Joe Zhou. He’s the founder and CEO of FirstBlood, an eSports startup that recently broke the speed record for crowdfunding, specifically in the crypto world. Prior to founding FirstBlood, Joe co-founded Alt-Options, a Boston based fintech or financial technology startup that built the first American style option trading platform for digital currencies. Joe holds a BSBA from Boston University Questrom School of Business and an entrepreneur residence at Babson College.
Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – Lean Startup What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Joe wished he was less concerned about how he was perceived in school
Time Stamped Show Notes:
02:11 – Nathan introduces Joe to the show 03:00 – FirstBlood is a platform that allows players to play games, not just for fun but for money 03:23 – FirstBlood charges money for each game or tournament played 03:49 – FirstBlood was launched in April 2016 03:55 – Joe’s co-founder, Anik, is also a big gamer 04:08 – They were both fans of League of Legends 04:14 – They attended a Hackathon where they were challenged to build an application that has never existed before 05:00 – Joe co-founded Alt-Options while he was still in college 05:15 – The technology was built from scratch 05:18 – There were about 2K users during the testing phase 05:50 – It was bootstrapped and $50K was raised from families and friends 06:02 – There were a group people who wanted to get into the space and Joe worked with them as a consultant for half a year 06:44 – Joe decided to do the token issuance because of the support they were getting 06:55 – DAO was successful until hackers were able to get into it due to a bug 07:19 – FirstBlood was one of the most promising projects that was going to DAO 07:26 – DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization is like a decentralized venture capital firm; it was managed by every person who has a token in it 07:52 – FirstBlood was operating under Project Tron in the DAO community 08:15 – After the bug, FirstBlood started building what was needed to run a successful crowdfunding campaign 08:52 – Joe and Anik gave talks and presented multiple ethereum meetups regarding their project 09:37 – Joe came home with a budget of 3-5 years runway for the entire team 09:46 – They’ve raised $5M in funding 09:52 – Team had 6 people and now they have 15 people 11:14 – They’ve calculated the ethereum’s pricing and deployed the contract to the network 11:51 – FirstBlood raised the money in just the first four blocks and processed in just 7 minutes 12:41 – FirstBlood has sold 465,313 ether tokens 13:10 – Joe shares why they released their own FirstBlood tokens 13:16 – Ethereum has some limitations 13:34 – The FirstBlood tokens are given unique utilities that are crucial to making the network work 13:42 – First layer is the transactional level utility where both ether and FirstBlood tokens work 14:20 – Witness program utility can only be run by FirstBlood tokens 14:52 – DotA is the first mobile strategy game and now is a stand alone 15:53 – When a game is settled, a set of information is sent to a network of witness nodes 16:02 – Witness nodes will then run tests using computational power to fetch the data and cross reference the data to make sure that it is valid 16:14 – The data then gets published into the blockchain and smart contract 16:32 – The winner of the games will pay a small percentage fee to the network 17:40 – The token price isn’t that important for the team 18:14 – The ratio of the token is arbitrary 19:24 – A lot of Dapps don’t have a real money function yet 19:39 – FirstBlood is closed to launching the beta 19:59 – Currently, there are 1592 people who have FirstBlood tokens 20:51 – Joe doesn’t think that it’s risky for them to have a lot of people handling the network 21:06 – The selection process has a cap rate on how one will get selected 21:19 – “We did cap at 1% for a maximum impact” 22:20 – Joe can’t disclose the amount he owns from FirstBlood tokens 22:50 – The allocation for founders is around 10% of the tokens 23:24 – Nathan asks Joe if it’s possible to cash out a million tokens into real dollars if he ever needs it 24:35 – FirstBlood made the headlines because they raised a $5M equivalent to ether 26:38 – The fund is owned by the project 27:08 – The ether can be used to keep buying the project 27:30 – Some of the money from the funds are used to pay the team 28:03 – FirstBlood liquidates 80% of the ether post cross-sales and 20% remains in the smart contract 28:39 – FirstBlood has around $4M in the bank that pays salaries and other company expenses 29:55 – The technology of FirstBlood has made people more interested in the project 31:00 – The decision to raise $5M was from the advice they’ve received regarding what it takes to increase network profitability 31:51 – Ether was valued when Joe liquidated the 372K shares at $11 per share 32:38 – Joe didn’t wait for the share value to increase because they needed the money to get the project running 34:25 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
In crypto, startups create their own currency if they think their network will be better of with it. Listen to your advisory board—if it’s time to raise for specific purpose, your business might be better of because of that decision. People will become interested in your project if it’s first in the space and they believe in your technology.
Resources Mentioned:
Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio booksShow Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
