Growing Communities Through NFT Galleries with Set

What is up everyone? Welcome back to the DIVY Crypto Podcast. Today I am joined by Seth Goldstein and he is the founder of Bright Moments. How's it going Seth? Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about Bright Moments, but before we get into that, let's hear your origin story. What got you into this space? And what were you doing

previously? Well, I'm a grizzled age entrepreneur. I'm in my 50s, so I've been there, freer, beginning of web one, the beginning of web two, and now, this is what we call the beginning of web three. I grew up in Boston, big Boston sports fan, go Celtics, and Red Sox and Patriots. Then I moved to New York where I started my first company in 1995, which was

a very early online advertising company called Site Specific. I sold it, went to work as a venture capitalist during 1999, 2000, really the beginning of that first bubble that burst and then kind of led into web two a couple years later. I've been an angel investor. I've built businesses and the advertising world and the financial services Wall Street World. Always using internet data and internet technology.

I've been using it in different ways. I co-founded an online music service called Turn Table, about 10 years ago. It was really interesting. And then a few years ago, I started a blockchain community center in San Francisco called Node. And I think it was there in 2017, 2018. But I first kind of got a sense of what was happening with tokens and Ethereum. Obviously you had

the ICO winter. And then two years ago, my partner, Kristina, I moved from San Francisco to Venice Beach. And I started taking pictures, photographs, and the friend of mine, you should knit one of those as an NFT on foundation. And this was January, February last year. And I saw the power of what happens when you kind of get that right. And the power of permissionless finance

and decentralized finance and not having to cringeshopify site and send out drop shipping of prints, but instead to exchange files digitally, you know, with ownership attached. And half of that experience, I started bright moments in April of last year. And it's really grown way beyond any of our dreams over the last 12 months. Nice. Nice. And just as a fun organic cross path world here, I'm

pretty sure I've taken meetings in Node. I lived in San Francisco. For five years. And I want to say that was near the Trans-America building, wasn't it? Yes. It was like, yeah. Yes. There you go. I have taken meetings there before. A lot of computers. Remember, I had a bunch of old computers. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool space. I remember that very specifically. And there's like a

really nice coffee shop right there. Kind of down at the corner there. I don't remember the name of it. But I, yeah. Yeah. San Francisco's near and dear to me, for sure. I moved out of there in 2019, kind of before all the craziness. But it's still favorite city. Just globally. Hopefully it kind of bounces a little bit back. But I do really love everything about

it. So let's talk about bright moments. You saw some explosive growth. We've all seen NFTs kind of come to the forefront myself and many listening included. Believe it is going to be in the back. And I'm really proud of the future of Web 3 and ownership. So I'd love to get your take on the market that drove the success here. What the catalyst there was. You

know, it really bring a lot of this mainstream adoption coming into the space for the last couple of years. Yes. Sure. I think in our case, it was important is the economy of being deep pandemic, deep quarantine in a place like that. And it's been a speech and it's been for those that haven't spent much time there is one of the stranger more colorful, more energetic

places. You know, in the country, if not the world. And so the idea of being in a pandemic in the middle of loony town, kind of speaks to, you know, what happened with us, which is coming out of the pandemic. I think there was so much pent up creative frustration that a community formed around. An NFT gallery and NFTs are so important not because they're a

JPEG in on a screen, but because they they have so much flexibility, they have so much utility, you can do so many things with them. And we really created a community in Venice Beach around this gallery where people from a coffee shop that we're meeting up every day and people from technology and curators and designers and entertainment people from nearby Hollywood, kind of all built to

community around the space in Venice Beach on Winward Ave under Venice sign. And we put up three screens. We started showing NFTs. We structured ourselves as a Dow. So we had a native token, an ERC 20 token called BRT. And we set up our first art exhibit in June of last year, almost a four year ago with Jeff Davis, who is the co-creative, who is the

chief creative office. We had a lot of sort of art blocks. And in doing so, we realized that we needed to do something during the daytime, not just during the evenings when we had shows, but how are we going to have people come to our gallery during daytime hours. And we had this idea of, why don't we give away NFTs, that you can only mint by

being in person physically. And so we used our Dow token, our BRT token as a sort of a geofence. And you had to be there. We were in the gallery to mint a crypto Venetian. And crypto Venetians were generative pixel art on art blocks, ethereum based. And we gave away a thousand over the course of a month and a half last year. And by the end,

these NFTs that we were giving away for free by late July early August, that it was suddenly worth two, three, four, if. And it was like we were a car dealership giving away 23 cars a day. Yeah, I think looking back some of the NFTs. They were given out during the during the early days, just became this sort of given away a mansion to someone in

value over the over the course of, you know, six months even in some of these cases that I've seen with, you know, board apes and all sorts of these sort of giveaways in the early days to get people engaged. And I think that's just sort of the cost of adoption. The cost of doing business with a new emerging space like this. And I think a lot

of people didn't really. Really realize that it was going to get as big as it did as fast as it did. Many just thought it was going to be a little bit more gradual. But it was really quite a fascinating year last year. And I like what you said about being their Invenous Beach, just sort of the loony bin feeling of during the pandemic. And it

just really was this sort of moment. I remember with everybody being locked down stuck at home. And I think that's what I was going to say. And researching these NFTs and it was like a prime situation for a new technology like this. So I feel like the your spot on with like that kind of crossroads and catalyst that that really gave it this this momentum. So

you kind of started with mentioning some things around the the token that you released the events that you you were hosting. Let's talk kind of about the where London fits in to this whole picture. Because I know that I've been in the market for a long time. So that's a big part here. Sure. So what happened in Venice is we we found product market fit. Like

we found that by giving away these crypto citizens. And we they were crypto Venetians initially that a whole amount of abundance. Economically was generated off of this very selfless generous charitable act. And what we found is the more we give away the bigger this business became, which is kind of non intuitive. But in the crypto world, strangely makes a lot of sense. Right. You see it

now with these free myths. So we tapped into something that I think is really important. That I'm created a lot of buzz a lot of hype and a lot of demand. And so often the heels of minting a thousand crypto Venetians. We realize, well, maybe we should now go to another city. And maybe over the course of two years, we could do 10 cities in mint

10,000 of these NFTs and have our own 10,000 character collections. Like the crypto punk to the board aches. And so on the heels of Venice Beach and the thousand crypto Venetians, we decided in August of last year to. Why don't we try to sell mint passes in advance to crypto New Yorkers because by the time we finish Venice, we had a waiting list of 2000 people

that signed up for these crypto Venetians that we were giving away for free. And so we evolved a business model. Like, okay, we're going to go to New York. And we're going to sell 200 of the thousand that we otherwise would give away for free to fund us going to New York and getting a gallery and flying there and staffing this experience. And within 20 minutes

of putting this auction out there, we sold 200 mint passes for two each. And back then Ethereum was, you know, $3,000, $1.2 million. So we raised $1.2 million about 20 minutes simply by selling $2 million. And then we had $200 mint passes to give away free crypto New Yorkers. So we took that money. We rent the gallery in amazing gallery space. And so on that hat

in August of street, we will be posting our second and empty. This is a passenger announcement for all of this. We will be at $4.2 million in Maxis. But we will be at $5.2 million in this afternoon due to the air cost of being quoted. So we asked for like this to remain in the last until today. We don't mind. It's supposed to be a second.

And those were 100 minutes that had to be done in the IRL. We did it over the course of four evenings in December. We finished the New York experience and we set our sites on Berlin. And then we sold tickets to mint a thousand, 333 out of a thousand Berliners. We took that money. We rented an amazing warehouse space in Berlin Hall, Kraftwerk. And we were

residents in Berlin for a month of April. And when we were in Berlin, we set aside another 333 tickets for London. And that's how we've activated London. So every city we go to, we sell mint passes in advance. And that's how we fund a pop up of that location. And now everybody that mince a crypto citizen is a member of the Dow and the Dow votes

on which cities we go to next. So there's a live vote now for city number six. It's between Mexico City to me, Central America. It's between Mexico City, Panama City and Puerto Rico. I think Mexico City will probably be win. And that's where we'll be in no factor. Very cool. Very cool. I like that. It's selling the mint passes and the community there in that city

is kind of a network effect because they're trying to get it, you know, to to attend it and also get people to attend it. Because if it's, you know, coming to their city, it's a really good representation of the community there with the NFC art scene. So very cool. I like that model with the team itself. Is it just you or how many people are on

the team? No, it's a whole traveling circus of about 20, 25 of us. It's kind of like Cirque du Soleil meets Coinbase or Yao Wolfe meets Metamask where it's partly live performance and partly, you know, smart content development. And we do that and we kind of improve the live minting experience everywhere we go. And in addition to the 333 mint passes that we sell, we give

away 334 to the local community. So in the case of New York, we gave away 334 crypto New Yorker minting experiences to local community, Lourab and Washington Square Park, same thing in Berlin and now the same thing in London. And then the last third, another 333 appointments get AirDrop to existing holders. So we have this really interesting structure where a third of each city collection is

sold. A third is AirDrop to existing holders. And the third is gifted and to onboard new members in the community. And we're working with Coinbase, we're working with Ledger, we're working with SAMSEL. And we're working with Artblocks to really kind of be that last model solution. On board people are to crypto and NFTs that otherwise might not make that step. Wow, that's very cool. So with

the kind of next steps for you, you're selecting the next city. It could be Mexico City. What does the next kind of 12 months look like for bright moments? Yes, so each city we go to, we mint a thousand crypto citizens to join the Dow. And we all also work with a roster of artists. So in the case of London, we are working with six artists,

we're part of what we call the London collection, starting with Nicholas Assoon, who's based in Paris, not a generative artist. It does amazing. Pixel art, Super Viby, we're working with SplitNiko, who's a Japanese artist. We're working with Matt Deloria, who did Meridians, which is one of the masterworks of Artblocks. We're working with Thomas Lynn Peterson, who did screens and Emily G, who did Memories of G.

Lynn and Jeff Davis, who we've worked with every city we've gone to. So in each of those cases, each one of those artists will be exhibiting for one week. We'll mint a hundred pieces with us, IRL, in the gallery experience in London. And then we'll pack up shop, you can go to Mexico, wherever the city number six is. And then when you think 12 months out,

we have four more cities to go after the fall. So we'll be at 6,000 minted cities. But we have two different persistence journey. Then fr Vimitarah. So we'll also have these incredible parity Iron Out tremendous. But for all of those better media, my right honours are consequences for going further next year, maybe you. This is also really our turning point for us. Also, in our open

audiences, we haveators, and then all these amazing art projects along the way with artists. Very cool. So somebody that's been in the space for a little bit, and as an experienced entrepreneur, like yourself, I'm a fan of turntable. I used it as well. I was big into product and early days there. So I really enjoyed seeing products like that come across. I'm curious to get your

take on what gets you excited in this space. When you get up in the morning, outside of bright moments, what is it that you just want to scream from the rooftops to everybody about the space? I wouldn't say it's outside of bright moments, but I think it's through bright moments I've gained tremendous conviction about the opportunity to go from ideas to execution incredibly quickly. But you

can experiment with new business models without having to spend nine months building software. Right. Like, we are all in this web three space by issuing tokens, by issuing tokens. We are issuing air drops by creating token-gative experiences. We are genuinely creating new languages and experiences that in the past would have taken millions of dollars and months, if not years. Now we are able to do weeks,

if not days. That's what really excites me. That things are moving faster and you can try things quicker. And it's like every NFT that you issue, it's almost like what it used to take to take a company public. Now you're able to put something out there in the market. It's liquid immediately. It's tradable for better, for worse. As they say, it's not about the floor price.

It's about the floor price. As much as you don't want to look at floor prices, they're incredibly interesting in terms of information and economic indicators. Sometimes they're manipulative. Sometimes they're rubbed. But it's still liquid and we can go in and out of projects without permission. And when you think about even what it takes to do something on angel list, it's a lot of friction. And so

I'm excited about this fluidity and the flexibility that we have with NFTs, not because they're about JPEGs on the screen, but because they're really flexible and interactable. They're ship mechanisms. Yeah. Well said. Well said. And I think it's going to touch every industry in some way, shape, or form, which is very exciting and to be early. In this space is always a huge win. It's listening.

You are still very early. It's still clunky and hard to use. It's hard on mobile. Think about it. It's still very desktop oriented. So there's a lot of just friction that will come out of the system. Simply with better mobile interfaces. So for somebody out there that's just heard the word NFT on this show listening to you, what would you recommend they do in terms of

education? Where should they go? Where's the best place in your opinion? We should definitely go to Brightmore. And follow us on Twitter at Brightmore. But I think there's some really kind souls and generous perspectives on NFTs. Obviously Gary V is super influential and as a huge community. Zeneca, we've had a chance to spend time with Zeneca. Some of them in Berlin for example. And I think

he's set a lot in terms of education. I think Snowfro, Eric Calderon, who's the founder of ARTLox, the founder of the Carpenter. And he's a pro-Mysquiggle. He's a wonderful spokesperson for NFTs. He was a huge crypto punk supporter and collector. The kind of evolved into his founding of ARTLox. I also think there's some really powerful minds thinking about gendered of ART in particular. So someone like

Tyler Hobbs is a great writer, a great thinker. And does amazing work as a programmer. I'm also right now getting, you know, deeper and deeper down the hole with FX hash and tasos as a new kind of ecosystem to look at some of the ARTLox. It's being created outside of Ethereum on a different blockchain. Very cool. Very cool. Well, those are all the questions I have

for you, Seth. Wherever you guys are listening, everything that Seth mentioned will be in these show notes. But that is it. Thanks so much for coming on in the show. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming on in the show.