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I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since. For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first is waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep. The second is waking up early, like 4:30/5am, and being wide awake. So I’ve been working on those two things. I still wake up in the middle of t...
AVCMirror
I have written many times here that it is important to me that I control the platform that I publish on. I use the open-source WordPress software for my content management system and run that on a hosted server. I use my own domain, AVC.com, to locate my writings on the Internet. That has served me well. No matter how horrible I become, nobody is going to take me down. But we can go even further down this path of controlling our destiny. We can decentralize the entire thing; the content manag...
AVCOpen Office Hours at NYC Tech Week
NYC Tech Week is next week. It will be a week filled with events for the tech sector to engage and connect with each other. A particularly great part of tech week is VC Open Office Hours. There are over 100 VC investors signed up to participate next week. Here is how it works: 1/ you select four investors (out of more than 100) that you want to meet 2/ you get up to four twenty minute meetings 3/ you discuss your idea with the investor in hopes of getting them interested enough to take anothe...
AVCSleep
I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since. For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first is waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep. The second is waking up early, like 4:30/5am, and being wide awake. So I’ve been working on those two things. I still wake up in the middle of t...
AVCMirror
I have written many times here that it is important to me that I control the platform that I publish on. I use the open-source WordPress software for my content management system and run that on a hosted server. I use my own domain, AVC.com, to locate my writings on the Internet. That has served me well. No matter how horrible I become, nobody is going to take me down. But we can go even further down this path of controlling our destiny. We can decentralize the entire thing; the content manag...
AVCOpen Office Hours at NYC Tech Week
NYC Tech Week is next week. It will be a week filled with events for the tech sector to engage and connect with each other. A particularly great part of tech week is VC Open Office Hours. There are over 100 VC investors signed up to participate next week. Here is how it works: 1/ you select four investors (out of more than 100) that you want to meet 2/ you get up to four twenty minute meetings 3/ you discuss your idea with the investor in hopes of getting them interested enough to take anothe...
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I have written about all of these things here at AVC before. But I am writing again as there is likely to be a bunch of chatter about Dapper, Flow, and NBA Top Shot as the news of a financing round comes out today.
Financings don’t really interest me but companies do. And this is a fascinating company.
Dapper Labs came out of an incubator called Axiom Zen back in 2017. The Axiom Zen team was looking at interesting things they could build using Ethereum. They contributed to the ERC 721 standard for non-fungible tokens and started building an NFT collectible game that became Cryptokitties. That got our attention and led to a financing that spun out the team and Cryptokitties into Dapper Labs. I wrote a short post on the USV blog announcing that we had invested in Cryptokitties, but in truth, we invested in much more. We are only seeing the entire vision now.
After building a few more collectible experiences on Ethereum, the Dapper Labs team concluded that the NFT experiences they wanted to create needed a different blockchain and they started building Flow. Flow is a proof of stake blockchain that was designed from the ground up for consumer experiences that require scale and performance and more.
And then they started building NBA Top Shot on Flow. That required a deal with the NBA which they made happen a few years ago. And it required Flow to launch. And it required a crypto wallet experience that was tightly integrated into the game that allowed new users to fund their wallets with credit cards in addition to crypto assets. Building all of that was quite a task but they got it all done by the middle of last year and launched NBA Top Shot into beta last summer.
Slowly but surely Dapper let more users into NBA Top Shot and iterated on the experience and by the end of the year, they had a hit on their hands. Hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions a month happen between collectors on NBA Top Shot. Pack drops sell out more or less instantly.
The success of NBA Top Shot has led many developers to Flow seeking to build additional collectible experiences and I expect that we will see many more great games and experiences on Flow in the coming months and years.
It is rare in the crypto sector to find a team that has successfully launched a blockchain, a wallet, and a number of popular applications. The Dapper team has done all of that and I am excited to watch what they do next.
I have written about all of these things here at AVC before. But I am writing again as there is likely to be a bunch of chatter about Dapper, Flow, and NBA Top Shot as the news of a financing round comes out today.
Financings don’t really interest me but companies do. And this is a fascinating company.
Dapper Labs came out of an incubator called Axiom Zen back in 2017. The Axiom Zen team was looking at interesting things they could build using Ethereum. They contributed to the ERC 721 standard for non-fungible tokens and started building an NFT collectible game that became Cryptokitties. That got our attention and led to a financing that spun out the team and Cryptokitties into Dapper Labs. I wrote a short post on the USV blog announcing that we had invested in Cryptokitties, but in truth, we invested in much more. We are only seeing the entire vision now.
After building a few more collectible experiences on Ethereum, the Dapper Labs team concluded that the NFT experiences they wanted to create needed a different blockchain and they started building Flow. Flow is a proof of stake blockchain that was designed from the ground up for consumer experiences that require scale and performance and more.
And then they started building NBA Top Shot on Flow. That required a deal with the NBA which they made happen a few years ago. And it required Flow to launch. And it required a crypto wallet experience that was tightly integrated into the game that allowed new users to fund their wallets with credit cards in addition to crypto assets. Building all of that was quite a task but they got it all done by the middle of last year and launched NBA Top Shot into beta last summer.
Slowly but surely Dapper let more users into NBA Top Shot and iterated on the experience and by the end of the year, they had a hit on their hands. Hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions a month happen between collectors on NBA Top Shot. Pack drops sell out more or less instantly.
The success of NBA Top Shot has led many developers to Flow seeking to build additional collectible experiences and I expect that we will see many more great games and experiences on Flow in the coming months and years.
It is rare in the crypto sector to find a team that has successfully launched a blockchain, a wallet, and a number of popular applications. The Dapper team has done all of that and I am excited to watch what they do next.
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