NFT 2.0: Creating Real Value with Sterling Campbell of Minotaur

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March 17, 2022

On this week’s episode I chat with Sterling Campbell, CEO of Minotaur. Minotaur is a web3 platform that helps people and brands launch NFT projects. There are a lot of steps - including a fair bit of technology - required to take an NFT launch from concept to launch. Minotaur’s tech-enabled service does all of this. As they put it, they “bring together artists, blockchain engineers and community managers to build successful NFT projects that can scale.”

Sterling has been in NFTs since 2017, which for this space is a long time, so he’s been around the block a few times and learned a bunch of stuff.

If you are still scratching your head when you hear about NFT, well he breaks it down pretty well in this conversation.

He also dives into what’s wrong with the industry right now and how he is hoping for a transition to what he calls NFTs 2.0, where NFTs flip from their focus on providing membership access to being technically more integrated as a method for adding value to communities.

Sterling is the right guy for this space - he has lived at the nexus of media, entertainment and business. And as far as being in a risky space - that’s not really an issue. He tells us about the time his parachute didn’t open while sky diving.

Oh yeah…and if that wasn’t enough…he’s a DJ that toured with the likes of Lil John and T-Pain. Enjoy the conversation.

**Note** I’m an investor in the company.

Show Links:

‍Transcript (this is an automated transcript):

MPD: Awesome. So let's start. Do you mind giving us an overview of what your company - Minotaur - does?

Sterling Campbell: does? Yeah, totally. So Minotaur is a full service end to end solution for an creation for brands and creators. So it's a, on one hand, it's a white glove agency for top tier creators and brands. On the other hand, it's a self-serve platform that enables long-tail creators to build their own NFT projects.

The whole reason for creating the company is the fact that interacting with a blockchain is extremely important for long-tail creators to own their audiences and to own their own monetization. But at the end of the day, it's really hard. Cause you have to find a, a solidity dev, you have to understand the crypto space, you have to understand their crypto communities.

And we really just wanted to make that easier for long-tail creators, but also enable all of our idols to jump in and make their own projects as well who need a more white glove treatment. So it's a nice little hybrid there.

MPD: And so folks doing. They were finding their own teams of people who were kind of experts in the space and putting it all together.

And now you guys show up in your one-stop shop. Is that the right

Sterling Campbell: way to think about it? Yeah. There's a couple of things that we always make. The joke that like half the celebrities that we talked to, or half the creators we talked to it's a bunch of kids in hoodies that come in and they're like, let us do your NMT project.

You'll make millions of dollars. And they have no idea what they're doing. They have no idea what they're agreeing to. And for us, it's like we come from a place of trust. A lot of the people at the company worked in entertainment before. So we know we have strong trust in the ecosystem, but at the same time, it's also abstracting a lot of the complexity out.

So you're not overwhelming them with, like now you've got to, you have to talk in this discord and you have to go on this Twitter spaces and all this stuff that, again, like they don't really want to do, but at the end of the day, that they have to do in order to convert into this opportunity.

So for us, it's yeah, one stop shop, but also we're there for the strategy was there for everything else. Because we think it's important. These are in these early days for projects to have as much in them as possible. And we really want to stand above in terms of.

MPD: You think of us, some examples of folks you've worked with, who's used you guys to do their NFT drop.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. So we built the tech for creature world I'm with Danny Cole. Danny was a, an artist in New York. He did 150 million in secondary revenue on his project. He's currently building out the second phase of it. Really strong artists with a really cool anyone that hears Danny talk it's so electric that you people have to buy, which is the main driver of the secondary, but also so much really cool tech went into building that project.

There was a game before you meant it. There was a way to change metadata of the actual entity you have. There's a lot of like really cool things that happen there. Another project is castle kid with Collin Tilley CA call until he is a Grammy award winning director, Amazon, a bunch of music videos for Justin Bieber and a bunch of other.

That one has been really ambitious in terms of our rollout. We were the fastest project to ever the most traits ever in a project, which ended up being a little bit more of a problem than it was a success. We also did the fastest time to merge in terms of token gated access to things. He is doing a masterclass on producing and directing.

And then the longer-term plan here is to do a, the first feature film based on an empty cells. So allowing the community as a Dow to decide the future of the film, to contribute to its creation, as well as its actual recording and like the post editing process and all of those other areas.

And then being able to be that first film created out of a doubt, which we're really excited about. Those are just a couple, we also, I've done a bunch of advisory work for a bunch of different projects, some of which is public and some of which isn't, but I've been around the space since 2017.

So I've definitely had my fair share of interactions on the

MPD: blockchain, which is a long tenure.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, I think it's one of the longest, everyone's always like I was in cryptos it's whatever. And no one can say like NMT is since that long, other than a very select view, which I think is I've always clung to a bit,

MPD: what is the service I've been Atari do and not to like, where do you guys

Sterling Campbell: start and stop?

So we were there from day one, if we can be for Kalika, for example the actual, like creation of the IP happened on the, on one of the first calls. So we sit from strategy all the way to, to follow through one thing that we're really starting to work on now. And one of our early learnings was that the follow-through is fairly important.

So like creating the proper incentives. Attach us to things without hurting. Our scalability is really important, but there's so many like hacks that we have for scalability and so many different ways that we can dog food, our own products that now everyone on our product, everyone on our team come the end of this month, we'll be able to launch their own project.

So essentially it can run the process from start to finish and we don't necessarily need this, this team hopping from project to project like we previously did. But to be honest, like we continue to support. Now. I, it's been about three months since we met to castle kid and we're just hammering each of the roadmap items.

The other part about that is that's really nice is that every time we do something it's tech that could be, can service the rest of the projects that we do. So as soon as we built like a dowel workflow, one click down. Now we can add that to any project. So any projects that we do now, and this has been what we've been working on over the past couple of months, any projects that we do now can come ready to rock so you can keep that momentum.

Yeah. We're launching a project and then saying, all right, now we're going to go build all the stuff that we said we were going to now. It's here's what we're promising. And we can deliver, 75% of this on day one, and then you get the journey of the rest. So you get to have that cool experience alongside the media.

MPD: Okay. So let's say someone listening to this decides, all right, I want to do one of these, how much time and planning do they need? What's, how long does it take from the time they drop you guys an email to the time something's happening? Yeah,

Sterling Campbell: It's a hard answer. I hate, I always say to say it depends, but it depends on a couple of things.

One thing is speed of the art. I think it's really hard to. The two biggest bottlenecks are community and art. A lot of the tech that we have now is super scalable. So we can launch a D app and all that stuff in about three days. The hardest part is like getting a project that people want to buy.

The space is changing so much from these like cash grabs and, on sustainable times to what I keep calling like NFTs 2.0, where it's people are actually finally demanding something. They're not okay with just, Hey, we're going to do a game. And then obviously the game never gets made.

Now they're finally demanding something that's actually concrete and done. Those are the two biggest blockers in our mind. Like the actual launching of a project has now become fairly commoditized on our personal end as a company. It's really about finding the right project. So it's cool.

We're doing like we're doing a project now with a $500 million fashion company. We're doing another one. Poultry winning a Pulitzer prize, winning cartoonists and things like that. Major athletes, major celebrities, people that are idolized in their relative countries, like all these different types of verticals, because now it's, we're moving from this arrow of like just promising stuff to like, let's go actually do this.

Let's go actually deliver this stuff. And that's really a really cool place for us to move. So to answer your question, six to eight weeks, I think is like a, is a clean time for the launch. But again, at that point you don't have too much, it can also be three to four months. It all depends on what you're offering and the angle that you're taking this all the project.

MPD: Got it. So who's a good fit who, who should reach out to you if they hear it?

Sterling Campbell: I think people that are good at building communities, honestly, like I published something on value recently. It's something that I've been thinking as like a founder and someone who's also been an investor for most of my career.

Like I think about value less than I probably should, but now it's come to the point where I really analyze like what people find value in. And I think the biggest early value creator is community. I think the idea that there's no real places right now where you can sit like synchronously, talk to people, you have Twitter and all these other Reddit and all these other places where you can say your opinion, someone will eventually get to it and you can have that interaction but discord and token data communities and all this, it's such a cool way to get that live.

I can jump into a council, could discord and talk to, a hundred people. And like that type of engagement and like attention is something that the average person just doesn't have, right? Like superstars, get that type of attention and any, anything that they do, but the other person doesn't get like thousands of people reading their thing whatever they have to say and reacting to it and all these other things.

Very well. So I think communities is number one beyond like celebrity. We've learned a lot actually about all that stuff. The second is do you actually want to build in the space? We don't, we try as hard as we can do them for cash grabs. We don't like to work with celebrities or any creators that we see don't actually want to do the project.

Don't actually want to follow through on what they're saying. And even if they balk at like early engagement, like they don't want to talk to their community, they don't wanna do it. Then it's we don't want to just launch stuff and get people hurt. Like it's bad on our brain and it's bad on their brand.

So those are the two biggest things for us. Do you actually want to do this? Do you actually want to be in this for a longterm? Cause because when three is going to be around for awhile and you only get so many bites at the apple here and we try to communicate that as much as possible and try to preserve our brand as much as we can.

MPD: So I was just at a conference and they had someone come and talk about NFTs and I could see it was like mostly over the head of everyone in the audience. Could we do a quick NFT? One-on-one. And just dumb the hell out of this. If you wouldn't mind starting with an overview, but then I'm gonna, I'm gonna ping you with a couple of topics or words that everyone's hearing just to make sure they get the lay of the land that works.

All right. Do you wanna just start NFTs? What are they

Sterling Campbell: start there? So NFTs are basically, it stands for non fungible token. The idea is that they can't be changed. It's a mutable. It is a unique piece of. Art or an item on the blockchain. It's different from a us dollar, for example, where if you have a hundred dollars, a hundred single us dollar bills, they all, they're all the exact same.

They might have different serial numbers, but they're interchangeable. And if T's technically are not all the same, right? Because they're a part of the collections, but they all have unique qualities. This is most obvious in terms of like traits. So if you look at like the board APR club or any of these things, each one of those NFTs is part of a collection that carries like certain attributes, but they're all different.

Some of them have had some of the. The utility of that stuff, doesn't really matter. It's more like a rarity thing. This is the rarest thing, which again, if you look at like baseball cards or other things, you can see why people care about that. It's not something that I personally care about as I'm not like a collectibles person as much as I am like a utility person, but the cool part about this is that is not that you get cool art of a monkey that is unique, but rather the fact that the underlying technology of that photo of that JPEG is more than a JPEG.

It is. It is your ticket to things. It is your membership. It is your access code. It's your authorization. You don't have, you don't use your email to sign up for things. In web three, you use your wallet and use your identity your metaverse identity to jump into these things. The problem with NFC is largely.

And like the confusion is that people see a picture of a monkey and they're like, how is this worth like a hundred thousand dollars? I don't understand it. And to be honest, like there are times in which I don't understand it either. And there are times when like value gets decoupled from price.

And I think that's a really important thing that people are learning for the first time in these markets, given that they've been told their whole life that like markets are efficient and all this other stuff, the reality is that if they're not, and it becomes a lot more apparent that the true speculative value of these things, when all of a sudden that JPEG is getting you on a yacht or is getting you into a conversation with Steph Curry or any of these things are happening which all carry a higher value.

I'm not going to pretend like it's a hundred thousand dollars worth of value, but I will say that like a lot of utility can be delivered to these things and people interact in this way already. It's just, they buy tickets to things. It's just a different mechanism for delivery. I think that the jump is not as big as people think.

And I think people are so scared of. All the buzzwords and all the nonsense and it's really a lot of the same stuff we're doing now, just in a smoother hopefully going to be a smoother way.

MPD: Yeah. That's the thing that made it click for me a while back was when I realized it, wasn't really just an art technology, which I want to talk about at its core.

It's a really good ticketing system. That's the language that you're using that I don't hear a lot of people, even in the space talking about it that way, but that's when it clicked, because that makes sense. You can imagine you're going to, NBA game and you've got some digital assets that looks cool.

It's got a little bit more fun character than a QR code on a ticket. But it also has the same effect gets you in and the person who wants to let you in knows it's you and you've paid for it. That's the core foundational layers. That's right. And we're applying it to art now. That's where

there's.

Sterling Campbell: The cool thing is that you were playing it to artists and that's why it gets so broad because all of a sudden, like utility running like a music musician for example is massive. Like you not only get something that could give you early access to their albums, but also you could get a VIP ticket, right?

There's so many different layers in which you can add utility to these things. And it really, it's funny because we've done all the weekend to like decouple and like unbundle all of the services and make them all these little point solutions. And like now we're moving back into this let's bundle it all up.

Let's do, let's find super fans and let's have them pay for something that gives them the best access as possible. Let's not do like a patriarch and then a VIP ticket and all these other things. Let's just front run revenue and couple it all into this, $400 asset that goes directly to the artist, as opposed to all these different platforms.

Only fans takes 25% Twitch takes 50% like the numbers are staggering. When you think about the creator economy is not owned by creators, it's owned by platforms. And that's, what's so cool. You're getting a ticket to like their show. It's not just like a physical experience, but like you're getting a deeper ticket to like the journey of the artist.

So Danny, Cole's a great example. He had 7,000 followers. He was about to begin his journey as a well-recognized artist. And all of a sudden you get a ticket to that. So now I get a front row seat, I get first access of everything he's doing. And there's upside that's tied to it. So not only that it's if I'm a hipster and I'm like always talking about the musicians that I saw first, I can buy that in empty as like an investment in the artist.

Which again, there's a bunch of complexities and difficulties that come with decoupling art from like investment opportunities. There's a reason like we don't usually do that kind of ruins the fun a little bit, but at the same time, it adds benefits to everyone as well.

MPD: So another way to put it is it's a supercharged membership card took community, but it's a unique card unto itself.

That's a little bit of a status symbol because it looks.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, exactly right. And you can flex it like no one owns this unique one and that's why we're rarities get important again, like I'm not, when I traded NFTs and was flipping them like a madman, I never cared. The only time I would get excited as if I happened to meet one and it happened to be rare and I would get more money than I would have otherwise, but right.

People like it, people like the senior in Campbell and I'm not going to pretend I'm not going to pretend I don't know why it's happening. It's just not for me personally.

MPD: Okay. So everyone's hearing art and community. Those are the kind of core pieces are coming together around these membership type organizations.

Can you give a little overview on discord? Everyone's hearing about it? I think a lot of people don't know what the hell it is, but you covered that.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. This is one of our biggest challenges with with bigger brands who obviously the demographics of them are not necessarily crypto native. So discord started as like a, originally it was like a fortune style like hell spot for a bunch of Deakins and it then became like a game or mechanism.

And I remember it was the only way that I could play video. I used to literally grab my cell phone and I would call my friends when I was a kid and just talk to them on the phone because I didn't have a mic and we were playing on a computer game. So there was no voice chat. And I just remember doing that so much.

And the discord enabled me to voice out with my friends to create parties like great group chats that like, they weren't like green bubbles. Cause someone had an Android, like it just was a really smooth experience and really nice for that. You can create specific channels, you can make things private.

Like it just became a really cool place just to hang out and talk. And the industry space has completely taken it over. Same with Twitter also. Yeah, those are the two hubs in terms of like where crypto Twitter, like where crypto groups hang out and discourse is really nice because of there's so many different tools that are being built to token gate things.

Again, they're all manual discord. Isn't really doing a lot of these things. I'm sure they're doing them in the background, but

MPD: you mean you have to have the NFT membership card just making this dumb to get access to the discourse.

Sterling Campbell: No, please. Yeah. I'm a little bit too in it. Sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

Yeah, exactly. So please stop me if that happens, but yeah, so that's the thing is. Some of our biggest channels, right? Like a place where I share all of the alpha, which is basically the word for any tips that I get on. Hey, this is going to be a hot project. Or Justin Bieber just got involved in this whatever it is which again, there's complexities to that as well.

Or like sharing alpha and all that stuff, information asymmetry and things like that. But those channels, you could only get to, if you buy the NMT and that's really where the value of community actually is demonstrated, right? That's where you decide, what's where the market decides.

Like this is such an exclusive group. There's only 10,000 of these. I want to be able to talk in this group. So you buy an NFC and then all of a sudden you could access. It was the main reason actually, why I wanted it so bad. In the beginning, when I was just a young pup in the space, I was like, everyone talks about how great the community was.

And I was like, I don't really know what they do but the community sounds dope. It sounds like it's a bunch of really smart people who have all believed in this for longer than everyone else. And I'm going to get involved. And it's just funny, cause I, I did, yeah I've had, this is the big thing and I don't want to, I've been called like a more bearish founder, which I think is actually benefit in the space called bears.

Like a couple of people, some people were like, why are you fucking my bags? Like, why are you in flooding? Is fear, uncertainty, despair, basically any type of negativity is cast out in the communities. And it's if you're not like drinking, the Kool-Aid people will get really angry. But the reality is like I joined it and I remember being like, I'm in some ways sicker spots, like already that are like way cheaper.

And I've met a lot of apes and like they're great people, the apes in general, like you guys like unbelievable in terms of what they're doing, they're going to be, it's an inevitability. I think it's a no brainer in terms of opportunity there. But it is just funny that. And value sentiment is just a purely dictated by price in that type of industry.

And everyone will who raw and talk about how great the community is when the price is going up and that the price goes down and the community abandoned that because people aren't actually driven by community, they're driven by value and they're driven by price. And again, that's totally fine.

Everyone has their own thing, but it was just funny to me to get in. And I was so excited to like link by NFT and start talking. I have this big what's up guys, like you're who I am and just like fell flat and the rest of it, just whatever definitely not worth the price of admission.

Now I'll tell you that, but I will say that it is speculative assets, like the value that if you had an ape, like the value that you've been given in terms of dollars is like an undeniable. The amount of times you've been airdropped things or any of the like crypto ethos style, like benefits that are unique to crypto have come to you.

People have made hundreds of thousand dollars just by holding one of these things without ever liquidating. So it's all really interesting. And I toss it over in my mind, like all the. And it's

MPD: a big status symbol, right? Everyone's got their Twitter handle there. They'll see their profile pictures of their age if they have one.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah. That's the thing that I miss the most, I would say is having that got me many more Twitter followers. That's the other part. I think I've written about this in my last piece, it was basically like this amount of people have not had this level of like mini celebrity ever before. And the fact that you can buy something for a couple of hundred bucks and then all of a sudden have 500 new friends, people through the pandemic and all these other random things, like they're thirsty for community there they're willing to get outside of themselves or any rational thought that they'd had before they got red pill by crypto.

Like they're now just aping into anything that will give them that sense of for just a moment that like quick hit of dopamine of seeing those notifications pop up. And I see it all. Even my own co-founders who have built small Twitter volunteer of their own, they get very fired up when that type of stuff happens.

It's only reason. I think some of them buy enough jeans. It's like just that dopamine rush of like more bodies. It's just an interesting thing.

MPD: So what's your biggest hit to date? You guys have been doing this, you're the backbone. You're one of the main people in this market, helping people push these out.

What's the stuff that, you hang your hat, you hang your hat on at this point. So

Sterling Campbell: the three case studies that we talk about are like our involvement with Boone G who did 15 million in primary. We did like the social. I published an article in Forbes on them. Really helped build that team out on the the tech side.

This was before we had incorporated as a company, but we had done creature world. It had done 150 million in second. The tech side of that. So was those are the two, like we did like a peace solution of a larger project. The data is like our biggest like end to end success. It taught us a tremendous amount.

The whole goal of castle kid was always to be like a proof of concept that we can not only show to other artists and other creators, but also one that we can learn everything we could about every single step in the process I had before that done an advisory project, something like that. I had launched a smart contract.

I had, I built a generative. I had done all these things like front by hand like painstakingly I've learned enough solidity to be dangerous. And I knew that I could do the full end, but doing the full end to end and having all these things linked to it does create a lot more complexity. It does create a lot more needs and being able to roll with the punches and be agile on those types of things is also really important.

The successes have been different in terms of the in terms of monetization, they've the largest success in my mind in terms of the future of the company has been CastleGate. I think we've built more overall tech. It put our heads down and said, we need to actually standardize a lot of this stuff.

I need to actually arm my people. And in the meantime, we've just been heads down on signing and stuff. I think the biggest things we have are the biggest successes we're going to have, are going to be done over the next couple of months. I, our pipeline has so many names on it that it's become its own section of our slack of just like pure deals that we're doing.

We've signed multiple major brands. We're not the preferred partner of Warner music group and several talent agencies just given our connections. And we've really just been getting our ducks in a row and parsing through all of the demand in order to figure out our go forward. Just given the fact that this started with, literally we started with two kids and a small crowded apartment and has grown out our team is.

Dozens of people in terms of part-timers and our overall ecosystem of mods and things like that. So very quick growth and just scaling that has been a lot, but yeah, Kelsey has been our biggest, I would say. That's

MPD: awesome. And whenever I hear an entrepreneur is saying, Hey, we went down and we did this really hard thing.

I'm hearing them clear way the forest to make it easy for the next person. So that's the value creation, right? People come and use our service now. And to them it seems easy because you've done all the heavy lifting.

Sterling Campbell: Yeah, it does. So this is my favorite part about this is that I've had so many people reach out and say Hey, I want to do a project.

And can you. And I was like, yes, you just wait a second and I'll give you all of the stuff that we did. And a nice little package wait, it was supposed to be done this week. This this week Ukraine stuff has pushed us back a little bit since that's a good portion of our team there, but, and they all say that.

And then I see them all sort of project. I said, look, start your discord. You have the art, you have all this stuff started discord. You don't need me yet. I'll be, I'll do the Tegrity. I promise I'll do the contract myself. If that's what it comes down to. But go build a, could you go to try to build a community?

And they all fail. It's the same as podcast, right? Like they don't. They say like after two episodes, most people quit or something. It's exact same thing. Getting that first thousand people is the most grueling I sent over 10th. I spent, or I sent over 10,000 messages in the discord, in my own CastleGate discord.

And that's a lot like that's a lot of time. I wish I could say. And typing them. Yeah, I was in there. I was blessing people to list by hand because of the fact that being real, being genuine was so important. And like now we have automated stuff. We have wireless bots, we have games, we have all the, all these things, but the reality was like, I needed to know every single little piece of it in order to know where the problem points were and how I can be more creative.

The reality is that like we're sitting in the time of email where I was like the 1990s, when again, I wasn't sending emails back then, but I heard a