Genopets co-founder: How blockchain and gaming intersect, a conversation with Co-Founder Jay

Fantastic, we just started. Awesome, Jay, how are you, man? Where are you calling from?

Thanks for having me on. I am in California, Los Angeles. Our team is spread out around the world. We're definitely a remote team. A lot of us are based in the US, and myself, California.

And have you lived all your life in California, or where were you before?

No, I've been all over. I was born in the US, but going to university here is originally what brought me to LA. That and the sunny weather. I'm one that's very affected by the weather. If it's too cold or too hot or raining, I'm not wild about going outside. It very much affects my mood. So when I found out about California, when I found out about this temperate climate that's never hot or cold and doesn't rain too often, it fit perfectly with me. That and the diversity of food. I'm a big food person. LA has some of the most diverse food cultures of anywhere that I've ever traveled. You can get great ethnic cuisine from basically around the world, all here in LA.

Nice. And why did you choose LA instead of SF, for example, in California?

Well, I went to USC, the University of Southern California, so it was in LA. I do think SoCal weather was a big draw for me when I initially made this decision. It was very much the weather, the temperate climate. I lived in Texas before and it was always raining, always hot. It wasn't my favorite.

How about you?

In LA, I'm good, man. I was actually in San Francisco last week and I just came back to London. But London is pretty bad when it comes to weather. It rains throughout the year, so anything you do, you have to carry a coat even if it's summer.

Yeah, it makes it hard to go outside and move, almost.

Yep. But every time I come to California, it's awesome. California is awesome. When it comes to business, when it comes to weather, it's fantastic.

Before you started Genopets, what were you doing?

So I got into crypto around 2016, 2017. In 2017, 2018, I was one of the first employees at Block.One working on EOS. It was one of the Layer One protocols back then that got really popular. I was on the marketing side of things, building community. It was my first foray into Web3 community building. We had one of the most exciting runs through the market at that time, building up a really solid foundation of people that were excited to build a new Layer One. Today there's like a million Layer Ones. At that time it was Ethereum and a handful of others that were starting to spring up. So that to me was probably one of the most interesting parts of the space: to see the power of Web3, which we didn't even call Web3 that much then. The power of crypto or blockchain to build community around this fundamental technology that was going to change the way the internet worked. That's what got me really excited about crypto. I've never actually been a huge crypto trader. I've always been more on the building side. I started my career as a product manager 10, 12 years ago. So the idea that blockchain could fundamentally change the way data was transacted and validated online, and digital scarcity as a concept, really resonated with me, and all the different potential use cases. Obviously that drove me into gaming today, but it didn't start there. It started more on the plumbing side of things, on Layer One. So that's what got me into this space. I was there for a few years, and that's where I met my two co-founders, Albert and Ben.

They had one of the most popular projects on EOS at the time called Genopets. They won our hackathon. It was a health data marketplace that would make an NFT out of your health data and enable passive income to individuals when researchers utilized your data in the aggregate for studies. So today, companies like 23andMe or Ancestry, or just in general, when your data is aggregated and sold, you never get a piece of the pie. So the idea was to make an individual's data into an NFT, so that in the aggregate, when your data was traded, you could get royalties on the utilization of your data in pharmaceutical research or whatever study was using your health data. For a number of reasons that didn't really pan out. It wasn't fun. It was very data centric and not consumer. So why as an individual would I care? Unless you were going to pay me a bunch of money, then maybe I would care. It's funny because that thesis is actually what turned into gaming. If the game's not fun, I'm not going to play unless you pay me a bunch of money. So Ben, my co-founder, had the idea back then to say, why don't we take this NFT that represents your health data? It doesn't have to be an NFT that's on chain that nobody knows what it is, with a bunch of cryptic blockchain stuff. It should be represented by something fun and something you care about, like a pet. So can we make a pet that is an NFT and has a bunch of blockchain technology behind it, but the average user is not even going to care about that? They're going to care that it grows and evolves and looks cooler the more they take care of themselves. And that became the hook for Genopets that tied it back into the previous idea of motivating people to stay active, of rewarding people for taking care of themselves, of providing this way to make people care about living a more active, healthy lifestyle, all through the guise of a pet. Because you'll skip going to the gym most days, but you don't skip feeding your dog. So can we bring those two motivators together and make taking care of your pet something as commonplace as putting in a few extra steps every day? That's kind of where it came from.

Wow. So that's how it started. Okay, so you guys had this idea. What did you do? You have this idea, how did you start building it?

Actually, I wanted to say, and I totally forgot, usually when I do these podcasts or AMAs, I'm walking on my treadmill. I got a treadmill when we started Genopets. I put it under my desk because I'm in meetings all day long, obviously working, so I wouldn't usually get to do this sort of thing. Going out to take a walk is less common for me. I don't know if the sound is going to bother you, but let's test it out and see what happens.

Let's see if it works.

It kind of sounds like you're being stopped. I don't know if you're getting a lot of background noise there. Hopefully not. It's a little bit noisy as a thing, but it tends to smooth out and I just get some steps in while we talk.

Yeah, I need to move. What's the level of your Genopet?

So I have a level 23 Genesis Genopet.

Okay.

There's a bunch of process and lore and story behind the way this works. A lot of crypto games typically require you to buy something to get in the game, and then after you buy something you're constantly looking at how much money you can make because you put money into this game. The game is predicated on this idea that I spend some money to make some more money. That's actually the thing that I never really liked about crypto, that the only reason to ever get into crypto for the last five years has been to spend some money trying to make more money. It's always been about finance. Gaming has this unique opportunity to get people to care about crypto not because of how much money they're going to make, but instead because it's fundamentally going to change the gaming paradigm. I just really want to play this game. Now part of this game or expansion pack in this game is for me to learn Web3. And that's the way we designed Genopets. Anybody can download the app with no wallet. They don't need to know anything about crypto. You download the app from the store. Today we're invite code only. So if you join our community and you're active in our community, you can get an invite code. But if you get an invite code to the game, you download the app, you sign in with Facebook or Google or email password, and you start to play. At some point throughout your journey, kind of like every free to play mobile game, you'll realize that there's more you could do, or there's faster ways you could progress and grow if you learn Web3. If you acquire a wallet and you find some NFTs and you start making stuff, think of it like the upgrades that you typically buy in your regular game, but we do all that through Web3. So it's not a requirement, but it's an opportunity to expand and enhance your gameplay and to earn some crypto while you play if you do the Web3 side of the game.

And then the initial bits of starting the company was what? Who was building, and who started building the community as well?

Yeah, so as I said, myself, Albert, and Ben, the three co-founders. Just about a year and a couple of months ago, probably last year in May 2021, the idea started to really come together. Like most startups, you end up making a landing page, starting some social profiles, making a deck, and start telling people about this idea we have. For us, actually one of the first things to do was make a demo. I don't think the site's still up. It was download.genopets.me. But on that site was the first demo of imbuing your personality into your personalized Genopet, because a big piece of this idea was that your pet is made as a reflection of you. So we started with those typical things, make a website, make a demo. When you get your Genopet, you answer five personality questions. Think of it like a Myers-Briggs personality test, and we use those to generate a Genopet custom to you. It's got a description that reads out like your personality, kind of like a Myers-Briggs. So that was one of the first things we did, and actually that was a big part of our growth. Putting the experience out there where people could play this little mini game and see their Genopet form was just fun and different. I would say that experience plus a really strong narrative tailwind of people being interested in crypto games around that time last summer were two of the really big things that got us going. Everyone had been talking about play to earn. We came up with this idea called move to earn, and as you move around, your pet's going to grow. I'm not big on the to earn concepts, but that's what it became. Especially last year, it was all the rage. So we caught a lot of good narrative tailwinds around the industry really evolving. And most importantly, our game looked fun and it looked nostalgic. Who doesn't love a good pet care game tied to something like moving around, because I've been trapped inside for COVID for the last two years. Thinking from the perspective of last year's timeline, there were just a lot of narrative tailwinds in the world behind this being a great idea with some legs. We did a small fundraising round, we launched a token, we started selling Genesis pets. We did the whole Web3 playbook to get the game going and get the community going. The thing that we always sort of held our heads high on was building experiences with the community. From the day we launched this company we had started building games. We built that demo I told you about. The first 3,000 Genopets to ever exist, 3,219 Genopets to ever exist, the Genesis Genopets, there was a game you had to play to acquire them. So while we launched our mobile game only a couple of months ago, we've been building games with the community and getting them active and involved since last year, since a few months after our first seed round.

How did you start with the community, though? Today you've built one of the best communities out there, and it hasn't even been a year or so. How did you start? How can someone start if they're seeing your journey? How did you guys start with the community? Where did you find the first few people that joined, and then how did you double down on it?

A large part of building community comes down to one thing: being present and existing with that community. I spend a lot of my time on Discord, a lot of my time on Twitter, just being a part of our community and building with them. So I would say one of the first big keys to a successful community is establishing it with the understanding that being a part of this community is more than just getting updates. It's not a one-way street. You're part of the conversation. You're helping grow and evolve the project. Your opinion matters and we want to hear it. That's a sentiment that our server has that probably no other game has really landed properly. The people in our server want to be there, not to get the next alpha. Yes, a lot of NFT projects are all about hanging around to find out when the next alpha drop is going to be. They want to be there because they want to contribute, and I want them there because we want to hear what your opinions and thoughts are on the way we can improve. So from day one, I've always been a very in the community, with the community type. I think that's the message we've always put out there. And that made people want to tell their friends, to bring other people into the community. We've grown wholly organically. Some of our earlier games that we built really attracted some attention. You build sharing into the experience. I remember even when we had a few thousand people on Twitter, one of the first things we did was a giveaway for the first thousand eggs for the Genopets, for people that would bring their friends into the community and tell them about Genopets. This is not rocket science. Obviously people do giveaways and sharing, but what makes it different is when those people come, you have to give them a reason to stick around. If they're just there for the giveaway, the moment it ends, they will leave if they didn't win. Or even if they won, they will leave. So what was really unique about the way we structured it is that you had the opportunity to retain the community and keep them engaged afterwards, because we were doing something fun at the end of the day. I make the joke that even without crypto it would be fun to have a pet that you walk around with. Certainly Web3 gives us a lot of unique opportunity to make our game. It increases and changes the economic model. It puts ownership in the hands of the player community. There's a lot of that type of thing that we're really excited for. Your traditional game studio makes stuff and sells it to people, but Web3 gives us the opportunity to have the community really engaged in that process. You can craft items and own those items and sell them to other people too. It's a little bit like Amazon. I buy stuff on Amazon all day long, but there's also people in our game who will be selling stuff. The items that you craft in a typical game, if you think of it like Animal Crossing, the stuff you make and trade with other people is now NFTs that you own. So there's value being transacted between players, that they could potentially get some earning from or transact value with one another. So I'm more invested in the economy of the game, and not necessarily financially invested. I just care about this stuff more because it's real, because I can pull it out of the game. The progress that I put into my Genopet to make it level 77, stage 12, a really cool evolve, is a representation of me. It's how much I've walked, it's how good I am at this game, it's the ultimate flex for how dedicated I am to my health, to an extent. So that narrative, back to the beginning of your question, and the idea that being here in this community means you're one of the first to understand and see this concept, acquire a Genopet, and have this flex that you're going to get to show off. We bridge the physical and digital. I don't like the idea that the metaverse is somewhere you escape to. We think about our game as augmenting life.

How much of them... There's an element of getting the community to tell you what to build, so they always see the features they want in the product, they see themselves and their ideas in the product. How much of their ideas do you incorporate versus your ideas?

There's a practical balance there, right? The premise of the game all started from our team before any of this community even existed. But what's happening now, and especially as we move to be more of a decentralized organization, decisions around game economics are proposed to the community. Should this mechanic work like this? We think about implementing features like this, and we collect feedback. Today there's no strict formal process with voting or anything around it. To be honest, it feels more like a conversation on a Discord server where people can chime in and have emoji reactions, which I think is a good step forward in the right direction. If you jumped on a Discord server today and you just asked, does this team listen to the opinions of the community, I would hope that the general sentiment is that we want to hear what the community's feedback is. This isn't a place where it's a one-way street. But as you alluded to, there are practical realities around that. We have to do engineering work, we know how the smart contracts work, there are going to be things that the team will have to make final decisions on. But I would say intentionally the bulk of those decisions are starting to include community more and more as we move to more decentralized governance over the way the game operates.

Nice. You mentioned that people are creating their own NFTs, selling them. What have you seen? What's the most usual thing that you see being created?

Well, to clarify that a little bit, the crafting of items is our next major release as of today. It's not out, although at the time of publication it may be live. We're just a few weeks around the corner from the ability for players in the game to make stuff. So the power ups, the custom wings, the color changing, the things that you typically buy in other games from the game publisher selling it to you, are created in our game by the players. So again, it's this opportunity to have the player base be more engaged with the full life cycle of the game, not just on the consumption side of wanting to get this potion so that I can do this to my character. Basically, everything in the game is created by the players.

And what's the future of the game? Where do you expect Genopets to be in one year, and where is it going to be in three years?

Today we start as a step counter. As you walk, your steps are converted to energy, and your energy fuels your gameplay. There's a bunch of different things you can do with it. But I do think in the near term, over the next year, we're looking at a lot more motion inputs. It doesn't necessarily just have to be steps. If you get a good night's rest, should your Genopet get help recharging? If you eat well, should it be more efficient at converting steps to energy? Should its mood play into how it's growing and evolving, so maybe you need to pet it and play games with it? We do see in the near term completing a bit of a tamagotchi loop, where you've got this pet that you take care of and nurture. In the longer run, certainly things like battle and exploring an open world, and other things to do with your pet as the game gets more robust, is the direction we're headed. I do think there's a big open sea, no pun intended, of stuff for us to really explore. Once you have this avatar that is a reflection of you, can you bring it into other experiences? Should it be my avatar in other games? Obviously, we're both more revved up for our own game, but there's a lot of ways that we're looking at this pet being a reflection of you. If I'm at the gym showing somebody that my Genopet is level whatever and has had this many reps, that's just a cool kind of flex for this digital NFT. Whether or not it's an NFT, or whether or not you understand it's an NFT, the progress in this game being measured by my progress in real life has a lot of opportunity to really reach a lot of different audiences.

Nice. So potentially the activity you do, not only your steps, but the way that you're sleeping and how well you slept, and then biomarkers like maybe your heart rate or your heart rate variability and how healthy you are, is going to drive the evolution of the pet. I like that.

That's the idea. Basically, the pet reflects you and how well you take care of yourself and everything that you're doing.

It's fantastic. And then how,

Walk us through a bit of fundraising. When someone is at your stage, you have such a great product and great community. How do you raise funds? How can someone that is building something similar learn from you when it comes to fundraising?

It's interesting. Fundraising is always a whole separate work stream from operating your company. It takes time. It takes the willingness to put yourself out there. It's a little bit like building a community in that you're rallying new people to get behind you and you want them to tell each other about how great your story is. But you're telling a slightly different story. For us, we've always harped on the fundamentals of this project being really attractive. It's a game that people are going to care about, and we have a bit of validation now. The community is strong, people do care about the game, they care about the IP, they like the concept, they're willing to tell their friends to get involved. A lot of the initial flywheel is moving now. When you look at fundraising, oftentimes it does come down to what is that narrative. Is the product foundation solid? Do you have the right metrics? Is your retention really sticky, even at a small scale, to prove that it's got some legs? Do you have some growth loops? And then from there, are you capable of scaling the team? Do you have the right people in place? Do you know where to go? I think we're in more of a stage where we'd be looking at a growth round than a seed round. A lot of people, for their initial idea, put together a deck, people like the concept, they think there's a market for it, and you can raise a small seed round. But with that seed round, what we've done over the last year is start to prove out that concept and really build out the game. So what we're looking at from our position now, if the game were at a similar stage to us, it would really be about identifying what your key metrics are, showing really strong retention and community growth, proving that there is a viable business model here, and that maybe that next tranche of funding helps you identify the right ways to scale.

Awesome.

And when it comes to the team, who's in the team today? You mentioned earlier you are all remote. What's your logic with remote?

Yeah, we're all remote. There are 24 full-time employees, and with agency and contractors we probably scale up closer to 50. What's really challenging from a team perspective being remote is there's obviously some logistics around being about at certain times and everybody having calls. That's a given. But the thing that I think is most rewarding that comes out of that is the time you spend together is oftentimes hyper focused and really effective. So we've been half luck, half just doing it the right way of getting great people together that are willing to stretch the time zones a little bit to make sure we have some overlap, that are willing to be very communicative asynchronously. Some of those things really come into remote work, and I think they are very important. But also, it gives you opportunity to find the perfect skill sets, no matter where they are. Just because you're in Los Angeles doesn't mean you have the best skill set for what we need. So there is that benefit. We also do things like have regular team activities, virtual ones, and bringing people together in person. So there's that benefit that comes out of not having to pay for an office every day. You have budget to do other things. It's an interesting time. A lot of people in the world had to be remote, obviously, for some time. Myself personally, I had worked remotely for a number of years even prior to COVID, and we're pretty used to having distributed teams, so it wasn't a big change. It's been great for sure.

Nice. And then where are most people from the team? At the stage you are, what's the biggest requirement when it comes to the team? Is it engineering? Is it marketing? What is it?

I mean, the bulk of our team is certainly engineering and product. We're really all over. I guess I would say the majority are in the US, but maybe it's 50% and 50% are other places. Off the top of my head, I don't really know the math there. But I would say at this stage, you're definitely primarily focused on building and getting a lot of engineering and product heads hired. We do have a solid ops team that's handling things like the economy too. A game has an economy, but a crypto game really has an economy, so we have a lot of things that we are balancing there to make sure that not only is the game fun, but it has the right mechanics to keep people in it and to keep it balanced. Tokenomics, obviously, is a big piece of what we have a team focused on.

And where do you think is the future of this space? In five years time from today, what are we going to be seeing in this space?

For me, I'm biased, but I think the way we've established the model is the right one. In five years time, the vast majority of games are just games. They have the opportunity for things to become NFTs, to be web-created, to quote-unquote earn from the experience of playing, but it's not required, and it's more seen as an expansion to the regular gameplay. That's the way we're designed, so again I'm biased, but I don't fundamentally believe that having to get a wallet, having to do things with crypto, is the right approach to forcing people to learn web3. Learning web3 should, in the same way that some people choose to not learn how the internet works, they just want to go to websites and read information and watch YouTube videos, you should not have to learn how crypto really works to experience these games. You should have the opportunity to, and maybe some advantage or additional things you can do because of it. But yeah, that's the way that I would see the space moving, and then you'll have all sorts of genres of games come out of that.

Awesome. Last point, is there something you want to bring up that I forgot to ask?

No, I guess you didn't ask me how many steps I got. That would probably be good.

How many do you have until now?

Let's look. That's always the joke when I do these things, I walk for like 30 minutes while we're recording. I'm not walking very fast, as you can tell. One second.

How do you measure this, Apple Health?

Yeah, Apple Health, but I actually find that my phone gets more steps than my watch, because my arm doesn't move a lot, my arm is always on the keyboard. So I turned off step tracking from the watch and just use the phone. I got almost 3,000 steps from our walking the last three minutes.

That's not bad.

No, I'm only going at about a mile an hour.

If you're 23rd, 11th though in Genopets, you're not going to grow much, will you?

It's about time. Actually, I'm going to get into more of the ethos behind the game. You have to put in the time to level up. It's easier to level up when you're lower, but similarly, if you want to lose a pound, it's not bad, but if you want to lose 20 pounds, it's a lot of work. The game is all designed around this healthy lifestyle, being active as a motivator, and it's not about how much you can run either. It's being consistent, because you'll see that every day the amount of steps you get has a diminishing curve to the amount of energy you get. And it's about doing it every day, not how much you can run. The marathon runner isn't the best player in the game. It's people that check in every day and can do their two thousand steps regularly.

Yep. I look forward to the update that you mentioned, because once you add activities, it will track my weightlifting sessions as well so I can upgrade faster.

Nice, nice. Yeah, I don't do too much weightlifting, but I'm trying to get my stats in more.

Awesome. Jay, thank you so much for this. It's been a pleasure. Awesome to hear what you're building. I'm using it daily as well. So I'm at level 10 now. I need to do it a bit more, but it's a fantastic one. Thanks, man.

Thank you, sir. I'm telling you, you get five, ten thousand steps in a day, it's more than enough to get the energy that you need to start leveling up. There's obviously more that you'll be able to do in the game soon, but for what you're training with now, get yourself used to doing that and we'll keep going. Appreciate the time. Genopets stopped me. Follow us on Twitter, Discord. I appreciate it, talk soon.