all right. Thank you so much For 20 into forward Thinking Founders, this is the podcast will be highlight. Undiscovered talent. We're scanning. Why Combinator, Pioneer Product Hunt Twitter, Indie hackers all these different networks to find really interesting founders and interesting projects and start ups. And we feature them on the podcast before you've probably heard it, any of them and that what's great about this is you get to follow along on the journey as they become more and more successful and say I knew them when? So thank you so much opportunity in the foreword Thinking Founders and Let's get into our next founder You haven't heard of. But you will. All right. How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Ford thinking Founders. When we talk to founders about their company,

their visions for the future and how they do collide today, I'm very say that they'd be talking to you. Robbie Ferguson, who was a co founder of immutable. Welcome to the show. How's it going?

Thanks, Matt. It's going really well. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, excited to have you on? I remember when I found you on the internet. I'm like this is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. And now you talk to you about it. So people for people that don't know what you what you do or what mutable is Can you give us an idea of what you're working on?

Absolutely. Andi, Thanks for the compliment. I It's always funny that the reactions I get when I tell people what we do is either, like, I have no idea what you're talking about or heart that actually makes sense. But it is kind of crazy s o. It's nice doing something Double. I think, uh, what we do is immutable is a technology company that basically allows you to trade your items in video games and any sports for real money. And we support this natively, which means that we work with the games themselves or make them ourselves. In the case of our flagship title built on our part fall because there's there's no real kind of secure way to build this without the compliance is of the developers themselves.

Okay, so look what's walk through this. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your feature title you like your primary game, at least at the moment, is God unchained. And

and that's right.

I see that it is a free to play competitive card game where players actually own their cards. Can you describe? But what is God's on? Shane? They. Can you explain what you mean by the howdy players? What is it doing to actually own your cards?

Absolutely. It's a good question on Bond, often internally will come up with phrases on realize that they have a meaning toe last. But they don't have meanings to people outside of the organization. And so a big part of our mission is to explain. What does ownership actually make? I think it's quite simple. If you want something you can and freely trade that thing but anything you want and no one can take it away from you without your permission. So so too simple axioms. Andi, Almost every single video game item and built doesn't follow one, let alone both of those actives. I am so by real ownership we mean that when you buy a card in God's unchanged when you earn a car in God's unchained, you can sell that card for real money you can trade that card for whatever you like with whomever you want. Andi, you have guarantees that we can never take that card away from you. And importantly,

not taking a card away from you is much more than just saying we can never take that asset out of your adventurous. It's also you have guarantees over the long term scarcity of identical digital assets. Because even if I can't take it away from you, if I print a trillion identical assets and give them to every person in the world, I've effectively diluted the value of your asset equivalent to it is if I had just still learning

from you. So explain to me it. So let's say I buy e card in God's unchanging and I own a card and I can sell it for for any anything. Can you kind of give me, like, a basic idea of what determines a card to value? Is it a marketplace like on the gods? Unchain where they I think it's worth this? Or is this really how does that how is value determined?

Exactly? There is absolutely a marketplace. We run one, and also there are many third party websites which run their own marketplaces for God's unchanged. The really cool thing is Thea amount of development that has gone into those websites is insane, I think partially due to the fact that we basically revenue share with anyone without adds value to our ecosystem. So we have ecosystem websites which have death building functionality which have marketplaces aren't that have earned more than six figures just by basically building this website and then linking people to our game

and what something that I've been thinking a lot about, like what we kind of were talking about before we started recording is like, I think that trading cards they've always been kind of popular with a certain amount of people, but I will. You kind of enabled is is a new type of game to it to exist and knew almost capably. I don't even know if you call it an asset class between, huh? Talk about it. How do you what it with Scott, with the technology used built on and with God's and Shane, what are some things that could be built on top of this like it's almost hard to imagine what can be done so you can give me some ideas only what you'd like to be still on top of this technology and what you think could be possible.

Yeah, it's a great question. There's a lot of talk about what doesn't open ID him. Registry. Andi. Real world credible economy enabled the video games that wasn't possible before. I think there are a lot of cool ideas. One of them is interoperability. But I actually think that interoperability is is probably a couple of years off really coming to fruition, which is simply like interoperability, which basically means I could take. This is Card, which is openly viewable, is on the item registry for God's unchanged, and then I could use that cloud in in some other with you again. But I don't think that there's currently an economic imperatives. Are video games toe to collaborate in this way?

It's it's difficult to say the probably the closest analogy and you know that the rial centralized gaming world is when fortnight does a massive partnership with Nike, and suddenly you can purchase no Nike skins for for your character and also some kind of items in fortnight might give you real world discounts so you could do that. But in a much more effective way with this system. For instance, where if you owned a digital copy off, say, a Nike shoe in fortnight on our platform, you could provably use that to get into exclusive concepts to get a discount on Real world True's to I mint Yourself a custom pair of shoes which match your online avatar. There are a bunch of things that are a provably doable. Only with this technology, I suppose, the other cool things that I would love to say. I think the gods unchain in particular is the economy really maturing into something which eyes akin to to a kind of an ordinary economy on Basically, what you see is that for any traded assets about a certain liquidity, you get things like derivatives are you get things like are people creating products which are trying to increase the utility on availability of various asset class? It's on.

One of the awesome things is, you know, a big inspiration for us. It is the real paper magic. The gathering, right, like you can trade those cards. You do have guarantees around. Well, no one can take this physical ownership away from me. I think we create a super set of that ownership where you have guarantees around long term scarcity. And will they have a minute's card again? But one of the really cool things is the secondary market. Kaplan Magic. The gathering cards dwarfs any primary sales. So you know,

I'm not sure how much they're selling a year, but the estimated secondary market cap, but all night of the gathering carbon existence is somewhere between 10 to 20 billion U. S. Dollars. And so if you can create an economy like that, we don't even have to have primary sales, which generates revenue. All we have to do is Boston. That economy take a small clip on facilitating trades, and we have a business model that is way more aligned with consumers interests than anything else.

Yeah, this is it's fascinating. E have a couple more questions. Then we'll go into a big vision and an app. So you were you were talking about some other players in this space like fortnight and whatnot. I'm wondering that it are you. Would you say your role with with immutable God's unchained are is your like part of the stack to make any game applicable. The things in the real world are you, like a game creator that only games like this early, how would you say you fit in to the overall gaming and e sports environment? Like what? What? What's the city where specifically, do you want to fit in or is that seat to be determined?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that there's a couple of stages, but how we want to fit in at the moment is really not in the interests off the biggest gaining publishers in the world to use an economy or software similar to this. And that's because they're the beneficiaries of a very captive and very profitable, uh, ecosystem. You know that the fortnight's of the world are making multiple billions a year. So is League of Legends. Mobile gaming is some of the highest margin industries and rapidly consolidating because of the power that the top companies have. So I think that the growth market for us in the medium turn are medium sized publishers for whom our technology represents strong advantage. It's in terms of the ability to acquire and retained users the closed uses will play Andi users will stick around on games, which drew more for them on by Do more for them. I mean, they offer them really economic value when they buy an item, rather than that being simply a rental model, which the current model is,

and also offer them some former real meaningful economic value for playing again. So you could effectively earn money by by playing again. And so I think, you know, and we have thes studios reaching out to us and saying, Well, hey, you know, we aren't the biggest that we're not the smallest but we think that if we used our technology, we could reach a much, much wider audience. And therefore it kind of makes sense for us to do an experiment here that said, It's early days and that's why we built our own game to prove that listing works in the first life

and I have to ask, you know it. What would you say is the 10 year, 20 year giant giant vision that you have for this company, and how big could it get and what will what will life looks like if it gets that big.

That's a great question. I guess people often tend to give quite quite lofty responses toe the long term vision. I think I have quite a specific vision, which is, I think, that the majority of our waking hours as humans is going to slip more and more into entertainment space as a civilization grows older. And I think that we'll see in two decades, particularly is video games approach near real life levels of fidelity. People will start to Stendhal their life in virtual reality. Uh, I'm not making a value judgment on that, but I think it's a never in that world. It is very, very important to me that consumers have rights around digital assets that are akin to physical assets, because at that point, the bridge between physical and digital is no more than an arbitrary distinction. Uh,

and so we essentially have the owners of that infrastructure, whether it be you know, Facebook or whether it be epic. Whomever looked like that, they're currently beat the incumbents. Looking toe in that space would have complete control over people's lives and meanings. Within that time, there would be the central bank making digital assets that impacted these people's identities that advertised it. There are atoms, their social relationships on their data. And so I think that unless you could have governance and restraints on these digital central backs, I say, Well, actually, we need to make real economies. We need to create real scarcity around digital items that consumers can be protected and have guarantees in the same way is in the physical world. It's looking like it's just gonna be a, you know, an extension of the very captive relationship that currently exists in video gaming.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's fascinating to hear for my last question, what can I ask that you have for the community of listening? Is there anything that we can do to help you make your vision happened? Your fascinating wasn kind of come to life. A little unit.

Yeah, great question. I, if you know of any games with an economy or you think would benefit from from this particular technology platform, the number one criterion we always consider is, is the game multiplayer on? Basically, from there, we we can work with most games, so, you know, just send a message and get in touch or try another game and let me know what you think. We're always trying toe get a ride and make it better.

All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and pretty much blowing my mind. I you have many ideas that I'll probably work on it. Like like one of it. Like when I had more of a band with, like, career wise, I'm probably gonna wanna circle back. And like, I have this idea, this idea like, how do I make it happen to things for, um Thanks for coming on. Introducing that me and the whole audience to this world. I think it's fascinating. Thanks for coming on. And best of luck

can I know I was

spreading the word in making your vision happened.

Thanks so much for your time.

That Okay. Thank you, everyone for tuning into that episode. I hope you really enjoyed it. And luckily, there's another one coming up real soon. But before then, I have a couple things to tell you. First, if you're listening to this and you think you're working on something, who are you think you're smart? Hit me up on Twitter. I am at Matt Underscore Sherman, and that is Matt with one t. So hit me up, shoot me in the M, and I'm happy to check out what you're working on and maybe we can get you on the part of.

But at the very least, I'm happy TV feedback on your product or project or start up. Lastly, if you can please rate this podcast in the iTunes stores, that would be awesome. I'm trying to get up in the ranking. Some more people discover these awesome founders. And the only way to do that or one of the ways to do that is growing with making. So if you like what you're listening, Teoh, please just go onto the 18 story, give it five stars, or for you know, or three. I'm not gonna tell you what to give. We'll just tell whatever I deserve. You should read that with that. I'm signing off. See you next time.