How to Profit from NFTs & Redefining Professional Networking w/ Alex Taub, Co-Founder & CEO of Upstream

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July 8, 2021

On this week’s episode I chat with Alex Taub. Alex is the Co-Founder & CEO of Upstream, a digital platform that is redefining professional networking.

Over the years I’ve watched many community platforms fail. I don’t know the exact stats, but the success rate is low. I think one of the reasons why a community platform is so hard to build is that it requires so many features to deliver sufficient value.

Upstream seems to have broken through by rapidly iterating on features and keeping the overall product lean. They delivered a complete product fairly quickly and the platform appears to be scaling.

In addition to running Upstream, Alex manages one of the communities on the platform: NFT Community.

We get into a general overview of what NFTs are, plus chat about some of his favorite projects which include NBA Topshot and a digital horse racing game called Zed Run.

If you’re interested in understanding the NFT market and how to profit from it, have a listen.

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Transcript

MPD: Welcome Alex. What's going on? How are you doing good. Thanks for being here.

Alex Taub: [00:02:09] Of course, anything, anything for you!

MPD: [00:02:13] I appreciate that. All right. I'm going to do your intro for you. A little background with the hope of putting some out there. I'm probably going to miss some stuff. So if I do tell me, so Alex tab is the co-founder and CEO of upstream.

Uh, now for those who are listening to this, who don't oh, upstream is a new mobile first community. That is absolutely exploding. Uh, I am a super active user of the app. I think I run more than a dozen communities on upstream. At this point. I also invest in the company's friends and family round, and it's been an absolute pleasure to watch Alex scale.

I've known for quite a long time. Alex has been a long time, super connected. And the New York startup texting. And now in Miami, he's not only started numerous companies, but he worked at a myriad of very prominent BD roles early in his career. He recently moved to Miami and has been helping to pioneer the ecosystem down there.

Uh, and he's also a very outspoken, proponent and active, uh, trader. In the NFT space, he was an early adopter of both MBA, top and Zen run. And I'm sure we're going to dive into that a little bit, Alex, anything I missed you wanna throw

Alex Taub: [00:03:24] in? Um, yeah, that was, that was it. I mean, I did, I did two years at aviary, two years at the Wala before I started social rank.

Um, but before that, when we initially met, I was working with the, these two Israeli guys. I don't know if you remember this, these two Israeli guys were trying to monetize online videos. Um, ended up not working out, but the next company that those guys started in the being a billion dollar company, um, what was the, so they started a cybersecurity company.

They're one of the preeminent Israel, cybersecurity companies. Um, and, uh, it's pretty, it's, it's controversial company a little bit actually. Uh, but also they've done some good stuff. They actually caught like El Chapo and things like that. It's called NSO. So they were there. Um, they started that.

MPD: [00:04:14] I had Jeff Bussgang, uh, who's the, one of the managing partners over at flybridge and a professor at HBS on the show a week ago, two weeks ago, something like that.

And I think it was just released. And we talked about how you never know who's going to be who in the startup community. You kind of gotta be cool to everybody, which is good practice anyway, but. He turned a corner three years later, you find out someone's absolutely, you know, elevated in what they've done and done something.

Cool. So it's kind of an interesting dynamic in that way. All right. Let's, let's get started. Um, you mind telling us a little bit about upstream? This is your underhand pitch to get us going.

Alex Taub: [00:04:52] Yeah, no. So we started upstream, um, You know, the actual origin of when outrun really started is, is definitely something for debate.

Uh, we started thinking a lot about it beginning of 2019 and, um, put a, put something in test flight, uh, in like June the summer of 2019. Um, and the idea was LinkedIn has this monopoly they've been around for the past 18 years. And, um, they basically own professional social, um, but they've dropped the ball on a few things.

So, uh, specifically, um, you know, groups, uh, we basically identified three things that we thought we had. There was like an opportunity around professional groups, the API. And like strength of relationship, who do you know and how well you know them. Uh, but we started with groups and LinkedIn groups is basically an abysmal product.

Nobody really uses it. Anyone who's building a new professional community is doing it on slack or WhatsApp or telegram or discord. And I love all those products. They're just not really meant for professional community. Um, so we started with like, okay, can we build a better professional sort of groups product and, and start with that.

So we started with the ability to give and get help. That was like the, the insight we had was like, okay, we can build this place where you can give and get help. And these communities can be sort of formed. And we release that, um, sort of end of 2019. And when beginning of 2020 started when COVID hit, we, we sort of evolve to add, uh, virtual events and that really sort of took off.

MPD: [00:06:23] Yeah. I think LinkedIn had more group functionality back in the day and actually gutted it. Yeah. It seems like it's clearly not core to the platform for how they probably had what drives revenue impressions and all that. No, but they seem to have sliced it down over time.

Alex Taub: [00:06:41] It's usually a good thing. It's usually a good thing to slice down product.

I think for them, they're like, okay, we're a data company. We're selling data to recruiters. And if we have an API, we're going to be basically giving away that data for free. So like they killed a lot of things because of that. But, um, listen, they are the best, like digital resume. Like I use LinkedIn every day, all the time.

I don't, I'm not trying to kill them. Um, I just think that there's more players in the professional network, professional social space that can play. And, uh, we want to be one of them,

MPD: [00:07:18] the groups that we operate on upstream, we actually have clone groups. The original groups are on LinkedIn, but the engagement it's, it's a mess.

There's no way to really have a conversation or any, any semblance of a real interaction, which is frustrate.

Alex Taub: [00:07:32] And by the way, just mark to go to that. So the way that we sort of think about it is right now, most things on option are very live in synchronous. So like these event, like we need to be here, people need to show up, you do office hours.

Like if nobody takes your office hours, there's not much you can really do. Um, There's other pieces like, uh, like the asks are really more like asynchronous, like you can ask and then come back. Like three days later, someone can see it and post, they don't have to be their lives. We're going to add more asynchronous experiences on upstream.

And then we're also going to add more like utility. So something we're working on actively right now around utility is like, what does it look like? That like, The professional, the way we sort of see it, there's two sides to options. There's like, there's the groups and the, and the sort of like the community side.

And then there's the, um, like the professional life cycle and like where we're playing right now in the professional life cycle and trying to get like a visual of what, the way my brain gets a little bit, but like the professional, like life cycle, there's all these different things that a professional does.

Yeah. And like, if you think about like where we are right now, we're like, um, like meeting new people and socializing is very popular and upstream. Like a lot of people come and use upstream and they meet me. Um, that's but that's very dependent on other people being there. There's other pieces to the professional life cycle that aren't as dependent to people being there.

So for example, like following up or reaching out or reconnecting all these different things that professionals do daily, that don't necessarily depend on other people being there at that moment, at that time for it to be useful. So that's where we're thinking about right now around utilities. What other tools do professionals use daily that we could theoretically, um,

MPD: [00:09:17] Are you ever going to merge into full business profiles a little bit more?

Like what LinkedIn's kind of core

Alex Taub: [00:09:23] is not, not like not as, not soon. Um, our focus is going to be more on like the groups and community stuff. And then some of the, some of the utility stuff, like the, the white whale problem of like, who do you know and how well, you know, them is something that's been very much top of mind for, for the last, uh,

MPD: [00:09:46] I've seen a lot of companies over the years, try to solve that.

I want to say a company a year for a decade, trying to figure that out, how to harvest the data from LinkedIn and make sense of it. That feature hasn't landed yet. There's companies out there now even trying to do it, but I haven't seen it widely used. So, but why you, right? You're a BD guy. You built some product stuff.

You're good at analytics. You've been in the startup community for a long time. Why didn't have all the things you could do. Why did you decide to tackle. The white space in the professional social networking.

Alex Taub: [00:10:17] So very question. Um, so it requires a little bit of context. Um, we had a company called social rank, uh, from 2014, Michael Schoenfeld and myself.

Uh, my co-founder, we started together, we left a wall of the payments started and we started this, uh, it was actually like a creator tool before creator tools, like was the, was the popular word. Um, and, uh, We were depending on like Instagram and Twitter, and really like dependent on the data. And we got burned many times, uh, but we built a business and we ended up selling in 2019.

But while we were, once we realized that there was. You know, once we realized that there was, there was no, um, we couldn't build a bigger company bunny because we were so dependent on the data from Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, we basically put it on autopilot. We had customers like the NBA, the NFL, Netflix, Samsung board, like blue chip customers.

Um, but we put it on autopilot. And what we did is we just decided to think about ideas that we would want to like actually work on. Um, and we have two rules. The first rule was. Don't build on top of a third party API, uh, like, uh, Twitter and Instagram again, uh, if you're going to build on an API, pay for it.

Um, and like, you know, cause like this, this video player right now and upstream it's it's AWS time, but we can use a gore or we could use, uh, it's a commodity, you know? So don't use, you know, really worried about

MPD: [00:11:43] getting cutting up, cut

Alex Taub: [00:11:43] off. Exactly. Or we have a backup if we do. So, um, so don't build on top of a third party API in the same way again.

And then the other was left short. If tomorrow you got walked down the street and got hit by a bus, like, you know, would you be happy with the stuff you're working on? Yeah. Analytics was like fun and cool. Like social media analytics was cool, but it just wasn't, it wasn't our purpose. It wasn't our calling.

And we were like, okay, let's find something that we'd be really proud about that we'd want to work on forever if we can control it. Um, and then we went through, like, we cycled through a lot of different ideas and we, and if we like something, we'd try to build like a prototype of it. And I've had this idea for a while and I was sort of trying to really flesh it out before I brought it to my co-founder and the team.

Um, And then what ended up happening was, you know, it's sort of like you said, like why us, like, we're sort of the perfect team to actually, uh, go after this because I'm the, I'm the right customer and user of this. I am like, like, we have a competitive advantage because I know exactly what I would want.

And then it's typically like nine out of 10 times. That's usually what we should like for the product. Um, cause I am like the user. And then on the other side of that, Michael is like tech is technology chops to be able to build anything, um, like having the combination of the right business person and the right tech person is a really hard combination to find, to do this.

Right. And I think that like, we're, we're the right team to do that. And we've built like a killer team move. We're nine people. Now we'd be like a killer team. Um, that is just that we're just like the right team to build this. Like, this is just, we're gonna work on this forever.

MPD: [00:13:24] But you're, you're pretty lucky because most people, I bump into people all the time who will reach out through the communities on upstream or other places.

And they'll say, Hey, how do I find a technical co-founder? They've got business DNA. They're out there on the household. They're meeting people. They're doing, but to have a technical co-founder in your pocket, who's a, probably a friend and someone you trust, I assume, right. That, um, can build in a lot of different types of stuff.

That's not easy. What, what's the, how did you come across Michael and any advice for him? Folks? You've got to find technical

Alex Taub: [00:13:56] partners. So it's actually been 10 years since we met, um, just recently. So we met on the original office hours named Westheimer project. Um, I remember that a throwback. Yeah. So I love that the story was.

Office hours just started allowing virtual office hours on Skype just to date it a little bit. Um, and, uh, we ended up, um, I ended up offering office hours and he took them and he was working on a little project. He was living in LA and, um, we hit it off and we just started talking, chatting. I was, I was working at aviary at the time and I was like, thinking through this idea around like, uh, a social debate web.

Cause, you know, me being, being a Jew who likes to debate, um, and I debate about everything. I just thought they were like, oh, this can live somewhere by itself. It's not a good idea. It was a decent idea to start a relationship, but it wasn't a good idea that like actually would make sense and work, even though it sounds like it's a good idea.

It's just one of those ideas that isn't actually a good idea. It isn't like a scalable, easy to do, because if you're going to have a debate, you're just going to do it on Facebook and Twitter and whatever happens. You're not going to take it somewhere else. But anyways, so he started working with me on it and then we started just building projects together.

So we got a little bit lucky, um, that we just hit it off. But at the same time, when I tell other people come to me and they say, how do I mean the technical founder? You sort of need to just go where these people live. You know, if you want and meet a developer, you need to go to hackathons. You need to go to, you know, meetups.

You need to go and spend time where these developers are. Um, that's really the only way to do it. Another real great trick is like, go work at a company for like a year or two, and like spend time with the engineering team there and like find someone who you really vibe with. Like, that's another really great way to go about it.

Like I worked, I joined aviary for two years and then Dwolla for two years. And a lot of that time spent there was, I met some amazing engineers and amazing designers people. I want to work with people I've I wanted to bring over when I started my own company. So that's a really great way to go about it is figuring out where these people live, where they play and go spend time there,

MPD: [00:16:11] meet them.

You did something else. You maintain the relationship while you were still on your own personal journey. You weren't ready to start again. Not everyone does that, are there tricks that you can into tips you can give to business folks about how to kind of forge and sustain those relationships with, with development folks?

Because one of the problems is, you know, they need engagement. They want to be excited about your projects. And I know a lot of developers who always worried the business guys going to take advantage of them. So how did you navigate kind of those dynamics? Any advice.

Alex Taub: [00:16:41] Yeah, I'm trying to think back into like actually how it went down or how it worked.

I think, I mean, I think to some degree it was, we were talking all the time. We were building, we were doing hackathons together and building side projects together. And we were just getting along. Um, but I totally understand how, like it could, it could be hard. I mean, it's, you need to be very deliberate about the stuff you need to, you need to, it needs to be a priority for you.

Like, I always wanted to start my own company, but I just wasn't ready. I didn't have a great idea and have the right team. And I went to these companies to learn from people who were doing it or, or I'd done it. And I think. The best tip is to just like, be very deliberate about the actions you take.

Listen, you can always make mistakes early on in career and then, and then, you know, get by it. But like, I was just really deliberate about like meeting engineers. I was really deliberate about working at business development for people who knew what they were doing and like spending meaningful time there.

And I think, yeah, that was, that was that's the best advice I can give is just be very deliberate about what you're doing and how you're going.

MPD: [00:17:44] Okay. So let me, let me take this different direction for a second. So thank you for the advice on getting a co-founder. One of the challenges I think looking at what you're doing, that's gotta be really hard.

Is community apps are tough. Uh, I failed in this space. A lot of people have failed in this space. I see another community app every month or two someone coming out trying to make it work. And I don't know if I totally have it figured out why so hard that very few succeed. Uh, I feel like it has a bigger depth.

Than most, most sectors that we're, we've gotten the tech community. My hypothesis is that it requires too many features to properly serve as a community. You might have to have like a newsletter and a chat function and a video it's a myriad of independent companies smushed together. What have you figured out?

That's working because Upstream's getting traction products. Great. What is your mindset for building it? And how is that allowing you to navigate kind of this valley of death?

Alex Taub: [00:18:41] It's funny. I don't think we have it all figured out, obviously. I mean, we're, we're still in the beginning of it and we're still figuring out what we don't even know what we don't know yet.

But that being said, I do have some thesis is around, like what makes an active and engaged community, a virtual community in person community I've always felt like it was a combination of two. It was like a, it was an equation actually. And active, engaged community equals like a, um, uh, like people, some people call it like a pot, like a pot sticker, like, uh, like, uh, like a sh uh, like I'm trying to, I don't want to curse, but like, what's the shit twirler or whatever, whatever it's called, like those use the word.

The word I'm thinking of is basically like someone who's in charge of making the engine. Right. It's like the person who's scheduling the event, the person who is following up on stuff, the, the, the it's, the admin, it's the community adamant of it. They're the two things that make an active, engaged community is one, a human element of a person who's in charge of the community plus technology.

And I feel like technology for the past decade or decade and a half has been just like an email list. Like a newsletter and maybe like a as emperor, like that was the technology. And I think like we're now jumping a little bit ahead and there's, there's so much technology that can be built to keep a community active and engaged, even if the person in charge, like, I think that that equation of an active, engaged community of human plus technology, you can actually take over a lot of stuff with technology.

That that will allow for slack with not the company slack, but like slack from the human that they can counterbalance themselves a lot more. Um, so I, a lot of this stuff that we're starting, we're going to be working on from now until the end of the year, there is like, what more technology can we build to make it easy for you to run your community?

So for example, Something that I've wanted for a while and we've pushed it off because we've had other things that have been prioritized over it, but it will come before the end of the year, I think is, uh, the ability to, um, you know, uh, sort of like an if this, then that, but as an ad. So like you want to go and set up and say, Hey, um, if someone doesn't come to an event in like, you know, month.

Uh, or like, meaning we've had events and they don't come in four months or six months or, or like a number of events. They don't come in for the last five events. Then Y happens, they get reprimanded. Uh, if like they're basically like setting up rules that, that, um, the technology can sort of use and then basically, um, make your life a lot easier.

So, you know, There's just a lot, like even just saying like, Hey, if you don't, I don't have X, Y, and Z are not going to be accepted into my community. And like, not having, not, not you having to like, miss that's the person, but like, have it part of like the flow, have it part of the technology. So I think that there's a lot of that that could be really cool.

Um, and that really useful. So I don't think we have it all answered and, you know, listen, it's not live yet, but by the time this comes out, it probably will be we're working on a product right now that we'll probably release at the end of this month or beginning of next. Um, and it actually is not tied to the community side of things.

It's actually more tied to the professional life cycle type side of things. Um, w when is this actually going to come out? I'm just want to know. I mean, if people were sitting here. Four

MPD: [00:22:13] weeks. Okay. You can

Alex Taub: [00:22:14] hold it. It's fine. If everyone here is okay, just keeping secrets. We're working on a product right now called upstream reconnect.

It's really simple. You come in and you log in with your Gmail actually, and it pulls in all of your, um, your, your emails, just the metadata of the, from the, to the duration, the frequency of sending. And it's going to tell you who you're losing touch with professionally and help you reconnect. And it ties back to this like utility aspect that we want to include where it's like, we want upstream to be this like third place for professionals.

And like, so the first place is home. The second place is work. The third place is usually like a club or like a church or synagogue or a mosque or wherever you, you know, wherever you have. And this idea of like this third place for professionals, where you go to interact with your peers, meet new ones, reconnect with old ones and spend meaningful time together.

So if we want you to coming back to Augustine every day, you want to build a whole slew of like utility features that you actually get value from. So like if you use this reconnect feature that we have coming out, um, and it really ties into like the theme for the rest of the year. The world's opening up and all this, all this great stuff, but you know, if we, if we do that, right, like you should get your list of people that you've lost touch with and be like, oh my God, like, I haven't spoken to mark in six months.

Like, and it should lead you to create stronger bonds with people. And like, I, the thesis around that is. You know the concept of like the, the, like the Dunbar one 50, right? Like the 150 people, you can have professional relationships or personal. I actually don't know if the personal or professional, but explain it,

MPD: [00:23:56] explain it for people listening.

Alex Taub: [00:23:57] Yeah. So actually, maybe don't know completely, but Dunbar one 50 is basically the 150 relationships you can manage at a certain point until. Um, and I just feel like to some degree, uh, w even with, even before COVID, but especially with COVID, like, we've blown way past the Dunbar one-fifty of like, I don't know where half of my, I don't even know where you are a mark, like you could be down in Miami, but you could also be back in New Jersey.

Like, I don't even know where you are in your house. Exactly my doctor. Um, but like, I don't know where my friends are anymore and like it's, and I feel like I'm S I stay connected to people because they see them on social, but like, there's some people I have spite have an email list and I haven't caught up with in a long time.

And I just feel like there's, there's a lot of this like human brain that has broken and like, you need a computer brain to take it to the next level. And, yeah. Sorry. I know I went on a little tangent. No, no, go ahead. But the last, the last piece of this is like the way I sort of see it as we prioritize this feature, this utility feature, because if the world didn't exist, like it, meaning, sorry, that doesn't make any sense.

If, if the, um, If, if you didn't take into account, what's going on in the world and it was just like our product roadmap and how we're thinking about things and how we're building things, this would not be the next feature. The next feature would be more admin tools like helping them do all those things.

Like the Zapier style type of stuff. If it was just us and like sitting there and figuring out what our users wanted, it would probably just be admin tools would be cool, new or like, uh, vent features and things like that. I've recently, and this sort of goes into one of the questions we were talking about, or that you emailed me around was like product and team.

Like what makes a successful company it's team it's, you know, it's market and it's timing. Those are of attraction timing. And yeah, I used to think it was all about product and team. I was like, oh, if you have a great team with a great product, do any, and then I've recently changed my mind around that.

And I actually believe it's actually more timing and more. Which I think investors like, just know like it's like they instinctively know, and that's why they, they invest in really, they look for really big markets, but like you could have a really great team with a really great product, something like path, right.

Really great team, really great product, the market and timing just weren't right for path. And like you have a great team, great product. You'll run into a wall because market and timing will always win. But if you have a mediocre team with a mediocre product in a massive market with great timing, like you will have a meaningful yeah.

And the reason I mentioned this is because if you take into account what's happening in the world, the world's opening up. The big themes for the rest of the year are going to be travel. IRL, reconnecting with friends, dinners, concerts, sports games, all that stuff. And like virtual events is going to go from like a weekly thing to like a monthly thing.

It's still gonna exist. It's still going to be important. It's just going to be for the next six months. I think there's going to be this snap back. So. This product was on our roadmap, but we were going to start working on it in the summer. At the end of the year, we just decided to just reprioritize things.

So I just wanted to give a little bit of context around that,

MPD: [00:27:10] but that was an entire company, but you're just talking, came out as you've reduced to a feature of your company. And it comes back to what I was saying before, about what communities, when the challenges with them mean these apps is you have to build so many, you have to smush so many companies together and that has to work.

You guys seem to be doing it? Well, one of the things I think is working really well in the app is you're reducing these companies down to discreet, simple features. And so it seems to be more sustainable, but that there was a, there was at least one company before that check, check to your kind of follow up, he heatmap, and he was contactless, something like that.

Yeah. And figured out who you were falling off with, and it would prompt you to reach out that was a SAS. You're building it as feature number 48 and upstream.

Alex Taub: [00:27:59] So that it's gritty. You mentioned that cause like I sort of mentioned it earlier. There's three things that LinkedIn has dropped the ball on. One is like groups.

Three was like strength of relationship, which is reconnect. Product is our first foray into that. Cause you need this, you need to know who you know and how well, you know them to some degree to know who you're losing touch with, but that's for another conversation. The middle one was. And that's, I think that actually ties it all together in my discombobulated brain.

Is that like to do this right? To do we need to build a platform, a professional platform and yeah, we'll be the first developer on it. We may be the only developer on it for awhile, but like eventually we'll have an API that you can build on top of an upstream community, the upstream ecosystem, and you could build your own applications.

Um, and that, to answer, like, to, to talk about what you're saying is like, But like, why not? Why can't we have all these cool companies that do these little things in this ecosystem, building things on top of us, that's going to take some time. You don't build a ecosystem overnight, but like again, Michael and I have done API APIs for the past decade.

So we know that stuff, we know that we've used other people's ecosystems we've built, use other people's EPI's. So building our own API, like we know how to do it.

MPD: [00:29:16] So I want to come back to something, we kind of covered three things. And the last bit I want to kind of respond to it. The idea that you're building features too, help people be more effective at managing is very powerful because communities kind