Paki McCormick
Appearances
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The Bidding War
There are people who are actually building and talking to museums and writing code and figuring out the legal structure and setting up the wallets and the partnerships and doing all of these things in a very short amount of time. At some point I was writing a different piece that week and I was just like, you know what, screw it.
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The Bidding War
I'm going all in on this outsider on the inside, explaining what was going on. You were like a participant observer.
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The Bidding War
Yeah, people were excited. Somebody was wearing a tri-corner hat. People were excited. People were getting into it. I wore a red, white, and blue hat. I didn't have any just straight-up America gear. People were, I think, a little bit in shock that they had pulled this all together. And the fact that we were even bidding and had a person at Sotheby's bidding on our behalf.
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The Bidding War
That's a really good question. One, it was the fact that everybody's talking about Web3 as this democratizing force and it's for the people and blah, blah, blah. And then this document that represents democracy and we the people and all of that comes up for auction. And so you can get a group of what ended up being almost 20,000 internet strangers to come together to buy this document together.
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The Bidding War
It was too much to pass up on and too beautiful of a symbol to miss out on. It's funny.
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The Bidding War
Totally, and I'm not dismissing that. I think the magic is that you could have fun doing dumb shit short term, and also as a byproduct of that, it also tests models that could be used for less dumb things and more impactful things over time. But I don't know, yeah, it's a copy of the Constitution,
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The Bidding War
But it's buying this thing together with a group of people that represents democracy and all the things that you love about this country. I don't know. Everything's kind of made up anyway.
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The Bidding War
Certainly the ability to have democracy without total chaos is one of the interesting things about DAOs.
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The Bidding War
was night and day. And this is why you progressively decentralize and you don't just open it up immediately. Because it was peaceful and the most well-run startup you've seen in the background. Everyone just having a daily stand-in, getting their tasks and going and doing those tasks and then checking in and getting help when needed in the core contributor group.
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The Bidding War
And then the main Discord was like, When Token, all the things that DAOs get shit on for was happening in that main group and it was total chaos and there's no way that you could possibly keep up with it. And people are guessing the bad intentions of the organizers and all of that kind of stuff. those bad intentions didn't exist, but just groups can kind of take on a mind of their own.
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The Bidding War
Which is why I do think it makes sense to really figure out what the structures are before fully decentralizing, like Constitution doubted. Which was an intentional decision, because had we just said, all right, everybody has a vote now, what are we going to do? We would have had someone wearing a 69-man costume go to Sub-B's. and replace Brooke as our bidder.
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The Bidding War
It can get out of control if you don't have the right kind of framework in place from the beginning. The point is not that it's fully democratic in everything, it's that people have more of a say and more ownership, particularly over time as the product is more mature and doesn't rely on that kind of coordination or product vision from one person or a small group of people.
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The Bidding War
It felt special for sure. I don't know if it felt historic or... I mean, at the end of the day, we lost an auction to buy the Constitution. And so it's not like the world changed. I do think it was a good opportunity to show that this other structure is kind of out there and people are going to do some wild things with it.
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The Bidding War
Here's Packy. And then, lo and behold, those people were the lucky ones because I, like an idiot, took my ETH back and missed out on the pop. But the people who had to keep their $50 in because it didn't make sense to take it out, all of a sudden their $50 was worth $2,000 within a week. So dumb. I mean, I know people who made like a couple hundred thousand dollars by accidentally like leaving.
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The Bidding War
I would have made, I put five Ethan. I would have made, I think at the peak, something like $900,000 had I just like waited a day to refund my money.
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The Bidding War
My name is Paki McCormick. I write a newsletter called Not Boring and run a venture fund called Not Boring Capital. And what does Not Boring Capital invest in? Not Boring Capital invests in early stage companies across the spectrum in tech. It's kind of the biggest categories that I invest in are Web3 and crypto companies, fintech, a little bit of consumer SaaS, and a long tail of companies.
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The Bidding War
Not foreign capital invests in tech companies, both kind of Web 2 and Web 3.
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The Bidding War
I really got back into crypto earlier in 2021 after being away from the space for eight years because I was mad at myself for selling Bitcoin in 2013. Like a life-changing amount of Bitcoin. A life-changing amount? I bought 38 Bitcoin in 2013 at 100 each and sold them for 150 each. And at the peak before this recent crash, I think it was like $2.5 million worth of Bitcoin or something that I sold.
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The Bidding War
Yeah. So it meant that I kind of stayed away from the space, and so I think I came into it with kind of a fresh perspective, writing more about other tech companies and business strategy and all of that type of stuff, and having operated in a very difficult business. I worked for a company called Bruder before.
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The Bidding War
So I think I came into it trying to say, all right, cool, crypto seems really interesting, and Web3 seems very, very interesting. What are the fundamentals here and how does this actually help you build a better product for customers and all of that as opposed to approaching it like a religion?
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The Bidding War
So instead of it going just VC investing in a potential drug to ultimately going public and having a public biotech stock, there's this in-between point. where by having the patient community involved, one, you could actually get the trials filled more quickly. It also helps with regulators to have the patient community themselves behind it.