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Sramana Mitra: I want to probe that point a little bit. We have done a lot of two-sided marketplaces. We see two-sided marketplaces all the time. We have lots of case studies. We have curriculum material on it.
As you rightly said, it’s much more difficult to go from zero to 10,000 than to go from 10,000 to a million when the network effect starts to kick in gear. That’s not just true in Blockchain; it’s true in two-sided marketplaces in general. To go from zero to 10,000, what are people doing that you have seen is working?
>>>Earlier this month, expense management services provider Expensify (Nasdaq: EXFY) went public. I have had several interesting interactions with Expensify’s founder David Barrett, explaining his journey to setting up this multi-billion-dollar unicorn.
>>>Jeremy Swift: I worked full-time during the day. I started waning on college. I was talking to advisors and told them about it. An advisor in the Comm department and another from the business department both sat down with me and said, “We understand your personality and what you’re interested in pursuing. We’re going to work with you if you’ll work with us to help you finish school.”
It took me a bit longer. It took me three more years to be able to finish my degree. I was on the six-year college program. I ended up taking night classes. I put my out-of-office reply in the middle of the day and I’d drive back to campus to a class and then race back to the office.
>>>I believe, strongly, that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial capitalism can be democratized, and wealth can be created in the middle of the pyramid using capitalistic principles. In the next 2-3 decades, the potential for distributed capitalism is very high and the outcome should be extremely positive around the world. That is the mission upon which my current work with One Million by One Million is based.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Artificial Intelligence startups are very hot these days. Read how CEO Dave Copps built Brainspace from Dallas. After we spoke in 2016, Brainspace was acquired by Cyxtera Technologies in 2017.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Dave Copps: I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. My dad was an eye surgeon. My parents had moved down from Wisconsin. They were snow birds, as they called themselves. My mom was a community leader. My dad was very smart. He graduated from college at 17. His dad had the same background. He went to the Navy while his friends were graduating.
Sramana Mitra: Now explain the structure in one of these cases where you’re investing as Plutus21.
Hamiz Awan: In Uniswap’s example, there’s a governance token for the protocol called the Uni. How does a company that doesn’t have a CEO make decisions? It’s actually the community that makes the decisions. They vote on that using their token. Their token gives them a voting right. That is the asset that we invest in. Investing in that asset gives us voting rights today. We believe that, in the future, it will give us a piece of their cash flows or some connection to their cash flows. Today it’s really a governance token. It gives a voting right.
>>>Zendesk (NYSE: ZEN), a leading complaint management services provider, recently announced its third-quarter results that continued to outpace the market’s forecast. The big news for Zendesk though was the $4 billion acquisition of Momentive announced last month.
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