🍜 COOK HOUSE CALLS: PAUL DELIO 🍜 - A RECAP - Powered by: @TheCatalystOG Hosted by: @0xChanglu Special Guest: @DelioPaul For this weeks episode of Cook House Calls we were fortunate enough to have a sit down with Paul Delio, Head of BD at @carv_official Below is a recap of this weeks call, lets jump right in! . . . 🍜 Introduce yourself and say a little bit about how you got started in crypto and what led you to where you are today? 🍜 The first time I heard about Bitcoin was in 2013 in some econ class in high school. Some kid brought it up to our professor, probably should have listened a little bit back then, but I got into trading in 2017. How I really came to working in Web3, I started working for a gaming project. Was there for about 11 months, and then joined the CARV team to lead up partnerships. ⚪️ 🍜 When you were getting started at CARV, what was most exciting about it and how was it pitched to you? 🍜 I remember my first call with Chloe, one of our founders, she was treating it less of an interview and more like I already had the position. I think she was really keen on hiring someone from America to come do BD. So I think no matter what, as long as I didn't monumentally screw up on the call, I had the job. ⚪️ 🍜How did you overcome some of the challenges and start to improve at your job? 🍜 When I started at CARV, I really just had to grow as a BD person and then also grow my network. The first few weeks were a little bit rough in terms of deal flow and bringing new partners on. One of my first contacts was actually Sam Steffanina. He was super welcoming and accommodating and that really helped launchpad me into the space a bit more. ⚪️ 🍜 What was the biggest challenge for you? 🍜 I think the hardest thing for me was adjusting to the move. I moved out to Shanghai to join some of the CARV team that was living there, to work alongside them. The Asian work ethic is crazy compared to what I was used to as a 9 to 5 guy his whole life. Then living in Spain, it was like barely nine to two. You would go out and like siesta. That was a massive adjustment. So getting used to the grind, which is universal across Web3, but I felt like it was especially more intense. ⚪️ 🍜 What has been your biggest mistake or loss as well as your biggest win while working at CARV? 🍜 I think my biggest loss was actually Pixels. I discovered pixels and got connected with Luke pretty early on, before the move to Ronin actually, a contact at Animoca. I got introduced and put in a group chat back in IVS, which was in June last year, and I was supposed to meet Luke there and It just never happened. It is a big miss that I didn't grow that relationship more ahead of time and now Pixels is where it's at. The biggest win, I think we've done as a team, collectively, really amazingly. Especially the Q1 of 2024, so I think the growth we've had in Q1 has been a collective win for all of us. ⚪️ 🍜 What are the secrets to building all these relationships? 🍜 I approached BD, relationships, and sales as I want to go make friends with this person. So anytime I'm really talking to someone for the first time, I'm really not hard selling CARV and what we do. I'm just being really chill about it and just trying to get to know the person, share a little about me, et cetera. In person stuff I think is a cheat code. It's very hard to do like BD when nobody knows who you are. ⚪️ 🍜 In Web3, Is the real win for you the relationships? 🍜 So I was trading a ton and I got really into meme coins, and I'm actually pretty big into one right now on Solana so that's how I've made a lot of money this cycle in terms of what I do on chain. All my time during the day is either I'll spend some time in the gym or I'm doing CARV things. To me your network is your net worth. I don't have any plans to leave CARV. I want to make CARV the last job I'll ever have to do. I think the biggest thing I've gotten out of being in Web3 is the friends I've made along the way. 🚨 Below is the full recording of this conversation, I highly suggest giving it a listen! 👇

🍜COOK HOUSE CALLS: KAM PUNIA 🍜 Cook House Calls brings the best founders and builders in the crypto space for a chat. We get a look behind the curtain at the trials and tribulations of being a builder and a founder. Today we're joined by - @Kam_Punia - Founder of @PixionGames and building @fableborne Below is a recap of this weeks episode . . . 🍜 What was your introduction into crypto? 🍜 So in terms of how I got started into crypto, it was 2017 and I fell into the Bitcoin white paper rabbit hole. As a thesis this was something that I was really excited about, and then diving deeper into blockchain technology and permissionless systems. I started to think about how that could be applied to gaming specifically, which is my first and true passion. Fortunately that's when I started to get involved in NFTs. My first angel check was into a company called VeVe, one of the largest mobile marketplaces for licensed digital collectibles. .Back in 2017, though, no one really knew about NFTs or what you could do with them, including myself. So they'd been building for four or five years before they really started to see major adoption. Luckily I had a front seat in their advisory board so I was able to really start to understand all the trials and tribulations this team was going through. So we went through so much before we even got started here at Fableborne and Pixion. ⚪️ 🍜 Can you share about your background before crypto? 🍜 I've been in gaming for 15 years, I started as a game designer working at Kojima Productions on two AAA console titles Metal Gear, Ground Zero series, and then Silent Hill. I moved from moving Kojima Productions, which is owned by Konami, or was owned by Konami, to then joining Konami to lead the Yu Gi Oh brand. Learned so much and that's when I then made a decision to start Pixion. Of all the games I worked on I used to play the original Metal Gear Solid as a teenager. So to be able to work on that, one of the predecessors in that series was, incredible fanboy moment. ⚪️ 🍜 What are some of the major differences between working in some of those companies and now working in Web3, what are the differences in the industries? 🍜 Working in Web2 there was a clear playbook. There were already studios that had been building games. There was a clear production process and pipeline. Tried and tested business models. That changed as mobile came into fruition, and a lot of what we're seeing now was similar to the experience I had when we were building the first Yu Gi Oh! game on mobile. We didn't know how to engage and retain players for years. We didn't have the monetization model that would allow us to scale. You're building up your own knowledge space and then you're trying to iterate on itself as quickly as you can. Even myself with 15 years experience in gaming, my experience matters less because it's not going to tell us, this is a silver bullet and this is how you build a billion dollar collection or a billion dollar ecosystem and game. Where my experience has helped, it has shown me what not to do. When it comes to scaling a team, how to build the right culture in a startup, the way to build a game, what methodologies and dev processes that really help you work with multi disciplined teams, that sort of thing is really helpful. ⚪️ 🍜 Walk us through how you got started with Pixion and Fableborn and what that process has been like? 🍜 So we've been building Fableborn for nearly three years. We definitely lean into our Web2 background and experience when it comes to finding that fun core game. So we have this three stage process where we build an idea that we think can work in the market, that we think has a position that can be an outlier in the space. We prototype that as quickly as possible. So 4 to 6 weeks generally, and we have something quite rough and playable internally. We playtest that, we have to feel that spark and that energy that we believe it's something that we can scale and that has a place in this market. If we don't we kill the game there and then. If we do feel like it's something that we can grow and it can be an outright hit, we then turn that prototype into a vertical slice, still focused on the core game. So no deep progression or a complete meta game, they're very much just a core game polished. Then we put that out into a stealth test, so that's testing with players that don't know anything about the game, our studio, or what we're building. The reason why we do that is just so we don't get false positives. Then we measure generally engagement KPIs and that gives us a clear idea if this game has scalability. From there we benchmark those KPIs in the top 15%, if we're there we continue, if not, we kill the game as well. We're ruthless in the sense that even if we've been building something for six months, if we're seeing in the data that clearly it's not going to be an outright hit early on, we are not shy of killing the game postmortem. Learning a lot from what didn't work and what did and then taking those lessons into a new game. Prior to building Fableborne we killed five prototypes, some after a few weeks, all the way to being bullish on a concept at prototype stage, putting that out live and clearly the market telling us through the data that it's not going to fly. ⚪️ 🍜 What were some of the struggles that you faced early on with building Fableborne? 🍜 I'd say some of the biggest challenges we've found is finding the right people early on. So we focused a lot on not only having those that are hungry, very excited about this new design space, not daunted by the challenges, but excited by the opportunity here. Those that also were happy to be tested, there's a lot of experienced individuals that have a very clear belief that this is what I've done in the past 10 years and that's what I'm going to lean on to find success for the next 10 years. It's not copy paste in that sense. So just finding the right people with a tremendous amount of experience that we can rely on, but we're also really adaptable was important. Then finally, just having the right values, we had a very clear way of how we wanted to work. Also, we're pretty candid, we're quite direct with how we work, but we lead with empathy. Now we've got an incredible team that runs itself in many ways, and it's a result of finding the right people very early on. ⚪️ 🍜 What is your perspective on Web3 gaming overall and where do you think it is going? 🍜 Every year that I'm in it, I'm becoming more and more bullish that absolutely it's inevitable. We just came back from GDC and it is the perception, but also the feelings. Everyone was really excited, everyone was happy to share knowledge. Then on the Web2 side, it's pretty down, it's pretty negative. So you're going to see more sequels, more clones or re-skins of current titles. I see more and more Web2 games becoming Web3 curious because what they're doing right now is starting to break and isn't working. They're realizing that and Web3 is this new design frontier where there's infinite possibilities. There's a few that I'm more bullish on than others. Mobile, for obvious reasons, and it's one of the reasons why we're building on mobile, it's the largest audience, the biggest addressable audience. I think that's going to be the platform that onboards users at best. Secondly, games as a substitute for real money gaming, or games that mimic real money gaming business models. I believe teams that are looking to disrupt that space or create superior models and superior gaming experiences or gamified experiences that resemble real money gaming are definitely onto something. I truly believe that Web3 will have 500+ million players in the next 6-7 years. 🚨 Below is the full recording of this episode, I highly recommend giving it a listen!! 👇

🍜COOK HOUSE CALLS: Mark Lee🍜 Powered by: @TheCatalystOG Host: @0xChanglu CHC is back and for this episode we chatted with - @markjoonlee - Partner and CMO of @SynFuturesDefi building on @Blast_L2 Below is a recap of the conversation . . . 🍜 About Mark Lee and SynFutures🍜 We've been around for quite a while now, since the end of 2021. Polygon first, then expanded to Blast like three weeks ago, right when the mainnet went live. If I go back to the start of my career, I started in TradFi. I was working for a boutique private equity firm in mid market manufacturing, mostly in the defense industry. Having worked with a lot of product driven companies, I wanted the experience of seeing a project from zero to one and then to scale beyond that. I decided to join SynFutures pretty early on, it was like months after the project started. I worked with them first on the agency side and then ultimately decided to join full time and roll up someone on my team into the project as well. We did 22 billion in volume since 2021, in the last three weeks we've done like 3 billion. ⚪️ 🍜3 billion in volume in the last 3 weeks? 🍜 Just to put that into context, our highest trading volume day, our all time high for V1 and V2 on Polygon was $110 million. That was kind of an anomaly, it just happened once and average volumes were quite a bit lower. But now we've been consistently hitting like $300 million a day. Just a few days ago we had $500 million in 24 hour volume. It's not one single factor that's attributing to our growth but I think everything's kind of working together. ⚪️ 🍜So could an enterprising person guess how much revenue your platform made? 🍜 They can see it on some platforms. We're still in the process of integrating with all the data aggregators, but I'm pretty sure there are some platforms that track fees generated. You can just look at our fee schedule and calculate what fees generated looks like. ⚪️ 🍜What's that ballpark number according to public info? 🍜 According to public info, maybe $300m volume a day? It's like it's almost like centralized exchanges or DEXs basically, but there are other pieces to it. We give back a part of those fees to liquidity providers on the AMM side and then some of that goes into our insurance fund to cover socialized loss. ⚪️ 🍜What was the process as you started growing your marketing company and taking on your first crypto clients, what was that process like? 🍜 The hardest thing for me was blockchain is a very technical space. I don't have a technical background, I've never taken a single coding class. So I spent a lot of time just reading white papers, trying to figure out what I was reading and it took me a while. I think that was the toughest transition. Even now I think it's still a problem where you'll have a bunch of engineers who get together and can't really sell their products. For some reason that seems to still be an unsolved problem, so there will always be work for different marketers. Not only different marketers but product strategy and product management. ⚪️ 🍜Can you talk about some of the challenges that you had in growing SynFutures, what was the hardest part? 🍜 Anyone who's built a purpose product, or even just a DEX in general, will tell you it's not that simple. It's a two sided marketplace in the sense that you need to drive traders, but in order to drive traders you need liquidity. If the traders get there too early and there aren't enough liquidity providers, there's no depth in the pools. Which means it's just unusable. Then the traders will churn if the liquidity providers get there too early and there's no activity, there's just no incentive in them. So timing is very important, you have to launch both programs at the same time to attract both, but that's easier said than done. The most challenging part is definitely attracting liquidity. ⚪️ 🍜Do you find that your project is skewed towards whales, or is it lots of small retail users who pop on just trade and then leave? 🍜 It depends on the platform, but for us we've always seen a pretty good distribution of like your small to midsize retail users. Part of it was we weren't doing any heavy marketing. We weren't running any incentives and the product was still, I don't want to say basic, but it was what we considered an MVP, a minimally viable product. But our V3, it's a lot more robust and we have a lot more functionality with it. ⚪️ 🍜What do you think is the future of crypto?🍜 Truthfully, I like GambleFi because it knows what it is. It leans into why crypto succeeds right now. It's the speculative aspect of it. I think about meme coins a lot, I have a love and love and hate relationship with them. I used to think, oh meme coins are shit. It's a poor representation of what's going on in Web3. But the more I think about it, I realize meme coins are pretty much the trojan horse for Web3 adoption. It's shiny, it gets people's attention. On the other side meme coins reflect the community driven values and ideals of Web3. So I used to hate it more and I hate it less now, I kind of understand why it exists. ⚪️ 🍜Do you want to share two or three of your favorite investments? 🍜 There is one project, they're trying to do something similar to what Polygon is doing with the aggregation layer, but focused on ZK aggregation. Anything aggregation based is interesting because one of the most challenging parts is attracting liquidity and doing it on one network is hard enough. When you're trying to go multi-chain and ultimately I think all projects would need to be multi-chained to some extent. I think aggregation layers kind of solve part of that. They bring in cross-chain liquidity, cross-chain composability, which just creates a more seamless experience for users. Then there's an RWA project that is tokenizing equities. You can think of it like tokenizing Coinbase stocks one to one. A token that represents a one to one share, it's one to one backed. I think it brings a real use case to DeFi and it solves something more impactful, you're solving an immediate problem. 🚨 Below is the full recording of this conversation, I highly recommend giving it a listen! 👇