Welcome back. This week while Lucas was out, Anita caught up with Devin Lewtan, cofounder and CEO of web3 media production studio Mad Realities. Mad Realities is the team behind “Proof of Love,” a dating show that allows its audience to vote and engage with its content using NFTs. Lewtan talked about how accidentally creating the viral Clubhouse show “NYU Girls Roasting Tech Guys” led her to launching a Paradigm and Paris Hilton-backed web3 startup. She also shared her insights on building community through web3 among people who might otherwise roll their eyes at that term. Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper: https://techcrunch.com/newsletters
Welcome back. This week while Lucas was out, Anita caught up with Devin Lewtan, cofounder and CEO of web3 media production studio Mad Realities. Mad Realities is the team behind “Proof of Love,” a dating show that allows its audience to vote and engage with its content using NFTs. Lewtan talked about how accidentally creating the viral Clubhouse show “NYU Girls Roasting Tech Guys” led her to launching a Paradigm and Paris Hilton-backed web3 startup. She also shared her insights on building community through web3 among people who might otherwise roll their eyes at that term.
Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper: https://techcrunch.com/newsletters
Anita Ramaswamy 0:04
Hey everyone, its Anita Welcome to chain reaction where we unpack and explain the latest in crypto news drama and trends breaking things down block by block for the crypto curious.
Every Tuesday we interview an expert in the web three space. This week I talked to Devin Luke tan co founder and CEO of Mad realities, which produces an interactive web three dating show called proof of love that uses NF T's to engage its audience. The show ended its first season in April just after raising $6 million in seed funding from investors, which included crypto VC firm paradigm as well as Paris Hilton. So I sat down with Devin to hear about what the team learned when it put out its first season this year and what's in store for this fall and beyond. Before launching that realities, Devon worked as a product engineer at Clay Ron and was head of growth at the popular clubhouse show. NYU girls roasting tech guys. So super excited for this one. Let's get into it.
Hi, Devin, how are you?
Devin Lewtan 1:02
I'm good. How are you doing? Nina?
Anita Ramaswamy 1:04
It's great to have you. I'm super excited to talk to you about Mad realities and proof of love and everything. But before we get into all of that I wanted to ask you about if you can share a little more on your journey to web three. I feel like you have a pretty interesting story. I mean, I first heard of you what I was following and why you girls roasting tech guys. So how did you get from there to co founding this company.
Devin Lewtan 1:25
I usually like to set the scene a little bit farther back. I went to NYU I graduated in 2020. And I was in Gallatin, which is the School of Individualized Study at NYU when I was at NYU was creating my own major and it was called The Power of conversation. So it was basically what makes a good conversation between people regardless of how well you know each other. And then how do you build it into the products we use? It was a combination of comp sci linguistics, design philosophy, I was very into chatbots. I was interning at a chatbot in college. But it started to turn into more of what does it look like to host communities? What does it look like to introduce people that wouldn't have anything to talk about and all of a sudden they feel very close. And I was always kind of like playing matchmaker in my life, which is funny and kind of foreshadowing. I was working at a company going down the path and doing like enterprise SAS postgrad, I was doing engineering at a startup called CLI. And then while I was there, peak pandemic in February 2021, my friends and I were like, screwing around on clubhouse together. I was like, as clubhouse was growing exponentially. Like every day, I'm pretty sure they had like 8 million active users. At that time. It was like Elon Musk was on. It was like the big peak moment. Yeah. And my friends and I were just like scurrying around. And all of a sudden, every time that we started for fun, turned into a 5000 person live what we called bar simulation, where the first night we were ever doing this, it was basically people in our room would come up, raise their hand, if they saw someone in the audience that they thought was hot, they'd hit shoot their shot at them. And then we would visit facilitate the conversation and roast up guys that they talked about their business or if they were being like a meme. It was totally this like lightning in a bottle moment that we were not planning for, but we were like, okay, shit, like there's something here. This really resonates with people. And so we totally just ran blue. Yeah, we were like, okay, like there's something here. This clearly resonates with people. What would happen if we ran with it? So we started running it regularly. We were running it twice a week, we had a bunch of celebrity guest judges on the show like Diplo tanks, Justin Kahn, Cody co it was like Logan Paul. It was like a very weird mix of like internet personalities. And then also like tech founders and personalities. We called it like a collision of worlds. I think that clubhouse did a really good job bringing a lot of different types of people together. And then we would also work with brands and do giveaways for the best pitches. And it was like a very fun and native integration into the app. And so we ended up running it like after that first night for about six months, I became obsessed with it. It was so funny, because in the beginning, I was like, I could never embrace something called NYU girls roasting tech guys. And then I was like, I am this person. I am an NYU.
Anita Ramaswamy 4:13
I'm an NYU girl too. So I feel that.
Devin Lewtan 4:15
And I work in tech and I work. I'm surrounded by guys all the time. And like, This is who I am like, this is how I exist. And so I just kind of became obsessed with it. I felt like it was this like live new interactive media format, where the community was actually the product. People were the content, they were creating the content with us, they were participating in it, they could have been a part of it. Or they could just sit and watch but there's this like, emotional, visceral feeling. And people were coming back and listening for hours at a time and we're like creating memes around it. And so I was just really excited about it because it felt like this new way of plugging people in and actually like really tapping into a social network with content but also just making it feel like a very fun experience and new way to like, entirely interact.
Anita Ramaswamy 4:59
Yeah, So how did a web three come into this? I assume you're getting there.
Devin Lewtan 5:03
Yeah. And so one of the things that was really interesting was that we created this insanely valuable community and this really valuable show. But we were beholden to the platform that we existed on, because we basically if clubhouse grew, we grew. And if clubhouse didn't, we didn't, we took it into our own hands to figure out how to grow outside and not be dependent on a certain platform. And that looks like trying to make content on other platforms. We signed with me to explore traditional distribution channels for content. And we worked with an engineer built our own, like the bootleg discord, or people, we could get people's phone numbers and emails, if they joined our like live chat during the show. I think this whole process was extremely enlightening, because it kind of just showed the options that creators have, you can either go to a network to get funding and old executives are making decisions around what gets funded and are optimizing for things that are guaranteed to work rather than like riskier, more like compelling boundary pushing stories, and you lose creative control and ownership. Or you can go to something like a platform like YouTube or Tik Tok, where you're at Mercy of the algorithms, and you are essentially making no money and leaning into like, what it takes to go viral. Right. So a lot of this was inspiring new ideas and new conversations between ours, my now co founder when we were hanging out at the time, and I left my job stopped working on the show last summer started really chatting more deeply with my co founder Alice around what it would look like to make the first piece of content that's uniquely enabled by web three. What that means is rather than it being a piece of content poorly funded, or a piece of content about crypto, like, what does it look like to actually have a native way that people can interact, have utility with NF Ts, and then ultimately try to shift the way that you fund and create content that was really my first introduction into web three, like I thought I was going to make some like collection of rows and FTEs and just try and make some money. And then I ended up being like, what if we literally disrupted media and Hollywood, which is it's honestly very character as it fits my, my personality. But it ended up being that we put out a blog post basically saying, what would it look like if we put on this dating show where people meant it or NF Ts, they could vote on who made it into the show what happens and who wins and get like fun, special, like governance perks based on the tear that they bought. So we put this blog post out in November with the idea of just okay, this is a proof of concept, we had 172 eath worth of passes minted, which was about 500k that got to go towards production of our show. And we built out our team to be able to essentially whip up a show in a couple of months and run this like five week crazy in person interactive, like community driven dating show in New York, where people were getting voted on,
Anita Ramaswamy 7:53
how big is your your core team?
Devin Lewtan 7:54
So we are six right now. And with contractors, we are closer to 50.
Anita Ramaswamy 8:00
I guess what I'm wondering is, you know, what is sort of the process behind putting this whole season together? I mean, you just wrapped up season zero in April, can you walk me through just sort of the writing and the casting and what roles different team members have and how like the audience engagement plays into that.
Devin Lewtan 8:13
It was crazy with this number of people like startups, you're always wearing a lot of hats. But I think that this just became so much bigger than we ever realized. And then we all of a sudden, we're doing so many different things. It started where we basically wrote up this idea of like, okay, what's gonna happen is that people are going to create videos online, across all platforms, auditioning to be on our show. And that's going to be the first level of content. And so like, people are going to market it for us because they're going to audition to be on the show. And we're going to make it so that our Rose holders can vote on who makes it onto the show with this leaderboard. So basically, we built this site. Alice is our CTO. And she basically oversaw with the help of a couple people from our community building out this game that was like a Tinder, like swiping on our paths. So that was the first piece that we did. And it was kind of like we did this incrementally. We were like, Okay, we're gonna build casting while we're figuring out the show. And then we are going to figure out the show as we go and just kind of like keep, like running exactly what was in front of us. So casting was the first part. While that was happening, we were starting to assemble a team around set production around writing scripts for the episodes, I basically just reached out to literally anyone I knew that was in the creative space on Twitter, because I I was supposed to be our producer. And then I was like, I don't know anything about producing I ran an audio show from my bedroom. And so we ended up meeting Adam, who was our third co founder, and we were introduced through a friend because he was working at a production company or a studio and was really like disheartened by the current state of the entertainment industry and was looking to start his own studio and was really interested about web three and then had all these ideas around unscripted content and like around more participatory young leaning audience CES. And so when he heard that we were able to raise the funding that we did from NF Ts, he was like, Okay, this is the path to what I'm trying to do. So that was a really big unlock for us bringing on someone who had production experience, who had the right people and his network. So our team kind of just shaped out from there, where once we had the casting piece, and we had this producer, who was now like our head of creative, we then built out the team to basically run a production studio from an office in Greenpoint.
Anita Ramaswamy 10:30
That's wild, it sounds like season zero went really well. And I read that season one is kicking off this fall, when does it come out?
Devin Lewtan 10:37
So it's going to be later this year, we're running a couple of different experiments right now, the first one will start to roll out in September. But we think the next couple of things that we're releasing is all interconnected. So the next show is one part of it. But it's actually like one part of a larger plan to move towards being a network and a place that other people can create shows. In addition to us, our goal isn't to be the only people making content in this way. We want to set an example for people and say, You can do this yourself. And we'll provide you with some of the tools and distribution and support you need in the beginning as we build
Anita Ramaswamy 11:11
out our own network. Yeah. So that's something I wanted to ask you more about. I know that theoretically, contributors have some ownership of the content through the NF T's. But what about people who want to come in and produce a show through your platform like financially? How is that sustainable for them? Is that like a source of income? Yeah,
Devin Lewtan 11:27
yeah. So what we're experimenting with right now is a couple different things. One is what it looks like to be powered by mad realities. That's the first. So we had a couple of people who reached out after we did our first season saying, like, I have this idea, this is why I think it makes sense in this format, some were more interactive, or like in line with our thesis than others. And so right now, what we're doing is essentially supporting a creative studio in New York that we met by building out their token system for a game they're building. So that's something we're gonna be releasing, we're not going to be able at this stage to support something at the scale of proof of love for other people necessarily, but the goal is through our own originals, and through multiple different experiments, we can essentially amass a Treasury or people can make proposals and get grants from us and get the support and start to build this ecosystem around projects in the space that fall within the thesis of the content we want to create. So what the next show will be, is essentially an opportunity for discovery of new talent. And so that might look like discovery of personalities or discovery of new shows that we want to create. But for people down the line, the idea is that we can essentially, like give them grants at a certain point where they can experiment on their own. But we focus more on like very experimental stuff, rather than a traditional show, like what we think of TV meaning is entirely different than the current definition.
Anita Ramaswamy 12:49
Yeah, that's something I would love to hear you expand on, because one thing I was thinking is like, as a creator, like, would people actually want that audience engagement on their work? I mean, there was we interviewed Aaron Levie of box on on this show, he was sort of talking about how decentralized decision making can be really clunky, you know, imagine like, the iPhone is about to release a new feature, and like you ask everyone to vote on what they want the new feature to be, that could be hard. So how does that work?
Devin Lewtan 13:12
Yeah, I mean, the way that we think about it is like, there's definitely guardrails to what's decided to show level, it's a little bit more of just like interactive or participatory. So in the case of our show, like, who gets voted in who gets voted out which the name be like, what was everything we decided, the place that we think it gets interesting is actually at the network level, when people start to make decisions around what they want to watch or don't want to watch. Like, we like the idea of there being a handful of shows, and people can rage quit a show, if they want it. They're like, I don't like this show, this show doesn't deserve this slot. This time. I think there's a lot of interesting like dynamics that can come from governance around that type of decision making, rather than I'm gonna control the making of the show, like we want creators to feel like they can bring to life their best ideas, right? And then like, let people have a say, in the parts they want to or like have more direct interactivity. But the part where we see it being interesting is actually at the media network level. It's like we're placing an algorithm.
Anita Ramaswamy 14:14
Right, right, I guess. Yeah, that that makes sense. Like in terms of the funding aspect of it, I know that you guys raised 6 million in seed funding in April, which is pretty cool, and that you're structured like a doubt. So how did that work? Like how do you go about the fundraising process? And how is your team involved in making those decisions?
Devin Lewtan 14:31
So we are like a pseudo Dow and the fact that again, we're very specific around what was decided by Rose holders. If you look at the right app, essentially, like people who bought our NF TS got very specific governance powers, like top people could get a video of everyone bowing down to them in person, like person event, or you could have a say in what someone a war like it was types of things like that, that we basically opened up as like a store of governance powers. In terms of when it came to fundraising, like we knew that some of the things that we want to do, were definitely pushing boundaries. And it would be nice to have real institutional support behind legal behind, building on a platform behind like really thinking through what it would take to essentially go after like a funding model and change that. And so that was some of the decision making behind why we took venture money and wanted to actually like, have runway to figure this out. Because there's no clear winner on what this looks like in the media and web three space. But it's definitely interesting, because we are very set on not putting our funding towards content, like the idea is that content should be funded by this new model in which there's this Treasury as a large like place for initial support. But then a lot of this is going to come from the interactivity and the participation of the people in our network. And so now we're just building up the platform at the funding.
Anita Ramaswamy 15:55
Got it. Yeah. And I imagined for like, if you brought on a new Creator, who wanted to do a new show, would that be like an entirely different NFT collection, and they would sort of set the terms of, you know, what their token holders would get?
Devin Lewtan 16:06
Yeah. So that's what the goal is, so that people can have their own passes that let people enter their universe. And then basically, we would have like, some type of points for the Mad realities universe in which if you create something of a lot of value, you can see some piece of value in our like, we're gonna have like a store of things that you can purchase with Mad blocks, and like people can interact. But yeah, the idea is that it should be self sufficient, at a certain point. But in the beginning, we supported that.
Anita Ramaswamy 16:37
One thing I'm curious about is, you know, reading about Mad realities, I feel like I've seen a lot of stuff on social media and just stuff and like, you know, different magazines and online about your shows and how they work and a lot of your in person events. And so I'm curious about, like, how much of your audience is actually crypto native versus people who don't really care that much about crypto and are just in it for the entertainment?
Devin Lewtan 16:56
Yeah, I would say in the beginning, we know that we were early in thinking about media and web three. And it's actually kind of funny to think of it as like riding a nice wave in a way like, we started by going after a crypto audience purely. But then as we got closer to actually like launching it into the world, we started focusing on a less crypto native audience, I would say that probably 60 plus percent of our audience is not your typical crypto native user. And that was intentional, because we think the thing that's going to bring the next 100 million people into crypto is going to be content, because it's intuitive. It's a real consumer use case. And it's something that I think like if you can actually set an example of what it looks like for something to be powered by crypto, but being a real product that people see value in that feels like the way to actually onboard new people. So it was cool, because with our show that we ran proof of love as a proof of concept, I would say there were a lot of people who came for the entertainment and might not have understood exactly what this bigger vision is. But they were able to say to their friend, I'm pretty sure that these rows holders that keep engineering are people who bought NF T's, those NF T's let them vote on things. And then the money from the NF TS fund did the show. And then they're like, that actually makes sense to me. Like that makes sense to me more than most projects in the space, right. So that was an interesting moment for a lot of people where they were like, that's actually kind of cool. Like, that's not really like the scammy type of use case that I think about with NF T's. And this is actually something I would see myself out, which is really changing my perspective on the space. And so that was really cool. I would say also our audience was, I think, like 65% female, based on our SMS list, which is interesting. Oh, cool. And so we and also like 75% in New York.
Anita Ramaswamy 18:45
Wow. Yeah. So I'm curious, did you offer any sort of support for people who maybe like hadn't ever set up a wallet or minted an NFT? or anything like that?
Devin Lewtan 18:52
Yeah. So at our finale, which we hosted at Webster Hall, that was like our biggest moment where we had like, 1000 people who came for this finale, which is very silly, but one of the things we did was anyone who voted on who should win the jackpot of the series get sent a condom and lefty, because we thought that like people who are losing their NFT virginity, stay safe. Yeah, gotta have a condom in your wallet. And so we had people who are walking around helping them set up Coinbase wallets, which is funny, but I would say like, one of the things that we're focusing on now as we build out our app is that it's important that that's not one of the steps in the process, you should just be able to create an account, not think about the fact that it's connected to a wallet, a wallet is compatible. But if you sign up, you should be able to have an NFT in your wallet and your app and not even think about it. It just is like a badge. And so a lot of the stuff that we're focusing on is like what is the experience like to be so user friendly and mobile first, where it doesn't even feel like it's a crypto product?
Anita Ramaswamy 19:55
Yeah, I'm curious what your thoughts are on whether you feel like blockchain technology Then like crypto is necessary for you to run the show. I mean, it seems like a lot of things like maybe you could do it without the blockchain. But what is sort of the reason for building it in this ecosystem?
Devin Lewtan 20:09
I mean, in the beginning, I'd say it was definitely like these building blocks are so much easier to set up what we're trying to do, then building our whole own membership system are our own way of like sending people rewards, the fact that you can have someone sign up or like mentioned NFT. And that is essentially like marking them as a member in your universe. And then there's all these plugins like that is such an amazing way to spin something up quickly. I would say now, as we think about what it means going forward, I would say one of the things that's important that we still see value in with the blockchain is status on who was there early, particularly in the fact that like, our goal is to help people discover new creatives, new creators, new talent, and to show that support early on is actually something that, again, you don't need blockchain to do this. But it just is intuitively the way it's designed. And it's solving some of the similar cases. And so I think when it comes down to the things we care about down the line around ownership status, and like actual governance around the network, it's just so much easier to have the system set up.
Anita Ramaswamy 21:15
That makes sense. I want to wrap up by asking you a question about sort of the future in the long term. I know that, you know, sentiment around crypto and Web3 has changed a lot in the past couple of months. And you know, people were really excited about it. And now some of that excitement has come back down to earth in some ways. How do you think that will affect your long term growth? Like if Web3 starts becoming this thing that like turns people off? Once again?
Devin Lewtan 21:35
Well, I would say a lot of what we're doing again, is like inspired by the space, but it's in no way dependent. And so that's what's cool is that, again, if you look at the demographic of the people who are coming to our shows in person, they were learning about crypto, but it wasn't like this super, it was an extra like bonus point. But to them, they enjoyed the thing regardless. And I think that's actually really special that we were able to create a product that was not purely based on like incentives of tokens for people to feel excited about it. Right. So I would say for us, like, especially in this next wave of what we're planning to release, we barely call it a web three product, we rarely call it a crypto product. But we still feel strongly about the fact that the underlying fundamentals and like what we're trying to do in terms of how we can essentially change funding for creatives and creators is still like, yeah, we're a web three web 2.5 company.
Anita Ramaswamy 22:32
Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on to chat about this. This was super interesting.
Devin Lewtan 22:36
Yeah, no, this is good. We have a lot of stuff to look forward to. So yeah, pay close attention in the next couple of months.
Anita Ramaswamy 22:42
I'll keep an eye out for the experiments and the fall. Thanks, Devon. Yeah, thank you.
Lucas Matney 22:48
We'll be back every week with interviews with the experts in the web three space. Catch Anita, Jackie and myself every Thursday for the latest in crypto news. You can keep up with us on Spotify, Apple Music or your favorite pod platform and subscribe to our companion newsletter also called chain reaction. Links to the newsletter and more from our guests can be found in our show notes and be sure to follow us on Twitter at chain underscore reaction.
Anita Ramaswamy 23:10
Chain Reaction is hosted by myself Anita Ramaswamy along with my co hosts Lucas Matney and Jackie melanic. We are produced by Yashad Kulkarni on our associate producer as Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal Keller Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator Alyssa stringer at leats audience development and Henry pika that manages TechCrunch his audio products. Thanks for listening and see you next week.