- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JJSFZX2RDJCJEKEFCWDWQZMH (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJSFZX2RDJCJEKEFCWDWQZMH)
Transcript
[David]: And yes, I don’t know. I guess we’ll go over it on the call. If you guys have a process already, I’m happy to adapt to it. It shouldn’t be an issue. I’m going to take this call. I’m going to help and write on the account for sure. And then what’s going to happen is I have two of my guys kind of on standby. One is a bit more technical. One’s a bit more casual and community driven in terms of their styles. Based on how the call goes, I’ll know who to like pull in for additional help as well. Okay. I was going through the accounts already. I think the guy, I think he wants kind of more casual content based on the sound. And I have someone who’s like pretty passionate about Solana and all of the eco. So like, I think it’d be a good fit to help as well. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I mean, that’s all fine. Process wise, let me invite you to Notion. Should I use that same email? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll tell you. [David]: No, Notion would be better to invite this one. Should I send it here? Yeah, you can just send it in here. [Michael Houck]: Just send it to me, not the meeting group chat. [David]: Oh, I can chat to you specifically, thanks. That one I think is better. That’s where we work off of I’ll add you to this right now. We have like a little Notion Hub template that we use. [Michael Houck]: If you get in there and you’re like, you know, we don’t want to do this or whatever, I can, you know, we can work with you on what makes sense there. Let me share this kickoff. That’s inside there with you. And you can let me know if you want to use that or not. Basically just simple questions about content and pillars, who the audience is, what are their primary goals, so we make sure that we’re hitting it, whether it’s users or credibility or whatever. And then process-wise, let me know. We can adjust obviously based on what you guys normally do too. [David]: Okay, cool. Yeah, I’m looking through it briefly now. Okay, this looks similar, like answering similar questions to what we have. Just yours seems like you have a few more questions or like you put it in a more processed way. Ours is like we ask for, We ask for like the basically the founder to give us like a background of themselves, regardless of content. So just who they are, what they’re doing, what they’re building, what they’re into, what are their passions, hobbies and all that. And then we ask them for inspo. So like what are accounts that you look up to? Both it could be brand account or personal account. It just gives us a good idea on not only the content, but like the tone or for writing. And then we ask them to also just pitch in on ideas initially, at least like like, for example, some people come to us and they have ideas of things that they want to write already or they have ideas for posts, but they don’t want to use us to do it. So we’ll ask them like, hey, just jot down like literally brain dump shit and we’ll just clean it up and start writing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’re totally we do the same thing at the bottom. We ask them for accounts, just throw them in Slack. And then, yeah, you should definitely encourage them to do what you guys normally do if they have host ideas or things they wanna write, just have them send it over in Slack whenever it comes to mind. Okay, he’s here so I’m gonna let him in a second. And then if you wanna send over Stripe link to me in Slack or Telegram or whatever later, I can get that set up so we’re all covered. Yeah, sounds good. Okay. So I’ll do an intro and then, I’ll turn it over to you for basically the rest of the call. In Patagonia. It’s nice. How about you? Yeah, just here in Dubai. [usmansaleem]: I was in Istanbul over the weekend for a couple of nights. There was this big sort of Solana company called Jupiter. I don’t know if you, you might have used it, right? I mean, so Jupiter had an event called Katstanbul. So it’s pretty good. Was there for like a couple of nights. It’s interesting to obviously attend an event where I’m not actively fundraising. It was refreshing a little bit. [Michael Houck]: You can actually, you can enjoy the event. You don’t have to worry about like meeting the right people and yeah all that stuff. [usmansaleem]: Yeah and I mean it was still like I was still intentional about okay who I wouldn’t be meeting but it was obviously more like business and product rather than and obviously we meet something interesting and it maybe materializes into [Michael Houck]: an investment that’s a bit different uh but yeah. Cool man um well I want to introduce you to David uh excited for you guys to to chat and and take things from here um we’ve got everything set up on our end so after this uh basically the way this will go, run through some questions, go deeper on some stuff that you shared in the intake form as well. And then depending on how long that takes, I’ll either go, you know, half hour, hour, sort of up to how long it takes, but we’ll get that info and then we’ll get started on content and, you know, walk you through the next steps of the process at the end. So we’re ready to roll here. Perfect. Great. [David]: Nice to meet you, by the way, usmansaleem. My name is David. Nice to meet you as well. I wanted to ask, how was the Jupyterverse? Like, was it hectic? It wasn’t hectic. [usmansaleem]: I think it was it was a much smaller event than other crypto events. But what was pretty interesting about it was that actually in the whole event, there was probably only one investor investor and it was just builders, ecosystem people and content creators. So the energy was actually pretty interesting. I think it’s interesting to actually think about like when VCs are there and it’s like there’s someone just focused on capital, capital, but actually over here It was like two days of solid, amazing announcements. And they’re doing this and they’re doing that. And so actually, I was pretty inspired from how they’re thinking about product and how they’re thinking about the company. Right. Because it makes you want to think bigger as well. So, yeah, it was great. It wasn’t hectic, which is great, to be honest. It was kind of smart. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [David]: They did the airdrop. And then I think that was right after the airdrop or that was the same day that event. [usmansaleem]: I think it was done like a week before or like a few days before, like when they went and then they kind of had this on the weekend. [David]: And then obviously they’re not buying back. Right. Yeah. The fees, the buying. Yeah. [usmansaleem]: The 50 percent buyback, which means that they’re going to be continuously, you know, it’s a good investment. I would say it’s probably one of the best investments to buy right now. Crypto should easily give you like a two to three X over the next year or so, I would say. [David]: I know. I’m a holder of Jupe. Nice. Do you stake it? No, not right now. I kind of just have a bunch of shit sitting in a salon wallet and I got to clean it up. [usmansaleem]: Just take it, right? Because juke staking, if you stake your juke and then you vote, you get like a lot more in your airdrop, which, you know, somebody was telling me, it’s like, if you stake one juke, you end up actually getting one back. Yeah, it makes sense. So it’s a smart thing, especially if you want to, if you’re long on juke. [David]: When they came up with the about the buybacks, I initially I thought like, I don’t know, I have a feeling they didn’t choose to do that. I think they were forced to do that because of Radium. [usmansaleem]: Could be, yeah, could be. I think it’s also, by the way, there’s like a whole shift now, right, after Trump’s come into power, because buybacks, you’re sort of maybe entering the realm of, OK, are you treating your token as security or whatever. So I think it’s like it’s one of the ways that you can actually pass on cash back to your users. Yeah, I suppose it’s like, if you have a governance token, which is totally untied to your underlying protocol, the only thing that the governance token allows you to do is vote. How do you, it’s like a meme coin in a way, right? How do you essentially, I think we’re moving towards a world where tokens, the underlying revenue needs to be somehow linked to the tokens. And if you already have a governance token out there, maybe a buyback is kind of the best way for that to happen. Is what I think will be super interesting. Right. Increase. Somebody was talking like increased revenue. So, yeah, increased revenue, increased buybacks. Basically, I feel like for a lot of the existing tokens, that’s probably going to be the meta. [David]: Yeah, because that’s that’s what the world understands in capital markets, right? It’s like it’s like buying a share and getting a dividend. And I think Uniswap did a really good job of trying to go very low. Like they went very far without turning on a fee switch or without like introducing that concept. Uniswap’s idea was to have like a governance token and the way it would accrue value, it was that the network of Uniswap would become so big and so valuable that even just owning one token, the token value would go up because the voting power of that token would go up. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like, I get it. But like, and I know that Uniswap, their mission is not to become like a cash flowing machine. Their mission is to become like a public good for all of DeFi to use. So it’s a little bit different. But I think no one, you can’t around the fact that like cash flow wins and like building like those kind of systems and flywheels is just always going to make more sense to token buyers and investors. [usmansaleem]: I also think it’s like in the sea of, I don’t know how many, I think it’s like thousands of tokens that have been launched every day, right? How do you, I think the ones that the protocols are able to differentiate their tokens with real value, those tokens will be the ones that end up doing really well. Because like what differentiates you from a meme coin, right? And so So it’s like these tokens are the ones hopefully, especially with buybacks and strong revenue, should have like at least maybe a floor. And then it’s kind of, you know, at least, you know, they’re relatively safer investments. And I think something like JOOP, by the way, it’s like 1.1 now, I think it definitely goes up like 3x, 4x, especially now that they have Moonshot as well. Right. So it’s like they have these crazy revenue sources as well. So it’d be super interesting to kind of see what sort of, yeah, where this goes, where this goes to it. But overall, like I really had a good time. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [David]: Nice. I still have to go to Dubai. I haven’t been, I want to go this year for token, but I don’t even know if it’s too late to book. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [usmansaleem]: It’s an April, right? Um, there’s also a break point in Abu Dhabi, if you’re like to Salama. Um, so breaking points, I would say probably the best, I mean, probably the best crypto conference, I would say, uh, in the way that actually the conference itself is really good. Whilst the other, the other conferences, you just want to go to the side events, you know? Yeah. That’s what I’ve heard. So break point is, uh, It’s in Abu Dhabi in December. So that should be really good. [David]: Hopefully. Yeah, I didn’t go to any of them last year and I kind of messed up. The last one I went to now was DevCon in Colombia. But that’s like ETH stuff. So that was when ETH was still like the big thing. [usmansaleem]: And now I feel like it’s very quiet. It’s all Solana. Yeah, it’s all Solana for now. I mean, it’s a tide, right? Tide shift. I’m very bullish in Solana because they’re very product-oriented. And they kind of know, they’re very good at marketing, right? So they’re very good at Twitter. They’re very good at marketing. So they kind of know how to capture certain matters as well. I mean, it’s very interesting if you follow sort of the whole AI. I mean, you obviously have the conventional crypto AI startups, which are actually building serious products. And then you have stuff, which is, and then virtuals and base, right? And then a friend of mine, Yash was like, Hey, why doesn’t Solana have AI? And he launched this hackathon, right? Solana hackathon, which he launched in, mid-November. And then as a result of that, majority of the AI activity moved to Solana. But again, a lot of meme coins, but they’re very good at capturing narrative. And it was not even a foundation-led initiative. It was a community-led initiative, which is what ends up happening, right? Once you have these flywheels, then the community is generating initiatives, community is generating content, which is amazing for Solana, right? So I think that’s what they’re like, We have non-CMOs that everybody should be chief marketing officer of Solana by the work they do effectively. [David]: Yeah, yeah, very true. Their vision is way different than Ethereum, where Solana is like very direct, point forward, go achieve it, where like Ethereum is thinking way, way bigger, broader. And I think they got a little too ahead of themselves over the last couple of years in terms of like how much block space would be needed and the right way to scale. And Solana is like, fuck that, just build something that people want to use and make it fast. Exactly. Seeing it play out now. [usmansaleem]: I think both are important. I think the structure of Ethereum Foundation is a bit fucked, right? I think you have to focus on the product side, like what Solana has done. Foundation focuses more on the product and community. And then they have the labs, which is focused on the research. And yeah, I mean, look, I’m not like very tribal about all this shit. Like a lot of people in crypto are. I’m not that tribal. So for me, it’s like I love Solana. I love the community. But, you know, we want to be multi-chain at some point. So, yeah. [David]: OK, that’s good to know. That was probably going be a question I had for you. OK, it’s cool. Just jamming with you already, I get a good sense of like, I think we could keep talking for hours about like all kind of things crypto. [usmansaleem]: I mean, like Solana, I think it’s like I’m super bullish. I think it’s like there’s, you know, the stories that I actually joined and started working crypto like last Jan and it was not on Solana. And then April, I moved my product over to Solana and then from April to November. And this is bearing in mind, somebody who’s new to crypto, very Just like, just learning on the way. Obviously, there’s a lot of strong past experience. And then, you know, by just virtually becoming a part of communities, you know, I was able to be disclosed around one and a half million. So, like, that’s a solid outcome. And I think that’s only happened because of the way Solana communities are and then the way they’re kind of helping builders, no matter where they are, reposition themselves to capture sort of value and, you know, and hopefully get out [David]: there and build cool products. Yeah, agreed. OK, cool. I spent the last day or two looking over your account as well as just the brand account to get a better gauge. I wanted to quickly see if you could run like give me a rundown on like what you guys are building. Yeah. Just kind of in your own words. And then we can talk a little bit about kind of the goals you want for your account, your style of writing, what you’re looking for. What’s most important for me is to understand, are you trying to be a founder that’s just like cool and in line with culture, or are you trying to be a founder that’s like always thinking of the next great thing and writing thought pieces on it and how you want your content to be? [usmansaleem]: Actually, let me give an intro to what we’re building so you have like a good clear idea and then we can sort of take it from there. So Aura is effectively, I mean, the thing about like actually we’re like designing a marketing campaign right now for launch and there’s like, when I sort of fundamentally think about gold on chain, right, and this The thesis is pretty simple that anything, any real world asset that’s come on chain needs to be more valuable or needs to have more utility than its off-chain counterparts. Currently, you can buy gold in a physical form or you can buy gold through your broker or an ETF or maybe a Web2 digital sort of digital gold app. Right. And all those are great. But I think there’s a few discrepancies. Right. Obviously. And I would say we compete against physical gold because I think the guy who want to buy physical gold will always buy physical gold. But here, I think there’s a huge opportunity in terms of digital gold. Predominantly, you know, we’re building a product which is far superior than Web2 digital gold because it’s obviously 24-7 trading. It’s composable, which means that actually you can do a lot more with this asset now, right? You can borrow against it. You can sort of use, you can trade against it. You can use it in purpose protocols. We have a yield bearing element. So you can actually earn a yield on gold from 4% APR, which is great because now you get the underlying appreciation in gold, which was the last year was like 25% or 30%. And then you get an additional 4 to 5%, which by the way, you can compound, right? And so one of the biggest issues that people always have with gold, especially like our generation and stuff is all gold is just like a store value, right? But over here now we’re converting into more a store value plus an income generating asset. So already it’s like yield composed ability, ability to redeem instantly for USDC, mint and redeem instantly, already makes that a far superior product. And that’s kind of vision number one. That’s kind of step number one, because the problem that we’re solving is far bigger than, hey, let’s just bring gold on chain. And when we think about gold markets, they’re fundamentally broken in most countries, especially most emerging markets. If you want to sell, buying physical gold in a lot of countries is not that easy, and And setting up digital gold business is not easy. And the reason being is because when countries sort of import gold in, golds become more expensive. It has a huge effect on their FX reserves, right? So a lot of countries have like dubious, like I’ll give you an example, like Pakistan, Egypt, they have very dubious gold markets, right? All the gold is smuggled in. And people who want to keep gold at home, sometimes they want to keep the gold at home for storage. So we see this huge market to be able to use tokens. Organized gold as a way of sort of getting gold out there and then obviously having a far superior product. And so essentially gold, but better. That’s kind of the tagline, right? One of the other things that we’re sort of trying to also maybe that gold is actually the OG meme coin, right? It’s the only meme coin which hasn’t rug pulled and it’s gone over for like 20,000 years, right? This sort of value, this memetic understanding, then that’s here to stay, right? This is an important asset for a generation. Our eventual aim is kind of build this infrastructure layer for people to be able to offer a gold, well, whether it be fintechs, whether it be sort of new banks to be able to offer this gold product to their users. And then one of the other things is also, I don’t know if you’ve used Moonshot, right? But the idea is gold buying should be as easy as sort of buying a meme effectively, right? And buying it as low as one dollar. So that’s what we’re coming about. You know, make gold better, have more utility and sort of bring it on chain in a better manner. Because the other is this. There’s already two big products out there, but they’re very trapped by copy-paste approaches, right? Which is, hey, we have this asset without thinking who it’s for and what you want to do with it, just put it on chain. I think that’s cool. They’re decent size, you know, five or six million, but they’re not necessarily, you know, we want to, we’re thinking in a slightly different approach, which is the product that we have, I think is super differentiated. Are you referring to PAX? Yeah, PAX. Yeah. Okay. It’s not really used in DeFi, right? [David]: It’s just like basically tokenized gold, but it’s not actually, there’s no other layer to it. Exactly. [usmansaleem]: And I think that kind of misses the whole point of crypto, right? If you look at stablecoins, the reason why stablecoins have done so well is, I think the reason why they’re PMF is because actually holding a USDC or USDT is far better than holding a digital dollar in your bank account or US dollar in cash, right? It’s open, permission is composable. So it allows you to do so much more with that asset. And that’s what we’re kind of going to sort of do as well, right? Can we do way more with this asset? Can we generally have different avenues for people to earn yields? Can we allow for people to trade during when markets are out? Can we allow for people to borrow against it? You know, especially in countries where they don’t have, you know, can we actually also eventually tokenize people’s own gold? So you have a couple of bars. Can we tokenize that for you so you can actually borrow against that asset? So that’s kind of the vision is ultimately to build this, you know, ecosystem of sort of products surrounding gold. And you were starting more like a fixed income product where, you know, it can be protocol, perhaps a bunch of different stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Interesting. [David]: I’m in agreement, too. I think there’s a bit of a weird thing with gold and crypto right now because I think a lot of crypto maxis are naturally just against gold. And I don’t think they want like I don’t think they’re willing. What’s the word? I don’t think they came to that decision themselves. I think the fact that they’re so bullish on crypto makes them feel like they have to pick one side or the other. But I think that’s because we’ve been taught so far as a younger generation that like gold is for boomers and crypto is for zoomers. But it’s not the case. [usmansaleem]: Because you look at like, I think big countries where there’s and I think usually countries where there’s gold consumption is quite high or retail markets are quite high. There are sort of leaders in those sort of behaviors, which then it’s a bit like when Western culture in terms of music and films is usually the leading indicator for what’s going to happen in the emerging markets in terms of, you know, interesting there. But I would say gold is a bit different. And what we’re seeing in China, we’re seeing that in India, we’re seeing a lot of places where actually Zoomers are now basically buying gold. And they’re saying, hey, like in China, there was this whole thing last year called gold bean craze, where Chinese teenagers and millennials were buying like, Gen Zs were buying like small beads of gold because they’re like, oh, this is the only way we can afford this asset now. So there is a, in India, for example, you know, so one of the competitors, it’s interesting because they’re a partner, but make it potentially be a competitor. They’ve built this whole Web 2.0 layer out for digital gold and majority of the users are sort of Gen Zs, for example, but you won’t even, I mean, not a lot of people know about this company, but this company has $550 million in revenue a year, right? And all they do is they built out the infrastructure layer out for gold. And we’re like actually, but the challenge for them is for them to expand in country by country by country, they need to be setting up in every country as you go. Right. What’s the beauty of tokenization is that we can actually target sort of a global reach, at least that approach from day one. Yeah. I also think, by the way, I don’t see like Bitcoin and gold. That’s like, I think Bitcoin is digital. Gold is a meme. And it’s been really successful because and the reason actually, I think maybe that’s the thread of our ride, which is the idea of using digital gold is because of the fact that gold is meaningful. Right. And people understand gold. And so it’s like, oh, here’s Bitcoin. Bitcoin, it’s digital gold, right? It doesn’t make gold. In fact, I think actually re-emphasizes how good gold is, right? Because the fact that you’re this new asset, which you’re basically saying is phenomenal, you’re trying to attach it to gold, or you’re trying to make it sort of an equivalent of gold, means that actually the gold has this cultural resonance and importance forever, right? And I don’t see them, I think people sort of see, oh yeah, Bitcoin’s going to reach market cap of gold and in mine, but I don’t think it’s going to mean that market cap of gold is going to completely disappear. You know, they’re not, I would say in fact, And yeah, they’re both here to say, you know, but I think it’s a great meme. I think this is how engagement’s been built over time. Right. And you’ve got Peter Schiff, who hates Bitcoin. He’s a gold maxi. So you kind of have, you know, a bunch of the stuff. [David]: Yeah, I think eventually he’ll have to take the pill and get on chain. And maybe it’s products like this, like that could tokenize gold and bring utility to gold that make him realize he’s missing out on so much other opportunities than just storing it in a vault. [usmansaleem]: I wrote this tweet, like, I think a couple of months ago, about a few months ago, actually, maybe September now, about sort of how Bitcoin and gold are like complementary assets, right? And actually somebody did this whole, like, if you have 50% gold, 50% Bitcoin, and you sort of rebalance it at the beginning of the year, you’re likely you end up in a better position than you would just put Bitcoin on its own. Gold on its own, because gold sort of tempers the volatility of Bitcoin over that time. And so it’s actually a better outcome to have a portfolio of joint Bitcoin and joint gold. [David]: Interesting. Yeah, I would love to see that and read more up on it. Yeah, I think it’s cool. I think from a business perspective, getting gold infrastructure on chain is a huge opportunity. Is anyone else even doing this right now on Solana? [usmansaleem]: No, we’re the only team on Solana who are doing this, which is which is great. You know, RWAs are not so big on Solana. I mean, there are, but we’re kind of the, which is great because, you know, hopefully, you know, we’re just setting up a launch date. I think we should be launching end of Feb and we’re going to be launching with a ticker dollar gold. So it’s going to be great. You know, we’re category defining on Solana. There’s a lot of, you know, I think it’s Solana people love supporting Solana. Projects as well. And we’re like a Solana native project. So yeah, so far, nobody yet. But who knows, Package might decide to come to Solana and you know. [David]: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good thing. You can maybe establish a bit of a moat. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, I haven’t seen honestly, so DeFi on Solana as a whole, it’s kind of like behind the scenes, I guess, because there’s just so much noise with other stuff right now. I do think, though, that this this year, Solana DeFi is going to make a big run just because they have to, right? Like in order to In order to sell the future of Solana beyond just a casino, you got to have some utility on the chain. I agree. And I think this is the year where they’re going to push for it. [usmansaleem]: And to be honest, there’s some pretty cool protocols that are working on stuff. And I think it’s, yeah, you know, in a way, I think a lot of this speculation and memecoin activity has been good for the chain in a lot of senses, because you really battle tested it out. Right. And it’s allowed kind of teams to move at a really rapid pays. But yeah, I think hopefully this year, you know, I think I know I know the foundation is pushing for that as well. And they’re trying to push for, you know, more focus. But it’s hard. Right. Obviously, the speculation stuff, which is kind of driving a lot of, you know, Trump choosing Solana. It’s all great news. It’s also it’s good. It’s good. [David]: Right. But yeah. Yeah. Like the meme coin thing is great because it attracts users. It attracts activity, attracts volume, transactions, whatever. But if they’re if they ever want to swallow up TPL and liquidity from, let’s say, Ethereum. The only way to do that is to go after stablecoins, RWAs, gold, like DeFi, that kind of stuff. [usmansaleem]: 100%. Okay, cool. [David]: Yeah, well, I guess one thing we want to, like, first of all, this has been a good chat so far. Good understanding of what you guys are building. Of course, I would love to have some sort of docs or notes if you guys have that you’re working on? [usmansaleem]: I’ll share like our, give me till tomorrow, I’ll share sort of our landing page and stuff and so you’ll get a good idea of what we’re building and you know. [David]: Yeah just because it’ll give me a good idea of what you’re building but also give me and then we want to keep in touch in terms of timeline too like when you guys are launching, when you guys have updates coming, announcements so that we can kind of structure content around that. [usmansaleem]: Actually the one thing might be so TBD and I’ll only you know, by tomorrow after basically our lead investor, their GP is coming to Dubai and they’re going to be doing sort of an event with kind of the German finance minister and the UAE government over here. And they want us to announce their around next week, TBD, I don’t know. But if it does, we actually might end up announcing around next week, which is earlier than I wanted to do it kind of more sequentially time with when the product launches, but it is what it is, right? It’s a good sort of PR opportunity and signing opportunity. We might do some like fake deal signing with the URI government. I mean, it’s probably irrelevant, but it’s good PR. So that might be, but I will find out and I will confirm. But I think that, so that’s going to be, hopefully that’s the funders announcement. So that might happen next week, but I’ll keep you updated on everything that sort of is happening. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. Just dump everything in Slack, docs, info, news, what’s coming up next, any urgent announcements, hit like that, just to keep us in the loop. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’ll be crucial. [David]: And then the only other thing really to go over on the call is, again, this can all be done after as well. But like, I want to get your gauge. You’ve already shared some ideas on like how you think gold, Bitcoin are complementary. Like those are good thought pieces that you can write content about. I think just talking about building a narrative, like of just bringing gold on chain or like the first ones to bring gold on Solana, those are those are narratives we can easily write like either like even simple content about. [usmansaleem]: I actually have like a three-page document by the way notion doc and what we’re building why we’re building the vision so like I’ve actually like put it all on paper anyway so you’ll be able to like pick points up and make it like read 10 times better I’m sure so I’ll sort of share all that with you that will that will be helpful useful context anyway. [David]: Perfect. I guess the only main questions for the call is then to just ask you about like your goals for the account regarding style and content because we see founders take multiple different directions. Like some founders are very just like shit posting, bull posting fun deep in the trenches on Twitter. And some of them are more refined, laid back, posting more longer form thought pieces, not as active or what I say, not as active. I mean, like posting less, but posting long form quality. To see, like, where do you find yourself fitting? [usmansaleem]: Yeah, honestly, OK, so on a personal I’m not like my personality is not that much of a shit poster. Right. But I think the questions like for me, what was the objective? I think objective was obviously to grow follower count, but it’s also kind of becoming that authority about these topics on real world assets, gold and just on Twitter. Right. I think. The natural style would be more more so kind of sharing sort of my thoughts on what we’re building and founder life and all that stuff. And maybe that doesn’t need to be always thought pieces or long-term pieces, but I don’t know. I’m just, but it’s also like, I know that the stuff that gets engagement on Twitter right now is the shit posting and fun posting stuff, right? So I think it’s kind of figuring out that balance. That’s what at least I would say. But again, do you think it’s like, you have to make that choice of either or, or it’s kind of, you know, what works best? From that point of view? [David]: No, I think you could definitely do both. It just depends on what it helps you gauge. It’s like tone of voice. Yeah. And I think there’s a way to do both. I think the best way is to just take a very thought leadership style approach. Yeah. Where again, I think it’s also nice that you guys kind of have this first mover advantage because then anything that comes out of your account is a thought piece. And like, if you guys are going to become like kind of this first mover to bring gold onto Solana, you can write content and own that lane and say, like, listen, we’re doing this. This is why here’s the vision. Honestly, the best way is like to start writing and then you’ll get a good gauge. Like when I say bull posting, I don’t mean like one liners with like swear words and like garbage in it. But like, I do think that once in a while you got to spit out like a one liner or something to just like stir up a little bit of engagement. And get the community rallying, even if the content itself doesn’t have a lot of value, like a one-liner on how we’re bringing gold on Solana or something super simple. It’ll make a lot more sense once we start drafting posts. Other than that, I guess one thing that might be important, which you can dump in Slack too, that helps us or helps me write is going to be accounts you look up to or accounts that inspire you, like ideally founder accounts, but even if there’s brand accounts too, that just have a good vibe. Um, but if you have founder accounts where you’re like, I like how this person writes, I like kind of the style. I like the branding of the account. Um, that gives us a good idea too. And then, yeah. And then one other thing is, are you open to like rebranding your account or not? [usmansaleem]: I’m open to whatever you’re like, you guys are the experts in this, right? So I think when Michael and Nicole, and I sort of said, I want to get better writing. And I think actually a lot of this process is obviously seeing how you write as well and kind of, you know, maybe having more inputs and just kind of, I want it to be sort of more, at least at some point, hopefully more collaborative. Maybe at some points it would just be not, but I think I want to sort of, it’s also a process of learning, right? Why you, what posts are doing well, what’s kind of the stuff that is engaging, engaging more, what’s, what’s helping and So you guys obviously come with a wealth of experience on what works and what doesn’t work. So I’m like very, very sort of open to whatever suggestions you guys have. [David]: Yeah. Okay, cool. Only reason I ask is because I noticed like, for example, there’s little things that like help your account when it comes to like ranking in the algorithm. Like one is like followers versus following. Like you follow way more people than you have followers. Even just little things like maybe we could fix. I like the PFP. The PFP is really cool because it’s you, but then it’s like digital. Has some cool color pops like on the timeline. Maybe like we can play around with the banner pick little things like that. Maybe the bio too, just to like adjust things. Other than that, I think it’s pretty good. Yeah. Like when I write, my goal is to make sure that like whoever’s account I’m writing for, they should be able to log onto their account at any point of the day, engage with people, post whatever they want as well on top of whatever we write. And like if they go through their account and see the post that I’ve written, it shouldn’t be like any surprises. It should be as natural as possible. And like it shouldn’t be a one way street where like you feel restricted that just because I’m going to be writing content for your account doesn’t mean that like you can’t do anything on top of it as well. Like if you have things or thoughts you want to put out, like it should be like you as well being able to put that stuff out. Or if you like if you have thoughts you can’t write or you don’t know how to put it into words, that’s when you use us to spin all the ideas and we craft it into content. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. The collaborative effort is the best way to run it. Cool. Yeah. Other than that, I think I have a good understanding. It’ll take just a bit of reading over what you guys are building in more detail to be able to craft a little bit more thought pieces and and like more sophisticated content, but we can, and then I can also start drafting more like casual content as well. So we have a good memory. [usmansaleem]: I’m also like getting back into the habit of reading. So I feel like there’s like easy like wins of, Hey, this is an interesting quote or there’s something interesting, dah, dah, dah. So like, I want to also like make it easier for you of like, maybe like, I’ll just be sharing either stuff I can tweet myself or stuff that I’m like, okay, this is stuff that I’ve observed this week and stuff that is interesting that we probably write about. Right. So I want to make it easier for you as well. Because I feel like the gold thought pieces, there’s not a lot of them. Right. It’s like it’s a pretty static. Maybe there’s a bit of movement every month on what’s happening in the gold markets and maybe that can be an interesting theme. But generally, like I think there’s like gold stuff and real world asset stuff. And then there’s maybe stuff that I’m reading through and I can be like, hey, this could make a good tweet. This could make a good theme or whatever. I’ll keep sharing that. [David]: Yeah, exactly. Even if you even if you write something yourself, you’re like, hey, is this a good way to write this or a good way to frame it, we can work on it too. Yeah, that sounds good with me. And then I guess, Michael, if you want to chime in here too, timeline wise, when should, when are we, like, when do we want to get started? [Michael Houck]: If we feel good about everything now, then I think let’s, let’s kick it off. Next steps would just be, we’ll get started on context gathering. We just want the more that you can throw into this over the next couple of days, the better. And then we’ll be reviewing and we’ll get started writing. Keep us in loop about the announcement for next week. Obviously we can help with that. If you can share your credentials for the account as well, you can share those directly with Ben in the channel. So you don’t need to put it in the channel or anything. Ben’s the guy who’s going to be going in there doing content ops, replying and doing all that stuff. He’ll also help us optimize the account a little bit too, like with some of the things that David was talking about. We’ll let you handle the follower count. I do recommend sort of getting that follower to following ratio adjusted, but obviously you don’t want to unfollow people from your account. So I want to leave that to you. Yeah, but basically next steps are we’ll get started on our side, just share everything you can and we’ll start sending over some ideas probably some point next week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Perfect. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Questions, I guess, just let me know. Happy to hop back on and chat more too. But just give me any questions and we’ll go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [usmansaleem]: All good. I think this is clear. Yeah. Let’s get it started. And, you know, I think we’ll find the chemistry, right. As we sort of get started. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, I could tell you guys are reviving. [usmansaleem]: So I think we’re in good hands here. You get the stuff about New Year’s, right? Sorry, about crypto. So It’s easy sort of chatting. Yeah, of course. All right, David, anything else you need or are we good to go? [David]: No, well, like I said, we’ll work through it as we start spitting out some initial content and then even little details with like how we organize it, how we structure it. We can always work through and make adjustments as we go. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would imagine that we’ll be experimenting for a bit to nail the voice and see what the audience wants. Yeah, excited. Perfect. [David]: Well, sweet guys speak to that.