 Kia ora kato, nā mā i haere mai. Welcome to today's live session from EHF and today we've got two guests. We're going to have Oliver Bruce, one of our C3 cohorts from the fellowship and he is a Kiwi investor and he does lots of amazing things and you are going to have a great session today. I will let Oliver take over the session but just a few housekeeping things. We are recording so the session is going to be on our website if you want to watch it afterwards. And I think Oliver will take you through how he wants to do questions and Q&A through this but it is a live session that we want people to have interaction with. So Oliver, over to you. Awesome and thanks Michelle. Hey everyone, I'm stoked to be able to do this with you all today because the story that I think we're about to hear is one of the coolest stories that I've heard in New Zealand. And when I first heard it I was like we've got to work out how to have this told. So I'm really glad that EHF was able to provide us with the platform to be able to tell the story and I think this is a really good group to hear it. I mean just a little bit of context on me. C3 work in predominantly in micro-mobility, electrical bias and scooters but I do crypto as well. And so that's where I kind of came to this world through a couple of connections. I just want to thank Stefan for making some initial connections which got me to John to David. So thank you, great to have you on. Excellent. Well hey David, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I feel like in some ways what we should do is just start right at the kind of very top-line level. Like can you tell us a little bit about yourself and then also Vivi and where you're at at this stage. Hey guys, thanks for having me on. So yeah, good morning wherever you guys are. My name is David co-founder and CEO of Vivi. Basically we are a D-commerce platform home to premium NFT digital collectibles. We give users easy access to digital collectible in the palm of their hand through a mobile device. Vivi offers an end-to-end solution and the journey allows users to come participate in a fandom. We believe that everyone's a fan of something. Whether it's an action hero from a movie or a superhero from your favourite comic and the NFT collectibles are designed to be like a physical collectible. They are available all in 3D and can be bought alive through the augmented reality function on your phone. And where users now can take photo and share amongst their favourite social media. And when you are missing out at collectible, you can navigate through our secondary marketplace to help you to complete that set. Excellent. And for anybody who hasn't gone and checked it out, you can download the Vivi app on the app store, sign up, get an account and go on and have a look and see what's available. But David, the things that you have on that store kind of blew me away. Because it wasn't just, I think the story with NFTs to date has really been this like, ah it's crypto punks and it's all these other things where nobody really knows who the artists are that much. I think it's now coming into the mainstream where you're starting to see a lot of bigger artists starting to get into the NFTs. But the thing that blew me away was just the, you know, who you had on. So do you want us to talk through the kind of the licensing that you have specifically? Yeah, so we started this business about four and a half years ago. I mean, I'm sure we're going to be talking a lot of men points on that. But touching base in the licensing really started that process about three and a half years ago. And, you know, companies that we have on board that we can mention, you know, which is available. We have likes like Marvel, DC Warner Brothers, Sony, Universal, Firecom, you know, Capcom, a lot of gaming company and a lot of secondary tier of studio. Pretty much we capture a lot of these IP owners in the business of Fendham and producing these superhero entertainment and bringing them all into one app is basically what our goal was. And what we really wanted to do was to produce a premium app where all these, you know, digital collectible will be living in one. Awesome. And so, OK, because the thing that blew me away was when you started talking to me about like how these different things have been doing. So you sold how many DeLorean's and how long? We did about 87,500 DeLorean and I think that was sold within a couple hours. We generate, I think that Pacific series was about $6 million US in revenue. That was quite exceptional. Certainly, you know, the NFT is really living up. And, you know, ever since we still see the growth still continue to, you know, thrive. Totally. And to give context to everybody else, when I'm saying that DeLorean, what I mean is the back to the future DeLorean from the movie. They sold digital models and different sizes and they sold out in a couple of hours and was about $6 million worth of stuff. And I see that you've just launched obviously Spider-Man and then you've got the Mighty Marble series and all these sorts of things. So you've got, you know, some of the largest brands that I can see on board coming to work with you. And I just, the thing that kind of blew me away is like there's a little company in New Zealand that somehow managed to end up with the NFT rights to all of these major global brands. And I, that's the part of the story that I really want to unpack today. So can you take me, like what was your background? How did you even get into this? Yeah, so I grew up in Auckland, North Shore. You know, when I left school, I started up my own retail shop called Fagabond Games. So for those of you know, you know, we do all the board games, the Pokemon card, the magic, the gathering, the war hammer. Pretty much back in 97, people think is the, you know, the super nerdy star. And that business has been thriving is still continuing after 25 years. I now have stores overseas and disruption business in different parts of Asia, all to do with gaming and retail. So I come from very strong IP background in terms of dealing with these intellectual properties and understanding what makes a collective really want to have that ownership. I mean, four and a half years ago, me and Michael found that we started understanding this blockchain thing. And this all really came about from one of my general manager and one of my gaming company introduced me into this blockchain technology. And that's where all this brainstorming comes in and, you know, where we are today. So like the part I'm trying to work out as you go, how did you actually get some licenses? Because you turn up to some of these places, you talk, you're going and talk to Marvel, you're going to talk to DC or whoever, you know, Warner Brothers, whoever it is. And you're some random Kiwi guy who owns the gaming shops. Like, can you tell me that what that conversation was like? How did you even get the intro in the first place? Yeah, so, you know, a major part of our success today in adoption, as you mentioned, is all about licensing. And I caught up, I think it's about 2017, around the end of 2017, I was up in Hong Kong at the 2018 beginning. And I caught up with a very old friend of mine who is by a gentleman called Al Khan. A very well-known individual, outstanding, being in the licensing business all his life, bought some of the most fantastic brands into the global launching, especially into the US. You know, I was responsible putting Pokemon on air in the US through his four kids' entertainment. So I saw him in Hong Kong and I was trying to sell him the idea that, you know, I really do believe that one day this D-commerce, what we call this digital commerce business is going to rise. And, you know, our idea is to try to get as much brand and license involved. Now, just so everyone understand the context of this, three and a half years ago, when you walk into a ballroom or a meeting and you start using the word non-fungible tokens or NFT, people just think number one, you're super nerd. Number two is they don't actually believe that the product will ever be, you know, have a demand for this. We had a pretty good early start with some smaller secondary brand IP and they're really kind of able to give us some sort of proof of concept of artwork, what the product will look like, how we engineer. So we will continue to turn up and try to get a booking into these large studio for a meeting. But let me tell you, it was extraordinary, extremely difficult. Number one is people don't believe in it. Number two is the minute they heard there's a blockchain, they pretty much think it's a scam or they think it's a Bitcoin or something. You know, but we really demonstrate as a Kiwi every time we go back to these studios, we show them something new and something that really moving ahead, regardless if they're going to come on or not, but we really wanted to showcase and have the opportunity to let them understand how they could look at monetising the IP they have through these digital rounds. So a lot of these IP that we have recently announced, like Marvel partnership, these partnership has not just really begun like two, three months ago when the hype of NFTs around. It was really being worked on for a number of years, and some of them are multiple years in the relationship to or to where we are today. But certainly it's a learning curve, you know, because as you say, all of a, we just nobody in New Zealand, we're pre-revenue, we're a start-up, you know, we have very small funds. We don't fit your average life, you know, major IP studios target area to work with. And so when you, so the contracts that you typically signed, are they their licensed agreements, you're typically locked, you've got some level of exclusivity for some period of time? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. Number one, most important thing is that all these brands and all these IP house, they do understand their brain power and they do understand the, you certainly don't want to be overusing it and over exposing it. So generally, when you give someone the rights to use that Pacific image, appear in, you know, on a special digital, you will not want it to be reproduced again and again because that brings out, you know, the collectability basically fizzles away. So everything we do are very limited. We mint XML and they sell out and that's it. Basically the secondary market takes it away just like you would in a physical world when you license, you know, some physical final toys, you put a limited edition on them. Once you sell out, the idea is that you don't reproduce it. So to keep that collectors, you know, happy. Yeah. And for folks just to give you kind of a bit of context on this, so I wanted to understand how this works. So I went into VV and I bought Spider-Man and this is Spider-Man in my lounge. So you can see like this is the sort of thing that you end up buying is a, it's not a great image, but yeah, anyhow, the, you know, you can go and purchase one of these things and it shows up and you're able to kind of place it into your room. So people are building whole collections of these things and the Spider-Man one in particular came out with five different editions and people got really excited about buying all five. And I was not so excited. I bought the one, you know, most common version, but maybe there will be resale value at some point if it does come out. So, I mean, David, that's a really, it's a really useful context. I think for me, certainly I didn't understand the collectibles business per se, you know, I just sort of like, oh yeah, cool. I figured that there's something cool there, but the folks who buy these things own them, right? And so that's the sort of, you actually are owning something, obviously it's licensed from Marvel to you. You now own it to yours. You can sell it. Yeah, pretty much that's correct. And what you have there was the first appearance of Spider-Man. And on top of that is the first Marvel NFT. And I think that sort of Spider-Man you got as a common is we call it common because we mint a little bit more so everyone can have something. If you, you know, we can talk about a little bit how we release these product and why we have these different scarcity. But one of the key aspect is to ensure that the fans have the opportunity to own one. And then we do the animated and we have an interactive one where you tap the screen. It does the jump. It does the spider web. And that's a secret rare, which is much lower mint number. And so just so I can get context on this as well. So when can you, can you give the numbers on what the Spider-Man sales were? Yeah. And to be very honest, the beauty about our app and the blockchain is that everything is, you know, transparent. I mean, we can help by just going online. Now we did about 60,000 Spider-Man. And we bought them in five different levels from the commons, the uncommon, the rare, the outer rare and the secret rare. So the three more rarity of them, I think we did about three million us in the first two or three seconds when they open up to the public. And then the, the uncommon sold out within an hour. And then the common edition, which is the largest run, sold out within, I think, 23 or 24 hours. And I think that drop combined was about four million us in gross revenue. So it was a very successful drop, considering it is just one character. And the Marvel universe had thousands of characters. Totally. Well, I was in that and I got a message from Donty who introduced us and he was like, hey, hey, hey, you've got to go get the Spider-Man. It's still available. So I jumped in. But look, I know as well that I'm only one of what, 400,000 users, or at least I was when we first talked. So I'm kind of curious. I want to get to the story, which is you launched in January and at this stage you were at 400k at the start of the month, more or less, right? Yeah. So around mid January, we open up. And when we open, we had about 50 internal test users when we fight it in. You know, they were either early bakers of our project. And since we open up now, I had a look online. I think we have about over 570,000 download active users could be around what you mentioned about the 400,000 plus mark. Yeah. So definitely still growing, obviously, with more and more announcement, partnership coming on board. We'd like to see this. But the first year, our projection was about 60,000 users. So we definitely under a bit of pressure, you know, to scale. And like any startup, we never thought this were going to be this many users today. You know, and they come with great responsibility and challenges on its own. Yeah. And for folks who might want to go check this out afterwards, one of the things that John T. suggested that I do, that I really went down a very long rabbit hole with, is go and check out the YouTube community for the BB community. Because the folks who go and collect these things, like they're crazy. I mean, in a lovely way, they're just very passionate community members. And like Twitter erupts when there's a celebration thing. Again, I had no visibility over any of this. And I think one of those things that is really interesting is trying to understand, especially if anybody spends any time in the crypto world, like economy is still flying under the radar. And so Dave, I want to ask, you know, like, obviously, like, talk me through that part, because there's, you know, you've launched on what was called GoChain, and just, you know, they're like, what was that process like for launching? And then why have you not been sort of traditionally recognised by the community or the crypto community as sort of currently stands? Yeah. So a couple of things that we have done, this project's been going on for since 2017. And obviously the brainstorming started earlier. But a few major things, as we know the blockchain world moves extremely fast. You're almost talking every six weeks, eight weeks or six months. It feels like it's another light year. Things are moving fast. GoChain fit what we needed to do three years ago when we start this business. But we always knew that we're going to come to a blockage where scalability and either transaction speed or guest fee. At the beginning of running this business, we thought about many, many multiple levels. Obviously, there's a lot of moving parts when you are in an NFT or token business. Things you need to look out for. You need to look at the license business that we have, the technology behind that and building the actual app and so on. So when we chose the blockchain that we are on at that time, it fits what we wanted. Low guest fees, environmental friendly, which is a major issue and talked about and blockchain or NFT, you know. And also most important, that's what we needed to do. But now, and I think moving forward around October, September, October, we are moving into a new blockchain, which is going to be a layer to Ethereum, which is a public knowledge now. We're working with a counterpart in Australia. Great team. They've been in the NFT gaming business for the past four years and become one of the most successful NFT game exists. So we're moving into that. And once again, because it gives us multiple layers of complexity for our business and as well as scalability. As you understand that Ethereum being on the blockchain is quite crucial for mass adoption. Yeah, I think the part that, and if I may provide some reflection, I think the reason that we haven't seen you turn up has been because GoChain is sort of relatively obscure sidechain for Ethereum that it doesn't have ERC712721 compliance. So it's one of these things of when you ship, I can see what's going to happen if you shipped across to a mutable and all of a sudden you're sort of like sitting on that equivalent of a compatible chain. And I think at that point, like the penny will drop for a lot of people, but like holy crap, wait a second. There's some group in here who won't have the NFTs locked out for all of these incredible brands and they're already on Ethereum. In actual fact, they've already got a community that's a juggernaut. And it just, yeah, those things will click and I don't think they have quite yet. And so then, you know, it's part of the reason I find it such an exciting story. And obviously right now, also such an exciting story. Yeah, so look, I mean, I want to talk a little bit about the company journey for you because it was, you know, like, I, you know, when you and I were talking and you said, you know, we would go into these meetings and try and explain what an NFT was. I mean, I've been in America for a while as well. So people kind of, you know, it is that story. How these things were, how did you, how did you, how was it to kind of go from, hey, we've got an idea to, we're trying to raise money and then, you know, obviously as well, I know that you had a kind of a nudge to launch in January. So just talk to us that part. So the first, I will say the first three years, we were almost travelling one city or one country ten day or every two weeks. Pretty much as you know, if you want to be in the business and you need to learn fast, you need to be in front of people's face. So we went through a journey. Pretty much will turn up every blockchain or crypto meetup events. We will be in Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Korea, it will be pretty much flying everywhere. And that community just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I remember going to consensus, you know, I think the second year they had a host of the third year and the event was just huge, humongous. And you know, the eruption of the rooms, everyone's all positive note. Part of that was all really in the ICO hype. You know, a lot of people went through that and joined in. We were kind of the, really the underdog because we believe in the NFT is going to be a huge thing where everyone in the blockchain is all talking about protocols, you know, raising money to build this, you know, product, the whole world will use. We really believe that while you have a great protocol, you have a great blockchain, you need to have applications. So we set ourselves to be one of the best application. And I do have them. It was extremely, extremely hard to raise money. I mean, we had one friends and family round pretty much. That's all we managed to raise. And then we had to do an IEO in Singapore with our Singapore company. And that really just, and it was a very small raise. And just so you're not in the context, there's company raising billions or hundreds of million. I think we've done little, less than 3 million in our IEO. And during that period, you know, whatever we raised, the market was gone wintertime, you know, the crypto winter really came. So whatever we raised, you pretty much took a huge discount on it, on what the real-life money you got on hand during this crowdsale. We, you know, we lived through, we had pretty much on the shoestring budget. Myself and Dan, we took no salary, no wages, you know, every now and then we have a very small joint just to pay, cover some costs. We pretty much had to move up to Asia because it was cheap to live there. You know, it was probably like one-fifth what we pay here. You could, you know, there was days that we'll be on $1.50 US meal a day because the convenience store was just cheap. You pretty much have to live through that grant. We built a team and we found all the teams pretty much remote, which we can touch it a little bit later on how we run. Yeah, so racing funds was extremely difficult. I think around December, January last year, January this year, December last year, we were pretty much down to the last couple of weeks money left. It will be pretty much week on week. And the great thing is FISA American Express came very, very handy. And, you know, I mentioned a lot of time. If anyone was converting their debt into equity, they would be my largest shareholder. We work on the string of closing. Myself and Dan, I think we did talk about three or four times in the morning. He was in my bubble, so we were living together and we'll say that we pulled the string today. And, you know, many of our FISA told us, hey, you really should go to the market and just see if the app had any opportunity to live. We decided to go live. And what you know today is basically, I think I remember the first couple of hundred bucks of sale came through and I told Dan, you know, I think we could pay for the web, you know, Shopify or the web thing that is running the subscription on. And then we had a couple of thousand and I said, oh, we can pay half the month wages for that developer. And pretty much the whole business will be like that. Obviously, part of this whole scaling is all about the server and we had AWS as one of our main key partner. And I tell you, I remember reading every single person, you know, and tried to get some Amazon credit and it's incredibly hard. Amazon basically say, well, you need to be infested by some VC or someone put something in. And luckily, one of our FISA that you guys will know of may some connection. We will overthrow the credit came next morning into account. I've got an email from New Zealand head go, you're very lucky. I don't know who you spoke to, but we've been told to give you this credit. And basically that bought us another week of, you know, keeping this business going. And around January, as you know, we went public live and that number really just escalate into what you see today. And it's a huge pressure point. You grow in a business from no money where you can't hire people to update. There was many, many times that we talked about, do we freeze new sign-ups or do we just let it go? So a lucky moment in social making we had to do. And with that, because the thing that kind of struck me about that story was you were so close to being dead and then at the same time as soon as you launched, it feels to me like not an overnight success because it was three years of backstory and all that sort of stuff to get to that point. But as soon as there was such a clear demand from the customer, like an incredible product market fit there, as soon as you launched. And yeah, it's just a kind of a beautiful, I mean, I'm really happy, obviously, that you've made it through and that you've been able to do it. But the one part, you know, there's a specific thing in there was just like we say it was really hard to raise and the folks that you talked to, like I assume there was just a real, I know at the moment in the New Zealand early stage investment community, it's really challenging to raise for crypto, even now still. It was almost impossible. So we came back around March 2020 and we had to take the last flight from San Francisco to New Zealand. We actually had a couple of VC meeting, one with SoftBank and a few other major venture capitalists. And we arrived on a Friday evening in San Francisco and the COVID basically followed us faster than ever. On Saturday morning, we got a letter from, you know, these VC starting to cancel. So we had about an eight day plan, how we're going to pitch it, how we're going to proceed to show them, because we actually had that proof of concept by then. Unfortunately, we had to take the last flight from New Zealand back to New Zealand. We arrived in pretty much within I think 48 or 72 hours after landing, New Zealand went into lockdown. I think the first four months during this COVID crisis was extremely tough because there was no VC's taking call. I think the precaution for them is that they really want to see how this whole thing plan out. So on top of really very tough, apart from the pandemic coming, we almost had everything. We were, you know, facing the wind the whole way. The success of what we had was purely in our mental strength to carry out through. We were running it low in cash and we had to downsize dramatically during the time, and therefore also that held us back on when we can launch the product, just so we have enough bin right. And you are right. Any crypto or any startup, you know, never mind what industry you are in, it is very, very tough to raise money, especially when you're a New Zealand business. A lot of the VC like to see your base up there, you're in a valley, amongst all the other tech startups, they feel more comfortable. A lot of the VC we spoke to, you know, or hesitate about infesting down here because they don't understand what the tech's requirement for them is, et cetera, back and forward. So it was very, very challenging. So the other part of that fundraising story, I'm conscious of trying to move on. So you did an IEO in an initial exchange offering on the Bitforics, which is based in Singapore, as a way to raise capital. You did that back in which year? Yeah, that was around 2019. And with that, like, you know, did you see that as an alternative? Like what I'm trying to think about is if there are crypto companies in New Zealand, do you think that that's a viable route for them to be going and raising capital or does it end up just with way more complexity for the sort of business that you do? Yeah, one of the major part is about navigating through jurisdictions and legislations. At that moment, that time when we were planning in late 2018 to do IEO or race crowdfunding, the New Zealand crypto of digital law and these assets were not very clear. There was few jurisdictions, a little bit better. There's few countries up in Asia where one was, I think, East European countries. What we wanted to do is to ensure that we set up a proper entity offshore that's, you know, different than what we do in New Zealand to run that for the purposes that we don't want to have any issues with legislations not being clear and regulatory issue. It was a very clear decision for us at Singapore was going to be the most welcome and friendly country in crypto. I believe a lot of digital asset exchange or crypto business are coming out from there and we're seeing a huge rough and it continues. They're very welcoming if you have great technology, great project, it works well. Yeah. The relationship, if you can just be really clear with me, so between the only token which is what was raised in the IEO that was raised on Bitforics and the New Zealand company, which as I understand it, is the one that actually has the licenses and effectively issues the and generates the capital. So the New Zealand company actually owns the platform that all these NFT sits on is crowdfunding. We raise funds and with the funds that we raise we managed to secure what we call the first layer of the license source and these license source we're minting these NFTs to be on this platform which is run in New Zealand. So really there's a license agreement between the two entities to ensure that it's very transparent particularly. New Zealand is a more of a company that will be is running the show, running empowering these technology. The Singapore company is really about the minting of these collectibles to be sold on the platform. So they're segregated one is very platform we have a B2B product we have a B2C product where the Singapore one is very much into the minting of the NFT and behind it the engines. Yeah, I know that there are folks who and as someone who isn't invested and has been looking at this I'm going to try to dig in and understand that relationship and also where the only token is and what value of it is and how that works and that's still if I'm totally honest still feels to me slightly okay but one of those things that I'm sure that the only token is the one that's currently traded on the chain and is really like so the Komi tied to that sort of thing Awesome, hey look I'm conscious of the time just for also for folks who are on the call I'm keen to do probably another 25 minutes or so of talking to David and then I'd love to go to questions for you so if you've got anything feel free to drop them into chat and then I think we can get to that in a little bit David, so one of the things obviously you said you know you ended up going largely remote for your team to your workforce and a bit of build for this can you talk me through that, like how hard does it seem to get talent, obviously like there's been a challenge with getting people into New Zealand specifically was it, did you have to do that because of that or Yeah, I mean couple reason is number one, we saw out to be the best at what we do and you know for the best you really need to look for global talent issue worked very well with us everyone is actually remote and you know one way or another we do we do have small offices up in Asia where you know we no longer actively using due to COVID now we're growing from about 6-7 employees now to around 30 what we have found work for us is to ensure that we have number one is every time is on COVID if we need help, support that's number one and number two is we really go you know especially our engineering team the lead in our engineering team goes you know go through a very high caliber of testing on engineers we go through a number of cuts and then generally all these talents are based either US, Europe, we're having there Southeast Asia some of the issue around talents in New Zealand is that we it's in the scent industry already blockchain is very new so to get coders, to get engineers in Pacific industry and the language that we write in et cetera for the app blockchain is only really small part of our business we got inside the app issue you've got the store, you've got the marketplace we have the social fee which is a quite key part why we become successful so we just want to make sure that the talents are accessible globally yeah so with that so you contract with the New Zealand company has it been a problem that I want to ask the question because I know we've got some New Zealand government folks on the call, that sort of thing what are the opportunities that we would have specifically around talent if we're thinking about the crypto space how can we better support in that space I think number one is what anything to do with crypto New Zealand's a great easy entry to do business here and many people know I think we rank on one of the top in the world where transparency no corruption it's extremely easy to set up a company here I think as a country we're very welcoming entrepreneurs to be here but specifically in crypto or on blockchain the problem where it comes to is that you have raw blocks the minute you tell your bank you work on blockchain they close your account it's free so they don't even understand or they don't want to understand I know a number of them we as a company my banking relationship even the bank I bank worked for 25 years didn't even want to talk to me about it so we will reject it so that's number one is that you can be a very friendly country to easily set these things up but if other things doesn't really come along it does turn people off and you know legislation I guess we really need to understand that this is going to be a new class of asset if it's not an asset then you say it's not if it is how do we legislate it more clarity and once you have clarity more and more entrepreneurs or programmers will start jumping in because they see opportunity through in every industry where it's all about opportunity people see clear opportunity they don't want to be labelled as criminals or scams or any of these it's really to understand how we can adopt this and encourage people I note that there's a New Zealand so the parliament at the moment is doing an investigation doing review of crypto space and if anybody here has an understanding of that the terms of reference on this are pretty terrible it's all about how it's being used to enable money wandering and all that sort of stuff with no kind of look out into what the opportunities might be for the space it's just a frustration that I generally had but yeah if there were sort of specific things government could be doing either about fundraising, hiring or talent where could they be assisting and helping more in this space yeah I think education is going to be a quite key sector and really welcoming people to come down under you know put on things like what you we're doing here today people understand what the frustrations clarity we had quite a bit of problem about how we can spend our R&D money or obviously we were not a huge employer in New Zealand based because most of our employees or contractors are offshore so therefore for us to claim our credits is almost impossible to navigate because we don't meet any of those limitations infrastructure I think we have you know I speak to a lot of other people in the industry and they as we know up in the Asia especially in China the crypto mining is now being moved out and a lot of them are going to taxes are the part of the world I have spoke to people who believe that the geothermal plant we have in New Zealand these excess power could be doing things you know there's a lot of great ideas things coming out that you know once again without clarity and government support on these we are missing out I mean what we really need to understand that the creative content is going to be here to stay because people are buying more and more of these digital content whether that's NFT or other ways when you have a rice and these creative content being purchased ownership of digital content will raise rice and people will want to store these digitally and wallets or in different forms or platforms so we really have a huge opportunity here moving on to you know to welcome these and there's gaming companies I spoke to this week thinking you know how they can integrate NFT into games and we sing article out here in New Zealand especially reportedly last week that you know the gaming sector finally is getting some attention and it could be one of our biggest exporter I mean we would like to think you know all these will help to contribute a lot more to speed things up Excellent Just as a specific one Binu who's at FMA just noted things please connect on the debanking issue he's trying to sort it as well so yeah it's been a widespread issue we'll connect you after the call yeah and now I want to I know that there's a number of people in here who are saying one how do I'm best but we'll come back to that what's your vision for leaving from here on out one of the things that really struck me when we were doing this the NFTs are interesting but they're like a byproduct of what we're trying to build I'd be very honest when we start to raise the money our white paper of our business plan was so huge and that could be possibly one of the reasons why we couldn't raise money because we were not very focused in one specific area we chose the digital collectible at the end to go as our MVP product simply because we knew we can get the brains we are a force behind the security so we do have another product that's a hardware product that allows digital assets to sit on and it's really a secure coal storage wallet really as you know in 2016-17 all you read on the papers was the exchange got had someone take your computer taking this digital asset so we thought for us to have these brand on board you really need to demonstrate that you have security so we built security product for these assets to sit on for these brands to really believe and behind us to bring our product out now that's number one I mentioned to you is really a by-product because it's hot right now and unfortunately that's how we generate the revenue but what most people don't really understand is the driving force behind this is really about fandom we just wanted to build a collectible product platform where people can buy these 3D models a major part on our platform is the user-generator content on your phone that Spiderman can appear in all men's reality you can take a photo you can upload it so if you think about throughout the year 2005 I think Facebook came out Instagram came out YouTube came out back then and then you have Instagram you have Twitter you have Lincoln and now we have TikTok that's very very popular every single one of these social media platform and something whether it's a generation or a very Pacific target audience and how they reach out now we wanted to build a fandom application where fans can come to one place and I run a physical shop and in back of my retail shop I have tables you will see 40 to 50% of my retail store have trestle tables and chair people to play on so any weather, any time you can come to my store and you can meet one another, speak the same language and you become best friends we go to what our business is about is understanding the second secret of you understanding what you dress up so all of I believe that you dress up as Pikachu when you go to these comic cons and and then on the Monday morning on Tuesday here we are talking and like no more people but once you know someone's second secret of what they do what they love whether it's a game you get along very well Phoebe is about bringing these fandoms to one place they can share and create that community that community aspect is a very big part and no one's tapping into that that's a multi-billion dollar business where the fans are coming into one place so every single week like you say on YouTube and social media there's these high to celebration drops and we've seen this business down physical we have seen Adidas for example or Nike when they release the shoes you go to in front of your favorite sneaker store you take a ticket and basically the sneaker gives you a chance to participate on their drop day and on the drop day you line up, you stand outside and everyone claps when they read out your number everybody claps and they celebrate for you to win a chance to buy a pair and by that time you haven't even bought it and everyone was so hyped up around this because they're building that community what we want to do is similar with fandom these brands that we have and it's bringing us combined the hundreds of years of content that we can be shaping that content in a different way similar to now we have streaming through Netflix streaming through Mahulu Disney Plus all these things now I really believe that these characters is now about to come to life so going back to where you where we're going to be coming up gamification we really believe that the gaming industry these assets that you are playing as a character some skins, on weapon upgrades could one day to be taken out from one game and to be sold and to be all mentored out into the real world that's number one we really strongly believe that the wearable device the AR glasses or the VR glasses and we're pretty sure Apple Google all these genius companies are going to be coming up with these light wearables apart from what you want to see from your email, your text message you really want to see Batman or Spider-Man standing in the corner of your room and those are digital and then digital artwork you put on the glasses your more name maybe is playing on the wall that's another huge and the metaphors we have announced that the Phoebe first is coming and it's something that we are very proud and actively working on is to bring this metaphors we knew the metaphors will be a way of communities all come to one place to build together and you know this is nothing really new I mean what we have created I don't want anyone to go away to think we have invented something we have an AR was already there these IPs are already there apps are already there what me and Dan have put together is just really what the fans want and we basically put it all on one app so you can think of it the Phoebe apps is about four or five different applications into one providing that end to end experience and I can go on forever this is so good but I think that the part that really struck me about this was just the idea of having being able to turn up in some virtual universe and be able to be like this is my Spider-Man or whatever in a very one of the things I found about NFTs and generally is that it's really like belonging to a club and it's about being able to say I'm in that club and that is such a powerful kind of human need it's just at this the job to be done is to want to belong and you've worked out how to do that a digital scale with incredible margins and ability to be geographically wherever you want to be and I think there's a really beautiful part of that which is still really not fully understood anyway I just want to two questions and then I'm keen to go to for me and then we'll go to questions but you know obviously we've got the ESF community on here we've got a bunch of other investors and folks who are kind of in New Zealand who are on here what can they do on this call to help you build your company? Yeah so we number one our businesses run across pretty much globally this is at this running 24 seven we don't switch it off we're reaching out to see if you think you can help and talent number one is that and developments or running the business we have an issue with scaling I have run multiple business in a different field and I really always believe that the scaling business in my mind is always have the one seven, 17, 70, 300 rule so you start off as one co-founder with co-founder so in this case me and Dan one then we employ our first seven people we go to the first 17 70, 300 you know we're in the process of now about to scale from this 17 to 70 brackets so you know there's a lot of you know governance that we need help on structure we work tirelessly to read things on forums how people run scale business number one is we need help from all parts of the world that's one and number two like any business eventually we do need to raise more money and that's probably one of the part of my biggest failure I failed to raise the money that is required we spend to 30, 40 hours a week out of the 100 plus hours we put in just to look at fundraising and at that end you still not able to raise so I need to reflect I need help on understanding you know what what makes fundraising work how the structure is you know there's a lot of aspect when you look at it when I have a down moment I look at things that we didn't do well on and you know fundraising is definitely one of it but with any founder and any you know enterprise or entrepreneur they are just thinking very much going straight as fast as possible and then obviously you know your paper everything just get bogged up so you know we need help in many different way to navigate through to be a billion dollar a unicorn company where we want it to be Hey Will you kind of answered my other question which was around investing and obviously you're looking to raise funds do you want to just elaborate on that specifically because I am confident a bunch of investors on the call I mean right this moment we're still going through a growth phase I mean my my concentration right now has been working on you know all our efforts has been on scaling really in our staff technology and I think on maybe the fourth quarter or this year we'll start look at doing one round and that's really expending into areas where we gone you know our biggest market right now is US followed by we have Canada UK France, Germany, Australia you know the key to key market that we really need to embrace and get into is Japan huge fandom I mean that market along is crazy you see the intellectual property they come out from there Greater China area is another area where we see a huge tremendous growth those key areas have dedicated teams they need to have localisation language et cetera we really believe that part of the funds will be raised will be spent on that and obviously I mentioned about the META first which we already start to iron out how we want to do you know going forward is either we grow organically which will be a bit slower or do we actively spend and invest in these territory to grow that team so we are hoping that on the fourth quarter to share that we can start working on that Excellent Great well um yeah folks if you've got any specific questions feel free to jump in you can either ask them in the chat or you can put your hand up and I'll work out how to unmute you there is a sort of very specific question from Carlos and he asked specifically around what's the team how does the team look like you know you said you and you founded the team there's myself and Daniel with the co-founder of the company we do CTO we do have the executive team is really in production design, licensing et cetera then we have our engineers most of our employees they really engineer and they follow and the you know we are just only starting to start to look at building out the management team and most of our work going out like you have seen today is really being our community being supporting us in the marketing getting things out this is a very hard we're in a very very tough position we do have marketing funds and we do have ways we want to market but the problem is right now we're getting all these downloads and the user come into the app and they go well there's nothing to purchase because our drop sells out in a microsecond within a minute every single week so you can imagine if you're a Marvel fan and you download the app okay cool tomorrow at 8am they're going to be releasing something you come at 8 or 2 it's already sold out so the community and so we are we're in the middle of going well if you're a new user you download and you just come in you go well this is stupid there's nothing to purchase so we we are thinking to start to roll out more and more content and obviously we have a backlog of content and the teams increase and right now to scale that content production line so we have more and more IP onboarding yeah great thanks David an awesome talk amazing story just to follow on from that when in terms of the engineers that you've hired what was your approach because obviously you're working in quite specific technology with you know the go blockchain and the smart contract space in NFTs did you focus on finding people who already could do this work like resourcing from consensus or did you focus on finding good software developers and training them in cryptography and blockchain NFTs smart contracts yeah that's a great question yeah we do go out to look for talents who already know these non issues and things but of course I mentioned earlier on the call that this industry is so innocent it just goes so fast every six weeks there's something happening so what we have done is right now the app itself is a close ecosystem so Oliver mentioned the NFTs actually sitting inside the app we don't allow the users right now to send it out when we move to for example immutable which is a great team supporting us that the interconnectivity is just going to try to connect from one chain to another then the inter-optable can start happening when the license speak to you last ago yes we are comfortable with this the layer of security I mean the development is not really just on the blockchain the blockchain is just really a part of our business to authenticate verifications the minting of the NFT but the actual app itself has multiple layers we have that unity engine inside for you to walk through that virtual showroom and you can share that showroom for your friend anywhere in the world to come into your room to see how you put your collectibles together so there is a issue of multiple levels of these that works together then just one then just really blockchain there is a question here from sorry Carlos is that cool no I was just being polite saying thanks for the answer oh okay Nicholas asks how could other industries use NFTs to create a positive impact on the environment or society or should we enterprise this technology in your view yeah there is quite a bit out there a lot of the industries become more innovative number one is not all blockchains are bad I mean environmental there is a lot out there environmental friendly like the one that we are moving to or even the one that we are on the perception I think out there number one people think anything that uses energy consumption is bad you know with all the mining etc but the social impact out there we have seen organisation including us we have actually put together a fund to help social environmental impact we just really only just started to look for a head in that our social charities section and how we are going to be funding out of part of what we gross earn to put back to the community that is number one so internally we are doing it we really believe that the beauty about the blockchain is transparency so if you can see organisations getting funded for x amount of money you see how that money has been spent and you know how the treasury works so you know multiple levels where the technology can be useful number one is that transparency and obviously it still needs a lot of adoptions you know for other organisations or companies to take those digital assets or transfer and adopt them fund racing there is a lot of ways charities can fund race through minting their own NFT to get support from the communities in different ways it's just another mechanism out there or another medium of tools that's available that we should really embrace and utilise and definitely you know if you don't think you need to use blockchain don't use it I mean there's a lot of things out there that's quite pointless I see from day to day or time to time that there's no need for it so please you do want to choose carefully whether you need it or not or you just want to do one no yeah totally I'm not against at all I think it's a really, really powerful tool that can be used for very good things as well that's why I was asking I've been following for a while and I think there's creativity and innovation there's a lot of amazing things to be done with this technology Thank you Anybody else who's got a specific question otherwise I have a few more that have been sent through privately All of it? Yeah sorry I was just wondering David thanks for the talk by the way it's fantastic just if you could speak a little to the demographics that you're witnessing in the NFT space presumably it's reasonably overweight younger individuals Actually you could be wrong the major age is about 22 to 48 is very strong in the 25 plus I'll tell you when you say young I mean we know guys you know people in much earlier stage now it's into the crypto and I you know I think because the product that we bring out demographically it's been ferricated to some of the early NFT that we have brought out like the DeLorean time machine there's certain age group right people get it but now we are seeing more comic books is out we released our first edition Marvel number one 1939 comic book I think last Wednesday or Thursday and that was a major hit we had 60,000 copies basically sold out and a lot of our newer fans obviously they were born in 1940s and buying one of these original comic they young readers they just came out that they never seen what the comic looked like in the 1930s now they have a chance to own one we have embedded and built and brought out a technology in our phone now you can read that NFT so you can read the digital comics as well and I think this week I believe that we are adopting the AR function so you can read the comic on your table scale it up flip the pages and actually be part and live into the comic itself so that's something quite exciting and to that Christian Patrick is that we want to start to hope we get a bit younger audience into it but right now 25 48 is a it's a major group great thank you there's a question here for are you worried about the current fight around NFTs will pull back much like the five years ago or is the space here to stay definitely and I think many people use right now the reference to where the internet was but I think the slight different thing about where we were in the 90s when the internet all come out this community of the NFT has actually produced a lot of opportunities you have seen a lot of these artists that coming out expressing through digital media and creating things and you know the beauty about the non-fungible side is you know the artworks on my wall you might come in you might go well that's not for my taste but the audience today out there they see things very different and they almost bind it to encourage one another it's like a piercicle and building that community and that community is very very solid I do have to say where the internet back then is all about infrastructure you know we're living in a world where internet's a fast phones is very mobile to us everything is all around us you know we can switch the lights on the wall switch and the light comes on so things are very much different to where we were so I really think when people say there's a hype I mean it's definitely a hype going to be here to stay we will what we will start to see is better and better products start to come out where the mediocre or you know really over a hype type of project will start to fizzle away but you know I read online I think even June quarter the the sale of NFT have still continue I mean some of these exchanges auction size or secondary market like open sea and all that they are showing very aggressive growth yeah but I was mind blown that how aggressive it is so we can see the community is just getting bigger and I think I mentioned earlier you know we are living in a content digital content world and there were just more and more people and the young adopters really understand because this industry hasn't really just started because of blockchain or Cova the gaming market alone is a 60 billion plus a year on buying skins buying you know character weapons or skins for their guns or their parents it's already a huge business just now that business is starting to transform into another shape of ownership yeah I'll add something in there as well if you don't have it which is I you know it took me a little while to get the NFTs and the one that really kind of clicked my understanding around the market and how this might work was Gary Banditchuk launched his restaurant so he's launching a restaurant in which the ownership of the so to fund the startup of the restaurant they are selling the tables and if you own a table you get a portion of the revenue anybody who wants to come in and book that table can effectively rent the table inside of the restaurant and you have to pay for to get that table for a particular hour of the day and then that's transferable so you can go on and book it and effectively might pay $5 or something to get the access to the table but then if you then go on and sell it and say for example you managed to get something on a Friday night really high cost to whatever to this very fancy restaurant you can then decide to sell it on the underlying revenue of the transfer of the asset ends up going back to the person who owns the table and so as a result is like a really strong community and if you own a table inside of that restaurant then it's sort of like access to a club and you can go I choose not to sell it to anybody or I choose to whatever and I just it was the first time I was like you know that's a you know there's some complexity in there to work out and we have to build the infrastructure government and handle all of that properly so where do you go to where it starts interfacing with the real world and the size of the new business models that are all enabled I can think about you as well at the moment with the transfer of the asset so say for example someone buys something on the second day is there is a fee that they pay to the platform for being able to trade those so right now just like any ebay or trade me we head down here there's a sellers premium we click a very small percentage two and a half percent really just to keep our system going and pay some bills so this is nothing new I mean auction house has been using it for a number of years on the sellers premium or buyers premium what have you not we really do see that you know what obviously what you just talked about with Gary's different way of NFT there's actually a lot of different other ways to monetise through NFT and I think last time we had a phone call a touch base that an NFT could be an identity it could be that character or that mark that mark but it's my identity I could use as a payment so we certainly as a company are always in the forefront to see what are the adoptions and how you can transfer that character that you own apart from just that image or the codes behind it to be a payment mechanism or it could be a technology for some other thing to your password or something so there's a lot of layers that many other engineers out there looking to adopt in a different way and therefore this is one of the reason I think the hype it's not really a hype in a way if you start to have utility value out of it people can do things I mean that Spider-Man you bought half of the fund is really just having it around you and you can process them behind it and share it with your friend so the value of utility will come further down the track and they will drive the massive adoption in NFT I couldn't find it but I wanted to share there was an amazing video that someone put up on Twitter of what the ARverse will start to look like when you can skin everything and so it was people walking around with like jackets that are someone but they're wearing this sort of very futuristic thing and then they looked out of their shoes and their shoes are kind of like made to look very custom and it's all just digital that you can see through the ARverse we have persistent AR through glasses and people walking around wanting to be able to social signal to each other in this world in which we're all in AR glasses I'm cool, I'm important and being able to walk around with the Spider-Man it would look weird but it would be cool maybe that's what I'll use it for when I'm eventually integrated into this world I was back there when BB was cool back in the jury beginning and got this collectible and you can see it there was there's also a question here and one that I'm really curious about so you obviously mentioned they're migrating from GO chain into immutable so immutable as you mentioned based in Sydney a lot further along in terms of the capabilities of the chain can you just talk me through how that didn't work can you simply swap out all of the only tokens in one chain into another and that's easy so we we nearly there in the integration bit and eventually the NFT we will be reminting them basically so that's why part of the app right now doesn't show you the address of these because what we don't mind is confuse our user to go well the address was changed there so we do that centralized to get that cross over we will be setting up sites for people to basically swap their tokens over and this will be very well advertised throughout our websites in the coming months and obviously there's going to be a huge carrier for you to do it's not going to be like you have to do it within two hours time of thing or you're losing so a lot of communication we'll be giving out this is nothing new a lot of change a lot of projects do change so this is quite regular thing unfortunate for us we have a lot of users so it does take a bit longer and David just to build on that question will there be any change to the tokenomics of the OMI token and or the concept of gems which is your user facing basically with anything to do with token what we're going through is getting recovery approval in different parts of the world obviously when we first designed the product regulation was not very clear quite important for us to ensure that users are coming on on board will eventually be KYC, AML right now as you know everything is purchased within the app like the Google Play Store as well as the Apple payment system so basically it's like a gaming company you come in you purchase James they take your credit card detail by the ecosystem the complexity really start to come in in which we have navigated the last 8 months to work out the best possibility how people can withdraw their excess gems we're navigating through all these and there will be a lot of compliance issue and we have higher compliance experts and consultants to work in these areas the utility value that we're bringing on to the extra token holders more in in a different way where they can participate a bit more, a lot more with what they have on hand now whether in the NFT or maybe in the metafers give them access to special drops or early access things like that Totally, I can also see a world in which you have to stake anyone to get access to a special room so you have to lock up your tokens for a certain period of time just again it's all about how do you build a community interest in a game in a trustless way around the world this is basically our next quarter that we're putting together and we have a thing called master collectors program that's coming out and a lot of that will be part of that whole fundamental the collectors program is very similar with what when you play a car game in a shop you click points you click status we have some collectors out there you can see in the app they have thousands if you watch some of the YouTube I'm blown that how much collectible some individual own and you know all these will be part of that whole ecosystem as the master collector program roll out and a lot of the tokens will hopefully be somehow utilising that There's one final question here which also I'm really curious about and it kind of goes back to you why did you end up building a secure wallet in the first place so I struggle enough to get bank services in my bank but like the prospect of me turning up with my spider-man and saying can you custody this for me I just think it's like obviously not going to be a thing for at least a little while but do you foresee that there is maybe an intersection where the existing world of DeFi and some sort of services that emerge in that space which can hold it but then also do things like hey you've got a spider-man are you open to renting it for some fee do you see that there's going to be a future intersection for DeFi Yeah so just bringing up that secure wallet so our secure wallet right now doesn't just hold digital currencies that also help you to hold your NFT inside as well it's like a secure wallet that holds other NFT so that's pretty much what you have in there if you can hold it in there I think we have about 600 type of NFT that you could adopt in now the problem where we are right this moment is getting the license company in the studios to slowly understand that the inter-optable environment where people do want to see spider-man to be sent out and I do have to say a lot of them are very happy to see that what we as a company need to be ensured is that our users are able to do it now I do have to say maybe 70-80% of our customers right now are non-crypto users so you can't have a guy send out his spider-man and he lost it because he lost his private key we do not want to have people start bringing us up and go send out a secret rare comic that comic somehow didn't get to the address that I put in and then we realise he put in the wrong address and go well it's kind of didn't work or they got scammed what we really want is more education I think adoption more and more people will be out there the community will be supporting that will need to come as well so it's not just about the brand owner it's about the user as well we want user experiences number one that they don't feel they buy in the steam and then they're going to lose their collectibles Excellent are there any other questions we've got a couple of minutes left well David sorry Nicholas do you think the purchase is running in the other NFT platforms because there's open sea in those or is it only in the app you can buy them again so you're saying if we could if we will allow the David now there's no possibility to buy any right if you want to buy one from another person that has it can you do it through these platforms or you can only do it through yes so in the app we do have a marketplace as well in about a few weeks time we are launching our web based version so our web based will allow you to navigate and look through the marketplace a lot easier right now everything is functioning through the firm so sometime it can get a little bit over cluttered so we are opening all that up in the web based coming up Fantastic awesome OK well thank you so much David I really appreciate this when I first came across it I was like a story needs to be told it's such a kind of crazy crazy tale of something that's been built from New Zealand I think you've done an amazing job communicating it today I just want to say thank you so much from the Edmund Hillary Fellowship community and what I'll do as well if anybody here would like to get in contact if you email me I'm just oliver.bruceatgmail.com so I'll just add an intro with David Awesome Thanks oliver and thanks David it has been an amazing session one of my favourites it's nice to be able to listen to a session rather than having to host it so thank you oliver for stepping up and doing that one and David all the best I've harvested a whole lot of stuff from the chat channel for you so that you can go through it I want to help out OK thanks team Thanks very much Cheers