S3E6 - Anjali and Collab.Land's 54k Communities

Summary

In this wide ranging chat with big talker - Anjali Young, co-founder of Collab.Land - she shares her journey into the crypto space and the importance of online communities in her own life. She discusses her early experiences in digital communities and the evolution of online interactions from early bulletin boards to today's token gated groups. 

Anjali explains that Collabland is an automated, tokenized community management service that allows projects to organize and reward their community members. She emphasizes the value of reputation building in Web3 and the opportunities for full-time caregivers in the crypto space. Yes, you read that right, caregivers have a great potential. 

Collabland is a platform that helps manage and grow online communities in the crypto space. They started on Telegram and later moved to Discord. They currently cater to over 54,000 communities across tens of various blockchains. Collabland is focused on serving the community while recently also embracing the financial aspect of crypto. They are introducing tipping, allowing users to send on-chain transactions within Collabland groups. 

Don't miss this chat! Listen to the end! 

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Anjali's Crypto Journey
06:23 Collabland: Automating Community Management
13:49 The Value of Collecting and NFTs
19:49 Reputation Building and Opportunities in Web3
25:22 Starting on Telegram and Moving to Discord
28:45 Being Inclusive and Supporting Newcomers
36:27 Embracing the Financial Aspect of Crypto
42:08 Looking Forward to the Bull Run

LINKS TO MY GUEST
Anjali on Twitter (X): https://x.com/damaderoca
Collab.Land on Twitter (X): https://x.com/Collab_Land_ 
Collab.Land web: https://www.collab.land/

Transcript

BFG (Pete) (00:01.064)
Hello everybody. And we are back. This is Web3Magic Podcast. I'm BFG or Pete. And I am here today with another lovely female guest. Today it's Anjali from Collabland. And if you've done anything in NFTs, you know Collabland for sure. And I am pretty sure at least one of your wallets is connected to them. So we will hear all about the journey and even more. Anjali, welcome.

Anjali Young (00:26.444)
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here and

BFG (Pete) (00:31.186)
So let's jump into it. The first question always is how did you get to crypto? Was it like long journey, short journey? What was

Anjali Young (00:39.788)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think my journey to this, what I do in crypto right now, definitely has very far roots. I started in like online digital communities before there was such thing as the internet. So even as a teenager, I would be on my modem and dialing up to what they call BBSs, which are bulletin board service. I don't know if you remember those. Yeah.

BFG (Pete) (01:06.0)
Right? Yeah, I remember those.

Anjali Young (01:08.886)
I think we're around the same age, so you'll remember some of the things I'm talking about. And so started with that and like just chatting with people online and then having like IRL, we didn't call it IRL then because there was no really concept of online yet. But meeting up, we'd have meetups all the time at Shakey's in Venice. So it was in Los Angeles, I grew up in Los Angeles. so as a teenager, my best friend from high school and I, Brandy, we used to dial up and I don't know if anyone knew we were in high school.

but we would like get into these groups and talk to all these people. And then we would just show up at these meetups and be like the youngest girls in the group and meeting all these types of different people. And so that was kind of my first like relationship with online community. And then since then I've been always involved with online communities. So my background, I'm a lawyer by education. I've also been an adjunct professor. My first job out of college was at an internet startup.

teaching people how to search on the internet. So this is years before Google. I know. So I worked at a company called Ink to Me and we had a product called HotBot. I know it sounds ridiculous and I remember in the UK, I guess it means bottom or something. So people would laugh at us. But yeah, we had an internet search engine called Ink to Me. Our product was called HotBot and it was Search. Years before Google knew about Search.

BFG (Pete) (02:11.664)
Hmm. Okay.

BFG (Pete) (02:19.738)
It does.

Anjali Young (02:33.614)
And so my job was like quality assurance and customer service. And a lot of it was just like teaching people how to use search terms and like, how do you get what you want off the internet? And this is 1996. So there isn't a lot of information on the internet, but even the little bit that was there, people wanted to access. And so that was like my first job, like working in like what we call web one now, but it was really just the internet then.

Like I don't even know if we called it, I guess, World Wide Web. We called it that sometimes, but I don't think anybody at my company did. So I worked at an internet startup and then I went to law school. And then my life after that, I wasn't involved with online communities for the years that I was practicing. But then I started researching my husband and I started researching adoption. And so we're like, this is something that I might want to do. Let me see if I can meet other people online.

who are either adopted people or if they're adoptive parents. And let me try to gather some information. So really years before our first daughter arrived, she's 19 now, but years before our first daughter arrived, I started getting involved with adoption communities, like meeting kids. Like it was so fun, because I was like an adult. This was on LiveJournal, but I was meeting kid teenagers, like adopted teenagers.

And I was asking them, like, what is your experience like? What are your parents doing that's right? What are they doing that's ruining everything? Like, what are you happy about? What are you sad about? Like, tell me about your life. And like, do I even want to do this? Because that relationship is so complex. And I just wasn't, you know, you just don't know if it's for you. And you want to do right by everyone in the relationships, right? Including your children, future children at that point.

And some of those girls that I met back then are still in my life and they have families and children and are like teachers and doctors. And it's so fun. It's like an opportunity to kind of see the future a little bit. And they still, you know, care about me. And I ended up, I have two adopted children. And so it's like very invested in my life. And that happened because I'm online community. So my relationship to the internet,

Anjali Young (04:58.816)
Online communities started very early. That really informs who I am in this position doing crypto communities. So I come to crypto communities, not from a financial side or even the engineering side of it, but I come from it like we get, we as humans get to find a way to make communities a whole new way. Like one of the things that really inspired me from the very, very beginning is

Board Ape and I know Board Ape, whatever, people say all different things, but I will tell you, they found Collabland. And before Board Ape, there were some other NFT communities using us, but not as a membership token. And so when Board Ape started using Collabland as a membership token, I was like, what is happening? Because you had people that were like taxi drivers in Singapore, and you were having people that were like,

VCs or CEOs that are from Silicon Valley all in the board eight server together and Connecting over the fact that they had a board eight like the other stuff fell away Right like their educational background or their cultural background or what country they're from or what religion they have or What their other social status is like none of that mattered and now people will be able to connect over this digital asset that

viewable to everybody, right? And so from my, I guess, evolution of seeing online communities, digital communities evolve, like this felt like being on the ground floor of something fucking amazing. So that's how I got into this space specifically in terms of what I do now. Crypto itself, my husband and I are co -founders of Collabland.

BFG (Pete) (06:40.37)
Fucking amazing, okay.

Anjali Young (06:51.854)
of Abridged. This is his third pivot. this is also his fourth startup, but he was doing this company, Abridged, and he had other co -founders. And then, you know, through the years, this company started in 2018. Through the years, people do other projects and especially pre -funding, it's very difficult for everyone to stay on the same path. And so his other co -founders fell away. And so then there was an opportunity because he had come up with this idea for token

chats. so originally the idea of collabland was it was a DAO tool. He comes from the DAO world. He co -wrote the white paper for a Malik DAO and was one of the founding members of Metacartel. And it's just that's where his where he got very, very excited and animated about crypto. He's a developer. However, it was really the DAO aspect and the coordination, like what he calls like removing coordination costs or, you know, lowering coordination.

cost. That is very exciting for him. However, I had a different idea for Collabland. So he had an idea to build up the DAO stack and continue to build more tools and continue to be a power tool for DAOs. And for me, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Look what's happening with Borde' like this is not just about DAOs. This is about creating a new way for people to come together on the

Like trolls, and from my experience from before, trolls are a really big problem. You do so much troll management as a admin or a mod of a community, and you don't know who's who. You don't know who's who. But with this, it's like you can see what token they have. Collabland's verifying what token they have. You know who they are. At least you know what they care about, and you know what they're associating themselves

BFG (Pete) (08:22.353)
Mm -hmm.

BFG (Pete) (08:34.578)
That's for sure.

Anjali Young (08:49.548)
And so you can say to them like, you own a hundred board apes? Okay, let's have a meeting together. Or you could say, wait, you're not even in the holder chat. Like you don't have any board apes. Okay, well then take your criticisms of this and you know, it's not even the mods or the admins that have to do it. Now you have like the individual members that say like, look, we're here to try to do something. Like we're trying to build a community here. We're about our vibes here for our membership. So if you're here and you're not looking

help us with that, it just like turned into group moderation. There's so many interesting things that come out of crypto communities. However, that was kind of my little thumbprint on this. Like let's instead of building up the DAO stack, why don't we like expand to invite more NFT communities to join us? And why don't we go over all the chains? Because he was very much prior to this and now he is not, he's very much a multi -chain.

BFG (Pete) (09:39.528)
Mm -hmm.

Anjali Young (09:47.552)
world Maxi now, but he was at ETH Maxi for a very, very long time. And I don't think that's unusual for developers who came to blockchain early because Bitcoin was the only real experience before and you couldn't really, you know, there was no builder community. Now there is, there's so much going on over there, stacks, lightning, runes, ordinals. They've got a whole bunch of stuff. Everyone, there's DeFi over there. Like there's plenty of stuff happening on ordinals now or sorry, on Bitcoin now. However, at that point it was

buy and hold HODL, right? That's it. It's HODL. That's all you do. Or buy pizza, right? Although, you know, we give him homage to say to him, thank you, showing a real world use of a Bitcoin was exciting. so Ethereum, he was a bit of an Ethereum maxi. So I was more like, why don't we expand to other chains? Like, why don't we have different types

BFG (Pete) (10:18.524)
Right. Yeah. Bye pizza.

Anjali Young (10:39.918)
NFT tokens, like, you know, started with 721, then you moved to 1155. And, you know, now there's so many other different types of NFT tokens. And so that was kind of like, I was most excited about that. And it's been great. Like, definitely there's people building DAO tooling, like that's happened. And so it's not like we didn't do that. So no one did

Like people did do it in Daoist, you how flourished and then had their issues here and there. Nothing is perfect. We're all made of people and people aren't perfect. that's, yeah, that's just the way it goes. We have moments. We have moments, but yeah, it's not always perfect. And anything made of people isn't gonna be perfect. I mean, true for anything, but yeah. So that's kind of been my journey into doing this work.

BFG (Pete) (11:13.661)
Here and there. Nice way to say it.

BFG (Pete) (11:29.456)
Okay, let me ask you super simple question. So when have you done your first thing on chain? Was it Bitcoin? Was it ETH? Was it NFTs? Where did it actually get on chain?

Anjali Young (11:41.952)
that's a really good question. That's a really good question. I don't know if it was my ENS name or if it was an NFT. And I don't even remember what my first real NFTs were. I think before I understood about membership or like, you know, the PFP projects, like I had other NFTs before that. There were NFTs before the PFP projects, right? And so I did collect NFTs here and there, but they weren't like a membership token. My very first PFP.

because I remember that one, it was a world of women. And it was a world of women that I thought looked most like me. Like it was early enough that they were cheap enough that I could kind of like go through thousands of them and like find the one that had like brown skin and like hair that was similar to mine and gold jewelry. And it was a lot of fun. So I would say that, like I'm a super NFT person. Maybe I got had some USTC or ETH before that probably, but it wasn't impactful for me.

my most impactful first experiences that I was most passionate about were NFTs and collecting NFTs. Not even thinking about the artists and who was on the other end of it, more just like, ooh, I like art. I like collecting. Like, what a great way to collect things without adding clutter to my house. And I still get to enjoy this, the fun of curating my own collection without

Yeah, just adding more stuff.

BFG (Pete) (13:12.018)
Nice. So it basically answers my question which I popped into my head. Like, you collect other stuff? So it's obviously yes.

Anjali Young (13:20.056)
Yeah, I do collect other stuff. I wish I didn't collect other stuff because I wanted my goal to some days to be a nomad. So I don't want to be in a house full time. I don't want to have a bunch of stuff. Even living here in this house, we moved to a smaller place. And I have a storage unit now. It bothers me to no end that I have a storage unit. But I wish, I wish, yeah.

BFG (Pete) (13:43.932)
That of course solved the problem.

Anjali Young (13:49.454)
I wish all of my assets were online. I wish. And when you have online assets, stuff is, but you still get that. So collecting collectibles like are like a $3 billion a year industry, maybe even more than that. Like we like to collect. Like sometimes, you know, they say, only women collect or what women collect is different and less important than what men collect. You know, there's so much judgment around collections,

BFG (Pete) (13:52.284)
Yeah, nice. I totally see that.

Anjali Young (14:18.87)
on a very basic human level, human beings are collectors. I don't know where it comes from. There must be some DNA genetic reason for it, but we do collect. so collecting NFTs, collecting assets online, even collecting meme coins, like it's fun. I love it. I like it a lot. It's a lot of

BFG (Pete) (14:39.208)
Basically you are a collector. That's good to

BFG (Pete) (14:44.943)
I'm not a collector. I started collecting only NFTs because it was something you don't have to carry around. And I moved around a lot. So I always hated it when you move from one apartment to another or country to country and the truck gets bigger, but nothing really substantially changed. It's just there is more stuff. So NFTs did it for me. Okay.

Anjali Young (15:05.335)
Eat

Nope. Yep.

BFG (Pete) (15:13.32)
basically partially answered the question, how did you guys get to collab land? So I backtrack a little bit. So when you started working on collab land, when the idea came, were you like full -time lawyer

Anjali Young (15:18.062)
But yeah, I can tell you that really quickly.

Yes. Yes. So collab land. Yes. sorry. No, I was a lawyer. Gosh, I've had a big life. But yes, I was a lawyer for five years. I mean, I still have an inactive license, but and I'm member of the bar. But no, I did that for five years. And then when we adopted our daughter, I thought I was still going to work. But she's autistic. And so I was like, well,

really think I need to dedicate my time to her. And I really wasn't so keen on the idea of having babysitters either because of the relationship that I was trying to nurture with my children that doesn't have a genetic component. So I decided I wasn't gonna work anymore. I was just going to care for her and build our relationship. And then that turned into when adopting our son, because I was already at home and how wonderful. And then

my children, my daughter I homeschooled until eighth grade. So she was about 13 or 14 up until age 14, I homeschooled her and then she went to high school. so, yeah, but that entire time, that entire time I was an adoptive mom and a homeschooling mom, I was a part of online communities. The biggest group that I was a moderator for was a 60 ,000 person Facebook group.

BFG (Pete) (16:31.42)
See you.

Anjali Young (16:51.576)
So I had been doing, yeah, I had been doing this type of work already, but just not getting paid for it, which is a lot of what I talk about now. Like when I do talk in person to people, I talk about the opportunities in Web3 for full -time caregivers, because the work that is required, the community work that's required in Web3, everyone's already doing it in Web2 and getting no money for

BFG (Pete) (16:56.968)
Peace.

I see.

BFG (Pete) (17:22.012)
Right. Well, are they getting any money in web3? That's probably the right question. Okay. Good. Good to

Anjali Young (17:22.68)
So bring your community buildings. Yes, they are making money in web three. Yes, they are making money in web three. I mean, that's the whole idea of a Dow, right? Like you contribute and you participate and you can get compensated. And not only you're getting compensated, but you are able to build an online resume. Like reputation building is something that we take for granted in crypto. But in the other world, how do you build a reputation?

Like I can say I was out of work for like 12, 13 years, right? However, the person who hired me was my husband and he knows what work I did. Like he saw me doing the work. So he knows what my skillset is. However, how would I have gotten a job? I put myself in the place of any caregiver, full -time caregiver. How do you break out from being a full -time caregiver where no one sees your

even though it's incredibly challenging and thoughtful and problem solving and resourceful. And it is all of those things. It requires more of you than I would say some people's full -time jobs in the regular world, but there's no evidence of that work. And with DAOs and with crypto, like if you do the work, if you show up at the events, you can get a pull -up at the very least. You can have people tip you. You can have evidence of when you joined a community

There's ways that you can prove where you were and what you were doing and what you're interested in. And in our particular interest in our industry, Web3, crypto, whatever, we value people's interest and curiosity. Like I'll tell you, just as a founder and someone that hires people, like if you're really curious about crypto, if you have just an insatiable appetite to learn about

And you've been through it. You have historical data up here. Like that means a lot to me. And so I think of stay at home parents as like, look, you're already doing this work for free. You could get paid. Yes, that's one way to get compensated. But even if you're not getting paid, you're building an online reputation. And that when you stop being a full time caregiver and you want to get back into the workforce, like we're going to be

Anjali Young (19:49.048)
Crypto is going to be here. We're going to make it to sound silly and cliche, but we are.

BFG (Pete) (19:51.998)
This is gonna be the best sound bite I'm sure It's like we're gonna make it we're gonna be here everybody hopes

Anjali Young (20:01.422)
We're going to be here. So if we're here, then we'll value that. Like invest in us. Like give us a shot pretty much. And I love that because even in our own hiring process, we've hired people that do not have traditional backgrounds at all, but they have an insatiable appetite for crypto. And being a part of Collabland, they have an insatiable sense of duty and service to community.

BFG (Pete) (20:29.118)
So you touched on a topic which I am pretty interested in and I don't actually think we've solved it yet. And this is like the reputation and...

What are your favorite reputation targeting projects?

Anjali Young (20:47.414)
I don't know. Honestly, I haven't seen or heard of anything that has been compelling for me because the value of the project is only as good as how widely it's used. So I just I haven't seen anything yet that people are trying to solve that part of like, how do you get in front of everybody? Like

BFG (Pete) (21:00.637)
Yeah, sure.

Anjali Young (21:12.802)
And that's the hard part. Like I love all these projects. I'm like, this is great. Like people are building all different types of things, but I'm like, okay, but I'm going to be using it. But if no one else is using it, then like it's not really verifying anything. I need, like what is really verifying is the blockchain. The blockchain is what verifies what we can do. And as much as we can get onto the blockchain will be better.

BFG (Pete) (21:36.444)
blockchain

Anjali Young (21:41.302)
And if we can come out with some way that some standard language around that, don't know. NFT is standard language. Everyone uses it. Like if we can come up with something like that for reputation, we'd be in business.

BFG (Pete) (21:53.94)
there you go. Okay. I think I missed one important part because my assumption is everybody actually knows Collabland, but it's definitely not true in my audience. So now give me the pitch of what Collabland is, what you guys do for anybody who, you know, doesn't

Anjali Young (22:04.63)
Right. Yes.

Anjali Young (22:12.494)
Okay.

Yeah, I should have started with that during my introduction. So apologies. Collabland is a automated, tokenized community management service. So if you have a project, BFG podcast project, and BFG podcast puts out a token called the BFG token, and now you want everyone that bought that token to get to know each

to join a group together, to organize now the BFG Army. And it happens in every industry. When I just said Army, it reminded me of a BTS, how they call their fans the Army. But you, BFG pod, can have all the people, your truest fans, the people that are willing to give you their attention and money right now, you wanna get them together so you can organize them. That is an incredibly powerful thing.

just hands down, that's incredibly powerful thing. Now within that community, you can say, if you own 50 ,000 BFG podcast tokens, you get different access. If you only own 10, you get this access. If you own 150, you get this access. Okay, if you minted on the first day, then you get this access. You're able to organize and reward.

your community. So that way you're not just extracting from them and saying, Hey, ha ha ha, now I have these people and now I'm going to make more money off of them because they're fans of mine. You're saying, okay, I'm here for you and you're here for me. And that's kind of what makes this whole financial social puzzle we're playing with in crypto so fun. So that's collab land. Yeah, really it is. That's where collab

BFG (Pete) (23:55.496)
So is that how the name started?

Anjali Young (24:00.646)
is it comes from collaboration. But if you want those people to come together. Now I'm a member, I bought your NFT or I bought your token, whichever. Now I'm joining. I want to join your group. When I enter your group, if you have installed the collab lamb bot either on your discord or your telegram, then they will verify that that person, me, Anjali, who's logging into discord, that I own X wallet, 0x12345.

I sign a message that says, I'm okay with you reading my public wallet address. It's a read -only permission. So all we know now is that this wallet address is connected to this person, Anjali. That's it. We don't have any access into the wallet. We don't have any other permissions. All we have is your public wallet address. And now we know that that Discord ID is associated with that wallet address. Then we read the public blockchain.

to see if this wallet address, 0x123, is connected with the token that the community is calling a membership token. What is the requirement to join this group? It must be some way, some asset online, NFT, fungible token, whatever. Anything that can be read online, right? Any asset online that can be

BFG (Pete) (25:22.108)
Yep. Got you.

Anjali Young (25:25.74)
That is what we're looking for. And if you have it, you get to come in. If you don't have it, you don't get to come in. And then, so that's the number one part of it. And then the second part of it is we do balance checks, like reoccurring balance checks. And so if you sell your token, if you got scammed out of your token, sadly, if you transfer your token to your best friend, if you, whatever, if you no longer have that token, then you also get removed. So we are trying to maintain the integrity of the community as

BFG (Pete) (25:56.24)
Okay, nice. So I assume you guys started on Discord and Telegram is relatively new or was it the other way around? Okay, nice.

Anjali Young (26:02.062)
Nope, it's the opposite. That's right. So we started Collabland in May of 2020, again, as a DAO tool. DAO's or not, well, DAO's was a very new thing at that point. Like just one year ago was the MolochDAO white paper. communities had moved away from Slack. Like crypto was on Slack way back when before it was on Telegram.

And then Slack was very much not interested at that time in managing the scammers bot problem. They're like, we're not going to cater to you crypto people. so then crypto moved to Telegram. And so we were first on Telegram for a very long time. I mean, all of 2020. Or just the very end of 2020, we moved to Discord. And so that was because more

on Telegram now, we're asking for more complexity. So it was a question of, okay, what do we do? And James, who's my co -founder and my husband, used to work with Jason Citron, who is the CTO or CEO and founder of Discord. And so then James said to Jason, like, can I bring my crypto bot to Discord? Or are you going to shoot me down? Like, are we cool with this? Like, can I do

pretty much. And Jason said yes, and so then we moved to Discord. And then when we moved to Discord, everyone came to Discord. So I think definitely part of the fault, the blame. Like people get mad about Discord all the time, I love it honestly. But to me it just reminds me of my childhood in NewsNets.

BFG (Pete) (27:36.446)
noise.

BFG (Pete) (27:40.786)
yeah, I remember.

Anjali Young (27:52.91)
For everyone that doesn't like it, it's collab land. We moved to Discord because we got permission from Jason and then crypto is there. now everyone's been looking for a Discord killer. How are we going to have a Web3 alternative to Discord? How do we fix it? How do we change it? And that's great. If people can do it, I think it's wonderful. It just means that we've evolved enough or matured enough as an industry as people feel that they can have a sustainable Discord killer.

A collab line's position is different. People should be everywhere they want to be, anywhere they want to be. And we're also very mindful of the fact that a lot of people's first experiences or second experiences are with collab line. So being where not just crypto natives are, but being in a place and supporting and growing an environment that includes crypto natives and people brand freaking new to crypto is extremely important to me and to all of

BFG (Pete) (28:45.534)
Cool. So what are the new places where you guys are looking at? Are there any Discord killers or Telegram killers around Web3?

Anjali Young (28:52.93)
Yeah, right now, no, absolutely not. no, I mean, we want to be open. So if anyone wants to use Collabland, we have an API. You can, but as far as like, so that can happen permissionlessly, right? But with us specifically right now, we are focusing still on Discord and Telegram. There is no slow period in growth between Discord and Telegram. Like as many,

Discord killer is out there. There are no one's calling no one's doing telegram killer. I at least I don't hear that in the popular chat, but Yeah, I'm not hearing that but I will say there's still so much To go with this cordon telegram. There's so much there's there are people I mean there are communities coming Constantly like July is not over yet, but we had about 250 a new communities join like in July already

BFG (Pete) (29:29.864)
Yeah, that's true.

Anjali Young (29:52.014)
And so it's like, then in January and February, we had like a few thousand. So it's like really crazy how people are continuing to come. Yeah, we're at 54 ,000 communities right now. Like include, mean, with Discord and Telegram, like that's crazy. And we have, I mean, just to get into a little bit of data, but we have like 2 ,500 to 4 ,000

BFG (Pete) (30:08.99)
communities.

Anjali Young (30:20.782)
Brand new wallets that have never connected to Collabland connect every single freaking day. Every day. I mean, it's across 38 different blockchains, but most of it is still Ethereum and Solana, right? Base is two, but I'm just saying like it's mostly, when I say Ethereum, mean, EVM. It's mostly EVM and Solana. so Bitcoin, we got to a little bit late. I'm obsessed with the fact that they did it, but I learned

BFG (Pete) (30:28.188)
Impressive, wow.

Anjali Young (30:50.574)
NFTs on Bitcoin at NFC Lisbon 2023. So I think it was like July 2023. Someone approached me. I had a booth and started talking to me about NFTs on Bitcoin. And I was like, okay, like it still felt so new. I wasn't hearing anything about it from everywhere else. There wasn't a community demand for NFTs on Bitcoin yet. And so we got to Bitcoin as like a, you know, later.

Like it wasn't one of the first ones that we added on. And I spoke at a Bitcoin conference in October that same year. And that's when I was like, really like, okay, you know, sold on it. And I was sold on. I mean, I was announcing the integration at the conference, but seeing everybody, everybody, seeing the excitement around that, around what was going on over there was super exciting. It's great. It's great.

BFG (Pete) (31:28.946)
You were sold.

BFG (Pete) (31:42.339)
I still don't get it, but it's okay.

Anjali Young (31:46.914)
You know, people are people. A lot of people in Bitcoin now are from ETH. So I'll tell you that they're from ETH because now they get to build. They just want to build. And now it's like, now I can build on Bitcoin. OK. And I mean, honestly, right, you can be you have an opportunity there, maybe not so much now, but you have an opportunity to start fresh, like to be in on the ground floor at Bitcoin because a whole different set of investors, a whole different set of media.

BFG (Pete) (31:53.625)
Yeah.

Anjali Young (32:14.604)
like a whole different ecosystem. And so you're able to take your knowledge and your learnings from ETH and really excel. So I don't fault anybody for moving in that direction because I think builders are going to build.

BFG (Pete) (32:29.572)
I wouldn't fault anybody. doesn't like the things happening on Bitcoin don't really fit into my view world and where the Bitcoin fits. So it feels very futile to me. But you you want to build, you want to make some money. Totally fine with me.

Anjali Young (32:31.17)
Yeah.

Anjali Young (32:41.25)
Yeah. And you're right.

Yeah, and it really is like you cannot watch everything. There's no way. You really have to pick a thesis, right? And then everything that falls outside of your thesis, you're like, there's no room. I don't want to learn a new thing. I'm not into that. Like I got my thing and it's really quite all consuming. I don't know. I'm, I know I'm not supposed to ask you questions, but do you do other things or are you like doing, cause this is like all I do. So don't know. Do you do other, I used to do other things.

BFG (Pete) (32:57.882)
Not for me!

BFG (Pete) (33:16.062)
I do a lot of other things. But I'm not running a project with 54 ,000 communities connected to it. So it's a different story. But wonderful story. I actually like it a lot. The number is impressive. I didn't even know we have so many communities in crypto, honestly. It didn't feel like that in Brussels.

Anjali Young (33:18.382)
I'm jealous. I used to do a lot of other things. It's been years.

Anjali Young (33:30.335)
I don't know.

Anjali Young (33:40.322)
Yeah!

Yeah, and because they're all so fragmented. Like, have you any idea how many communities there are in Tezos? Like, do even think about Tezos communities or Bitcoin communities or Polygon communities? it's like, it's so spread out. Like, cannot be, well, A star, A star, it's like a Japanese blockchain. And we support them too.

BFG (Pete) (33:55.429)
no.

BFG (Pete) (34:00.104)
The polygon is big. Yeah, that's

BFG (Pete) (34:07.824)
star right

Anjali Young (34:11.276)
And there have so many communities that are going on in Japan and in the Asian area, like in Asia and Southeast Asia. Like we don't think about that, but they're there. And then South America and in Africa, like there's so many regions. And so not only across blockchains, but across like there's such a huge cult, still cultural pockets, right? And so it's very difficult. And I feel like collab land is in a really special spot.

BFG (Pete) (34:12.914)
Whoa.

BFG (Pete) (34:17.988)
Nice.

Yeah, true.

Anjali Young (34:40.524)
because we can speak to, at least we can speak to community as we see it across all the chains. I can tell you that. Like I have that bird's eye view of what's happening in community. Like what chain, like, wait, what's happening? Like this chain is growing the most this week? Like wait, this like project is growing the most this week? Like what?

It's a really fun way to see and you see it not only in your particular chain, but you see it across all the chains. it's, fun. I would say that that part is really fun anyway. Yeah.

BFG (Pete) (35:14.642)
I see.

I can imagine. Should I ask which community is growing the most this week or which chain?

Anjali Young (35:24.394)
well, I don't know, because tomorrow is our day. And so we always do the, we have all hands on Friday mornings. And then our data engineer comes in and he puts up these big reports and we're always like, ooh, ha, that's so cool. It's always fun.

BFG (Pete) (35:31.719)
I see.

BFG (Pete) (35:38.918)
Okay, so you have to tell me tomorrow, just ping me tomorrow. What was the biggest growing chain? I'll put it into show notes. It's cool. Nice. So what's next for collab land? So you guys have been doing this for almost four years, maybe five. So what's next?

Anjali Young (35:45.718)
Okay, I will tell you.

Anjali Young (35:58.003)
Yeah, you know, that's been a really tough one because and we've definitely stumbled around what to do because we want to serve community. That's really the goal of why James and I do this and why our team does this. But we need to be sustainable. And it's been a hard learning of like we need to embrace the financial

of crypto. We have to. cannot ignore the fact that there are many people who are here to make money and we shouldn't shun them. Like we should try to include them and find a way to use the use money and the financial reasons people come here and incorporate them with community. So like how do we somehow able to add value to our communities and make them richer by

including a financial element, rather than saying, a financial element is going to ruin everything. Like money is the root of all evil. Instead of thinking that the money is the root of all evil, what if we think, what are ways we can value add our communities or supercharge our communities with some sort of financial element? So that's been hard. And we've tried a few things. We've failed at a few things. And in

right, for everyone to see. Like, this is probably the most raw, exposed way to live because everybody in the world see, or like people who are watching or look you up, see like what you've done wrong and what you've done right. And it's all there, all your decisions and what I like to say, all your childhood traumas are all there on display for everybody. So anyway, that's been a really interesting journey,

with what we're doing next is we're doing tipping. So now you're going to be able to do on -chain transactions within collab land groups. I don't know if we're going to settle on the word tipping. I've been getting a lot of feedback lately saying tipping is not even something positive in Europe, in Asia, in South America, in Africa. Like no one thinks of tipping as a positive thing. People think it's just evidence that you're not paying a fair wage to your employees. And so we're like, shoot, maybe we won't call it tipping.

Anjali Young (38:22.424)
But what you can do is you can do an on -chain transaction. So if you and I are in a Discord server, we're in the BFG Podcast server, and we're chatting with each other, or even if we're not chatting with each other, I can send you money. I can send you, we're starting with four chains, but I can send you one of these four chains. I don't want to give it all up because it's not coming out until August 8th. But what we're doing is that you can tip or give someone

trade share whatever some crypto with somebody else just using your Discord username or telegram ID and now I'm feeling like I maybe shouldn't have talked about it because I'm gonna do a press release so I don't know when this is gonna come out I should have said something anyway I didn't think of it will it come out after August 8th

BFG (Pete) (39:10.31)
Hmm, yeah, well, after August 8th, there's a chance it's gonna come out on August 8th, actually. I am making a note that it shouldn't come out before August 8th, that's all

Anjali Young (39:20.174)
Okay, I'll take it. 8th is great. If it's August 8th, then we can keep all of that

Anjali Young (39:29.442)
You know why? Cause my PR company will literally just chew me a new one. Like they're going to be so mad at me because they put out a press release and it's under embargo. So, you know, like, it's serotonin. I'm totally going to introduce you to them by the way. They, I already showed them your podcast. and I said I was doing it they were like, that's so cool. But I'm going to tell them like, I mean, I guess we're not going to, you're just gonna have to edit all this stuff out. Sorry. But for you personally, if you want,

BFG (Pete) (39:33.241)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

BFG (Pete) (39:39.351)
Right, right, I know. That's what they do.

BFG (Pete) (39:51.816)
Great.

Probably.

Anjali Young (39:58.826)
You want more guests. The guests that are serotonin clients are pretty, they care about what they're doing and what they're saying and they usually have opinions. I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but if you're looking for that, serotonin can pitch you people.

BFG (Pete) (40:14.536)
That would be lovely. No, I have great respect. Sure. I've read the book and you know, I sort of like what they're doing and that they, I would say that they are kind of selective. It's nice. know, they could be basically taking everybody's money and doing very little, especially during the bull runs with the background they have.

Anjali Young (40:16.302)
Do you wanna do that? Okay.

Amanda Kasat.

BFG (Pete) (40:42.896)
nice to see that they are sort of normal. But I always hated this PR process. It's like, give us the press release, we will send it to everybody, there is embargo, you can't talk about this. It's like, my God, I want to talk about this.

Anjali Young (40:43.968)
No, they're a really good team. Yeah, I really, really like them. And one person, yeah, sorry.

Anjali Young (41:03.008)
I know. I know. I know. I know me too. Like I literally had a call with them yesterday and they were telling me it's gonna be an embargo. And I'm like, blah blah blah blah Awful. Anyway, we can get back to it. Do you have other questions or are we done?

BFG (Pete) (41:12.978)
All right.

Right, have, yeah.

Well, definitely it's like, so what are you looking forward to? This is going to be last question because we have 40 minutes and it's too long. I'm going to cut out a couple of minutes, but it will be hard because you talk a

Anjali Young (41:31.65)
Yeah, too long. You can cut all of

Anjali Young (41:39.864)
Just

BFG (Pete) (41:40.144)
Nobody said that, right? Ever. Nobody ever mentioned it. But the last question for today is so...

Anjali Young (41:48.366)
I might keep it really short. So short, you're going to be surprised. Okay. It's a challenge.

BFG (Pete) (41:51.486)
Okay, let's see that. What are you the most looking forward to in like second half of 2024?

It can be from collab land, can be an event, can be something totally different. Doesn't matter.

Anjali Young (42:08.36)
Yeah, I mean my real honest answer and we'll just go with that, which is I'm waiting. I'm looking forward to the bull run really starting.

BFG (Pete) (42:17.342)
Okay, that's an honest answer nobody dared to say yet. That's pretty cool Yeah, let's hope there is gonna be a bull run. Well, Jari, thank you very much the whole 30 minutes. That's something was a treat And I'm pretty sure I'll see you on some conference very soon and I'm looking forward to collab land tipping Whatever you guys are gonna call

Anjali Young (42:40.577)
Thank you or whatever we call it. I don't know if anyone hears this, tell me what you want me to name it. But no, this was great. I know we met in Brussels just a few weeks ago and you were telling me about your podcast and here we are. So I appreciate you taking the

BFG (Pete) (42:57.256)
Thank you very much. Have a great day.