GEN C: Beauty Meets Blockchain with the Co-Founder of KIKI, Jana Bobosikova

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When we started to build Kiki ORG, we didn't set out to build a blockchain company. We set out to build a company that can be co-created and co-own by customers. And we realized that blockchain today is the only technology that can help us make this statement true.

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This episode is sponsored by SAFE, the account abstraction leader on Ethereum PRODUCT. Avery PERSON, we're back again, Gen C. We have an exciting episode today. Our guest is Yana Babashikova, who is the co-founder of Kiki ORG. Kiki is a beauty platform that is doing some really cool stuff with technology and co-creation and rewards and loyalty and community. And it's just a really wonderful conversation. I know you have been in touch with her for a while. I believe I met her at Art Basel for the first time this year. And she has infectious energy and enthusiasmabout what she's building. So that's going to be great. A thousand percent.

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And it's something that, you know, I have been, would always often use as like a reference point of like, imagine if I wanted to launch a new beauty brand and I solicited the opinion of consumers, mags, calla, who you and I are both very close with, often would sort of think about this idea of like a lipstick Dow ORG. And then we heard about Kiki World and we're like, oh, it's, it's lipstick Dow ORG. That's amazing.That's a great idea.

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And it wasn't just us who thought it was a great idea.

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It got a really impressive list of investors, including one of the biggest beauty brands on the

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planet, biggest beauty conglomerates, I should say, on the planet.

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So I am super excited to have grown. Absolutely. But first, Avery, what is a Stubio PRODUCT?

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A studio is a fan-powered studio that launches on Tubi. So Stubios ORG is something we've been working with the Tubby team on for quite some time. And this is probably one of the projects I am the most excited about in Mainerland GPE because I can get really addresses like a consumer need. Everyone who is listening to the show right now knows that the method of identifying Hollywood GPE stars, like, which used to be like who Jeffrey Kattenberg likes, is that has changed. The new stars are born on TikTok ORG and everybody knows it.TikTok and TikTok and other platforms, I should say. And Tooby ORG also knows this. And, you know,

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Tubi is owned by Fox. We had Melanie PERSON on recently, who's the CTO and super impressive. And she talked a lot about how they're building for the future. And Tubi is ad-supported streaming service, which is really popular with the sort of younger Gen Z multicultural communities. And they have the incredible sort of branding of down the rabbit hole. Their CMO Nicole Perlapiano PERSON isn't badass. And they were really inspired by a quote from Issa Ray PERSON,where she basically said, Hollywood GPE, like, you are, we'll have to put in the show notes.

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But she basically said, like, Hollywood GPE, you're killing your own industry. Like, y'all are not creative people. Let the

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creatives do the creative thinking and you guys stick to the money counting. And, you know,

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inspired by that and inspired by sort of consumer research, Tooby ORG decided to launch studios, which is a platform to empower emerging creators to launch a show on Tobe ORG. They actually get to direct it and they get to engage their communities along the way. It's really awesome. One of the first sort of participants is Lady London PERSON, who's this epic

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rapper. Yeah, you know Lady London PERSON. You're with it. And she's super excited about what she's kind of bringing to market and bring your fans along with her. And they all get to be mentored by Issa Ray PERSON,

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which is also just lights out too good. So cool. Yes. Yeah, I was really happy to see this.

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I know you shared it. I think it was yesterday the day before on LinkedIn ORG. So I went kind of down that rabbit hole. It's so funny. I read all of your stuff and it is really exciting. And I love the idea of creators

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getting just bigger and bigger platforms and learning from people who can help them think about their careers in ways that they're not getting maybe other places. And I also saw last night on, on TikTok ORG,

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this really very, very heartfelt sort of post by this. This is a black screenwriter in Hollywood GPE and a director. And he was saying how just since he started to now, he's like, there's only two or three main studios. The people who are really writing the big checks are tech platforms, right? The apples and the Amazon ORG's of the world and Netflix ORG is not the sort of ones who come out of a craft of movie making and showmaking. So I think there's a really nice juxtaposition where these creators and their audiences can sort of pull forward the narratives that they want to hear, as opposed to that being sort of decided by 10 specific people in a boardroom who are like blessing whether this is going to be good to

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add more subscribers, right, or something like that. So I really sort of liked that this was kind of bottom up from

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creators, but also from Issa Rae PERSON, who really understands her community so well and that she gets to help them, I'm sure there'll be more mentors coming, but they get to help these young creators think about their career in a really connected way that also is about craft and art and content first.

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Well, Sam PERSON, I know you totally get it. This is something that I think is so aligned to like the Web3

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ethos. And a lot of the things that we talk about on this show, it's amazing to see a big company like Fox ORG, like putting their money where their mouth is and producing these things. And when I talk to a lot of creators around what they're looking for, they're all looking for distribution.

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And guess what's distribution?

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TV.

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Yeah. So I'm really excited about it.

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And they need content. They need content.

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They also need original content. Like no one wants to see like Fast and Furious 19 WORK_OF_ART. Or I mean, I guess some people do, but there's such a dearth of like original creative content. They also need original content. Like no one wants to see like Fast and Furious 19 WORK_OF_ART. Or I mean, I guess some people do, but there's such a dearth of like original creative content that people are craving and wanting.And like, yeah, it's really hard. And having a breakout is hard. But building with your community, it, you know, makes that even more interesting and exciting.And there's even more coming out afterwards that I just can't wait to share. What else news is catching your eye this week, though, Sam PERSON?

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There's two other things I want to talk to you about. So one is, there's announced last week, Open AI ORG just did another news deal, this time with the Financial Times ORG for a partnership. And there was some commentary that I was reading on social, which was that in essence, the news industry is welcoming its own death by a thousand cuts. So people are kind of thinking about it through the lens of, well, this is another monetizationin that, you know, open AI is now paying. Now, Financial Times ORG is interesting because all of their content is behind a paywall. So unlike, say, CoinDesk, where right now all of our content is public. And so it's been scraped already, probably by any of these models. Financial Times ORG actually has something that is hard to get. So they made a deal, but then, yeah, the idea comes, you know, is by searching on with chat GPT or withOpen AI, are you now getting served ways for them to monetize that in a different way? Or is this them thinking, well, this is a balance of some revenue here and we have our subscription. And I just like, I guess what I thought to think, we've now lived with this idea of chat GPT and especially the content world, whether that's books, whether that's music. Now we've heard about YouTube videos. Now we're in the news cycle. But is in some respect the entire media industry just slowly like encouraging its own decay by making these deals or should they really be uniting to sort of push back and say, no, none of us are really willing to do this, at least in the way that you guys want. I just wondered if you had any thoughts about this.

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What is happening in what they should be doing or two different things, Sam PERSON, as you obviously very well know. When has it ever worked at a bunch of like these little publishers get together and like actually make a difference against the man? I mean, this has just been, you know, the melting ice keep thing we've talked about for such a long time. I think it's it's the short term and the long term thinking. And in thinking for the short term, a lot of these organizations have not set themselves up well for the long term. But also sometimes like what's, you know, might be the most disruptive is like coin dust going all in on TikTok ORG and winning that.Right.

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But that's then you have to hire new people and you have to like think in a whole new way and that's a whole new muscle that would take a while for it to play out. And to me, that's a little bit of it. Right. It's like there's the complete revolution versus

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a lot of times people are thinking kind of like incrementality of what can I do to make this a little

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bit better or keep it a little bit how it was when ultimately you never then get to like the place where

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like you're crushing it with social. And you know, you're talking about it from publishers. I see it from brands too. We are spending a lot of time and effort and money on thinking about these like one to two campaigns that are supposed to be like these big ideas. But that's just not how people consume media these days, right? And that's not how it's not like it was 20 years

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ago where like one breakthrough tagline is going to work as the only thing. That can be part of it, but that has to manifest in a way that's relevant instead of just, you know, having a great idea and then just pushing it through reach. So I think it's, it's not just the media industry

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would be my take. That's no, it's a great point on brands because they're, they're, they're, they suffer from the same opportunity of an essence, in essence, being extracted away. I mean, Amazon ORG to some degree has already done this in how it's looked at sales cycles and then create its own product, right? So it's the equivalent of something we'll keep our eye on.

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No, I want to double tap on that, Sam PERSON, because I think that retail media is one of the biggest

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threats to like big CPG ORG. And the way that it's working right now is they are creating their own

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private labels. They are charging the brands to advertise on their media networks, basically pay

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for placement, which is normal in the stores, right? Like, that's always been a thing. They're turning up the seat gradually while they extract all the data and then use that to build their own products. And it's really this catch 22 exactly what you're talking about for publishers. Like, okay, are they not going to be there? But then they're in the short term,

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they're going to get hit. But in the long term, they're going to build that muscle of like how

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they can connect directly with consumers themselves, which in the long run might be the move.

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And, you know, nobody really, like everybody's laughing about poppy and feastables till

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they're not. Yes. Well, and to your point, once you've created that paradigm, Amazon's a great example. You have two options. You could be Nike ORG who says, we're going to pull a lot of our styles out. And so therefore you have to come to Nike.com ORG or our preferred retailers, because they're just getting cannibalized. Or you are now paying what is an above 30% tax to play the Amazon ORG game where it used to be much lower. But because they just slowly, incrementally increased the cost for playing the game of fulfillment and all of those things in the advertising network, you then eat it, you end up having to have such scale. The only way to make money is toplay a very razor-thin margin game. So I think you're absolutely correct about this. Every final thought for you is, I was revisiting a tweet from Matthew Ball the other day where he had this chart. I think we might have talked about it, but I just wanted to double tap into it, which is the New York Times now has more users playing games than reading news. And, you know, we know the popularity of Wordle PRODUCT and why they bought that. And I know you're a connections maxi. So, you know, thinking about about that and the crossword puzzle and all this stuff.And it just made me wonder whether it's learning language with duolingo, whether it's Robin Hood and how you're buying stocks. Now it's the New York Times and how you're, you're sort of becoming a game player on it. Just is gamification the big unlock that we all need to refocus our thoughts on? Because it causes so much to all time. It causes so much interaction with the brand. And people love playing games, even if passively they don't even know they're playing a game. How do you guys weave gamification into your campaigns?

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We do a ton of things with gamification and like somewhere like full on games, something like a pick-um, which is branded. People love it though. Like that we can't get people to come to a beer website every week, you know,

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unless there's a game. You just wouldn't do it because like, why would you? There are some of the other things you could be doing online. Gamification works. It drives dwell time. It drives brand association. But it has to be the right thing. I think sometimes people try to

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gamify everything. And it's like, why does that social media post like need to, you know, have a game in it? And making a great game, like making a connection, like how many, you know, you've got to have a million different word games until you get a connection. And I think it's that, by the way, I want to give a shout out to the creator. I think her name is Winona Lau PERSON. So that is a creative thing, just producing that game every day and sparking joy with millions, including you and I.

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I mean, joy or frustration, because I have not been able to always solve this puzzle. But we'll save that for later. You know, our guest, Avery, Yana PERSON is gamifying, frankly, the beauty industry.

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Beauty.

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Right. There's a ton of rewards. There's a ton of social collaboration. There's a ton of rewards. There's a ton of social collaboration. There's a ton of like collective decision making that happens within what Kiki ORG is building. So after the break, we will come back with Yana from Kiki ORG. We'll hear all about what they're building and stay with us.

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Can't wait.

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So, first of all, great to be here, guys. My background, really, the interesting bit is I studied theology and economics and business. And I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I'm from the Czech Republic GPE. And I grew up watching America GPE on TV. And I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I'm from the Czech Republic, and I grew up watching America on TV, and I thought it was such a cool place, and I definitely needed to be over there.So to preface everything, I think with Kiki World ORG and my career, I feel very fortunate to be able to say that I'm living the American NORP dream, doing my best to contribute to building a future here. What I've been always interested in is the stickiness of why people stay in certain systems or pursue certain things. And in a very long story short, I got the opportunity to launch a brand in the U.S. GPE after I started a distribution company in theCzech Republic, which my mom now runs and she does a terrible job. Do I say terrible? She does an incredible job. The opposite of terrible. She does an incredible job. The opposite of terrible.

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She does an incredible job.

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And so I launched several brands in the U.S. GPE in the beauty and personal care space. And it was really striking to me that the beauty industry really is standing on the shoulders of platforms, creator recommendations, customer content, and that neither customers or creators get really rewarded that much for really building this category. I think it's something like 5% of creators get paid for content in the beauty space. And so after I finally got my green card, which is a very ceremonious moment for meand something that I pursued for a long time, I started my own company, which was an operating company, which supported supply chain, product development, B2BB sales and innovation, many companies that you would find in stores like Sephora, Alta ORG, and others. And it was a very natural progression to start thinking about how we can connect the dots and build something new. And with Kiki ORG, I have two co-founders that make me look good. We have very diverse backgrounds. Ricky PERSON is an incredible creative. He's a chief creative at Kiki ORG. We connected over the fact that design is thelanguage of adoption. And so we can come out with the smartest, coolest things, but if it doesn't look beautiful, it's very unlikely to be adopted. And Brandon PERSON, who's our co-founder and head of product, his background is an enterprise SaaS. And we're very excited about what's next for overall consumer with a beauty lens in mind, knowing that the next generation of brands will be not just promoted by creators, but created by audiences and creators. And we really wanted to build a platform where customers can co-create and co-own products, not just use and sell them.

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Awesome. So where did the idea of a co-created beauty brand come from? You've had to experience building businesses. How did you decide, let's go into the co-created beauty world? Well, I think we were just not excited to use the internet to sell objects.

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So before we started Kiki ORG, we had this idea that products should be connected and they should be linked to the internet. And we want to ask the people on the internet, like it's a rich medium, people use it to create things. However, in the consumer good space, people use it to sell things. And that's such a shame. And we were just really interested in this question, what kind of products, what kind of world we would live inif we ask others to collaborate and participate, and here's the key plot was be rewarded for it. Because obviously, you know, asking people questions on the Internet is not a new idea, but coming up with a way that they can sustainably participate in the creation, and there's a loop in how they become co-creators and co-owners is what was the founding thought. It was power to the passionate.And we didn't want to be the ones that are going to be in an ivory tower telling you this is the best. And seven scientists work for seven years to create this. And now you need to buy this. And we were like, no. It's like, it's not our first rodeo. We have some innovation. We came up with an airtight, NFC tag enabled nail polish.Then you can apply on the go with one hand. It's cool. But do you tell us what else it should look like, what color should it be and shouldn't have a sand. Like we want to do this together. We think it's a much more interesting way to create products. It's a much more difficult way to create the products.

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But that was really the founding thought. And we've had a lot of learning since. So happy to double click on these as well. Okay. I want to hear a little bit more about that product that you said really quick, Yanna PERSON. It was an airtight nail, chipped nail.Explain that one.

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So our first launch product was pretty nail graffiti. It's an airtight pen that allows you to literally apply nail polish on the go. So I'm wearing it on this nail. And then peel it off and change your color. So if you think from first principles, like who decided that we sit at our nail salon, get our nails done for an hour?Like it's crazy. Like, literally Elon Musk is going on Mars and we're getting our nails down for one hour. Like the gap of technology in personal care and in other areas is really jarring, I think, sometimes. And so we thought, why don't just do it on the go? And so Pretty Nile graffiti has an NFC ORG tag that's housed at the cap of every product. The reason why we put it there is twofold.We wanted to reward our audience, not just for purchase, but for the physical product use. And we also have created a circular supply chain where this product can be industrially refilled because it's custom tool. And so when you get your pretty nail graffiti, hopefully you voted on which color you would have created. So you got your points. You got your collectible, which we call collectible when we talk to our friends from the beauty world. And we say ERC 721A PRODUCT when we talk to our friends from the beauty world and we say ERC 721A when we talk to our friends from the crypto world. We strongly believe that nobody needs to know that it's on chain, but it's very cute.

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So, Yanna PERSON, I want to just dive into this a bit because you talk about being a co-created beauty brand. You also talk about having products chipped. We've seen that you have a product that has literally that your nail itself can be chipped. You also work with other creators and you let people vote on sort of the color ways and all the different products that you're making. Just like tell us a little bit about that ecosystem and what made you decide to go sort of community firstin all of the decisions? Because I can imagine it makes it actually harder to create product.

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Yeah. So we're really interested to build a world where customers feel that piece of the products that they use belongs to them and they're part of it in a different way rather than just buying. I think some of the things that we think about a lot is that if you're a power user of a beauty brand, so you really love a brand, it's probably a net negative experience because you get more text messages, you get more emails, you get asked to buy more things. And so it's actually kind of upside down.

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And so one of the things that makes Kiki World ORG different is that we reward customers even before they buy. And so if you come to our website today and you can swipe, vote, or click on the things that you like, and every time you do that, you get Kiki ORG points. Now Kiki points, you don't need to have a

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wallet or anything to collect them. They go into your account. And when you part of these campaigns, so taking Cherry Chai PERSON as an example, it's our one-night strand, it's a one-day hair color. Cherry Chai PERSON has beautiful textured hair, and it's actually a very interesting cosmetic problem, how to deposit a color pigment for one day to textured hair. And so her audience is very excited to participate in the creation of their product. And every time they do, they also get collectible. That collectible is a beautiful chrome-looking cherry. It looks super cool.I encourage everybody to go and vote on their one day hair color favorite to get theirs. And that allows us then to have a community around people that have participated in the creation of the product. And it's important to us that that part of participation is on chain because it builds a network around this product forever so long as we are online. But the benefits from the voting, which can be daily, is redeemable for the final product. So because you have contributed to create a equation of the product, you get it at a different price that's somebody that justgoes and buys it. And we have a public ledger reference of you having been the creator of that product forever, which can lead to very interesting scenarios down the line. But the reward for being a part of it is immediate, and that's something that's very important to us. So let's talk a little bit

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about this idea of sort of rewarding users for participating and rewarding them along the journey. And you just said rewarding them immediately. How does this actually work in practice?

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Well, so you literally come to our website. you swipe on one of our campaigns and points are immediately deposited into your account. And so then if you go and shop any of our products at checkout card, you can redeem them for $4.4. So instead of paying $29 for pretty nail graffiti, you can be getting it essentially for free if you've accumulated enough products as a participant in creating our products. And I think something that's very interesting to us is that participation doesn't need to be tied to physical product creation. It can be tied to asking your members, like, should we have a meetup or we do these slap sample lunches?

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Should we have it in Miami or should we have it at the next consensus conference? Should we have it in L.A. GPE? And really putting out this idea that your voice matters.

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And I think if anybody that's watching this can see there's people here behind me, they probably don't realize that they're on this camera, so I shouldn't talk about them too much. But they're Kiki World ORG members that have come proactively to us and said, can we build this together? Can we do this and the other projects? And I think that that level of innovation that we can as Kiki World ORG offer is because we have core values that are reflected in a very simple way by rewarding input and participation.And so there's two components of reward. One is this immediate dopamine. Okay, I did this, I got that, and that's important. It also builds a culture where if you bring something to the table, you get something back. And I think that that can lead to really interesting innovation and commerce. So, Jana PERSON, when we were talking

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right before, you made a statement that I thought was really interesting, which was you said you are two consumer for crypto and you're two crypto for consumer. And now you're talking about points and you're talking about digital collectibles and you're kind of playing around the dancing around the lines of what both audiences can reward, but they actually don't always love the other side. So I wonder if there is some insight that you have as you're trying to build a brand. You know, I think about the fact Avery and I interviewed Ben Leventhal from Blackbird ORG, who, you know, doesn't talk a lot about crypto, but he's using a lot of crypto tools or the magic team who has 35 million walletscreated, but most people don't even know they have one. So could you talk a little bit more about what it means to be building on top of these crypto rails, but also your audience base are going to be young women, fashion forward people who are not always the ones people think of when

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they think of like the crypto DGEN. Yeah. I think, thank God.

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And I think all of your guests are definitely our friends, at least spiritually or spiritual allies, I would say. You know, when we're building a brand or community, I think the technology that you use and the best technology in the world is invisible. And I think it's the entropic part of the world of all of the dynamic forces in our lives. And so we do believe that on-chain network as a component of what we

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build is important if we are to build the next generation of customer and community-powered products. So it's there very deliberately. But as an individual customer, you do not need to know that it is on chain. What you do need to know is that there is something that you want to come back to and that you want to do something with and that when you do something with it, like redeem it, collect it or share it, it makes you happy and you want to do more of it. And maybe it makes you happy because he got your discount.Maybe it makes you happy because you shared it with a friend. And maybe it makes you happy because you contributed to making a product. But in the end of the day, you are enabling a community commerce experience. And what technology you use doesn't matter to the end customer.

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What matters is the experience and the utility and the quality and the joy and the magic of the overall experience and product.

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Okay, Ghana, so all of that said, do you consider Kiki World ORG a Web3 brand? If someone had it, you know, to be like, yes, no. Depends on who that somebody is.

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They're writing you a check. Depends on what fun that is. And I think, I mean, we have disclosed

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our launch partners and I think they capture it actually perfectly. So our original investor is

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a stator companies. They're a publicly traded company that invested into a company that said blockchain in our pre-seed deck. And our second investor is Estee Lauder ORG companies, they're publicly traded company that invested into a company that's at blockchain in our pre-Cdeck.

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And our second investor is A16 Z PRODUCT crypto.

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And I think if you ask A16Z crypto team as a steleotter team, what Kiki ORG does, you would get same answer using different words. And I think that the words really are a little bit less important than the mission, which is we're creating products in a new way. We're creating products with our community. And we're giving community and creators the tool to reward their audiences for doing things with them online. And that is the bottom line. And I think somebody will invest or be interested in us or participate because they want to be on chain. And I'm proudly saying Kiki World ORG is probably the only place you can do that in the beauty ecosystem.And other people will come to us just because this is a really cool nail polish. And I can tell you, I love all Kiki World's ORG members for all of these reasons equally. And I think it's one of the things that we're really proud of that it's a place that you can come because you're interested in innovation period. And you shouldn't have to listen to a TED Talk or podcast to know why it's interesting. It's maybe the physical product that was created that's cool, or maybe it's the fact that you can weigh in on what gets created that's cool. Or maybe it'sthe fact that you can click and get discount that's cool. It's all cool. And the technology really

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is, I think, secondary to that experience. Yeah. And I want to ask, though, because I think a lot of the thesis in Web3 around creating communities that are connected via wallets or some abstraction of are also about the idea that you have a more direct relationship with your consumer. I don't think it's been proven out in the way that we would all like to think of, oh, the death of the cookie means Web 3 has a rise opportunity. But you have these relationships going on. You have some of your of the cookie means Web3 PRODUCT has a rise opportunity. But you have these relationshipsgoing on. You have some of your technologies built on a Web3 PRODUCT stack. Is that about the data play? And does that help you then be able to decide more of how you create this community together with your users? Or is it just people love points? People love co-collaboration. It allows us to build something. And whether they buy our product at Sephora ORG or direct on our dot-com doesn't really matter. Look, I think as a business builder,

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it is always a data play to some extent, right? And it's not data play because you're trying to do evil. It's a data play because you're trying to do service to your audience. I think the fact that some of the data is on chain allows to build a better business and gives you more extensibility to what that business might become because the data may be used by different parties and can be built on top of in a different way. So for me, as a builder, I think it's smarter with the asterisk of puttingthe correct type of data on chain. I don't think that everything needs to be in chain and we get challenged every day about this. So when you come to Kiki don't World today, yes, a wallet is created in the back end with a set of whitelisted actions. You don't know that. It happens in under a second. And it's not important to the experience on the site today, but it may be important.It allows us to do things that we wouldn't be able to do if we didn't have that in the background today. And so I think, honestly, when we started to build Kiki ORG, we didn't set out to build a blockchain company. We set out to build a company that can be co-created and co-on by customers. And we realize that blockchain today is the only technology that can help us make thisstatement true. That does not mean that blockchain needs to be on the frontier, but I think it's a smarter way to build your stack because it allows you and your customers to use the data in a different way.

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I love that. And were you yourself an avid user of blockchain-based tech before you got started with Kiki? I remember chatting to you about this a couple weeks ago. And I think it's such an

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interesting story. Well, so I was studying pricing of public goods before I started being in beauty at all. And this is many, many moons ago. And so I think market design and market pricing and all of these things are deeply intellectually interesting to me. And I think there's different ways to think about the value chain with the technology stack that we have today than we had even 10 years ago. So even as an example for Kiki ORG, we couldn't do what we do co-created products in small batch manufacturing, had there been not advances in additivemanufacturing, that allow us to do what we do without compromising unit costs and other sort of lead to time related items on the back end. So if you ask me, was I an avid user? I was not a DGEN

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before I started Kiki. I will admit that I explored becoming one. I did try and I went to, actually I went to V-Con ORG to study D-Gens and focus group.

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Focus. I really, really tried. And I think, you know, my takeaway from, but I was into

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I was very interested in cryptocurrency and application of cryptography as a piece of the value chain.

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And so what my sort of long story short was,

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the empowerment of creativity online that can be encapsulated through blockchain

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is very powerful because the value gets created through the creative class online. I strongly believe that the value accrues to the application layer overtime because technology, to some extent, technology's check is going to continue to get cheaper. And so finding a ways to reward that layer of your brand or community around you is incredibly important and probably the only way to sustain a business long term. And so I was very interested in it intellectually now. Could I go and write that code and deploy a smart contract? Probably not. I feel very lucky that we have a very talented team at Kikyu World ORG.And again, it's interesting for me when people think we're a beauty company, well, our largest team is our engineering team. So I don't think that there's another company that looks like a consumer company that can say that. So I think that our commitment to building a network that can serve the next generation of creators and customers is absolute. And I think that that tech stack in a way is not here yet. And so we're very excited

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to be a part of building that network. And so I'm thinking about when I was at Art Basel FAC, I recorded, I don't remember if it was you. I knew we had met at a party, but someone had one of your NFC chipped nails. And I wanted to get the whole flow of that experience. And I recorded it. I put it up on my socials. People were very impressed with it. So I consider myself now a Brad

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ambassador. But the question I had was one, you know, the idea of this kind of like wearable business card, but also really could be almost anything. You know, I could see an artist or a musician giving these out to young girls. And then therefore they all get to connect in community and it links into a place to meet. I can see the idea of people becoming collectible themselves in interesting ways or having point systems. I think about the idea that other brands, because you are on chain, could look at, oh, how many people, you know, from a collaboration perspective, can work together because you have this physical object that people can wear. And I knownails are one of those things. But I guess I'm starting to think about as I look forward to a more hyper-connected like multi-reality mixed-reality world. I know you guys are working on some AI opportunities as well. How does this all like come together in this idea of this connected ecosystem of personalization, creator culture, but really also being part of this massive

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community trying to build something together. What a big question. I think I'm known for a little

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those. So first of all, here's a chip, the one that you had in your nail. And it's in all of the

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products powered by Kiki ORG. So let's start with something visceral. Now, the principles of Kiki from the get go is we make what we make together so we don't decide what we make alone, but we will put the best technology for you to co-create with. So all of our products will be connected and they have been from day one and we have a pipeline of about 30 that are ready to go when, if and when we see the right opportunities. I can tease a little bit where we're working on a super cool thing in Fragans, code name Layer 3. You've heard it here first. And we're working across many other categories. Paches and nails, face patches and nails.Those are two categories in our life, I think, are really sort of a very clear example of what a wearable connection versus a connection that's in your physical object makes different. I have to give a quick shout out to Winnie, who is one of our early Kiki World ORG members, and she said, can we do nails? We're like, well, it's funny you say that. We've been working on nails.So let's do it together. And I think that is part of the sort of Kiki World ORG ethos that can accelerate innovation when we see a community that's really excited about that. And so I think building a social graph online based on your offline connections is obviously a very sexy application of what a wearable technology can do. Rewarding people for talking to other people is, I think, something that crypto world is veryexcited about. I think that the way that we think at Kiki ORG is a little bit lighter on the financialization of everything. But I can tell you an analogy to this. We talk to a lot to beauty professionals, aesthetician, makeup artist, salons. And imagine a world in which a nail salon puts NFC tag into the artwork. We called virtual press on nails,the product category that we have launched with this. And so every time that their clients do tap, the salon, they accrue rewards to come back to their salon. So that's a very clear use case from a salon perspective. And again, I think the crypto version of this probably sounds like, you know, your own points and there's a decentralized social grab that goes to the nod of the salonthat accrued, blah, la, la, blah, blah. And they're both true. They're not one of them is wronger than the other. But I think that we're very early to see how the audience will respond to that. I definitely think there's a magic. Like I think the real world component of what we do at Kiki ORG is incredibly powerful.When people tap packaging and they see that it connects to their Kiki ORG world profile, it's like, oh my God, wow. And I think the challenge of building a real business is, however, okay, there's a wow component, but what did it do for you? And that what did it do for you will determine if you'll do it again. And so I think that the real use case of why we put tags in packaging, well, so we can recycle them and you can be rewarded for when you help us do that, so that we can reward you. So you'rea power user. So you tapped your product 10 times. We know you love it. And so we want to hear, what should the next one be. So those are some of the lessons that we also had. So when we launch Kiki ORG, we ask anybody on the internet, what should we make? I mean, it's pretty cool. But in hindsight, we probably should have asked some of the expert communities first. So these things are very obvious in hindsight. And now that we have over 20,000 world members, we can see, okay, this group really loves to use nail polish because they tap 100 times. We want to work with them on what the nailpolish looks like. And I can tell you the ideas that our community has, like our latte patches, we would have never come up with. So the level of innovation that you can get through decentralized process that rewards input is unparalleled. We've seen it in software. We haven't seen it in consumer goods. And Kiki ORG seeks to be the platform that will bring this speed and craziness of innovation into people's hands.Okay.

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So we're going to need to know about these latte patches. Okay.

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Okay. So when we first launched Kiki ORG, we thought that we were so cool because we created these holographic face patches. So when you wear them on your skin, they kind of gave like a really cool vibe. And we were told, so these are true hydrocolored acne patches. Acne patches is a very, like, growing category. People love to wear them.And people voted on the shape and the print. So we have ones with Smiley PERSON and one with these bolts on them. And in one of our lab lunches, one of the creators called Eddie Moda PERSON was examining them. It was like, the pool is great. The thickness is great. And he was like, wow, this guy is like the largest living expert on face patches. And he was like, yeah, I said, Eddie PERSON, why don't you make a patch with us? I mean, we thought we did great because holographic foil is a really tough thing to figure out, apparently, in the beauty world. I know it sounds a littleridiculous. And he said, well, I study psychology, and I thought, like, people are either a tea person or a coffee person. And when you have a zit on your face, you want to, like, you feel insecure. So it wouldn't be fun if you put something in there that's, like, warm and fuzzy and conversational. And so we had people vote on whether we should make latte or matcha patches that were co-designed with Edie Moda PRODUCT. And they voted for latte, cute patches and holographic patches. Everybody that voted got points every step of the way.They got a collectible that forever marks them as co-creators of the latte macho patches. And we would have never, ever come up with the idea of putting latte on your face. Here we are. It looks great.

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Yet you have to give the people what they want. Exactly.

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So, Yana PERSON, just to wrap up, it feels like you have had a lot of learnings of how to engage your community and how to work with other creators and create a democratized, decentralized sort of voting system for a new product. So if there's someone listening who wants to start a collaborative brand with the audience, what are the things they should avoid or watch out for? And what are the things that really are how to superpower that?

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Well, I will use this opportunity to say that we're launching a set of permissionless tools for this person to use when they want to do that. And I would love to hear from them. I would love their feedback. We're creating

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early better users that want to create their world as their followers or their friends, what they

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should make and make them a part of it from the get-go. And we're very excited to provide tech platform to do that. So first of all, please get ingo. And we're very excited to provide tech platform to do that. So first of all, please get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to support you. And we think that we have, to some extent, identify the elements of productizing some partsof that process. And I think, you know, if you look at anything that we've done today, I mean, there's some sexy parts. SDK Skin Development Kit that is live on our website as a collaboration, could have 190,000 outcomes as a moisturizer. And so in that example, we have created parameters for every step of the process that are unique to this product category, that we can overlay with our platform in terms of what attributes you vote on, which once you don't,what metadata goes on chain, which doesn't. And we're very excited about the framework that we created for this. And we're very excited to share it with the world in our permissionless app launch as Kiki ORG. But I really think that the first advice to any entrepreneur, anybody that wants to build is just do it and do it with people that have done it before. Do it.I mean, the first lap samples we have here, we're always embarrassed. I'm already embarrassed about our upcoming lab sample because it only gets better. And so I think the speed of iteration and the speed of feedback and having been built into the processis something that can be massively improved across all the products that we're using from like the chair I'm sitting on to the makeup I'm using. Like these product cycles have historically been long and top down. And the fact that we now have technology to have people participate and reward them for itcan lead to a lot just better products on the other side. So get started. I mean, your first community, when we started, our first product was co-created by 513 people. You can look at OpenC PRODUCT, printing a graffiti pearl co-creators. Now we have 20,000. Hopefully that will lead to 20,000 better, 50,000 times a better outcome.But even if you have one feedback, it's better than zero. So get going. I always say design is the language of adoption. I think my number one advice would be to make it really, really cool. And I know that probably sounds like a very ambivalent or ambiguous advice. But I think, you know, oftentimes, especially in the Web3 world, I'm guilty of it too. I'm sure we tend toover intellectualize the importance of something that is not actually viscerally clear as to what that it is. And I think that really being focused on the quality, the design, the utility of the product itself, I think is ultimately the most important thing because all the bells and whistles, you know, whether that product is connected or not connected, like they'll vanish. But if there isn't a repeat interest in doing it again, I think, and again, that doesn't probably happen on iteration one. So I want to preface by saying that, but I do think that sometimes we get lost in the how andforget the what a little bit. And I think that it's very important for any entrepreneur to really stay very product focused. And when the product is the technology, it's really easy to get lost in the distinction of what is a tool and what is the ultimate experience that people will want to experience again and again and again. And that's how you build a business.

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Yana PERSON, thank you so much for spending the time with us. We will pay attention to what Kiki ORG is doing. We love that you're building a Web3 connected brand, but you're building it with much more intention.

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Platform. Platform. Platform.

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I'm sorry. Powered by Kiki, Kiki World ORG, all of the things. And just really lovely insights for you to share with our audience. I'm sure they will appreciate it.

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Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you, Yana PERSON.

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For one, I can't wait to try Yana PERSON's products.

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She said she was going to send us a creator kit.

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And the second thing that I took away from that amazing talk is that she is such an entrepreneur through and through. I feel like Yanna PERSON builds businesses.

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Yes, Yana PERSON's great. I really appreciate her perspective. I do think that she, when you look at her background, she is sort of known for, yeah, building business, building innovation. And it really does feel like innovation comes first. I thought I was really interested to hear that she has a larger engineering team than sort of any other team at the shop, which

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is someone building a platform. So I, and I was wondering how much of this is really a tech brand or a tech platform when it really comes down to it. And then that little nugget at the end of them building a stack where other entrepreneurs can build on top of them, I thought was also really, really fascinating. For sure.

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I think, Yonna is going places, Kiki World ORG is going places. And companies like Estay ORG lot are taking notice. Absolutely.

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All right, Avery, we will see everyone next week. Thank everyone for listening to this episode and we look forward to future ones coming. Bye, Jency PERSON.