GRTiQ Podcast: 191 Ben Huh

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Ben Huh (00:00:21):

What really motivates me is helping an entrepreneur discover something, be successful, help solve problems, watching them be successful without making the same errors, mistakes that I did or others did.

Nick (00:01:02):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking to Ben Huh, a pioneering entrepreneur, co-founder and investor. Many listeners will know Ben as the visionary behind the massive success of Cheezburger, the internet sensation that transformed memes and user-generated content into a business powerhouse.

Nick (00:01:21):

Ben’s career spans decades of innovation from his early entrepreneurial efforts to his role as a thought leader in web3. He’s currently an integral part of the Orange DAO where he continues to champion tech, web3, crypto, and DAOs. During this interview, we explore Ben’s remarkable journey from growing up the son of immigrants, his time at Northwestern University, the rise and exit of Cheezburger to his current work, empowering the next generation of web3 entrepreneurs.

Nick (00:01:50):

I think you’ll find Ben’s insights into meme culture, decentralized systems, and entrepreneurship are second to none. I started the conversation with Ben by asking about where he’s from.

Ben Huh (00:02:03):

I was actually born in Korea, and I lived there until I was 11. I’m what they call a third culture kid, which means that I actually spent time somewhere else before immigrating to the United States. So I spent some time in Hong Kong.

Ben Huh (00:02:15):

And to date myself a little bit, this is Hong Kong during colonial British rule. That’s a thing. It made a pretty serious impact on me as 11, 12, 13, 14 because I saw this kind of intersection between the west of the east. And I got to do it with a lot of freedom because in Hong Kong, you can just [inaudible 00:02:36]. You could just go out as a child and feel perfectly safe and then come home and then [inaudible 00:02:42] by your parents while riding the public transit, which is not a thing in most United States.

Ben Huh (00:02:47):

I was pretty adventurous as a kid because I think I had the freedom to kind of roam around, and my parents were busy, latchkey kid. And I moved two of all places when I landed in the States, Sacramento, California, which is not the Sacramento California that people know right today. It’s a lot more Sacramento-y not Ben.

Nick (00:03:08):

In doing research for the interview, you’ve done some Ted talks. You’ve done some public speaking. And one of them was on immigration. That’s a big part of your background in your story. Talk to us about that. I’ve had other immigrants that have moved to the United States on the podcast. How did that shape your worldview and sort of how you approach life?

Ben Huh (00:03:26):

I had to immigrate twice. So once as a child, 11 years old when my parents to Hong Kong and then I had to immigrate again at the age of 14. And the second time around, you’re like, “This is hard,” because you actually have to do a part of the immigration yourself, but you’re not an adult.

Ben Huh (00:03:43):

The United States, most places in the world are not that strict about immigration. The narrative around immigration in the United States, it’s centered around legal, illegal. And the truth of the matter is the laws here are so strict and sometimes so contradictory that it is very difficult to be an immigrant and stay quote, unquote, “perfectly legal.”

Ben Huh (00:04:07):

Your visas can expire, and then you can un-expire them. So are you legal when the visa expires? It’s a labyrinthine system as they describe it. And I really had to fight that even as a minor. And so you grow up very quickly, and you learn to navigate the legal side of your immigration because it’s no one’s going to help you with that. And so that was kind of the mark that the immigration system left on me when I came to the state.

Nick (00:04:34):

Other guests have mentioned, I’m going to say it’s a burden, but I don’t know if it is, but sort of this burden of the parents sacrificing so much and immigrating and moving their family, that there’s a little bit of a burden to the first-generation children to make the most of it and to work extra hard and to put a lot of effort into things. And that can be a burden. A lot of people feel stressed about it. I’m curious if that played any factor in your story.

Ben Huh (00:05:00):

Yeah. So I think the first time around when we moved to Hong Kong, since I was such a small kid, it was very much a burden on my parents. The second time around when we moved to the States, it was actually a burden on me as well. I’m the only fluent English speaker of the family.

Ben Huh (00:05:14):

And so when it came to understanding how to make our household finances work or to sign a lease, there’s this 15-year-old kid having to navigate that for my parents, which still continues to this day. I’m a first-generation immigrant. So I don’t appear like one. But in all senses of immigration, I have to rush into it as an adult while I was a child, and it is still rough, because I have to deal with my parents’ side of things. It’s still a burden on me as a person. However, it’s like this is something you do for your family. This is also coming from an Asian culture. There’s no escape from this.

Nick (00:05:56):

What about this idea of the American dream? I’m being a little presumptuous. I’m supposing that you live the American dream. Did your parents live the American dream or is this not something that’s actually true anymore? There is no American dream.

Ben Huh (00:06:07):

I don’t think there’s a singular American dream. I think the brand of the American dream is really, really good. It is probably the most underrated and the most underappreciated brand of the United States as a company, if you think about it that way.

Ben Huh (00:06:22):

And so everybody around the world thinks of the United States and immigration as a ticket to success. And for the vast majority of them, it’s you have to, right? Either you make it as an immigrant, or you’re on the streets. And there’s a reason why there’s a lot of immigrants who are not on the streets because for them to get here, whether it’s skilled or unskilled immigration, they have to figure it out. They have to put food on tables for their family, send money back home or whatever it’s that they have to do. It’s do or die.

Ben Huh (00:06:50):

The American dream is a function of that. If you came here, you better make something out of it. And I think it’s become far more difficult. Yet at the same time, we don’t have a choice. You have to make it. And so for me, my American dream wasn’t mine. It was my parents, because coming here as a kid, you’re just like, “Okay. What choice do I have?” And then you get here, and you’re like, “Oh, well, I need to go to college. How the heck are we going to pay for that?” And so you have to figure it out. And I think that kind of Edisonian necessity is the mother of all invention. It’s kind of like that for a lot of immigrants.

Nick (00:07:30):

Well, you mentioned college there. You eventually went on to Northwestern University. So you figured out a way to sort of solve for this in your own life, but you studied journalism and sociology. Talk to us about how you landed in those two disciplines.

Ben Huh (00:07:43):

Most immigrants don’t come to the United States to get a liberal arts education.

Nick (00:07:50):

Right.

Ben Huh (00:07:50):

You’re going to invest private school money into something. Well, you better as well have an ROI. My parents didn’t know enough about what I should do in life, and they didn’t push me enough or in the way that most immigrant parents do. But they also gave me the freedom to go explore what I want to do.

Ben Huh (00:08:10):

And I made a completely illogical financial choice. And then I’m like, “Well, I guess I’m going to a trade school,” which journalism school is. Even if it’s at a top university, it’s still teaching you a craft and a trade, which was really nice to learn because there’s something you can do and make money doing.

Ben Huh (00:08:31):

However, it wasn’t the stepping stone that most people use to get ahead in life. The largest cohort out of my class, I think, ended up going to law school. Northwestern journalism school is a great way to get into law school. I couldn’t afford grad school. So I was like, “Okay. Time to go on my own.” And I started going into business because what am I going to do with a journalism degree other than just be a journalist, and that isn’t the best living.

Nick (00:08:57):

What are your thoughts on the state of journalism? If we talk about immigration, that’s a pretty loaded topic in today’s environment, but I would say journalism as well. I know you moved on from it, but do you think about that, the state of journalism in this country?

Ben Huh (00:09:09):

Very much so. I think it was a real passion of mine to understand how people consume the information, people consume media. To hit two hot topic buttons in a row, when I was graduating from journalism school in 1999, and so it was literally peak newspaper time. So newspapers were worth billions of dollars. The internet revolution still hadn’t hit.

Ben Huh (00:09:31):

People didn’t understand the impact it was going to have on ad rates and things like that. Literally, newspapers were given regional monopolies to act as a public service in which they weren’t doing. And so there was this, I think, misconception of journalism, this noble thing, and the internet laid waste to that incentive model where it was no longer about what quote, unquote, “impartiality.”

Ben Huh (00:09:57):

The internet basically said, “If you can drive eyeballs, she can drive engagement. If you can drive clicks, that’s what the business is about.” And there’s no doubt about it that internet has become far more business oriented in terms of its own economics, primarily because the economics of journalism went really, really south. And so it was very difficult to make a living as a real journalist.

Nick (00:10:18):

Does web3, blockchain, crypto, does this modern technology address maybe the challenges we’re facing in journalism as you’ve described?

Ben Huh (00:10:28):

I think there are ways to address communications and platforms and world curtains, and I think that comes before journalism can actually thrive on it. So right now, the incentive model of advertising says, “If you have eyeballs and if you can keep people on your site and keep them clicking, then you can make money.” And that’s how you survive as a business. And you can spend a small portion of your business focusing on the things that are public good that you want to do.

Ben Huh (00:10:56):

Every time you have a new technology revolution, I think there is an opportunity for us to reset those economics and incentives. And the problem with journalism today is that it’s ad driven. So you have to rob attention from one side of your day, and you have to be willing to direct that attention towards advertisers or a piece of content that generates those eyeballs. And so it doesn’t have the economics that you need to drive real independence.

Ben Huh (00:11:28):

I think web3 absolutely offers that because the cost of distributing content, the cost of acquiring users can actually go down if people own a stake or people own the tokens or the governance model or the distribution model, or you can federate by saying, “We are a community, and we stand by this, or we don’t.” And so you can actually carve out the level of credibility or the authority that you want and graphic. That’s literally what’s happened, is that the social graph got owned by a handful of big companies, and we’re all paying a tax to actually distribute through those graphs.

Nick (00:12:04):

So let’s return back to your story. As we talked about got a degree at Northwestern, pursuing a degree in journalism and sociology, you shifted to business after realizing that you probably made a little bit of a mistake. How did you get started professionally upon graduation? What did you get doing?

Ben Huh (00:12:20):

So this is 1999, 2000 to where some of the forward-thinking newspaper publishers realized that their classified advertising business, which drove 40% of their profits were going to get blown up by in.

Ben Huh (00:12:36):

And so they launched a company to actually go take those classifieds and preempt that and go build an online version, the same way that Hulu became the streaming arm of Disney ABC and cut a deal with a bunch of other people. The newspaper [inaudible 00:12:49] actually did the same thing and decided to build a classified engine on the internet, which still survives to this day.

Ben Huh (00:12:54):

What they didn’t realize was that Craigslist was the competitor, not other newspapers or other big technology companies. Craigslist is the classifieds, and it is only the classifieds. And the Craigslist business model is just unbeatable. And so I could see that coming, and I was like, “Okay. Well, I’m staying at this.” I’m working for this internet company owned by newspapers and I don’t know that that’s where I want to stay.

Ben Huh (00:13:19):

And so I did the thing, frying pan into the fire. So I started my own internet technology company in Chicago, January of 2000, just as the tech bubble was bursting. And that was bad timing, terrible timing, also terrible location to build a tech company.

Nick (00:13:38):

I look at your career in buckets. And forgive me again, it’s a little presumptuous. But in 2007, you found a Cheezburger, which we’re going to talk a little bit about here. It was a huge success. But if we think about sort of this period of time upon graduation to Cheezburger, what are some of the lessons that you sort of draw from that early part of your career?

Ben Huh (00:13:58):

I was the guy that was willing to say yes to things that other people were hesitant to say yes to. And this is, I think, when you’re young, when you have the energy and when you don’t have the scar tissue of having been in business for a long time, these are the things that you can say yes to.

Ben Huh (00:14:14):

When I was running Cheezburger, it was more about wanting to leave my existing job, which was too many hours and just not a boss that I enjoyed working with. Then it was like, “I think this is a great business idea. And therefore, I should go build a business.” It was like, “Okay. I’d rather do this. I’d rather post cat photos on a blog on the internet than work at this technology job as a product manager.”

Ben Huh (00:14:36):

So yes, sure. I guess I’ll do that. Why not? And it was that why not part that really became, “Oh, crap. Now, there’s the great recession.” And now, I’ve got to pay the bills. And how do I see this as an opportunity instead of a live book? How do I turn this disadvantage of running a blog network that nobody understood really? But it’s got a lot of traffic, A lot of people want this. What the heck is this thing? And what the heck is fortune?

Nick (00:15:07):

Well, let’s dive into that a little bit here. So you’ve shared a little bit about the origins of Cheezburger. But for any listeners that may be not familiar with what that is and what it did, can you just tell us again a little bit of the backstory there, the origins, and what it was?

Ben Huh (00:15:19):

Yeah. So this was before anybody in the mainstream or really even on the internet really knew what a meme was or even knew how to say meme because it’s spelled meme if think about it. People were posting cat photos with captions on them in these internet forums, 4chan, something awful. And they were being used as the shorthand for the beginning of what we call, today, internet culture.

Ben Huh (00:15:50):

Culture on the internet at that point was not really seen as a distinct culture outside of pop culture. So the pop culture was it, and there was really nothing beyond that. And the internet was creating its own vernacular. And so I ended up becoming internet friends with two people, Eric and Kari, who started this website called I Can Has Cheezburger. And they were reposting submissions from people on the internet. I ended up buying the website from them with investor money.

Ben Huh (00:16:21):

I think about it as absolutely bonkers. I was living in Seattle at the time and decided to run it full time. Ended up acquiring a company, a website called Fail Blog and ended up building hundreds of our own sites based on the knowledge and the understanding of internet culture and memes and because also at the time from a business perspective, we could acquire somebody else’s blog on WordPress and integrate it and basically get a return on investment in three months or less.

Ben Huh (00:16:50):

And it was astounding business because we had scale, and we could generate revenues per user that was far greater than any other blog network at the time. And so we became one of the top destinations on the internet. And you just couldn’t tell from the front. We would call ourselves a reverse mullet strategy. We were party in the front business in the back.

Ben Huh (00:17:13):

And so it didn’t look like a real business. And so we would get these funny emails from people after I would do an interview or whatever, and they’re like, “I just thought you guys were two dudes in a basement.” And then we’re like, “We have the spirit of [inaudible 00:17:27]. It’s got basement.”

Nick (00:17:30):

It’s really an amazing story. And Cheezburger went on just for listeners that lack the context to have 375 million page views per month, an epic success. Did you know at the time that you were involved in something like this? You talk about the early days of meme and what is a meme and early days of internet culture, and what is internet culture? Did you know that you were sort of a pioneer on this at the time?

Ben Huh (00:17:55):

I think in the beginning, it was a matter of survival. It was like, “Okay. How do I pay the bills? How do I pay my employees? How do I keep this thing growing?” And then there was a point in which it felt like, “Oh, we are definitely onto something that is different and new.” And part of it was if you’re in an industry and no one recognizes you as an industry, you have to declare that you are an industry.

Ben Huh (00:18:18):

And so you have to go out and say, “Podcasting is an industry.” And we are a leader in that industry. And so you have to create the category and convince people that the category is real and growing.

Ben Huh (00:18:30):

I remember actually having to go to New York a lot to sell advertising for the website and having to explain to ad agencies in New York that user generated content isn’t something they should be afraid of, that the vast majority of content in the world is going to be user generated and just show them the future. And even to them, it was very scary. And then they couldn’t understand it. And it was like the press started calling.

Ben Huh (00:18:57):

And that’s when it was like, “Oh, okay. I think it’s going to be okay. I think we’re onto something really big, and I think we’re the leader in the space.”

Nick (00:19:07):

What is somebody in a position like that? And I think these rocket rides are rare. web3 is a little weird because it seems like everybody’s looking for a rocket, but they’re not ubiquitous. And clearly, this was a huge success. What is growing and scaling something like that? I’m sure at first, it’s exciting, but there’s got to be a moment where this seems very real with huge implications.

Ben Huh (00:19:30):

Yeah. It’s step, number one, make sure your website stay up. Your infrastructure needs to stay up. This isn’t like the blockchain where you can ship smart contracts and then be like, “Vitalik, please take care of it.” It’s like you have to feed the servers and make sure you don’t have bottlenecks, and you can actually scale.

Ben Huh (00:19:46):

We had an amazing partner in WordPress and Matt Mullenweg, and we’ve decided they were going to be our front-end infrastructure, and then we had to run the backend. And so we had to work with great partners to figure out how do we scale this thing. It is a rocket ship no matter what.

Ben Huh (00:20:00):

The turning point that I remember are going from, “We can do this to we’re going to dominate this little corner of the internet,” was when we decided to launch a new website every two weeks. So we were on a plan to launch a new website every two months. And that’s six experiments a year, six shots on goal every year. And I’m like, “Okay. What do we need to cut? What do we need to sacrifice? What do we need to add so we can do 26 experiments a year?” And that completely changed the trajectory of our business because we just became so good at responding to culture and just events that were happening in real time.

Nick (00:20:41):

Did you enjoy it? I think we romanticize this idea of going on a rocket ride like this. I imagine, again, it gets very serious real quick. Is it something that all suddenly kind of turned into, what is this to, oh, what have I gotten myself into, or did you enjoy it?

Ben Huh (00:20:57):

There was no real time to enjoy it. This is, I think, the double-edged sword of being an entrepreneur is that sometimes when you do the thing, then you get to the promised land that what you think is going to be a great promised land. You have to figure out how to enjoy that because it is absolute chaos, monkeys in a barrel chaos.

Ben Huh (00:21:21):

Everything’s breaking all the time. No one’s got a roadmap for you because you’re the first one doing it, or at the scale that you’re doing it, and no one has an answer. And so you have to get so comfortable with this idea of uncertainty and chaos. And then the ones that do well are the ones that realize what’s important because in a mature business, you can think about all the different things that you’re doing. Other people have gone before you. You can learn from that and say, “Okay. How do I do a better version of what somebody else did?”

Ben Huh (00:21:50):

In the case of Cheezburger when there wasn’t really somebody that came before you, you’re like, okay, we have all these videos coming in through Fail Blog of basically people getting kicked in the nuts, people falling in their face. They last five seconds. I’m like, “You can’t post a five-second video on a YouTube and monetize it.” Now, you’re just wasting your time because while the content’s interesting, also, people don’t want to sit there and watch a five-second video.

Ben Huh (00:22:18):

It’s like, “Okay. How do we lengthen a five-second video in which we have nothing else?” It’s like, okay, there’s an intro, there’s an outro. Okay. That could do a few more seconds. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to slow down the video to one third, and we’re going to attach that to the end. And we’re going to loop it. And now, you’ve got a video that’s over 30 seconds. And once you’re over 30 seconds, you can start to monetize.

Ben Huh (00:22:41):

It was just like, “What else we got?” That’s the only thing we had. And the next thing you know, we had more views on our YouTube channel than Michael Jackson. And it was absolutely insane. We’re like, “Oh.” And then everybody else is copying the same format because they realized, “Oh, these guys figured out something.” And so all across the internet, there’s all these videos of people getting kicked in the nuts with this intro, outro and slowdowns. And the next thing you know, it’s like you set the standard. That was a wild thing to watch. It’s like, “Oh, we are being watched.”

Nick (00:23:16):

I guess I have to ask this question about returning to your personal story and being the son of immigrants. Your parents are watching all this and are somewhat involved. They’re seeing this happen. What’s their experience? What are they saying? Are they shocked that their son in this country has gone on to do Cheezburger?

Ben Huh (00:23:35):

So that’s the part. My parents don’t understand what I did. They look at it, but it doesn’t make any sense to them because culturally speaking, the humor may be Fail Blog. But our gift pages, none of this stuff really resonates with them. And so they’re just like, “Well, he’s a successful entrepreneur.” Amazing.

Nick (00:23:55):

Amazing.

Ben Huh (00:23:56):

He’s just like, “Well, he’s doing well for himself. That’s good.” It was like this level of abstraction down.” it’s like, “He’s doing all right.” We don’t have to worry about it.

Nick (00:24:06):

Well, eventually, Cheezburger was acquired, and you were able to step away and move on to other things that we’re going to talk about. But I want to ask you about that transition. I’ve had a lot of entrepreneurs on the podcast, and there’s only been a handful of them that have had successful exits and have been able to be acquired and move on. And I have to always ask the question about that transition. Was that difficult to give up your baby and walk away?

Ben Huh (00:24:30):

There were actually technically two different acquisitions that happened. So the first one was we were acquired by a different set of investors. So that became, I continued to run it. And so I’ve had this weird experience of having the same company and having two acquisitions in which one I stayed and led it. And the other, we were acquired by a different group, and then I ended up leaving.

Ben Huh (00:24:51):

And so I’ve run the entire life and fast 10X speed, this one company. Being acquired and staying on, it was so exciting because you felt like people believed in your vision, people believed in the upside. And at that time, we were just hitting it out of the park. We would set a goal and would blow it away. And so it became like how do you set the goal higher?

Ben Huh (00:25:13):

And then at some point as Facebook and the social platforms all realized that they were leaking traffic, and they wanted to keep it for themselves. One of the earliest Facebook apps was a clone of, I Can Has Cheezburger.

Ben Huh (00:25:30):

And so again, as you are the market leader in this tiny little space and growing, other people can copy you, and you have to defend that. And we didn’t have a great defense from the social networks just managing their own traffic and deciding to keep it.

Ben Huh (00:25:45):

And that became difficult for me to understand because the OpenWeb was far easier for me to understand. It’s open. You can look at the players. You can see what they’re doing. And generally, they don’t have the tools that the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world have to manage their own outbound draft.

Ben Huh (00:26:05):

I didn’t make that transition well, and we ended up having to sell the company and for me to leave the company because it ended up just burning me out. And it wasn’t the type of business that I was really good at running. And that transition happened feels like a blink of an eye.

Nick (00:26:17):

Well, let’s talk a little bit about what you did next. And maybe, before we get there, I do want to ask you just a couple of follow-up questions about meme culture because as I said at the beginning, you were a pioneer in this. You really set the standard. And for people more sort of business savvy, you established and won the format war, if you will, on this particular topic.

Nick (00:26:39):

But this meme thing has gone on, and it continues to sort of morph and evolve. And particularly in crypto, another very hot topic. We’ve talked immigration. We’ve talked about the media. Now, we’re going to talk about meme coins. But how do you sort of interpret what the crypto culture has done with memes and this meme coin phenomena?

Ben Huh (00:26:58):

Yeah. Actually, I’m going to quote one of the fellows in our latest batch of companies in the Orange DAO fellowship. So Orange DAO is a community of entrepreneurs. We’re all venture backed and experienced. And we run an accelerator two times a year. And this last company, there’s an entrepreneur named Brian. He runs a company called Recess. And his thesis is that meme coins and memes are the future of luxury brands through web3.

Ben Huh (00:27:28):

And I just thought he hit that nail right on the head. What I love about it is it’s just not a thing that a lot of people are thinking about. So if you think about generationally from technology, the Gen X, the millennial, to Gen, Z, memes have become such a greater part of their life that memes are no longer pieces of content. They’re assets. They’re financial instruments. And that’s what meme coins are representing right now.

Ben Huh (00:27:54):

I think there’s a lot of meme coins that don’t really know how to generate value, how to keep the value, how to actually create a bigger pie for everybody. And so there’s a lot of pump and dump, and there’s a lot of stuff in meme coins that I don’t like. At the same time, I understood coming from and looking at the basement of the internet, that created the meme culture as we know it today.

Ben Huh (00:28:15):

This is all where it starts. So if we can drive an understanding of culture and an appreciation of internet and meme culture into the future, you can see that this is where it’s headed. So many people get exposed, not just ha-ha, it’s funny content, or that resonates with me. It’s I own it. I am a part of this community. I am living in it. I have helped grow it.

Ben Huh (00:28:42):

There’s so much more engagement that happens through a meme coin than just a meme. So I think that is going to drive people’s understanding the same way like old people boomers collect like old cars, classic cars. When Gen Z becomes boomers, they will be looking back at meme coins and going, “Oh, man, what a good time.”

Nick (00:29:05):

It’s an amazing perspective, especially at a time when meme coins get a lot of criticism. But if I understand your argument, I mean we’re really sort of on a journey of what this concept will actually be once fully formed. And I really like the perspective you shared there. I want to talk to you about Orange DAO, and that’s presently what you’re working on, is spending your time on. But there was a stop on your personal journey after Cheezburger and before Orange DAO at Circa, and I was just curious if you could talk to us a little bit about what you did there.

Ben Huh (00:29:35):

Yeah. So Circa was a project that the current co-founder of XMTP and I created together back then. I had an idea that news, the way it was consumed was way too repetitive and wasn’t really value-added.

Ben Huh (00:29:53):

So whenever you find yourself on a news site and you’re scrolling, they’ll give you a new update on what’s happening. And about two paragraphs in, you realize you’re reading the same thing that they wrote two days ago.

Ben Huh (00:30:08):

And from a technology perspective, it’s like, well, if we could figure out a different way to present this, we would actually know what you have read and what you know. In other words, we can use journalism and news as a means of knowing what was in your head. Okay. How do we create a format? How do we create a mobile format in which we can give you what we call platonic elements of news?

Ben Huh (00:30:34):

And so it’s like what’s a big news recently. Let’s say there was a plane, a Frontier air flight, that had a hard landing and one of its engines caught on fire. And this is one of those things where it’s like there will be three to 10 updates in the next day or two about this.

Ben Huh (00:30:52):

And if I could follow that specific piece of news and know what information you’ve seen that this plane landed, everybody was safe, I don’t have to tell it to you again. I can just give you a one-sentence update and push it to you and know that that transaction of reading that information was super efficient. That was the premise of the entire company. Now, the problem is that while that is ideally good, most people use news as a way of procrastination.

Ben Huh (00:31:22):

They’re reading content because they don’t want to do something else. And if you give it to them in the tiny little elemental pieces, they actually don’t spend a lot of time with you because it’s not actually achieving the goal of I want to know something, and I want to procrastinate, or I want to be entertained.

Ben Huh (00:31:38):

So we failed the actual market part. But anybody who actually understood, it was very critically acclaimed to the point where some of the navigation elements that Circa was using to Matt’s credit actually ended up on Apple’s homepage. So the little dot navigation that you see on the right, I think Circa was the very first company, if not one of the very first companies, to actually do that type of dot navigation. And so it was like this incredibly innovative way of doing news delivery that didn’t gain a lot of traction.

Nick (00:33:14):

Was it hard for you to jump back into another startup and get busy again? I get the sense from your description of your experience at Cheezburger that that was exhausting, and there was a lot of work, and you sacrificed a lot. I’m always curious an entrepreneur jumping into the second thing, if it’s hard, if they’re a little reluctant.

Ben Huh (00:33:32):

For Circa it was no, because I was backing Matt. I was backing somebody who had a track record and was a really amazing product designer. And now that he’s gone to XMTP or he started XMTP, you can tell that he was just on his way to something good. I actually ended up going to Y Combinator and ended up working there to work on a moonshot project that Sam Altman was championing. And it was in construction of all things.

Ben Huh (00:34:00):

And that was completely unrelated to what I was doing before. And that’s actually kind of exciting for me because you have one life, and you can do the same thing over and over again and get better at it. A lot of people are really into that. And nothing wrong with that at all. I think it’s really incredible to watch people hone their skill set.

Ben Huh (00:34:21):

Also at the same time, I am more interested in something different, something new, something that I can learn from, which is what got me from media to internet memes, to Circa, then Y Combinator, then construction tech, and then to DAOs and crypto. And so it just, my life has been this like, “You can’t put that in a box. You can’t categorize it.”

Ben Huh (00:34:44):

And I think it’s difficult in a soundbite world to deal with someone like that. However, I’ve actually enjoyed it very much, and it’s certainly made me appreciate just how much innovation, for lack of a better term, just how much trying to make good stuff happens in the world.

Nick (00:35:10):

What can you tell us about your time at Y Combinator? And you mentioned working on a project with Sam Altman, and that’s pretty remarkable stuff there. Talk to us about that.

Ben Huh (00:35:18):

This is obviously Sam Altman pre-OpenAI. In fact, they actually sent me to OpenAI, be like, “Ben, you should actually go talk to those guys because they’re doing something amazing with robotics.” And I went there, and I was like, “Sam, we’re so far from taking those robotic AI stuff and actually making it meaningful.” I don’t know that there’s anything here.

Nick (00:35:36):

Amazing.

Ben Huh (00:35:36):

I didn’t even know that the GPT team was there doing anything. I think it was a pretty small team at the time. The idea was how do you build a new city from the ground up today? And so if you think about cities, they’re all founded around transportation corridors. Trade was like the reason why you’d have a city, and a city is great as a network. And what’s amazing about cities is that they’re decentralized.

Ben Huh (00:36:02):

So if you think about the Bay Area or LA or any major metropolitan area, there’s no real central authority. There’s a bunch of small authorities that they actually network together. And the productivity of a single human being that enters a high-density city, it’s far greater there than anywhere else.

Ben Huh (00:36:18):

Cities are the most productive geo-located engines of the world. And today, I think it’s very fashionable to think about companies as being remote. I run a remote company, totally get that. But those remote people do live in a city. They are somewhere. And that somewhere actually absolutely makes a difference.

Nick (00:36:36):

I want to pause here and ask you about the nature of entrepreneurship. And clearly, you’re still on your journey. And because of what you’re doing at Orange DAO, you get the opportunity to continue to work with entrepreneurs and do that type of thing.

Nick (00:36:49):

But at this stage in your career, and I’m talking kind of Y Combinator working on Circa, what are some of the main lessons you learned about entrepreneurship that you could share with us? Maybe, the two or three characteristics that you think sort of explain or define what a successful entrepreneur looks like?

Ben Huh (00:37:05):

Yeah. I think it’s important to segment entrepreneurship into the growth stages or the pre-product market fit, the growth, and then the mature stages of the company. And so when we talk about entrepreneurship, we’re really referring to the first two parts. The part three mature companies, they tend to be managers, not entrepreneurs.

Ben Huh (00:37:21):

Even during growth, a lot of them switch to being managers. An entrepreneur is willing to do what other people have decided consciously, unconsciously, that it’s not worth it. That to me is the very core fundamental basics of being an entrepreneur. You have to do things that don’t scale. You have to roll up your sleeves when no one else is willing to.

Ben Huh (00:37:44):

You have to enter markets that no one believes in. And you have to make it work. And so a lot of entrepreneurs, I think, see other entrepreneurs, and they forget about the time that entrepreneur had to do the thing that nobody believed in. And you have to believe in yourself, your market, your idea or the team enough to go through that chasm between I believe and they believe, because the translation layer between I believe to they believe is only going to be you. There is no one else. So you have to make that happen. And so much of that is luck.

Ben Huh (00:38:26):

I started this company that acquired a cat picture website. That is a weird thing to say even today. But I had to believe in my ability to actually build something where else that would’ve not happened and somebody else would’ve done that business? So there’s a fundamental belief.

Ben Huh (00:38:48):

And then the other is the belief in listening to your customers. If you believe in yourself, great. If you believe in your team, great. You can build something, but it’s not going to be valuable until you listen to your customers. You have to talk to them. You have to serve them. You have to understand what their life is like and to build something that they love to you.

Ben Huh (00:39:07):

And so those two things, belief in you or your market or whatever, and then listening to customers are the two fundamental pieces of any entrepreneur.

Nick (00:39:17):

What about this question about conviction and drive? I mean, not the question of whether you need it or not, but maybe the source of it. Sometimes, they have to have passion or, no, they just need to be persistent in fall in love with their idea. Do you have sort of a thesis around the importance of conviction, and where it must come from?

Ben Huh (00:39:36):

This is actually a very interesting topic because you can have conviction in yourself and your idea. But in most cases, it’s wrong. This is not a controversial take, but this is a hard take. This is where chances are the idea that you start out with, the assumptions you had about the market because most entrepreneurs are first timers, it is not going to be right.

Ben Huh (00:40:04):

And so if you have conviction that you are right, then you are going to be wrong. If you have conviction that you will figure it out, then you’re going to be okay because then it opens you to listening to customers or to others, to people who have gone before you. But if you insist that you are right in the face of the market, the market has more money, and the market can outlast you. So who do you want to be? Are you going to be an entrepreneur or somebody with an idea?

Nick (00:40:39):

Do we undervalue the role of luck in the story of entrepreneurs? I always think about how we self-select these success stories because we only read about the successful ones. We don’t hear about the ones that never made it

Ben Huh (00:40:49):

Survivorship bias. Absolutely. And I think that’s the part I think people misunderstand about the narratives around entrepreneurship, is that the stuff that you don’t hear could fill the internet. It’s just like we don’t talk about failures. It’s important to talk about them because I think they serve as a lesson, but also at the same time, failures, they follow a pattern.

Ben Huh (00:41:14):

I can tell you that 99% of business failures fall into a handful of categories. You didn’t raise enough money. You didn’t have the right team. You didn’t listen to your customers. It’s just like a classic case of pattern matching. It’s very easy to pattern match failures. It is very, very hard to pattern match successes. And I think that’s where the media and podcasts like this play an amazing role is that there are some commonalities, but every success is really a different path.

Ben Huh (00:41:40):

And in fact, one successful entrepreneur creates too much competition to follow them. And therefore, that path gets shut down. You can’t succeed the same way that somebody who had before you was successful. It’s very hard to do so. It’s very hard to follow. And so I think the takeaway here is the uniqueness of the path of success, you will have to figure out, but most failures tend to follow very simple patterns.

Nick (00:42:04):

I’ve had the opportunity to interview people that have worked with Andy Grove. I’ve had the opportunity to interview people that worked with Bill Gates. You’ve met Sam Altman, somebody who’s having quite an impact in tech right now. What can you tell us about Sam and your experiences sort of working with him?

Ben Huh (00:42:20):

For me, Sam was super easy to work with. He valued his time. I valued mine. I didn’t have to do a lot of bullshit. I was like, “Sam, this is a deal that I want to do.” And he is like, “Okay. Let’s do it.” I just thought about it for a second, and I think he had good heuristics. He had good mental models as to how things worked. And even if you came to him with a novel new thing, he knew where to classify it and how to quantify that risk or the opportunity and could make a very quick decision about it.

Ben Huh (00:42:51):

It was also super ambitious. And so if you’re ambitious than somebody else is, it’s a great match. The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail with their partners because the ambitions don’t match. One’s far more ambitious than the other, and one’s going to drive the other one nuts, if that ambition mismatches. So in a business partner, that’s really important, and I saw him for that project, for that moonshot project. He was clearly the partner there for me. And there’s one other partner, [inaudible 00:43:18] who was there as well. And the three of us were just absolutely crazy people.

Ben Huh (00:43:24):

How do we build a new city? Well, maybe, if we think of the primary mode of transport as drones, maybe we can build a city in the middle of a desert with solar power as the major backing. Great. Who’s got a lot of desert? Oh, well, why don’t we go to Mexico? I mean, it was like, “Let’s call the president of Mexico.” The logical outcome of the discussions we had just sounded like insane, crazy people.

Ben Huh (00:43:47):

And that was what was really fun about being there. It was like, okay, well what do we know about special economic zones that we’re going to propose to the president of Mexico? Well, we don’t. Can we call up this Nobel laureate who won a Nobel Prize at special economic zones? Yeah, let’s do that.

Ben Huh (00:44:00):

So the amount of time it took me to reach a conclusion of what do we need to do was like 30 seconds. We’re going to call the president of Mexico and propose a special economic zone using the theories of a Nobel laureate. Not hard. How do we do that? That’s the hard part, or that’s the work part. But the logical conclusion was like, “Yeah, this is the right thing to do. Let’s go do it.”

Nick (00:44:25):

Well, let’s turn now our attention to Orange Fund and Orange DAO. So talk to us about the origin story there, how you sort of came into this, and what you’re working on?

Ben Huh (00:44:36):

Most of my entrepreneur friends who have been successful in any way, shape or form are now investors. What’s funny is that all of those friends who have been successful their own unique way end up going to investing, and they’re doing the same thing as everyone else.

Ben Huh (00:44:52):

And so like, “Hey, did we learn anything?” What did we learn from being entrepreneurs? What’s unique about what we’re doing? So anytime you see a success, the best way to understand it is to work backwards, not like how did they do it? It’s if I want to achieve that today, what would I need to do in order to get there? And so the best investors in the world have amazing networks of other entrepreneurs.

Ben Huh (00:45:18):

They have a portfolio of companies and other founders who are referring good deals, good entrepreneurs and helping out the network, and things like that. And so we’re like, “Okay. We have crypto. What can we do to crypto to build the network before we have our own as a VC firm?”

Ben Huh (00:45:35):

And so we’re like, “Okay. Let’s create a debt.” Let’s create a network of founders who are willing to help each other and will give tokens to people who help each other, which then can be used for governance. And then I think the timing was absolutely excellent. This was early 2001. And we ended up being able to recruit, I think, 1500 founders to this network.

Ben Huh (00:45:58):

And so before we had a successful fund, we had a successful network, and I’m like, “Okay. This is the way to go.” This is how we build momentum. This is how we build a referral network so we can build a better fund because the alternative is we invest, and 10 years later, we have alumni, and they’re willing to refer. And so let’s advance this thing forward 10 years and start with the end, which is the network, and then we build the fund.

Nick (00:46:22):

And the decision to have this DAO structure and a token, that’s one of those baked-in hard-to-reverse type of decisions. What was some of the thinking there?

Ben Huh (00:46:34):

I think that’s actually the value of it. When you decide that you’re going to build a DAO and give out tokens and authority and power to your community, that commitment is what drives this whole thing because if you can run that, then people won’t participate. And so this is where the commitment to building the community first became our strength and our advantage. And so I think we would not be here if we did not make that call.

Nick (00:47:06):

Well, let’s talk about where you are today and what here is. So tell us about Orange DAO membership and projects, and the people you get to work with.

Ben Huh (00:47:14):

Yeah. So our network is made up of founders who have gone through Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz’s CSX program. Some came through the Sequoia program. And so we are looking at very experienced founders who have reached the top of the early stage.

Ben Huh (00:47:34):

The vast majority are founders are not in crypto. But they’re good entrepreneurs. They have experience in building a company, raising money, shipping a product, and what have you. We are now continuing to grow the crypto side because we have a program called the Fellowship Program, which is modeled after YC’s program, and it is specific to crypto.

Ben Huh (00:47:56):

We understand the tokenization part. We understand the economics of tokens and the regulatory landscape, the infrastructure around it, and we’ve been running this program now, this is our fifth program that we just finished. And there’s about 15 companies in every batch. And the outcomes have been phenomenal for the founders that have gone through it.

Ben Huh (00:48:17):

And I think it’s where as a founder, once you’ve gone through the process of building a company, you are willing to help out others, and it is stitched together by the existence of a governance token that allows us to actually have a say in how that community’s work.

Ben Huh (00:48:35):

And so we provide an investment $100,000. The applications run every six months, and some are rolling. They’re open right now on orangedao.xyz. And people can apply, and we see thousands of applications every season. It’s a highly competitive program. I think we let in less than 1% last batch.

Nick (00:48:58):

For any listeners who would like to be part of that or at least take a swing, what’s the best way for them to sort of explore more and get to know more about Orange DAO?

Ben Huh (00:49:06):

Yeah. So we also just acquired launchcaster.xyz which is the platform where you can actually test out your product ideas. It’s like the product content web3. And so we want that to be the front page of entrepreneurship going forward, and you can go launch a product that you can apply for our program with the experience that you have. And we accept people who just came straight out of college all the way to multiple repeat founders.

Ben Huh (00:49:32):

It doesn’t matter how much or how little experience you have. What matters to us is that you can build, that you can show that you can build, and that you are focused on building something that people love to eat.

Nick (00:49:45):

In another interview, you said that DAOs can be the operating system of the future because they’re software first and transparent. You’ve mentioned DAOs a couple times before formally talking about it here. But do you have high conviction for DAOs? This is not an aberration of web3. This is something that will persist.

Ben Huh (00:50:01):

Yeah. I think the idea that if you think about the creation of a corporation, it was built at an age in which software as a concept did not exist. You had to take action on your shares through lawyers, letters or markets. And we have collapsed that into an entirely justice thin stack of software.

Ben Huh (00:50:22):

If you have token, you can vote. That’s it. Super simple. That creates a lot of responsibility as the token holder to understand what you’re voting on, to be a part of the organization, especially when the rules aren’t very clear or the rules haven’t been disseminated via means to the culture of the internet.

Ben Huh (00:50:39):

It is more power and easier to use by orders of magnitude than a share when it comes to governance and having a voice. So I think that stack will continue to mature. I think it’ll happen at [inaudible 00:50:54] starts. I don’t know that DAO is the right word for that going forward. I think every technology generation has to figure out what the marketing side of this is going to be. But yeah, I absolutely think that if you are going to be participating in networks of the future, it’s going to happen through tokens.

Nick (00:51:09):

So Ben, it’s clear that you’re a very brilliant and accomplished guy. You’ve had some incredible success in business, and I imagine someone like you can sort of pick and choose the types of things they want to work on and be involved with. Where does your conviction for crypto, web3? And again, web3 is one of these disputed terms. Maybe that’s not a term that you use, but where does your conviction sort of for crypto in this industry come from?

Ben Huh (00:51:32):

I think that the arc over history to giving people what they want is probably one of the strongest. I think that kind of underpins even our belief in democracy, not the other way around. And so for a average human being to get what they want, they want control, they want value, and they want to have some upside.

Ben Huh (00:52:00):

The reason I love web3 is that it fundamentally understands that without the need to believe in a third party to give it to you. I think what’s missing and undervalued is the idea of agency. And what’s been interesting to watch is that we have this we growth of AI, which is actually giving people the ability to filter information from wide variety of sources and actually summarize it to give me more agents.

Ben Huh (00:52:29):

And every single piece of technology that’s been created, I think, is giving the average user more power and knowledge and more control over what they own. And crypto, I think, ties that together so well. That’s why I want to do this.

Nick (00:52:48):

Ben, earlier when you were talking about the lifecycle or stages of entrepreneurship and this crossing the chasm from early stage entrepreneur to maybe more of a managerial sense, I want to ask that same sort of question or that paradigm in the context of web3 or crypto the industry and crossing that chasm to greater adoption or consumer-facing depths. If it’s correct that we’re not there yet, the question is what is it going to take to get us there?

Ben Huh (00:53:15):

Yeah. I think we saw in the last cycle that NFTs were this incredible cultural connector between web3 and what people want to own and want to participate in. I think the nosebleed valuations that were really created by the macroeconomic conditions and just people needing to have a place to put their money to see or to grow and to the functional need to speculate for a lot of people drove that price up to unsustainable levels.

Ben Huh (00:53:43):

When I see stuff like that, you can pretty much bet that it’ll happen again. And so it’s not going to happen again in the way that it’s predictable or really useful, but that desire to own, to participate and do it through a intermediary that like there’s trustworthy because it’s software and that it can be verifiable is a really good foundation.

Ben Huh (00:54:08):

What’s funny is that I don’t think people who are in crypto understand just how much value we put in the ability to trust the system. This is the part I think a lot of my friends who’ve actually gone through Web1 and 2 who don’t get crypto dismissed is that they see the news. They see the headlines, and they don’t experience for themselves how does the system actually work, and what do people care about?

Ben Huh (00:54:34):

When you make value as easy to move as software, there’s going to be a lot more value creation, period. They’ll also be a lot of chaos But the amount of value that’s going to get created by giving people control over their assets, it’s the same way that mortgages have worked, that if you make getting up buying a house easier, the prices of houses are cool.

Ben Huh (00:54:56):

There’s no fundamental question about that, and we’re doing that using infrastructure and is happening quietly behind the scenes for a lot of people, and we invest in those companies as we see it happening. Account abstraction, the ability to actually move funds automatically between accounts, having agency over it, the reporting, it’s happening in so many places.

Ben Huh (00:55:15):

It is actually very, very fun to watch, and it is incredible to see the amount of talent that’s here and the amount of trust that they’re putting in to decentralized systems where you can verify those actions.

Nick (00:55:27):

If you put on your historian’s lens for a minute here and place web3, how do you see it in relationship to web2? And this is a pretty common question I ask on podcast, but is it a revolution against the quote, unquote, “sins of web2”? Is it an evolution, sort of like this is just the natural progression of tech and what it would do or something else? How do you place it?

Ben Huh (00:55:54):

I think web3 has a lot more analogy with Web1 than it does with web2. Every successful technology is a revolt against the flaws of the previous system. Whether we are successful at curing the flaws of the system or we just create a different set of lords over the other, that’s an interesting question. Who knows if that’s going to happen or not?

Ben Huh (00:56:17):

But every technological revolution creates an opportunity for someone other than those in charge to be successful. Web1 was a lot of noise, a lot of ups and downs and took a long time, and there were a lot of naysayers.

Ben Huh (00:56:33):

web2, the revolution was really under the radar. And by the time the networks had shown up, the social networks had actually taken power, that was already part of the system. web3, we’re not creating a shadow financial system. In fact, we’re not creating a financial system that’s going to replace the existing one.

Ben Huh (00:56:53):

We’re actually creating a side chain to the existing financial network. It is going to coexist until it is no longer deniable that this is the mainstream, the same way internet culture did when people dismissed it. It’s a bunch of cat photos with misspelled captions. Who would love this stuff? This makes absolutely no sense, and here we are.

Ben Huh (00:57:16):

Blockchain to me is the same level of usefulness. It’s not until it is. And when it is, it’s going to be too late for most mainstream people to understand that it is too late. This is the only way to actually work in technology, is to be too early. Otherwise, you’re just going to miss the whole thing.

Nick (00:57:36):

Fully evolved, is web3, as you said there. And I might be mischaracterizing what you said there, but is it a side chain to finance or is it much more broad, meaning that it’ll swallow other types of industry or use cases?

Ben Huh (00:57:50):

It will absolutely swallow other industries because a distributed ledger or decentralized ledger system is much more functional and useful when there’s more than just value on it. So we think of the financial system as primarily of existing of value and transactions, and that’s a long way to look at the blockchain. The blockchain also contains information, information in ways that are surprising and delightful and weird and things like that.

Ben Huh (00:58:16):

And the best financial traders of the world see the financial system as a system of information, not a system of value. The value is an outcome of understanding of the information. And so the more information we put on chain, the more interesting and more valuable it becomes. This is like the core of network effects. And so, yeah, this is where I’m really excited to see weird stuff on chain. Memes on chain is fantastic. You can’t value it, and you can see the last generation NFTs as memes on chain.

Nick (00:58:46):

Ben, I’ve only got a few more questions for you, and I really appreciate the time you’ve given to me. It’s been so much fun to learn about your story and to welcome another really cool pioneering entrepreneurial story to the GRTiQ Podcast.

Nick (00:58:57):

And so super grateful that you joined. My first question is about then the things you’re seeing in web3 by virtue of what you’re working on at Orange DAO. Clearly, you’re seeing some projects that are exciting, maybe some new verticals, but can you shed some light on things that are making you excited about the future?

Ben Huh (00:59:15):

I’ll give you two examples. One is a social network that is based on chain. So people own the spaces that they’re actually building. That only exists as a desktop open experience, not trapped in an app, not TikTok, completely different where it is open-ended.

Ben Huh (00:59:33):

And you can build and browse a webpage together with one another in real time. So you and I can actually go to the same webpage, not a screen share, but literally to the same Amazon shopping page and shop together. It’s called Telecore. And that is completely orthogonal to every social experience that we’ve experienced so far.

Ben Huh (00:59:53):

In fact, it was tried to Web1. The technology just wasn’t there because the video streaming and all those capabilities were just rudimentary. And now, you can actually take a group road trip through the internet with your friend. And it’s built on a fundamental thesis that it is no longer acceptable to be a walled garden social.And that’s actually going to be a fun way to actually own parts of that experience.

Ben Huh (01:00:17):

The other is a blockchain called Rise. There’s also another blockchain company called Zero-G, Zero Gravity. Rise is creating a blockchain that’s as fast and as capable as the backend of an app. If you were to insert a blockchain today, a high-performance blockchain today, it’s not fast enough, and it can’t do enough compute to really serve as the backend of a mobile app.

Ben Huh (01:00:44):

We’re just not producing blocks that are big enough or fast enough. It’s just to cost too much gas to do that. And this team decided that they actually wanted to build a chain with a functional capability of the backend of a mobile. And then Vitalik invested after us.

Ben Huh (01:01:01):

So this is like, “Oh, that’s a major co-sign.” The other is this company called Zero Gravity, which is a little blockchain, and it is based on AI. It’s based on making AI open and transparent so that we can actually invest in a model that is verifiable so that we know that the AI is serving humanity’s needs, not the interest of its own corporate overlord. And so you are seeing two ideas around a blockchain that is completely different from one another, and this is the kind of part you’re like, “Wow, these are ambitious, ambitious entrepreneurs,” and they’re incredibly capable and technical.

Nick (01:01:38):

The second question I want to ask you is the importance of decentralization. I think there’s arguments to be made about when does web3 stop being and behaving like web3 and not just web2.0, 0.2? Is decentralization a core component here?

Ben Huh (01:01:54):

There’s a fundamental myth about decentralization, and it’s hard to address because everybody thinks about it a little bit differently, but don’t realize that they are because they use the word decentralization as if it actually means something. It doesn’t really mean anything.

Ben Huh (01:02:06):

Decentralization is a direction towards giving more people authority and power than we did before. It is also a technique, but the technique is so varied. I just gave you three examples of companies where decentralization is part the core of the identity, yet we couldn’t tell you what that was.

Ben Huh (01:02:24):

Everybody’s kind of doing it differently. The flip side of decentralization is that while you can decentralize authority and you cannot decentralize accountability and be successful. You cannot say, “Because we decentralized that nobody is accountable for the actions of the network.” That is absolutely not true. Somebody is and must be in order for the network to actually be healthy and move forward and scale.

Nick (01:02:50):

And then the final question I want to ask you before I asked you the GRTiQ 10 is about conviction. I asked you about it earlier, but I want to know about yours. What drives you? Where does your conviction come from?

Ben Huh (01:03:02):

I think at this point in my life, it is not about the technology. And technology is interesting. I love using the technology, and there’s some rough edges that are painful. It’s interesting, and I think it’s a good canvas for entrepreneurs to actually go build something. What really motivates me is helping an entrepreneur discover something, be successful, help solve problems, watching them be successful without making the same errors, mistakes that I did or others did. At this point, I take more joy being a coach than I am a player.

Nick (01:03:33):

Well, Ben, as I said, you’ve been very generous with your time and we’ve reached a point in the podcast where now I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are fun questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. And I do it because it allows us to get to know you a little bit more, but also I think it introduces listeners to things that they can try, things that they can learn from or maybe ways that they can achieve more in their own life. So Ben, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Ben Huh (01:03:55):

Yes. Let’s go. Countdown from 10 or count up from one.

Nick (01:04:12):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Ben Huh (01:04:15):

This is a hard one. All these questions are quite hard. So I’m going to pick some of the top. So if I had to pick one book, it’s a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It’s actually sitting on my shelf behind me, written by a guy named Rhodes, R-H-O-D-E-S. It’s a tome of a book, and it tells you the story from the discovery of the atom to post-World War II, dropping the bomb on human beings and having to deal with the consequences of it.

Ben Huh (01:04:44):

So if you watched Oppenheimer, the movie, this actually starts well before that. I read this in college, and it was such an incredible story because it happened in such a short period of time the same way the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane, and about half century later we were flying in space, just blink of an eye.

Nick (01:05:05):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Ben Huh (01:05:08):

Yes. Battlestar Galactica, I’m sure I had this answer a lot. It is such a great distillation of humanity. The setting is space, but it doesn’t really matter where it’s set. It’s set as a sci-fi, but it tells you the story of how civilization struggles with itself.

Nick (01:05:28):

How about this one? If you could listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Ben Huh (01:05:33):

Yeah. So I learned, I think, when I was in my early 30s that most people stopped listening to new music in their late 20s. I was like, “Okay. Well, that seems like not a good thing.” That’s a person of culture or internet culture. I was like, “Okay. I’m going to have to enjoy listening to a whole new category of music.”

Ben Huh (01:05:54):

And so I ended up picking Jazz and EDM. So the recommendation here is Odesza, A Moment Apart, a great set of concerts in 2017 pre-pandemic. It was just such a great moment before everything shut down. And their intro video for their opener for the concerts are just mind-blowingly, just phenomenal digital art.

Nick (01:06:18):

Ben, what’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Ben Huh (01:06:22):

So this has happened to me very early in my life. It’s a very simple piece of advice that’s very hard to for a lot of people, spend less than you earn. Just fundamentally sound piece of financial advice. It is financial advice. And you should take it as such. Spend less than you earn.

Nick (01:06:40):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Ben Huh (01:06:45):

Yeah. I think a lot of people don’t realize that even in business, I think, CEOs make a lot of decisions and they have to. But when you look back in a year or years later and you look back at a given year, only like a handful of decisions ever made a difference. It’s just that the problem is when you’re in it, you don’t know what they are. But if you can look back and see what decisions actually made a difference in your business or in your personal life, you’ll actually know them, and you can see in the future, “Oh, there are some telltale signs that a decision will be really monumental and important.” They’re not difficult. You just need to know about them in advance to make a better one.

Nick (01:07:21):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Ben Huh (01:07:25):

Email messages, whatever. Only a few things require a response. You are not required to comment on everything. You’re not required to respond to every email. You are actually not even required to respond to the framing that they gave you in an interview or on an email. You can just note out of that by deleting the email in the first place or the message is ignoring.

Nick (01:07:46):

And then Ben, based on your own life experiences and observations, what is the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains people finding success in life?

Ben Huh (01:07:55):

Yeah. I think this is a thing that happens actually more in web3 and other spaces because it’s a financialized frame of mind, but more important than value in web3 is actually the block. And a block is a fundamental unit of effectively time. And so time is the ultimate equalizer. Everything can be measured in time. But quite often, it can’t be replicated same way. And so time is the most valuable thing we have. And I think people who use their time better are happier.

Nick (01:08:28):

And then the final three questions, Ben, are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is, the thing that most excites me about web3 is.

Ben Huh (01:08:35):

There’s so much amazing talent. And because web3 forces you to think about products and software in such a different way than the previous generation of technologies, the people who tackle those challenges are really inspiring to me.

Nick (01:08:49):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, I still call it Twitter, you should be following.

Ben Huh (01:08:53):

So this is not an answer to X. This is actually on Instagram. Of all the answers that I gave you, a lot of them took a long time to get there. This is just a throw away because I think it’s useful, and I think that’s exactly how you should approach social media. It’s just throw away but useful. There’s an account on Instagram called We Have the Data, and it’s an aggregator of other interesting charts. It’s such a great way to reframe your thought, but you should obviously challenge everything that goes in there to say, “Is this the right framing?”

Nick (01:09:21):

And then the final question, I’m happiest when.

Ben Huh (01:09:25):

A founder I have helped is finding success.

Nick (01:09:37):

Ben, I’m deeply humbled that you would join the GRTiQ Podcast and share your story. It was a thrill for me to learn all the different things we talked about today from your time growing up, the son of immigrants, to what you’re working on now at Orange DAO, and all the success and learnings along the way. So I’m grateful to you. If listeners want to stay in touch with you, follow things that you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Ben Huh (01:09:59):

Yeah, orangedao.xyz. There’s a newsletter. Also, they can apply for a fellowship program. That is the most value you can get from me instead of just following me on Twitter and elsewhere. That’s really the face, the front page for me.