Podcasts about vibhu norby

A conversation with Vibhu, the founder of DRiP.haus, one of the most popular consumer apps in all of crypto (being focused on the creators).We are also happy to announce the launch of our Solfate Drip channel where you can collect Solfate Podcast episodes as digital collectibles! Subscribe to our Drip channel today: drip.haus/solfate (we have some fun experiments planned)PS: Checkout the Snapshot newsletter: a byte-sized email newsletter filled with the biggest updates from Solana ecosystem teams and builders. ~5 minute read. Every 2 weeks.

This week, Vibhu Norby CEO of DRiP joins the show for a discussion on building one of crypto's most popular applications. We deep dive into the growth & business model of DRiP, measuring real active users, building great UX in crypto & finally Vibhu shares some advice for founders looking to build a company & raise funding. To hear all this & more, you'll have to tune in! -- Access Protocol is the best way to discover premium content from crypto's top publishers and independent creators. Access Protocol has reinvented content monetization, meaning you can access this premium content without endless ads or hard-to-cancel subscriptions. Access Protocol is crypto-native, built on Solana, and already has 225K users reading content, receiving NFTs and interacting with creators! Use this link to check out Access Protocol today:https://bit.ly/AccessProtocol_Lightspeed -- Follow Vibhu: https://twitter.com/vibhu Follow Mert: https://twitter.com/0xMert_ Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/smyyguy Follow Lightspeed: https://twitter.com/Lightspeedpodhq -- Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (01:25) What Is DRiP? (05:52) DRiP's Growth (11:20) Access Protocol Ad (12:08) Crypto UX (17:44) DRiP's Mobile App (20:24) DRiP's Active Users (35:19) DRiP's Business Model (44:11) Tips For Founders Raising VC Money (50:48) Building A Start-Up -- Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Dan and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

In this episode, Austin chats with Vibhu Norby, CEO of DRiP, a platform that has distributed millions of digital collectibles to its community ... for free. Among other topics, Vibhu discusses the unlikely emergence of the company's vision and how the innovation of compression helped that vision become a reality. According to Vibhu, platforms like DRiP not only offer new experiences to creators' collectors and patrons, but also to creators themselves, particularly when it comes to better web-based payment rails.  DISCLAIMERThe content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor.  Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives. All opinions expressed herein are the speakers' own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any entities.  

In this episode we talk about DRiP, the onchain Instagram featuring over 70 creators who share diverse content through weekly drops of free NFTs.

In this clip we introduce you to DRiP, the onchain Instagram featuring over 70 creators who share diverse content through weekly drops of free NFTs.

We're joined by Vibhu Norby, the founder of DRiP, to discuss why DRiP is crypto's best shot at mainstream adoption. DRiP has already minted 18 million NFTs to 800 thousand wallets. If one crypto app has found product market fit, it's DRiP. In this episode, we cover what makes DRiP unique, what crypto should learn from the gaming industry, how creators can leverage DRiP, the future of NFTs, how DRiP will forever change Solana and more! - - Timestamps (00:00) Introduction (01:15) What Makes DRiP Unique? (11:34) DRiP's Insane Growth (14:28) Community Pushback and FUD (17:49) How Gaming Inspired DRiP (22:09) Learnings from Working with Tony Fadell (26:16) Jito Promo (27:16) Permissionless Promo (28:19) Why Vibhu Doesn't Like Curation (30:54) How Can Lightspeed Leverage DRiP? (33:17) Tracking and Attribution on DRiP (36:46) DRiP's Business Model (39:19) Predicting the Future of NFTs (42:21) Why DRiP is Only on Solana (44:48) How DRiP Will Onboard Millions of Users to Solana (48:58) Competition, Products vs Distribution & Building in Web3 (01:01:36) Rapid Fire - - This episode is brought to you by Jito. Jito is the easiest way to earn MEV rewards on Solana with liquid staking. Stake your SOL with Jito to start earning high yield powered by MEV and access instant liquidity through Jito's liquid staking token JitoSOL so that you can use your staked assets across Solana DeFi. Visit jito.network to get started today! - - Follow Vibhu: https://twitter.com/vibhu Follow Mert: https://twitter.com/0xMert_ Follow Garrett: https://twitter.com/GarrettHarper_ Follow Lightspeed: https://twitter.com/Lightspeedpodhq Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ - - Use code LIGHTSPEED30 to get 30% off Permissionless 2023 in Austin: https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-2023 - - Resources Jito jito.network DRiP https://linktr.ee/drip.haus https://twitter.com/drip_haus DRiP analytics dashboard https://analytics.topledger.xyz/tl/public/dashboards/7XqwqSZ3r7aYD5EVBwd67VHQ3Y1pXrq0agQptxuU - -  Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Garrett and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Our guests this week are Vibhu Norby and Degen Poet. Vibhu is the founder of DRiP, a platform that allows users to receive free NFT collectibles, commissioned from artists and projects across the landscape of crypto. The project has grown exponentially since its inception, with over 300,000 wallets receiving at least one NFT a week. Degen Poet, a prolific artist on Solana, has been a key collaborator on the project. Vibhu and Degen Poet discuss how DRiP is changing the game for NFTs and why the first experience people have with blockchain should be through art. Plus, they share their unique processes for creating and distributing NFTs, and why they choose to plant their flag in Solana. Show Notes:0:56 - Latest News3:05 - What is Drip?        5:22 - Origin story of Degen Poet, starting working in Solana and Vibh10:13 - Workflow with NFTs12:54 - Working with other artists16:01 - How Drip helps Degen Poet's work17:51 - Only on Solana21:42 - How is drip breaking phantom?22:50 - Future looking like Instagram26:53 - Platforms like Drip vs. traditional mediums30:40 - Things to change /have changed in the industry    33:52 - A builder they admire in the Solana ecosystem? Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey, everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. And I'm super excited to reintroduce our first repeat guest, Vibhu Norby, as well as Solana's very own Degen poet, Vibhu and DP, welcome to the show. Vibhu Norby (00:27):What's up? Thanks for having me back. Degen Poet (00:30):Hey, thanks so much for having us. Brian Friel (00:32):Vibhu, I mentioned this before recording, but you're a friend of the pod. You're the first official repeat guest of the Zeitgeist, and the last time we had you on was October of last year and you were working on Solana Spaces, which was a really big and audacious project I'd say, and a lot has happened since then and you're still working on big and audacious projects on Solana. Can you walk us through what has changed in the last couple months and what are you working on today? Vibhu Norby (00:56):Good times, good memories. Yeah. What happened in between October and now? What changed? Funnily enough, Drip actually started that same month. We actually started sending NFTs to people starting with Vincenzo in late October. I think we did two drop before Breakpoint. Yeah, things were going fine and then our world got flipped upside down once again by those who must not be named. For a couple months there, I think we were trying to figure out how we were going to continue to operate the stores. Obviously Phantom was a major benefactor of spaces along with Solana Foundation, but they who must not be named were also major sponsors and it was kind of the three pillars of our business and one of them got pulled out. And simultaneously with all of that, Drip was blowing up and changing everything for us internally. Coming into January, every single week we were stacking at 15, 20% week-over-week growth on the list organically. (01:51):And between December 1st and the shutdown of Spaces, our Twitter following more than doubled and all of the new growth were people coming to us for stuff related to Drip. And so I was spending my time going between doing customer service for Drip, talking to artists, and then the store was starting to feel like it was losing its voice a bit kind of naturally in that. Yeah. I mean as much as we loved it for a bunch of different reasons, it just made sense for us to take this traumatic pivot from physical retail stores to free NFTs. I think it was a really good decision. I think one of my best decisions so far in life because since we closed down Spaces, Drip has grown five, six x since then. We've really greatly expanded the product and kind of the vision for it and I think we're making a big impact on Solana and crypto in general. Brian Friel (02:45):You mentioned that this was born out of Solana Spaces originally, it was almost just this separate side thing you were doing and became this absolute beast that had to be unleashed. For those who aren't familiar with what Drip is, can you describe what Drip is, how it operates today, and then maybe talk a little bit about the scale that you guys are currently operating at? Vibhu Norby (03:05):Yeah, sure. Really simple value prop. You sign in with Phantom, you get an invite code and you start getting free collectibles. You can kind of engage with the product as much or as little as you want. By default, you get a free collectible from us every Wednesday and those collectibles are NFTs and they're real on chain Solana NFTs and we commission those pieces from artists and projects, not just now within Solana but across the landscape of crypto. And we pay for the airdrop costs and it's totally free. It's one of the few things in all of our industry that starts at free, ends at free. You don't need any tokens in your wallet, you don't have to go through KYC with an exchange. More recently, a couple months ago in March, we started adding these additional lists that you could subscribe to. Degen Poet was number one, but since then we've added another seven creators and we launched two new streams every Friday. (03:57):Those work the same way. You sign up for an individual creator that you love, can be an artist, could be a brand, could be NFT project, a video creator, influencer. They send you free collectibles on some regular basis and you can collect them, you can trade them, you can hold them, you can brag to your friends about what you got. In terms of growth, we've continued to grow 10, 15% a week even at a very big size now. There's two kind of stats that kind of matter. One is we consider non-fraudulent wallets as many people tried to farm Drip in the past. That number in real time right now is 300,000 and we're sending out at least 300,000 NFTs a week on showcase right now. But in total, every single week across all of our creators now, we're sending well over a million collectibles every single week. This is unbelievable groundbreaking stuff. It's not happening anywhere else in our industry, but people fall in love with Drip every single day. It's been awesome. Brian Friel (04:49):Yeah. I've been a day one subscriber of Drip. I love it. It's such a delightful thing to have all this new art coming in your inbox every day. You kind of hinted at this only possible at Solana, which I want to dive into too. But you did mention there, Degen Poet, and I'd be remiss if we didn't introduce Degen Poet now to the show. I think if you're a listener and you've been around the Solana space, especially on Twitter, you've seen Degen Poet, I'd say one of the most prolific artists on Solana for some time now. Degen Poet, for those who don't know, can you introduce who you are, how you got started on Solana, and then how you also started working with Vibhu? Degen Poet (05:22):I guess I'm Degen Poet. I live in Chicago with my wife and a couple dogs. I got started in Solana in the summer of 2021. I was just basically doing trading and stuff in Bitcoin and then trading all the other coins. I did some leverage trading on CuCoin and then found Solana through the whole Sam Coins DeFi on Solana first. I think Radium was my first stop. That's kind of my first experience with it all. I thought NFTs were garbage and a silly idea and all those things. I had probably been out of poetry for, I don't know, seven or eight years at that point. I did all of my college education and got an MFA in poetry and then just decided that it wasn't a great career path as far as the money you could make and what you had to do to support yourself as a poet is pretty difficult in the real world. (06:16):I gave that up and just kind of did business for a living, did computers, Excel, stuff like that. That's how I kind of made a living and then found Solana through all this. I started buying some stuff on Digitalize. I bought a Solana Monkey, a viking I think pretty early on and papered it way too early. But I think it was at that point where I decided maybe I should try poems as NFTs just because nobody else was doing it. I figured it'd at least be a unique way to try. The first thing I got started on was gmu poems, which was basically an NFT, which was a list of words. And at the time they were going really hot because they were based on this Eth derivative of something called Loot, I think. But I was mad at it because I was like, how is it worth so much money and doing so great? And it's literally just a random list of words, but instead of being mad at it, I decided to kind of embrace it and then just filled in the spaces between the words with poems. (07:11):And I did 200 of those in a month and that's how I got my start on Solana. And then just was making NFTs nonstop ever since, mainly through Exchange Art, doing one of one art. And then over the last year or so since Editions opened up, did additions on exchange art, and then that all just kind of led me to Vibhu and Drip. I really like serving a large audience with art. I mean that was always really fun with Editions. And then with Additions, I wanted to deliver them at a low cost, but that just invites bots to basically come in and flip your stuff. Bots were making way more money than I was off my art just because of the setup, you know what I mean? That's, I think, what intrigued me about Drip is I could achieve this thing that I wanted, which was giving art to all these people on Solana for free basically. And then there's no real bots, everyone's trying to sign up as an individual and gets it airdropped. It's not like a mint. Yeah, I think that's kind of where it all started and how it all made sense for the way that I was distributing my art. Brian Friel (08:12):Yeah, you hit on a lot there. I think that journey of trying out Solana for the first time, this new primordial soup of ecosystem projects and then this totally irrational NFT market, everyone gets dive into it. I think a lot of people can resonate that picture. Vibhu Norby (08:26):Right. I got to interject here because Degen Poet just introduced himself for five minutes and not one time did he mention the word typewriter, which is what he's most famous for of all things is that he didn't say the word typewriter. Brian Friel (08:42):Yeah. Vibhu Norby (08:43):But how did you find a typewriter? Just tell us that quickly. Degen Poet (08:47):Let's see here. I was cleaning out my sister's ex-husband's parents' basement and we found a typewriter when I was in college, and I think I just got really into them at that point because I was doing poetry and stuff and just would smoke tobacco pipes and type on a typewriter pretending I was some guy. I think that's where it all started. And then it picked back up again around Solana or whatever. My wife bought me a typewriter as an anniversary present. That was the first one that I really beat the crap out of for Solana. That's, I guess, what started it. From poems to trying to make something visually more appealing is really what it all clicked with. With NFTs specifically, I started out with just Photoshop and text and I needed some way of making it visually more appealing because that's how you get sales. But that basically took me from a poet to someone who makes art with a typewriter was kind of because people really pretty pictures on NFTs and turns out I like making them. There you go. Brian Friel (09:51):I think Vibhu brings up a great point there. I mean, Degen Poet I think is prolific and well known for having this unique process with a typewriter. If you could expand a little bit on that, Degen Poet, how do you go about creating these collections and is there anything that you do with Drip in particular that is different from either your normal flow or other flows that you know of of NFT artists on Solana? Degen Poet (10:13):Yeah. I mean I guess one of my main things that I've sort of been consistent with are the profile pictures. As a legendary, I'll take an existing Solana profile picture and just kind of do a typewriter version of those. For that process, I basically sketch a version of the profile picture with a pen, and then those were sort of my guides for the typewriter. I've done it freehand on the typewriter before, but you're only exposing a small portion of the paper at a time and it's really hard to get the proportions right. It's helpful to kind of map them out with a pen or marker sketch first. And then I do go through with a detailed typewriter version of it. I try to pull in words or traits or something to do with the NFT as part of the words that make up the image just as a piece of interest if you zoomed in. (11:03):And then I'll print out another copy of that. I'll do another sketch or sometimes I'll just paint on the typewriter piece itself and I'll use oil pastels or watercolor. At the end of the day I'm layering two scans. One of them is basically just the typewriter ink and then another one is this sort of painted version and I layered them on top of each other so you get a colored version of a typewriter piece, and that's kind of how all the profile pictures start. I think that's definitely pretty unique, just using all the physical pieces and really trying to make it all from physical scans versus any sort of digital pieces. And then anything digital is really for animation. Sometimes I'll type out every single frame and I'll make individual frames physically for everything that I'm animating. Other times I'll just cut out a piece of the eye or a piece of a lip or something like that on Photoshop and move it around, save a few different images or change colors or something. I do some Photoshopping to get the pieces animated, which I think just kind of adds another level to it. Typewriter is such an old physical looking thing. And so it's interesting, I think, to see it in an animation style. That's something I've really leveled up with Drip. I feel like I've done way more animations with Drip than any of my art sort of previously. Brian Friel (12:22):You hit a lot there throughout the intro and throughout describing your process, but basically this journey, I think a lot of people resonate with coming to Solana, seeing this fragmented NFT landscape ripe with speculation. That doesn't always make sense, but I think Drip's unique in that it's changing all these models, it's flipping them on their head. Vibhu, can you speak a little bit to who you're working with? Who are these artists that are now reaching out to you? I think you've proven this model with the Degen Poet, but when you talk to artists on Solana, what's attractive to Drip for them? Vibhu Norby (12:54):Yeah. I want to touch on something that you reminded me of, which is that the transition from Spaces to Drip, although on the surface is very jarring, the thing that kind of ties them together was that when we were meeting people in real life trying to introduce them to blockchains, what we found time and time again was that it was the art and the PFPs that were resonating with people in the store. It wasn't all the other stuff. And yet the way that most people have gotten into here is through an exchange where it's all about trading. And so I put this on Twitter many times, but things would be different today and they will be different in the future if the first experience that people have of this amazing technology is art, right? It's la piece from Degen Poet. It just changed everything. What am I looking for in artists?n (13:38):I probably talk to between 20 and 30 artists every single week, artists, projects, creators, and we probably filled about 100 requests per week, I would say right now. We have a really high bar. There's only three slots per week now. There's a showcase and there's two channels. And we book these things out for months in advance. The thing that resonates to me the most is artists that see themselves as more than just putting their pen or their paintbrush on paper, whatever their medium is, but as content creators as well. I think what attracted me to Degen Poet for a long time and I think why people love Degen Poet, yeah, the art is really good and I think that has to be there, but there's a lot of really good art. It's Degen Poet's personality. It's how that comes out in his work. (14:22):It's how he tells a story around his pieces. He publishes videos of the typewriter itself and the creation process. To me, we definitely have an eye for these kind of super artists who are brand building for themselves and have a vision for how to take care of their community in addition. To me, I mean, there's a lot of amazing artists in the world and if you just take blockchain out of it, you can walk into any gallery and see these incredible things. But there's this disconnect between the thing that you're buying and the person that made it and you. And in crypto, it gives this opportunity to cut out that piece and just connect directly with the creator. And if the creator takes advantage of that, that's very attractive to us. That tells me that they're thinking differently about what crypto can add to them. We have a pretty high bar, to be honest. (15:08):I mean I think we could fill up Drip with illustration and other techniques. There's a lot of amazing photographers, but I think at least in the early stages here, we have the opportunity to be curatorial a bit and relentlessly, we've been programming out our new channels trying to bring something different to the table each week. I think if you fast forwarded a year, it's going to be full of the same stuff that Instagram is full of and other big networks, it's just kind of natural. But right now we have an opportunity to keep a vision for what a collectible can kind of be. I don't know. I kind of know when I see it, but that's probably my framework. Brian Friel (15:44):Yeah. You hit on a couple things there with, not just just filling with great art, but the way that this can change the relationship between an artist and their fans. Degen Poet, from your experience, how has working with Drip influenced both the way that people discover your content, but also the relationships that you have with your collectors? Yeah, Degen Poet (16:01):Yeah. I mean it definitely makes it a much wider net, which is nice. They have a larger community to gather around. It feels like everyone who's kind of a channel in Drip is part of a little club or group or something. And so a lot of the same collectors will collect from multiple channels across Drip and things like that. There's more going on than just my art, but it still feels like a piece of a larger community. Everyone's kind of bringing a different style of Drip to the table. It takes less pressure off of my shoulders where I have to have my own Discord or be so focused and all these things. I could do that if I wanted, but I don't have to. Drip is big enough and has enough engagement from the tools that they provide that it helps sustain that better than I could than when I was alone. (16:47):And yeah, I guess you get a lot more people, right. You really do get people who would never have bought my art. And it's not because they didn't like it, they probably couldn't afford it or they didn't really know about it, but they happened to get in through Drip. And so get new people who earnestly really enjoy the art because that's how they found it. They found it from something free, they weren't trying to flip it and that's how they found it. Yeah, I don't know. It definitely casts a wider net and I feel you do boil up more people that just truly enjoy what you do versus the other side. Yeah, that's been great for that. Brian Friel (17:23):Yeah. I want to pause here and just dive into a topic that we mentioned briefly at the start, which is Solana. Degen Poet, you described your journey to finding Solana and I mentioned that I think if anyone's been around crypto Twitter, they know who you are. Prolific typewriter artist of Solana. Vibhu, you've been deeply involved with Solana for over a year and now. Why do you guys plant your flag in Solana, and what about Solana is able to make this a reality where no other blockchain can really do what Drip is doing? Vibhu Norby (17:51):I'm trying to refashion myself a little bit in our narrative because I mean you'll see on our Twitter page and on our site, occasionally we'll talk about Solana, but we've been trying to focus on the collectibles. I mean even with NFTs, I've eliminated using that word on our corporate account entirely in very specific cases. I don't think anybody on the consumer side really cares about that. But from the builder's perspective, two aspects. One is that they pioneered the state compression model, which allows us to do NFTs at a very, very big scale relative to the old version for a very low cost, a couple $100 per million, totally affordable for a business like us. And I think the second thing is that Solana has a really active developer community and some really amazing devs inside of it that are hunting for things to build. (18:35):And it's really competitive too. All the infrastructure around anything new on Solana develops fast. Perfect example of that is Tensor. We went live with it March 22nd, three months ago, and it's certainly been a couple weeks, maybe two or three weeks because they went live with trading on there. And it's an amazing experience and people can trade these compressed NFTs, 200 at a time and there's a brand new kind of thing, right. But it's not just them, there's B Man who built this tool called PopKey, it's Keerel who built the Drip tracker. There's just all these amazing 10X engineers, if you will, itching to be involved and be part of the Solana community. And we feel like anything that we can't get to, someone else is just going to build anyway. And hey, when we're ready, maybe we'll pick it up. Or maybe that tool just kind of develops its own path and we don't have to touch it. (19:28):And that thing is unique to crypto too because all of our NFTs are composable. It just really does. We're kept to such a high bar of development 'cause if we don't reach that bar, then three other companies are going to recreate what we're doing, do it better, and then people also going to just take our content and then do it better on top of our content and our data. I don't know about other chains, maybe they have that too, but I've just observed that Solana is, because of the size of our community and the energy there, seems to attack these things with a lot of vigor that I didn't see, at least in Ethereum when I was first getting into this space. Brian Friel (20:02):No, I couldn't agree more. I think Solana has carved out its own kernel of a genuine dev community. It's a double-edged sword like you say, because it's highly composable and you have this great force everyone will want to build with you, but it invites a lot of competition where if you do slack, there will be people who will take what you do and run with it. But I think so far you guys have done a really great job of really leading in this vertical of Solana. DP, do you have anything to add to what Vibhu said with respect to Solana, maybe from an artist's perspective? Degen Poet (20:31):As far as only possible on Solana, I definitely think it comes down to the compressed NFT. You can't cost effectively drop a million NFTs a week on any other blockchain, not even close to a 1,000X, not even close. I think that's the core of it that allows us to be different on Solana. But then all that other stuff, the unspoken kind of stuff is just the energy of the people here on the chain and the fact that Tensor and all the rest, not only do you have to be able to mint one million NFTs a week for low cost, but you also have to have people that can build stuff to do with them. And that is, I think, an underappreciated aspect of Solana. And I feel like Drip, from my perspective, all we have to do is just kind of continue growing the market for compressed NFTs, continue add channels and add people kind of doing stuff with compressed NFTs and then Solana will provide. As you get bigger and there's more market, more people want something, then Solana starts to make those things happen. I think we'll see that and that will be incredible. Vibhu Norby (21:32):I'm going to flip it back to you, Brian, as well. How is Drip breaking Phantom and what does Phantom need to address? Degen Poet (21:37):Yeah. When can I hold 5,000 NFTs please? Vibhu Norby (21:38):There you go. Brian Friel (21:41):Yeah, no, I would say from a dev perspective at Phantom side, we were early to support compressed NFTs, but it's almost a naive assumption that hey, we ship support and we'll be good because it basically is opening Pandora's box where now people just go wild whenever they're given a new medium to express with this kind of stuff. And we saw it firsthand with Tensor launching their NFT marketplace. We're getting requests, why can't I sign 5,000 transactions at once? You guys can't simulate 5,000 different transactions, but it makes us go back to basically first principles and what is the wallet being used for here? How should we be basically specializing the wallet and what do our users really want this for? And I think, Vibhu, you painted a great story at the start of this where eight months ago, the world was ending for all of Solana, they who should not be named. And in six to eight months, you've gone from that state to completely bootstrapping an organic network with hundreds of thousands of users who love and use this product every day. (22:34):How do we stay adaptable enough for that, huge question and a huge challenge and was really the fun of what's working in this space I think is all about. Vibhu, you mentioned a little bit too on the future of, I think you hinted a year out from now looking like Instagram. Can you say more about that? Vibhu Norby (22:49):Yeah. Depending on the day I wake up and I think about YouTube or Instagram or Twitch or Patreon or Roblox or you name it. There isn't a perfect analogy for this stuff because it kind of is a blend of a lot of different things. I mean literally every single day we're trying to address a problem in our product and we search for some mental model from some other place and see if that kind of makes sense. And not all of it does, but Instagram is such a simple product to talk about because it is a simple product. Everybody, not just creators, but normal people post photos to their feed or stories and then you follow their friends and you follow the celebrities or influencer, whatever that you like and that stuff shows up in your feed. And you think nothing of it. Okay, I go about my day, I open the app, I click something and I'm good, I'm happy, I close it. (23:43):But what's sitting underneath of Instagram is this advertising industrial complex that is calculating an enormous amount of data for every single thing that you do on the app. You open the story, how long did you open the story for? How many people are you connected to that also did the same thing? They're building profiles. I used to work on this stuff. I know this is what we do. Yeah, there's a reason for it. I don't think it's bad. I don't think advertising is bad. I want to put that out there. I know Anatolia thinks it's evil and it's part of the reason why he talks about Solana as the anti-spam control network, but it is good for small businesses, but the group that gets abused in that situation are the users and the creators that actually use the app. You go talk to any creator on any network that's not on the top 1% and they're making almost no money from these things. (24:33):We have an artist that's launching tomorrow called Bangers. He has 200,000 on Instagram. He has three and a half billion views of her content on Giffy. 'Cause she makes all these animated gifs and she told me that she made $20 from Giffy and almost nothing from Instagram ever. I mean we just don't think about it. But people build their livelihoods and businesses on these social platforms and increasingly so. I mean young people today, you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, it's not a firefighter. They want to be content creators, they want to be YouTubers, they want to be TikTokers, literally what they want to do. But when we examine these platforms and how they treat all of the kind of participants in that ecosystem, you just see this thing where all the power and all the money is aggregating inside of these couple of companies, ByteDance with TikTok, Facebook, Google, Amazon. (25:28):The trifecta of these trillion-dollar companies. Where I want to take Drip is, hey, let's take that model that we know people because people like to just follow someone and see their content, but let's start to tweak the internal economics of each of these components and do it in a way that over the next couple years, creators can make more money from this stuff. Even users might be able to make money, which is a very new concept, but it's something that is normal in crypto and just not normal in Web 2.0. If we can successfully build a model that's better, there's no reason why creators won't come over, it's just an awareness thing. Can we get the word out and can we make this easy to use and safe? I don't know if that's Instagram or it's YouTube or whatever. Instagram is the easiest thing to talk about. I think Drip is a really big idea. I hope that there's many other entrepreneurs that are looking at what we're doing and thinking, hey, maybe this kind of thing could apply in other categories too, and together we can come after these conglomerates, give the power back to the people and that would be a beautiful thing. Brian Friel (26:31):I couldn't agree more. Degen Poet, when you hear that and you take into consideration everything you told us about your journey starting on these fragmented marketplaces and everything and now everything that you've been doing with Drip, how do you think your relationship with Drip will evolve? Do you foresee the majority of your art being now distributed via platforms like these versus traditional mediums? Degen Poet (26:52):Yeah, for sure. Solana NFTs in the first place gave me a place for my art. I tried to be a poet in the real world and didn't really see the value in it even to publish a book and to get nothing back and to spend all the money to publish it, that kind of thing. Just NFTs and Solana in general as a first step was incredible to me to be able to make any kind of money off of my art period. And then that is what led me to become an artist. I wasn't making pictures or whatever before this, so it allowed me to exist as an artist in the first place. And then I guess I got hungry for the idea that you could live off this as a career or something. For me, I guess, I just want to create a space where people after me, people around me can do this seriously as 50% or more of their income for their lives. (27:45):I guess that's what I want to continue to push on at Drip, things like donations, et cetera, but finding a way to make them work and have them be something on a consistent basis that again, another artist can use that model and create a source of income that's reasonably dependable. A weekly Drip of donations I think is way more sustainable and understandable than when you're going to sell in your next auction. You sort of have a steady growth than all the rest of it. And so I don't know, it's just a better model to actually build a true career off of. Yeah, I don't know. For me, continue to find ways to take advantage of Drip and put all my work there that makes sense. I still have some one-on-ones outside of Drip, but I might even incorporate those into Drip someday. Yeah. I mean for me, as long as they let me Drip, I'm dripping. As long as the door is open for me, that's what I'm going to do for sure. Yeah. Vibhu Norby (28:43):Degen Poet is actually more close to the prototypical Solana artist than you would think. When I'm talking to an artist, I always ask, what's your full-time job? Very few of them are artists full-time. I mean that is really uncommon and it's really hard to make a living that way. Most of the artists that we work with are graphic designers and they make websites for clients and they're being creative maybe in some other way, but it isn't their source of income. And I don't think that if you look at this generation that wants to be content creators, that all of them can be content creators and make a living. Someone has to put food on the table, right. But you can add a little bit of extra for some of these folks and for the top 1% of them, or top 5% or top 10% of them to be able to make a reasonable living from doing this, I think is possible. (29:33):And my gold star metric for, I'm going to use Degen poet as our test baby, is how close can we get to replacing the income from his W2 job over the next year? We're actually not that far away. We're making progress and we continue to tweak that and it will pay back dividends. If he can be full-time on this and he'll be able to have, I don't know how he has a full-time job already. That part's a mystery to me, but in theory, more art, more content, more delight for people, that will help us grow too. DP and I are very aligned on that as a kind of a side quest to just getting art into people's hands. Brian Friel (30:08):Yeah. I think that's a great first goal. When you guys think about how we get to a world where the Degen Poets of the world can do this full time no questions asked, it's like an afterthought to even consider another job. Are there anything that you think that we need to change as an industry, something we should stop doing? And I ask this question because last time we had you on the show, Vibhu, you had a couple hot takes that you dropped, mostly around how a number grow up is very bad for the industry. I want to ask, has that thinking evolved at all for you, Vibhu? And then I also later want to hear some Degen Poet has any ideas on that as well. Vibhu Norby (30:41):I'm still on the same train. Number go up, number go down both equally bad in many different ways. The only thing is I really feel it when if you're sitting on Twitter all day, you really feel the price. You don't even have to look at the tweets. When Bitcoin was over 30K yesterday, I felt it. I didn't even have to look at my app. When Solana's down, you feel it. For better or for worse, the audience there is highly effective. And so I can't help but be empathetic to it, but it's actually an imperative for our industry to survive, especially in the US for us to move past the tokens, we have to. I strongly feel that, this is going to offend some people. I'm just trying to be careful how I say this. I think that the OG crypto community who was here in 2015 to 2017, the ICO era and these people are holding our industry back in a lot of ways. (31:37):I think they're all over our biggest applications and our biggest exchanges and this and that. And I think somewhere in the back of all these folks heads, they can't get over the fact that the bull market's going to come back again and they're going to have a Lambo. And it just doesn't make sense if we're serious about this being in the hands of billions of people, sorry, we can't make a Lambo for all seven, eight billion people on earth. Some of us have to drive a Honda Civic, some of us have to drive a bike. Can we get bike money for everybody? Can we get there first and let go of the kind of grasp of all the token people? That's where I'm at. I could be wrong. Maybe I'm flawed, maybe everyone can have a Lambo. I would love one, but that's not where I see the future. Degen Poet (32:20):Yeah. I mean I guess I feel similarly. I guess you want to create a space in the blockchain where the number go up and down doesn't really affect your day to day of enjoyment. You don't think about the price of a t-shirt or a box of Legos or whatever it is going up and down. You still just consume them because you want it or you like it here and there. I think of the Pokemon card analogy when it comes to this. I think with Drip House where they're just cards in general. I think there's a space for the legendaries or whatever it is, smaller supplies, having numbers go up. I do think that creates a lot of fun and excitement, brings people on, all that, but it really needs to be balanced with the day to day. Your reason for being here can't be that, because if it is, then it's like yeah, it doesn't feel sustainable and you're just building a system where there's a small amount of winners and most people are losers. And so it's like what are you really doing for the world at that point? We need to find a way to create value for digital assets that's just inherent in whatever the object is. It's not because of a price or a speculation, it's just because you value whatever the thing is. Brian Friel (33:31):Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think you guys are on the right path here and I think a lot of people who use Drip every day are resonating with what you guys are doing. Well, guys, this has been a really awesome conversation. One question we always ask our guests, I'd love to hear this from each of you, maybe starting with Degen Poet, is who is a fellow builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Degen Poet (33:52):I really like the Foxes a lot. I like drags and I like the Foxy Dev. I think that they've done an awesome job of trying to find actually useful stuff that people could use on Solana and bringing it into their system and I've seen them do some stuff overnight for people and all the rest of it. Really like them. Really like the guys at Tenor too. I mean the stuff that they've done for us in compressed NFTs is pretty incredible. Everyone on those teams is great. Brian Friel (34:21):I agree. Vibhu. Vibhu Norby (34:22):I'm going to recall 'cause I'm a second time guest, the answers I gave last time, 'cause it's kind of funny in retrospect. I think I mentioned Ahkshe from Super Team who I would give again and again. He's been such an amazing supporter of me and Drip and places before that. And I think at the time I also gave Frank Deca as my other answer. I still have a soft spot for him. I know he left Solana, but I can't help but admire the fanatical community building that he has. But yeah, I mean today, the couple of people that came to mind for me were, yeah, I mean the Tensor guys are amazing. These guys are just... A hilarious story. I pinged Ilia, the founder, yesterday and I asked them, hey, can I have a vector version of your logo? And I kid you'd not. The second I typed that, I see Ilia is typing and then three seconds later the vector file was there and I was like, did you just have this sitting on your desktop ready to drop into this? Brian Friel (35:15):Copied on the clipboard already? Yeah. Vibhu Norby (35:17):They really don't like that. Just really responsive. I respect that a lot. I want to give a shout-out to a guy named Carol who I won't dox him. He's a really impressive guy in real life and I got to know that after I spoke to him. There's these people in our community that are anonymous. I think he's an OK Bear or whatever, maybe a monkey business, and you find out their real life and they're like some VP of some big company. You just never know who you're talking to. But he's been, both for Drip and for Dialect, who I also listed as my admiration for, he's just been building stuff for free that benefit our communities and hundreds of thousands of people use those tools every single week to track their Drip collection. He's KIRYL_SOL, I believe he is his Twitter handle. Yeah, huge ups to that guy for carrying collectibles into the future. Brian Friel (36:06):I love it. These are all future guests of the podcast we're naming here. We have to get these guys on, have them tell their story as well. But yeah, Vibhu, Degen Poet, I just want to thank you guys from the Phantom team. We love everything that you guys are up to. We really think that Drip House arose at a time when Solana needed it most. We think you guys really carry a light forward for a way that pioneer's a new model for art on Solana, for artists making a living. Really excited for everything that you guys have to come. Thank you so much for your time on Zeitgeist. Degen Poet (36:33):Thanks for having us. Vibhu Norby (36:34):Thanks. Bye.  

Welcome to the latest episode of The Index. In today's show, we delve into the world of Web3, the Solana ecosystem, and the exciting future of digital collectibles with our special guest, Vibhu Norby. Vibhu, the Founder, and CEO of Solana Spaces, leads a pioneering company that initially operated Solana stores in New York City and Miami. Now, they've concentrated entirely on their groundbreaking project, Drip.Vibhu shares with us how Drip is becoming a unique platform that allows creators to build a universe of collectibles around their content, fostering an immersive experience for their audience. Join us to gain insights into Vibhu's creative journey, the evolution of Solana Spaces and Drip, and his thoughtful perspectives on the future of the digital collectible realm.This episode is brought to you by The Graph, the Google of Blockchain.

Vibhu Norby, Founder & CEO of Solana Spaces, joins Rich Pasqua and Matt Sky to discuss the convergence of physical spaces and blockchain and a new era of development in the space.We cover: How Solana Spaces is using blockchain and in-person crypto onboarding to encourage web3 mass adoption and education  A complete reimagining of retail through web3 and blockchain technology  Solana Mobile, dapps, social media, and the substantial utility-focused development happening in the crypto/web3 space  Episode links: https://solanaspaces.com/ https://twitter.com/solanaspaces https://twitter.com/vibhu https://drip.haus

Episode Notes:Solana Spaces founder and CEO Vibhu Norby sits down with Brian Friel to talk about creating crypto's first interactive retail experience that aims to onboard the next wave of users to web3.Show Notes:Brian Friel (00:06):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist. The show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers for pushing the Web3 space. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Vibhu Norby. Vibhu is The founder and CEO of Solana Spaces. The first in real life crypto retail experience. Vibhu, welcome to the show.Vibhu Norby (00:27):Thanks Brian.Brian Friel (00:28):Real excited to talk to you today. I think of all our guests, you have some of the most unique backgrounds of somebody who's now full-time in crypto. If you don't mind, could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your journey to what is now launching Solana Spaces?Vibhu Norby (00:41):Yeah, I definitely do. Our team is a different type of team from what you mostly see. I used to be a respectable tech entrepreneur raising VC from tier one firms and building cool companies, writing code for Google. And then sometime over the last two years, like everybody else, I became a degenerate crypto guy. Pretty much my whole life, I have been writing code since I was a kid, and my first job was at Roblox. Funnily enough, I built their collectable system back in 2009.Brian Friel (01:08):Wow.Vibhu Norby (01:08):This was a long time ago.Brian Friel (01:09):Sneak peak to NFTs.Vibhu Norby (01:11):Yeah. I worked at MySpace. My big break came when I joined a startup called Nest, which was the smart learning thermostat company that Google acquired while I was there, and I was still writing code there, but I kind of got interested in what we were doing with retail. I got exposed to a couple of projects that the company Google was doing to build out an experience inside a Best Buy and Target an Apple stores and so on. And I fell in love with the idea of building a physical store for hardware products.Vibhu Norby (01:43):So I left Google with a bunch of other people, and directly prior to Solana Spaces for seven years, I built this national retail chain called B8ta. We opened stores all over the country. Japan, Middle East, at some point we owned Toys R Us for a good six months, which was a very interesting project.Vibhu Norby (02:00):And then a lot of people during Covid started getting interested in crypto. First Ethereum and then Solana, and at some point B8ta, this was a physical retailer that was super affected by Covid. So I started thinking about what I want to do next and I was pretty convinced that I want to get into this space. And I tossed around a bunch of software ideas. I'm not really, by my nature, a physical retail person, but by chance, met Raj in November last year. Although we had talked a long time prior to that, at that moment we connected around building a IRL Solana store. Both thought it was an interesting enough and weird idea that had a very small chance of being important, and those are kind of the best ideas to build. So between November and March we figured out a deal with the Solana Foundation and created Solana Spaces.Brian Friel (02:53):That's awesome. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you guys are already live in New York. You're planning a store in Miami, is that correct?Vibhu Norby (03:00):Yeah. We opened Solana Spaces at Hudson Yards at the end of July and that was our first store, and the next location opens the first or second week of October in Miami. And these are two very different spaces. The first one is a 1500 square foot retail space, very much a store in a major shopping mall. The location in Miami, we call the Solana Embassy, because it is the craziest store on planet Earth I believe. It is a store, it's a coworking lounge, it's a nightclub, it's the best events venue in Wynwood, and it's all dedicated to teaching people about Solana.Brian Friel (03:38):That's awesome. So like me as an end user, let's say I was walking through Hudson Yards, I see this store, can you paint a picture and walk us through what can I expect when I walk into one of these stores?Vibhu Norby (03:48):The store is modeled around being your first crypto friend. That was how we designed it. And we asked for ourselves, how do people get crypto pilled in the first place? And pretty much everyone will share a story of someone in their life or someone they knew that got them a Phantom wallet and gave them NFT or gave them some tokens. So we wanted to build that kind of experience for people that maybe don't have a crypto friend yet.Vibhu Norby (04:13):So when you walk in, first of all, the space looks unlike anything you've seen in a typical shopping center because it's full of NFT artwork. And we have this crazy immersion screen that shows you what's happening on Solana in real time. And then we've got amazing merch products everywhere. So it's got this stunning welcoming look. And when you come in, there's two paths you take.Vibhu Norby (04:37):One path is, you can come and learn about how blockchains work, if you have more time. If you have less time, which is the average person, your first step is going into the Phantom Seed Phrase booth, which is a privacy pod where in three minutes you learn about how to keep your seed phrase safe and you get little cards you can write it down on, and then we drop you a PO App for completing that. And after you exit the seed phrase booth, you can walk around the store and scan your phone at all these different tutorial displays, and each one of those will open the DApp Browser in Phantom Mobile, and walk you through a tutorial about Orca, about Step'n, about MetaPlex, about Degenerate Ape Academy, about Form Function, or any number of our other partners. And once you've completed those learning materials, we give you another NFT. It's all gas list, no transaction fees.Vibhu Norby (05:30):Once you've collected enough of those badges, you show our store ambassador and we'll give you USDC. So basically we are paying people to learn about crypto in the store. And this is literally a micro version of what a good friend is supposed to do, right? Give you their wallet, give you some NFTs, give you some money.Brian Friel (05:49):Right.Vibhu Norby (05:50):And of course if you want to, if you're a degenerate like me, you can also spend that money immediately on the merch in the store.Brian Friel (05:56):The shoes. I want the Solana shoes. I see those on Twitter and I'm pretty jealous.Vibhu Norby (06:01):Yeah. We've got the Solana shoes, we've got the best socks in crypto, we've got hats and designer wear. And everything in the store is something that we designed and is exclusively available there, so you can only get it in the store. So it's kind of worth your time to come out of your way and try this.Brian Friel (06:17):That's super cool. And was there anything in particular from your experience founding B8ta, that impacted this vision that you had for Solana stores?Vibhu Norby (06:24):Yeah. If you know what we kind of did at B8ta, this is in many ways a direct descendant. It's a more fleshed out version of some of the big ideas that we were on to. B8ta was a... and my team hates that I'm always talking about it, but it was important part of my life. I started it when I was 27 and kind of grew up with it. We raised a hundred million dollars of venture capital, we opened stores everywhere and we had quite a large team and made a big impact on industry. We were the National Retail Federations retailer of the year. And the thing that made B8ta very innovative at the time was we had re-engineered the store business model to basically run auctions on top of space, like physical space, and we'd sell the space to the highest bidder. And so it was a more accessible way for newer brands to enter into a store.Vibhu Norby (07:07):And what we did here was we fixed a bunch of the things that we didn't like about that model, and benefit from everything from the rewards layer that crypto can offer companies to some very, very wild things that we're doing that we have not announced yet that we will soon. But in fact, the whole business model of this company we have not revealed yet to the public. And that business model is going to blow people's minds. That is probably the thing that is the most built on top of the learnings of my previous venture, and it's really a big idea on how quickly could you grow a retail business.Brian Friel (07:42):That's really cool. That's quite the cliff hanger. I'm tempted to press you on that but I won't because we have a ton of stuff to get through already on this. But I am curious, switching back to, you show up to this store, you walk in for the first time. I'm sure you're seeing both people are completely new to crypto who just think this store is interesting and they want to walk in, then you know have the crypto native degenerates like yourself, me and people listening to this podcast. But for the folks who are new to crypto specifically and they're coming into the spaces, what do you find that is resonating with them the most and maybe what is giving them the most friction about this crypto experience?Vibhu Norby (08:13):I think the hardest part has been teaching people about how the blockchain works. I think I was a bit more optimistic that people will be interested in the technology, but what clearly resonates to me is without a doubt, NFTs is one thing to kind of read the news about NFTs and write them off as write click saving, why would you need this? I'll just save this image to my computer. But it's another thing for someone to open up a wallet and see that this is something that's theirs. Even if it's a worthless NFT, people connect with those. And there's something called the endowment effect in retail, which is why most stores are loosely optimized around getting you to put your hands on the products, because once you feel a shirt in an apparel store or you pick up a video game, and nobody buys video games in real life anymore, but at GameStop, there's like a little part of your brain that doesn't want to give it back.Vibhu Norby (09:11):So our job in the space is give you things, tell you that you own them and get that endowment effect started. We've had some really cool experiences that have been shared with us. We had a guy that came from Ethereum and he walked into the store, this was a couple weeks ago, and he maybe had heard about it, but he didn't have any of the Solana tooling and didn't have a Solana wallet, and all of a sudden he was telling us on Twitter that he was investigating all the NFT projects and Solana and he had applied for y00t lists, and I feel like he was fully down the rabbit hole, right?Brian Friel (09:45):One of us. Yeah, that's awesome.Vibhu Norby (09:47):That story we've heard a bunch of times. So I think NFTs and then the merch, I cannot tell you how surprised we were how much people love merch. I don't know, it doesn't matter whether you know about crypto or not, you know about Solana or not, people are coming in and buying the gear. And that's a beautiful thing because I think what it says to me is crypto is really a community building tool, and one of the ways to be part of the community is to wear the stuff that community wears, and that's another way to kind of participate. So we really do focus on making high quality stuff that people want that's eye catching and interesting. And if you walked in and you didn't understand the crypto stuff but you like the products, that's a win. We'll take it.Brian Friel (10:30):Yeah, that's cool. And I guess taking that a little bit further, the store is really highlighting the whole Solana ecosystem, but for a given crypto project, say there's a crypto project that's building on Solana right now listening to the podcast, should they be thinking about in real life retail experiences? I think this is something that has been basically on no one's radar in the crypto space for a really long time and you're showing that there might actually be a reason for individual projects to pay attention to this.Vibhu Norby (10:53):I think there has been a lot of theory. I mean we can talk about payments for example. Payments are theoretically the very best use case of crypto, whether that's like remittances or that's paying a vendor, and not to shill Solana, but I do love me Solana.Brian Friel (11:10):I will note real quick, you're not actually part of Solana even though it's called Solana Spaces, it's a separate organization. Just to make that clear.Vibhu Norby (11:18):Yes. But we did call the company Solana Spaces and it's pretty hard to go back at this point.Brian Friel (11:22):Yeah, right.Vibhu Norby (11:24):Yeah, I think Solana particularly should be an awesome tool for payments because the fees are basically zero and that certainly isn't true with even credit cards. So I think that was a hypothesis, but making that come to life for somebody and building a mental model for other businesses has yet to happen. So I think if you're a store or you're a cafe, you absolutely should be looking at Solana pay. The question on that side is, how does it benefit the consumer and how do you overcome that acquisition cost and time of getting someone to download Phantom and fund it and swap it over to USDC and all that kind of stuff. It's a lot of steps today.Vibhu Norby (12:00):The two areas I think that are interesting, one is merch, and I have to talk about that, but I think every NFT community should be thinking very hard about what experiences they can build that represent and amplify their brand and their ethos.Vibhu Norby (12:14):If the first month of the store taught us anything, it was that there's an intense passion for these projects and I would love to see that problem space explored. In the Embassy, we have a Degenerate Ape Cafe, and it's an NFT coffee shop. We'll serve you hot coffee. It's all a roast made by a community member and it's got the monolith designer coffee bags and-Brian Friel (12:35):Nice.Vibhu Norby (12:35):... it's designed out of crates. And we have these cool branded cups. I don't know if this made it into production, but at the bottom of the cup there was going to be a QR code that you could scan and get a proof of caffeine NFT.Brian Friel (12:47):Oh, that's a cool little Easter egg. Yeah, finish your drink and get that.Vibhu Norby (12:50):It kind of starts that way, but then you can imagine that maybe you can take your proof of caffeine badge and next time you come back you get a discount on it. So you start to build the rails of loyalty. I was sitting there waiting for NFT collections to break into IRO experiences, but at this point, we're just going to build all of them for the Solana community. Whatever they want to build, IRL, they need to come talk to us because we are very much interested in setting examples for what this space will look like in the future.Brian Friel (13:19):So thinking five to 10 years out, I know that's a really big ask in crypto, but how do you see these two worlds converging? Right now, I'd say that most of crypto culture lives on Twitter and you guys are making really big inroads into the retail space. Do you see you guys really catalyzing that and most projects going through you? Do you see individual NFT collections spinning up their own entities to handle in real life venues? How do you see about five, 10 years out in the retail space playing out?Vibhu Norby (13:48):I'm going to confess, I'm pretty much a token MAXI. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that every IRL business in... Five or 10 years is way too short. But if you fast forward it a hundred years, I think every IRL business, every fashion brand that matters, every coffee shop, it will have started digitally and we'll start with digital assets. Why not five to 10 years? Because everything physically just takes forever to be disrupted. It's just not even possible to move that fast. But over a long period of time, I do think that it's inevitable. The reason being, that every talented creative person on earth right now is either exploring NFTs, creating them, dabbling in them, and maybe it can extend to not just NFTs, but I think NFTs and token AMEX and all of the kind of interesting combinations of those things. Crypto is an incredible creative sandbox for entrepreneurs. And it's also the most accessible way for entrepreneurs to get started. The composability of the ecosystem and the tooling.Vibhu Norby (14:50):Great entrepreneurs are attracted to things that are accessible because it's so hard to build a business in the first place, that if someone else is out there offering a tool that makes life easy or makes it easier to monetize, they're going to find it. So you're seeing it right now. I think digital art... What's happening right now with NFTs on Solana is a historical thing. It is mind blowing how many NFTs are minted every day on Solana. It's actually crazy. And that's coming from still a very small audience. We're at a hundred-thousand plus a day. I think there was a day the other week that was like 300K in a single day. So not a stretch of the imagination to say that the next great coffee entrepreneur, the next great fashion designer, the next great retail entrepreneur, is going to start with an NFT collection, with digital art, with digital assets.Vibhu Norby (15:40):And what happens when you have a sandbox that's accessible to the greatest entrepreneurs, things are going to come out of that that are incredibly disruptive. Of course the hit rate will be very small, but there aren't that many massive businesses in the world. And so I think it's pretty likely that we're going to start seeing crypto companies picking off certain use cases and industries, obviously creating new ones as well. And you're going to see this fastest in the things that are most simple on the sensory side, that's why I think art. Art has already been massively disruptive. I've dabbled in traditional art collecting and that whole world has been turned over in the last two years completely. And to me, it makes sense that that was the first thing to go because I think from a form perspective, it's the simplest to represent digitally. I think the latest adopting things will be hard physical assets, things like commercial office buildings in real estate, these things are very, very difficult to bring on chain, but it will happen and there are smart entrepreneurs working on it today.Vibhu Norby (16:42):So I think if you think five to 10 years... Maybe it will happen faster than we think. But the whole tree of ideas around IRL is going to be explored in that time period. The question is just, how long does it take for those things to become very meaningful and very large. I think that's a much longer process. Starbucks was in obscurity for 20 years before they figured out the formula for scaling. So maybe Solana Spaces, is that right? You never know over a long enough period of time. But I just think that the greatest creatives are working in crypto. So I'm just very excited to see what kinds of ideas these people create and how we can support them.Brian Friel (17:17):That's awesome. Yeah, this is a very exciting future you paint. And you say you are a Token MAXI. I'm curious though, do you have any contrarian views on the current state of crypto?Vibhu Norby (17:27):Yes.Brian Friel (17:28):Do you have anything in particular that you think the space should be focusing on that it's not?Vibhu Norby (17:33):How many people do I want to offend?Brian Friel (17:37):I'd say go big.Vibhu Norby (17:38):This is going to piss everybody off that listens to this show, but so be it. I think token going up and going down is very bad. I think if Solana... We never talk about price by the way. We never talk about it as an investment vehicle and I very much think that that's caused a lot of problems. But I think if Solana never changed where it was, I think if it became a USDC level of stability, this would be the greatest boon for the ecosystem. Because I think that you have within every interesting crypto project, it's flooded with speculation from the very get go, and these teams get obsessed with the price instead of the experience. And in the earliest days of a company, you just want the founders to be obsessively focused on the product and just making the product really good.Vibhu Norby (18:21):And I've seen a lot of communities, they won't say it necessarily, but I think I've seen a lot of projects get focused on how these things perform as an investment, not just as a product experience. So stability in this arena would be very good. People will be mad at that because obviously everyone wants the tokens to go up, but the best companies will be built when the founders are able to focus on building great things only. So that's one thought there.Vibhu Norby (18:45):I think some of the ideas we've shared around fashion are kind of contrarian. I think it's the next thing to go. I think after art, because the fashion world effectively was built for NFTs. You have limited supply items, you have great design wins, you have provenance, you have intense loyalty and identity formed around fashion products, products from runway level stuff to the things that make into Macy's. You see the same thing with collections. They do collection one, becomes very expensive, they do collection two, they do collection three, and it becomes more accessible over time. That's basically how the fashion world works.Vibhu Norby (19:19):And we tweeted recently that fashion designers today, they don't go to the fabric store and select fabrics and then go home and put them in front of a sewing machine. They open up Blender, they open up 3D modeling software and build the fashion that way. So by default, the fashion world is already moving to a 3D and digitally native format. Definitely in the next five or 10 years, that category is going to be completely disrupted by NFTs. What I see and what the ecosystem talks about as merch, this is not merch, this is actually about modern fashion and it's about people connecting with the things that they own in a deeper sense. And so crypto merch is going to take over the world. Merch is how a hundred, 200 million people are going to find out about Web3. And we're not going to call it merch, it's just going to be fashion. I really believe that and I'm seeing that on the ground level in the store every day to be honest.Brian Friel (20:12):That's super cool. One last question we ask all our guests. You paint a great picture here of the future blending in real life experiences with crypto, how crypto and entities are taking over the art scene and then soon to be fashion. But looking ahead, I guess one last question we ask everyone is, who is a builder that you admire in the Salona ecosystem?Vibhu Norby (20:33):I don't know if this is a unique answer, I'm going to give you two people that are totally different ends of the spectrum. One is. I'm obsessed with Frank DeGods.Brian Friel (20:41):DeGods. Yeah.Vibhu Norby (20:42):I just don't think there's another person like him, like another entrepreneur out there like him. He's just a unique marketing machine that the world has never seen before. He basically broke the Twitter algorithm for millions of people for two weeks straight. And it's not unintentional. He's maniacal about understanding how people are going to react to things. And I know he's been taking a break recently, but I'm definitely a Frank Maxi. I don't own DeGods by the way. I don't have any financial interest in it. I just think that he's an awesome builder. I wish more people in crypto would be thinking about marketing the way he is because it is making a real impact. His fervor single handedly brought over so many people for me to take a look at Solana.Brian Friel (21:25):The y00t list has passed, so we know this is a genuine recommendation. There's nothing at stake here.Vibhu Norby (21:31):No, no, nothing at stake. No y00t list. And then number two is Akshay BD from Superteam.Brian Friel (21:37):Yeah, Superteam.Vibhu Norby (21:38):He's brilliant, but I don't think anybody else thinks like him. I've been observing how he's building Superteam Dow and very closely because, well I can't really share why I'm looking at that, but they are building the first truly decentralized entity. Every detail of how they built that company is just different from a typical company. To how you get employed, how they pay people, where the people are, I think is a much bigger deal than they get credit for. I'll give an example, they just launched this product called Earn the other day, and I posted a bounty on there and I swear, I had 25 people who just did the work and sent it to me without even asking. That's pretty dope. And I'm a big fan of his. He knows that.Brian Friel (22:19):Yeah, we saw something similar. Just to plug that if it's further. When I was first getting started on Solana, we started this Solana cookbook to help engineers share resources and Superteam Dow just took that and ran with it. And I'd say most of the heavy contributors were tied into that in some way. And it's really cool to see them organizing and leveling up the whole space. I couldn't agree more.Vibhu Norby (22:37):Both he and Frank, they're both cult leaders of different flavors. Akshay much more understated but true visionary, and Frank, completely the opposite. More obviously cult leader. But yeah, thanks for the question.Brian Friel (22:50):Yeah, that's awesome. Well Vibhu, this has been an awesome discussion. Really appreciate you taking the time to jump on, share your background and also your vision for the future of crypto and in real life experiences. If people want to learn more about Solana Spaces, where can they go?Vibhu Norby (23:04):You already know, at Solana Spaces on Twitter. It's the best Twitter account in Solana, if I do say so myself.Brian Friel (23:10):Beautiful. Yeah, I actually spent more than I'd like to share on Sunday trying to figure out your seed phrase like crossword puzzle. That was awesome that you guys did.Vibhu Norby (23:18):We do it every week. I have another one dropping this Sunday. I have another one dropping Sunday after. We're going to do a crossword pretty soon. Yeah, Sunday puzzles.Brian Friel (23:26):Super cool. Well keep us posted on when you guys are opening a store on the west coast. I'm pretty jealous of all our east coast friends who get to do what you're doing. But thanks for coming on. Definitely want to have you back at some point.Vibhu Norby (23:36):Thanks Brian.

The hottest-selling gear lately seldom even has a screen, Norby tells CNET Now What.

The hottest-selling gear lately seldom even has a screen, Norby tells CNET Now What.

We chat with Vibhu Norby, Founder & CEO of b8ta, and Mark Ghermezian, Co-CEO of American Dream, to determine best practices with safety, technology, and change in the face of the COVID-19 challenges. See how they ensured their businesses would make it through, and learn how yours can too!The World Retail Forum provides to retailers all over the world the tools, the knowledge, and best practices for recovering from the impact of COVID-19. The World Retail Forum was created in collaboration with one thousand global retail outlets, shopping centers, brands, investors, and architects. Representatives from businesses in fifty countries have participated in our weekly On The Frontline: Navigating COVID-19 live event. Retailers, restaurateurs, and small business owners—whether they are one-person operations or organizations of ten thousand—can benefit from this level of cooperation.

Chris Walton sits down one-on-one with b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby to discuss the history and business model of b8ta, "Retail-as-a-Service" theory and practice, and his company's new partnership involving Toys R Us. The conversation was frank, spirited, and quite frankly left us with even more unanswered questions about the long-term value surrounding what we have seen so far from b8ta's first footnotes on the chart of retail history. For the full transcript of this podcast: https://omnitalk.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/MXZKmr_1581001407.txt

Retail as a service—It’s a thoughtful and forward thinking model created by b8ta, building stores that let people experience products the way their makers intended, serving to open pathways to discovery and purchase, and changing landscape for the better… Vibhu Norby, Founder/CEO of b8ta (a platform and  store designed for discovering, trying, & buying the latest tech products). joins Rob Sanchez on location in Palm Spring, CA at eTail West.In this episode: Seeing retail as an engagement and marketing engine, not as a supply chain mechanism Retail as a service A lot of ownership over experience in stores The intersection of physical and digital sides Quality of survey data What products work for b8ta’s offering, largely electronic products of some type Design differences to other platform such as Amazon Four Star Products are not “verticalized” Why the product is the hero Overhead cameras important in b8ta’s stores The “war for space” Experience retail is the future How multi-brand retailers should stay away from being logistics companies Same-day is inevitable

EP139 - B8ta founder and CEO Vibhu Norby  Vibhu Norby is the founder and CEO of b8ta.  b8ta is a software-powered brick and mortar retailer designed to improve the customer and maker experience. They help people discover, try, and learn about new tech products while empowering makers with a simple retail-as-a-service model that puts them in control. In this interview, we cover Vibhu's background, how he came to the idea for B8ta, b8ta's retail partnerships (including Lowe's and Macy's), their unique marketplace dynamic, their experiential retail as a service offering, their recent fundraising success, and Vibhu's vision for the future of retail. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 139 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, August 1, 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.   Transcript Jason: [0:26] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show. This is episode 139 being recorded on Wednesday August 1st 2018. I'm your host Jason retail geek Goldberg. And as usual I'm here with your cohost Scott Winslow. Scot & Vibhu: [0:42] Jason and welcome back Jason's Ghosheh listeners. Jason I don't know about you but I've been on pins and needles this week no we have a special guest tonight. You and I are both probably the biggest gadget geek ever and we have a new favorite store and it's pretty exciting to have someone from that store on the podcast. There's a company that we have talked a lot about on the podcast so I'm hoping longtime listeners can kind of guess what we're talking about here. The company is beta and that's B the number T.A. Beta is such a unique company. I don't want to get in the middle of describing it to everybody. I want to kind of leave that for our guest who is the CEO and founder of b8ta, Vibhu Norby. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited I've been listening since the first episode. Jason: [1:37] We are we're thrilled to have you. And I do think Scott and I are the target market for your concepts. We'll get to that in a moment. But before we do normally we'd like to start interviews is get a little rundown from our guests on their career progression and what led them to their current role. And in your case. Beta is not your first cool gig. So definitely want to share that with the audience. Scot & Vibhu: [2:10] Yes so I I grew up programming, and fell in love with computers and software when I was an early teenager and sort of joined a series of startups and then end up leaving to do one of my own. And we got funded by Y Combinator and then raised a couple of million dollars from, some investors and that we were making a social network for the phone and back in 2011 when snap chat and a bunch of these guys got started and we didn't make snap chat. So the company didn't totally work and we we found a home at Nest a few years ago. [2:53] At the time when they had one product and were just starting to think about launching multiple products and so there I joined as an engineer and brought my whole team and company over. It was sort of an acquisition. And that was where I got introduced to retail for the first time really from the brand side. Nest was a really pioneering company. A lot of ways we were were really introducing the idea of smart home to the consumer not just the Nest Learning Thermostat and doing that was complicated. It was a complicatedproduct. We also really love retail because a lot of the team had come from Apple and understood the value of retail beyond sort of sales. And so we used we used retail as a as a place to store and make people aware of the product and get them hands on and that was what the genesis but actually I want to talk about the first time I talked to you Jasonbecause, it's kind of you know four years ago I actually didn't know very much about retail and so when I was trying to learn about the first thing I did was like you know basically typing like who who to follow about you knowin retail, and your name came up and I ended up falling on Twitter for a bit. And at a point when I wasn't sure if I should we should actually do beta. I called him LSU and is like hey can we get a call I want tell you the idea that working on and just get your feedback and so we got on the phone. Do you remember this. Jason: [4:20] I totally remember this. I wasn't sure you wanted to disclose it. Scot & Vibhu: [4:25] Yeah. So we we got on the call and I was like hey you know this is what we're thinking about doing. We don't know much about retail what we understand the problem. And I think you said you know this is like been done a lot, or it might work but you'd be much better off if you could solve this other problem that I have which is that people are not buying chewing gum anymore because they're looking at their phone and they're checking out atthe supermarket. And I was like oh that's that's interesting like I me think about they actually spent way too much time thinking about how to get people to buy chewing gum after that conversation. But I'm very thankful that we decided to move forward with this. Remember that. Jason: [5:05] Yeah I totally do. I might slightly I don't. I'm not sure I necessarily tried to completely pivot you. But I'm also glad you stuck to your guns. Scot & Vibhu: [5:17] If you ever saw the chewing gum problem I'm not sure what. Jason: [5:20] No no. I feel like there still is an opportunity as the world moves to auto replenishment for for you know all of those consumable items like you know impulse purchases are likely to go away. So if there's any entrepreneurs out there with a clever idea you know we've got to we've got to figure out how how we're going to do impulse purchases in all digital purchases path. Scot & Vibhu: [5:45] So spoiler alert but I think we should put a gum station in every beta Boom problem solved. Jason: [5:51] Yeah that that's one way to go. The part in conversation I remember us talking about though which I think we should come back to later is the role of other retailers in your concept. Scot & Vibhu: [6:09] Yeah. I mean you have I think if I remember you had suggested that we should talk to some other retailers who were pretty focused on building something for ourselves on the software side. But that opinion obviously change in the last 2 1/2 years. Jason: [6:25] Yeah I was gonna I mean that you probably got the sequence right. But I think I feel like I mentioned that, there would be potential interest in some established retailers and partnering with you or potentially funding the idea you had and at that time, as any entrepreneur you were you were laser focused on crushing all the traditional retailers and doing it all yourself. And so I think that's that's how you started that. You may have progressed since then. So one other thing before we jump into beta hardcore though is you were at Neste pre Google right so you were actually acquired by Google is that do have the timing right. Scot & Vibhu: [7:08] That's right. Yeah. Very shortly after I joined, and it was you know the acquisition was I think we learned about it like January 11 2015 14 and then it closed in February and I had joined just four months or five months prior to that. But it was the company was at an inflection point when I had joined and it made a lot of sense. Jason: [7:33] Yeah for sure. I feel like a super friendly product to everyone now but, if you go back to that Genesis you original concept was sort of, what with a smart thermostat look like if Apple were to design one and when you guys want that first product it was one of the original digitally native vertical brands right. Like you you made this product that you were predominant you were selling direct and partnering with retailers on it required a bunch of education because no consumer knew they needed it. And so I feel like there was a big retail education play in it which is of course interesting. Scot & Vibhu: [8:15] As funny. I mean we didn't see it that way at the time. And even it took even after we started the company I didn't realize that but every single Early Stage Harbor company was a DnD VB as you noticed, because they were selling the product direct and and that and the advantage that a lot of Harbor companies have relative to other types of, DNA BS is that they always have the users contact information because most of them have an account sign up as part of the onboarding process. And so it sort of they're sort of natively by default dnt Bebe's. Jason: [8:59] Absolutely. Scot & Vibhu: [9:02] Yes. Let's let's jump into beta so let's start at kind of the the origin story. Anything kind of tell us how you got that idea and maybe kind of tell folks what how you describe it today. [9:21] Sure. So I don't think any good idea is sort of, a singular eureka moment maybe it is but for us it was a lot of different kind of influences came together to create this. The the biggest the biggest thing for me was working at NASA and, understood and sort of seeing this disconnect between how we as a brand and as a supplier to stores thought about are the value of our presence in their stores versus the value that a retailer saw. And the presence in their stores and that disconnect is is incredibly fundamental and incredibly hard to fix. And so you know as a brand we wanted stores to be education point for customers. We needed a scalable way to get our product Nest thermostat in the hands of customers. And and we felt that you know when we came into a store we wanted to present the product in a beautiful manner kind of let it let it live like a hero product there. We never came into a store without uncap or display or you know something that was sort of taking the product out of the box. [10:45] And and in order to do that you know we end up spending a lot of capital a lot of time you know deploying a lot of people into the field to sort of ensure that like every time we had our product out there that cost. And when a customer saw that it was presented beautifully and and frankly retailers back then and it wasn't that long ago. But you know how fast things have changed in this industry. [11:10] This was not a totally common idea for them I think they had an Apple shop and shop and maybe a few of their large brand partners but to allow of any new company to come in and build a cool experience wasn'tnative to their business. And you know they their business model of retail is really set up to to be the end of the supply chain the store right. They've got a buyer they figured out that this is a product they want to bring in. This is how many units they want to get. They think they can sell and the store is sort of like this the warehouse with a pretty face as a retailer wants described to me and you know for us it was the start of the consumer journey. And so. [11:54] This basically what happened is I learned about this because I had asked our Head of Retail who's now my co-founder Philip RHA UB and he had a retail analyst. I asked him why we weren't in more stores. You know we were in Target. Apple Best Buy Home Depot Lowe's. And I was looking at our sales force. One of the bucket in sales force and I just noticed like hundreds of retailers from you know globally who are asking to get its products in their stores. And I was like This is a you know an amazing opportunity. And he said well because we don't see retail as a surprising pivot you want to make sure the products are presented well and so we just can't, give away it to anyone who asks and that was like you know that that gave me this aha moment that maybe there was, a way to fix that. At the fundamental level for a retailer. [12:53] But but you know we. You know I sort of sat on that kind of learning for a while and then I got more involved the retail team at NASA when they asked me to build a training system for associates inside of other people's stores. And you know when I started working with the customer support team on trying to figure out how to, address you know sort of this you know when a customer buys a product at a store but then they call, our support center and then you know where we said that customers should they return the product and I realize that like a retailer like a brand like Nasz never wants the customer to go back to the store. There's all these kind of weird things that I was finding out and I wondered if you know if we were having these issues that probably means that every other supplier in Best Buy. That is like us like GoPro for example or Fitbit at a similar stage was probably having a similar similar fundamental issues. And and you know if we were building sort of code bases and processes to solve this and they were as well that that's a very inefficient use of all of our resources. So beta was this idea to create a retail platform from the ground up that supported a customer experience as the primary use case for the store. [14:20] And supply chain as a secondary or test Cherry use case. And then we I mean it is really that simple honestly we just want to we didn't you know the business model kind of came around later. You know if you're if you're going to separate yourself from the supply chain use case of a store then you can't buy the product and so it kind of made sense to rent space to companies. But yeah the disconnect was the genesis. And as it turns out like you know now nowadays anytime we find a disconnect between, two parties that are doing business you know a customer brand or a brand and a retailer or a retailer and a customer we think there's an opportunity to deploy business new business models or software to fix it. There's but anyway that's that's a bit about the company but we can talk more. Yeah. So. [15:19] Maybe this is a good place to start. How big is speed of just kind of from a store footprint perspective. [15:27] So we have eighty two stores that we managed today and own operate 70 of those are inside of LOEs so we have a quite large partnership with them around smartphones. We've got a store with Macy's inside of their flagship store and we've got, 13 actually I think 12 owned like kind of flagship in line stores or kiosks inside of malls. And in terms of the scale of people we about 350 people that work inside of these stores and we're at our per post office call so I've been in Palo Alto is kind of what you would think of as the flagship store, flagship for us we have. We have a number of flagship. So we just we just mean any kind of any store that has our flag our logo on it that it was our first store. That's actually a very unique store none of our stores look like that today it was it was built on a budget in a woodworking shop. Beautifully done. But but definitely a one off. So the newer ones are fancier who's that Congressman. [16:42] Yeah we spend a lot more time in designing them. It's the series a store the Series B stores are much nicer. The Up series is this the series a sort of the best and then you start to realize that you've got to build a business and that every single thing that you see in the store has to be cut from a tree. Yeah. Jason: [17:02] Yet it's all the timbre turns in all the hardwood turns into a particleboard is basically what happens in other curves. Scot & Vibhu: [17:09] 100 percent is exactly exactly right cool. The way I've described it is it's kind of a you know Apple Store like kind of feel with seems like about 2000 square feet there. And but you know literally hundreds of different kinds of products you can interact with mostly in the kind of gadget electronic category. It's not fun because you come to the folks that work there are super helpful so if you had an idea of what you wanted they were ready to leave bailable. But I thought my experience was just kind of spinning like two or three hours and they're just kind of touching everything and trying it out and learning about it. Is that kind of how you think about the old experience at this point is that a decent description. Yeah. So each store is about 25 100 square feet features that are 120 different brands. You know maybe 130 different products. Every price out of the box and it's a real live working demo. Like we when we get a new product in a store we actually take like the first one out of the shipment and just take it out and set it up like we were a customer. [18:20] There's a lot of space between the products. It looks like an Apple store although that wasn't the intention it was really designed around actually or analytics system and how overhead cameras capture information. But you can definitely spend two to three hours in there because everything that you're seeing is kind of a one of a kind. Interesting thing that you probably haven't seen before and these are complet. You know the price to carry the tech products are complex and and they were hard time to understand. And so you know having really good staff is super important to us. I think two to three hours is definitely way above the average visit which is about 15 minutes. But the average customer only usually look at about a third of the assortment on a given at a given time. So but we have a tremendous amount of customers who kind of see it like a museum they come and they look at everything one by one and want to make sure they don't miss something. Jason: [19:25] And it's funny because in one way I would argue you're sort of the the opposite of an Apple store in that, there's not a lot of surprise and delight moments in an Apple store anymore. They actually used to carry more third party products than there was a little more variety but my sense today is you know exactly every single product you're going to discover in the Apple store before you walk in there.Right. So it's it's most people that walk into an Apple store are walking in with some kind of mission in mind. Like they're either coming for service on an existing product or they're coming to buy a product that they already know about and know that Apple has there or maybe they want to see it and make a final determination inin a big way. I would I sort of feel like your story is the opposite. I'm not likely to know. I know the kind of products you're going to have in your store but I'm not likely to know exactly what you have and I'm almost certain to discover some products I didn't know about. And so to me it feels much more like a sort of serendipitous discovery moment for the shopper versus a specific mission in mind a moment like I might have at Apple is that. Scot & Vibhu: [20:37] Yeah. So the data proves that out for sure. So 70 percent of the products at a average customer season are store they're discovering for the very first time. So and actually on the other side of that and Apple and Apple stores about 70 percent Apple products. [20:55] Oh you're probably 70 percent Sandras seeing something that you you definitely saw before. But we have two types of shoppers in our store. There is there is the shopper who kind of wanders into just be surprised and be delighted by everything that people are making in the world. But we definitely serve a use case for a lot of our brands of high quality demonstration. So a lot of the company and you can if you if you like google some of the companies that we have in our store you can see when you go to their website they have a store finder and the store finder is just pointingcustomers to us you know saying hey if you want to check this thing out in person. This is the place for you to do that and we love those kind of visitors because they come in for one thing and we give them that amazing demonstration experience that you know no one else could give except for beta. But of course while they're there they'll find a bunch of other things that maybe, they didn't know about and that's that in terms of a percentage of traffic about 40 percent of our traffic is driven by the brands that individually use case but in a mature store for us that that that tends to go up and up. So basically like if you lived in Palo Alto once you've been to the store once and you've seen everything are a couple times the next time you come, back is because you saw like a prophet on the Internet that you were interested in trying out first and then you'll come in for that specific thing and try it out. Jason: [22:21] Yes. That makes perfect sense. It's funny because I imagine as people get more familiar with this door that you definitely could have some sort of mission shoppers and it it sounds like one way, they might find you is through the product manufacturer's website. But you do now have your own Web site as well. And that's another discussion you and I had when you first launched you didn't have your inventory online. And I mentioned that like in the long run customers that became familiar with your store would want to be able to see what kind of products you were carrying before they made a visit. So now that you apparently took that advice and so now I'm going to ask a terrifying question. Has that had any value or are you finding that that you do have perhaps a subset of your shoppers that that shop your website and then decide oh cool you've got a new a new kind of product in stock that I want to go see. Scot & Vibhu: [23:18] Yes so funnily enough we I mean I think we specifically avoided doing an e-commerce site for a while because we wanted to stay focused on on stories which was our kind of unique value prop for brands. And we also didn't want to do e-commerce that we didn't have something to offer that was special and we act. We launched e-commerce in August officially last year. So it's been one year to date in that time period. It's gone from obviously zero percent of our sales volume of products to almost 20 percent today. [23:55] So we've had a lot of growth there. I think you know what we learned more than anything was that our associates in the store needed a place to, can point shoppers to who maybe wanted to do more consideration or you know had some kind of education like they were traveling and you know the product shipped somewhere you know. And and so it serves an essential function. Are our sales associates. I would say more so than customers. We don't like buying from beta dot com is not better than buying from Amazon. If you're a Prime member for example so we're not trying to compete for every single sale but it's been an effective tool on the store side of the business. I would say we built the entire platform in-house for a reason which is that we have a lot of really cool things coming down the pipe that, will give us at least some advantages over maybe shopping on Amazon or from the brand's website that we can uniquely do because we have a lot of stores. Jason: [25:04] Nice. And just a clarification. I like that to me is exactly why I was suggesting you have the inventory online was sort of as an adjunct to your sales process. Not so much that you'd capture a ton of sales via e-commerce but that people would wanna know what you had in stock before they visited the store or or people would want to do that final consideration after the store. So I'm glad to hear that. That's providing some benefit to you. I get that you're you know nobody wants to our Amazon Amazon so it probably doesn't make sense to just try to compete with their exact customer experience. But one of the things that I perceive is also true and I'd be curious to hear from you is I do think it's possible for you to be selling products before they're likely to show up on Amazon. So I do think there's some early stage new new products that you know where manufacturers reach out to you as early experience and they may not be distributing through Amazon yet. Is that true or does everyone go to Amazon Day one these days. Scot & Vibhu: [26:16] No that's totally true. And in fact it's not just that they come to us. You know before Amazon but they also come to us after Amazon a lot of brands that we work with. They start selling there and they don't necessarily get what they want out of that experience and it was a bit more control they want more data and they'll come back and you know will be sort of be one of the onlymultibrand experiences that can carry it. We also have a lot of international companies that don't have a, local distributor or as a Web site where you can you can buy from here and so there are a lot of cases where we are the only place you could buy that wasn't necessarily our strategy initially but, you know more and more I think that will be a focus for us. The other interesting thing is I think you know. [27:07] When you sign up with beta as a brand, your entire experience of managing your stores with us and deploying content and training and materials is all through our dashboard. And so we've found that companies don't want to have to sort of manage all these different silos of of you know information and marketing information. And so our our our system allows a company to sort of make a change once in it and that content reflects everywhere in-store online, in our accounting backend in our checkout you know everything all at the same time and that's for the right type of company at an early stage that's actually better than even selling on their own website. Jason: [27:52] Yeah. And I think that teases something that's unique about your model that we haven't totally covered yet which is you are not a pure traditional wholesaler where you just, go discover some product you want to sell the people you buy a thousand of them at a wholesale price you mark them up to retail and sell them to someone else. You're actually closer to Scott Wingels favorite thing a market marketplace right where you're essentially providing a platform and you're letting manufacturers, leverage your platform your drive you're generating traffic and then you're letting them sell to do that traffic through your platform. Do I have that right. Scot & Vibhu: [28:37] Yeah we're actually a two sided marketplace and it's it's hard to see from the outside because we look like a kind of technology store brand. But on the inside you know brands are subscribing to space in a store. But we also work really closely with landlords and on that side they're competing through lower rents or things like you know funding for store build outs or you know marketing. They're actually competing for these brands dollars and our store is sort of the glue that that brings those two together. And so you know across our every store of ours is different because companies that sign up with us they can choose where they want to be and they don't have to be in every everywhere if they don't want to. And they can also in every store sort of price differently and so you'll oftentimes you know you might see a company that is you know maybe moving from store to store or trying to figure out the right markets for themto be in. And what really makes their decision is how good the data is in that in that spot and what and what the economics look like and that's driven by the landlord in our case that you know we didn't. Again a lot of the stuff we didn't really see going into it we were just like we wanted to solve this really central problem that brands had. [30:00] But it's evolved to look more like a marketplace on the business model side than any other type of retailer today. And I think that you know just I can anticipate your next question but I think that's where we started getting interested in working with other retailers because you know there are effectively some of the largest landlordsin the country. And and I think as we export our model further we knew that square. Good square footage was going to be the thing that the supply side that sort of drove a lot of the demand. Jason: [30:37] Yeah and I want to come back to that in a bit. It's even it's good square footage with high buying content which is even more exciting. Scot & Vibhu: [30:44] Of yes. Yeah. Jason: [30:45] But the so one of the things that I'm always curious about. So a brand has to want to work with you. The economics have to work. They have to see the benefit. You know they likely they have to have a product that requires some storytelling or some demand. And so there's a bunch of factors that would make a brand want to work with you. But it probably wouldn't work for you to just accept any brand that wanted to work with you. Right. So you know you wouldn't want to end up with a bunch of brands that just were struggling to sell their crap. And so therefore were were willing to you know be a tenant in your store and sell their stuff. It does feel like you have a curated assortment of cool gadgets that people like Jason and Scott Wingo would like to buy. So like I guess I'm I'm curious how you work that curation in a in like a traditional retail model of curation is easy the merchant decides what they're going to carry and what they're not going to carry. It feels like your emergence if you even have a of merchant sort of has a harder job because they have to both decide what they want and then it has to be an appealing model for that stuff. Scot & Vibhu: [31:58] So we actually philosophically are anti-corruption. We think that a lot of the problems that brought that retailers have encountered over time is is because of their you know quote unquote curation process on the buying side. The way curation works. And the reason that that the products in the store are actually you know out to be really good is that their business model we chose. [32:29] Weeds out bad products extremely quickly in the same way that maybe you know an advertiser in an auction system like Google AdWords weeds out bad ads as well. Basically when you have a product that doesn't resonate with customers they don't want to spend money and so they leave. And when it comes when a product is resonate with the customers they never want to leave because they're making money. And in fact they start to expand with us and take over more space and more and more stores. And we've seen this effect really dramatically in three years of running this model where you know we've built up you know for every 10 companies and maybe you know two or three of those company turns out to begood. And we've built up a roster of you know the best brands in the world who again have great economics and would never want to go. But it's important for us to compete you need to bring in new things, because you know and we don't want to make the choice upfront all the time as to whether that product you know would sell because that you know frankly like you know maybe buyers have some some algorithmic helpand you know spreadsheets all kinds of stuff. But like you know a lot of decisions are made at the gut level and I can tell you from our kind of internal game of trying to guess what their product going to do well with us. We just get it wrong so often that it's not even worth trying to be honest with you. [33:55] I think where we have a couple of of sort of post launch with beta curation moments for example with a product return block and we have an algorithm for that. [34:06] We take it out. You know if the if the product doesn't have a you know a return policy that jives with ours. We oftentimes won't accept it but we're pretty open. I mean we I think to be honest that's what makes us really unique and. And the other thing is like I think for customers retail can be a decision making tool and sometimes that decision is a negative decision. This learning that that you don't want this product. Maybe you saw this thing in mind but you know after seeing it in person it's not for you. Disserve that kind of function you have to take things to that are kind of on the edge. So I don't know if you expected the answer but I we we we take this. I mean we've really thought a lot about this and it's it's a big part of our business. Yeah. I'm intrigued on the marketplace side of building a two sided marketplace. Seems easy but it's hard because I always tell folks that are starting on it is kind of like rowing if you row on one side of a canoe or a kayak or something like that too much then you just go in circles ChAFTA. There's a there's a balance you have to fall and there has been harder building this on the supply side which I think you call makers or on the demand side or tussle bit about it. Any interesting stories there. I'd love to. I think other marketplace people would love to hear. Yes the supply side for us is there a state side. On the demand side as the Brandts. [35:30] So it has been hard. And one of the reasons it's been hard is that we we have grown significantly faster than the category itself. And so you know we ended up finding a lot of opportunities on the supply side. You know really early on and so we've we've had to actually really control how many locations were launching every year and keep in lockstep with our best companies. But the thing is like there's enough there's enough brands out there that are launching every day every week that we've been able to. We've been able to open stores that are added and grow at a pretty good rate. [36:16] You know the I think there I think there will be a point in the future that where it's not clear that you know opening another store is best for all of the brands. But you know so far so far it's been working and it hasn't been as much of an issue as maybe you would think. [36:39] Another interesting challenges like where do you stop. We all kind of like as a soccer guy your practice. You know you like to solve customer problems. I have this problem of where stuff. So I imagine it's kind of interesting. So on the brand side you guys have done a really cool job of you know I can be in five stores in California and then I can kind of like you give me this life cycle that I can use right allthe way to. You know I think you call it store open concept flagship when I looked to your site you have this kind of like model that I could even see on the soccer side. You know if someone wanted to start selling on on Amazon there's no reason you couldn't like you know launch them there you know. So. So that's interesting and then you know maybe you can almost become their PM. You know there's there's because like you said earlier you've got their product data. They've started with You Can you be you know is that an interesting place to go or do you start there and then on the landlord side. I imagine you guys are you know generations ahead of a lot of these landlords on now to think about Dhara why are these things what's resonating with their customer. So I can see you going deep there too. How do you think about those aspects. [37:49] Yeah we we actually I mean we've we've talked about projects like that a lot. But we've I think the opportunity that we have stumbled upon is really in physical retail becoming. [38:07] Experiential rather than supply chain focused. And I often started to to think that you know experience for retail is a third channel. It's a new channel you know compared to maybe wholesale is the first one and an online as a second because it doesn't cannibalize your, or other channels you're the focus is different you're capturing customers at maybe a different part of the of their lifecycle. [38:40] And so. For us we think about growth really on three vectors I would say. One is on the contacts where one might find products. So today we have like you said we have owned stores and they come in different flavors. We have that flagship in line. We have the open air format and then we have this full store as a service product that we launched called built by beta. And then you know in other contexts there's Lowe's. We just added Macy's as a big partner for us. And maybe you can imagine others as well coming down the pipe. There's environments so these are the different ways that a brand might want to represent themselves in the physical world. So you know we started with a two foot display that was the only option that companies had. And then we we started adding more options you could take forefeet you could take a table you could take a room you could take half of the store you could take a TV, you know create a whole store and and then on the on the third vector you have, product categories and we've been really focused on tech for a long time but I think if you watch us closely especially if you watch our product assortment over time we started to to bring in other things like apparel andcosmetics and and so on. [40:04] I think those each of those three vectors is is is growing for us and we're we're exploring them as far as we can take it. But we've I mean I think you can. I think one day we we've imagined sort of building that that software distributions system that you're talking about, but the online experiential retail opportunities is such a fast growing category that, we'd be remiss not to to see how far we can take this. There. Jason: [40:38] Very cool. And you you mentioned something in that answer I want to drill into a little bit more of the built by beta program. Real quick you guys have like I mentioned that right from my perspective you guys have built a platform you engineered a lot of the pieces yourself like as opposed to a lot of retailers go out and buy, a POS from company eBay and they buy you know gondolas from Company B. You guys built the digital signage system for the stores and a content management system that the that the brands have access to to publish content to those digital signs you you build your POS you alluded earlier to thefact that you have. Scot & Vibhu: [41:18] Training system. Jason: [41:19] Yeah. Training for the sales staff. You alluded to that, detail the in-store analytics package that's not just purchase analytics but actual browse analytics so you're you're watching shoppers flow through the store. So you're using that in your own stores and obviously in your shop in shops in Macy's and was, built by beta is you selling that whole platform of tools to another brand that wants to have their own branded store is that right. Scot & Vibhu: [41:56] Yes so as I mentioned like experiential retail is a different channel and what we realize what we noticed you know in sort of trying to find the right tools to build the business. We notice that everything has been subtly architected around the store as a sales channel as a place to get a box out the door. And and and you know as it is as one example a lot of the companies that we work with don't see the first purchase from a customer as the as the last time they're going to make money from that customer. Right. They are thinking about it as a customer acquisition cost but they maybe have a subscription package or accessories other things that they are or are you know consumables that they think are going to drive longterm value from a customer. And the typical In fact every single point of sale system in the world today, does not support a customer or checking out and adding on a cloud subscription or does not support a customer or checking out and adding on accessories or or other sort of options like that. And so we we you know in order to serve the brands that we work with the best we had to we had to think about those challenges. And we ended up just sort of building a lot of the pieces ourselves. [43:17] But that that kind of example I mean that's just one of many many things where like the existing tools out there are just not good enough for this new channel thats being created. And so when we you know I think as Scott was mentioning before like this this continuum of like you know a company is the way we are. The ideal path for a brand with us is that they start with something small in a handful of stores that they think are really good. Maybe a display is two feet and as they find success though maybe take out a room and build something thats a, more custom and and a bit more of an experience and I think we started to hear from some of our our our best customers are especially our large customers that, maybe a room inside of our flagship store wasn't enough and they wanted, a much larger kind of representation. And so we said Well of course like why not like we can easily take a lot of the stuff that we built and help other companies. [44:18] But the store just like we have. And I think even the business model that we have was useful in thinking about this because, when you are a new brand opening a store and maybe your vertical brand and you sell a few products but you don't have that many. It's actually hard to figure out like what your store looked like and what other like should you bring other third party products in there like you know should you have like you know a product duplicated. You know 20times in the same space. So our business model actually helps companies who deploy stores with us, find other brands that that may want to participate in their ecosystem and so they in effect. The the people who consume our platform on that side also kind of plug into this marketplace as a supply supplier. And so it's a unique product I don't think anyone else has ever worked or built a turnkey storefront that has staffing and build out and all the things that you need included. It's I mean we launched in April it's super early but you know we've there's a couple of. [45:34] But you know definitely a lot of interest on that saw from companies across categories not just in tech. Jason: [45:39] Nice in my remembering right. So I feel like I read something about him. There was a TED store that may have permanently or temporarily opened using built by beta. And then I think you guys did a net gearcompany in stores right. Scot & Vibhu: [45:56] Yeah. So we. So we launched it at TED. TED had asked us to come in and build the store with them. So that was that was a really cool experience for us. But yeah the net net your flagship was the first one that we announced and is live today in San Jose at Santana Row. So basically it's it's a it is it's a Netgear store it has their signage. It's got you know their logo on the receipts it's got their logo on the bags and on the employee's shirts. But behind the scenes we've actually we're actually running the store so it's our people they're on our payroll. We designed the experience with them and then we worked with them to find other third party products that would be sort of merchandise around theirs. But it's the first time that they've ever done something like this before. They've typically I mean they're gigantic company but they've typically, you know a wholesaled to Best Buy and a lot of multi-brand retailers like that and like a lot of enterprise company a lot of large companies they had been thinking through, this transition that's happening from wholesale direct to consumer and they don't want to miss out. And so you know in in that when you become a direct to consumer brand you start to think about retail differently. And I think we were we really worked with them to define the first version of the beta to be honest with you. [47:18] But they're just one of many companies that are going through this right now. This transition very well girl. It's kind of like experiential retail as a service. So everyone you know you have to have as a as a service on your name these days that is exactly how we talk about it. [47:37] Very cool that is a good time to pivot. Fellow entrepeneur so I love to talk about the nuts and bolts. I was looking on base and it said that you guys have rates 38 million. So progress on that and you have some really good blue chip investors like Khosla Ventures Comcast and then some strategics like me. And there I imagine it was kind of fun. Two or three years ago when you started pitching VCs on a retail concept because you know every headline is about end of stores and mageddon and whatnot, but you've restarted it. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that journey there. [48:13] Yeah. Yeah. We've we've raised a lot and in a short time frame. So what I'm going to say it doesn't sound authentic but it's true. It wasn't easy to raise the money. I think we you know in our seed round we must have approached about 75 investors and a lot of them didn't even want to talk to us. They didn't believe in brick and mortar the kinds of things that we heard about stores were apt to be honest with you were ridiculous. We we you know I think retail is kind of interesting in the sense that like everyone thinks that they know it because they shop in stores but very few people actually understand the dynamics. And we definitely face that a lot. But as as time has gone on I would say each year of our company the environment has gotten easier and easier for brick and mortar are concepts. And you know in this year Larry you've seen a lot of direct consumer brands getting funded and a lot of that a lot of funding is going into opening stores. And so I think our business case has been validated increasingly so. But you know a couple of years ago when we started it was definitely like you said like the headlines were just not good and a lot of people based there in vestment decisions on how the group is thinking. And that was probably a mistake. Jason: [49:41] And we're coming up on time but I want to ask this question because you guys you know you guys have developed some interesting category leading experiences up to now. Do you have a vision for where experiential retail is going. Like if we jump in a time machine and move forward like five years what's awesome experiential retail environment going to feel like that as it is it just a slightly more polished version of, what we're doing a day or do you see some significant changes. Scot & Vibhu: [50:14] So we were not a gimmicky company. So I don't you know we don't think a lot about how the store experience itself is going to change. But I would say that if you look at a macro level every. I mean you know this as well as I do but every bad retailer is going to go out of business. Between now and like you know 2040. [50:34] And they're you know a lot of them are going to be replaced by these new brands who are you know getting to a point where stores start to make sense. You know brands that sort of online. And and I think when you walk into a mall in the future really five years from now, it will primarily be a bunch of kind of direct to consumer and vertical brands taking up the space there and, I think that's great for customers because those products are better. They resonate with a different audience than maybe the typical traditional retailers that today occupy a lot of square feet, and and frankly like the business model these companies are using kind of naturally lends itself to better customer experience in the store because there's certain no conflict of interest between you know what a customerwants and what what the brand wants like that. These brands don't care whether that customer buys the product right there and then they they think about the store for lots of thing for customer service for learning for for events all things that people love. [51:46] But yeah we don't have a lot of insight into what the store will look like but I can tell you that if we have something to do with it a lot of stores will be designed around analytics and data and data capture. And so they'll probably look a little bit more like our stores than than not. Jason: [52:05] Yeah I hope you're right on that one. I know you and in the show you know at the beginning of the year we do this prediction show. And I feel like I used to do a prediction every year that retailers would get more serious about their in-store analytics and I keep losing on that prediction. So I would I would love your help in making that one finally be true. Scot & Vibhu: [52:26] Well it will be true by NEC and by just by companies these retailers going out of business and being replaced by new ones like us. Jason: [52:34] Yes yes. Although that cooling takes a little bit of time. But it's happened again. We've used up our allotted time serve if listeners have any questions that they didn't get answered during the show. We encourage them to jump on Facebook and ask questions and we certainly feel free to reach out to you you know to the extent that any of them are, focused on your business and of course if this show is valuable to you we sure would appreciate if you jump on iTunes and give us their five star review. Scot & Vibhu: [53:08] Thanks for joining us. And where can folks follow you online if they want to learn more about either what you're up to or beta. [53:17] Site. I look at every e-mail I get. So definitely email me via B.H. You made a dot com or you can follow me on Twitter. But to be honest with you I just tweet about beta. So if you if you want that that's the best place for Beta news. Jason: [53:34] Nice and Until next time. Happy Commercing.

Vibhu Norby is co-founder and CEO of b8ta, a software-powered retailer designed to make physical retail accessible for all. Norby was a lead engineer at Nest, a company acquired by Google which makes smart thermostats. Previously, Norby worked for MySpace and founded the family social network Origami Labs.

Vibhu Norby is the co-founder & CEO of B8ta, a new store designed for discovering, trying, & buying the latest tech products, as well as a new platform called “Built by B8ta”, which aims to power the future of physical retail experiences. Vibhu moved to silicon valley after college to join a startup. He was eventually fired from the job, but then joined another startup which was acquired by MySpace. From there, Vibhu joined YC with a social network startup of his own, raised some money, and was later acquired by Nest. It was there that Vibhu started to really get interested in the future of retail - especially for emerging hardware brands. Vibhu joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it was like running his own startups & working at Nest, why he started B8ta, how he thinks about the retail industry, what Built by B8ta is all about, what they’ve learnt scaling to 80 physical stores, what’s next for the startup, and much more.

This is a rerun episode so a re-release of the episode Vibhu Norby of b8ta. Why am I doing a rerun? Well, there are a few reasons for it. Rather than speed up like what most people do, I want to slow down at the beginning of the year. I am doing some energy management by not coming out with new content. Instead I'm reusing some content. This is in line with the first episode I have released this year which was about simplicity. Many times we're too busy, so busy that we forget to enjoy life and to celebrate some special episode from the past. This is the episode that you loved most in 2017, based on the number of downloads. By re-releasing it, I wanted to put a spotlight on them. Hardware startups, at least in the consumer space want to sell to the end customer and this episode has some important insights so listening to it again or the first time can prove useful. Vibhu was before with Nest, the smart thermostat maker. This is where he had the realization that retail is far from optimal and that one might have to rethink retail to bring it up to date, to capitalize on today's tech capabilities. b8ta is essentially a software-powered retailer. In this episode Vibhu talks about b8ta's contrarian belief on why brick and mortar stores are dying, how they want to bring back customers to the stores, and what the best brands do. Nowadays e-commerce topics is stealing the headlines, but contrary to this, people actually buy products in stores. You can also learn about conflict of interest between brands and retailers and how Vibhu wants to solve this conflict with his company. You can also find out how he validated his idea, what mistake he made during this time. He also walks us through the process what details make your brand sell or not sell inside a store. And many more topics will be covered, too. Enjoy! Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com Show highlights can be seen below: Why I am doing a rerun of this episode? - [0:37] How is the store model of b8ta reversing the trend of brick-and-mortar stores closing down? - [3:45] Previous professional experience that lead Vibhu to creating a platform for solving the retail conflict - [6:44] Important observations that evolved into replacing a whole system – [12:55] How did he validate the idea? - [14:28] Key ingredients that differentiate b8ta from their competitors - [17:23] How does the platform pay the makers? - [20:55] Importance of timing and speed of bringing products to market - [22:05] A walk through b8ta's four-step customer journey that they analyse - [24:58] Plan for success – mistakes the founders made while growing the company [28:05] If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [31:57] Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [32:28] Vibhu's everyday routine – [33:11] Some cultural differences that Vibhu observed throughout his career – [34:58] What is the best way to reach Vibhu? – [36:46]

My guest this time is from Silicon Valley, USA, Vibhu Norby of b8ta. This is an episode that you should simply not miss - many many things to learn from and a guest to inspire you. Vibhu was before with Nest, the smart thermostat maker. This is where he had the realization that retail is far from optimal and that one might have to rethink retail to bring it up to date, to capitalize on today's tech capabilities. b8ta is essentially a software-powered retailer. In this episode Vibhu talks about b8ta's contrarian belief on why brick and mortar stores are dying, how they want to bring back customers to the stores, and what the best brands do. Nowadays e-commerce topics is stealing the headlines, but contrary to this, people actually buy products in stores. You can also learn about conflict of interest between brands and retailers and how Vibhu wants to solve this conflict with his company. You can also find out how he validated his idea, what mistake he made during this time. He also walks us through the process what details make your brand sell or not sell inside a store. And many more topics will be covered, too. Enjoy! Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com Show highlights can be seen below: How is the store model of b8ta reversing the trend of brick-and-mortar stores closing down? - [3:45] Previous professional experience that lead Vibhu to creating a platform for solving the retail conflict - [6:44] Important observations that evolved into replacing a whole system – [12:55] How did he validate the idea? - [14:28] Key ingredients that differentiate b8ta from their competitors - [17:23] How does the platform pay the makers? - [20:55] Importance of timing and speed of bringing products to market - [22:05] A walk through b8ta's four-step customer journey that they analyse - [24:58] Plan for success – mistakes the founders made while growing the company [28:05] If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [31:57] Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [32:28] Vibhu's everyday routine – [33:11] Some cultural differences that Vibhu observed throughout his career – [34:58] What is the best way to reach Vibhu? – [36:46]

In part 2 of Vibhu's interview, he and Brendan discuss the idea of the App Store for physical products, changes across the retail category and the secular growth of ecommerce. More on b8ta: b8ta, a software-powered retailer designed to make physical retail accessible for all, was founded in 2015 by Nest alums Vibhu Norby (CEO), William Mintun (COO), and Phillip Raub (CMO). b8ta helps people discover, try, and buy new tech products while empowering makers with a simple retail-as-a-service model that puts them in control. b8ta has locations in Palo Alto, Santa Monica, and Seattle. For more information: b8ta.com

Vibhu Norby, CEO of b8ta, sits down with Brendan to discuss their retail-as-a-service business model, creating a new shopping experience for brands and customers, and how data and metrics play a major role for today's retailers. More on b8ta: b8ta, a software-powered retailer designed to make physical retail accessible for all, was founded in 2015 by Nest alums Vibhu Norby (CEO), William Mintun (COO), and Phillip Raub (CMO). b8ta helps people discover, try, and buy new tech products while empowering makers with a simple retail-as-a-service model that puts them in control. b8ta has locations in Palo Alto, Santa Monica, and Seattle. For more information: https://b8ta.com

‘Tis almost the season to offer gifts large and small for the loved ones in your life. In the podcast, Kevin and I focus mostly on larger gifts, because once you add connectivity the price takes a big jump. We also discuss Black Friday deals. Vibhu Norby, the CEO of B8ta, is on the show … Continue reading Episode 86: The Internet of Things Podcast gift guide