Show notes
The high speed world of ICO’s: Smith and Crown discuss cryptoeconomics and the future of tokens Smith and CrownTranscript
Laura Shin:
Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, a podcast about the big ideas and fascinating people in blockchain tech and cryptoassets. I’m your host, Laura Shin, a senior editor at Forbes covering all things crypto. Thanks for tuning in. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, help get the word out about the show. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or on your Secret, Slack and Telegram channels, and if you have a chance give the show a rating or a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Big thanks to our sponsor, Onramp. If you’re having an ICO, a token sale, a token allocation event, a token generation event, or whatever else projects are calling themselves nowadays, you need a website. Check out Onramp. This full service creative and design agency provides its clients with attractive and persuasive branding, websites, and marketing materials. Spark interest in your project, generate buzz, check out ThinkOnramp.com.
So, today we’re recording from beautiful Portland, Oregon, where I’ve come to see the eclipse, but that also gave me the perfect opportunity to talk with ICO site Smith and Crown because they are based here. So today on the show I’ve got CEO Brian Lio and head of research Matt Chwierut. Brian and Matt, welcome to the show.
Brian Lio:
Thanks, Laura.
Matt Chwierut:
Thank you.
Brian Lio:
Great to be here.
Laura Shin:
So let’s talk first about what it is that you guys do.
Brian Lio:
Sure. I’m happy to give an overview there.
Laura Shin:
And just to be clear, this is Brian who is talking.
Brian Lio:
Yes. This is Brian. So Smith and Crown first and foremost is a research group. We’ve been around for over four years at this point and we study the breadth of the blockchain space. Right now a lot of our research is focused on new assets that are coming online, and part of that is understanding how they issue tokens, and wading deep into the world of token sales and ICOs, as it were.
Laura Shin:
I had no idea you had been around for four years.
Brian Lio:
Yes. We’ve actually been around for quite some time.
Laura Shin:
How did it start?
Brian Lio:
So this was one of those things where I have another company that is a design and strategy group out of New York, and one day came across Bitcoin, as many of us had, and realized that this was something that was going to be what I worked on for the foreseeable future, and got so excited about it, started to put together a team slowly, over the last few years, and we spent a lot of time looking at where it was that we could really make an impact in the space, and we were super passionate about it and we wanted to figure out where, you know, our unique set of experiences and talents could do the most good and make the largest impact. So over time we built a team, we refined our vision, and then we started to publicly publish research just over two years ago or so.
Laura Shin:
Okay, and Matt, how did you get involved with Smith and Crown?
Matt Chwierut:
Brian and I had known each other since eighth grade and this is our second startup together, second company. So at some point Brian pitched me on joining to help with the research efforts and a lot of the content development, applying new analytical methodologies to the cryptofinancial space, and I was a little skeptical at first. He was earlier to the crypto and Bitcoin scene than I was, but the more and more I started reading about it the more and more I got really excited about it, and so I started shifting more and more my attention to working on this, to learning, and to understanding what Smith and Crown’s role in this emerging industry would be.
Laura Shin:
So this was your second startup together, what was your first?
Brian Lio:
So we actually worked on a documentary travel series together a number of years ago called Jet Set Zero.
Laura Shin:
Oh, interesting.
Brian Lio:
Yeah.
Matt Chwierut:
The early, early days of web TV.
Laura Shin:
Did you travel around? Where did you guys go?
Brian Lio:
We went all around the world. We actually started in Seattle and then we traveled to Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey.
Laura Shin:
Oh, nice.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. Yeah.
Laura Shin:
That sounds amazing.
Brian Lio:
It was. It was quite an experience. It was successful in its own right.
Laura Shin:
Matt’s laughing, for those who can’t see. He’s like, giggling and snickering. What’s so funny?
Matt Chwierut:
I just apologize to Brian for bringing that up.
Brian Lio:
No. No.
Laura Shin:
Why?
Brian Lio:
It was quite an adventure. Not our most profitable endeavor, but certainly one rich with experiences.
Laura Shin:
Yes. I’m very familiar with that having once been a travel writer, so I totally know how that goes.
Brian Lio:
Yes, I’m sure you do.
Laura Shin:
So what were you guys doing? You said that you had a design firm?
Brian Lio:
Sure. Yeah. I still do. So that was, you know, it’s been quite a successful firm, it continues on, we brought on new partners who are handling a lot of the day to day operations. It’s called the Bright Iron Group. So yeah, it was great. It gave us a real insight into user experience design, interface design, digital strategy and products and so forth, and it kind of helped us understand the role that we might play in the space. We kept looking across, you know, we were very excited about Bitcoin and the larger industry, and we were trying to figure out where can we play an important role to make an impact here.
Laura Shin:
I don’t see the connection.
Brian Lio:
Sure.
Laura Shin:
Like, design, and then now you’re kind of doing research.
Brian Lio:
Sure. Right. So there are two things there. So one is that we were first in the space it was still very much in the days where there were a lot of people who thought Bitcoin is the one and only, Bitcoin forever and ever, and that is the end, and we really saw this as a space we were just scratching the surface of, and it was going to be far more complex, far more dynamic, and far more strange than anyone expected. And so what we really saw as one of the critical pieces that we didn’t see being addressed and a place where we could really help is, you know, how do you even wrap your head around it, even in the early days of it?
So we saw the idea of high quality intelligence and then a platform with which to interact with that intelligence as the place where we could really play that role, and we worked for a lot of different companies of various sizes, and even in the traditional financial markets we were really dissatisfied with the quality of interfaces and work that was out there, how people interact with intelligence, reports, analysis, information. So it was a problem that we had wanted to tackle for a while just in terms of the interface and design side, and then we saw this need not just for really compelling research, but also for accessible interfaces so that everyone could interact with it.
Laura Shin:
And so Matt, what was your background when you said he brought you on to do the content and research? Do you have more of that analytical background?
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah, a lot of my background has been research into emerging technologies. So I spent a number of years in the Valley, Silicon Valley, with a group called Institute for the Future. They do…
Laura Shin:
Oh, I know them.
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah. Futures research into emerging technologies. So I did that for a while, I did some grad school work and focused a lot on smart cities and how cities are adapting emerging technologies, and those are two big areas, I had a couple of years doing economics consulting which ended up helping quite a bit, and that was when I made the pivot to this space.
Laura Shin:
When did you join?
Matt Chwierut:
That’s a good question. It was a gradual transition into the team, and then went full-time early last year.
Laura Shin:
Okay, and how many employees do you guys have now?
Brian Lio:
There are ten of us now and we’re hiring as fast as we can.
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow. Yeah, well, so I want to talk about that. Let’s dive into the details on how you guys do your work. So, how do you get your information?
Brian Lio:
Sure. It’s every possible source. When we first came into the space, again, and still to this day, is if you want to provide information in this space there just aren’t consistent and reliable sources for the most part, so a lot of the research and sourcing we do has been through a very hands-on process.
So one of the things that we’ve done is take pretty extended research trips, you know, across the US and internationally as well. We’ll actually head out to a region and do three or four weeks plus, and every day is meeting new organizations and individuals in the space, a bit of building relationships and connections and learning what we can just on the ground, so we’ve done some pretty extended trips in Israel and the surrounding areas, all over Europe, extensively in the US, and we have some upcoming ones planned to Asia as well.
Essentially it’s a combination of every possible channel and news site and information source and forum online combined with a couple of hundred people that we know around the world that help us vet information, that feed us information, that we can talk to about trends. So it’s really kind of every possible channel that we can access, we combine.
Laura Shin:
And so when you…oh, go ahead.
Matt Chwierut:
I’ll expand on that a little bit because it is very important how we arrived at what we’re doing. Like, early on when we started researching ICOs and token sales we knew that this was…like, we saw the long term potential of this method of distributing a token, raising money, advertising, onboarding new users for a protocol, but at the time if you wanted to learn about them you were crawling through Bitcointalk and Reddit, and reading through white papers of varying levels of sophistication and objectivity, and the barrier to information to access any of these opportunities was so, so high, and we saw that as a place where we could start to stitch together information from all these different sources, talking to the teams, talking to other teams that were doing something similar, to try to create a coherent story about what these opportunities and what these companies and what these protocols actually are that would make sense to a third party.
Laura Shin:
And what percentage of the things that you write about do you actually talk to the team in person for?
Matt Chwierut:
Oh, almost 100 percent.
Laura Shin:
Oh, really?
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah. For the stuff that we do that’s a little bit longer form. There’s a couple of projects where we will just write a very small amount and sometimes we don’t speak to the teams, but those are just summaries of existing information. For stuff that’s a little longer form or if we’re looking at cross markets and a number of different types of applications or a number of different industries we’ll talk to most of the teams.
Laura Shin:
Okay, but you know, for ones where you’re just kind of grabbing info from their website or whatever, what percentage of the site is that?
Brian Lio:
We write on pretty small percentage on the token sales that contact us, the inbound at this point is just truly overwhelming, there’s so many. So it’s really just a small subset of them that we go into depth and…
Laura Shin:
That you talk to.
Matt Chwierut:
Correct.
Brian Lio:
…do a sort of analysis. Yes.
Matt Chwierut:
Correct.
Laura Shin:
Right.
Brian Lio:
So anything that we right about, typically it’s a group that we speak to, but the ones that we list, that’s just to make that information accessible and consistent.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, so that’s what I’m asking, what’s the breakdown between what you write about and what you list?
Brian Lio:
Oh, the percentage that we write about at this point, I don’t know. It’s a relatively small percentage.
Matt Chwierut:
It’s changed remarkably over time. We think of a number of different eras in ICO history, the beginning when it started, Mastercoin is usually seen as the first official ICO in 2013, and there was an explosion of ICOs that included Mastercoin, Ethereum, NXT, a number of protocols that are still around today, and then the long winter in the whole industry after the Bitcoin price crash and after Mt. Gox ICOs and token sales really fell out of favor, no one was really doing them, and then we saw a pickup early last year, you saw a couple more protocols and the emergence of more applications, more tokens at the application layer, and it started to become more and more popular, and then about four months ago the space absolutely exploded.
Laura Shin:
Right.
Matt Chwierut:
So now, I would say five to ten percent, if I were to ballpark, of the entire market, if you define the market as a project that announces some intent to raise funds through a token sale.
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow. Okay.
Matt Chwierut:
We write about…we try to list everything…our philosophy there is that there’s not really a good place online where you can find a list that isn’t a promotional or advertising platform, and so we don’t charge projects to list on our Smith and Crown dashboard, we want it to be an open public information source that anyone can come and do their own research, and then we select a couple of those to go a little more in depth on, write about it, illustrate what they’re doing with their token, with the industry, with the team.
Laura Shin:
Right. When you do that are you intending it to be sort of like a quality marker that, you know, this is something people are aiming for, to be written about on Smith and Crown?
Matt Chwierut:
Not necessarily. Sometimes we pick projects just because they’re doing something very novel or very ambitious even if the chances for success seem slimmer than many other projects. We’ll sometimes pick projects that not a lot of other people or sites or places are writing about because we think what they’re doing is actually very valuable. So we don’t want it to just be…we don’t think about it as just a proxy for all of the top sales.
Laura Shin:
So how do you decide? If some of them are just kind of more novel and then there are certain ones I’m sure you just have to write about because they’re highly anticipated.
Matt Chwierut:
Correct.
Laura Shin:
What are all the factors that go into deciding?
Brian Lio:
Sure. Yeah. It’s a variety of factors. I mean, it’s relatively subjective. It’s ones that, as you mentioned, if there’s a lot of community interest around a project that increases the chances that we’ll write about it because we think providing additional information and context will be particularly useful there. Sometimes it’s a project where it happens to correspond with research we’re doing internally, we’re doing a bunch of research on a particular methodology or mechanism or attribute, and this project happens to incorporate those, so it’s just an area of interest for us at the time. So yeah, it’s certainly not intended to be an endorsement or a recommendation. Largely we figure the more research, thoughtful research that we can put out there that’s accessible to people the more good it does and the more people can take that and then build from it. So we…
Laura Shin:
Do you ever interview people and then not do a longer writeup about them if you’re sort of feeling like maybe this team isn’t going to pull it off?
Matt Chwierut:
Sure. Occasionally, but it’s rare.
Brian Lio:
And in terms of the formality of the interviews too. I mean, we’re at a place where there are days where we could end up talking to three or four teams, so in terms of, we get exposed to a lot of projects and we talk with a lot of teams on different levels of formality. So yeah, we talk to far more teams than we end up writing about.
Laura Shin:
And actually to go back to the travel piece, why don’t you just do those interviews by phone? Why do you go to these regions to talk to them?
Brian Lio:
Sure. A lot of the interviews we do now are by phone, but sometimes in order to expand our network and actually meet people you have to be on the ground. You know, even in this highly effective virtual era we live in it doesn’t replace face to face conversations, and a lot of this too is to really understand what’s happening at the edges of the space, what’s coming next, you have to sit down with people, you have to have a coffee or beer or whatever and win their trust, and you know, get their real thoughts on what’s happening, and get their introductions to other people that are not known in the community or are not active players, that don’t have Twitter accounts. So we found in each one of these exercises that we’ve done, we’ve met incredible people, we’ve gotten a lot of really amazing insights, and the only way that that would have happened is to be on the ground, meeting people one day at a time.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, so in that sense your job and my job is very similar, but yet you choose to live in Portland where I really don’t think there are a lot of, you know, there is a lot of activity going on here. So like, for me I moved to the Bay Area a little bit over a year ago, and one of the factors was there’s a lot of activity there, and I’m not going to lie, I actually wanted to move to Portland because I have a ton of friends here, I love the city, and yeah, I mean, I like the Bay Area as well, but there was something about like, my heart was telling me, go to Portland, but then I was like, this just makes no sense on any rational level, so I made that choice. So why do you guys choose to be based here?
Brian Lio:
Sure. A lot of it was how logistics worked out at the time. I’ve mostly been based out of New York for the last eight years, but Matt and a few other members of our team actually ended up being based in Portland, and so it made sense, the majority of the team was here, you know, let’s spin something up.
But also we found in terms of looking forward and building up the company, is we’re working on some of the most complicated and interesting problems that exist in the world today, and when we’re talking to new analysts or team members, whoever that may be, they’re from every corner of the world, and when we’re saying come, come move here, we like Portland because very high quality of life, very low comparable cost of living. So we see it as a really good place to build and expand our research practice.
And then in terms of location to projects, this is such a geographically dispersed place, it would be really hard for us to find a location that was centered at the heart of it, so to speak.
Laura Shin:
Really? You don’t think the Bay Area has an advantage? I definitely do.
Brian Lio:
I think that there are a lot of projects in the Bay Area, but I think that there are just as many interesting projects so many other places in the world.
Laura Shin:
But not Portland.
Brian Lio:
But not Portland. Yeah. Portland is a great place to do research from, and when you’re traveling 80 percent of the time it’s a very nice place to return to.
Laura Shin:
Oh. Oh. You’re traveling that much.
Brian Lio:
Yes.
Laura Shin:
Wow. Okay. Okay. Well, kudos to you. I can’t do that.
Let’s talk a little bit about how your work has changed. You guys were talking a little bit about that, about how, you know, there were very few ICOs kind of even less than a year ago, and all of a sudden it’s just sped up to, you know, 1,000 percent really quickly. So in the beginning, how were you finding these projects? Were you seeking them out and did they not know about you guys and how were they coming to your attention?
Matt Chwierut:
In the very early days a lot of it was discovery on Bitcointalk. It was the platform of choice for announcing these, and we’d usually discover them, sometimes they’d reach out to us, sometimes we’d spend time on the forums and understand, we could encounter them in Twitter conversations, but there weren’t enough in any given month for us to feel like we were missing a really big piece of the action, what was going on. Teams were usually very accessible and open, and they still are, but then they were just very willing and excited that someone who had a little bit of a platform and a portal to the broader world and the broader industry wanted to talk to them.
So that ended up being a really big piece, and then as we put our nose to the grindstone and kept doing a lot of this work, because we were really, really passionate about it, over time we grew in terms of a following, in terms of popularity, in terms of people referencing us, and now it is much more people come and ask to be…
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I’m sure.
Matt Chwierut:
…listed, ask to be researched or interviewed.
Laura Shin:
Do you want to put an estimate on how many emails and Twitter messages and everything else you get a day or a week or a month or…
Brian Lio:
Oh, man. It’s hard to say. It’s really increased. I mean, some days it can be a dozen, two or three dozen inbound just on getting project listings.
Laura Shin:
And so when did you kind of notice that things were changing?
Brian Lio:
Sure. I think we started to see the signs of it, between six and eight months ago is when it first started to pick up, and then it’s been the last four months or so where things have really continued up on that trajectory, but yeah, I think as early as eight months ago we really started to see that things were diverging from where the trendline was originally drawn.
Matt Chwierut:
Absolutely.
Laura Shin:
Was there like, any moment when you were just like, whoa, this is going to be huge?
Brian Lio:
Well, it’s kind of interesting for us, this was kind of what we planned on. We always expected there to be this level of growth, I think it just happened sooner than we thought it was going to. You know, if you look at the space there’s still a lot of challenges in terms of onboarding and accessibility and usability across a number of key areas, and so we expected that to be a slightly larger barrier over the long term.
But in terms of the excitement, it just grew really fast, and we noticed it in a few different formats. You know, so we don’t just study token sales, we really study the entire breadth of the blockchain space, all assets, all projects, and so that’s kind of what the token sale practice came out of, but you know, in the work that we’re doing we started noticing these trends where we would start to get a lot of calls from hedge funds or institutional investors or big financial organizations, and so pretty early on we started to notice, hey, there’s some key groups here, and we’re getting a lot of calls from a lot of high level people looking for information, being very interested in the space, so we started to adjust some of our estimates of how fast this was going to grow because a lot bigger players than were publicly revealing themselves were being very interested in the space.
Laura Shin:
And that sort of clued you in that there was a lot more money coming into the space, like, not even just people who’ve made big gains on their earlier crypto, but new money, fiat money coming in.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. It’s interesting, I mean, it’s one of the reasons why we go and travel and spend as much time as we do on the road meeting people, is that we’re in a very interesting position where we could have a lot of conversations with everyone from institutional investors and people who own investment banks all the way through to crypto anarchists. Everyone has got a different, interesting view on this, and by combining all those conversations together you can start to piece together the puzzle of who is interested, what are the levels of engagement, what are the things that hold people back, what are people really excited about, and kind of stitch that together into a picture of where things are going.
Laura Shin:
And so those institutional investors, when they were calling you, what is it that they wanted? They wanted kind of like, more information than what you were putting on the site or…
Brian Lio:
Yeah. It’s one of those things where I think it was pretty interesting, you have a lot of people who…we were talking to a lot of people who are used to being able to understand whatever new industry they wade into. Here’s a new sector, this is the next one that we’re going to put venture behind or incorporate a new hedge fund, or whatever that happens to be. People with decades of experience are used to being able to figure things out very quickly and so they thought, blockchain, this is the next hot space, we’re going to get involved, and then they spend a couple of weeks on it and they say, whoa, whoa, still don’t get this, and then they start looking at it, do we hire an analyst? Do we build a team of analysts? You know, how do we even begin to wrap our heads around this? And then we get these calls, how do I start? What is this space? Help me get a handle on what’s even going on here, how we participate, how we move forward.
So a variety of levels of questions, but people understanding that this is an important thing to be aware of, to be involved in, and then this realization that you can’t just get up on it in a week or two.
Laura Shin:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I definitely agree with you there. Okay. So we’re going to take a break now for an important word from our sponsor, Onramp.
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So, how do you guys make money?
Brian Lio:
That’s a great question, one we get often. So when we first started this and we said we’re a research group, we’re going to study the breadth of the blockchain space, we’re going to build a platform and tools around intelligence, people thought we were nuts. People in the industry thought we were nuts because why do you need an intelligence platform when it’s just Bitcoin, and then people outside of the industry thought we were nuts because they said, Bitcoin? That’s nonsense.
So this is something that we’ve bootstrapped ourselves for years at this point with the idea of being able to very independently pursue a specific vision that we had. So our vision for how we make money is largely centered around the idea of launching an intelligence platform, so kind of like a Bloomberg for crypto or so. The idea is really to make a platform that’s as accessible as possible to people. When you look at other tools that are out there today in traditional markets they tend to be very, very expensive and tailored for the kind of financial elite. One of the things that’s really exciting about the whole blockchain space is accessibility and inclusion, is that everyone all around the world will be able to access the assets and tools and utilities that the blockchain space provides, and so our vision really is for an intelligence platform that everyone can use, that provides information, analysis, analytics in a way that’s accessible and can act as an onramp, and then on top of that we will build access to increasingly sophisticated features for the people who need it.
Laura Shin:
So it’s like a fremium model.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Brian Lio:
And it’s one of the reasons why we publish so many of these reports online and so much information, just to make it accessible, right? There’s been no shortage of people that have come to us and said, your model should be publishing nothing and charging banks a lot of money for these reports, and we said you have listened to nothing that we’ve said and that’s antithetical to kind of our vision for this. So we want to make information accessible, exactly, and provide some base level of utility much like we do on the site to everyone, and then for people who need more sophistication, to allow them to pay a subscription fee for that.
Laura Shin:
So what are some of the different premium things that you’re going to offer and charge for?
Brian Lio:
Well…
Laura Shin:
Have you started doing that?
Brian Lio:
So this is something that we’ll have a private beta for later this year and we’ll roll out publicly early next year.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Okay. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re planning?
Brian Lio:
We’ll get to that.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Okay. You’ll give that to me as an exclusive or something? I’ll write it up on Forbes.
Brian Lio:
That sounds very good.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Awesome. That’s a great deal.
Brian Lio:
So in addition to that kind of in the meantime is you know, so we largely see our efforts right now concentrated in three big areas, so one is continuing to build out the platform. We’ve spent years building out tools and processes and analytics beyond what we’re publishing and the goal is to use the platform to open those up and make them accessible to people, so that’s where we’re spending a lot of time and effort.
The second area that we spend a lot of time is in general advocacy and education. You know, again, we got in this space because we’re really passionate idealists about the positive transformative power of the blockchain. We think this is something that we can’t even begin to imagine its potential for changing the state of the world, reshaping industries, and so forth, but for how excited we are about its positive potential, with the growth that we’re seeing right now this is a delicate time. Things are happening very fast, things can break. Mistakes can be made when things happen so fast and there’s so much capital involved. So right now we see this as an area where education is so critical, so we’re spending a lot of time trying to go speak at conferences, trying to go give private talks, have dinners with people that are looking at this space, who are going to bring in significant resources or attention, we’re going out to DC and trying to wave our hands around and provide education.
Laura Shin:
To regulators you mean?
Brian Lio:
Yeah. We’re doing some work with the Chamber of Digital Commerce and trying to help provide education. So we’re putting a lot of effort just into general industry education where we can because we feel with all the attention on the space right now people getting reliable, quality information that’s free of hype or a sales pitch or fear is just so important for new established players that are getting in to understand it and to make good decisions.
Laura Shin:
And to go back to earlier when you were saying that you go on and you give talks and stuff as well, what exactly are you educating people on in those talks?
Brian Lio:
Sure. The idea is to just generally provide an overview of this is the industry, this is its potential, you know, these are the concerns of the industry, this is were we see it’s going. It’s very hard, a lot of these stuff that gets written about the industry tends to capitalize on one sensational point or another, and there’s a lot of nuances and a lot of complexity there. So even if you’re just trying to follow along with a lot of the headlines it can be hard to get a sense for what’s really going on. So there’s a really wide variety of topics, but having time where we can sit down with people and give them that overview and really answer more in-depth questions around how things work.
Laura Shin:
And earlier when you were talking about kind of like the mistakes and risks and stuff like that, do you also…what you were talking about before the podcast, about how people are throwing silly money in and they probably shouldn’t and stuff like that, do you give any advice like that?
Brian Lio:
A lot of what we say is, look, there’s a lot of lessons that have already been learned. We don’t need to learn every lesson the hard way. There’s a lot of common sense, there’s a lot of best practices that can be applied to this space that exist elsewhere, and so we think that education is an enormously important part of that, giving people access to resources and then following up and working closely with people who are going to come in and make an impact.
A third area of our activity is actually around advisory services as well.
Laura Shin:
Oh.
Brian Lio:
So we are in a unique position in that we have spent an enormous amount of time and resources studying how digital assets and tokens are designed, what their utilities and properties are, how their economies work or should work, and doing that modeling and thought across literally hundreds of projects…
Laura Shin:
Like the field of cryptoeconomics.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So we spend an enormous amount of time on that, and so it’s something we realized, we started to see a lot of kind of mistakes or missteps being made by projects that were designing tokens or economies, or perhaps more established companies that are looking to get into this space and have a lot of questions about how you do this, you know, really…I think that there is a lot of competence out there, but the reality is we’re at the very earliest stages of understanding how token economies work, how token rights and properties interact with each other, what makes for successful systems and not.
So what we started to do, on a fairly limited basis as we only have so many people, is to work with projects and organizations to help them better understand cryptoeconomics, to help them to act as a thinking partner specifically around these ideas of cryptoeconomic design, how do you structure a token, how do you structure distribution, what makes sense, and really I think there’s been an unfortunate focus on the short term of issuing a token. I think it gets positioned in a lot of ways as a capital raise when really this is a very long term decision where even small decisions can have large consequences, and so what we try and do is help teams think through the cryptoeconomic design as something that’s fundamental to their team or project or organization and all of the long term consequences and thoughts and modeling that goes into that.
Laura Shin:
Wow. So you’re helping some of these teams.
Brian Lio:
We are. Yeah, and so it really runs the gambit. Right now we’re really focused on areas that we find that there’s some complexity or a particular interest. You know, one area that we’re seeing a lot of organizations reach out to us, actually much larger established organizations that have been looking at the space, they think they perhaps have a business that could benefit from tokenization in some way.
Laura Shin:
Sort of like Kick or _____ 0:31:06 or one of those.
Brian Lio:
Sure. Exactly. Yeah. So these large players are coming in and what they’re looking for is where can they get expert advice on this and where can they get someone to help think through what that hybrid model looks like, someone that can help them understand their existing business and lines of business and say here’s an opportunity to extend one or to introduce a token into this, and what does that look like, what are the pitfalls, what are the opportunities, and really helping them think through the complexities of those decisions.
Matt Chwierut:
Tokenization, in terms of the process of a company integrating a token into their business model in one way, shape, or form is more than just doing the math on the cryptoeconomics. It’s a really big piece of it, the token design, but you also have to think through user experience, and is it plausible to assume that people are going to use this token? Is this going to be fun? Does this make sense in terms of your product and your brand? And then long term, tokenizing is a huge investment because it had a huge impact on your business model, and having a token or some kind of a tokenization strategy marries you to the decisions that you made in ways that are very difficult to go back on without breaking some kind of a promise with token holders.
Laura Shin:
Right, or unless you bake governance in or something.
Brian Lio:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
Where you can propose changes. Well, so do you feel like if you’re giving advice or advisory services to some of these teams, but you’re also then serving as this resource, like, is there some kind of separation between the people who do the two different things or…
Brian Lio:
Sure. It’s a great question and honestly, I think a really important one. So kind of our design, what we take pretty religiously, is disclosure. I mean, we think that’s one of the big things that this space is going to go through, is really the importance of disclosing relationships here. So luckily we work with the smallest fraction of the projects that come across our dashboard and that we list, and we have a very strict policy, anything that we do any writing on where we have a relationship on, any kind of financial or token-based relationship, very clearly disclaim that. You know, we want to make sure front and center that the writing should stand on its own, but that people understand there’s a relationship there, it’s clear, we’re on as advisors or providing advice or whatever that happens to be. So it’s something that we take very seriously and we think is an important part, not just for us but for many of the players in the industry.
And we do separate…
Laura Shin:
But is it also different people? Okay.
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah, we do separate people. So the people who end up doing the research and writing are different than the people who end up working on the project.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, so what are some of your maybe working hypotheses around cryptoeconomics? Like, what do you think works? What doesn’t work?
Brian Lio:
Sure.
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So there are a number of different areas that tokens and tokenization have proven very powerful, and we think far and away what we’re going to see in tokens in five years we couldn’t even imagine today. It’s really the frontier of creativity. I feel like every week I come across something that I hadn’t thought about before.
I do think that there are a class of tokens that are a little bit more like equities and stocks in companies and there’s a lot of regulatory issues around that, those are going to get worked out, and a lot of really smart lawyers and regulators actively thinking about this today around the world.
But in many ways tokenizing ownership over a protocol or ownership over the company behind it…
Laura Shin:
An asset. Yeah.
Brian Lio:
…they are very, very creative, and equity as a share in a company is something that’s been around for over 100 years, really interesting novel financial innovation, but it’s not the only way you can imagine ownership over some kind of a joint endeavor, and so this has been a really interesting area of experimentation, and I think that as the regulatory issues get worked out people will, there will be a little bit more creativity and experimentation. That’s one.
A second one is in tokens that will resemble digital products that are usable by consumers, particularly crowds and crowds of people, so very good at incentivizing crowds to take good actions on a platform, to avoid bad actions.
Laura Shin:
So what’s an example?
Matt Chwierut:
A good example, and this actually isn’t a token that went through a crowd sale, but Numerai, they have a token, the Numeraire, and the purpose of the token is…I guess it’s worth saying a couple of words about them, what they do…we didn’t have a relationship with them or anything, I just think what they do is really interesting. But they have a community of data scientists around the world that are constantly crunching deidentified data from stock markets and prices and weather economic data to do predictive models on the performance of different stocks or industries, and the data scientists submit outcomes of their models every week to Numerai which takes those and uses it to improve their model.
Laura Shin:
And they invest using those models. They’re a big hedge fund. Yeah.
Matt Chwierut:
Yes. Yeah, exactly, and then they compensate the data scientists who are the top performers across the platforms.
Laura Shin:
In Numeraire which is their token.
Matt Chwierut:
Correct, and historically it’s been in BTC, but they’re also distributing Numeraire, and the role that Numeraire plays on their platform is that the data scientists stake it as some kind of indication of confidence in their model in that individual week, and that’s really interesting because if they’re wrong it’s not like Numerai the company pockets the proceeds, they don’t…
Laura Shin:
Yeah, it gets burned.
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So from the standpoint of a data scientist they know that that Numeraire is not being extracted by the company and that the outcome of what happens to that Numeraire is determined by the algorithm and by the performance of their individual model.
Laura Shin:
Right. How good their model is. Yeah. Well, but just to go back to what you think the better ways to structure tokens are, is there anything else?
Brian Lio:
Well, we get this question a lot, what’s the best way to structure a token, what’s the best way to do token distribution, and one of the things that, you know, that we’re trying to get out there is that is no one right way, there is no one killer methodology or framework or whatever it happens to be.
There’s really this question of what is right for the organization, and this comes back to this focus on whether you’re using some kind of distribution event to distribute because it has utility for people or whether you’re just using it as a capital raise, because if you’re using it as a capital raise then you’re looking at a set of strategies to maximize a capital raise, but if you’re looking at this in terms of distribution then you really have to take that step back and think through, you know, what is this organization, what is the intention, who will use it, who are all the different members of the people who will use it, what will they use it for, and with that then you can say, here’s a set of different attributes or utilities or properties that a token has, these are the ways an economy can function in order to incentivize and support these types of actions. But those can be radically different depending on the type of problem you’re solving, and the same thing with distribution, is that there’s different distribution models out there that can be very different depending on whether you care whether one person comes in and snatches up everything or whether there’s a specific group of people that you want to immediately be using this or be holding it or whatever that happens to be.
Laura Shin:
Well, that’s really interesting because then it sort of, just in my mind I start thinking about spectrums or quadrants and kind of like, different, you know, depending on what your goal is, different strategies, matching with that. So in terms of distribution what do you feel is a good way to structure a token sale to get a large number of people to buy?
Brian Lio:
Yeah. I think we’re still at the early stages of what good models for that look like, but it’s interesting, we’ve seen some kind of novelty in this in experimentation. Urbit did something interesting where they had a mailing list and they distributed these, kind of airdropped these codes to their mailing list and there were two codes per email and they could be used to purchase a fixed amount of tokens in their ecosystem.
Laura Shin:
And each, what do you mean by two codes? Every single person got the same number?
Brian Lio:
They got two codes. Each person got two unique codes that they could use, so they could use one code to purchase a unit and then they could go and sell the other code or share it with a friend or whatever they wanted.
Laura Shin:
Oh. I see. Oh. Like, you plus one. I see.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. Exactly, or they could just give away both, whatever that happened to be, but it was an interesting model in that here was a group of people that were interested enough to follow along with them, and they wanted to give them the first chance to have this kind of capped participation, which was certainly a novel thing, but some of these clever things only work so many times. If that becomes the expectation then you have people signing up with multiple addresses and so forth.
So we think part of this is going to be evolving, we’re going to see a set of different popular versions of this emerge. Some of them are going to be tied to provable identity, some of these are going to be distributed to internal users of an existing product or system or someone else’s existing product or system. So part of this is going to be the challenges of identifying who you want to be participants, and what’s the best way to give them access, and in what quantities. And sometimes just open participation will make sense and sometimes it will be something specific or nuanced.
That’s one of the things about this space that I think can be very terrifying and overwhelming, but is also the very exciting part of it, is that the tools that people have in order to build projects, in order to get initial participation, they’re essentially limitless, there are so many different combinations, and we’re just starting down the path. So a lot of the thinking that we do is saying, look, here’s a bunch of models we’ve already seen, but what are the next steps looking like? How can these be improved? What are new ways to do this? So it’s very fun for us to get to work with teams who can share that vision and share that excitement for figuring out what are the new ways to do it, and I think we’re going to continue to be surprised by some of the methodologies that get implemented by teams.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. So what you said about how once something becomes a trend people try to game it, is it just forever going to be this kind of cat and mouse thing?
Matt Chwierut:
I think yes and no. One of the biggest things that is more and more becoming part of the industry and part of the token sale space is some kind of KYC identification registration which historically hasn’t been a major piece of it, and not doing that poses a lot of dilemmas for projects, because if you can contribute anonymously from any individual address then you can essentially civil attack or try to get a larger share of any individual sale even if they try to cap.
Laura Shin:
Right. Civil attack is like having multiple addresses. Yeah.
Matt Chwierut:
Correct. Correct. So Vitalik Buterin framed this really, really well, that you kind of are…either you limit the amount of money that you raise or you uncap the number of people that can actually participate, because if you don’t have a capped raise then anyone can contribute anything and you can maximize participation, but if you cap the raise then you can end up in situations like what happened with the Basic Attention Token where a very small number of people got very large portions, and so the dilemma cannot really be solved without really, really clever mechanisms. He just framed that really well, but one of the piece of that puzzle is KYC in some way, shape, or form. So if you’re an individual and they try to cap it, and maybe there’s a strategy, like every individual address can only contribute this many dollars or this many ether, then you can just have a thousand addresses to still get a huge portion of the system, but if there’s some kind of registration that prevents someone from creating a thousand addresses then you have a little bit more flexibility in determining who can get involved, at what levels they can get involved, and why.
Laura Shin:
Sort of like CoinList for the non-accredited, too.
Matt Chwierut:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We think we’ll see more and more of that in the space because it’s a really interesting tool kit for projects to experiment with distribution because the distribution strategy is just as important as every other piece and it really varied project to project.
Brian Lio:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and I actually wanted to ask you, before you were saying sometimes people want to release tokens to a big network and other times maybe they just want to maximize the amount of money they can raise, but is there anybody who doesn’t want to release their tokens to a large number of people? I can’t think of any scenario in which that would be a goal.
Brian Lio:
Well, I mean, if you’re just seeing this as a capital raise and you don’t care where the money comes from, you know, then it doesn’t matter if 100 people give you a dollar or one person gives you a 100 dollars.
Laura Shin:
Oh, interesting.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. What excites us about the space and what we’re looking at is using a distribution event for distribution as opposed to a capital raise, but there are certainly people who use this as a mechanism solely for capital raise, and I think we’ll see that emerge and kind of carve out its own space.
Matt Chwierut:
The kinds of tokens that more fit that mold are, for lack of a better word, fee-sharing or revenue-sharing tokens, so the holder of the token is entitled to a portion and fees or revenues generated on some kind of a platform, and many people call these rent-seeking tokens because the token holder really plays no role in the success of the platform.
Laura Shin:
What’s an example of that?
Matt Chwierut:
There are a number of examples but they’re often paired with other token functions or token properties, but an example might be the DigixDAO token where token holders get a portion of fees generated through the sale of digitized gold.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Matt Chwierut:
Now, DigixDAO also has a governance function which makes it really important to distribute, so a lot of the tokens end up having or embodying a number of different rights and a number of different properties.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So one thing that I’m so curious about is how much traffic does your site get and how has that changed over time?
Brian Lio:
Yeah. I don’t have the numbers handy. Obviously we’re not tracking the numbers so closely. For us it was really about the who, who we’re talking to and who is on the site, and we had some modest and ambitious goals for ourselves in terms of traffic, and at some point we realized that traffic was like, 4x our most ambitious goals, and when we really stopped tracking it we were so far beyond our estimates, our projections for what we wanted in terms of traffic, and at this point we’re so completely inundated with inbound. So we’re growing at some crazy week on week growth percentage at this point, I don’t have the exact numbers.
Laura Shin:
Wow.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. We stopped tracking it, it’s getting so wild.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Well, I’ve seen it also in my podcast downloads. So one other thing I was curious about is your Smith and Crown Index, what is it and how did you decide what goes into it and all that?
Brian Lio:
Sure. I’ll talk about this at a high level and Matt can jump in on the details. So yeah, this is something that we’ve had actually for a really long time. I mean, it was one of the first things that we worked on literally years ago, and it’s kind of evolved over time, but we were really looking for…you know, when you pull up, say like CoinMarketCap and there’s a thousand things on there, there’s so much noise. We think it’s very intimidating for newcomers to the space, and then even if you’re looking at it, how is the market doing? Do you really want a lot of, you know, a lot of short term volatility for tokens that really don’t have any value and essentially going nowhere? Do you want that being part of your overall market measure?
So what we’re doing with the Index is trying to find a set of constituents that we think represent the overall market as a whole and use those to track to have a more accurate proxy for how are things doing, right, as a benchmark that you can use, and this is something we’re going to continue to be working on moving forward and have some cool announcements about coming up. But the idea is it provides an accurate benchmark across the industry.
Laura Shin:
And so what metrics are you using to decide which tokens are included and also then how do you decide the weightings and stuff?
Matt Chwierut:
We look at a couple of different factors, one of them is that we only look at fundamental blockchains. We don’t include meta tokens, so that’s the…
Laura Shin:
And how do you define a meta token?
Brian Lio:
Oh, one that’s built on top of another blockchain, so a token that’s built on…
Laura Shin:
Oh, okay. So no ERC-20 tokens?
Matt Chwierut:
No ERC-20 tokens or their correlates on other blockchains. So that’s a big one, so we’re only looking at fundamental blockchains. Second, we look at…
Laura Shin:
Some other people might call that a protocol token, is that correct? Okay.
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s correct. I do think there’s still a lot of semantics that are still being worked out exactly across the industry, but that’s a totally fair way to put it.
Laura Shin:
Right. Okay.
Matt Chwierut:
The other factors that we look at in terms of inclusion would be performance and activity on the blockchain itself. So, is the blockchain gaining traction? Is it actually being used? Is it still really a stage that no one is really building on it? So projects and blockchains that do have some moderate level of traction and existence and activity is part of it.
Laura Shin:
And by traction do you mean developer activity or trading volume or what…
Matt Chwierut:
A lot of it could just be the transaction level. So yes, so it could be developers, it’s like, what is being developed on the platform? It’s how many wallets there are, how much transaction activity is actually going over the blockchain itself, and we have to adjust that a little bit for trade volumes and for proof of work coins since they’re distributing coins across the network quite a bit. But it’s really who is using the network, transaction and volume is one of them, developer activity, community following is another really big thing that we look at.
Laura Shin:
And just from the way you’re describing this it sounds like are you trying to maybe subtract some of the speculative activity? Is that what you’re doing or is that included?
Matt Chwierut:
What do you mean by speculative activity?
Laura Shin:
You know, people sometimes are not really interested in the token itself but they’re like, hey, I expect this to go up, so there’s a lot of trading volume, or…
Matt Chwierut:
Oh, sure. So market activity is definitely something we look at. So I said we’ll do blockchain level analysis or what’s going on over the chain itself, and we also look at markets. So we’d look at factors like how many different markets and trade pairs does this individual cryptoasset have across fiat and across crypto, so kind of how strong is it as part of that entire interconnected market? We look at trade volume over a pretty meaningful amount of time, so things that have short term spikes in price, network value, or trade volume, you know, look past a lot of the short term stuff.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Yeah. I guess what I was going at is sometimes the tokens are trading a lot but then the actual utility in it is maybe a lot less. I know Brian was at Token Summit and Chris Burniske gave a great talk where he talked about like, subtracting out the speculative value and getting to the utility value.
Brian Lio:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Laura Shin:
How do you decide the weightings for the index?
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah, so the weightings currently are done based on network value. So we call it market capitalization, we generally don’t like that term because market capitalization is the sum value of a company’s shares, and as we’ve said, tokens are not shares. They’re very, very different. They’re very different even from each other, and I think actually Chris is the one who had the…
Laura Shin:
Yeah. He came up with network value.
Matt Chwierut:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and brilliant, we use it a lot.
Laura Shin:
And also for podcast listeners, you should go back and listen to the episode I did with Chris and Adam White, it’s more than a year ago, but even then Chris and Adam of course were just both really far thinking in this area. What problems do you still see that need to be solved in this space, you know? What concerns do you have?
Brian Lio:
You know, on one hand I think you have right now one of the big things that needed to be solved is just onboarding. When we look at the research and projects we want to roll out, and we think of it as a series of bridges. So you have people that hear about this entire industry and space and they want to get involved, and what does that first bridge look like? You have to introduce them to it, you want to provide a curated set of information that’s intelligent, that exposes them to projects and endeavors and sources of merit, and then once people start to get familiar with it then the next step is perhaps to acquire some assets in the space, and that’s where something like a Coinbase comes in, and then once you have those maybe you want to go beyond what is the most mainstream, and then you know, again, providing that research and the insight and the tools for that, but then where do you hold those tokens? How do you secure them? How do you make people feel comfortable with that? And then going beyond that, you know, how do you people get more advanced than just holding a basket of assets and so forth?
So in each one of those points we see that there’s a bridge to a new level of capability and understanding, and I think now for people that are dedicated enough and savvy enough you can navigate all of those pathways, but it’s narrow, you’re kind of fording the river on a lot of these, it’s possible, but the more…I think that’s a series, each one of those kind of bridges is an area where there’s a lot of opportunity for people to come in and solve the problems of adoption and onboarding, you know, as…we kind of see it as this way where there’s a lot of people who want a password reset button, they want insurance, they want security and custody, you know, and the idea is that there will be this kind of city that’s built with laws and rules and custody and so forth that will help bring on enormous numbers of people and amounts of capital, but there’s always a chance to kind of step outside the city walls and go down directly to a network level and transact in whatever way is possible.
But the idea now is that there’s so many talented people out there, there’s so many organizations that want to get involved that are simply missing robust tools and onramps to come in and participate in the industry, so I think anything that helps solve those problems is pretty meaningful right now, and I do think there are a lot of problems on onboarding right now, so I think that’s one big area.
And then the other one is around clarity, too, is that this is very much the frontier in a lot of ways, and you know, we’re seeing with the _____ 0:53:21 discussion and so forth is that it’s not entirely clear where all the lines are for this, and you know, we know for sure that there are a lot of players of all shapes and sizes waiting on the sidelines, very excited about this, but are looking for more clarity. So I think that’s another big issue with this space and a potential for problems, when you have people that are moving very fast at very large scale and a lack of clarity, you know, that can certainly cause issues.
Laura Shin:
Where do you think all this activity is going? What do you think the future looks like for developers, for VCs, for investors, and for all of us? Like, what will our lives look like five years from now? You know, pick your time frame.
Brian Lio:
Sure. Sure. No. I think five years from now, I think anyone with a prediction for five years out other than…unless the prediction is we don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s likely wrong. That’s one of the things that we love about this space, is that for as much time as we spend with a dedicated team researching this every day there’s still stuff that’s new and novel and surprises us, and we spend a lot of time mapping out these technologies and projects and where they’re going to go, and…
Laura Shin:
Like, do you think people will own 20 different tokens?
Brian Lio:
Sure.
Laura Shin:
Oh, okay.
Brian Lio:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think we’re going to see…I think that we’re going to see a pretty rapid maturity in a lot of spaces. There are just so many people, smart people in every corner of the globe building tools and projects, so I think we’ll see an integration into everyday life in a much larger way than we see now, right, and not everyone will know that they’re using tokens or the blockchain for all these activities, I think, right? A lot of these onboarding tools will use this behind the scene to power an experience or an application or a financial transaction or whatever that happens to be. People don’t need to directly interact with the idea of tokens. These can be, the blockchain, these concepts can be behind the scenes powering all sorts of experiences and infrastructure, but yeah, I think we’ll see much more integration of them into daily life and the average user.
Laura Shin:
Well, but is there anything in particular that you think you’ll be doing with these tokens?
Matt Chwierut:
Yeah. One thing I’ve gotten really, really excited about is tokens have been increasingly used in things like social networks or areas where content is user generated, and so you think in an average day an internet user that is contributing to a number of these different platforms is contributing without any way of really reporting that kind of contribution in a way that leaves the platforms. So constantly giving to all these different platforms, you post on Reddit, you contribute to Wikipedia, you answer questions on Stock Exchange, you share photos or information or answers across a number of different platforms, and currently there’s not a great way to accumulate or to measure the social capital that you are building in doing that, and tokens are one way where that could start to happen. We’ve seen a number of different models, again, I think we’re going to see stuff that will just totally blow us away in five years, but it’s kind of at the beginning of doing that.
Laura Shin:
And like, accruing to our identity. So if I like, have good tweets plus good Facebook posts plus interesting Reddit comments, like, all of that will…
Matt Chwierut:
Correct, and people are talking about this in web 2.0. Like, it’s not a totally new concept, just blockchain is a technology that’s around that allows that to be totally auditable. It makes it independent of the platform provider. Previously a company that just stores this information in a central database can corrupt it, can lose it, can manipulate it, so this is a time when the tools for reporting and tracking and trading that are independent of the platform and independent of any individual company that’s running a website, and so we’re starting to see the foundations for what that could look like, the value that you are constantly generating, creating on the internet. So that’s one thing that excites me, and we see a number of different projects that are starting to explore this idea and starting to create those foundations for other ways of transferring those between different platforms.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Yeah, and I even saw like, a tweet from Naval Ravikant, the AngelList founder, the other day saying something like, oh, I will pay some prize or something to a team that comes up with a good decentralized Twitter.
Brian Lio:
Twitter. Right.
Matt Chwierut:
Right.
Brian Lio:
All right, so in terms of a more specific prediction, I think one of the longer term trends we’re tracking that we think is pretty interesting is right now you see a lot of the activity of governments in this as largely being that of exploring regulatory practices, but what I think we’ll see is with five years of adoption based on the path we have now is the blockchain based networks will be an important part of the global financial ecosystem, and you will see, much like different countries right now have a very vested interest in their own economic policy and global economic policy, having to move from the stance of just regulation to active involvement in these global economic networks. I think we’re going to see a pretty big shift in that over the next five years, a realization that this is now a strategic economic activity as opposed to something that can just be done by individuals, it has to be carefully regulated.
Laura Shin:
Yes. Well, I guess we’ll see how it all plays out, so thank you both so much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about your work and get in touch with you?
Brian Lio:
Absolutely. Smithandcrown.com.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Great, and do you guys have Twitter or anything?
Brian Lio:
We do have Twitter. Smithandcrown as well.
Laura Shin:
Okay. All right. Great. Well, thanks so much.
Brian Lio:
Thank you. It was great talking to you.
Matt Chwierut:
Thank you.
Laura Shin:
Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. If you’re interested in learning more about Smith and Crown, check out the show notes which are available on my Forbes page, Forbes.com/sites/laurashin. Unchained comes out every other Tuesday. Please share the podcast with friends and on social media, and remember to review, rate, and subscribe to it in iTunes or your preferred platform. Thanks again for listening.
