Rocket 🎃

Some news to share: I am stepping back in as CEO of Yuga Labs. Wylie and I are grateful for all the contributions and operational rigor Daniel has brought to the company, and appreciate his thoughtfulness and mentorship over the past year. I’m reinvigorated to be taking the reins for our next chapter. Looking at what’s ahead for Yuga, we need to execute with a more cryptonative focus across the entire company. There’s a couple things that are top of mind for Wylie and I: -BAYC: Appreciate everyone coming out to the first “Bored Meeting” this past weekend. To sum up our thinking around BAYC in the briefest possible terms, the utility of BAYC comes from the network. From everybody who is in the club. That’s why ApeFest is so special, why Made by Apes has seen explosive adoption, why the clubhouse itself is so hype, and why BAYC is able to collab with some of the biggest brands in the world. We want to unshackle the BAYC team at Yuga as much as possible to execute against its vision. More focus, more agility. So it can do the above, and create the space for the magic and crazy shit we used to get up to more often. Focus and agility requires autonomy. Step 1 is already done. A new company, “BAYC LLC”, was created as a Yuga subsidiary and will be responsible for everything BAYC. We’ve got a crack team of ninjas on the BAYC team, but there’s still a couple important roles to be filled over there. -Otherside: Otherside should be the living room of web3. The default space you go to in order to play and hang with your community (no matter what community that is). Otherside is also a massive swing for the fences. We’ve got a lot of work to do. The only way it gets built properly is if you all come in and experience it more often. When we set out to build Otherside, the goal was to make it a public, iterative process. I’m confident in the work our team has done to get us back to this plan, and our communication is going to ramp up this week starting with “Apes Come Home.” And we need to follow it up with a lot more frequent communication starting now and throughout the year. -Gaming: We need to approach games at Yuga with a tighter focus on what works. For us, that’s a barbell approach: 1) crazy fun play patterns that any kid at heart can enjoy. The more wildly fun and mass market, the better: like Dookey Dash. This is all about opening the funnel and flooding our ecosystem with millions of new users, and leveraging that to create opportunities for creators, IP holders, and pro players. Stoked for how this is coming together with our friends at @farawaygg 2) Cryptonative mechanics and platforms, like [redacted]. We’re going on three years since Yuga was founded, and we couldn’t be more excited about some of the stuff we’ve got in the pipeline. Extremely grateful for the team that’s assembled here across all our brands. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I couldn’t imagine doing it with any other team, or any other community of builders. Thanks for your support. For those who will be there, I’ll see you at NFT Paris.