Sterling Campbell: It's a hard answer. I hate, I always say to say it depends, but it depends on a couple of things.

One thing is speed of the art. I think it's really hard to. The two biggest bottlenecks are community and art. A lot of the tech that we have now is super scalable. So we can launch a D app and all that stuff in about three days. The hardest part is like getting a project that people want to buy.

The space is changing so much from these like cash grabs and, on sustainable times to what I keep calling like NFTs 2.0, where it's people are actually finally demanding something. They're not okay with just, Hey, we're going to do a game. And then obviously the game never gets made.

Now they're finally demanding something that's actually concrete and done. Those are the two biggest blockers in our mind. Like the actual launching of a project has now become fairly commoditized on our personal end as a company. It's really about finding the right project. So it's cool.

We're doing like we're doing a project now with a $500 million fashion company. We're doing another one. Poultry winning a Pulitzer prize, winning cartoonists and things like that. Major athletes, major celebrities, people that are idolized in their relative countries, like all these different types of verticals, because now it's, we're moving from this arrow of like just promising stuff to like, let's go actually do this.

Let's go actually deliver this stuff. And that's really a really cool place for us to move. So to answer your question, six to eight weeks, I think is like a, is a clean time for the launch. But again, at that point you don't have too much, it can also be three to four months. It all depends on what you're offering and the angle that you're taking this all the project.

MPD: Got it. So who's a good fit who, who should reach out to you if they hear it? 

Sterling Campbell: I think people that are good at building communities, honestly, like I published something on value recently. It's something that I've been thinking as like a founder and someone who's also been an investor for most of my career.

Like I think about value less than I probably should, but now it's come to the point where I really analyze like what people find value in. And I think the biggest early value creator is community. I think the idea that there's no real places right now where you can sit like synchronously, talk to people, you have Twitter and all these other Reddit and all these other places where you can say your opinion, someone will eventually get to it and you can have that interaction but discord and token data communities and all this, it's such a cool way to get that live.

I can jump into a council, could discord and talk to, a hundred people. And like that type of engagement and like attention is something that the average person just doesn't have, right? Like superstars, get that type of attention and any, anything that they do, but the other person doesn't get like thousands of people reading their thing whatever they have to say and reacting to it and all these other things.

Very well. So I think communities is number one beyond like celebrity. We've learned a lot actually about all that stuff. The second is do you actually want to build in the space? We don't, we try as hard as we can do them for cash grabs. We don't like to work with celebrities or any creators that we see don't actually want to do the project.

Don't actually want to follow through on what they're saying. And even if they balk at like early engagement, like they don't want to talk to their community, they don't wanna do it. Then it's we don't want to just launch stuff and get people hurt. Like it's bad on our brain and it's bad on their brand.

So those are the two biggest things for us. Do you actually want to do this? Do you actually want to be in this for a longterm? Cause because when three is going to be around for awhile and you only get so many bites at the apple here and we try to communicate that as much as possible and try to preserve our brand as much as we can.

MPD: So I was just at a conference and they had someone come and talk about NFTs and I could see it was like mostly over the head of everyone in the audience. Could we do a quick NFT? One-on-one. And just dumb the hell out of this. If you wouldn't mind starting with an overview, but then I'm gonna, I'm gonna ping you with a couple of topics or words that everyone's hearing just to make sure they get the lay of the land that works.

All right. Do you wanna just start NFTs? What are they 

Sterling Campbell: start there? So NFTs are basically, it stands for non fungible token. The idea is that they can't be changed. It's a mutable. It is a unique piece of. Art or an item on the blockchain. It's different from a us dollar, for example, where if you have a hundred dollars, a hundred single us dollar bills, they all, they're all the exact same.

They might have different serial numbers, but they're interchangeable. And if T's technically are not all the same, right? Because they're a part of the collections, but they all have unique qualities. This is most obvious in terms of like traits. So if you look at like the board APR club or any of these things, each one of those NFTs is part of a collection that carries like certain attributes, but they're all different.

Some of them have had some of the. The utility of that stuff, doesn't really matter. It's more like a rarity thing. This is the rarest thing, which again, if you look at like baseball cards or other things, you can see why people care about that. It's not something that I personally care about as I'm not like a collectibles person as much as I am like a utility person, but the cool part about this is that is not that you get cool art of a monkey that is unique, but rather the fact that the underlying technology of that photo of that JPEG is more than a JPEG.

It is. It is your ticket to things. It is your membership. It is your access code. It's your authorization. You don't have, you don't use your email to sign up for things. In web three, you use your wallet and use your identity your metaverse identity to jump into these things. The problem with NFC is largely.

And like the confusion is that people see a picture of a monkey and they're like, how is this worth like a hundred thousand dollars? I don't understand it. And to be honest, like there are times in which I don't understand it either. And there are times when like value gets decoupled from price.

And I think that's a really important thing that people are learning for the first time in these markets, given that they've been told their whole life that like markets are efficient and all this other stuff, the reality is that if they're not, and it becomes a lot more apparent that the true speculative value of these things, when all of a sudden that JPEG is getting you on a yacht or is getting you into a conversation with Steph Curry or any of these things are happening which all carry a higher value.

I'm not going to pretend like it's a hundred thousand dollars worth of value, but I will say that like a lot of utility can be delivered to these things and people interact in this way already. It's just, they buy tickets to things. It's just a different mechanism for delivery. I think that the jump is not as big as people think.

And I think people are so scared of. All the buzzwords and all the nonsense and it's really a lot of the same stuff we're doing now, just in a smoother hopefully going to be a smoother way. 

MPD: Yeah. That's the thing that made it click for me a while back was when I realized it, wasn't really just an art technology, which I want to talk about at its core.

It's a really good ticketing system. That's the language that you're using that I don't hear a lot of people, even in the space talking about it that way, but that's when it clicked, because that makes sense. You can imagine you're going to, NBA game and you've got some digital assets that looks cool.

It's got a little bit more fun character than a QR code on a ticket. But it also has the same effect gets you in and the person who wants to let you in knows it's you and you've paid for it. That's the core foundational layers. That's right. And we're applying it to art now. That's where 

there's.

Sterling Campbell: The cool thing is that you were playing it to artists and that's why it gets so broad because all of a sudden, like utility running like a music musician for example is massive. Like you not only get something that could give you early access to their albums, but also you could get a VIP ticket, right?

There's so many different layers in which you can add utility to these things. And it really, it's funny because we've done all the weekend to like decouple and like unbundle all of the services and make them all these little point solutions. And like now we're moving back into this let's bundle it all up.

Let's do, let's find super fans and let's have them pay for something that gives them the best access as possible. Let's not do like a patriarch and then a VIP ticket and all these other things. Let's just front run revenue and couple it all into this, $400 asset that goes directly to the artist, as opposed to all these different platforms.

Only fans takes 25% Twitch takes 50% like the numbers are staggering. When you think about the creator economy is not owned by creators, it's owned by platforms. And that's, what's so cool. You're getting a ticket to like their show. It's not just like a physical experience, but like you're getting a deeper ticket to like the journey of the artist.

So Danny, Cole's a great example. He had 7,000 followers. He was about to begin his journey as a well-recognized artist. And all of a sudden you get a ticket to that. So now I get a front row seat, I get first access of everything he's doing. And there's upside that's tied to it. So not only that it's if I'm a hipster and I'm like always talking about the musicians that I saw first, I can buy that in empty as like an investment in the artist.

Which again, there's a bunch of complexities and difficulties that come with decoupling art from like investment opportunities. There's a reason like we don't usually do that kind of ruins the fun a little bit, but at the same time, it adds benefits to everyone as well. 

MPD: So another way to put it is it's a supercharged membership card took community, but it's a unique card unto itself.

That's a little bit of a status symbol because it looks. 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, exactly right. And you can flex it like no one owns this unique one and that's why we're rarities get important again, like I'm not, when I traded NFTs and was flipping them like a madman, I never cared. The only time I would get excited as if I happened to meet one and it happened to be rare and I would get more money than I would have otherwise, but right.

People like it, people like the senior in Campbell and I'm not going to pretend I'm not going to pretend I don't know why it's happening. It's just not for me personally. 

MPD: Okay. So everyone's hearing art and community. Those are the kind of core pieces are coming together around these membership type organizations.

Can you give a little overview on discord? Everyone's hearing about it? I think a lot of people don't know what the hell it is, but you covered that. 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. This is one of our biggest challenges with with bigger brands who obviously the demographics of them are not necessarily crypto native. So discord started as like a, originally it was like a fortune style like hell spot for a bunch of Deakins and it then became like a game or mechanism.

And I remember it was the only way that I could play video. I used to literally grab my cell phone and I would call my friends when I was a kid and just talk to them on the phone because I didn't have a mic and we were playing on a computer game. So there was no voice chat. And I just remember doing that so much.

And the discord enabled me to voice out with my friends to create parties like great group chats that like, they weren't like green bubbles. Cause someone had an Android, like it just was a really smooth experience and really nice for that. You can create specific channels, you can make things private.

Like it just became a really cool place just to hang out and talk. And the industry space has completely taken it over. Same with Twitter also. Yeah, those are the two hubs in terms of like where crypto Twitter, like where crypto groups hang out and discourse is really nice because of there's so many different tools that are being built to token gate things.

Again, they're all manual discord. Isn't really doing a lot of these things. I'm sure they're doing them in the background, but 

MPD: you mean you have to have the NFT membership card just making this dumb to get access to the discourse. 

Sterling Campbell: No, please. Yeah. I'm a little bit too in it. Sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

Yeah, exactly. So please stop me if that happens, but yeah, so that's the thing is. Some of our biggest channels, right? Like a place where I share all of the alpha, which is basically the word for any tips that I get on. Hey, this is going to be a hot project. Or Justin Bieber just got involved in this whatever it is which again, there's complexities to that as well.

Or like sharing alpha and all that stuff, information asymmetry and things like that. But those channels, you could only get to, if you buy the NMT and that's really where the value of community actually is demonstrated, right? That's where you decide, what's where the market decides.

Like this is such an exclusive group. There's only 10,000 of these. I want to be able to talk in this group. So you buy an NFC and then all of a sudden you could access. It was the main reason actually, why I wanted it so bad. In the beginning, when I was just a young pup in the space, I was like, everyone talks about how great the community was.

And I was like, I don't really know what they do but the community sounds dope. It sounds like it's a bunch of really smart people who have all believed in this for longer than everyone else. And I'm going to get involved. And it's just funny, cause I, I did, yeah I've had, this is the big thing and I don't want to, I've been called like a more bearish founder, which I think is actually benefit in the space called bears.

Like a couple of people, some people were like, why are you fucking my bags? Like, why are you in flooding? Is fear, uncertainty, despair, basically any type of negativity is cast out in the communities. And it's if you're not like drinking, the Kool-Aid people will get really angry. But the reality is like I joined it and I remember being like, I'm in some ways sicker spots, like already that are like way cheaper.

And I've met a lot of apes and like they're great people, the apes in general, like you guys like unbelievable in terms of what they're doing, they're going to be, it's an inevitability. I think it's a no brainer in terms of opportunity there. But it is just funny that. And value sentiment is just a purely dictated by price in that type of industry.

And everyone will who raw and talk about how great the community is when the price is going up and that the price goes down and the community abandoned that because people aren't actually driven by community, they're driven by value and they're driven by price. And again, that's totally fine.

Everyone has their own thing, but it was just funny to me to get in. And I was so excited to like link by NFT and start talking. I have this big what's up guys, like you're who I am and just like fell flat and the rest of it, just whatever definitely not worth the price of admission.

Now I'll tell you that, but I will say that it is speculative assets, like the value that if you had an ape, like the value that you've been given in terms of dollars is like an undeniable. The amount of times you've been airdropped things or any of the like crypto ethos style, like benefits that are unique to crypto have come to you.

People have made hundreds of thousand dollars just by holding one of these things without ever liquidating. So it's all really interesting. And I toss it over in my mind, like all the. And it's 

MPD: a big status symbol, right? Everyone's got their Twitter handle there. They'll see their profile pictures of their age if they have one.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. That's the thing that I miss the most, I would say is having that got me many more Twitter followers. That's the other part. I think I've written about this in my last piece, it was basically like this amount of people have not had this level of like mini celebrity ever before. And the fact that you can buy something for a couple of hundred bucks and then all of a sudden have 500 new friends, people through the pandemic and all these other random things, like they're thirsty for community there they're willing to get outside of themselves or any rational thought that they'd had before they got red pill by crypto.

Like they're now just aping into anything that will give them that sense of for just a moment that like quick hit of dopamine of seeing those notifications pop up. And I see it all. Even my own co-founders who have built small Twitter volunteer of their own, they get very fired up when that type of stuff happens.

It's only reason. I think some of them buy enough jeans. It's like just that dopamine rush of like more bodies. It's just an interesting thing. 

MPD: So what's your biggest hit to date? You guys have been doing this, you're the backbone. You're one of the main people in this market, helping people push these out.

What's the stuff that, you hang your hat, you hang your hat on at this point. So 

Sterling Campbell: the three case studies that we talk about are like our involvement with Boone G who did 15 million in primary. We did like the social. I published an article in Forbes on them. Really helped build that team out on the the tech side.

This was before we had incorporated as a company, but we had done creature world. It had done 150 million in second. The tech side of that. So was those are the two, like we did like a peace solution of a larger project. The data is like our biggest like end to end success. It taught us a tremendous amount.

The whole goal of castle kid was always to be like a proof of concept that we can not only show to other artists and other creators, but also one that we can learn everything we could about every single step in the process I had before that done an advisory project, something like that. I had launched a smart contract.

I had, I built a generative. I had done all these things like front by hand like painstakingly I've learned enough solidity to be dangerous. And I knew that I could do the full end, but doing the full end to end and having all these things linked to it does create a lot more complexity. It does create a lot more needs and being able to roll with the punches and be agile on those types of things is also really important.

The successes have been different in terms of the in terms of monetization, they've the largest success in my mind in terms of the future of the company has been CastleGate. I think we've built more overall tech. It put our heads down and said, we need to actually standardize a lot of this stuff.

I need to actually arm my people. And in the meantime, we've just been heads down on signing and stuff. I think the biggest things we have are the biggest successes we're going to have, are going to be done over the next couple of months. I, our pipeline has so many names on it that it's become its own section of our slack of just like pure deals that we're doing.

We've signed multiple major brands. We're not the preferred partner of Warner music group and several talent agencies just given our connections. And we've really just been getting our ducks in a row and parsing through all of the demand in order to figure out our go forward. Just given the fact that this started with, literally we started with two kids and a small crowded apartment and has grown out our team is.

Dozens of people in terms of part-timers and our overall ecosystem of mods and things like that. So very quick growth and just scaling that has been a lot, but yeah, Kelsey has been our biggest, I would say. That's 

MPD: awesome. And whenever I hear an entrepreneur is saying, Hey, we went down and we did this really hard thing.

I'm hearing them clear way the forest to make it easy for the next person. So that's the value creation, right? People come and use our service now. And to them it seems easy because you've done all the heavy lifting. 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, it does. So this is my favorite part about this is that I've had so many people reach out and say Hey, I want to do a project.

And can you. And I was like, yes, you just wait a second and I'll give you all of the stuff that we did. And a nice little package wait, it was supposed to be done this week. This this week Ukraine stuff has pushed us back a little bit since that's a good portion of our team there, but, and they all say that.

And then I see them all sort of project. I said, look, start your discord. You have the art, you have all this stuff started discord. You don't need me yet. I'll be, I'll do the Tegrity. I promise I'll do the contract myself. If that's what it comes down to. But go build a, could you go to try to build a community?

And they all fail. It's the same as podcast, right? Like they don't. They say like after two episodes, most people quit or something. It's exact same thing. Getting that first thousand people is the most grueling I sent over 10th. I spent, or I sent over 10,000 messages in the discord, in my own CastleGate discord.

And that's a lot like that's a lot of time. I wish I could say. And typing them. Yeah, I was in there. I was blessing people to list by hand because of the fact that being real, being genuine was so important. And like now we have automated stuff. We have wireless bots, we have games, we have all the, all these things, but the reality was like, I needed to know every single little piece of it in order to know where the problem points were and how I can be more creative.

The reality is that like we're sitting in the time of email where I was like the 1990s, when again, I wasn't sending emails back then, but I heard a lot about it. The, they used to hire agencies to code emails and I think that's where we are in an empty space. Like I think there are so few solidity devs that it's like, the pricing is ridiculous.

The money is insane. That it's really easy to hold on to that stuff, but margins are going to compress it and you really need a way to solve pain points for the future. So for us. Why don't we just have this all in one solution. We've already done everything ourselves. And then now when people hit me up and it's like not a project that I think needs like custom tech, I just say Hey, wait two weeks.

And I'll just give you a nice little package. I'll take away less than I'm gonna charge you up otherwise. And then everyone wins. If you go build your community, we both went. If you don't, then it, none of it, we didn't waste our own time. So that scalability gets really lethal. And that's without even talking about how the worst person, the worst tech person on my team can now launch their own projects to do the people that are on our agency side, which I've created four X margins.

MPD: What's success in this. I know castle kids. Wasn't your biggest move that you've been involved with, but it's the one where you went into end. Yeah, I dunno if you can talk about it, but what kind of money moved in that project? 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, so it was 4 million in primary. So right off the bat, it was $4 million that was split between a bunch of different parties in terms of what we did.

Our net revenue was about half of that. Our gross revenue that we recognized was about half of that. Net was a little bit lower than that. She 

MPD: did one project. When you say primary, you mean it's the initial issuance of the NFTs that people can buy first transaction. Exactly. The finance folks.

Sterling Campbell: Exactly. 

MPD: How long did that take to make 

Sterling Campbell: a. It was the, from the on sale to the money was about 18 minutes. Yeah. The process of that was a lot longer, like 

MPD: 10 

Sterling Campbell: minutes. Exactly. And it's eight weeks. Hypercharged like my, I remember at one point during the on sale, there's a bunch of funny stories I have about like this whole process, but like the day of the on sale, we had a presale going.

And we and my partner, I was in San Francisco. My partner was in New York and I noticed, I was like, it's two 30 for me. I go, you're still up. And it was 500 and I had to order him. I go, I need you onto we're on sale tomorrow. And he was watching like a couple of things, like making sure that everything was tight.

And I was like, dude, I got it. Let's just like sleep in shifts. So you say six to eight weeks, you say all of these things and people think it's so easy that it's almost insulting because the amount of like blood and sweat and I think literal tears that went into that process was so grueling.

But again, like now there's nothing that can faze us. Like we, we dealt with the dos attack, we dealt with people trying to hack. We dealt with a bunch of people. We don't, we dealt with you not being able to mint. We dealt with a bunch of other things. I don't know if we dealt with it, but we resolve it

close the ticket. But we did so many different things that like success to me is first of all, knowing that I'm not scamming people, that's one of my biggest things is that there's so many people in this space that are so bad and they'll, they can make the money, they can do big things, they're stealing it.

They're taking $70 million of liquidity out, for example. So that's one, the other is can I actually build something? Can I actually do something that like, exists? A poo Gacy pretend thing. Like I'm going to go build a game. If I say I'm going to build a game, can I go build a game? If I assume to do a 3d asset, can I go do a 3d asset so far?

We've nailed every single piece of that for every project that we've done. And that's really important success though, at the same time as can we go and like really start taking this over. And again, like with where our pipeline is at and with where we are, it is not necessarily a hits driven business, but we're always one shot away from another massive project in and of itself.

So we're organizing ourselves around that taking really big shots. Our pipeline has over 60 million followers and in terms of and that's like over four or five people we're very confident in the future of this. We really just want to make sure that we're building real stuff and we're not just saying, Hey, here's some with a lot of followers.

I go by this, that's following eat. Those a crypto is really important to me as well. 

MPD: Okay. So you guys have launched these successfully. You've gone into that. What are the top three tips you'd have for people who are interested in this, whether they use your service or not what are the, what's the top three pro tips?

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. I think don't fall for the stamps. And I know that's easier said than done, but there's so many people and I've now watched a bunch of my friends try to launch projects and, I've tried to give them support where I can, but they'll go pay a an influencer who is charging them like one year for a tweet.

And that influencers just botting everything. Don't fake it. There's another tip I would have don't we with castle kid it was very, it would have been very easy for us to pretend like we had 60,000 people on our server. We banned about 39,000 bots as part of our process. And that made us have a smaller server.

Technically it was only 25,000 when we meant it. But it was real. And I knew, and everyone else knew that it was real. Cause we would publish it was basically like putting heads on spikes. We would publish it Hey, we banned today. We've added 1100 bots. We'd show them the reports of like how many people we abandoned.

And that was like, wow, these guys, these are actually 25,000 customers. And that was like the craziest thing. I, there's so many businesses as an investor that I've looked at. And I don't know that I've seen growth like that. Our charts are like crazy. Like the amount of, we were incorporated for about 18 days, I think before we made the money or 30 days, something like that.

And like the power and the space is really cool, but you have to leverage it in a real way. If you don't leverage it in a real way, you'll never do another project. That'll be over. For us it's always been important. And then those are two. The third is it's don't be fake. And then don't like, don't make sure that you have something that's unique.

Don't just copy everything that's done before you. I know that you people see, oh, there's all these derivative projects, Kevin's and all that stuff made a bunch of money, but the reality is those are all being done by the same people. If you like digging a little bit and you do a little bit block.

It is a machine that's been created. That is an evil machine in my opinion, but it's not, a couple of kids in a basement being like, let's go do a derivative it's calculated. And it's it's designed to take liquidity out of the markets. A few of them are actually like true builders and this is what we're going to see the crypto winter or the NMT winter, or the bear market or whatever.

It's just going to be, people's getting smarter. It's not going to be people giving up. It's just gonna be people getting smarter, which is why I'm so excited about NMT 2.0, because I think true builders there aren't very many of us, there are very few actually. And if you have the right stuff and you're prepared, like money flows to value in times of, bear markets.

And I, I do that. That does a joke since everything's still up 10000%, but yeah, that's probably the. 

MPD: You define NFT 2.0 for us. What's 

Sterling Campbell: 1.0, so this is just a thing I've been saying recently in our pitches and things we're talking about, like NMT is 1.0 was like the minting. So like getting things done making sure that something could get on the blockchain that people could own it and that you could then start delivering value to the NFT.

And if these 2.0 is integrating Anaptys much more largely into a broader system. So in my opinion, I think that NFTs that then create ecosystems is going to be really important. There's only 10,000 of them 5,000. But there's so many different interactions and things that you can offer that maybe not everyone wants.

So in my opinion, NFTs, and then tokens coming behind them are really important. I think social tokens are not very great on their own. I think they create a ton of complexity. I'm publishing something on this as well, very soon. But when coupled with a certain ecosystem where it's let's say it's a musician again, I want to go on tour or maybe I don't want to go into her.

I'm just gonna hold onto the tokens and I can sell them to someone else who maybe doesn't have an NMT, but once like a merchandise like signed merge, if I own the NMT, I get dropped free tokens. And then I can use that to do whatever engagement that I want. And then also link this to if I listen to the album a hundred times, I can earn some tokens and all these different types of mechanisms in which you can control engagement.

And you can have that, like two-way street of value between the creator and the artist. But that takes time to do, and it takes a real builders and it takes a real, like real technology integration. Yeah, exactly. The shed, people promise a game in four weeks, four months. And it's they should start building things at all as hard, and then building them on the blockchain with limited devs.

And now with a war, like all these other things, like I never thought any like global global geopolitical issues would impact like a JPEGs business, but here we are, yeah. 

MPD: Yeah. So playing it back. So 1.0 is, Hey, everyone gets their membership card seamlessly 2.0 as a membership card gets you things perks and all that.

Sterling Campbell: The contraction really makes it's really important. Like people are like, aren't you and I get, I know so many people are waiting for like NFTs because I'm such a I'm so like, loud about it. I know there's so many people just waiting for it to get to come down and people are like, aren't you scared?

Aren't you worried? Like you're really leveraging up on a very risky asset. And the route is I need this to happen. I need people to stop looking at pictures of random animals and saying that's worth $20,000 because it's really hard to deliver a $20,000 experience. This is my biggest fear with Hugo labs and the apes and everything else.

Like as soon as you have to start doing stuff, you remove like the fog of war and all of a sudden that value you have to like, make that decision about the value people went to the yacht party. It was fun. I had a great time wasn't necessarily worth the amount of money that it had, that it would cost for a membership.

I don't think so. And I think that I need this contraction because I can't sell a $20,000 experience. I just can't like how many things do we buy? They're that expensive, but I can sell $400 experiences. I think that's really where the price points and these things could jump. Like tickets are to your point earlier, like StubHub, they could jump two X, three X, they shouldn't jump 110,000 X because of the fact that you just can't deliver those types of things.

Life is not there's not many things in this world that I would spend $200,000 on. And that's like the reality. And I think that's, what's necessary for 2.0, to make sense. And to be honest, how people actually see, like my dad will get involved, if it has like real utility. And it's just the speculative nature is what damages it a bit.

MPD: What does the industry need? As you're going from 1.0, to 2.0 for the entrepreneurs listening to this, how can they help? Where are the opportunities.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, it's funny because for most of my web to life as an investor I always scoffed a little bit more about design because it's like, how many different templates are you or, flows are there. I feel like we have it figured out a bit, but now I'm at three I'm like, man, no one knows anything.

And it's silly to pretend like the experiences is smooth, right? Onboarding someone to crypto through NFTs is hell, I would never want to do it. I've never believed in entities as an onboarder for people. I think NFTs can get people interested in crypto and then they need to do other things first.

But it's so ripe with scams and the flows are so bad that there's half the time you click a DAP and it doesn't even have. It doesn't even give you a notification about what's happening. So you don't even know what you're signing or anything like that. People are getting ripped off left and right.

So we need like better UX and UI. I think those two things are like the biggest, shorter, you only element volume like billions of dollars are being traded on that or staked or anything. And so it looks so horrible. And I guess swab shit does too, but it's just, it's a horrible experience.

And we're better than that. Like web three should be like the most sleek, like futuristic and it's just not, it's a Chrome browser extension and a couple other things. I just limit the optics of the experience. 

MPD: Yeah. And if you're not pretty much a developer at some level, or have been trained in technology at some level, it's hard to navigate.

It's hard. It's not, it is not designed for, average the average consumer yet. Not even close. 

Sterling Campbell: Not even close and I get that's something we've, that's one of our biggest learnings is that I was so ready to drop all this stuff. That's like super exciting to crypto people. Like Dow's being involved in films and things like that.

And they're just not ready. They don't, someone says what was a DOA? What's a DOA I kept getting. And I was like, that's not even how you spell it. We're so far, actually we're so far in the route is it's cause it's who knows what's going on. It's so much you got, discords flying around.

You have, people are talking about like monkeys and staking sheep and a bunch of other like it's so much it's. So a little 

MPD: bit, the jargon is a barrier, right? Even when I'm trying to do during this, just trying to break it down to things that people going to compare this to make it super complicated.

The crypto did this too, mining, when you talk about it's, when you describe to people, Hey, it's computing power to process the transactions. People like oh, servers that run the website. Yeah. That, and that's a lot easier to understand than mining because mining has another association. It's totally confusing 

Sterling Campbell: language.

Yeah. Proof of work in general. It's like a whole thing that like took me a while to understand like, yeah, that's the problem. And I'm sure this is, again, I don't have it as much visibility, but I'm sure the internet was like that too. Of like people understanding email and all these things like you have to walk.

So there's so many people that are, so I've been in it for so long. They're like, they're like myself. Like you just forget where people are at. And, 

MPD: and for this technology to come of age and to get mass market appeal, it's not those consumers learning those jargon. It's the technology moving to them.

Exactly. It's coming into natural language that we're all used to, that everyone can understand. Okay. But there's a lot of people jumping into this, right? Like I saw a report today that Instagram is going to get an NFTs. I don't understand exactly what they're doing. W what's happening here? Is this a sign that it's going mainstream?

Is it jumping the shark? Who's jumping into this? I don't 

Sterling Campbell: know if you know the jumping, sorry. I do. I do. It's one of my, I actually use it a lot in people don't ever get it. I think I actually don't really know where it stems from, but I want to tell 

MPD: you that happy days. Yeah. Way back when the Fonz eventually goes water skiing, there's a jump in the water over a shark.

And that was the moment when the show went too far. 

Sterling Campbell: So jumping the shark. I remember that's great. So I saw a tweet earlier today that I really loved, but just said the only thing it said was we're winning. It was like a retweet of that and of the meta thing. And it was just like, we're winning.

The same as as soon as Jack Dorsey finally, admits it. Like it's not just Bitcoin and like other things are cool too. Like then I'll get even more excited, but I don't need that. This is one of the biggest things that I think is really hard for people to understand is. All of these things that exist might not end up being as crypto, as people want to your point about technology needed to come to them.

Abstracting away is the easiest path to do it's abstract in a way, what they're doing, you leveraging underline technology. But one thing that we're working on pretty heavily, every single creator asks for is can I make these in USD? And it's it's not the point. The whole point is to like to get off of this stuff, let them in and USD see if you want.

But like whole point is to get away from it. But we understand that that's probably, what's going to take the metaverse is even crazier because everyone's like flocking to decentralized land and that kind of teases land and throughout there's like gaming, all that stuff is content driven, right? Is metaverse or meta rather, or epic games or any of these bigger platforms.

As soon as they get interested in stuff, it doesn't make your bags more valuable. It makes the underlying technology more valuable. But if Instagram gets an NFTs, I don't think someone's going to go buy. You're sat super snail from three months ago. Like they're going to buy the new shit or they're going to buy the stuff that they're the platforms that they already exist on, do it.

And it's going to be so content driven that I think it's actually very dangerous for this like ecosystem that we've worked on for so long. Like this decentralized, all of these different, ethos that we have, like open, see, it's not very decentralized, like it's that they can automatically shut people down at a mass, just shut a bunch of people down in other countries, like the sub that we've been working for so long.

And that makes it so cool. Gets taken out a little bit. So I think that those things are interesting because I think that they're half of it's just press or understanding like the pure money behind things and saying we can beat the competition, which I completely agree with for the record.

Like we, as a space need to do better about not looking like jackasses that just throw money at anything because then all it's going to happen is you're getting all these like cash, grab these from like major organizations. And we worked a lot with brands and be like, this is not a precedent.

This needs to be like a thing for you guys. So you need to make sure that you are working on like an ecosystem here. It doesn't have to be like, random fashion company is in the crypto now, but more like these are, this is a member, the new membership. And this is how you get it.

And these are points in our system and you can abstract all the crypto stuff away, but are you going to adopt the technology or not? And I'm very nervous about massive centralized platforms leveraging their content arms, which are better than everyone else and driving adoption in like a nasty way.

That's my biggest fear. And I think the Metta versus not decentralized, I think the metaverse will be one by content creators. I think if you look at that and these other companies, like the games are just more fun. I'm not gonna, I can't spend an hour and a half in a decentralized, but I can spend a lot of time playing fortnight.

I have spent a lot of time playing fortnight, so I get nervous about all that, but I also think it's ultimately gets more people into crypto in general, which is great for the underlying bags that I'm holding. 

MPD: So for the organizations out here. Okay. Cause I'd imagine there's a lot of people who are the, have a title that has the word technology or innovation in it, and they need to do something for their boss and they want to make a move here to get promoted or keep your job or filling a roadmap or listen to someone on the board, whatever, however it came about and they're thinking, oh, okay, NFTs.

We're going to go to the bottom of it. They're making an internal presentation. I'm thinking like universities, companies, nonprofits, big organizations, trying to figure this out, where do, where should they use NFT? Where should they not? And where should they let me ask it that way? 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, that's a great question.

They should use them for memberships 100%. You need a certain level of engagement from your online audience. Like we've talked to certain beauty brands who are like, most of our stuff is in stores. Like we don't really have a membership. Like we might want to do that. I was like, there's no better way to launch a new vertical in my opinion, or a new business line than entities.

Cause you front on your revenue at least a little bit. You basically prove that an idea is good with your consumers before you do it. And if it sucks and it sucks, it's not who cares, no one looks at your brand as like a non NFT native brand is wow. Their NMT project failed.

That was super late. I don't think that people that actually care about your brand really notice that it's people that you were maybe going to get, or like this was a Lambo. And so it was like a lot of stuff that brands do. So memberships are the first one for universities. I've been doing a lot of talks with universities recently, and it's super cool.

I don't know if they'll ever bite on this. I think it takes a lot of like much, much older people who move way slower to adopt this. But the reality is it's like governance and student organizations, all these things could be done in such a cooler way. Like a school isn't is a closed ecosystem. They have meal plans, they have points that can be redeemed for things already.

They already have a lot of the foundational rails in place. They just need to shift the technology a little bit. If I could vote on, on policies, I would switch my, I would have been a lot more active in my student government. I know like you versus don't really want people to be involved, but like that, it does.

I think it does change, shift a lot of different things. And I think that enabling your consumers, especially people who are willing to spend the most money to engage with. It is a greatest way to decide where you're going next. There's all that talk about, find your a hundred people that are gonna spend a thousand dollars instead of a thousand are gonna spend a hundred or whatever the phrase 

MPD: is.

Okay. So we're both Columbia business, school grads. So given an example there, so how would Columbia business school drop and FTS in a way that actually makes sense? 

Sterling Campbell: So they already have, I think I might be wrong, but I know a bunch of students dropped like a collection, a hundred sold out immediately.

It was super cool. I was really cool to be a part of that. The way they would do it, in my opinion is content token getting content. So I think Harvard is like, it's such an easy decision for them, right? Cause there's so much content that people want. They're already token gated. It's a great way to like tip their hand up.

Hey, we're on the forefront of innovation. Even if you don't really like this and we can create a smooth experience. So you can just access our case studies and you can spend different amounts for different times and all that stuff you can, it's a really easy way to do it. The other is like for Columbia, I think so.

So that's part of it. I think another part of it is around like decision-making and budgets that are being allocated. Like I think it should be more of a treasury. The amount of money. I know personally, like a lot of the money that we spent on events was like very unilaterally decided by two people and like very centralized decision-making.

And I know that there's a lot of room for like misconduct in those types of ways. So I think that a really cool thing would be to like create more treasury management systems where people vote on stuff and it's actually decided by the people. And again, these aren't super, aren't scary things.

Aren't crypto super crypto things. These are just let's use some technology in order to do this. There's a way to do this in a web 2.0, version two. It's just, in my opinion, not as innovative and lack, it feels to like adhere to an infrastructure that's already built. 

MPD: All right. I want to switch gears if you're open to it, we'll start like we fit the NFTs a bit, but I want to learn more about you.

Can you give us just comfortable for everybody, but you start at the top. So just give us a little overview of your background. I know you mentioned that you grew up in Las Vegas. And we overlap a little bit in some Southern California. Can you give us a little love your story? 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. So I was born in Riverside, moved to Vegas when I was three, my dad was a concrete contractor.

So you basically just moved the business to where it was the fastest. I was first person in my family go to four year institution. I went to USC as an undergrad studied business, and then my dad made me, and then I studied music, which was my real passion thereafter. I got a double major in both of those.

I, when I was a sophomore in college, so I wasn't even 21. I performed with Dylan Francis who was just coming up as a DJ at a random USC party. I was just playing music a bunch of, as much as I could just, and you sitting 

MPD: in front of me, what are you doing? You show 

Sterling Campbell: you up there on guitar. Yeah, so I'm like I play piano guitar growing up.

I can pray, I can play pretty much any instrument with a keyboard basically. But now I, then I was just performing my songs. And just deejaying. So I did that. He came up to me and asked me like what a song was. And I was like, oh, that's something that I made. He was like, damn I didn't realize that you were playing like a random, like basement show.

And he's would you want to come play like around LA? I was like, yeah, I'd love to. So played a couple shows after that. You got me connected and then eventually met a couple other people who got me even more ingrained. I was bringing like a whole college crowd, everything, which is like every club stream.

So I won't pretend like it was just cause I was a musical genius, but more than I was a marketing genius, I could fill the rooms, which I knew was the biggest thing. And I've got a couple of domestic tourists went on tour like John disclosure, T-Pain a bunch of different acts. And then leverage that to get myself into the music business at WME, doing music tour.

Did that work for the head of the music department at about three months from the mail room to working for him, which was insane, got to see the whole big business instead of the hated, it asked to move to the finance and accounting department because we had just bought the UFC and we were so excited.

I was so excited. Oh, wow. We're becoming like bigger than the agency. I want to be involved on the MNA stuff. And they said, no, cause I was like a musician, so I wouldn't let me do it. So I started a company doing a stock trade alert, service, just built it myself, using Twilio and a couple of other things.

So anyone that wanted to follow my portfolio would just spend 10 to a hundred bucks a month, depending on what access they wanted and also called Minotaur. Funny enough. I'm going to insights though. Got it. Yeah, we've got over a thousand users from page of wall street, bets did 200 and something percent in 2017, took it to my boss.

And I said, look, this agent, this partner, and like all of your friends are all sending for my business. I clearly know what I'm talking about in terms of analyzing companies. Let me switch into the department. Let me go do finance and accounting and finally let me do it. And then I first deal that I worked on with dapper labs and CryptoKitties back in 2017.

So that was what red billed me. I converted everything to crypto. So I started investing in crypto pre. My all my users, like just created like the entire company ended up getting knocked out. Cause everyone's you're a mad man. What are you doing? And I'm saying, I was like, you guys have followed me until this point.

I've made everyone a lot of money. Let's rock. So lost a lot of that. And then crypto winter knocked me out. So I gotta go back to school. I gotta find my by myself, do all that stuff. Did a bunch of VC investing and then started Minotaur after Columbia business school.

MPD: So what's the background on the name? Miniter why is everything 

Sterling Campbell: I'm just obsessed? Yeah. So there's two angles. One is half man, half bull. So I'm always, I'm like not a bowl only. I'm actually fairly bearish on many things, but I do believe when I believe in something, I go full bore into it. So I'm, I am just a man, but I'm also, I also like that, that also the military, like historically is just such a cool.

I also like the really like weird stuff. Like the military story is really interesting. Like finding your way through a maze, like the, this like beast. You're like, crushing kids and things like that. She has an interesting story to me and I just felt like the, both of those played so well in a market type business.

And both of the companies, like the reason I kept the name for this one is because they're both, onboarders in a way, right? Like creating a smoother onboarding experience for creators to launch projects and join the ownership economy is like the whole ethos of Minotaur and enabling like all my friends who were first-time earners, because they had just gotten out of college.

They'd never made money before enabling them to enter the markets more safely with like a guide at hand was all, I was doing mandatory insights. So I feel like that, like thread continued. It's also been mostly what I've been doing throughout my life. I've published a lot of content. Like I've always been into like showing people how to do stuff.

It's like something that like drives a lot of like personal happiness and fulfillment for me to be on like the financial nature of things. 

MPD: Now it seems like you're a little bit of a wild man, right? This sector you're chasing and everything else. What are the life experiences that have helped shape you?

How did you get here? 

Sterling Campbell: I'm addicted to risk. I think my dad is an entrepreneur as she was like a non-traditional entrepreneur, like someone who just started a real business and and I'm not knocking anyone when I say that, but like a business entrepreneur. Yeah, exactly. No, like you owned a hundred percent of the company, like never raised capital and never really dealt with anything outside of just let's go make money, build houses.

That taught me to take risks and to push into things as much as possible. I, when I was younger, I was like obsessed with like experiences, like the currency of life. Like I kept saying that like to the point where I think it was really annoying. And I saying I need to experience every single thing.

Like I don't want to miss a show. I don't like I phone mode into every single thing. It was like a reckless amount. I was chasing like a skydiving license. So I did 24 jobs in two and a half weeks, three weeks, I was driving to Paris, California, every like every moment that I had and sleeping there overnight.

And like in a bunk with eight other people that I'd never met before and like skydivers or like weird people in general. So like just a weird experience. And then my 24th job right before the license at 25, I I nearly, I, my parachute didn't deploy. I had to pull my reserve and nearly like nearly crashed to my death.

And I was like, man, I was so pissed if that happened. Yeah, it was nuts. And I, and 24 Johns, that would be dead. When my, when I pulled my reserve, it's a whole crazy experience. Like you have to like decouple your main shoot, like through two poles here, and then you go back into free-fall and then you have to then pull your reserve, which is spring loaded.

And this whole other thing 

MPD: from the moment you realize your. Until you can 

Sterling Campbell: get it. So you have the reserve at school. So you're looking altimeter on your wrist and it says like how high you are. And it has a yellow Hey, like you should decide, you should pull here. And then it has a, if you pull after this, like your, you won't stop that fast enough.

It's funny. Cause it's been so long. I think it's 2,500 feet, 300, 3000 feet. You drop about a thousand feet a second. You drive, you jump from 15,000 feet. So you don't have that much time. And the things like you play around for a bit too, cause you're like, you're enjoying yourself. So I flipped out of the plane.

I was messing around. I pulled I whatever. I knew that I was going to get my license soon anyway. And then I looked up and this thing was like real curl and I was still falling. There's a real big difference between pre-fill. I've never don't know if you've ever done it, but like between freefall and then floating.

And I was like, I'm not floating. I'm still falling pretty fast. I looked up and my thing was like, was all fucked up and. And then I pulled my thing off, pulled it off, go back into free fall. And then, you don't really remember a lot of that. Like you're just, so well-trained, they make you do that before every single jump you know exactly what, like I could do it right now.

Like I feel right work. And it's funny, cause I've actually taught me a ton. Like I realized that like within reason, like I started looking like both ways before I crossed the street. After that, like I was like, man, life was like, I have so much more to do. There's so many more things that I want, but like this level of risk, I was riding motorcycles all the time.

Like I was doing everything I could to just soak up that like adrenaline I was like going to music Fest. I go, I still go to 10 to 12 music festivals a year. I'm so like addicted to the rush of that stuff. And the funny thing is that like none of those rushes where anything like the castle get on sale, right?

Or the creature rolled on sale or any of those things like success in business is like very addictive as well. Especially with that rush of the fact that it's all jam packed into a moment is so cool. And I think that I've really found. The perfect, like nexus between like my old life and music and my future of investing and all those other things.

It seems like the perfect storm for me in terms of like my connectivity to artists and ability to like, speak both languages. I can't imagine a better fit in my mind. 

MPD: Yeah. It seems like you were made for this path. You're here now and you've been in the fire and you've learned a lot. What are the most important things you learned about entrepreneurship?

What tips can you offer people? 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, I think this one was like no one to spend the money. I think in terms of like fundraising and those things I think people, I don't know how other people feel about this but I've always been like super frugal. My growing up in my family, like we, before my dad's business, Moved to Las Vegas.

It was very, it was a struggle like concrete and California's not that big of a thing. And and I grew up like really understanding like the value of money I used to be so scared. Like my mom would give me money for lunch at school and I would just find like free lunch around school. And I would just pocket the money.

Cause I was so terrified that we were going to get kicked out of our house and like we renting it. Like we didn't own anything and had no furniture. I was like sharing a bed with my cousin, like all this crazy stuff. So I've always been so like brutal and I don't want to spend money if I can learn it, I'll just do it.

So with like my company too, like with guitar originally there's a guy that was like, yeah, I can build this out for you for this amount of money. And I was like, no shot. I'll just go learn it for that amount of money. Like I'll just, I value my time and my own bank more to do it. The thing is like with investing though, like the whole point is that you're supercharging that.

And I think that's been one of my earlier lessons. You can just spend the money to get help and to where you're not doing everything my team had to tell me dude, you got to pull off of like our generation. If it makes no sense for you to do that. And I think that's like the biggest lesson it's like having trust in not only your team, but also in your own ability to allocate capital, even though it's something that like is, it may be something newer for you trust that you need to spend money on the things that you need to spend money on to, to arm yourself to be lethal otherwise.

And I think like finding out who I was and who I am and like what I'm really good at and it's really just talking I'm really good at being an agent. I worked at WME. Like I have a really strong like ability to sell and make people understand things. And I kept hearing that feedback and I was like, I used to be afraid to even talk on the phone, to call the doctor's office or anything.

Yeah, it's crazy. That's like my biggest rank now I'm like, I'm telling like where we're at as a company is because of the entire team executing. It's not possible without me. I'm out there selling and doing that. And if I don't do that, we can't execute. And if I'm too busy worrying about working or learning how to do solidity and not paying an engineer because I was like, I could just do his job.

I don't know what he's doing all the time. Like all that, like that's not the right way to do it when you're trying to move fast. And that's been my biggest thing that I had to learn because of my dad, with my dad, it was just way different. And I've never had that kind of guidance. And so now I spend the money when you need to spend the money and know that you're better than you think.

And you put the team around you for a reason. And if you don't like the people that are around you, then just go get someone else's big world. It's great 

MPD: having you on. I learned a ton. Thank you so much for doing this. 

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's always a blast.

MPD: So Sterling is clearly fascinating. And I love being able to talk to people who are in these frontier industries who are not totally drunk on the Kool-Aid. You get a little dose of reality and some insight into how all these novel technologies such as entities in this case will actually be integrated and apply to society going forward.

This is where I pander and ask you to help out. If you liked what you heard, give us a five star review share with a friend. Anything else you can do? You can find me on Twitter at MPD. And to hear more of my conversations with innovators, you can subscribe on YouTube, Facebook, or any major podcast platform.

Just search for innovation with Mark Peter Davis.

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